Word: goretta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WONDERFUL CROOK Directed and Written by CLAUDE GORETTA...
...carts away shipments to be burned secretly and, in his simplest and most desperate expedient, begins pulling armed robberies to meet the payroll. Talk about bourgeois paternalism! Letting the workers profit from the boss's labor may be bad economics, but in the hands of Swiss Director Claude Goretta it is good cinema. Within its modest, admittedly improbable dimensions, Crook could scarcely be more deftly done...
...Goretta works in an exhilaratingly quick, dry, uninflected style. He seems to have a horror of squeezing an emotion too hard or dwelling on a scene too long. He depicts a holdup with no more than a breathless glimpse of Pierre fleeing across a supermarket parking lot. He foreshadows the death of Pierre's father by juxtaposing sequences of youthful high spirits on a bicycle with views of the immobile face...
Through the accumulation of such glancing, oblique details (sensitively photographed by Renato Berta), Goretta builds up a pattern of shapely ironies. Pierre impulsively confides in one of his intended victims, a post office clerk named Nelly Wagner, and she ultimately becomes his mistress and accomplice. Yet, credibly and touchingly. Pierre remains devoted to his wife -Nelly is only his partner in crime. When, as they must, the police catch up with Pierre, his baffled, tearful wife remonstrates, "I'm strong too!" In trying to make up for his father's mistake, he has only repeated...
EVEN MORE EVOCATIVE are those progressions of shots with which Goretta establishes the rhythms of the film. The increasing tempo of excitement is matched by tighter, more frequent cutting. Scenes alternate from light to dark. A solitary tree stands still in a haunting though brightly lit field. Bits of broken chairs, marred by flame, are discerned in the warm earth-tones of a neglected garbage heap. A light flashes on a bank window. Nelly stands across the street by a bicycle. When Pierre dashes out we realize the two have become accomplices...