Word: coutard
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Raoul Coutard's Hoa Binh begins on the outside. Its first shot is a map of East Asia, and there is the Vietnam of our mind's eye, a twisted banana fastened to the Asian underside. The map gives way to images of American soldiers, transporting weapons, rescuing the wounded, and patrolling the jungle. Still, it is Vietnam from without, seen through Western eyes, in terms of bombing targets, helicopter landing zones, bars and whorehouses...
...Binh is the first feature film to be directed by the superb French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, 47, who has photographed much of the work of Godard and Truffaut. Made entirely in Viet Nam during 1969, the movie is full of scenes of severe beauty: gas-masked soldiers outlined against a metallic sky, actors in elaborate Oriental costume running from a bombed theater, whole rows of huts bursting suddenly into flame...
...Coutard, the skeletal narrative often seems no more than a backdrop for his arresting images. He is at his best looking at Saigon through the children's eyes as they wander through a nightmare city that has been torn by war but is still bursting with luxurious restaurants and gaudy nightclubs. Coutard seems to share the children's wonder and confusion. There is one especially moving interlude in which they huddle around a sidewalk movie machine to watch an old Fernandel film...
...chubby and cute Vietnamese children who play the leads hardly look as if they had been savaged by the war. Yet, if Coutard has been rather sloppy about realism, he is scrupulous in avoiding propaganda. He refuses to take sides. Hung overhears an American defending his country's participation, and later, when he is taken to a political meeting, listens to a member of the N.L.F. explain its ideology. Both speakers are persuasive, and both promise victory. For Coutard, obviously, politics pale beside a single human imperative. In Vietnamese, hoa-binh means "peace." · Jay Cocks
Confession has enough individual merits to redeem its overall flaws. Though their film lacks the compact literacy of The Prisoner, Costa-Gavras and his Z squad (Screenwriter Jorge Semprun and Director of Photography Raoul Coutard) are too subtle and ingenious to make anything conspicuously bad. The brutal indifference of lower-echelon toughs is conveyed with deadly certainty. The pathetic buffoonery of a courtroom defendant losing his pants is an excruciatingly effective touch of humor. Nor is it possible to fault Montand's performance as a Camus figure cast into a dialectic inferno...