And I'll loan you the bullets.

Tonight, part of the alarmingly good Perles Noires line-up at La Cinémathèque française.

First:



Second:



Taken in accidental tandem (that is, the willed accident of stitching them together into a single duration of viewing), they build up an echo chamber between them, and one which can't be reduced to a periodization of shared elaborations of subtending anxieties et cetera.  One in which the defense of the family has rarely been so psychotic.  The "justification" of police violence so fragile.  Intentions - but I did it for you, baby, don't you see that now? - so irrelevant, in a weather-gutted house so open.  The return to the normal state of affairs (the third wheel locked up or shot down, all of us leaving the cinema into a night where the sky is still blue) so unwelcome.  That look they give each other so doomed to end with their missing each other in the hallway, one off to jail, the other back to family, while the elevator drops soundless and there are still those gridded shadows, falling on the swirled marble walls, that simply cannot be explained diagetically.  And so rarely so it goes so true.