An annual festival of restored treasures, Cinema Reborn returns in its sixth year with a larger slate of films, two restorations that are world premieres and many that will screen in Australia for the first time. In 2024 the festival extends its reach as well, screening for the first time in Melbourne. It offers an abundant, eclectic selection that rewards curiosity, as well as embracing familiar names and classic titles.

The opening night feature in both cities is Midnight (1939), an elegant, effervescent screwball comedy of deceptions and double standards. Claudette Colbert plays Eve Peabody, a resourceful American showgirl who wakes up in a railway carriage on a rainy night in Paris with little more than the gold lamé gown she is wearing, a bag containing 25 centimes and a pawn ticket from Monte Carlo. Pragmatic and optimistic, she takes refuge in a salon full of the city’s wealthy and well-connected where, almost as if by magic, she is transformed from an interloper to an aristocrat’s wife. And that’s just the beginning.

“Every Cinderella has her midnight,” says Eve, but her hour of reckoning never seems to arrive: rude awakenings or sudden reversals appear to be perpetually deferred. At the salon she meets a kind of fairy godfather, wealthy Frenchman Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore), who has a particular reason for cultivating her – not to woo her, but rather to incorporate her into his own schemes, confident that she’ll come along for the ride.

Midnight was directed by Mitchell Leisen, a costume designer turned director whose long career has arguably not received the critical attention it deserves. The script is by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, that famous pair of complementary talents whose writing collaborations from 1938 to 1950 encompass film noir, melodrama, sophisticated comedy and screwball. Midnight is witty and expertly structured but it is also a sardonic portrait of high society. Gossip, malice and infidelity are the order of the day and being caught is the ultimate faux pas.

In his book Romantic Comedy in Hollywood, James Harvey calls Colbert “the most amoral of all the great screwball heroines”. As Eve, Colbert gives a fluid, elastic performance of a character who is strictly speaking not a con artist but rather an enterprising improviser: a good-natured young woman who rides the wave of opportunity where it takes her. Barrymore, a legendary star of the silent era, was a gifted actor who could be an erratic presence on set, but he’s the ideal scene partner for Colbert in Midnight. His character is a more interesting foil for Eve than her putative love interest, taxi driver Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) – a stalwart fellow, absent from much of the film, who valiantly tries to keep up with her inventive machinations.

A side note: Hedda Hopper has a small role as a society hostess. Hopper was soon to give up acting altogether as she reinvented herself as a right-wing gossip columnist, one of the cheerleaders and enablers of Joseph McCarthy’s Hollywood blacklist.

If the Paris of Midnight is a Paramount Pictures construct, the Paris of Chantal Akerman’s La Captive (2000) is the real thing – but also very much a place of the filmmaker’s imagination, a shifting, atemporal, haunted location. In the credits Akerman says La Captive is “inspired by” La Prisonnière, the fifth volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time), posthumously published in 1923. She shifts the setting from the belle époque to a contemporary Paris that feels simultaneously modern and anachronistic. An additional, crucial inspiration is Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the story of a controlling man and a woman he tries to reshape and contain, a narrative of a love entwined with death.

Obsessive, jealous relationships are a recurring element in Proust. Akerman confines herself to a single one, changing names and details but retaining the suffocating intensity and ambiguity of the original. The first-person narrator becomes Simon (Stanislas Merhar), a wealthy young man living in an apartment with his grandmother and tended to by a chauffeur and a housekeeper. Albertine, the object of the narrator’s desire, becomes Ariane (Sylvie Testud), a young woman who fills her days with a regime of diversions and artistic pursuits, singing lessons, visits to a museum and outings with female friends.

Ariane lives with Simon, who oscillates between different but equally flawed attempts at possession and control. He is most aroused by her when she is asleep (or perhaps feigning sleep). He suspects Ariane is betraying him with women. His suspicion becomes compulsion, his life a ritual of surveillance, interrogation, repetition, humiliation, doubt feeding on itself. Ariane is as elusive for the spectator as she is for Simon.

“If Proust is a fever dream, a tangle of language to lose one’s way inside of, Akerman’s project is to make us wait,” writes Christine Smallwood in a new study of the film. In distilling Proust, Akerman creates a work that is very much her own. Her adaptation, co-written with Eric de Kuyper, is economical with words but rich with precisely drawn images and evocative sound, whether it’s the percussive impact of footsteps or the brooding, recurrent theme from Rachmaninov’s symphonic poem Isle of the Dead. A Schubert sonata – a recording that features cellist Sonia Wieder-Atherton, Akerman’s partner – is used more sparingly. Akerman also draws on – in unusual, singular ways – Carmen, Bizet’s tale of murderous male obsession, and Così fan tutte, Mozart’s ostensibly light-hearted examination of women’s fidelity put to the test by their men.

Egyptian filmmaker Tewfik Saleh also tackles a literary adaptation in The Dupes (1972), a compelling, multifaceted exploration of dispossession, masculinity and loss. His film is framed by a quote from Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish: “My father once said: a man without a country will have no grave in the earth.” The Dupes follows the contours and language of its source, Ghassan Kanafani’s 1962 story Men in the Sun, but expands it vividly and cinematically. Kanafani, a novelist, editor and spokesperson for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was killed in a car bombing in the same year The Dupes had its Cannes premiere.

The adaptation differs from the original near the end in one crucial detail that it would be unfair to reveal. According to Hilary Kilpatrick, the English translator of Kanafani’s book, the small but significant alteration made by Saleh reflects changing circumstances and the growth of the Palestinian resistance movement since the story was written.

The Dupes is set 10 years after the 1948 Nakba, the violent displacement and expulsion of Palestinian people following the creation of the state of Israel. It introduces three male characters one by one, in a distinctive fashion that shifts between interior and exterior perspectives. There are abrupt transitions between and within each story. Brief scenes that could be memories, dreams, intimations, symbolic representations of the lives of others are embedded within naturalistic, tactile depictions of the individuals’ lives and circumstances.

“For each of the Palestinian characters, 1948 is an unaddressed trauma, the root cause of a personal predicament that is never confronted directly,” says Nadia Yaqub in an essay on the film. All three have reached a point of desperation and become convinced their only hope is to make their way to Kuwait to find work, using the services of a smuggler. They embody different generations and experiences but they are also sharply drawn, individualised figures. Abou Keïss (Mohamed Kheir-Halouani), the oldest, has memories of an idyllic rural past as well as a feeling of self-reproach – “I am a peasant, the only thing I know is ploughing” – and his flashbacks include images from elsewhere of combat and newsreel footage. Assaad (Bassan Lofti Abou-Ghazala), a younger man, has been an activist and is being pressured into marriage. Sixteen-year-old Marouane (Saleh Kholoki), who had ambitions to be a doctor, is forced to leave school and support his mother and siblings when his father and older brother abandon responsibility for the rest of the family.

The men arrive separately in Basra but end up together. At this point, the film undergoes a transformation. A fellow Palestinian, Abou Kheizarane (Abderrahman Alrahy), offers to smuggle them into Kuwait. We learn, through a flashback of recollection he never shares with the others, that he has his own complicated backstory. The Dupes morphs into a tense, unsettling thriller that retains its political perspective and culminates in a devastating, unforgettable final image.

ARTS DIARY

DANCE The Other Side of Me

Heath Ledger Theatre, Whadjuk Noongar Country/Perth, April 30–May 2

VISUAL ART Single Channel

Goldfields Arts Centre, Wangkatja Country/Kalgoorlie, until May 10

MUSICAL A Girl’s Guide to War

Cremorne Theatre, Meanjin/Brisbane, May 2-4

BALLET Beauty and the Beast

Dunstan Playhouse, Kaurna Yarta/Adelaide, May 3-4

VISUAL ART Grand Tour

fortyfivedownstairs, Naarm/Melbourne, until May 4

LAST CHANCE

EXHIBITION Louise Bourgeois: Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day?

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until April 28

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