Film Review #126: Red Road
2006
Director: Andrea Arnold
Cast: Kate Dickie, Tony Curran, Nathalie Press
In one quietly remarkable scene during writer-director Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, a professional watcher tracks a van across the largest city in Scotland. Glasgow is one of a number of European – and now US – cities to employ an Orwellian number of live-feed cameras to assist police in constant surveillance. Their CCTV system goes by the public name City Eye, suggesting the friendliness of some jaunty TV news show at a downtown farmers’ market on a Saturday morning. Jackie (Kate Dickie) is good at what she does, daily scrutinizing a bank of TV monitors covering “Division E,” an area along the city’s northern fringe that includes Red Road. Jumping from screen to screen, the van’s image travels across Jackie’s monitor bank with a peculiar urgency – it’s as if Jackie were running along a frozen river after a drowning man swept beneath the ice. When the van nears the edge of Division E, Jackie just runs down the hall and jumps on an adjacent sector’s bank of monitors.
City Eye HQ is a honeycomb of such dark cells, bunkers lit by their own banks of flickering screens – atomized images and intently staring, hunched watchers. Jackie sees a girl stabbed, collapsed on a curb, and sends an ambulance at once. Peering behind a shed overgrown with shrubbery, she determines the rough sex going on there is consensual. No corner’s out of sight, no matter how debris-scattered or abandoned. And early on, nonchalantly, establishing that the barrier between screen and life could be very permeable, Jackie walks those same streets, pausing and bending down to pet the dogs she recognizes from seeing their routine daily walks on-screen. These few curb-side encounters comprise the closest thing to warmth she allows herself.
That van that Jackie tracks, a commercial vehicle advertizing home locksmiths, carries a sandy-haired ex-con named Clyde (Tony Curran) and his former cell-mate, the mink-like Stevie (Martin Compston). Along with Stevie’s girlfriend April (Nathalie Press) they live in a high-rise complex known as the Red Road flats – the tallest residential towers in Europe when they were built, scarily bleak and monolithic, squalid, crime-ridden, and slated for demolition when Arnold filmed this movie. In one scene Stevie brings April a puppy and she scoops the can of dog food directly onto the kitchen floor. In another, when they’ve opened a window to enjoy the gale-force wind at their great height, he dangles April half out the window “for a joke.” Clyde has been working his way through the local women.
What is so edgy about Red Road is not its blunt depiction of sordid, overshadowed lives – though Arnold has a gift for the striking, economical detail – but its wholly convincing and unexpected redemption. It does not look like it will go that way for the longest time. With the forces of City Eye state apparatus arrayed against Red Road entropy, no one seems to feel any safer. Gradually, snatches of speech and photos in Jackie’s own meager, tidy flat – a back story as fragmented as City Eye’s portrait of Glasgow – tell us she lost her husband John and small daughter Sorcha four years ago. She now sleeps with an urn containing their ashes, withdrawn from her baffled, grieving in-laws and their challenging pet parrot who “doesn’t like strangers.” For some time we assume Clyde’s connection to their deaths must have been a violent attack – a murder or robbery or kidnapping. It seems incredible he doesn’t remember her, but she’ll remind him that he never looked at her in court.
Jackie’s pursuit of Clyde – first on the live-feed monitor, then in person and ever more intimate – seems tilted toward sexual obsession, then toward revenge. Red Road has understandably been likened to Michael Haneke’s Caché (2005) in both its menace and use of surveillance. And Red Road’s mounting dread combines with a filming style of gritty natural light and hand-held cameras – an environment in which things often end grimly. Instead, Arnold executes a startling hair-pin turn between Jackie and Clyde that never skids off-track into sentimentality and reveals the depths of regret each carries. It’s clear that in this entire city there is no other human to whom either can say what each must say to the other. The film ends with a lush long shot of a broad Glasgow boulevard – it comes as a small shock to realize this is the first whole image of the city encompassing any real horizon and vanishing point in the entire film.
Besides a slew of prizes in Scotland, Andrea Arnold won the 2006 Jury Prize at Cannes for Red Road, which had brief art-house play in the US before going to DVD earlier this month. Her first feature-length film, Red Road follows three previous shorts, including the arresting 2005 Oscar-winning Wasp – starring Nathalie Press, April in Red Road – which the DVD producers were wise enough to include on this disc. If Red Road reminds you of the Dogme-95 style of Danish director Lars von Trier (2003’s Dogville, better yet 1996’s Breaking the Waves, itself set in Scotland), it’s because it’s the first of three features by three directors in a joint project between Glasgow’s Sigma Films and Denmark’s Zentropa, proposed by Trier and executed by his producers, Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen. Advance Party is designed to share cast and characters, though each writer-director creates their own script. Meanwhile, let’s keep our eye on Arnold and her way with a story.
*******
This review appeared at Stylusmagazine.com on 9/26/07;a shorter version appears in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 9/27.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Film Review #125: Snow Cake
2007
Director: Marc Evans
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Carrie-Ann Moss, Emily Hampshire
Let’s admit it: when some of us think of Sigourney Weaver, we think of Ellen Ripley in the four sci-fi Alien movies. Each with a different director, the Alien films came out over two decades – 1979, 1986, 1992 and 1997 – with room left in the story for a possible fifth episode. Who can forget the athletic, courageous Ripley in Aliens – the second film and my favorite – clad in her giant forklift, challenging the acid-drooling monster to a showdown on that spaceship deck to protect the little orphan girl Newt? If not for Ripley, it’s impossible to imagine many films since with capable female action heroes.
Ripley’s rescue of Newt made her a mother – opposed by the female monster guarding her own offspring. The unfolding saga played on the nature of motherhood (both natural and surrogate), species mutation and mixing, its effects on identity and the meaning of “human.” Weaver’s Ripley held that elaborate tale together. Weaver’s since displayed a brilliant comic streak in films like Working Girl (1988), Heart Breakers (2001) and Holes (2003) and gone deeply dramatic too, as in 1997’s The Ice Storm – her roles have often commented on motherhood in some form.
In the past week two DVDs of films shot in 2005 have hit local rental shops about mothers who’ve lost a child and their life-changing encounters with another parent grieving the same tragedy. The more conventional is Hilary Braugher’s Stephanie Daley, a Sundance Institute project. Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton), a forensic psychologist, consults about a high school student who gave birth in a ladies room stall on a school ski trip. Swinton’s character is herself pregnant again, after losing a baby, and her marriage strained. Amber Tamblyn plays the title role – her next move after the end of Joan of Arcadia. This film addresses the loss of an infant in a straightforward tragic way. We understand the way in which this story is being told and we can focus on the acting – quite good – and the shape of the story-telling, the directing, the way the movie’s shot, also quite good. The DVD is generous for a writer-director’s first feature film, with a making-of short and commentary track. Stephanie Daley is a sad, sad little film – never aiming for megaplex status to begin with – but we should look out for more work from Braugher.
Then there is Snow Cake, a joint Canadian/UK production with Weaver as Linda Freeman, shot along the highways of western Ontario and the little town of Wawa on the frigid, remote shore of Lake Superior. Weaver’s acting chops are given, when we see her on-screen the mom thread familiar. But a film that successfully combines autism, romantic comedy and a parent grieving the death of their only child?
Like Stephanie Daley, Snow Cake’s theatrical run was brief. Welsh filmmaker Marc Evans directed – he’s now at work on a film due out next year about poet Dylan Thomas’ wife, Caitlin, with Miranda Richardson – from the first screenplay by British comedy writer Angela Pell. Pell has small son who’s autistic and wrote the part of Alex Hughes for Alan Rickman, familiar as Professor Severus Snape from the Harry Potter movies.
This background mix may help explain how this wonderful little movie’s parts fall gracefully together. Alex Hughes heads toward Winnipeg through rural Ontario, just out of prison for killing the drunk driver who hit Alex’s teen-aged son – on the boy’s way to meet Alex for the first time. In a truck stop, he reluctantly gives a ride to Vivienne (the talented Montréal actress Emily Hampshire).
Vivienne is Linda’s daughter, hitch-hiking back to her mother’s house. Purple-haired, adolescent, generous, chatty to distraction, a bit loopy, Vivienne is all her name implies –vividly, strikingly alive – and it’s Alex’s bad luck to be driving when a trucker broadsides them, the crash killing Vivienne. Alex follows her body to Wawa, stays with Linda to arrange the funeral, engages in brief romance with the next door neighbor Maggie (Vancouver’s Carrie-Ann Moss, Trinity from The Matrix).
Linda is autistic, cheats at Scrabble, wants Alex to stay till Tuesday to put out the garbage, feeds the dog bananas, adores “sparklies,” is happiest munching on snow in her backyard. For someone who “doesn’t do social” Linda is keenly observant of those who do. She advises Alex to get different eye-glasses, for example, because she judges the ones her has to be unfriendly. “You neuro-typicals seem to value friends,” she tells him, “and I’m only trying to help you get some.” Pell endows Linda with a stream of laugh-aloud zingers, borne of her own self-reliance and self-knowledge, her lack of social decorum and her own generous self. If Weaver's performance at times seems a bit overly stylized, that may come of the fact that autism itself contains an element of performance in order to get along with others. Alex emerges from his frozen grief in her quirky company. Go to school on this one.
*******
This review appeared in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 9/20/07, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2007
Director: Marc Evans
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Carrie-Ann Moss, Emily Hampshire
Let’s admit it: when some of us think of Sigourney Weaver, we think of Ellen Ripley in the four sci-fi Alien movies. Each with a different director, the Alien films came out over two decades – 1979, 1986, 1992 and 1997 – with room left in the story for a possible fifth episode. Who can forget the athletic, courageous Ripley in Aliens – the second film and my favorite – clad in her giant forklift, challenging the acid-drooling monster to a showdown on that spaceship deck to protect the little orphan girl Newt? If not for Ripley, it’s impossible to imagine many films since with capable female action heroes.
Ripley’s rescue of Newt made her a mother – opposed by the female monster guarding her own offspring. The unfolding saga played on the nature of motherhood (both natural and surrogate), species mutation and mixing, its effects on identity and the meaning of “human.” Weaver’s Ripley held that elaborate tale together. Weaver’s since displayed a brilliant comic streak in films like Working Girl (1988), Heart Breakers (2001) and Holes (2003) and gone deeply dramatic too, as in 1997’s The Ice Storm – her roles have often commented on motherhood in some form.
In the past week two DVDs of films shot in 2005 have hit local rental shops about mothers who’ve lost a child and their life-changing encounters with another parent grieving the same tragedy. The more conventional is Hilary Braugher’s Stephanie Daley, a Sundance Institute project. Lydie Crane (Tilda Swinton), a forensic psychologist, consults about a high school student who gave birth in a ladies room stall on a school ski trip. Swinton’s character is herself pregnant again, after losing a baby, and her marriage strained. Amber Tamblyn plays the title role – her next move after the end of Joan of Arcadia. This film addresses the loss of an infant in a straightforward tragic way. We understand the way in which this story is being told and we can focus on the acting – quite good – and the shape of the story-telling, the directing, the way the movie’s shot, also quite good. The DVD is generous for a writer-director’s first feature film, with a making-of short and commentary track. Stephanie Daley is a sad, sad little film – never aiming for megaplex status to begin with – but we should look out for more work from Braugher.
Then there is Snow Cake, a joint Canadian/UK production with Weaver as Linda Freeman, shot along the highways of western Ontario and the little town of Wawa on the frigid, remote shore of Lake Superior. Weaver’s acting chops are given, when we see her on-screen the mom thread familiar. But a film that successfully combines autism, romantic comedy and a parent grieving the death of their only child?
Like Stephanie Daley, Snow Cake’s theatrical run was brief. Welsh filmmaker Marc Evans directed – he’s now at work on a film due out next year about poet Dylan Thomas’ wife, Caitlin, with Miranda Richardson – from the first screenplay by British comedy writer Angela Pell. Pell has small son who’s autistic and wrote the part of Alex Hughes for Alan Rickman, familiar as Professor Severus Snape from the Harry Potter movies.
This background mix may help explain how this wonderful little movie’s parts fall gracefully together. Alex Hughes heads toward Winnipeg through rural Ontario, just out of prison for killing the drunk driver who hit Alex’s teen-aged son – on the boy’s way to meet Alex for the first time. In a truck stop, he reluctantly gives a ride to Vivienne (the talented Montréal actress Emily Hampshire).
Vivienne is Linda’s daughter, hitch-hiking back to her mother’s house. Purple-haired, adolescent, generous, chatty to distraction, a bit loopy, Vivienne is all her name implies –vividly, strikingly alive – and it’s Alex’s bad luck to be driving when a trucker broadsides them, the crash killing Vivienne. Alex follows her body to Wawa, stays with Linda to arrange the funeral, engages in brief romance with the next door neighbor Maggie (Vancouver’s Carrie-Ann Moss, Trinity from The Matrix).
Linda is autistic, cheats at Scrabble, wants Alex to stay till Tuesday to put out the garbage, feeds the dog bananas, adores “sparklies,” is happiest munching on snow in her backyard. For someone who “doesn’t do social” Linda is keenly observant of those who do. She advises Alex to get different eye-glasses, for example, because she judges the ones her has to be unfriendly. “You neuro-typicals seem to value friends,” she tells him, “and I’m only trying to help you get some.” Pell endows Linda with a stream of laugh-aloud zingers, borne of her own self-reliance and self-knowledge, her lack of social decorum and her own generous self. If Weaver's performance at times seems a bit overly stylized, that may come of the fact that autism itself contains an element of performance in order to get along with others. Alex emerges from his frozen grief in her quirky company. Go to school on this one.
*******
This review appeared in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 9/20/07, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Film Review #124: The Brave One
2007
Director: Neil Jordan
Cast: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews
Thanks to David Letterman, the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and plenty of advance screenings in the hinterlands, most people paying attention to new releases know the basic storyline of The Brave One. I won such a ticket myself and saw this film in a mall theater, where ironically it displaced Death Sentence that night (a street-walker of a film if ever there was one). More ironically, in The Brave One, “Street Walk” is the name of the New York City public radio show that the popular Erica Bain hosts. Early in the movie, Erica (Jodie Foster) is talking in the radio station’s hallway with her producer, Carol (Mary Steenburgen). This is before Erica loses everything – her doctor-fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews), her dog Curtis, her moral bearings and sense of who she is, not to mention nearly her life – in a summer night mugging in a tunnel just inside the Strangers’ Gate entrance to Central Park. Carol tells the popular journalist – already we know she’s smart and curious and loves her work and does it well – that Bravo! TV has been calling. Erica raises both palms, shakes her head, exhales sharply – evidently this is not the first troll from TV recruiters – and says, “I’m not a face. I’m a voice.”
This simple declaration – which could sum up Foster’s whole approach to her own career choices – is enormously resonant in this film. This statement expresses how many who work on-air feel about radio, distinguishes among media in their effects, and points at the means of untangling the conundrums of violence.
The Brave One contains extreme violence. After the deeply unnerving scene in which a trio of yelping thugs kick David and Erica, bash them full-force against the tunnel wall with sickening crunches, and wield crowbars whose force makes their limbs bounce – well, then Erica moves on, once she can leave her the tunnel of her building’s front hallway. She moves on, horrified and disbelieving, first shooting a crazed stranger in a convenience store (this scary cameo from director Larry Fessenden, whose own scary The Last Winter opens later this month), then blasting two subway thugs, a pimp in a station wagon who’s held a girl of maybe 12 for six days, and a sadistic gangster whom the cops can’t nail, before she locates the guys who took her future.
This is frankly a post-9/11 movie about a world in which unthinkable firestorms of sudden violence erupt at any instant. In a film where sound is so crucial – set in New York and released the week of 9/11’s sixth anniversary – an unmistakable jet plane roars overhead just as Erica and David enter the park to walk their dog, lightly bantering over whether to elope (his idea) or wait for invitations (her’s and his mother’s idea). As a post- 9/11 film it’s also about what “combat conditions” do to one’s nervous system and one’s soul, as embodied in that modern day go-between figure, at best a kind of translator – the reporter.
The Brave One also addresses the interplay between media and violence in more intelligently than most efforts. You don’t expect that from the revenge flick genre, but when you think about it, isn’t this exactly where a filmmaker could address such issues? One key was a mindful choice of job for Erica, who is not a radio journalist haphazardly. Poking along in the wake of the glitzy internet, where everything hums through its electronic sheath, radio – that platform for pitching one’s voice into the great raw unseen – has been making a comeback. You don’t need middle-class leisure reading time for the radio – Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), the detective following Erica’s case, hears his own interview in a squad car while stuck in traffic – even if there is still a whiff of class and gender bias – Mercer tells Erica his wife listened to her show before admitting he does.
Originally Erica was a newspaper reporter and Foster argued for the change. Foster has said about Erica, “In a way, David is her physical identity” – Erica’s way back to the surface of waking after three weeks in a coma is the physical recollection of their bodies making love – that “she becomes a voice in the night” without him. There’s a lovely image of Erica, just stirring, her index finger held clipped in a lighted, clothespin-like device that monitors her pulse, lifting that finger tentatively – if you think of E.T., she is really is coming back from deep space. In the film’s helpful but not overbearing production notes, producer Susan Downey says that making Erica a radio host allows her frequent voice-overs to be more “organic” to the way the film’s narrative unfolds for this character.
In ways the 2006 Robin Williams vehicle The Night Listener and Kasi Lemons’ recent Talk to Me don’t begin to approach, Jordan’s film captures how Erica works with her own voice as an instrument, edging it lower so she’s speaking from her diaphragm, out of her own core, practicing with a stop watch, starting her “intro” over to fix her cadences and enunciation. When NPR did its massive first-anniversary Hurricane Katrina coverage, I was able to interview national correspondent Melissa Block for a local radio piece about that project. She was somewhere in Mississippi, the phone connection wasn’t great, my time with her short. A consummate pro, she chatted me through my nerves just long enough for my voice to settle down – I could hear it myself when I got there.
Foster spent time researching her role at a west coast NPR station and it shows, from the way she holds a mic during an interview to the everyday lingo to certain values about the work. We meet Erica dangling a mic over some street grates, gathering ambient sound for a piece she’s putting together. She’ll lay that track under a voice track, fade it in and out for transitions between her commentary and her interview clips. And one of the best parts of this film’s sound design is how it captures the peculiar timbre of your voice coming through headphones when you’re speaking into a live mic. DP Philippe Rousselot, who’s worked on three other Jordan films and on Foster’s Sommersby (1993), developed a wobble for his Steadicam so that he could roll the horizon to visually convey disorientation, since the film largely occurs from Erica’s point of view. Less obviously, this film also achieves, sometimes with great intimacy, what her experience sounds like to her.
Good public radio commentary is crafted language, whether that occurs on the Apple laptop we only catch a glimpse of, or by habit of mind in the disciplined way Erica puts her words together. Language arises in the part of the brain that shuts off in the presence of traumatic threat and rage. What we see dramatically when Erica goes back on-air and cannot immediately speak is her struggle to get out of that primitive place, that ancient reptile mind. When she tells Carol, who thinks she needs more time off, that she needs to speak, she really is talking about what will save her, and by extension what might save the rest of us.
When Erica interviews Mercer, she turns off her recorder when he asks her to, later agrees something else can remain off the record. Think about how come the term “radio paparazzi” mostly seems incongruous and how come Don Imus seemed particularly injurious. There is a great variety of media and its practitioners in this film besides radio – press conference reporters and photographers, newspapers, TV, audio recorders, surveillance cameras in bodegas, VHS tapes, cell phones with video functions, video-cams, text messaging, emailing. There’s even a two-way mirror at the police line-up that magically puts Erica inside the camera’s eye. Most of it is intrusive, sensational, distorting, fragmentary rather than holistic, and deeply scornful of boundaries.
That is, most is inherently violent, often visual images and screaming headlines that provoke more panic and rage – speechless states where conversation is impossible. During the Central Park attack on David and Erica, the thugs take turns recording their attack on a cell-phone and a video-cam. Jordan inserts clips of these recordings on-screen as the attack proceeds, so that what we see alternates between the attack as Erica sees it, careening and chaotic, and then as it looks on a cell-phone screen, distorted and surreal – showing us in the moment how flesh gets reduced to trophy, an image already degrading into cartoon. Here’s where you recall the fearful, intuitively correct reaction of so-called primitive peoples who believed photographic images stole their souls. This seems not so “superstitious” when we consider how provocative media saturates our perception and attends our worst behavior.
This cell phone video returns to Erica later by email, quite unexpectedly. She doesn’t know it exists until she downloads it. Like the original attack, this facsimile plays inside a tunnel – she’s in the subway – where the setting reinforces the wave of déjà vu that brings Erica to her knees as she watches. Because this cell phone video has likely slipped out of the audience’s minds with the flow of events, its reappearance blindsides us too.
Erica Bain is on a hero’s journey of the most literate sort. Consider the scene where she tells the girl Chloe (Zoe Kravitz), whom she has just rescued, “I am nobody.” Brought to Chloe’s hospital room later by Mercer, Erica advises her to tell the truth. Then Mercer asks the girl who saved her and Chloe answers, gazing back at Erica, “I saw nobody and nobody saw me.” Old English majors will recognize this as lifted right out of Homer’s Odyssey, where the wily Odysseus fools the blinded, one-eyed Cyclops by answering that his name is “Nobody.”
Erica is not made “masculine” in this film. I suppose you could imagine this as a director’s strategy since a female vigilante is the last thing the police expect. Erica is depressed and traumatized. She gets visibly thinner, she’s not sleeping, her clothes get grubbier, more wrinkled and darker.
A repeatedly helpful reference here is the work of Jonathan Shay, the psychiatrist with a doctorate in classics, and his two books based on Homer’s ancient epics, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1995) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). Suffering from combat trauma as genuine as any on the streets of Baghdad, Erica Bain finds herself disconnected, increasingly isolated and a stranger to herself, having lost her single “special” comrade, with a shrinking horizon (think how much of the action occurs in tunnels and cramped hallways), betrayed by what’s right (Mercer’s own growing disaffection with the law reinforces this), her grief thwarted, in a classic “berserker” state. Shay argues that what heals is narrative – ordered, shared words that put form on chaos. If we think that Erica “gets better” because Mercer lets her shoot Lee (Luis Da Silva Jr), we have misread Jordan’s film entirely.
One clue is Erica’s neighbor Jackie (Carmen Fjogo), a reclusive, angry-faced black woman who refuses to speak and digs furiously in her courtyard garden. Erica and David smile a little over her on their way out to walk the dog that night – evidently they have a little gentle bet going over whether they can get Jackie to answer in the building’s hallway or on the front stoop. It’s Erica staggering in late one night, bloodied, that prompts Jackie to speak, to touch her. Stunned, Erica says, “That’s the first time you’ve ever said my name!” Sewing up Erica’s arm and bandaging her, Jackie takes in Erica’s confession that she’s just killed a man, and relates in an indeterminate accent that, where she comes from, “Soldiers made little boys shoot their families to prove that anyone is capable of crossing this line.”
Encounters like those with Jackie, Chloe, and Mercer are Erica’s lifelines, what allow her to survive finding and shooting Lee. Critically, they are clearly lifelines for Jackie, Chloe and Mercer too. Shay’s work is illuminating in its provision of context, but what occurs cinematically is Foster’s performance – to a quieter extent, Howard’s – in Jordan’s exquisitely prepared environment. I know 2007 is not yet over, but Jodie Foster’s extraordinarily moving Erica is easily the best – and bravest – performance by an actress I’ve seen all year.
*******
This review appears on 9/17/07 at Stylusmagazine.com.
2007
Director: Neil Jordan
Cast: Jodie Foster, Terrence Howard, Naveen Andrews
Thanks to David Letterman, the cover of Entertainment Weekly, and plenty of advance screenings in the hinterlands, most people paying attention to new releases know the basic storyline of The Brave One. I won such a ticket myself and saw this film in a mall theater, where ironically it displaced Death Sentence that night (a street-walker of a film if ever there was one). More ironically, in The Brave One, “Street Walk” is the name of the New York City public radio show that the popular Erica Bain hosts. Early in the movie, Erica (Jodie Foster) is talking in the radio station’s hallway with her producer, Carol (Mary Steenburgen). This is before Erica loses everything – her doctor-fiancé David Kirmani (Naveen Andrews), her dog Curtis, her moral bearings and sense of who she is, not to mention nearly her life – in a summer night mugging in a tunnel just inside the Strangers’ Gate entrance to Central Park. Carol tells the popular journalist – already we know she’s smart and curious and loves her work and does it well – that Bravo! TV has been calling. Erica raises both palms, shakes her head, exhales sharply – evidently this is not the first troll from TV recruiters – and says, “I’m not a face. I’m a voice.”
This simple declaration – which could sum up Foster’s whole approach to her own career choices – is enormously resonant in this film. This statement expresses how many who work on-air feel about radio, distinguishes among media in their effects, and points at the means of untangling the conundrums of violence.
The Brave One contains extreme violence. After the deeply unnerving scene in which a trio of yelping thugs kick David and Erica, bash them full-force against the tunnel wall with sickening crunches, and wield crowbars whose force makes their limbs bounce – well, then Erica moves on, once she can leave her the tunnel of her building’s front hallway. She moves on, horrified and disbelieving, first shooting a crazed stranger in a convenience store (this scary cameo from director Larry Fessenden, whose own scary The Last Winter opens later this month), then blasting two subway thugs, a pimp in a station wagon who’s held a girl of maybe 12 for six days, and a sadistic gangster whom the cops can’t nail, before she locates the guys who took her future.
This is frankly a post-9/11 movie about a world in which unthinkable firestorms of sudden violence erupt at any instant. In a film where sound is so crucial – set in New York and released the week of 9/11’s sixth anniversary – an unmistakable jet plane roars overhead just as Erica and David enter the park to walk their dog, lightly bantering over whether to elope (his idea) or wait for invitations (her’s and his mother’s idea). As a post- 9/11 film it’s also about what “combat conditions” do to one’s nervous system and one’s soul, as embodied in that modern day go-between figure, at best a kind of translator – the reporter.
The Brave One also addresses the interplay between media and violence in more intelligently than most efforts. You don’t expect that from the revenge flick genre, but when you think about it, isn’t this exactly where a filmmaker could address such issues? One key was a mindful choice of job for Erica, who is not a radio journalist haphazardly. Poking along in the wake of the glitzy internet, where everything hums through its electronic sheath, radio – that platform for pitching one’s voice into the great raw unseen – has been making a comeback. You don’t need middle-class leisure reading time for the radio – Sean Mercer (Terrence Howard), the detective following Erica’s case, hears his own interview in a squad car while stuck in traffic – even if there is still a whiff of class and gender bias – Mercer tells Erica his wife listened to her show before admitting he does.
Originally Erica was a newspaper reporter and Foster argued for the change. Foster has said about Erica, “In a way, David is her physical identity” – Erica’s way back to the surface of waking after three weeks in a coma is the physical recollection of their bodies making love – that “she becomes a voice in the night” without him. There’s a lovely image of Erica, just stirring, her index finger held clipped in a lighted, clothespin-like device that monitors her pulse, lifting that finger tentatively – if you think of E.T., she is really is coming back from deep space. In the film’s helpful but not overbearing production notes, producer Susan Downey says that making Erica a radio host allows her frequent voice-overs to be more “organic” to the way the film’s narrative unfolds for this character.
In ways the 2006 Robin Williams vehicle The Night Listener and Kasi Lemons’ recent Talk to Me don’t begin to approach, Jordan’s film captures how Erica works with her own voice as an instrument, edging it lower so she’s speaking from her diaphragm, out of her own core, practicing with a stop watch, starting her “intro” over to fix her cadences and enunciation. When NPR did its massive first-anniversary Hurricane Katrina coverage, I was able to interview national correspondent Melissa Block for a local radio piece about that project. She was somewhere in Mississippi, the phone connection wasn’t great, my time with her short. A consummate pro, she chatted me through my nerves just long enough for my voice to settle down – I could hear it myself when I got there.
Foster spent time researching her role at a west coast NPR station and it shows, from the way she holds a mic during an interview to the everyday lingo to certain values about the work. We meet Erica dangling a mic over some street grates, gathering ambient sound for a piece she’s putting together. She’ll lay that track under a voice track, fade it in and out for transitions between her commentary and her interview clips. And one of the best parts of this film’s sound design is how it captures the peculiar timbre of your voice coming through headphones when you’re speaking into a live mic. DP Philippe Rousselot, who’s worked on three other Jordan films and on Foster’s Sommersby (1993), developed a wobble for his Steadicam so that he could roll the horizon to visually convey disorientation, since the film largely occurs from Erica’s point of view. Less obviously, this film also achieves, sometimes with great intimacy, what her experience sounds like to her.
Good public radio commentary is crafted language, whether that occurs on the Apple laptop we only catch a glimpse of, or by habit of mind in the disciplined way Erica puts her words together. Language arises in the part of the brain that shuts off in the presence of traumatic threat and rage. What we see dramatically when Erica goes back on-air and cannot immediately speak is her struggle to get out of that primitive place, that ancient reptile mind. When she tells Carol, who thinks she needs more time off, that she needs to speak, she really is talking about what will save her, and by extension what might save the rest of us.
When Erica interviews Mercer, she turns off her recorder when he asks her to, later agrees something else can remain off the record. Think about how come the term “radio paparazzi” mostly seems incongruous and how come Don Imus seemed particularly injurious. There is a great variety of media and its practitioners in this film besides radio – press conference reporters and photographers, newspapers, TV, audio recorders, surveillance cameras in bodegas, VHS tapes, cell phones with video functions, video-cams, text messaging, emailing. There’s even a two-way mirror at the police line-up that magically puts Erica inside the camera’s eye. Most of it is intrusive, sensational, distorting, fragmentary rather than holistic, and deeply scornful of boundaries.
That is, most is inherently violent, often visual images and screaming headlines that provoke more panic and rage – speechless states where conversation is impossible. During the Central Park attack on David and Erica, the thugs take turns recording their attack on a cell-phone and a video-cam. Jordan inserts clips of these recordings on-screen as the attack proceeds, so that what we see alternates between the attack as Erica sees it, careening and chaotic, and then as it looks on a cell-phone screen, distorted and surreal – showing us in the moment how flesh gets reduced to trophy, an image already degrading into cartoon. Here’s where you recall the fearful, intuitively correct reaction of so-called primitive peoples who believed photographic images stole their souls. This seems not so “superstitious” when we consider how provocative media saturates our perception and attends our worst behavior.
This cell phone video returns to Erica later by email, quite unexpectedly. She doesn’t know it exists until she downloads it. Like the original attack, this facsimile plays inside a tunnel – she’s in the subway – where the setting reinforces the wave of déjà vu that brings Erica to her knees as she watches. Because this cell phone video has likely slipped out of the audience’s minds with the flow of events, its reappearance blindsides us too.
Erica Bain is on a hero’s journey of the most literate sort. Consider the scene where she tells the girl Chloe (Zoe Kravitz), whom she has just rescued, “I am nobody.” Brought to Chloe’s hospital room later by Mercer, Erica advises her to tell the truth. Then Mercer asks the girl who saved her and Chloe answers, gazing back at Erica, “I saw nobody and nobody saw me.” Old English majors will recognize this as lifted right out of Homer’s Odyssey, where the wily Odysseus fools the blinded, one-eyed Cyclops by answering that his name is “Nobody.”
Erica is not made “masculine” in this film. I suppose you could imagine this as a director’s strategy since a female vigilante is the last thing the police expect. Erica is depressed and traumatized. She gets visibly thinner, she’s not sleeping, her clothes get grubbier, more wrinkled and darker.
A repeatedly helpful reference here is the work of Jonathan Shay, the psychiatrist with a doctorate in classics, and his two books based on Homer’s ancient epics, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (1995) and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming (2002). Suffering from combat trauma as genuine as any on the streets of Baghdad, Erica Bain finds herself disconnected, increasingly isolated and a stranger to herself, having lost her single “special” comrade, with a shrinking horizon (think how much of the action occurs in tunnels and cramped hallways), betrayed by what’s right (Mercer’s own growing disaffection with the law reinforces this), her grief thwarted, in a classic “berserker” state. Shay argues that what heals is narrative – ordered, shared words that put form on chaos. If we think that Erica “gets better” because Mercer lets her shoot Lee (Luis Da Silva Jr), we have misread Jordan’s film entirely.
One clue is Erica’s neighbor Jackie (Carmen Fjogo), a reclusive, angry-faced black woman who refuses to speak and digs furiously in her courtyard garden. Erica and David smile a little over her on their way out to walk the dog that night – evidently they have a little gentle bet going over whether they can get Jackie to answer in the building’s hallway or on the front stoop. It’s Erica staggering in late one night, bloodied, that prompts Jackie to speak, to touch her. Stunned, Erica says, “That’s the first time you’ve ever said my name!” Sewing up Erica’s arm and bandaging her, Jackie takes in Erica’s confession that she’s just killed a man, and relates in an indeterminate accent that, where she comes from, “Soldiers made little boys shoot their families to prove that anyone is capable of crossing this line.”
Encounters like those with Jackie, Chloe, and Mercer are Erica’s lifelines, what allow her to survive finding and shooting Lee. Critically, they are clearly lifelines for Jackie, Chloe and Mercer too. Shay’s work is illuminating in its provision of context, but what occurs cinematically is Foster’s performance – to a quieter extent, Howard’s – in Jordan’s exquisitely prepared environment. I know 2007 is not yet over, but Jodie Foster’s extraordinarily moving Erica is easily the best – and bravest – performance by an actress I’ve seen all year.
*******
This review appears on 9/17/07 at Stylusmagazine.com.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Film Review #123: Cotton Mary
1999
Director: Ismail Merchant
Cast: Madhur Jaffrey, Greta Scacchi, James Wilby
When his film Cotton Mary caused a furor in England’s Indian community upon its premiere there in 1999, Ismail Merchant mildly remarked that “all societies have their eccentrics.” In this way the Bombay native turned aside protests that the title character was so extreme as to slander the whole of post-colonial India and avoided engaging in arguments about political correctness.
There’s no denying that Mary, a scheming half-Anglo whirlwind of ambition (operatically played by Madhur Jaffrey, who also co-directed) – she begins as a hospital aide and imagines one day presiding over her own manor house in distant England – seems menacing right from the start rather than merely restless, and she later works herself into moments that splash over the border of psychotic. Characters both Indian and English alike regard her with alarm. But Cotton Mary, one of a handful of films that Merchant directed, is not such a departure from his other work. Usually he handled the producing end of the famous Merchant-Ivory team’s films. A fair number of these – Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Bombay Talkie (1970) and Heat and Dust (1983), for example – explored the enduring toxic effects of colonial displacement that in some ways crescendoed after India’s independence in 1947. We can rightfully see Cotton Mary as one allegory for that debilitating legacy.
This film is set in 1954 along the southwest coast of India’s Kerala state. Cotton Mary (nick-named because of her bumptious preference for expensive English cotton over home-spun) works as an aide in a small hospital. We meet her strolling to the small Anglican chapel on its shaded, already-shabby grounds with her niece Rosie (Jaffrey’s daughter Sakina, whose befriending of screenwriter Alexandra Viets was the conduit for this script landing in Merchant’s hands). Brittley judgmental, nosey and intrusive, Mary keeps up a constant stream of advice to the smoldering-eyed young woman, who is more interested in the rector’s flirtatious son than the sermon and interested not at all in exerting herself on the behalf of the English sick. Mary wears a locket with a faded scrap of photo of the mixed couple that bore her and upon this scrap she builds her dreams, even though the departing English soldier father has left this discarded branch of the family tree in a tenement-like Anglican poorhouse.
Out of her aunt’s sight for barely a moment, Rosie snags a job “doing translation” for John MacIntosh (James Wilby), a correspondent covering developments in India’s emerging and troubled young democracy for England’s BBC news service. Often on assignment, John is away when his wife Lily (Greta Scacchi) enters labor early with their second daughter, almost loses the baby and cannot feed her, nor – truth be told – does he much care when he does come home to the exceedingly comfortable home his wife’s plantation owner father has provided them, complete with life-long servants such as head butler Abraham (Prayag Raj, whose genteel correctness echoes Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day). As an aside, Merchant’s portrait of John as one of the jarringly modern generation replacing the older colonialists is at least as unsparing as that of his Mary. An opportunist at every turn, John visits a remote farm strike and reassures the angry workers – “My father was a union man too. I will tell your story!” – as earnestly as he lies to Lily about his affections. After helping himself to Rosie’s bare breasts in one scene, he’s furious to learn an Indian has been suckling his own infant.
Into all this discontent strides Cotton Mary, making herself indispensable to Lily. Each day she secretly takes the tiny girl across the river to her wheelchair-bound sister Blossom, who works as a wet-nurse and lives with the female relatives in the alms house. Soon Mary moves in with the MacIntoshes, raiding the storeroom, bragging to her poor relations, systematically undermining Abraham until Lily fires the old man. What Mary mostly takes is English soap, and what she mostly insinuates about the loyal old retainer is that he’s “unclean” – Mary sickens Lily by claiming he prepares food with his “toilet hand” – so her attack resonates with visceral loathing well underneath more conscious generous sentiments.
Like George Orwell’s absorbing early novel Burmese Days (1934), also about late British rule, Cotton Mary lays bare the elaborate, vicious local competition first provoked and then ignored by colonial powers regarding local folk. Burmese Days is built upon the plot engineered by a local magistrate, U Po Kyin, to discredit the decent Dr. Veraswami within the small English community, simply because he believes the Indian to be somehow “in his way.” Veraswami’s friend, the timber seller Flory, quickly recognizes this attack for what it is, but could stop it only at great cost to his own standing among other ex-pats. “It is so important not to entangle oneself in ‘native’ quarrels. With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love – yes,” Flory reflects. “Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. But alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a ‘native’ quarrel is a loss of prestige.” Despite the film’s focus on Lily regaining her capacity to evict Cotton Mary, her real turning point begins as she and her older daughter Theresa agree to seek out Abraham and together search for him. In so doing, they discover a side of India neither has imagined. In an Italian film, we would know that Lily's daughter Theresa - no less than the little girl of comparable age whom Mary instructs in prayers and work habits in the final scene - stands for the future of her nation. It's a convention equally applicable here.
Meanwhile, Mary grows more extreme each day. She steals Lily’s clothing, strides unnervingly through city with the baby carriage, dressed as “the madam” herself, visits a hair salon for a Western bob. This transformation starts early at Lily’s hospital bedside when Mary kicks her own nurse’s shoes into a corner and steps into a pair Lily had discarded under the bed. Bursting repeatedly through this fantasy impersonation is Mary’s sudden, feverish rage – against her countrymen and the English in about equal measure – which leaves those in her wake aghast. If Merchant calls her “eccentric,” it’s only to coax us to watch.
*******
This review appeared in the 9/13/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1999
Director: Ismail Merchant
Cast: Madhur Jaffrey, Greta Scacchi, James Wilby
When his film Cotton Mary caused a furor in England’s Indian community upon its premiere there in 1999, Ismail Merchant mildly remarked that “all societies have their eccentrics.” In this way the Bombay native turned aside protests that the title character was so extreme as to slander the whole of post-colonial India and avoided engaging in arguments about political correctness.
There’s no denying that Mary, a scheming half-Anglo whirlwind of ambition (operatically played by Madhur Jaffrey, who also co-directed) – she begins as a hospital aide and imagines one day presiding over her own manor house in distant England – seems menacing right from the start rather than merely restless, and she later works herself into moments that splash over the border of psychotic. Characters both Indian and English alike regard her with alarm. But Cotton Mary, one of a handful of films that Merchant directed, is not such a departure from his other work. Usually he handled the producing end of the famous Merchant-Ivory team’s films. A fair number of these – Shakespeare Wallah (1965), Bombay Talkie (1970) and Heat and Dust (1983), for example – explored the enduring toxic effects of colonial displacement that in some ways crescendoed after India’s independence in 1947. We can rightfully see Cotton Mary as one allegory for that debilitating legacy.
This film is set in 1954 along the southwest coast of India’s Kerala state. Cotton Mary (nick-named because of her bumptious preference for expensive English cotton over home-spun) works as an aide in a small hospital. We meet her strolling to the small Anglican chapel on its shaded, already-shabby grounds with her niece Rosie (Jaffrey’s daughter Sakina, whose befriending of screenwriter Alexandra Viets was the conduit for this script landing in Merchant’s hands). Brittley judgmental, nosey and intrusive, Mary keeps up a constant stream of advice to the smoldering-eyed young woman, who is more interested in the rector’s flirtatious son than the sermon and interested not at all in exerting herself on the behalf of the English sick. Mary wears a locket with a faded scrap of photo of the mixed couple that bore her and upon this scrap she builds her dreams, even though the departing English soldier father has left this discarded branch of the family tree in a tenement-like Anglican poorhouse.
Out of her aunt’s sight for barely a moment, Rosie snags a job “doing translation” for John MacIntosh (James Wilby), a correspondent covering developments in India’s emerging and troubled young democracy for England’s BBC news service. Often on assignment, John is away when his wife Lily (Greta Scacchi) enters labor early with their second daughter, almost loses the baby and cannot feed her, nor – truth be told – does he much care when he does come home to the exceedingly comfortable home his wife’s plantation owner father has provided them, complete with life-long servants such as head butler Abraham (Prayag Raj, whose genteel correctness echoes Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day). As an aside, Merchant’s portrait of John as one of the jarringly modern generation replacing the older colonialists is at least as unsparing as that of his Mary. An opportunist at every turn, John visits a remote farm strike and reassures the angry workers – “My father was a union man too. I will tell your story!” – as earnestly as he lies to Lily about his affections. After helping himself to Rosie’s bare breasts in one scene, he’s furious to learn an Indian has been suckling his own infant.
Into all this discontent strides Cotton Mary, making herself indispensable to Lily. Each day she secretly takes the tiny girl across the river to her wheelchair-bound sister Blossom, who works as a wet-nurse and lives with the female relatives in the alms house. Soon Mary moves in with the MacIntoshes, raiding the storeroom, bragging to her poor relations, systematically undermining Abraham until Lily fires the old man. What Mary mostly takes is English soap, and what she mostly insinuates about the loyal old retainer is that he’s “unclean” – Mary sickens Lily by claiming he prepares food with his “toilet hand” – so her attack resonates with visceral loathing well underneath more conscious generous sentiments.
Like George Orwell’s absorbing early novel Burmese Days (1934), also about late British rule, Cotton Mary lays bare the elaborate, vicious local competition first provoked and then ignored by colonial powers regarding local folk. Burmese Days is built upon the plot engineered by a local magistrate, U Po Kyin, to discredit the decent Dr. Veraswami within the small English community, simply because he believes the Indian to be somehow “in his way.” Veraswami’s friend, the timber seller Flory, quickly recognizes this attack for what it is, but could stop it only at great cost to his own standing among other ex-pats. “It is so important not to entangle oneself in ‘native’ quarrels. With Indians there must be no loyalty, no real friendship. Affection, even love – yes,” Flory reflects. “Even intimacy is allowable, at the right moments. But alliance, partisanship, never! Even to know the rights and wrongs of a ‘native’ quarrel is a loss of prestige.” Despite the film’s focus on Lily regaining her capacity to evict Cotton Mary, her real turning point begins as she and her older daughter Theresa agree to seek out Abraham and together search for him. In so doing, they discover a side of India neither has imagined. In an Italian film, we would know that Lily's daughter Theresa - no less than the little girl of comparable age whom Mary instructs in prayers and work habits in the final scene - stands for the future of her nation. It's a convention equally applicable here.
Meanwhile, Mary grows more extreme each day. She steals Lily’s clothing, strides unnervingly through city with the baby carriage, dressed as “the madam” herself, visits a hair salon for a Western bob. This transformation starts early at Lily’s hospital bedside when Mary kicks her own nurse’s shoes into a corner and steps into a pair Lily had discarded under the bed. Bursting repeatedly through this fantasy impersonation is Mary’s sudden, feverish rage – against her countrymen and the English in about equal measure – which leaves those in her wake aghast. If Merchant calls her “eccentric,” it’s only to coax us to watch.
*******
This review appeared in the 9/13/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, September 07, 2007
Film Review #122: Goya’s Ghosts
2006
Director: Milos Forman
Cast: Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgård, Natalie Portman
In the first of two explosive showdowns between the slender, hesitant Spanish painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) and the imposing conniver Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem in various flowing get-ups and locks), we are as surprised as Lorenzo. It’s fairly well into the movie; we have all gotten used to Goya as a pushover, a fussy string-bean of a man who squints and laughs self-deprecatingly when he would prefer not to answer. Over sixteen years in the making, as it turns out, following massive convulsions that both men survive – France’s 1808 invasion of Spain, the installation of Napoleon’s brother Joseph on the throne, the temporary fall of the Roman Catholic Church’s Spanish Inquisition – Goya’s insistence that Lorenzo take him to Inés Bilbatúa (Natalie Portman) is ferocious.
Lorenzo puts Goya off, suggests the painter is “obsessed.” Lorenzo has recently whisked this broken woman – long years ago one of Goya’s models – out of Goya’s hands, into an asylum, smoothly branding as madness her claim that she bore his child while rotting in the Inquisition’s prison. Now Goya has spotted the daughter, Alicia (also played by the impressive Portman), a tough cookie working the fine closed carriages of gentlemen in the capital’s park. To his artist’s eyes the extraordinary resemblance is proof enough. With rising anguish at his own cowardice and failure to protect Inés, Goya lists to Lorenzo the times her face has haunted him, shown up in his work – in its way this roll call a kind of argument that fuels his urgency. And here, director Forman lets us share what the painter sees – women’s faces from the breadth of Goya’s career flash on the screen, from paintings, on cathedral ceilings. This cavalcade concludes with an image of Truth as an angel lying dead – it’s the last etching from Goya’s monumental, 80-plate series, The Disasters of War. Then Goya bursts forward, grasps the much larger man with both hands, and a savage sound escapes the painter’s throat as Lorenzo staggers backward. “I won’t abandon her again! Take me to her!”
In this decisive moment, Lorenzo’s eyes widen, as if he sees Goya for the first time. Whatever he sees frightens him. Next time Goya visits, Lorenzo’s eyes widen again, dart about for escape before he decides to brazen it out. In a film so much about looking, where so much work gets done by characters glancing and nodding and staring at each other, part of Bardem’s Baroque portrayal of Lorenzo involves his seductive, always-hooded eyes, both a seasoned dissembler’s constant evading of detection and an ever-calculating gaze. During the second showdown – Lorenzo hatches another vicious scheme to hide his tracks, just as the English invade – there is a special authority in Goya’s commanding, “Look at you! You’re a whore!” precisely because Goya has mastered his own capacity to look and in doing so – this official court painter who has kept his place through several crowns of various nationalities – becomes less one himself.
Goya’s Ghosts has done reasonably well over the summer as a high-toned historical potboiler. Nearly two months into its US theatrical run, it’s still on a couple dozen art-house screens and has probably helped along the forthcoming DVD release here of Spanish director Carlos Saura’s film about the painter’s last years in exile, Goya in Bordeaux (2000). But Goya’s Ghosts has its complainers, chiefly around its use as allegory for Iraq, its distracting chronological inaccuracies, and difficulties with the way Czech director Forman, who has coaxed so many Oscar-caliber performances from previous casts, has managed his leads.
The film’s parallels with the war in Iraq are blunt: foreign invasion and brutal occupation, powerful radical clerics, fanatic insurgents, the people’s horrific suffering, the flowering of corruption in the vacuum left by failed regimes, and of course events at Abu Ghraib Prison. Part of the movie’s plot involves the Inquisition’s use of torture to discover heretics, in this case the delicate, vivacious and innocent Inés. Once her arms start to wrench out of their sockets, she confesses as quickly as she can figure out what she’s supposedly done. As the guest of her wealthy father at an exquisite private dinner designed to bribe, convince or blackmail him into freeing her, Brother Lorenzo – who has just raped Inés in her fetid cell, her small naked hips twisting futilely away from him – remains serenely impervious to Tomás Bilbatúa’s logic about torture until the merchant gives him with an on the spot demonstration.
Probably this scene more than any other has provoked the word “ham-fisted” – as if Forman exaggerates life under the Inquisition merely for the sake of passing agit-prop. Goya’s Ghosts should enjoy rediscovery in a few years when it’s less bound to today’s headlines. But this complaint illustrates why some filmmakers just insist they are only making fiction.
The issue of whether a film is propaganda echoes Goya’s situation as an artist and his stylistic attempts to portray the horrors of warfare in significant portions of his work more universally. It’s true that the film’s closing credits play over a magnificently detailed and sumptuous scrutiny of several paintings of specific historical events – believe me, you won’t be reading the tiny lists of names. That backdrop includes The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, huge canvases respectively of French North African troops ("Marmelites") suppressing revolt against the occupation and part of the 5,000 executions of Spanish civilians that occurred over those two days.
But elsewhere, as in The Disasters etchings, Goya does something new. Here – despite recognizable military uniforms, the omnipresent Spanish arches and Goya’s repeated use of “I saw this!” to title graphic atrocities – we also see orienting horizons, frames and landmarks start to melt away, dissolving the markers that bind an image to a single location or date – and to a literal notion of “accuracy.” A line of men tied to stakes seems to stretch to infinity and the heaps of dead seem to fill the entire world. Fred Licht has written extensively about this quality in The Disasters and how the series has more in common with some modern war photography than with classical painting that depicts war as heroic and circumscribed. And in The Caprichos – the film opens with monks handing around images of beasts preying on the populace from this print series and worrying about Spain’s reputation – Goya portrays war and corruption in ways we now call surrealistic.
By rare luck a non-touring exhibit of The Disasters of War – a first-edition set of all 80 plates, loaned by the Arthur Ross Foundation to Syracuse University – has coincided with the film’s opening where I live. So I went to see Goya’s Ghosts after spending part of an afternoon with The Disasters. This greatly affected how I saw both the film and those irritated, puzzled complaints about Forman’s inaccurate chronology. I’m not sure his approach is entirely successful, because it calls enough attention to itself to confuse people. But it’s clearly an approach to the question of how we remember artists, rather than haphazard filmmaking, and moreover an approach that Goya’s stylistic innovations suggest he might appreciate in the movie re-make of his life.
These chronological inaccuracies involve the time frame and order of events and certain of Goya’s works. The film tells us the opening scene occurs in 1792, with those first monks handling some of the Caprichos prints as well as some from The Disasters. Perhaps a year’s worth of action occurs and there’s a break, resuming “15 years later” with the French invasion of 1808, the opening of prisons, and Lorenzo’s return as a prosecutor for the French occupation – spouting Voltaire on human rights – with a French wardrobe, wife and three kids in tow. After what should be another break but does not seem so on-screen, the English invade (1813), reinstating the Spanish royals and Inquisition (1814), and Lorenzo dies gruesomely by garrote. Forman also fudges the onset of Goya’s deafness and migraines a bit later than 1792 and ignores his wife and son completely.
But what really rankles some viewers is that Forman plucks images from all over Goya’s career and inserts them in the story. Goya didn’t make the Caprichos until 1799, nor even start The Disasters until 1810, and the latter series wasn’t published until 1863.
We have the idea that bio-pics should handle basic facts literally, as if history happens in a straight line. Suppose we are free to choose from an artist’s over-all work and illustrate crucial junctures retrospectively? Drawing on the meaning of a whole body of work offers a different order of accuracy and truth – one that’s analogous to Goya’s shedding of stylistic and compositional conventions to convey the extremity of his times, an era when the Inquisition’s methods mock truth.
When Goya sees Alicia strolling that park, he’s stopped in his tracks by sheer visual self-evidence. Watching Goya’s Ghosts after an afternoon with The Disasters is also full of gripping serial déjà vu. No matter what else Goya’s Ghosts may be, Forman has thoroughly steeped his movie in The Disasters (and for all I know, a host of other Goya work). He sets up his shots in scene after scene so that, for a fleeting instant, some image from those plates congeals on-screen, echoing the grouping of bodies, a fallen horse, gang rapes, dismemberments, executions, the elaborate garrote machine, the slant of certain shadows and arches, even the distinctive face of one figure (whose look-alike shows up on-screen as Goya’s sign language interpreter) and the peculiar angle from which we see Lorenzo’s body taken down, piled on a cart and hauled away. It’s a breath-taking visual achievement – and an unusually demanding one for audiences. You don’t have to know Goya’s work to watch this movie, but the movie will send you to the work and back again.
This visual emphasis puts the performances in some context. Skarsgård’s Goya is not too passive – a ghost himself, one impatient reviewer says – but a man of retiring temperament engaged in multiple deadly struggles to keep his footing. For much of the film, Bardem’s Lorenzo does over-power him, and this provides a visceral screen experience of the long-gestating impulse to resist that informs art and uprisings alike. When Goya springs at Lorenzo, he’s as surprised as the rest of us. But we all believe it.
*******
This review appeared today in Stylusmagazine.com.
2006
Director: Milos Forman
Cast: Javier Bardem, Stellan Skarsgård, Natalie Portman
In the first of two explosive showdowns between the slender, hesitant Spanish painter Francisco Goya (Stellan Skarsgård) and the imposing conniver Brother Lorenzo (Javier Bardem in various flowing get-ups and locks), we are as surprised as Lorenzo. It’s fairly well into the movie; we have all gotten used to Goya as a pushover, a fussy string-bean of a man who squints and laughs self-deprecatingly when he would prefer not to answer. Over sixteen years in the making, as it turns out, following massive convulsions that both men survive – France’s 1808 invasion of Spain, the installation of Napoleon’s brother Joseph on the throne, the temporary fall of the Roman Catholic Church’s Spanish Inquisition – Goya’s insistence that Lorenzo take him to Inés Bilbatúa (Natalie Portman) is ferocious.
Lorenzo puts Goya off, suggests the painter is “obsessed.” Lorenzo has recently whisked this broken woman – long years ago one of Goya’s models – out of Goya’s hands, into an asylum, smoothly branding as madness her claim that she bore his child while rotting in the Inquisition’s prison. Now Goya has spotted the daughter, Alicia (also played by the impressive Portman), a tough cookie working the fine closed carriages of gentlemen in the capital’s park. To his artist’s eyes the extraordinary resemblance is proof enough. With rising anguish at his own cowardice and failure to protect Inés, Goya lists to Lorenzo the times her face has haunted him, shown up in his work – in its way this roll call a kind of argument that fuels his urgency. And here, director Forman lets us share what the painter sees – women’s faces from the breadth of Goya’s career flash on the screen, from paintings, on cathedral ceilings. This cavalcade concludes with an image of Truth as an angel lying dead – it’s the last etching from Goya’s monumental, 80-plate series, The Disasters of War. Then Goya bursts forward, grasps the much larger man with both hands, and a savage sound escapes the painter’s throat as Lorenzo staggers backward. “I won’t abandon her again! Take me to her!”
In this decisive moment, Lorenzo’s eyes widen, as if he sees Goya for the first time. Whatever he sees frightens him. Next time Goya visits, Lorenzo’s eyes widen again, dart about for escape before he decides to brazen it out. In a film so much about looking, where so much work gets done by characters glancing and nodding and staring at each other, part of Bardem’s Baroque portrayal of Lorenzo involves his seductive, always-hooded eyes, both a seasoned dissembler’s constant evading of detection and an ever-calculating gaze. During the second showdown – Lorenzo hatches another vicious scheme to hide his tracks, just as the English invade – there is a special authority in Goya’s commanding, “Look at you! You’re a whore!” precisely because Goya has mastered his own capacity to look and in doing so – this official court painter who has kept his place through several crowns of various nationalities – becomes less one himself.
Goya’s Ghosts has done reasonably well over the summer as a high-toned historical potboiler. Nearly two months into its US theatrical run, it’s still on a couple dozen art-house screens and has probably helped along the forthcoming DVD release here of Spanish director Carlos Saura’s film about the painter’s last years in exile, Goya in Bordeaux (2000). But Goya’s Ghosts has its complainers, chiefly around its use as allegory for Iraq, its distracting chronological inaccuracies, and difficulties with the way Czech director Forman, who has coaxed so many Oscar-caliber performances from previous casts, has managed his leads.
The film’s parallels with the war in Iraq are blunt: foreign invasion and brutal occupation, powerful radical clerics, fanatic insurgents, the people’s horrific suffering, the flowering of corruption in the vacuum left by failed regimes, and of course events at Abu Ghraib Prison. Part of the movie’s plot involves the Inquisition’s use of torture to discover heretics, in this case the delicate, vivacious and innocent Inés. Once her arms start to wrench out of their sockets, she confesses as quickly as she can figure out what she’s supposedly done. As the guest of her wealthy father at an exquisite private dinner designed to bribe, convince or blackmail him into freeing her, Brother Lorenzo – who has just raped Inés in her fetid cell, her small naked hips twisting futilely away from him – remains serenely impervious to Tomás Bilbatúa’s logic about torture until the merchant gives him with an on the spot demonstration.
Probably this scene more than any other has provoked the word “ham-fisted” – as if Forman exaggerates life under the Inquisition merely for the sake of passing agit-prop. Goya’s Ghosts should enjoy rediscovery in a few years when it’s less bound to today’s headlines. But this complaint illustrates why some filmmakers just insist they are only making fiction.
The issue of whether a film is propaganda echoes Goya’s situation as an artist and his stylistic attempts to portray the horrors of warfare in significant portions of his work more universally. It’s true that the film’s closing credits play over a magnificently detailed and sumptuous scrutiny of several paintings of specific historical events – believe me, you won’t be reading the tiny lists of names. That backdrop includes The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808, huge canvases respectively of French North African troops ("Marmelites") suppressing revolt against the occupation and part of the 5,000 executions of Spanish civilians that occurred over those two days.
But elsewhere, as in The Disasters etchings, Goya does something new. Here – despite recognizable military uniforms, the omnipresent Spanish arches and Goya’s repeated use of “I saw this!” to title graphic atrocities – we also see orienting horizons, frames and landmarks start to melt away, dissolving the markers that bind an image to a single location or date – and to a literal notion of “accuracy.” A line of men tied to stakes seems to stretch to infinity and the heaps of dead seem to fill the entire world. Fred Licht has written extensively about this quality in The Disasters and how the series has more in common with some modern war photography than with classical painting that depicts war as heroic and circumscribed. And in The Caprichos – the film opens with monks handing around images of beasts preying on the populace from this print series and worrying about Spain’s reputation – Goya portrays war and corruption in ways we now call surrealistic.
By rare luck a non-touring exhibit of The Disasters of War – a first-edition set of all 80 plates, loaned by the Arthur Ross Foundation to Syracuse University – has coincided with the film’s opening where I live. So I went to see Goya’s Ghosts after spending part of an afternoon with The Disasters. This greatly affected how I saw both the film and those irritated, puzzled complaints about Forman’s inaccurate chronology. I’m not sure his approach is entirely successful, because it calls enough attention to itself to confuse people. But it’s clearly an approach to the question of how we remember artists, rather than haphazard filmmaking, and moreover an approach that Goya’s stylistic innovations suggest he might appreciate in the movie re-make of his life.
These chronological inaccuracies involve the time frame and order of events and certain of Goya’s works. The film tells us the opening scene occurs in 1792, with those first monks handling some of the Caprichos prints as well as some from The Disasters. Perhaps a year’s worth of action occurs and there’s a break, resuming “15 years later” with the French invasion of 1808, the opening of prisons, and Lorenzo’s return as a prosecutor for the French occupation – spouting Voltaire on human rights – with a French wardrobe, wife and three kids in tow. After what should be another break but does not seem so on-screen, the English invade (1813), reinstating the Spanish royals and Inquisition (1814), and Lorenzo dies gruesomely by garrote. Forman also fudges the onset of Goya’s deafness and migraines a bit later than 1792 and ignores his wife and son completely.
But what really rankles some viewers is that Forman plucks images from all over Goya’s career and inserts them in the story. Goya didn’t make the Caprichos until 1799, nor even start The Disasters until 1810, and the latter series wasn’t published until 1863.
We have the idea that bio-pics should handle basic facts literally, as if history happens in a straight line. Suppose we are free to choose from an artist’s over-all work and illustrate crucial junctures retrospectively? Drawing on the meaning of a whole body of work offers a different order of accuracy and truth – one that’s analogous to Goya’s shedding of stylistic and compositional conventions to convey the extremity of his times, an era when the Inquisition’s methods mock truth.
When Goya sees Alicia strolling that park, he’s stopped in his tracks by sheer visual self-evidence. Watching Goya’s Ghosts after an afternoon with The Disasters is also full of gripping serial déjà vu. No matter what else Goya’s Ghosts may be, Forman has thoroughly steeped his movie in The Disasters (and for all I know, a host of other Goya work). He sets up his shots in scene after scene so that, for a fleeting instant, some image from those plates congeals on-screen, echoing the grouping of bodies, a fallen horse, gang rapes, dismemberments, executions, the elaborate garrote machine, the slant of certain shadows and arches, even the distinctive face of one figure (whose look-alike shows up on-screen as Goya’s sign language interpreter) and the peculiar angle from which we see Lorenzo’s body taken down, piled on a cart and hauled away. It’s a breath-taking visual achievement – and an unusually demanding one for audiences. You don’t have to know Goya’s work to watch this movie, but the movie will send you to the work and back again.
This visual emphasis puts the performances in some context. Skarsgård’s Goya is not too passive – a ghost himself, one impatient reviewer says – but a man of retiring temperament engaged in multiple deadly struggles to keep his footing. For much of the film, Bardem’s Lorenzo does over-power him, and this provides a visceral screen experience of the long-gestating impulse to resist that informs art and uprisings alike. When Goya springs at Lorenzo, he’s as surprised as the rest of us. But we all believe it.
*******
This review appeared today in Stylusmagazine.com.
Film Review #121: Sugar Cane Alley
1983
Director: Euzhan Palcy
Cast: Garry Cadenat, Darling Légitimus, Douta Seck
On Tuesday, labor leaders complained in The New York Times that Brooklyn’s 40th annual West India Day parade the day before – typically a couple million line its route – now overshadows Labor Day observances in the Big Apple. That’s ironic, since West India Day has its roots in 19th century celebrations of Great Britain’s 1834 abolition of slavery, which freed 800,000 – most living in British West Indies colonies – from involuntary servitude. Revived in the flush of '60s ethnic pride and activism, Brooklyn’s West India Day moved from its original August 1st to merge with the traditional Labor Day, thereby expanding the holiday to include all workers.
The Caribbean Diaspora Film Festival also overlaps West India Day. And on Monday, to coincide with that parade, CDFF offered this year’s crown jewel: four screenings at BAM Rose Cinema of Martinican filmmaker Euzhan Palcy’s classic, Sugar Cane Alley (1983) – also fitting, since slavery was abolished not once but twice during Martinique’s days as a French colony. This engrossing, well-made movie, Palcy’s first feature, won 17 international awards when she made it at age 28.
Sugar Cane Alley tells the escape from the sugar cane fields of smart and decent, but hardly saintly, 11-year-old Jose Hassam (Garry Cadenat), by dint of his grandmother’s insistence that he go to school. As his neighbor, the elderly cane-cutter Medouze (Douta Seck), teaches Jose and events in the film make clear, life on a French plantations in the 1930s was different from slavery in name alone. Workers were routinely cheated and beaten. And when kids drink some rum one day while the adults are in the fields, and burn down a shack, and the bosses just send them into the fields too.
Sugar Cane Alley runs from August 1930 – when we meet Jose and his grandmother Ma Tine (Darling Légitimus) at the Rivière Sallée plantation – to shortly after May 6, 1932. Jose wins a partial scholarship to a better school in the capital, Fort-de-France. He and his grandmother travel by riverboat and settle there in a packing crate; she does laundry to pay his remaining tuition. We can fix the movie’s span because Ma Tine takes the boat home on an errand and when she doesn’t return, Jose follows her and he passes a newsboy on the dock hawking the headline that French President Paul Doumer was just assassinated.
Dating the movie’s end in this way stamps the times in which Jose comes of age: a decade of considerable political and labor unrest in the Caribbean as well as the birthing of the international Négritude movement by intellectuals of African descent from French colonies who crossed paths in Paris. (One of those was the Palcy’s fellow Martinican, the writer and eventual mayor of Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire, about whom Palcy has also made a documentary.) This strategically-placed detail announces that this sleepy backwater boy's fate is part of something far larger. The assassinated Doumer had administered French Indochina – Vietnam – at the turn of the century. Setting a tone that would bear grim fruit later, even down to our own day, Doumer had proudly reported from Asia, “We have monopolies on alcohol, salt and opium production and are profiting off the cheap labor both in the mines and on the plantations.”
Palcy is careful to frame but not overwhelm Jose’s story with such references. A mischievous 11-year-old – he breaks a prized sugar bowl and lies about it, gets revenge on an adult who makes him late to school, bickers with the smartest girl and then matures into her friend – Jose is already interesting on his own. His eventual bond with Leopold, unacknowledged mulatto son of the plantation’s owner (uncredited, like most of the children’s roles), has great conviction in its final dramatic moment, despite just a few quiet earlier scenes together. Here, at a fever pitch, Jose’s loyalty to his dying grandmother jostles with Leopold’s capture by police for what we may assume is a first of many acts of resistance.
This culmination is a far cry from Sugar Cane Alley’s opening moments of festive piano and sepia-toned tropical postcards such as tourists mail home during cruises. Jose discovers the movies in Fort-de-France – wryly, it’s Dracula on the bill, Europe’s home-grown voodoo – but Palcy’s characters aren’t spending their days at the beach. Her overhead tracking shots of narrow halls and lanes, tight framing and close-ups convey how constricted chances are for the cane-cutters. There’s rarely a horizon – rarely an open future – except when Jose seeks Medouze’s stories of ancient Africa on the hillside and finally plans his own return to the capital.
The first black woman to direct a mainstream Hollywood feature – A Dry White Season (1989) on South Africa’s apartheid – Palcy has maintained an international vision of justice, but like director Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) has more often found work in television than film. (Yvonne Welbon's 2003 doc Sisters in Cinema is a worthwhile watch in this respect.) She’s made Disney’s Ruby Bridges (1999), on Louisiana school integration, and Showtime’s The Killing Yard (2001), on the 1971 Attica prison massacre. She based Sugar Cane Alley on Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley, which she read at age 14. She said, “It was the first time I read a book written by a black man of our country about the fruits of our country.”
And you don’t have to go to Brooklyn to see it.
*******
This review appears in the 9/6/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1983
Director: Euzhan Palcy
Cast: Garry Cadenat, Darling Légitimus, Douta Seck
On Tuesday, labor leaders complained in The New York Times that Brooklyn’s 40th annual West India Day parade the day before – typically a couple million line its route – now overshadows Labor Day observances in the Big Apple. That’s ironic, since West India Day has its roots in 19th century celebrations of Great Britain’s 1834 abolition of slavery, which freed 800,000 – most living in British West Indies colonies – from involuntary servitude. Revived in the flush of '60s ethnic pride and activism, Brooklyn’s West India Day moved from its original August 1st to merge with the traditional Labor Day, thereby expanding the holiday to include all workers.
The Caribbean Diaspora Film Festival also overlaps West India Day. And on Monday, to coincide with that parade, CDFF offered this year’s crown jewel: four screenings at BAM Rose Cinema of Martinican filmmaker Euzhan Palcy’s classic, Sugar Cane Alley (1983) – also fitting, since slavery was abolished not once but twice during Martinique’s days as a French colony. This engrossing, well-made movie, Palcy’s first feature, won 17 international awards when she made it at age 28.
Sugar Cane Alley tells the escape from the sugar cane fields of smart and decent, but hardly saintly, 11-year-old Jose Hassam (Garry Cadenat), by dint of his grandmother’s insistence that he go to school. As his neighbor, the elderly cane-cutter Medouze (Douta Seck), teaches Jose and events in the film make clear, life on a French plantations in the 1930s was different from slavery in name alone. Workers were routinely cheated and beaten. And when kids drink some rum one day while the adults are in the fields, and burn down a shack, and the bosses just send them into the fields too.
Sugar Cane Alley runs from August 1930 – when we meet Jose and his grandmother Ma Tine (Darling Légitimus) at the Rivière Sallée plantation – to shortly after May 6, 1932. Jose wins a partial scholarship to a better school in the capital, Fort-de-France. He and his grandmother travel by riverboat and settle there in a packing crate; she does laundry to pay his remaining tuition. We can fix the movie’s span because Ma Tine takes the boat home on an errand and when she doesn’t return, Jose follows her and he passes a newsboy on the dock hawking the headline that French President Paul Doumer was just assassinated.
Dating the movie’s end in this way stamps the times in which Jose comes of age: a decade of considerable political and labor unrest in the Caribbean as well as the birthing of the international Négritude movement by intellectuals of African descent from French colonies who crossed paths in Paris. (One of those was the Palcy’s fellow Martinican, the writer and eventual mayor of Fort-de-France, Aimé Césaire, about whom Palcy has also made a documentary.) This strategically-placed detail announces that this sleepy backwater boy's fate is part of something far larger. The assassinated Doumer had administered French Indochina – Vietnam – at the turn of the century. Setting a tone that would bear grim fruit later, even down to our own day, Doumer had proudly reported from Asia, “We have monopolies on alcohol, salt and opium production and are profiting off the cheap labor both in the mines and on the plantations.”
Palcy is careful to frame but not overwhelm Jose’s story with such references. A mischievous 11-year-old – he breaks a prized sugar bowl and lies about it, gets revenge on an adult who makes him late to school, bickers with the smartest girl and then matures into her friend – Jose is already interesting on his own. His eventual bond with Leopold, unacknowledged mulatto son of the plantation’s owner (uncredited, like most of the children’s roles), has great conviction in its final dramatic moment, despite just a few quiet earlier scenes together. Here, at a fever pitch, Jose’s loyalty to his dying grandmother jostles with Leopold’s capture by police for what we may assume is a first of many acts of resistance.
This culmination is a far cry from Sugar Cane Alley’s opening moments of festive piano and sepia-toned tropical postcards such as tourists mail home during cruises. Jose discovers the movies in Fort-de-France – wryly, it’s Dracula on the bill, Europe’s home-grown voodoo – but Palcy’s characters aren’t spending their days at the beach. Her overhead tracking shots of narrow halls and lanes, tight framing and close-ups convey how constricted chances are for the cane-cutters. There’s rarely a horizon – rarely an open future – except when Jose seeks Medouze’s stories of ancient Africa on the hillside and finally plans his own return to the capital.
The first black woman to direct a mainstream Hollywood feature – A Dry White Season (1989) on South Africa’s apartheid – Palcy has maintained an international vision of justice, but like director Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust) has more often found work in television than film. (Yvonne Welbon's 2003 doc Sisters in Cinema is a worthwhile watch in this respect.) She’s made Disney’s Ruby Bridges (1999), on Louisiana school integration, and Showtime’s The Killing Yard (2001), on the 1971 Attica prison massacre. She based Sugar Cane Alley on Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley, which she read at age 14. She said, “It was the first time I read a book written by a black man of our country about the fruits of our country.”
And you don’t have to go to Brooklyn to see it.
*******
This review appears in the 9/6/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Thursday, August 30, 2007
Film Review #120: Before Night Falls
2000
Director: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Javier Bardem, Oliver Martinez, Johnny Depp
Before Night Falls opens on an apparently simple scene set in Cuba’s northwest Oriente Province, 1943. The camera’s eye gazes skyward as sun glints through deep green forest canopy far overhead – lovely, with a slight gentle wind – then sweeps down to a tiny year-old boy, sitting naked in a mud pit. The camera pulls back and up, away from this make-shift playpen isolated in a field, some ways from a shack. No one’s nearby this pit that’s open to sun and rain. In a single fluid arc, this opening establishes a twin image – the imagination and freedom that by our nature we seek, inspired and unlocked in the natural world, against a harsh, essential solitude. Our eyes in the shimmering tree tops, we sit trapped in the blunt mud.
The film’s opening, so painterly in handling these prototypic images, comes courtesy of writer-director Julian Schnabel, who leaves his painting every few years to make a film about another artist. Here, the naked toddler left in the pit by his young mother while she works in the fields is the eventually – against all odds – prolific dissident Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (played by various Schnabel offspring and then as an adult by the great Javier Bardem). Schnabel wrote the script, based on Arenas’ memoir of the same title, with the writer’s close friend Lázaro Gómez-Carriles (played onscreen by Oliver Martinez), to whom Arenas dictated the manuscript when he became too ill with AIDS to type.
Previously Schnabel made the cult favorite Basquiat (1996/DVD 2002) about graffiti artist and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (aka Samo). His 1980s prominence in Manhattan’s art world overlaps Arenas’ sojourn there; the writer landed in New York via the 1980 Mariel boatlift by which 125,000 Cubans left their nation. (After a long period of harassment and friction with Castro’s regime partly stemming from being openly gay, Arenas was able to secure exit permission by declaring himself homosexual and therefore undesirable.) Both men died in 1988, Basquiat by heroin overdose, Arenas by a drug overdose suicide that the film portrays as assisted.
For a first film, Basquiat was an embarrassment of ensemble acting riches, starting with Jeffrey Wright’s remarkable screen debut in the title role. His scenes with David Bowie (still the best Andy Warhol portrayal short of Warhol himself), as these two wary confidantes talk over painting and fame, are unmatched. Basquiat also commented explicitly on celebrity commercialization through art critic and self-proclaimed Basquiat discoverer Rene Ricard (Canadian actor Michael Wincott, who appears in all three of Schnabel’s films), whose voice-over narration comes directly from Ricard’s 1981 writings in ArtForum.
Wincott returns as Cuban writer Herberto Zorilla Ochoa in Before Night Falls, in which Schnabel addresses the fate of dissident art and lifestyles under Castro’s revolution. Zorilla, a mentor to Arenas, was tried in the 1960s for violating the penal code’s Article 243 – forbidding assembly of more than three persons – because he had hosted a reading in his home of his own and some friends’ writings. When he publicly renounced his own work, Zorilla’s wife leapt to her death off a balcony. Shortly after this, Arenas – he had published one book in Cuba, winning a national honorable mention – began smuggling his own manuscripts to France with a painter who admired his work and had sought him out during a visit from Paris. Eventually arrested in 1973 on the pretext of molesting some boys at a beach, Arenas was sentenced to prison for “ideological deviation” and publishing abroad without permission. Escaping prison once, Arenas then served almost two years in the infamous El Morro. (Johnny Depp’s dual cameo roles – as the blond queen Bon Bon and the prison’s sadistic Lt. Victor – are incisive special treats.)
Arenas was extremely active in 1980s literary New York, as he had been in Cuba. Before Night Falls concentrates on his deeply deprived youth (once he survives that mud pit, his grandfather chops down the trees on whose trunks he carves poems when his teacher tells the family he has a special gift); his early years of writing (mentoring older writers coached his efforts and tutored him in world literature); his part in the burgeoning gay scene in Havana and its collision course with Castro’s regime; his grueling imprisonment (an acquaintance who worked as a psychologist in Cuba tells me Schnabel’s portrayal of El Morro doesn’t go far enough); his efforts to leave Cuba and his eventual relocation in New York with his enduring friend Lázaro, who nurses him in his final days. Arenas had a long, on-again-off-again relationship with a wealthy Errol Flynn look-alike with a white convertible to match, Pepe Malas (Andrea di Stefano), whose various repeated betrayals thread through the story.
Though cinematically stronger because of it, Schnabel’s film also leaves a good deal out, including positions Arenas held in journalism and in editing two Cuban magazines, that substantiate the international reputation Arenas gained, especially in Europe, before he ever left Cuba. Published three years after Arenas’ death, his memoir Before Night Falls was named one of that year’s ten best books by the New York Times. Right now, amazon.com lists 74 Arenas titles in print, many re-issued since the film’s release.
Javier Bardem was Oscar-nominated for his performance as Reinaldo Arenas and picked up a Special Jury Prize in Venice, among a raft of critical kudos. Actually not Bardem’s first portrayal of a gay man – in 1999, he appeared in a far more overtly sexual Spanish film, Second Skin – this role is more remarkable for his eerie recreation of Arenas, with whom he shared little physical resemblance. Besides a splendid commentary track – Schnabel plus Bardem, Gómez-Carilles, both DPs and composer Carter Burwell – the DVD also contains a clip of a 1983 interview with Arenas when he was 40.
In the long twilight of Castro’s presidency, reassessments and remembrances can only accelerate. We can liken Before Night Falls to Jonathan Demme’s hugely under-appreciated documentary, The Agronomist (2003/DVD 2005), about assassinated Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, an early Aristide supporter who cooled amid the rising corruption, violence and dissembling of his hero’s regime. No part of the political spectrum has a monopoly on hardened positions, of course – the US embargo on Cuba has also meant that the films of Cuban master director Humberto Solas have reached US screens slowly when at all.
Schnabel’s third film opens in the US in December, having taking Best Director at this springs’ Cannes. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly recounts how a high profile French fashion magazine editor endured a paralyzing stroke in the mid-90s.
*******
An abbreviated version of this review appeared in today’s Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2000
Director: Julian Schnabel
Cast: Javier Bardem, Oliver Martinez, Johnny Depp
Before Night Falls opens on an apparently simple scene set in Cuba’s northwest Oriente Province, 1943. The camera’s eye gazes skyward as sun glints through deep green forest canopy far overhead – lovely, with a slight gentle wind – then sweeps down to a tiny year-old boy, sitting naked in a mud pit. The camera pulls back and up, away from this make-shift playpen isolated in a field, some ways from a shack. No one’s nearby this pit that’s open to sun and rain. In a single fluid arc, this opening establishes a twin image – the imagination and freedom that by our nature we seek, inspired and unlocked in the natural world, against a harsh, essential solitude. Our eyes in the shimmering tree tops, we sit trapped in the blunt mud.
The film’s opening, so painterly in handling these prototypic images, comes courtesy of writer-director Julian Schnabel, who leaves his painting every few years to make a film about another artist. Here, the naked toddler left in the pit by his young mother while she works in the fields is the eventually – against all odds – prolific dissident Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (played by various Schnabel offspring and then as an adult by the great Javier Bardem). Schnabel wrote the script, based on Arenas’ memoir of the same title, with the writer’s close friend Lázaro Gómez-Carriles (played onscreen by Oliver Martinez), to whom Arenas dictated the manuscript when he became too ill with AIDS to type.
Previously Schnabel made the cult favorite Basquiat (1996/DVD 2002) about graffiti artist and painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (aka Samo). His 1980s prominence in Manhattan’s art world overlaps Arenas’ sojourn there; the writer landed in New York via the 1980 Mariel boatlift by which 125,000 Cubans left their nation. (After a long period of harassment and friction with Castro’s regime partly stemming from being openly gay, Arenas was able to secure exit permission by declaring himself homosexual and therefore undesirable.) Both men died in 1988, Basquiat by heroin overdose, Arenas by a drug overdose suicide that the film portrays as assisted.
For a first film, Basquiat was an embarrassment of ensemble acting riches, starting with Jeffrey Wright’s remarkable screen debut in the title role. His scenes with David Bowie (still the best Andy Warhol portrayal short of Warhol himself), as these two wary confidantes talk over painting and fame, are unmatched. Basquiat also commented explicitly on celebrity commercialization through art critic and self-proclaimed Basquiat discoverer Rene Ricard (Canadian actor Michael Wincott, who appears in all three of Schnabel’s films), whose voice-over narration comes directly from Ricard’s 1981 writings in ArtForum.
Wincott returns as Cuban writer Herberto Zorilla Ochoa in Before Night Falls, in which Schnabel addresses the fate of dissident art and lifestyles under Castro’s revolution. Zorilla, a mentor to Arenas, was tried in the 1960s for violating the penal code’s Article 243 – forbidding assembly of more than three persons – because he had hosted a reading in his home of his own and some friends’ writings. When he publicly renounced his own work, Zorilla’s wife leapt to her death off a balcony. Shortly after this, Arenas – he had published one book in Cuba, winning a national honorable mention – began smuggling his own manuscripts to France with a painter who admired his work and had sought him out during a visit from Paris. Eventually arrested in 1973 on the pretext of molesting some boys at a beach, Arenas was sentenced to prison for “ideological deviation” and publishing abroad without permission. Escaping prison once, Arenas then served almost two years in the infamous El Morro. (Johnny Depp’s dual cameo roles – as the blond queen Bon Bon and the prison’s sadistic Lt. Victor – are incisive special treats.)
Arenas was extremely active in 1980s literary New York, as he had been in Cuba. Before Night Falls concentrates on his deeply deprived youth (once he survives that mud pit, his grandfather chops down the trees on whose trunks he carves poems when his teacher tells the family he has a special gift); his early years of writing (mentoring older writers coached his efforts and tutored him in world literature); his part in the burgeoning gay scene in Havana and its collision course with Castro’s regime; his grueling imprisonment (an acquaintance who worked as a psychologist in Cuba tells me Schnabel’s portrayal of El Morro doesn’t go far enough); his efforts to leave Cuba and his eventual relocation in New York with his enduring friend Lázaro, who nurses him in his final days. Arenas had a long, on-again-off-again relationship with a wealthy Errol Flynn look-alike with a white convertible to match, Pepe Malas (Andrea di Stefano), whose various repeated betrayals thread through the story.
Though cinematically stronger because of it, Schnabel’s film also leaves a good deal out, including positions Arenas held in journalism and in editing two Cuban magazines, that substantiate the international reputation Arenas gained, especially in Europe, before he ever left Cuba. Published three years after Arenas’ death, his memoir Before Night Falls was named one of that year’s ten best books by the New York Times. Right now, amazon.com lists 74 Arenas titles in print, many re-issued since the film’s release.
Javier Bardem was Oscar-nominated for his performance as Reinaldo Arenas and picked up a Special Jury Prize in Venice, among a raft of critical kudos. Actually not Bardem’s first portrayal of a gay man – in 1999, he appeared in a far more overtly sexual Spanish film, Second Skin – this role is more remarkable for his eerie recreation of Arenas, with whom he shared little physical resemblance. Besides a splendid commentary track – Schnabel plus Bardem, Gómez-Carilles, both DPs and composer Carter Burwell – the DVD also contains a clip of a 1983 interview with Arenas when he was 40.
In the long twilight of Castro’s presidency, reassessments and remembrances can only accelerate. We can liken Before Night Falls to Jonathan Demme’s hugely under-appreciated documentary, The Agronomist (2003/DVD 2005), about assassinated Haitian radio journalist Jean Dominique, an early Aristide supporter who cooled amid the rising corruption, violence and dissembling of his hero’s regime. No part of the political spectrum has a monopoly on hardened positions, of course – the US embargo on Cuba has also meant that the films of Cuban master director Humberto Solas have reached US screens slowly when at all.
Schnabel’s third film opens in the US in December, having taking Best Director at this springs’ Cannes. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly recounts how a high profile French fashion magazine editor endured a paralyzing stroke in the mid-90s.
*******
An abbreviated version of this review appeared in today’s Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Film Review #119: Shoot the Piano Player
1960/62
Director: Francois Truffaut
Cast: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Albert Rémy
There’s the sound of frantic running in the dark on pavement. A car’s headlights and gunning engine chasing someone. Suddenly this guy runs right into a street lamp, knocks him out cold, and another guy, shifting an armful of roses, helps him up. And so these two strangers stroll for a bit, discussing marriage and how the rose-carrier finally fell in love with his wife. They part, and the chase resumes. Later on, two thugs will kidnap a boy and, side-tracked in their enthusiasm for gadgets, drop their stern demeanor to brag about air-conditioned hats and such, but by then we’re used to impromptu chats and fanciful insertions.
Before Bonnie and Clyde, there was a little French film called Shoot the Piano Player. Bonnie and Clyde’s 40th anniversary earlier this month has caused a flurry of film magazine and newspaper movie-page comment about that 1967 film. Based loosely on the exploits of notorious bank-robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who ranged across the Midwest prairies during the Great Depression, Bonnie and Clyde remains a landmark in US film-making, both for its controversy and adoption of new film techniques. In the title roles, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are attractive, witty and, like their real-life counterparts, derided banks as institutions of the rich that stole the money and land of ordinary working people. Like their real-life counterparts, the celluloid duo courted media coverage as folk heroes. Further, Bonnie and Clyde depicted violence more graphically than US film had done before, even in the 1903’s-era B gangster movies it fondly recalled, both with the ending’s shockingly prolonged execution and a number of shots directly in people’s faces during the story. For the first time, a US film used “squibs,” tiny explosive charges, attached to bags of red paint, which detonated to simulate gun-shot wounds as they occurred.
Bonnie and Clyde also adopted story-telling techniques from French “new wave” filmmakers working a bit earlier that decade – sudden shifts in tone from comic scenes to extreme violence, jump cuts and chopping editing – that were disconcerting then because they broke down storylines and barriers between art and real life. Tapping Arthur Penn for director certainly worked out – besides the film’s immediate and durable popularity, its showing at the Oscars was immense – but star-and-producer Warren Beatty’s first choice had been François Truffaut. This was largely based on Truffaut’s 1960 film, Shoot the Piano Player, itself a tribute to US 1930s gangster films and an adaptation of a 1950’s American pulp fiction novel by David Goodis, Down There.
Shoot the Piano Player was only Truffaut’s second feature, released a year after The 400 Blows. Not well-received initially, it didn’t open in the US until mid-1962, carried on the wave of his third feature, Jules and Jim. Before his death in 1984, the man who made those three films in his first three years also made films like Fahrenheit 451, Mississippi Mermaid, the five Antoine Doinel films (starring Jean-Pierre Leaud) and my personal favorites, Day For Night (1973) and The Story of Adele H (1975). But in his essay for Criterion's 2-disc set in 2005, Kent Jones has called Shoot the Piano Player – at 84 minutes, Truffaut was already getting the job done fast – “the skeleton key” to all Truffuat’s work. Despite that set’s feast of bonus interviews and commentary, the movie’s eminently watchable more than once all by itself.
It’s a wisp of a story. A sad-eyed, very private Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), is playing honky-tonk piano in a bar, far from the tuxedoed concerts of his career as Édouard Saroyan. He’s raising a younger brother, and getting more than eyed by both the golden-hearted prostitute who lives next door, Clarisse (Michèle Mercier), and the barmaid Léna (Marie Dubois). Like the actor who plays him, who’s known mostly to Americans for his singing, Charlie comes from an Armenian-French clan. His older brothers, Chico (Albert Rémy) and Richard (Jean-Jacques Aslanian), hide “like wolves” at a remote farm between badly botched hold-ups. Charlie wants out of their scrapes and hasn’t seen them in four years when Chico – he of the lamp post – pursued by two thugs he’s double-crossed, Momo (Claude Mansard) and Ernest (Daniel Boulanger), bursts into the bar. When Chico escapes, the thugs pursue Charlie, then Léna, kidnap Charlie’s little brother, and in various vehicles all head through the winter night to a showdown at the farm.
An old poster from his concert years in Léna’s room prompts Charlie’s flashback of his career and its costs – the suicide of his wife Thérèse (Nicole Berger) – and he shares this with Léna. In a scene that surely influenced another, later film – Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), also starring Beatty – the thugs stalk those hiding inside the peaceful, snow-covered Saroyan farm, then spot Léna running through the forest and shoot her, so that her snow-covered face is where the camera comes to rest.
Along the way, Truffaut has embedded rich, sometimes earthy discussions about relations between the sexes along with comic escapades in wildly unlikely spots, Charlie’s regret, tender romance, and the cost of fame and guilt and family loyalty. Vintage stuff.
*******
This review appeared in the 8/23/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films without a theatrical run in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1960/62
Director: Francois Truffaut
Cast: Charles Aznavour, Marie Dubois, Albert Rémy
There’s the sound of frantic running in the dark on pavement. A car’s headlights and gunning engine chasing someone. Suddenly this guy runs right into a street lamp, knocks him out cold, and another guy, shifting an armful of roses, helps him up. And so these two strangers stroll for a bit, discussing marriage and how the rose-carrier finally fell in love with his wife. They part, and the chase resumes. Later on, two thugs will kidnap a boy and, side-tracked in their enthusiasm for gadgets, drop their stern demeanor to brag about air-conditioned hats and such, but by then we’re used to impromptu chats and fanciful insertions.
Before Bonnie and Clyde, there was a little French film called Shoot the Piano Player. Bonnie and Clyde’s 40th anniversary earlier this month has caused a flurry of film magazine and newspaper movie-page comment about that 1967 film. Based loosely on the exploits of notorious bank-robbers Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, who ranged across the Midwest prairies during the Great Depression, Bonnie and Clyde remains a landmark in US film-making, both for its controversy and adoption of new film techniques. In the title roles, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are attractive, witty and, like their real-life counterparts, derided banks as institutions of the rich that stole the money and land of ordinary working people. Like their real-life counterparts, the celluloid duo courted media coverage as folk heroes. Further, Bonnie and Clyde depicted violence more graphically than US film had done before, even in the 1903’s-era B gangster movies it fondly recalled, both with the ending’s shockingly prolonged execution and a number of shots directly in people’s faces during the story. For the first time, a US film used “squibs,” tiny explosive charges, attached to bags of red paint, which detonated to simulate gun-shot wounds as they occurred.
Bonnie and Clyde also adopted story-telling techniques from French “new wave” filmmakers working a bit earlier that decade – sudden shifts in tone from comic scenes to extreme violence, jump cuts and chopping editing – that were disconcerting then because they broke down storylines and barriers between art and real life. Tapping Arthur Penn for director certainly worked out – besides the film’s immediate and durable popularity, its showing at the Oscars was immense – but star-and-producer Warren Beatty’s first choice had been François Truffaut. This was largely based on Truffaut’s 1960 film, Shoot the Piano Player, itself a tribute to US 1930s gangster films and an adaptation of a 1950’s American pulp fiction novel by David Goodis, Down There.
Shoot the Piano Player was only Truffaut’s second feature, released a year after The 400 Blows. Not well-received initially, it didn’t open in the US until mid-1962, carried on the wave of his third feature, Jules and Jim. Before his death in 1984, the man who made those three films in his first three years also made films like Fahrenheit 451, Mississippi Mermaid, the five Antoine Doinel films (starring Jean-Pierre Leaud) and my personal favorites, Day For Night (1973) and The Story of Adele H (1975). But in his essay for Criterion's 2-disc set in 2005, Kent Jones has called Shoot the Piano Player – at 84 minutes, Truffaut was already getting the job done fast – “the skeleton key” to all Truffuat’s work. Despite that set’s feast of bonus interviews and commentary, the movie’s eminently watchable more than once all by itself.
It’s a wisp of a story. A sad-eyed, very private Charlie Kohler (Charles Aznavour), is playing honky-tonk piano in a bar, far from the tuxedoed concerts of his career as Édouard Saroyan. He’s raising a younger brother, and getting more than eyed by both the golden-hearted prostitute who lives next door, Clarisse (Michèle Mercier), and the barmaid Léna (Marie Dubois). Like the actor who plays him, who’s known mostly to Americans for his singing, Charlie comes from an Armenian-French clan. His older brothers, Chico (Albert Rémy) and Richard (Jean-Jacques Aslanian), hide “like wolves” at a remote farm between badly botched hold-ups. Charlie wants out of their scrapes and hasn’t seen them in four years when Chico – he of the lamp post – pursued by two thugs he’s double-crossed, Momo (Claude Mansard) and Ernest (Daniel Boulanger), bursts into the bar. When Chico escapes, the thugs pursue Charlie, then Léna, kidnap Charlie’s little brother, and in various vehicles all head through the winter night to a showdown at the farm.
An old poster from his concert years in Léna’s room prompts Charlie’s flashback of his career and its costs – the suicide of his wife Thérèse (Nicole Berger) – and he shares this with Léna. In a scene that surely influenced another, later film – Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), also starring Beatty – the thugs stalk those hiding inside the peaceful, snow-covered Saroyan farm, then spot Léna running through the forest and shoot her, so that her snow-covered face is where the camera comes to rest.
Along the way, Truffaut has embedded rich, sometimes earthy discussions about relations between the sexes along with comic escapades in wildly unlikely spots, Charlie’s regret, tender romance, and the cost of fame and guilt and family loyalty. Vintage stuff.
*******
This review appeared in the 8/23/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films without a theatrical run in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Film Review #118: You Kill Me
2007
Director: John Dahl
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson
As movie directors go, John Dahl is a cult classic kind of guy, even leaving aside his debut of three stunning noirs over five years beginning in 1989 with Kill Me Again, followed by Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. Dahl tried his hand at terror with Joy Ride and made a credible entry in the World War II revival with The Great Raid two years ago. Just as his 1998 Matt Damon-Edward Norton poker buddy tale, Rounders, found its post-theater fans by word of mouth along with the rise of televised poker championships, You Kill Me is destined for a following among those familiar with escaping the grip of demon rum via the 12 step method.
The script from writing team Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely has seasoned for a decade or so. Dahl prowls many a cliff but never pitches over the edge into the arch satire, easy slapstick, tragic melodrama or earnest soap to which movies about addiction are so susceptible. Instead, You Kill Me contents itself with an understated knowing about early recovery, wrapped in a decent gangster yarn. And really, what could be more appetizing for the desperados that all sobered-up drunks with a little time under their belts secretly know themselves at heart to be? One of the pleasures of watching this film in a dark movie theater includes the small pockets of rueful, appreciative laughter where Dahl has gotten it right. You Kill Me premiered in late April at Tribeca, opened in theaters in late June, and at its peak in late July graced 252 US screens. Now at lower Manhattan’s Angelika Theater three times daily for the tail end of this respectable if diffident run, You Kill Me should have enough critical mass for an early DVD release.
Take for example the first church basement Alcoholics Anonymous meeting of professional hit man Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley), the visual equivalent of an old Plymouth’s slant-six engine wheezing and popping its way back to life after a few seasons at the end of the driveway. Frank slides resentfully into a folding chair in the back row – exiled to San Francisco, which is how he sees it, from wintry Buffalo – and there he slouches, studiously disinterested, armed folded, chin tucked in, his torso bent to one side so he’s even shorter. His eyes, less windows to his soul than periscopes, scan the room in slow motion. A woman at the front of the room speaks and Frank starts to listen. Without the slightest bit of mugging, instead bafflement, irritation, surprise, dismissal and disbelief cross his face and roll through his body – a sharp squint when he actually hears what she’s saying, a weary half chuckle at this fool, a soft snort at this scam, a bending of his head and a hitch in his seat he can’t quite contain. To Dahl’s credit the woman speaking has little to say that’s quotable or extreme, but Kingsley’s cement-faced, long-solitary killer has almost imperceptibly, against both his better judgment and intentions, softened.
As Frank’s sobering up goes on – he finds improbably that something’s spoiled his drinking, he gets a sponsor (Luke Wilson as we should get to see him more often) who holds impromptu discussions at the door of his Golden Gate Bridge toll-booth, he impulsively speaks at a meeting and explains that he kills people for a living, he has a slip and almost loses a girl, he makes a return trip to Buffalo where he seeks out a hometown AA meeting, and he more than survives a drink thrown in his face in a deserted lounge on the grayest of afternoons – this first encounter with mindfully sober people repeatedly proves itself a sound anchor.
All his life Frank has worked for his uncle, Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall), head of Buffalo’s Polish mob. A gruff, old-school papa with a Brill Cream pompadour, Roman later locks his son out of sight in the cellar and awaits his own slaughter in an armchair in his cramped, dark vestibule when he realizes his rival boss is coming through the front door. Frank’s steady vodka consumption converges with this challenge to his uncle’s lucrative control of city snowplowing by upstart Irish thugs and their new-comer Chinese partners. The winter Buffalo scenes were actually shot in Winnipeg, but Dahl captures the look and ambiance of western New York’s scrub trees, old working class neighborhoods, city streets and parking lots.
Early on, Frank botches killing the rival O’Leary (Dennis Farina), a sadistic sociopath of the sort Dahl has specialized in since Michael Madsen’s Vince Miller in Kill Me Again. Frank is so loaded he passes out in his car on the appointed chill and starless night. Hauled before his uncle in the snowplow garage, his protests, promises and pleas – all requiring an excruciating effort from one so hung over – fall on deaf ears. Never rising from this hot-seat – actually we’re witnessing what’s known as a family intervention – Frank finally subsides, leans forward and throws up on the drain grate conveniently under his feet.
So Frank is sent west to San Francisco. There, the family’s fixer, Dave (Bill Pullman, a Dahl regular), sets him up in an apartment as gray as Buffalo’s winter. A tiny window over the kitchen sink lets in a patch of California sun. Frank unpacks by opening a new quart of vodka. He intends to kick back on the gray couch and wait out his exile. Instead, Dave drops him off to that church basement, then hauls him to a job at a modest funeral chapel. Here he is good at making corpses presentable and lends a surprisingly stalwart presence to calling hours. And here Frank meets Laurel (Téa Leoni, who holds her own with Ben Kingsley in a delicious performance of great range, bite and nuance). To please her mother, she’s dropping off a pair of bowling shoes (stolen, way too big) for her despised step-father’s burial outfit. She tells Frank all this in the embalming room’s doorway. Frank’s first flirtation – you have to pay attention here, as she is, to appreciate how these soul-mates recognize mutual connivance – consists of assuring Laurel’s mother at calling hours, in front of Laurel, that the shoes “fit like a glove.”
The tart and wary Laurel, herself a survivor who navigates the cutthroat world of media advertising, is Dahl’s sweetest and most hopeful woman character yet, capable of both tenderness and the grit needed to follow Frank back to Buffalo when his cousin calls for rescue from O’Leary. She is miles from those mesmerizingly toxic femme fatales of Dahl’s early noirs – Fay, Suzanne and Bridget. Laurel’s presence is also part of how Dahl balances comic elements so that the film refrains from caricature and stops short of something we’d sum up as “madcap.” The script provided plenty of opportunities. You Kill Me opens, for example, with Frank incentivizing the chore of shoveling his front sidewalk by tossing his vodka bottle a few feet ahead of him into still-virgin snow drifts. He can’t turn down a drink from a family of imbibing mourners and winds up dancing. He coaches Laurel in assassination techniques by slicing a watermelon. Coerced by Dave into nudging a real estate deal along, he shows up in a stuffy businessman’s office in his shorts.
Entertaining as these scenes are, they’re also signs of a life wildly out of whack. A little to the left with Laurel and we’d tip into conventional happy-ending land, not the richer, harder-won, surprisingly vivid smile that opens Frank’s face when he says he now has something worth hanging onto to.
*******
This review appears in today’s Stylusmagazine.com.
2007
Director: John Dahl
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Téa Leoni, Luke Wilson
As movie directors go, John Dahl is a cult classic kind of guy, even leaving aside his debut of three stunning noirs over five years beginning in 1989 with Kill Me Again, followed by Red Rock West and The Last Seduction. Dahl tried his hand at terror with Joy Ride and made a credible entry in the World War II revival with The Great Raid two years ago. Just as his 1998 Matt Damon-Edward Norton poker buddy tale, Rounders, found its post-theater fans by word of mouth along with the rise of televised poker championships, You Kill Me is destined for a following among those familiar with escaping the grip of demon rum via the 12 step method.
The script from writing team Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely has seasoned for a decade or so. Dahl prowls many a cliff but never pitches over the edge into the arch satire, easy slapstick, tragic melodrama or earnest soap to which movies about addiction are so susceptible. Instead, You Kill Me contents itself with an understated knowing about early recovery, wrapped in a decent gangster yarn. And really, what could be more appetizing for the desperados that all sobered-up drunks with a little time under their belts secretly know themselves at heart to be? One of the pleasures of watching this film in a dark movie theater includes the small pockets of rueful, appreciative laughter where Dahl has gotten it right. You Kill Me premiered in late April at Tribeca, opened in theaters in late June, and at its peak in late July graced 252 US screens. Now at lower Manhattan’s Angelika Theater three times daily for the tail end of this respectable if diffident run, You Kill Me should have enough critical mass for an early DVD release.
Take for example the first church basement Alcoholics Anonymous meeting of professional hit man Frank Falenczyk (Ben Kingsley), the visual equivalent of an old Plymouth’s slant-six engine wheezing and popping its way back to life after a few seasons at the end of the driveway. Frank slides resentfully into a folding chair in the back row – exiled to San Francisco, which is how he sees it, from wintry Buffalo – and there he slouches, studiously disinterested, armed folded, chin tucked in, his torso bent to one side so he’s even shorter. His eyes, less windows to his soul than periscopes, scan the room in slow motion. A woman at the front of the room speaks and Frank starts to listen. Without the slightest bit of mugging, instead bafflement, irritation, surprise, dismissal and disbelief cross his face and roll through his body – a sharp squint when he actually hears what she’s saying, a weary half chuckle at this fool, a soft snort at this scam, a bending of his head and a hitch in his seat he can’t quite contain. To Dahl’s credit the woman speaking has little to say that’s quotable or extreme, but Kingsley’s cement-faced, long-solitary killer has almost imperceptibly, against both his better judgment and intentions, softened.
As Frank’s sobering up goes on – he finds improbably that something’s spoiled his drinking, he gets a sponsor (Luke Wilson as we should get to see him more often) who holds impromptu discussions at the door of his Golden Gate Bridge toll-booth, he impulsively speaks at a meeting and explains that he kills people for a living, he has a slip and almost loses a girl, he makes a return trip to Buffalo where he seeks out a hometown AA meeting, and he more than survives a drink thrown in his face in a deserted lounge on the grayest of afternoons – this first encounter with mindfully sober people repeatedly proves itself a sound anchor.
All his life Frank has worked for his uncle, Roman Krzeminski (Philip Baker Hall), head of Buffalo’s Polish mob. A gruff, old-school papa with a Brill Cream pompadour, Roman later locks his son out of sight in the cellar and awaits his own slaughter in an armchair in his cramped, dark vestibule when he realizes his rival boss is coming through the front door. Frank’s steady vodka consumption converges with this challenge to his uncle’s lucrative control of city snowplowing by upstart Irish thugs and their new-comer Chinese partners. The winter Buffalo scenes were actually shot in Winnipeg, but Dahl captures the look and ambiance of western New York’s scrub trees, old working class neighborhoods, city streets and parking lots.
Early on, Frank botches killing the rival O’Leary (Dennis Farina), a sadistic sociopath of the sort Dahl has specialized in since Michael Madsen’s Vince Miller in Kill Me Again. Frank is so loaded he passes out in his car on the appointed chill and starless night. Hauled before his uncle in the snowplow garage, his protests, promises and pleas – all requiring an excruciating effort from one so hung over – fall on deaf ears. Never rising from this hot-seat – actually we’re witnessing what’s known as a family intervention – Frank finally subsides, leans forward and throws up on the drain grate conveniently under his feet.
So Frank is sent west to San Francisco. There, the family’s fixer, Dave (Bill Pullman, a Dahl regular), sets him up in an apartment as gray as Buffalo’s winter. A tiny window over the kitchen sink lets in a patch of California sun. Frank unpacks by opening a new quart of vodka. He intends to kick back on the gray couch and wait out his exile. Instead, Dave drops him off to that church basement, then hauls him to a job at a modest funeral chapel. Here he is good at making corpses presentable and lends a surprisingly stalwart presence to calling hours. And here Frank meets Laurel (Téa Leoni, who holds her own with Ben Kingsley in a delicious performance of great range, bite and nuance). To please her mother, she’s dropping off a pair of bowling shoes (stolen, way too big) for her despised step-father’s burial outfit. She tells Frank all this in the embalming room’s doorway. Frank’s first flirtation – you have to pay attention here, as she is, to appreciate how these soul-mates recognize mutual connivance – consists of assuring Laurel’s mother at calling hours, in front of Laurel, that the shoes “fit like a glove.”
The tart and wary Laurel, herself a survivor who navigates the cutthroat world of media advertising, is Dahl’s sweetest and most hopeful woman character yet, capable of both tenderness and the grit needed to follow Frank back to Buffalo when his cousin calls for rescue from O’Leary. She is miles from those mesmerizingly toxic femme fatales of Dahl’s early noirs – Fay, Suzanne and Bridget. Laurel’s presence is also part of how Dahl balances comic elements so that the film refrains from caricature and stops short of something we’d sum up as “madcap.” The script provided plenty of opportunities. You Kill Me opens, for example, with Frank incentivizing the chore of shoveling his front sidewalk by tossing his vodka bottle a few feet ahead of him into still-virgin snow drifts. He can’t turn down a drink from a family of imbibing mourners and winds up dancing. He coaches Laurel in assassination techniques by slicing a watermelon. Coerced by Dave into nudging a real estate deal along, he shows up in a stuffy businessman’s office in his shorts.
Entertaining as these scenes are, they’re also signs of a life wildly out of whack. A little to the left with Laurel and we’d tip into conventional happy-ending land, not the richer, harder-won, surprisingly vivid smile that opens Frank’s face when he says he now has something worth hanging onto to.
*******
This review appears in today’s Stylusmagazine.com.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Film Review #117: Lonely Hearts
2006/07
Director: Todd Robinson
Cast: John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Jared Leto
Granddaddy of today’s speed date and chat room, America’s Cold War-era lonely hearts club catered to socially hesitant World War II widows and worried aging singles by discreet postal newsletter. As is still the case, this was fertile ground. In 1948 Martha Beck, a registered nurse, joined such a club in New York City and soon met toupee-clad con man Ray Fernandez. Unlike his previous marks, the full-figured Martha followed Ray after he robbed her, igniting an obsessive mutual passion. After she dropped her two small kids at the Salvation Army, Martha managed Ray’s dates, and posed as his sister to reassure skittish prospects. By the time they were arrested outside Grand Rapids in 1949, this duo had industriously fleeced three dozen women of their bank accounts. Charged with 20 murders, tied to three more, they admitted to 12 – these involved poison, bludgeoning, shooting, drowning and dismemberment. After a failed insanity defense, they went to Sing Sing’s electric chair in 1951 for killing wealthy and ostentatiously religious Albany widow Janet Fay.
At least three movies tell their tale – the first two released in 1970 and 1996. The latest, Todd Robinson’s Lonely Hearts, went quickly to DVD on July 31st after a theater run both long-delayed and brief. Writer-director Robinson is the grandson of Nassau County Detective Elmer “Buster” Robinson (John Travolta), who – with fellow cop Charlie Hildebrandt (James Gandolfini) – finally chased down Ray and Martha (Jared Leto and brilliantly-cast Salma Hayek). Then he quit police work. In five years he’d worked 1000 homicide cases.
Lonely Hearts premiered at New York’s 2006 Tribeca Festival to good reviews but didn’t reach theaters until this April, when it hit an apparent wall of fatigue with similar stories. Despite popularity on-screen of World War II battles and Cold War espionage, recent attempts to explore parallel upheaval in private life during that same period – often through noir-ish treatments of actual unsolved murders – haven’t been as sure-footed. Intervening films like Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia (about Elizabeth Short’s 1947 murder), Hollywoodland (Ben Affleck’s vehicle about Superman actor George Reeves’ 1959 death) and even David Fincher’s under-appreciated Zodiac (somewhat later California serial killings) have been less warmly embraced by audiences.
Robinson’s film deserves another look. It’s beautifully shot, with uniformly fine performances – including Laura Dern as Rene, Buster’s girlfriend-under-wraps. And Buster’s story provides a new, edgy parallel meditation on obsession and its price for “the rest of us,” an approach neither earlier film took. Robinson sets this up at once, opening his film with Buster’s wife’s suicide on their anniversary in 1947 – off working, he’d missed dinner once too often, and came home late to find the table set and her body in the tub. The film introduces Buster to Ray and Martha’s handiwork a year later via another woman shot dead in a bathtub. The echo hits Buster hard. Director Robinson’s film evades the question of whether his grandfather was already seeing Rene Fodie before his wife’s suicide or simply started afterward with unseemly speed – less, I think, out of any family reticence than correctly intuiting that his film is dramatically stronger for focusing on the detective’s secretiveness and Rene’s demands for attention as mirrors for Ray and Martha.
A kind of ricocheting comparison develops. When Martha discovers Ray in bed with another woman – this leads to her first murder – he exclaims, “Jesus, Martha! I was working!” Fed up with Buster’s all-consuming work, Rene resorts to leaving instead of murder – but at the worst possible moment, when Ray and Martha have just surfaced in Michigan, having killed a cop. Rene announces, “I’m leaving. I’m going to live with my sister in Rochester. Say something to stop me!” Buster manages only, “I don’t want you to go. I’ll be back in a couple days.” Early on, Charlie reminds Buster, “Just do your job!” That’s always more than anyone bargains for.
All three films select some variation on these key murders in the duo’s malignant career – their first, then that which sends them to Sing Sing, and the final fiasco with Delphine Downing (pregnant with Ray’s baby) and her small daughter. All three films convey convincing animal heat between Ray and Martha, but the earlier two place them in distorted, suffocating isolation, decisively defining them as pariahs rather than markers of a new post-war darkness in American life. Though Robinson had seen the previous two films, when he declares Lonely Hearts is “not a re-make,” that is surely a starting point for why not.
Leonard Kastle made The Honeymoon Killers (1970/DVD 2003) because he judged Bonnie and Clyde (1967) “revolting” and “fake” for glamorizing violent criminals. Kastle used grainy black and white film, shooting a manipulative, hysterical Martha (Shirley Stoler) from unflattering angles so she looked even blowsier. For his only film – Kastle works in opera and orchestra production – he adapted Mahler’s 6th symphony for the score, calling it as “over-baked” as the story. An extraordinarily articulate Kastle explains in detail on the DVD how the film was made and his own series of choices as writer and then director.
Respected Mexican noir specialist Arturo Ripstein’s Deep Crimson (1996/DVD 2005) set his version in 1949 Mexico, with Coral (opera singer Regina Orozco) and Estrella (Daniel Gimènez Chaco). Lurid peach and purple skies, splashes of red transform a blood-soaked towel flung over a chair to simply part of the décor. Like Kastle, Ripstein lingers on Martha’s heft as an outward sign of excessive, unrestrained appetite – both directors devote lengthy scenes to her gorging. Like Kastle’s cult favorite, Deep Crimson is about abnormal psychology, not empathy.
Casting slender Salma Hayek as Martha – Jared Leto’s skinny, jittery Ray reinforces this – allows Robinson to use physical mass differently, conveying visually how irredeemable promises and sorrows weigh men down. Charlie and Buster – Travolta added pounds for this role – are dense, ponderous men, oxen, enlarged yet again by their trench coats and brimmed hats and the deep shadows they daily traverse. This is the first of the three films that includes substantial treatment of the police themselves. In doing so, Robinson explores what happens during interaction with personalities such as Ray and Martha over time – exactly how they are socially toxic beyond their individual horrific crimes. In contrast, Kastle’s film virtually excludes police, while Ripstein simply equates his back-country lawmen with the duo. This is Robinson’s first feature-length film – he previously made the Oscar-nominated documentary Amargosa and some TV movies – and that makes his next effort something to look out for.
*******
This review appears in the 8/16/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent films that didn’t open in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2006/07
Director: Todd Robinson
Cast: John Travolta, Salma Hayek, Jared Leto
Granddaddy of today’s speed date and chat room, America’s Cold War-era lonely hearts club catered to socially hesitant World War II widows and worried aging singles by discreet postal newsletter. As is still the case, this was fertile ground. In 1948 Martha Beck, a registered nurse, joined such a club in New York City and soon met toupee-clad con man Ray Fernandez. Unlike his previous marks, the full-figured Martha followed Ray after he robbed her, igniting an obsessive mutual passion. After she dropped her two small kids at the Salvation Army, Martha managed Ray’s dates, and posed as his sister to reassure skittish prospects. By the time they were arrested outside Grand Rapids in 1949, this duo had industriously fleeced three dozen women of their bank accounts. Charged with 20 murders, tied to three more, they admitted to 12 – these involved poison, bludgeoning, shooting, drowning and dismemberment. After a failed insanity defense, they went to Sing Sing’s electric chair in 1951 for killing wealthy and ostentatiously religious Albany widow Janet Fay.
At least three movies tell their tale – the first two released in 1970 and 1996. The latest, Todd Robinson’s Lonely Hearts, went quickly to DVD on July 31st after a theater run both long-delayed and brief. Writer-director Robinson is the grandson of Nassau County Detective Elmer “Buster” Robinson (John Travolta), who – with fellow cop Charlie Hildebrandt (James Gandolfini) – finally chased down Ray and Martha (Jared Leto and brilliantly-cast Salma Hayek). Then he quit police work. In five years he’d worked 1000 homicide cases.
Lonely Hearts premiered at New York’s 2006 Tribeca Festival to good reviews but didn’t reach theaters until this April, when it hit an apparent wall of fatigue with similar stories. Despite popularity on-screen of World War II battles and Cold War espionage, recent attempts to explore parallel upheaval in private life during that same period – often through noir-ish treatments of actual unsolved murders – haven’t been as sure-footed. Intervening films like Brian De Palma’s Black Dahlia (about Elizabeth Short’s 1947 murder), Hollywoodland (Ben Affleck’s vehicle about Superman actor George Reeves’ 1959 death) and even David Fincher’s under-appreciated Zodiac (somewhat later California serial killings) have been less warmly embraced by audiences.
Robinson’s film deserves another look. It’s beautifully shot, with uniformly fine performances – including Laura Dern as Rene, Buster’s girlfriend-under-wraps. And Buster’s story provides a new, edgy parallel meditation on obsession and its price for “the rest of us,” an approach neither earlier film took. Robinson sets this up at once, opening his film with Buster’s wife’s suicide on their anniversary in 1947 – off working, he’d missed dinner once too often, and came home late to find the table set and her body in the tub. The film introduces Buster to Ray and Martha’s handiwork a year later via another woman shot dead in a bathtub. The echo hits Buster hard. Director Robinson’s film evades the question of whether his grandfather was already seeing Rene Fodie before his wife’s suicide or simply started afterward with unseemly speed – less, I think, out of any family reticence than correctly intuiting that his film is dramatically stronger for focusing on the detective’s secretiveness and Rene’s demands for attention as mirrors for Ray and Martha.
A kind of ricocheting comparison develops. When Martha discovers Ray in bed with another woman – this leads to her first murder – he exclaims, “Jesus, Martha! I was working!” Fed up with Buster’s all-consuming work, Rene resorts to leaving instead of murder – but at the worst possible moment, when Ray and Martha have just surfaced in Michigan, having killed a cop. Rene announces, “I’m leaving. I’m going to live with my sister in Rochester. Say something to stop me!” Buster manages only, “I don’t want you to go. I’ll be back in a couple days.” Early on, Charlie reminds Buster, “Just do your job!” That’s always more than anyone bargains for.
All three films select some variation on these key murders in the duo’s malignant career – their first, then that which sends them to Sing Sing, and the final fiasco with Delphine Downing (pregnant with Ray’s baby) and her small daughter. All three films convey convincing animal heat between Ray and Martha, but the earlier two place them in distorted, suffocating isolation, decisively defining them as pariahs rather than markers of a new post-war darkness in American life. Though Robinson had seen the previous two films, when he declares Lonely Hearts is “not a re-make,” that is surely a starting point for why not.
Leonard Kastle made The Honeymoon Killers (1970/DVD 2003) because he judged Bonnie and Clyde (1967) “revolting” and “fake” for glamorizing violent criminals. Kastle used grainy black and white film, shooting a manipulative, hysterical Martha (Shirley Stoler) from unflattering angles so she looked even blowsier. For his only film – Kastle works in opera and orchestra production – he adapted Mahler’s 6th symphony for the score, calling it as “over-baked” as the story. An extraordinarily articulate Kastle explains in detail on the DVD how the film was made and his own series of choices as writer and then director.
Casting slender Salma Hayek as Martha – Jared Leto’s skinny, jittery Ray reinforces this – allows Robinson to use physical mass differently, conveying visually how irredeemable promises and sorrows weigh men down. Charlie and Buster – Travolta added pounds for this role – are dense, ponderous men, oxen, enlarged yet again by their trench coats and brimmed hats and the deep shadows they daily traverse. This is the first of the three films that includes substantial treatment of the police themselves. In doing so, Robinson explores what happens during interaction with personalities such as Ray and Martha over time – exactly how they are socially toxic beyond their individual horrific crimes. In contrast, Kastle’s film virtually excludes police, while Ripstein simply equates his back-country lawmen with the duo. This is Robinson’s first feature-length film – he previously made the Oscar-nominated documentary Amargosa and some TV movies – and that makes his next effort something to look out for.
This review appears in the 8/16/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent films that didn’t open in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, August 10, 2007
Film Review #116: The Passenger
1975/2005
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider
It’s one of the most penetrating stares on-screen this side of the Vulcan mind-meld. TV journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson), annoyed that his hotel room’s shower has no soap, has gone next door to borrow some. In search of a civil war whose guerilla forces keep melting away, he’s just walked miles back to this sweltering, dirty, fly speck of a town through the southern Chad desert. His guides have left him. His Land Rover sits mired fender-deep in drifting sand. Locke’s had a few drinks with this guy, David Robertson (film producer Charley Mulvehill, who resembles Nicholson), and instead of soap Locke finds him dead.
Hovering above Robertson’s face, Locke sees they look enough alike to pass for one another. In that moment, as he later tells a character named only “the girl” – an architecture student who provides him with some background on the bizarrely irregular Barcelona buildings of Antonio Gaudì and then briefly becomes his lover (Maria Schneider, fresh from Last Tango in Paris) – he traded himself in for a “new one.” Switching passports, belongings and rooms, Locke correctly assumes that Europeans look alike to the desk clerk. Soon he’s catching planes, keeping the dead man’s appointments – Munich, Barcelona, finally the Spanish town of Osuna. Now he’s an arms smuggler for the rebels who eluded him as a reporter. Once Locke’s wife collects his effects and sees the doctored passport with its photo of a stranger, she pursues him, as do the dictator’s agents. In a single seven-minute tracking shot that squeezes through the grate in Locke’s hotel room window and finally meanders back, all these and miscellaneous more converge in Osuna’s dusty plaza, where a car’s muffler back-firing might instead have been an executioner’s shot.
The Passenger premiered at Cannes in 1975 to great consternation because, to the tastes of that day, it left so much unresolved. Not Michelangelo Antonioni’s best known film, we now recognize it as among his best-made and, as Nicholson notes on one of two commentary tracks (the other with screenwriter Mark Peploe), as fresh as yesterday’s headlines – right down to the gun-runner’s date book with its eerily significant September 11th appointment at the Hotel de la Gloria. With Antonioni dead last week at 94, it’s the film I went back to first and it’s the one I’d want someone to start with.
The Passenger has a past whose contortions mimic the film’s own explorations of what comprises the "full story." Sony Pictures released its DVD in 2005 after special screening at Lincoln Center’s 43rd New York Film Festival and limited theatrical runs on both coasts. The theatrical trailer for that choreographed re-entry hailed The Passenger as a “lost masterpiece” and advertised the “director’s preferred cut.” Not exactly.
Antonioni’s four-hour original emerged in an edited version just under 150 minutes – then pared to 126 minutes, finally stripped some more to 119 minutes at MGM’s demand for North American release. Although that film played art houses for a decade, Antonioni would condemn those deep cuts in 1983 – the same year Nicholson’s Proteus Films bought the negative. Nicholson then acquired world rights in 1986, sat on the film until VHS licensing (and a single Japanese DVD edition) expired in the 90s and finally made a deal with Sony. Sony’s current 126-minute version restored Locke’s secret trip back to his home in London (where he discovers his wife Rachel’s lover Stephen via a note taped to the bedroom door), but another 20 minutes that Antonioni judged crucial still remain missing.
Yet The Passenger shows a master’s hand and eye. While Antonioni has really been branded at this point as a purveyor of ennui and elusiveness, there’s an almost lyrical quality to this film. Locke’s quest for freedom remains at the heart of all the twisted, dirtied paths he takes. Speaking as Robertson the first time, this man who from the first is usually clad in aviator’s sunglasses says, “I’d like to inquire about flights.” In Barcelona, he escapes from his former producer Martin behind a rack of caged birds at a sidewalk market. Antonioni’s camera catches Locke, arms stretched like wings over the water, from above the cable gondola he takes across a bay on a sunny afternoon. And a delicate birdsong outside Locke’s window commences the last scene.
Remembered with admiration by his London colleagues for his professional “detachment,” Locke hears from the rebel Achebe, honored to finally meet “Robertson” in a Munich church, that the gun-runner is “different from the others – you care about our cause.” When Locke has missed Robertson’s other appointments – Achebe has been arrested – and thinks he’ll walk away once more, the girl reminds him that Robertson “believed in something – I thought you wanted that.” Locke’s interview with the dictator – which Martin intends to excerpt for a documentary memorializing Locke – is a failure in his wife’s eyes and his own, precisely because he accepted obvious lies about a civil war the dictator assures him does not exist. She reminds Martin, “I was there for that interview,” and then Antonioni obligingly offers a flashback of what transpired outside the frame.
And The Passenger is a brilliant, prophetic catalogue of the ways truth morphs, distorts and erodes when politics and media meet, through the expectations and collusion of both reporters and their audiences in making intelligible images to explain events. In what becomes a litany of accusation against the reliability of so-called evidence, in a film full of mirrors’ reflections and window panes through which we see the story, one “document” after another – passports, hotel registers, journalist’s interview tapes, official governmental assurances – fails to sustain proof when we look behind its surface.
The film’s elasticity even invites new meanings – jostling whatever post-9/11 viewers bring to Robertson’s date-book, for example, that might reinforce today’s stereotypes about Africa and other non-Western cultures, about Muslims, about terrorism and rebellion. Some reviewers have also suggested that Robertson’s datebook echoes Pinochet’s military coup in Chile. But there's a closer-to-home reference, since Antonioni uses the buildings of Barcelona-born architect Gaudì so extensively. Gaudì’s buildings have great visual power as settings for a story of a man whose reality has become warped. ThatThe Girl offers some historical details about who the architect was invites us to go ahead and do the same - that architect was an ethnic Catalan nationalist in a region once a sovereign nation, until defeat by Spain forces on September 11, 1714. That date is still mourned annually in that region. In fact, Gaudì was arrested on September 11th in 1924, two years before his death, for speaking the banned Catalan language at a banned church service commemorating the date. Antonioni uses Gaudì’s work to remind us that the heart of darkness under which official suppression of truth occurs is, as Robertson tells Locke, pretty much everywhere. Antonioni’s work is ever new in urging us to look again.
*******
This review appeared in the 8/9/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1975/2005
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Maria Schneider
It’s one of the most penetrating stares on-screen this side of the Vulcan mind-meld. TV journalist David Locke (Jack Nicholson), annoyed that his hotel room’s shower has no soap, has gone next door to borrow some. In search of a civil war whose guerilla forces keep melting away, he’s just walked miles back to this sweltering, dirty, fly speck of a town through the southern Chad desert. His guides have left him. His Land Rover sits mired fender-deep in drifting sand. Locke’s had a few drinks with this guy, David Robertson (film producer Charley Mulvehill, who resembles Nicholson), and instead of soap Locke finds him dead.
Hovering above Robertson’s face, Locke sees they look enough alike to pass for one another. In that moment, as he later tells a character named only “the girl” – an architecture student who provides him with some background on the bizarrely irregular Barcelona buildings of Antonio Gaudì and then briefly becomes his lover (Maria Schneider, fresh from Last Tango in Paris) – he traded himself in for a “new one.” Switching passports, belongings and rooms, Locke correctly assumes that Europeans look alike to the desk clerk. Soon he’s catching planes, keeping the dead man’s appointments – Munich, Barcelona, finally the Spanish town of Osuna. Now he’s an arms smuggler for the rebels who eluded him as a reporter. Once Locke’s wife collects his effects and sees the doctored passport with its photo of a stranger, she pursues him, as do the dictator’s agents. In a single seven-minute tracking shot that squeezes through the grate in Locke’s hotel room window and finally meanders back, all these and miscellaneous more converge in Osuna’s dusty plaza, where a car’s muffler back-firing might instead have been an executioner’s shot.
The Passenger premiered at Cannes in 1975 to great consternation because, to the tastes of that day, it left so much unresolved. Not Michelangelo Antonioni’s best known film, we now recognize it as among his best-made and, as Nicholson notes on one of two commentary tracks (the other with screenwriter Mark Peploe), as fresh as yesterday’s headlines – right down to the gun-runner’s date book with its eerily significant September 11th appointment at the Hotel de la Gloria. With Antonioni dead last week at 94, it’s the film I went back to first and it’s the one I’d want someone to start with.
The Passenger has a past whose contortions mimic the film’s own explorations of what comprises the "full story." Sony Pictures released its DVD in 2005 after special screening at Lincoln Center’s 43rd New York Film Festival and limited theatrical runs on both coasts. The theatrical trailer for that choreographed re-entry hailed The Passenger as a “lost masterpiece” and advertised the “director’s preferred cut.” Not exactly.
Antonioni’s four-hour original emerged in an edited version just under 150 minutes – then pared to 126 minutes, finally stripped some more to 119 minutes at MGM’s demand for North American release. Although that film played art houses for a decade, Antonioni would condemn those deep cuts in 1983 – the same year Nicholson’s Proteus Films bought the negative. Nicholson then acquired world rights in 1986, sat on the film until VHS licensing (and a single Japanese DVD edition) expired in the 90s and finally made a deal with Sony. Sony’s current 126-minute version restored Locke’s secret trip back to his home in London (where he discovers his wife Rachel’s lover Stephen via a note taped to the bedroom door), but another 20 minutes that Antonioni judged crucial still remain missing.
Yet The Passenger shows a master’s hand and eye. While Antonioni has really been branded at this point as a purveyor of ennui and elusiveness, there’s an almost lyrical quality to this film. Locke’s quest for freedom remains at the heart of all the twisted, dirtied paths he takes. Speaking as Robertson the first time, this man who from the first is usually clad in aviator’s sunglasses says, “I’d like to inquire about flights.” In Barcelona, he escapes from his former producer Martin behind a rack of caged birds at a sidewalk market. Antonioni’s camera catches Locke, arms stretched like wings over the water, from above the cable gondola he takes across a bay on a sunny afternoon. And a delicate birdsong outside Locke’s window commences the last scene.
Remembered with admiration by his London colleagues for his professional “detachment,” Locke hears from the rebel Achebe, honored to finally meet “Robertson” in a Munich church, that the gun-runner is “different from the others – you care about our cause.” When Locke has missed Robertson’s other appointments – Achebe has been arrested – and thinks he’ll walk away once more, the girl reminds him that Robertson “believed in something – I thought you wanted that.” Locke’s interview with the dictator – which Martin intends to excerpt for a documentary memorializing Locke – is a failure in his wife’s eyes and his own, precisely because he accepted obvious lies about a civil war the dictator assures him does not exist. She reminds Martin, “I was there for that interview,” and then Antonioni obligingly offers a flashback of what transpired outside the frame.
And The Passenger is a brilliant, prophetic catalogue of the ways truth morphs, distorts and erodes when politics and media meet, through the expectations and collusion of both reporters and their audiences in making intelligible images to explain events. In what becomes a litany of accusation against the reliability of so-called evidence, in a film full of mirrors’ reflections and window panes through which we see the story, one “document” after another – passports, hotel registers, journalist’s interview tapes, official governmental assurances – fails to sustain proof when we look behind its surface.
The film’s elasticity even invites new meanings – jostling whatever post-9/11 viewers bring to Robertson’s date-book, for example, that might reinforce today’s stereotypes about Africa and other non-Western cultures, about Muslims, about terrorism and rebellion. Some reviewers have also suggested that Robertson’s datebook echoes Pinochet’s military coup in Chile. But there's a closer-to-home reference, since Antonioni uses the buildings of Barcelona-born architect Gaudì so extensively. Gaudì’s buildings have great visual power as settings for a story of a man whose reality has become warped. ThatThe Girl offers some historical details about who the architect was invites us to go ahead and do the same - that architect was an ethnic Catalan nationalist in a region once a sovereign nation, until defeat by Spain forces on September 11, 1714. That date is still mourned annually in that region. In fact, Gaudì was arrested on September 11th in 1924, two years before his death, for speaking the banned Catalan language at a banned church service commemorating the date. Antonioni uses Gaudì’s work to remind us that the heart of darkness under which official suppression of truth occurs is, as Robertson tells Locke, pretty much everywhere. Antonioni’s work is ever new in urging us to look again.
*******
This review appeared in the 8/9/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, August 03, 2007
Film Review #115: 3 Needles
2005
Director: Thom Fitzgerald
Cast: Olympia Dukakis, Stockard Channing, Lucy Liu, Chloë Sevigny
Near the end of Thom Fitzgerald’s film about the global spread of HIV, the missionary nun Hilde (Olympia Dukakis) wonders why, in this time when the virus threatens us all, we have not joined together to fight it. The dilemma of whether a just, compassionate God could allow such suffering among innocents – ancient as the Old Testament’s Job and routine ever since in the form of persistant genocides and plagues – is not Fitzgerald’s concern here.
Instead, in three 40-minute vignettes, he offers illustrations of what sainthood might look like in an imperfect world. It’s Hilde who observes that saints were “ordinary people once, not divine, who somehow lived beyond their flesh, if only for a moment.” It’s her voice-over narration –from beyond the grave because she is brutally raped, her body discarded, contemptuously half sunk into the mud of a riverbank spot where baptisms had been conducted – that pulls the three stories together, beginning on the South African coast with a tribal circumcision rite that includes the boy Huku, and ending, after detours to China and Montreal, with Huku’s joyful wedding procession across a meadow overlooking the ocean. The ironic titles of the stories – “The Fortitude of the Buddha,” “The Passion of the Christ,” and “The Innocence of Pagans” – suggests that our earthly dogmas and judgments comprise a good share of the “flesh” that saints live beyond.
First, a blood smuggling gang in a small, remote village at the southernmost tip of China. The pregnant Jin Ping (Lucy Liu, in a more subtle performance than most Americans see in her usual films), who carries the virus herself, has rising qualms about the haphazard blood collection procedures and finally walks away. As villagers sicken and die, one farmer loses his assertive and humorous daughter, his closest companion. A stern military officer, who crosses paths with Jin in the opening scene, is sent to restore order and is moved to help the weakened, despairing father with his rice harvest.
Then, an HIV+ Montreal porn actor named Denys (Shawn Ashmore) continues to work, out-witting monthly testing to supplement his mother’s scanty waitress wages. He’s discovered and fired when his invalid father dies. In this event also converge his mother Olive’s accidental discovery of the nature of his job and his HIV status. He comes home to find her watching one of his videos in the parlor as his father’s body still lies in bed. She (Stockard Channing) infects herself with the virus in order to sell her large life insurance policy and support him.
Back at that South African village, where enterprizing children are re-packaging and selling infected syringes back to the clinic, three missionary nuns, Hilde, Mary (Sandra Oh) and the novice Clara (Chloë Sevigny) have a singular mission. With Africans dying at such a rapid rate from the virus, they aim to convert as many as possible so their souls aren’t condemned to Purgatory. Hilde and Clara soon diverge over their mission’s scope – first Clara wants to help the women sell their baskets, soon she’s bringing orphan’s home and eventually she has sex with plantation owner Hallyday (Ian Roberts) in exchange for medical supplies and the arrest of an HIV+ worker who had raped a child. Once released, that worker and a friend retaliate against the nuns.
Born in New Rochelle, Fitzgerald has lived in Nova Scotia since 1986, making films widely respected in Canada but not so much known here until recently – 3 Needles should be a turning point, even though belatedly, on that score. As a writer-director, Fitzgerald has an uncommon capacity to observe detailed daily life in local cultures and to leaven earnestness with wit. He coaxes powerful, often largely non-verbal performances from his actors – Jin’s exhaustion and resolve, the playful bond between Tong Sam and his daughter, Olive’s discovery of her son’s HIV status and then her own, Clara’s decision that sex with Hallyday supports her spiritual mission.
Not yet forty, Fitzgerald has already made a half dozen thoughtful, original feature films with the who’s who of Canada’s best actors, confidently entering foreign cultures, and exploring alternative stories within a single frame, the twin tyrannies of propriety and social acceptance, and what genuine compassion demands of us. In The Hanging Garden (1997) a young gay man returns to Halifax for his sister’s wedding after ten redemptive years in Toronto, with his recollection of the suicide he might’ve committed instead taking tangible form. Beefcake (1999) spoofs 1950s male physique magazines. Bloodmoon, originally make for TV in 2001, uses side-show freaks and were-wolf lore to examine our addiction to normalcy. The Wild Dogs (2002), set in Bucharest’s post-Ceausescu ruins, uses some actors from Bloodmoon and weaves a multi-strand plot about a dog-catcher, a pornographer (Fitzgerald himself), a diplomat’s wife (Alberta Watson) and some maimed gypsy beggars. The Event (also 2002), set in Manhattan and also with Dukakis, addresses HIV and assisted suicide.
Fitzgerald movies are worth getting to know. Besides, as Hilde says, you could be a saint right now, and not even know it.
******
This review appeared in the 8/2/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2005
Director: Thom Fitzgerald
Cast: Olympia Dukakis, Stockard Channing, Lucy Liu, Chloë Sevigny
Near the end of Thom Fitzgerald’s film about the global spread of HIV, the missionary nun Hilde (Olympia Dukakis) wonders why, in this time when the virus threatens us all, we have not joined together to fight it. The dilemma of whether a just, compassionate God could allow such suffering among innocents – ancient as the Old Testament’s Job and routine ever since in the form of persistant genocides and plagues – is not Fitzgerald’s concern here.
Instead, in three 40-minute vignettes, he offers illustrations of what sainthood might look like in an imperfect world. It’s Hilde who observes that saints were “ordinary people once, not divine, who somehow lived beyond their flesh, if only for a moment.” It’s her voice-over narration –from beyond the grave because she is brutally raped, her body discarded, contemptuously half sunk into the mud of a riverbank spot where baptisms had been conducted – that pulls the three stories together, beginning on the South African coast with a tribal circumcision rite that includes the boy Huku, and ending, after detours to China and Montreal, with Huku’s joyful wedding procession across a meadow overlooking the ocean. The ironic titles of the stories – “The Fortitude of the Buddha,” “The Passion of the Christ,” and “The Innocence of Pagans” – suggests that our earthly dogmas and judgments comprise a good share of the “flesh” that saints live beyond.
First, a blood smuggling gang in a small, remote village at the southernmost tip of China. The pregnant Jin Ping (Lucy Liu, in a more subtle performance than most Americans see in her usual films), who carries the virus herself, has rising qualms about the haphazard blood collection procedures and finally walks away. As villagers sicken and die, one farmer loses his assertive and humorous daughter, his closest companion. A stern military officer, who crosses paths with Jin in the opening scene, is sent to restore order and is moved to help the weakened, despairing father with his rice harvest.
Then, an HIV+ Montreal porn actor named Denys (Shawn Ashmore) continues to work, out-witting monthly testing to supplement his mother’s scanty waitress wages. He’s discovered and fired when his invalid father dies. In this event also converge his mother Olive’s accidental discovery of the nature of his job and his HIV status. He comes home to find her watching one of his videos in the parlor as his father’s body still lies in bed. She (Stockard Channing) infects herself with the virus in order to sell her large life insurance policy and support him.
Back at that South African village, where enterprizing children are re-packaging and selling infected syringes back to the clinic, three missionary nuns, Hilde, Mary (Sandra Oh) and the novice Clara (Chloë Sevigny) have a singular mission. With Africans dying at such a rapid rate from the virus, they aim to convert as many as possible so their souls aren’t condemned to Purgatory. Hilde and Clara soon diverge over their mission’s scope – first Clara wants to help the women sell their baskets, soon she’s bringing orphan’s home and eventually she has sex with plantation owner Hallyday (Ian Roberts) in exchange for medical supplies and the arrest of an HIV+ worker who had raped a child. Once released, that worker and a friend retaliate against the nuns.
Born in New Rochelle, Fitzgerald has lived in Nova Scotia since 1986, making films widely respected in Canada but not so much known here until recently – 3 Needles should be a turning point, even though belatedly, on that score. As a writer-director, Fitzgerald has an uncommon capacity to observe detailed daily life in local cultures and to leaven earnestness with wit. He coaxes powerful, often largely non-verbal performances from his actors – Jin’s exhaustion and resolve, the playful bond between Tong Sam and his daughter, Olive’s discovery of her son’s HIV status and then her own, Clara’s decision that sex with Hallyday supports her spiritual mission.
Not yet forty, Fitzgerald has already made a half dozen thoughtful, original feature films with the who’s who of Canada’s best actors, confidently entering foreign cultures, and exploring alternative stories within a single frame, the twin tyrannies of propriety and social acceptance, and what genuine compassion demands of us. In The Hanging Garden (1997) a young gay man returns to Halifax for his sister’s wedding after ten redemptive years in Toronto, with his recollection of the suicide he might’ve committed instead taking tangible form. Beefcake (1999) spoofs 1950s male physique magazines. Bloodmoon, originally make for TV in 2001, uses side-show freaks and were-wolf lore to examine our addiction to normalcy. The Wild Dogs (2002), set in Bucharest’s post-Ceausescu ruins, uses some actors from Bloodmoon and weaves a multi-strand plot about a dog-catcher, a pornographer (Fitzgerald himself), a diplomat’s wife (Alberta Watson) and some maimed gypsy beggars. The Event (also 2002), set in Manhattan and also with Dukakis, addresses HIV and assisted suicide.
Fitzgerald movies are worth getting to know. Besides, as Hilde says, you could be a saint right now, and not even know it.
******
This review appeared in the 8/2/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Film Review #114: Gypsy Caravan
2007
Director: Jasmine Dellal
Cast: Esma Redžepova, Juana la del Pipa, Nícolae Neascu
About two-thirds of the way through this documentary of a North American concert tour in the fall of 2001 – the opening moments inform us concisely that it deals with four countries, five bands, 35 musicians, nine languages and 16 cities over six weeks – there is a short clip of the film’s two real divas, sitting side by side in the cramped, lurching tour bus. On-stage, each has been a glittering, towering, singular presence, rousing sold-out, cheering audiences to their feet. Each is a commanding cultural figure in the far-flung, thousand-year-old Roma diaspora – Juana la del Pipa central to a legendary flamenco family ensemble from Spain’s Andalusia, Esma Redžepova a five-decade veteran of some 20 albums and six films in Macedonia and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her work with Kosovo’s 5,000 Roma refugees.
On that bus, sitting together, glancing affectionately at one another, these two middle-aged ladies seem much like long-lost friends, albeit reunited after a millennium torn apart by the Roma’s migration out of northern India and persecution nearly everywhere they went. Such delighted mutual discovery among the tour’s musicians gets as much attention from filmmaker Jasmine Dellal as she gives to concerts. That is just what the producer of this tour and its 1999 predecessor, World Music Institute’s Robert Browning, intended, hoping it would “encourage them to group together as a people.” While the concert performances are often electrifying, some of the most telling moments occur as participants rehearse together, share steps and tunes and food, and recall their own struggles and losses. These moments in turn act as gateways to frequent cinematic excursions back to their homelands.
Often known simply as Esma, Redžepova hails from Skopje, Macedonia. It’s her rendition of the Roma anthem, “Djelem, Djelem” (“I went, I went”) that opens the concerts. Her recording of “Caje Šukarije” was the featured song in last year’s film Borat, and Esma’s currently suing Sasha Baron Cohen for using it without permission.
Juana la del Pipa performs with her nephew, Antonio El Pipa, who runs a flamenco school in the city of Jerez de la Frontera. A massive woman with a raw wail of a voice that takes getting used to, Juana’s description of her mother fits herself: “When she stood up, she was like a cathedral.”
The string-based Taraf de Haidouks (literally, “band of outlaws”) is one of two groups in the film from Romania. Formed in 1989, shortly before Ceauşescu’s demise, their music largely supports their village of Clejani. Patriarch and senior violinist Nícolae Neascu first tapped his incredibly fast protégé, nicknamed Caliu, when the latter was too poor to afford a burial for his infant daughter. Sally Potter used them in her film with Johnny Depp about Nazi massacres of Roma in France, The Man Who Cried. Depp appears briefly in an interview about working on that film.
The 12-piece brass band Fanfare Ciocärlia (Romanian for “skylark”) won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Europe last year with their CD “Queens and Kings.” Dellal takes us into the farm kitchen of one of these musicians after the tour, where a woman sits singing while she chops food and the tuba player cuts hay with a scythe. Filmmaker Emir Kusterica has used their music in the soundtracks of his Time of the Gypsies and others.
Maharajah comes from Rajasthan in India’s northwest desert. Here, in their original home, the Roma were members of the dancers’ caste, says Harish Kumar, the group’s dancer. His work on-stage involves cross-dressing and make-up as a traditional female character and a dazzling swirl across the floor called “the Knees Dance” that he says only two people can perform. As an outgrowth of the tour, this group is now collaborating on the Maharaja Flamenca project with Antonio El Pipa.
Footage of the 2001 tour traces that bus northwest from Manhattan to highlights in Toronto, Niagara Falls, Ann Arbor, the flight south to Miami and Austin, and return to the road to Oakland and up the coast through redwood forests and along the Pacific coast to Oregon. Dellal – with master documentarian Albert Maysles as her DP and a sizable camera crew – uses this tour as the organizing frame. Each week’s “chapter” features tour footage as well as individual profiles and leisurely detours to the musicians’ home communities abroad. This structure does organize an unwieldy amount of material even if the chronology is occasionally confusing. For example, Dellal inserts the funeral in Romania of the elderly violinist Nícolae Neascu before the tour’s closing concert in Portland, though Neascu died a year later in December of 2002. This suggests the considerable “background” footage was shot after the tour concluded, also accounting for the film’s release occurring only now.
Once a student of the great Marlon Riggs, the British-born and New York City-based Dellal has spent the past decade immersed in filming Roma culture. In large ways and small, this makes Gypsy Caravan a film for new-comers and Roma alike. The lovely shots of birds wheeling through a peach-colored dawn sky that open the film and recur, for example, provide an image of lonely wandering, but they also evoke an ancient fable that the Roma were birds who turned themselves into people. Both image and fable echo in a music teacher’s lament in Harish’s home that so many Roma today can’t read when he adds, “In ancient times we had our own scholars – one transcribed the notes of birds.” In a characteristic Dellal transition, his students’ singing then fades to Harish performing the same delicate melody beneath stage lights. In another scene’s gentle visual rhyme, the poking heads and necks of geese watching a speeding train on the Romanian horizon fade into swaying tubas on-stage.
Dellal’s previous documentary, American Gypsy (1999), helps explain the enormous access she clearly enjoyed in making this film. That aired in August 2000 on PBS and has screened widely at festivals. For five years, Dellal followed a family of Spokane car dealer Grover Marks after police raided and trashed their home and son Jimmy embarked upon a lawsuit unprecedented for its sustained and very public challenge to Roma ill-treatment. For that film she also interviewed scholar-activist and fellow-Brit Ian Hancock, who introduced the term Porajmos (“the devouring”) in the early 1990s to distinguish the Roma counterpart to the Holocaust.
In Gypsy Caravan, Esma relates how her own father was the sole survivor of a mass execution in the town square. Still, it’s a mistake to think that Roma persecution ended with the Nazis. Dellal specifically dedicates her second film to the Decade of Roma Inclusion, a compact of nine Balkan nations, begun in 2005 and supported by George Soros’ Open Society, the World Bank and the UN, that addresses poverty, housing, education and health. Amnesty International continues to report burnings, police beatings and other violence against Roma as a significant problem in a number of countries.
Meanwhile, Time Magazine has compared the emerging growth and popularity of Roma music to the birth of jazz. Dellal’s films should do much to fill in the background about the people and communities producing this music, and focus greater curiosity on Roma as cinematic subjects. Europe has produced a rich body of film about Roma, but this presence has been fragmented at best in the US and it will take more than The Riches to fix that. For example, Algerian-French director Tony Gatlif’s pioneering 1993 documentary on Roma music, Latcho Drom (Safe Journey), is still hard to find here. However, several other of his films – the charming Crazy Stranger (1997), Vengo (2000), and Exiles (2004), fiction features which explore Roma culture and music in Romania, Spain and Algeria respectively – are available on netflix, as are a few classics like the Russian Emil Loteanu’s 1975 Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven. Gypsy Caravan is a treat, an achievement, and it opens a world.
*******
Gypsy Caravan opened theatrically in the US on June 15 and is still screening on both coasts. Dellal’s first documentary, American Gypsy, releases on DVD in August. This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 8/1/07.
2007
Director: Jasmine Dellal
Cast: Esma Redžepova, Juana la del Pipa, Nícolae Neascu
About two-thirds of the way through this documentary of a North American concert tour in the fall of 2001 – the opening moments inform us concisely that it deals with four countries, five bands, 35 musicians, nine languages and 16 cities over six weeks – there is a short clip of the film’s two real divas, sitting side by side in the cramped, lurching tour bus. On-stage, each has been a glittering, towering, singular presence, rousing sold-out, cheering audiences to their feet. Each is a commanding cultural figure in the far-flung, thousand-year-old Roma diaspora – Juana la del Pipa central to a legendary flamenco family ensemble from Spain’s Andalusia, Esma Redžepova a five-decade veteran of some 20 albums and six films in Macedonia and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her work with Kosovo’s 5,000 Roma refugees.
On that bus, sitting together, glancing affectionately at one another, these two middle-aged ladies seem much like long-lost friends, albeit reunited after a millennium torn apart by the Roma’s migration out of northern India and persecution nearly everywhere they went. Such delighted mutual discovery among the tour’s musicians gets as much attention from filmmaker Jasmine Dellal as she gives to concerts. That is just what the producer of this tour and its 1999 predecessor, World Music Institute’s Robert Browning, intended, hoping it would “encourage them to group together as a people.” While the concert performances are often electrifying, some of the most telling moments occur as participants rehearse together, share steps and tunes and food, and recall their own struggles and losses. These moments in turn act as gateways to frequent cinematic excursions back to their homelands.
Often known simply as Esma, Redžepova hails from Skopje, Macedonia. It’s her rendition of the Roma anthem, “Djelem, Djelem” (“I went, I went”) that opens the concerts. Her recording of “Caje Šukarije” was the featured song in last year’s film Borat, and Esma’s currently suing Sasha Baron Cohen for using it without permission.
Juana la del Pipa performs with her nephew, Antonio El Pipa, who runs a flamenco school in the city of Jerez de la Frontera. A massive woman with a raw wail of a voice that takes getting used to, Juana’s description of her mother fits herself: “When she stood up, she was like a cathedral.”
The string-based Taraf de Haidouks (literally, “band of outlaws”) is one of two groups in the film from Romania. Formed in 1989, shortly before Ceauşescu’s demise, their music largely supports their village of Clejani. Patriarch and senior violinist Nícolae Neascu first tapped his incredibly fast protégé, nicknamed Caliu, when the latter was too poor to afford a burial for his infant daughter. Sally Potter used them in her film with Johnny Depp about Nazi massacres of Roma in France, The Man Who Cried. Depp appears briefly in an interview about working on that film.
The 12-piece brass band Fanfare Ciocärlia (Romanian for “skylark”) won the BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Europe last year with their CD “Queens and Kings.” Dellal takes us into the farm kitchen of one of these musicians after the tour, where a woman sits singing while she chops food and the tuba player cuts hay with a scythe. Filmmaker Emir Kusterica has used their music in the soundtracks of his Time of the Gypsies and others.
Maharajah comes from Rajasthan in India’s northwest desert. Here, in their original home, the Roma were members of the dancers’ caste, says Harish Kumar, the group’s dancer. His work on-stage involves cross-dressing and make-up as a traditional female character and a dazzling swirl across the floor called “the Knees Dance” that he says only two people can perform. As an outgrowth of the tour, this group is now collaborating on the Maharaja Flamenca project with Antonio El Pipa.
Footage of the 2001 tour traces that bus northwest from Manhattan to highlights in Toronto, Niagara Falls, Ann Arbor, the flight south to Miami and Austin, and return to the road to Oakland and up the coast through redwood forests and along the Pacific coast to Oregon. Dellal – with master documentarian Albert Maysles as her DP and a sizable camera crew – uses this tour as the organizing frame. Each week’s “chapter” features tour footage as well as individual profiles and leisurely detours to the musicians’ home communities abroad. This structure does organize an unwieldy amount of material even if the chronology is occasionally confusing. For example, Dellal inserts the funeral in Romania of the elderly violinist Nícolae Neascu before the tour’s closing concert in Portland, though Neascu died a year later in December of 2002. This suggests the considerable “background” footage was shot after the tour concluded, also accounting for the film’s release occurring only now.
Once a student of the great Marlon Riggs, the British-born and New York City-based Dellal has spent the past decade immersed in filming Roma culture. In large ways and small, this makes Gypsy Caravan a film for new-comers and Roma alike. The lovely shots of birds wheeling through a peach-colored dawn sky that open the film and recur, for example, provide an image of lonely wandering, but they also evoke an ancient fable that the Roma were birds who turned themselves into people. Both image and fable echo in a music teacher’s lament in Harish’s home that so many Roma today can’t read when he adds, “In ancient times we had our own scholars – one transcribed the notes of birds.” In a characteristic Dellal transition, his students’ singing then fades to Harish performing the same delicate melody beneath stage lights. In another scene’s gentle visual rhyme, the poking heads and necks of geese watching a speeding train on the Romanian horizon fade into swaying tubas on-stage.
Dellal’s previous documentary, American Gypsy (1999), helps explain the enormous access she clearly enjoyed in making this film. That aired in August 2000 on PBS and has screened widely at festivals. For five years, Dellal followed a family of Spokane car dealer Grover Marks after police raided and trashed their home and son Jimmy embarked upon a lawsuit unprecedented for its sustained and very public challenge to Roma ill-treatment. For that film she also interviewed scholar-activist and fellow-Brit Ian Hancock, who introduced the term Porajmos (“the devouring”) in the early 1990s to distinguish the Roma counterpart to the Holocaust.
In Gypsy Caravan, Esma relates how her own father was the sole survivor of a mass execution in the town square. Still, it’s a mistake to think that Roma persecution ended with the Nazis. Dellal specifically dedicates her second film to the Decade of Roma Inclusion, a compact of nine Balkan nations, begun in 2005 and supported by George Soros’ Open Society, the World Bank and the UN, that addresses poverty, housing, education and health. Amnesty International continues to report burnings, police beatings and other violence against Roma as a significant problem in a number of countries.
Meanwhile, Time Magazine has compared the emerging growth and popularity of Roma music to the birth of jazz. Dellal’s films should do much to fill in the background about the people and communities producing this music, and focus greater curiosity on Roma as cinematic subjects. Europe has produced a rich body of film about Roma, but this presence has been fragmented at best in the US and it will take more than The Riches to fix that. For example, Algerian-French director Tony Gatlif’s pioneering 1993 documentary on Roma music, Latcho Drom (Safe Journey), is still hard to find here. However, several other of his films – the charming Crazy Stranger (1997), Vengo (2000), and Exiles (2004), fiction features which explore Roma culture and music in Romania, Spain and Algeria respectively – are available on netflix, as are a few classics like the Russian Emil Loteanu’s 1975 Gypsies Are Found Near Heaven. Gypsy Caravan is a treat, an achievement, and it opens a world.
*******
Gypsy Caravan opened theatrically in the US on June 15 and is still screening on both coasts. Dellal’s first documentary, American Gypsy, releases on DVD in August. This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 8/1/07.
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