Blu-ray Review: The Moderns

Is it just me, or does the face on the far right of the Blu-ray case remind you of Alfred E. Neuman from MAD Magazine? I thought it was that character for a bit, and it took me a while to realize it’s Wallace Shawn in drag from the end of The Moderns.  Anyway, The Moderns has an excellent cast. In addition to Wallace Shawn, it stars Keith Carradine, Linda  Fiorentino, Genevieve Bujold, Geraldine Chaplin, Kevin J. O’Connor and John Lone. And it takes place in a time that has always interested me – 1926, in Paris. It is a wonderful, character-driven film with its own style, dealing with questions of art vs. commerce, how we assign value to the things in our life, and what exactly is art. It brings fictitious characters and historical people together, and also uses a bit of old stock footage to establish the time and place, further mixing reality and fiction.

It opens with black and white stock footage of Paris, and the first moments of the action are also in black in white, as the film eases us into the time period. And then, still during the opening credit sequence, it gently goes from black and white to color. The film does this several more times, slipping into black and white during scene transitions, and inserting exterior stock footage. Much of the action takes place at a café where ex-patriots – including a lot of artists – gather. In the first scene, Oiseau (Wallace Shawn) says to Nick Hart (Keith Carradine): “Who are all these people? Seems like a new boat load of ex-patriots gets dumped here every day.” Oiseau is a columnist who wants to transfer to Hollywood, and wants to take Hart – the cartoonist for his weekly column – with him. He tells Hart that Hart’s trouble is he doesn’t know what he wants. But Hart has spotted what he wants across the room – an alluring woman staring back at him. Rachel (Linda Fiorentino) is now married to Bertram Stone (John Lone), a man eager to buy his way into culture, but it turns out that she and Hart have a past (and, as they say in Magnolia, the past is not through with them).

Hart is an artist, but his work doesn’t sell. Libby (Genevieve Bujold), the woman who runs the gallery, gets him a job creating copies of three paintings so the paintings’ owner can take the originals without her faithless husband being any the wiser. Nathalie de Ville, the woman who hires Hart, is played by Geraldine Chaplin, who is wonderful, as always. She tells him, “I guess I’m in need of a little flattery these days,” and gives a slight pause before “these days.” And in that pause, she tells us so much. Geraldine Chaplin is able to convey a lot with just a breath, a look, a pause. She is fascinating to watch. But the entire cast is quite good in this film.

I love the look of this film, and its pace. Several scenes make use of mirrors and interesting perspectives. There were just two shots that momentarily pulled me out of the film. The first is an odd shot of a piano player, where the camera zooms in on him in a jolting way, for no apparent reason. That shot could easily be cut. The second is an odd pan over to a group of more modern people looking directly at the camera. I found myself wondering about that shot for several minutes, and missed whatever was said immediately after it. The film has some excellent dialogue. One of my favorite lines is from Libby, as she describes Bertram Stone. “He’s got lots of money, he’s just not worth a damn.” (What a great description of the current president of the United States.) But probably my absolute favorite line belongs to Oiseau. He is speaking of suicide and says: “I saw a man once who’d been hung. He looked a bit disappointed.”

Special Features

This Collector’s Edition Blu-ray contains a feature-length documentary about The Moderns, titled Art And Artifice In The Moderns. This documentary features interviews with director/co-writer Alan Rudolph, co-producer Carolyn Pfeiffer and actor Keith Carradine. Rudolph talks about the film’s time period and the lost generation, saying he picked the year 1926 because at that point, “The party was kind of over.” He talks a bit about his earlier work, and the long path to getting The Moderns made, mentioning that Robert Altman influenced everything he’s done. Those interviewed talk about shooting in Montreal, and how the set design helped create that sense of unreality. Rudolph says that he would often tell his director of photography, “We’re inside of a painting.” Carradine talks about doing some of the actual painting, including the painting that became the artwork for the film’s poster. I love Keith Carradine’s take on what acting is, and how you go about it. There is a lot of information on the casting, including that Mick Jagger was originally set to play Bertram Stone. This documentary is approximately ninety-six minutes.

The Blu-ray also contains the film’s trailer.

The Moderns was directed by Alan Rudolph, and was released on Blu-ray on September 19, 2017 through Shout! Factory, as part of the Shout Select series.