A Second Take: Bertolucci's The Sheltering Sky *** Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1975 film 1900 has a circuitous history with its American audience. When first released, this five-hours-plus epic of the intertwined lives of two Italian men, born on the same day in 1901 to different classes and political outlooks, was a commercial flop in the U.S. Then in 1995—the year Bertolucci said he wanted to embrace a wider audience—the film was re-released in the U.S. This version, an hour shorter, has achieved enduring recognition among audiences and critics alike. Reflecting on 1900’s differing stateside receptions, two decades apart, Bilge Ebiri wrote in Senses of Cinema that, in retrospect, a “U.S. studio releasing a Communist film at the height of the Cold War seems downright surreal even now.” *** Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky (1990), adapted from the 1949 novel by Paul Bowles, is another film whose time has come belatedly. It was only a minor success in America and many critics disliked it, finding it boring and mistaking it for apolitical. Claretta Tonetti has written in some detail about this. For example, Pauline Kael complained about miscasting and spoke for many when she quipped that the characters traveled “deep into monotony.” *** The Warner Home Video DVD release of The Sheltering Sky dates from 2002, suggesting a commercial faith in its better chances twelve years later. Why might they be right and why should we pay attention again to this movie? First, we ought to reconsider the film in light of his overall work and signature cinematic techniques. The Sheltering Sky begins to seem more like Bertolucci, for example, when we focus on the theme of looking backward — either to mid-century (WW II and the post-war period) or to May 1968 (the student strikes in Paris) — to really comment on the present. His subsequent films have also increasingly engaged questions about the role of art in society. Second, the current climate is more receptive to other issues The Sheltering Sky raises. Some of those have been incubating since the novel’s publication — in 1990, Bertolucci told Fabien Gerard during an extensive interview that the novel was “ahead of its time”—but these issues now seem more urgent and more pervasively intelligible in a post-9/11 world. *** The Sheltering Sky is the middle film of three often grouped together as Bertolucci’s “Eastern trilogy,” a shift from previous work, a working-out of a cluster of particular interests, and a point in the evolution leading to his later films. First was The Last Emperor (1987) — massive in both scale and popularity — about how China’s last hereditary ruler, Pu Yi, transitioned through the Communist Revolution. That film includes thoughtful attention to the presence and implications of his English tutor. The third film was Little Buddha (1993), with complementary stories about a reincarnated Tibetan holy man born to a modern-day Seattle couple and the mythical figure Siddhartha as a youth in the initially unlikely person of actor Keanu Reeves. Despite their far-flung settings and diverse story-lines, these films all present the volatile personal consequences ensuing from the East-West encounter. The Last Emperor won nine Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. This might have earned Bertolucci’s next film at least the benefit of the doubt. Instead, many reviewers were vitriolic. In her own 2002 look at post-modern Italian cinema, Millicent Marcus suggests a way to start understanding this hostility. Discussing The Last Emperor, she refers to Palestinian Edward Said’s book on the East-West encounter, Orientalism (1978), insisting that the first film of the Eastern trilogy was much more about Italy than China. Said argues that the “Orient” is a fixture of the West’s imagination because it performs a “mirroring function” against which the West defines itself. *** Well, we are immediately in Bertolucci-land with this thought. Marcus’s use of Said’s discussion of mirroring, reflecting surfaces, projection on screens, and views through the veils provides a pretty good starter list of Bertolucci’s favorite cinematic techniques for visually representing the scrambling, disintegration, and cultural confusion of identity in The Sheltering Sky and elsewhere — from at least as early as The Conformist. *** Let’s look at what happens in the film. At 137 minutes, The Sheltering Sky is long. Set in 1947 in post-World War II North Africa, its story loops from Tangier, Morocco, and south through the Sahara to Niger and eventually back again (although Bowles says in his introduction to the 1998 paperback edition that he set the novel in Algeria). Bertolucci’s film opens with something else that’s new besides a setting: a stunning title montage of post-war New York City — the world the film’s characters have left for Africa — backed by Nelson Riddle-style orchestration with xylophone accents, of a ticker-tape parade, 5th Avenue, Radio City Music Hall, and other landmarks, the Automat, and jitterbug dancing, Central Park in winter and finally, boarding an ocean liner. This archival footage of New York City in the title montage is followed by the scene on the dock in Tangier, where a specific ocean liner arrives with Port and Kit Moresby and their friend George Tunner (John Malkovich, Debra Winger, and Campbell Scott, respectively). It’s easy to let their ship and the one leaving Manhattan in the title montage slide together in our mind as one. This creates a visual inversion of the familiar for us. The landscape that we know to be “our” New York is oddly distant, exotic, like something brought back from far away as part of a documentary film perhaps. But that Tangier dock, with its giant rusty cargo crane, warm rich colors, and the cast in their crisp outfits, seems immediate and real. And the contrast makes it easy to understand the expression that one’s old life “seems like a dream.” *** One of the first things Port Moresby talks about is his dreams, though the café in which he does this has both radio and a newsboy hawking papers to keep travelers connected to the outside world. Port’s dreams proliferate as time goes on, some of them feverish and hallucinatory, some possibly “real.” In that first café scene, Kit Moresby’s legs splay, unladylike, while she gets her shoes shined like a gent and remarks that the Italians have “oddly” given women the vote. She’d already opened a case on the dock with Djuna Barnes’ 1937 novel Nightwood sitting on top, signaling that elastic sexual identities will have some place in this story. In the café, we also meet the distasteful British duo, mother and son, the Lyles, and Paul Bowles himself, delivering the first of three narrator’s epigrammatic voice-overs. *** Self-indulgent and excessive, the Lyles regularly spew the kind of racist, contemptuous remarks about Africans and about French Jews that make it difficult to accept this as an apolitical film. Mrs. Lyles is a travel writer, stealing a living from those she disparages; her son cadges money from Port, then steals his passport. Passing a group of indigenous prisoners in chains marching along a remote road later, Port remarks that “someday they’ll throw the French out.” *** Both novelist and filmmaker portray the financially independent Moresbys as genuinely loving one another, but their marriage is in trouble. Kit goes along with Port’s quest for a geographic cure, though she pleads with him to stop by the time they are looking over a valley with circling, white-caped horsemen, from what they discover is a cemetery. Port has been to North Africa before, speaks Arabic fluently, has both familiar destinations he wants to show Kit and others he wants to explore. Atop the cliff outside Boussif, they try to make love, fail to hold the moment once Port pauses to philosophize, and then weep wretchedly in each other’s arms for the loss — moving, memorable dramatic performances from Malkovich and Winger. *** Although Port visits prostitutes and exotic dancers himself in the film, he is jealous of his wife and gets rid of the seduction-minded Tunner — the Lyles take him off the Moresbys’ hands — but he sickens with typhoid fever in El Ga’a. Port dies in a shabby, remote French garrison, imagining that Kit is leaving him as he leaves her stranded. Dazed and wearing his jacket, Kit hitches a ride with a Tuareg nomad, Belquassim (Eric An-Vu), on a passing camel caravan and accepts his sexual advances. For a time Kit, disguised as a boy, resides in a locked rooftop room after they reach his home city, until Belquassim’s wives turn her loose and she unveils herself to them as a woman by unwrapping her turbaned head. *** The New York Times’ Vincent Canby, writing on the film’s opening day in 1990, called this part of the film an “existential update on Rudolph Valentino’s old chestnut, The Sheik,” the 1921 silent film that depicted a white Western woman’s swooning seduction by the obviously Italian heart-throb, dressed up as an Arab to add some thrill. Part of the difficulty in the East-West encounter has been the limited, stereotyped categories available within which to imagine intimacy. Kit and Belquassim’s encounter, as written by Bowles, involved rape and sharing Kit with another nomad. Bertolucci told critic Fabien Gerard that he committed his “betrayal” of Bowles’ novel -- softening and reconfiguring Kit’s sexual experience with the nomads — after he talked with them on location about their culture and heard a convincing account at odds with Bowles’. *** Eventually transported by British Embassy staff back to Tangiers’s Grand Hotel, Kit instead sets off for the old café, missing by moments a more seasoned, now-moustached Tunner, who’s actually waited months for her. Paul Bowles greets her. Is she lost? he asks; she says yes. *** Many opening reviews of The Sheltering Sky were mixed and contradictory. Sometimes this belied a fondness for Bowles’ novel that created a hurdle for any film adaptation. Roger Ebert wrote, for example, that he grasped Bertolucci’s adaptation well enough, but the book was “so complete, so deep and so self-contained that it shuts the movie out.” It’s worth taking a look at the range and fervor of those first reviews. Canby liked the film a lot, calling it “possibly Mr. Bertolucci’s most seductive, most hypnotic movie. . .a long, beautifully modulated cry of despair,” and he thought Malkovich and Winger as the leads were “extraordinarily fine.” Stephen Farber judged Bertolucci’s film “one of the most uncompromising movies ever released by a major studio, a despairing masterwork.” The Washington Post printed two reviews the same day. Desson Howe found the film “rhapsodic” and the plot better as it went along, whereas Hal Hinson groused that the movie was “monotonously obscure, a Marxist version of Dances With Wolves.” James Sanford predicted The Sheltering Sky would “provide blessed relief for any insomniacs who venture near it.” *** Do some of these comments tell us more about antipathy toward Africa and the East in general than about Bertolucci’s film? The director told Gerard that some common elements in the novel and the late ‘80’s might make that era more understanding of Port and Kit’s “isolated melancholy,” which he thought had reached “epidemic proportions” in Western culture. He noticed renewed searches for “alternatives to consumerism,” which illuminates the giant, rusty, unused cargo crane that sits on the dock when Port, Kit, and Tunner first arrive in Tangier. Bertolucci also felt that late 1980’s environmental focus on greenhouse effects and the encroaching desert supplied the Sahara with greater power as metaphor. *** How about our own era now and its openness to Bertolucci’s long-held concerns? Bertolucci has often looked back in his films on two eras in particular: Italy during World War II (and the post-war period) and the May 1968 Paris student strikes (the time of his own political coming of age). In 1970, The Conformist investigated how one man could turn himself over to the Fascists and suggested parallel contemporary dangers. Millicent Marcus insists that Bertolucci’s choice to focus on how collaboration with the Fascists occurred (instead of focusing on heroic resistance) marks that film as a warning. Bertolucci has returned to that theme a number of times. *** Moreover, we now seem more open to reconsidering that era and its moral dilemmas too. One of the most popular dramas in New York City last season was Light in the Piazza, a musical about an American mother and her daughter visiting Italy in the 1950’s, resurrected from a novel and film adaptation (both 1962). This seems an odd project for post 9/11 theater unless we consider that US audiences are now willing to explore the last great global turning point of similar significance. I have argued elsewhere that Woody Allen’s Match Point is likewise really about the 1950’s—a virtual remake of A Place in the Sun (1951)—and that he achieves the stuffiness of that era (for U.S. audiences) by placing his story within a certain British class, despite the story’s apparent contemporaneity. We seem to be able to look back seriously in about half-century chunks. Ahead of his time in being open to The Sheltering Sky, Canby noted that it occurs in 1947, that anxious sliver of time before the 1950’s “when the civilized world is still trying to discover the reassuring boundaries of commonplace routine.” *** A Western post-9/11 world similarly feels it way along now, too. This exploration involves an insight like Port Moresby had when he remarked that the Moroccans would throw the French out one day. Yet a few reviewers either confusingly considered the film "Marxist" at a time when Bertolucci had moved away from Marxism, or those like Bilge Ebiri considered that The Sheltering Sky’s “sheer lack of politics seems to be its most remarkable trait.” I find Port’s comments and the racism of the Lyles both clearly political. The film is political in the very implications of its aesthetics. So Said’s discussion of Orientalism still offers a way to wed East and West cinematically in Bertolucci’s work. The Italian director’s cinematic vocabulary is based in Western thought. Ever since The Conformist, Plato’s myth of the cave, with its shadowy illusions, has been Bertolucci’s basic visual metaphor. But the techniques he has used for expressing that are also wonderfully consistent with Said’s description of how the East has served the West aesthetically as a mirror. The Sheltering Sky offers a common visual language of mirrors, shadows, and reflections, Venetian blind effects, shots through glass or veils, and images of both entrapment and separation via shots through bars, cages, and wire mesh. Additionally, Bertolucci told Gerard that the Tuareg nomads considered the desert a mirror of their own eternal movements. *** Roger Ebert also liked The Sheltering Sky early on. He objected to its marketing as an erotic thriller, saying it wasn’t really about sex at all—it was, he felt, “about American intellectuals confronted by an immensity of experience they cannot read or understand.” Part of what Ebert meant about American intellectuals circa 1990 occurs in the film with a major recurring image, the floating head. We initially see our trio head-first from behind the edge of the stone pier and we often see close-up shots of Port’s head upside down, suggesting his inability to position and integrate himself successfully in the world. Bertolucci mirrors his characters’ heads with a movie poster depicting a head outside the Cine Alcazar, across the street from the café in Tangier. Both early in the film and later, when Kit returns to Tangier and the café, tracking shots take us by this poster on the way into the café. *** The Sheltering Sky is, after all, about two artists at creative impasses (Port is a composer and Kit a playwright). Bertolucci’s next three films portray artists who withdraw from the world; Stealing Beauty (1996), Besieged (1998) and The Dreamers (2003) all address the danger of illusion in art. This was, finally, the lesson of Plato’s cave, his reason for distrusting artists, and part of Bertolucci’s point about how the Fascists could fool The Conformist’s Marcello and others of his generation. This culminates in The Dreamers, about three young film buffs who rattle around in an ancient Paris apartment while the May 1968 strikes occur outside. Bertolucci’s films have long urged us to use cinema for something other than escapism or “an outing.” *** Ebert also compared Bertolucci’s film to Australian Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), in which the white women simply disappear into the landscape. The Weir film is extremely unsettling because -- against plot conventions of that time anyway -- there is never any resolution of the school girls’ disappearance from the austere rock formation they visit. This brush with the unresolved unknowable evokes dread. For Americans, 9/11 has made this dread explicit and apocalyptic, and provides motivation to untangle our own illusions and our own “Orientalism.” So, The Sheltering Sky may now be interesting and absorbing in a new way for U.S. audiences, who may be willing to stand some degree of discomfort without so much “boredom”—or its underlying defensiveness. ***** This was written for the Second Take feature column at www.Stylusmagazone.com, where it appeared on 10/11/2006.

Film Review #57: The House of Sand *** (2005) *** Director: Andrucha Waddington *** Cast: Fernanda Torres, Fernanda Montenegro, Seu Jorge *** Usually there’s just a handful of us: the ones who sit there all the way through a film’s closing credits. But at this screening – a weekday matinee and almost full – I’d say three-quarters of the audience sat right there with me. Some movies you don’t want to end. The House of Sand instead comes to rest with the grace of a last breath, drenched in the same piano strains that its central character Áurea, the concert pianist marooned sixty years in the pond-dotted Maranhão sand dunes on Brazil’s northeastern coast, has wept to finally hear again. *** This is director Andrucha Waddington’s third feature fiction film, interspersed with documentaries that often focus on Brazil’s composers and musicians. One such subject, Gilberto Gil, has also done this film’s classically-based soundtrack, making extensive use of such pieces as Beethoven’s Appassionata piano sonata and, fittingly, Chopin’s Preludes Opus 28, #15 – The Raindrop. The House of Sand opened in 2005 in its native Brazil, screened at last year’s Toronto’s international film festival, has now just run a quite respectable six weeks in Manhattan at Lincoln Plaza and embarked on limited release in smaller cities’ art house market. Nevertheless it has not been as successful, either at home or in the US, as Conspiração Filmes, the cooperative Waddington founded with other directors and producers ten years ago, had hoped for – or as audiences like the one in that matinee might predict. *** The House of Sand presents three generations of women, played at different ages in a sort of round-robin style by Fernanda Torres (she and Waddington are married) and Fernanda Montenegro – she is Torres’ mother and probably most widely known in the US as Dora in Walter Salles’ Central Station (1998). Film critic A.O. Scott rightly calls the women’s work in this film “not just two performances, but a suite, with harmonies and counterpoints,” referencing the obvious musical parallels. Waddington and his long-time screenwriter Elena Soárez have structured the film chronologically as four movements, each tied to an historic celestial event that pierces the endless haze of days with inspiration. *** The film opens in 1910, as Halley’s Comet passes near earth on its 75-year orbit. A minute line of figures straggles across the horizon in a wide, self-consciously photographic shot. This is the pregnant Áurea (Torres) and her mother Dona Maria (Montenegro), brought here by Áurea’s deluded husband Vasco. The first night in this spot, after the drunken Vasco reaches oafishly for her, Áurea watches the comet. Vasco’s house will collapse, killing him and stranding the women. Their only neighbors are the sea-side quilombo. One of this community of fugitive slaves, Massu (Seu Jorge, City of God), grudgingly befriends them. *** 1919: Áurea’s daughter, also Maria, is nine. Their lives are organized around escaping back to Rio. Áurea’s long-planned deal with an itinerant peddler to transport them is disrupted by news of a scientific expedition visiting the vicinity to photograph the May 19th solar eclipse. Áurea travels to see this, has a passionate encounter with a soldier, Luiz, and weeps when she hears music again in the festive camp. While she’s away, her mother dies; both Luiz and the peddler leave without her. Bereft, Áurea connects explosively with Massu. *** 1942: An older Áurea (now played by Montenegro) is content with Massu, but her daughter Maria (now Torres) is desperate, dissolute, often drunk and promiscuous. This occurs during World War II’s daily fly-overs by US fighter planes avoiding the German U-boats patrolling coastal waters. An older, courtlier officer now, Luiz returns (Stênio Garcia in a role charmingly like his Zezinho in Waddington’s last feature, Me You Them). Finding Áurea occupied, he takes Maria with him to Rio in his jeep. *** 1969: Maria’s return to the coast coincides with the Apollo II moonwalk, deepening a sense this place has the remoteness of space. No longer angry and desperate, she brings a record player to her mother and they reconcile. *** Certainly The House of Sand is a meditation upon entrapment in its many guises – the ever-shifting, undistinguished chaos of the wilderness that might engulf these refined women, their own psychic isolation, and the rigid social blinders within which Áurea must first follow Vasco and then deny Massu for years. Waddington has been clear about the film’s cinematic forbears. Given an old photo of a shack from this region and challenged to generate a film project, he had recently seen two other films: Teshigahara’s film version of Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) – seacoast villagers trap an outsider in a sand pit – and Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), about Mexican aristocrats unable to leave a dinner party. *** Using Torres and Montenegro as he does, Waddington also evokes similar efforts like István Szabó’s Sunshine (1999), in which Ralph Fiennes played successive generations of a Hungarian Jewish family’s sons. Waddington has been preoccupied by notions of permutation, thematic variation and the sometimes “spitting images” of family resemblance – nature’s version of photography – since his earlier feature films. Fernanda Torres played twin sisters in Gêmeas (1999); Me You Them (2000) relates the story of a woman with four sons by four men, three living with her under one roof. *** The House of Sand is one of those films in which it’s hard to distinguish the fruits of acting from what’s provided by other aspects of production. Especially with Torres, Montenegro and Jorge, that acting proceeds with undeniable magnetism and command, and not much dialogue. Clearly the film owes much of its emotional power, for one thing, to layers of musical reference – aside from the sheer sound of performance. In both story and soundtrack, this is pointedly European classical music, carrying all the attendant tension of great outpourings channeled through formal structure and beginning at great odds with this wild land. Brazilian audiences would not miss the added associations of two nationally popular musicians, Seu Jorge and Luiz Melodia, portraying Massu the younger and elder. Above I called the wide opening shot of the homesteading caravan on the horizon self-consciously photographic. Me You Them, filmed in the cane-fields of nearby Bahia, is saturated with high contrast, almost neon-rich hues, but The House of Sand – while not a black and white film – often looks visually abstracted, almost bleached. What we see on-screen here is not what the naked eye haphazardly sees but instead what appears through a lens that frames, captures and fixes images of the world, however chaotic the subject may have been in the raw. There are many shots in the dunes – groupings of figures angled against blank expanses, bodies composed against the shadow-heightened, ramshackle shelters – that call up the photos of another Brazilian, Sebastião Salgado. Particularly in his African famine photos Salgado also addresses the wild, the fragilely momentary, the shifting sands of desert life. And whatever narrative exists in this movie about Áurea’s past life occurs solely through the flimsy snapshots she’s brought with her, what she props out of the wind against a rough upright pole. *** The House of Sand is a strenuous movie, requiring some patience, some attention, some settling in to savor those last minutes as the credits roll and the piano notes cascade over you. *** This review was written for www.Stylusmagazine.com, published there on 10/6/2006.

Film Review #56: Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film *** (2006) *** Director: Ric Burns *** Cast: Andy Warhol, Laurie Anderson, Edie Sedgwick *** This week’s national prime-time PBS American Masters broadcast of Ric Burns’ four-hour Andy Warhol doc follows the film’s exclusive two-week theatrical engagement earlier this month at Film Forum in New York City. As hometown try-outs go – both Burns and his production company, Steeplechase Films, make Manhattan their home – that was an undiluted triumph. Other movies on rottentomatoes.com might get a 100% rating, but I don’t remember them. *** The Film Forum gig is part of a trend toward more varied distribution formats – either stand-alone theatrical releases or limited theater engagements combined with televised broadcast – that is one outcome of the recent surge in popularity and production of documentary films. Similarly, Brooklyn-based filmmaker Stanley Nelson has reliably been stocking PBS’ American Experience series with a feature length doc every year or so. Now, after enthusiastic festival receptions since last spring, Jonestown, his film about the 1978 Peoples Temple incident, opens October 20th at Manhattan’s Quad Cinema and then in a handful of other cities before its national PBS broadcast next year. *** Andy Warhol also extends Ric Burns’ own recent turn toward using the lives of artists to discuss American life. We know Burns for broad-canvas projects designed for multiple evening viewing on PBS – docs on New York City, the massive Civil War series with his brother Ken, and the six-part The Way West. After tightening his focus with the Donner Party film, Burns turned for subjects to photographer Ansel Adams and playwright Eugene O’Neill. Now Warhol, an artist Burns says he himself actually knew little about before this project. *** Andy Warhol is so appealing partially because Burns shares with the rest of us that sense of suddenly noticing what’s been in our midst. The film opens with a long montage of talking heads who appear again throughout to form a commentary that complements narration by composer-performance artist Laurie Anderson - I for one am itching to ask her where narrating Andy Warhol's life fits in her body of work! Among these commentators, art critic David Hickey says that Warhol, founder of the 1960’s Pop Art movement, was “so American that he was virtually invisible to us.” One of the great pleasures of this film are the successive moments of illumination about Warhol’s life and work, not only the unknown nuggets – even some vast tracts – but the focus Burns brings to what had previously subsided to background buzz by its very familiarity. *** Also early on, writer Stephen Kock comments that Warhol’s “great gift was immediacy. This is it. This is it. Nothing more. Right now.” Right from the start, Burns addresses the dilemma of making a narrative film about an artist who was short on narrative, even in his own extensive filmmaking projects. Burns includes a great deal of archival footage, some of it speeded up, of Warhol in the midst of that present, doing his work. And Burns lets Kock goes on to put Warhol in the Romantic tradition, adding that “we are always on the edge of death, because we are always losing the moment.” *** Over four hours, while juggling an abundance of topics, Burns returns to the themes of Warhol’s invisibility and how his art expressed and addressed immediacy repeatedly and in many ways. He manages not to dwell on the sensational in Warhol’s career – a minefield in itself, given the sometimes clashing mix of Warhol’s personal infatuation with celebrity and his work’s comments upon it. Instead, Burns picks and enlarges key components. Here are just four of my favorite parts. *** Burns’ treatment of Warhol’s early years in a middle-European immigrant slum in Pittsburgh, his mother’s life-long encouragement of his art, and how he got from there to art lessons at Carnegie Tech to 1950’s Madison Avenue together comprise a model of documentary’s multipurpose exposition and editing. We see what art rescued Warhol from as well as how it fueled both his drive for celebrity and his later art. The comparison between the Eastern Orthodox church icons of Warhol’s boyhood and his later Marilyn Monroe portraits is one of the many small lightening bolts in this film. *** Although Warhol’s real hey-day was the 60’s and 70’s, Burns spends considerable time on the 50’s. This rescues a whole body of Warhol’s work that is largely unknown nowadays – especially(since he later insisted he couldn’t draw) his exceedingly fine and prolific draughtsmanship, not just the blotted-line technique that advertising clients loved, but for example the stunning nude studies he did. Burns’ decision to spend some time in the 50’s also rescues what it meant in practice to move from commercial to fine art. When we say Warhol erased the line between them, we usually think about subject matter: soup cans and multiple silk-screened, flamboyantly colored portraits based on photos. But it meant how art was carried on too. Not just that, as an employee of Bonwit Teller, Warhol was able to take advantage of the department store’s annual perk to staff to exhibit their “off-hours” art work in the store’s display windows. But that including crowds of people in your studio was a part of how you did the art itself, not something incidental indicating that you'd party later. *** Movie people can’t help but glory in the sections about Warhol’s extensive film experiments, for the chance to see rare clips from them and watch their production, and for the discussions of what Warhol was doing and the inspiration that his curiosity and freshness provides for how any of us approach cinema. You can dip in anywhere here. Warhol’s early movies were silent and often addressed time, such as the tantalizing tension created in his early Sleep. Here, the camera rests on Warhol’s sometime-lover John Giorno’s sleeping face in real time – the voice-over in Burns' doc points out that painting doesn’t offer real time, even as literal time disappears for the sleeper himself. You might know about Warhol’s later split-screen 6 1/2-hour long film Chelsea Girls, but Burns bothering to include the earlier ones pays off. *** Along with Warhol’s movies came his “superstars.” Burns wisely chooses to highlight one from this period, which again has multiple uses. The Velvet Underground and Nico are there, and Ondine and Candy Darling and the rest, but the young troubled blue-blood Edie Sedgwick embodies Warhol’s indie film period. Her demise from drugs, while Warhol looked on and largely did nothing, illustrates a side that Burns manages to include as part of the man and as something other artists, such as Bob Dylan, had positions about. *** Burns’ mastery at juggling such an enormous career is surely a result of past work on grand scales. But I am struck at something else that emerges here. At one point when covering the 1964-68 period of the Factory, Warhol’s vast, silver-painted East 47th Street studio, Burns quotes Warhol on the motley crew of hangers-on he invited in, from drag queens to Harvard flower-children to other artists and intellectuals, “I don’t feel all these people are hanging around me. I’m more hanging around them.” *** Crucially, the talking heads that Burns includes are as integral to a film about Warhol’s art as they were to the art itself. Warhol’s rise was rapid – both as a commercial artist and as a “serious” artist. This occurred in the midst of people who could articulate what he was doing, at a moment when critical voices mattered much more than today. In some ways we’re in a similar, sympathetic period now – our version is an increasing attention on “public art” projects that put art back in everyday life and seek to erase aesthetic distance. Paradoxically Warhol’s influence may also be part of today’s bad press and general disregard of critics. Already an incredibly rich window on Warhol’s life, work and times, Burns’ film opens another on our own. I can hardly wait for his next project. ***** Written for Stylusmagazine.com & published there on 9/21/06.

Film Review #55: BEOWULF AND GRENDEL *** (2005) *** Director: Sturla Gunnarsson *** Cast: Gerard Butler, Stellan Skarsgard, Sarah Polley *** For some of us, the terrorist narrative has been hard-wired in from the start. You don’t have to be an old English major for your mind to slide over to Beowulf in a dark theater when those two cops are caught in the grinding jaws of World Trade Center rubble. For English-speaking peoples, al-Qaeda’s raid echoes our first story, what still stains our thinking. A year before 9/11, poet Seamus Heaney’s new translation of Beowulf, originally contracted by Norton for mild-mannered college lit anthologies, had jumped onto best-seller lists, fingering some ancient hair-trigger. *** Even if you can’t quite see the Twin Towers as a modern-day Viking mead-hall, one version of this tale worth catching, despite some glaring faults, opened in the US in July. Filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson’s 2005 Beowulf and Grendel had a successful Canadian run, bracketed by sold-out festival appearances at last year’s Toronto and this spring’s Seattle. It has going for it a thoughtful take on hatred, the inspired though wholly inaccurate decision to film in his native Iceland, and an appealing if not very well-used international cast – Gerard Butler (Phantom of the Opera, Lara Croft) as Beowulf, Stellan Skarsgard (Dogville, Ronin) as Hrothgar, and Sarah Polley (Dawn of the Dead, My Life Without Me) as the witch Selma, a newly invented character. *** Gunnarsson’s movie, which he says comments on the US invasion of Iraq, shared Manhattan in July with Elliot Goldenthal’s opera at Lincoln Center. The opera is adapted from John Gardner’s 1971 novel, which Gardner specifically wrote to protest the Vietnam war. But Gardner’s Grendel – written from the monster’s point of view – also coincides more broadly with the birth of modern terrorism used against the West, in the West. Since then, one Beowulf revival has followed another, with more coming down the pike. *** Beowulf is an old story, set about 500 A.D. Beowulf, from what is now Sweden, goes to the aid of King Hrothgar, in what is now Denmark, finally killing Grendel (whose name means “grinder”). The monster had been raiding the king’s great hall at night like a refrigerator, eating his men alive, 70 at a time. While Beowulf had later opponents too, in our day we mostly have fixated on Grendel who took such pleasure in terrifying the Danes. Most versions have changed the story somehow, obsessed to explain Grendel’s viciousness – an on-going literary version of “Why do they hate us?”– beginning with the Christian monk who first wrote it all down and tacked on the idea that Grendel descended from murderous Cain. The Irish priest Brendan in Gunnarsson’s movie, who’s baptizing all those warriors in the river? He’s several centuries too early to be in that neck of the woods, but his presence makes the point about new faith’s appeal in uncertain times. *** What’s right about this film includes location filming in Iceland, whose landscape is radically different from green, heavily forested Denmark with its gentle coastline. Beowulf and Grendel is often quite beautiful, its cool, austere sweeps punctuated by scenes splashed with rare, welcome sunlight. In the original, Hrothgar’s warriors feared the deep, impenetrable forest, while today’s National Geographic-saturated audiences might not. Iceland provides a wilderness more suited to modern tastes, experience, even to our brands of fear – blank wastes that Beowulf calls “the end of the world,” icy seas, shrouded mountain-tops, looming cliffs overshadowing the strand, dwarfing men and monsters alike. Gunnarsson contrasts this with what we might call a “revisionist epic” aesthetic, undermining the shiny, puffed-up human grandeur of other costume projects. J.R.R. Tolkien loved, taught and borrowed from the original Beowulf, but Gunnarsson’s movie has no vast LOTR army hordes, no fairy gauze. Life really is nasty, brutish and short here – muddy and cold too – for the few people huddled together on the coast against the gale-force winds. *** This almost abstract setting alerts us to current parallels, much as staging MacBeth in modern dress has served to do through successive troubling political eras. What we find is rather more thoughtful than you expect. Beowulf says he fights in a new way, contrary to the “berserkers” of his own time, who work themselves into a blood-lust frenzy. Not that he refrains from killing Grendel. But his curiosity about Grendel’s motive means he must learn who the monster is and what constitutes his complaint in order to kill him, contrary to modern warfare’s aim of turning the enemy into a faceless object fit for defilement. *** In fact, there is a good deal of explicitly ethnic hatred in this film, expressed in classic terms of filth. Grendel can smell men coming from a distance, and he picks out wrong-doers by smelling what they have touched. He contemptuously fouls the mead-hall’s threshhold, an insult Beowulf’s men reciprocate when they find Grendel’s cave. No matter what kind of statesman-like things they are saying at official peace talks, if one side is calling the other “dirty,” you can count on such behavior in whatever territory is occupied. As a cultural expression, Beowulf and Grendel surely hitches a ride too from a whole slew of recent films set in odd locales and times that play with how we define “human” and its opposite – Ripley in the Alien films, Terminator I and II, the Blade series and its relatives, and lately the resurrected zombie genre. That Grendel then has language and therefore a complaint astounds Beowulf. This discovery alone – so unlikely in Beowulf’s world – unravels Hrothgar’s suspect account. *** The engine of this discovery is Sarah Polley’s bizarre character, Selma. She reluctantly translates Grendel’s words to Beowulf. Polley has been an impressive actor and Selma’s presence gets a lot done plot-wise. But she’s as sadly out of place as the jarring slang that acts as filler in the dialogue. “Oh, here we go!”, “That’s one beer-hall!”, “You can’t swim for shit!” and Beowulf’s “It’s been a while!” during his mercifully short sexual encounter with her. But if you want a handle on how much 9/11 stirs up our old, crazy, low-down stuff, this movie offers a glimpse. *** Still screening in a lone Cleveland, Ohio theater at this writing, Beowulf and Grendel has been out on DVD since July 18th. Written on 9/10/2006 for Stylusmagazine.com.

Film Review #54: Idlewild ********** (2006) *** Director: Bryan Barber *** Cast: André Benjamin, Antwan A. Patton, Terrence Howard ***** As soon as the young dancer Aisha Mitchell got out of the New York City premiere screening of Idlewild, she called her mother. Mitchell, who is apprenticing with the Alvin Ailey II Dance Company/Fordham and had snagged one of four free tickets at her studio, comes from a family of performers and artists. Her mother runs a dance school in upstate New York, her brother is a stage lighting designer and, thanks to her photographer grandmother, most everyone in the family learned to handle a camera before they could read. Mitchell was calling her mother, shouting over the celebrity party hubbub, one dancer to another, “Mom, you gotta see this movie!” *** Not so easy in upstate New York. A single mall multiplex in the five counties surrounding Aisha Mitchell’s hometown has Idlewild on-screen during its wide release opening week. Further, there’s been a chorus of sour harrumphs abroad in the land about this movie – some of them fueled by disappointment in the soundtrack CD, which unfortunately got out just ahead of the film. *** Following their stunning music videos, Idlewild is the cross-over to film for the friends-since-forever hip-hop duo OutKast. Originally an HBO project slated for TV, Idlewild picked up additional producers, funding and film status during its several years’ gestation. André Benjamin, aka André 3000, plays shy piano man Percival, and Antwan A. Patton, aka Big Boi, plays Percival’s friend-since-forever, the small town showman Rooster. There are plot-twists and complications galore, making necessary the film’s lightening swoops and cuts back and forth between scenes as the story proceeds upon several parallel tracks. These involve the retiring gangster Spats (Ving Rhames), his vengeful henchman Trumpy (Terrence Howard in easily the film’s best dramatic turn), Rooster’s two-timing ways, Percival’s quandary about leaving his still-grieving undertaker father and his own lyrical but ill-fated romance with the mysterious singer Angel Davenport, who turns out to be Sally B. Shelly. *** Although the movie title references a planned, all-black vacation enclave about 70 miles north of Grand Rapids, Michigan, that flourished from the 1920’s into the 60’s, writer-director Bryan Barber has moved his story to seedier, vaguely more menacing Georgia. Here, there are boot-leggers, small-time vicious hoods, and a saloon called Church with production numbers whose loopy grandiosity is all out of proportion to the town’s sleepy, unassuming exterior. *** That Barber uses the name of the Michigan resort at all and then moves the setting to the Deep South allows him to pull associations from both regions and adds a certain bite. Idlewild is not really about historical accuracy in a literal way – not a story of 1930’s Georgia as much as a story about a hip-hop duo making a movie about the 1930’s. They themselves invite us to share in their own exploration. Someone has said the cast looks like they’re playing dress-up in their parents’ out-sized clothes. Well, yes. And the movie has the confidence and capacity for self-mockery to mostly pull that off. When Rooster arrives on stage the first time he strikes a pose and surveys the crowd with a look that asks, “So how do I look in this rig?” *** In fact, doubling, dissembling and transformation pervade Idlewild’s whole fabric. Story elements aside, in this film’s elastic universe, time passages are marked by a change between Technicolor and black and white. Doodles suddenly live and jump off Percival’s sheets of music. Portions of photos enlarge and start to move. Rooster has a silver whiskey flask with the figure of a rooster on it that animates and raps boisterously with him. Several times cinematographer Pascal Rabaud slows the camera to tease out the breath-taking grace of choreographer Hinton Battle’s large dance numbers. Dismissed by some as “mishmash,” this really amounts to a visual equivalent of rapping that loosens up the mind’s eye. Something startling occurs from these shenanigans, I think, that prepares us to let in the extraordinary. Set down in the middle there’s a sequence of Percival and Angel coming together during a drenching night thunderstorm that’s unashamedly, full-tilt lovely. And, in a deft illustration of violence that’s anything but gratuitous, Idlewild contains a trio of bloody showdowns in which Rooster first hides from Trumpy, then daringly runs away (in the best car chase in years), and finally vanquishes him back at Church. *** Idlewild stumbles sometimes along its inspired path. A couple smaller performances verge gratingly on slapstick. Rooster’s own rapping on-stage is strangely limp, despite the dancing in others that his character inspires. I held my breath a bit during Percival’s final moments with Angel as veering too close to maudlin – even as I found myself engaged in what he’d choose. And I remain crossly unforgiving about the decision to cover up Percival’s final spectacular song and dance number with the scrolling text of the end credits. Some of our best filmmakers gave us uneven early work – incandescent scenes alternately jostling with duds inside the same movie. I remember wondering during The Last Temptation of Christ if Scorcese maybe had an evil twin. Idlewild is flawed in the way that brazenly brilliant, impudent, full-of-themselves projects usually are – projects that get some people a little tight around the mouth – which means, yeah, you gotta see it. ****** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared on 8/29/2006.

Film Review #53: When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Parts

2006

Director: Spike Lee

Lee’s Katrina Doc on HBO Is Majestic, Moving

Spike Lee is a patient man. Four Little Girls, his documentary about the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, opened during the same week that the US Justice Dept. announced the case re-opened, leading to the arrest of three long-identified suspects – in 1997. Today, Four Little Girls usefully corrects the mistaken notion that there were no terrorist attacks on US soil in those years between Pearl Harbor and 9/11. Yet Spike Lee waited over a decade for the Birmingham families’ permission to make Four Little Girls.

In the run-up publicity for his new documentary about Hurricane Katrina, Lee said he’d like some people to go to jail for their actions before and after the storm. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts aired earlier this week on HBO in two parts. HBO runs the entire doc – almost four and a half hours with its lengthy end credits sequence – next Tuesday, August 29th, the anniversary of Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana. The first half was screened in New Orleans Arena last week for over 10,000 people, who snapped up the free tickets in 48 hours.

Despite hustling to get this movie done in time for next Tuesday’s anniversary of Katrina’s landfall in Louisiana, Lee has remained a patiently angry filmmaker. Completely without voice-over narrative, this film lets its subjects – over 100 interviewed – tell their own stories. That pays off handsomely. It also allows Lee to present material about their experience that could otherwise be brushed off as inflammatory, such as the rumor that some levees were blown up on purpose to flood the poor, largely Black Ninth Ward and divert waters from other sectors. In the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, that had happened in New Orleans.

Lee has brought with him many of the same crew from Four Little Girls. HBO’s Sheila Nevins green-lighted the project, getting Lee on location by Thanksgiving for the first of nine trips. Noting that HBO never before doubled both the size and budget of a documentary, Nevins correctly calls this “the film of record for Katrina.” Sam Pollard produced and supervised editing of some 30 versions. Trumpeter and Ninth Ward native Terrence Blanchard, who’s scored Lee’s films since 1990’s Mo’ Better Blues, also performs, talks and in Act III escorts his mother back to her ruined home.

Acts I and II recap and reframe material that most of us with a pulse have already seen about the storm’s approach, those who fled and those who couldn’t, and what passed for rescue. Set to African drums and then Louis Armstrong singing “Do You Know What It Mans to Miss New Orleans?”, the opening montage intersperses historical footage of New Orleans revelry with Katrina devastation, setting up anew the contradiction and irrationality of what occurred. People recall over and over that tsunami relief reached around the globe in half the time it took FEMA to reach New Orleans. There are desperate moments of fear, anger, grief and rescue. One bizarre moment has red-coated Canadian Mounties arriving to help the relief effort. Closing the first half with a long montage of abandoned bodies is a risky move, if you think about it, because many viewers might easily not come back.

But Act III is worth the wait. Here, focusing on displacement of what WWWL radio host Garland Robinette says has been almost a million people, Levees really is majestic and moving. And here, Lee’s art as a feature filmmaker immeasurably deepens and supports the documentary. Here is where Terence Blanchard takes his frail but regal mother home, and where First Mother Barbara Bush visits the Houston Astrodome “refugees,” shrugging that “some of these people were underprivileged anyway.” In one sense, the whole film comes down to those two white-haired old ladies.

Act III is full of such masterful Lee moments of simply placing what’s worlds apart side by side. Terrence Blanchard walks through the Ninth Ward playing the hymn “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” on his trumpet, the music framing cuts between his walk and other faces and voices. Wynton Marsalis explains how the African drumming patterns from New Orleans’ old Congo Square, blended with French opera – “Where else in America? Not Boston!” – show up in today’s jazz. And Miss Phyllis Montana-LeBlanc, one of the memorable recurring personalities Lee brings on repeatedly for her blazing, shot-in-the-heart one-liners. Certain key still photos reappear throughout too, imposing an emotional order of the chaos by their accumulating familiarity. If you notice how such things work in movies, repetition and variation of people, images and musical themes is first-rate, a fitting achievement for Lee’s twenty year career.

By Act IV, I was tired, not in the mood for engineering data, insurance scams, and off-shore oil leases whose royalties are mostly siphoned away from Louisiana where they might pay for wetland restoration and community relief. But then, once again re-paying the wait, Levees winds up with a jazz funeral for Katrina – there’s one resilient elderly dancer in a fedora and sash emblazoned with “Jolly Bunch” who leads it – telling us a secret, I think, about what we lost and what endures. Spike Lee is a patient man, after all, as in “Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.”

*******
This review appeared in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 8/24/2006.

Film Review #52: My Country, My Country ********** (2006 ) *** Director: Laura Poitras *** Cast: Dr. Riyadh al-Adhadh, Carlos Valenzuela, Peter Towndrow *** How often have physicians – both characters and real figures – explained or personified modern violence from the very heart of its upheavals? Pasternak’s Yuri Zhivago made Russia’s convulsions intelligible. From Algeria’s independence war, psychiatrist Franz Fanon produced The Wretched of the Earth. Cillian Murphy is a doctor-in-training in the Irish Free State-era civil war in Ken Loach’s Cannes sensation, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Though Dr. Ayman al-Zawahari may be no Che Guevara, Osama’s right-hand man too was once a surgeon. *** Now the exceedingly complex question of transplanting Western-style elections to Iraq during an escalating insurgency comes to our movie theaters in the person of Dr. Riyadh, whose seemingly doomed run for political office approaches tragedy. *** Speaking by phone from New York last Friday, the day her documentary My Country, My Country opened there at Cinema Village, Laura Poitras related how she found her film’s protagonist. In “this kind of filmmaking,” she explains, it doesn’t make sense to plan things too much. In July 2004, she had been in Iraq about three weeks. Working entirely alone, she intended to film the six months’ run-up to Iraq’s first elections. Then, she encountered the Sunni physician as he conducted an inspection at Abu Ghraib Prison. We see this on-screen, as he patiently, intently wades through and sorts out the tangle of flayed emotions and crossed agendas. *** Poitras says, “My instincts just told me, like, this guy is really amazing, in terms of his ability to talk across both sides of the fence – to reach out to the detainees, and then also to negotiate on their behalf with the US military.” *** To a remarkable degree, Poitras’ even-handed film manages to do the same thing. Her lucky discovery of Dr. Riyadh – coincidentally a candidate for the Baghdad Provincial Council from the largest Sunni group, the Iraqi Islamic Party – provides a resonant focal point for Western audiences. That he is both a physician and a Western-style candidate, with a family of constantly challenging women, engenders a familiarity about Dr. Riyadh that puts him on a par with many seemingly more familiar, non-Iraqi figures who teem across the screen – UN-connected Europeans, Australian mercenaries, US military and State Department types. *** For Arab audiences – and for our illumination if we wish – there is the film’s haunting soundtrack, written and performed by Kadhum al-Sahir. Consider that this pop-singer and classic composer, from Iraq’s northern city of Mosul – who has lived in exile from Saddam's regime in Egypt since 1993 – is the world’s top-selling Arab musician (over 30 million records). Connecting those dots suggests the complexity of the Arab world’s response to US presence in Iraq. And, of the array of successfully made contacts manifested throughout her film, Poitras is most proud of Kadhum al-Sahir’s participation. When he performed in Detroit, she flew there and went backstage to ask him to do the score. *** “For any Arab speaker, if they watch the first five minutes of this film?” Poitras answers her own question, “The second his voice comes on, they know this man. He’s singing, ‘Oh my country, when will you have a happy morning?’ They know that voice and they know he’s in exile. It sends shivers, because it has such resonance.” *** My Country, My County opens on Baghdad’s Election Day morning. A single bird sweeps across vast pink dawn sky. A man makes coffee in a dark, cramped kitchen. A young woman’s voice asks, “Dad, will you vote?” Her question becomes a refrain, repeated three times through the film, underscoring the irony of Dr. Riyadh’s position as both father and candidate. By the time he sends his wife and off-spring out to vote, his party has withdrawn its slate in boycott and ordered him to stay home too. The film then back-tracks six months, and brings us along at intervals, with tightly edited vignettes of Dr. Riyadh’s progress alternating with the larger project of mounting an election, up to this Election Day morning, replaying the kitchen scene and proceeding to the day’s immediate aftermath. *** Along the way, we see Dr. Riyadh treating patients, feeding his chickens, pleading with the Americans to let medical aid into the embattled city of Fallujah, facing his increasingly fractious family, and arguing – against a tide of resentment and sorrow from every quarter – that, “If we don’t participate, we will be left on the sidelines.” With elections two months off, Dr. Riyadh has grown thinner and grayer. In one somber scene, speakers at his party headquarters debate pulling out of the election. Repeatedly the camera pans back to his watchful face as he grasps that most of his party colleagues are simply unable to see past their fury at the US. *** On Election Day, he listens when his wife and daughters return home from the polls embarrassed, vociferous. “I elected you myself,” one daughter practically spits, adding that they were the only family from their block at the polls. His wife Samera – who earlier had exclaimed, “Politics is not good for you!” – says she hid her purple-inked finger. Another daughter sarcastically says no, she cannot make the luncheon salad – because she’s voted, “The Resistance is after me!” *** Much of the three days surrounding the election is occupied by the kidnapping for ransom of Dr. Riyadh’s nephew Yasir, whose father, also a doctor, breaks down during cell-phone negotiations when he fears his son is lost. Despite raising Yasir’s ransom price – a sum that Poitras reports she contributed to because, she says, “How could you not?” – Dr. Riyadh coolly shares his analysis with the camera as well as with the family packed into his tiny living room. He observes, “Saudi Arabia and Syria are giving money to the Resistance. The whole world is giving money to the Resistance.” Of the kidnappers, part of wide-spread intimidation kidnappings near the election, he adds, “They don’t need our money.” *** Dr. Riyadh may be, as Laura Poitras says, a deeply religious man, but he is also deeply astute, uncommonly able to pay attention to what goes on around him and maintain his own footing. In this, he and the filmmaker are alike. *** When not trailing her doctor-candidate protagonist, Poitras is following the voter registration and election process – with the UN support team headed by Carlos Valenzuela, at Iraq’s Election Commission, inside US State Dept. “pep talks” and media strategy briefings, along on transport of heavily guarded registration materials and ballot boxes, at gun deals with Australian mercenaries in the mountains of Kurdistan, inside helicopter sweeps over the city and protests at the Abu Hanifa mosque. Over and over, with a jolt at some unexpected scene, you wonder how on earth Poitras got where she is shooting from. Its very immediacy is unnerving. Despite the chaos Poitras documents, the film itself is organized, coherent, rapidly paced and devoid of cheap shots. But it would not be half so good a movie without the doctor and his family. *** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it ran on 8/11/2006. Hear an interview with Laura Poitras on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM, on Thursday, 8/31/06 at 8:00 p.m. DST, via web-streaming at www.waer.org.

Film Review #51: THE LOST CITY ******** (2006) *** Director: Andy Garcia *** Cast: Andy Garcia, Inés Sastre, Nestor Carbonell, Bill Murray *** Who can blame Andy Garcia if he got the bends? When it all finally came together, his window for location shooting of The Lost City in the Dominican Republic was just 35 days and his budget under $10 million. Garcia’s passionate elegy to mid-century Havana’s cultural, political and musical upheaval, The Lost City, was an idea he’d nursed since 1985 – the same year he says he started making his living as an actor and could afford epic movie dreams. For the last 16 years he collaborated with expatriate Cuban writer G. Cabrera Infante on the script. Also star and director, Garcia produced the film score’s nearly 40 songs and nightclub production numbers, wrote five of them and then performed some of the music on-screen. *** Despite anticipatory feature profiles of Garcia last spring, reviews of the film were luke-warm. Complaints were sundry. These ranged from the film’s perhaps self-indulgent length (143 minutes), to Garcia’s own acting, to whether Bill Murray’s tart role belonged there at all, to the film’s eye-wideningly irreverent portrait of Che Guevara. The soundtrack alone drew raves and was scheduled for CD release well before the film itself. *** Now The Lost City’s DVD release is announced for August 8th. And you know what? The Lost City has been moseying along, holding its own for all its flaws. In pretty much its last week of commercial release after a three-month run, The Lost City is on-screen in 24 cities across the US. *** It will be worth catching on DVD for reasons beyond its obvious visual loveliness and soundtrack. These would include Infante and Garcia’s gauntlet-provoking take on Che Guevara, the film’s use of women, and Garcia’s highly physical acting and directing, all of which support The Lost City as a film as much about memory as history. *** The Lost City covers the years 1958-61, during which several factions waged resistance against military dictator Fulgencio Batista, who had run Cuba since 1933 and reportedly murdered some 20,000 people. Fidel Castro’s guerillas entered Havana in January 1959 after 25 months of fighting. Andy Garcia was six years old when he and his family left for Miami in 1961, apparently getting very little out past Castro’s airport guards. The film portrays this time via the fictional Fellove family saga, which centers on three brothers and their differing paths. *** Eldest brother Fico (Garcia) presides over the nightclub La Tropico, echoing both Casablanca’s Rick and last year’s The White Countess. Oddly, memory tempts me to recall The Lost City starting with an elaborate dance number at Fico’s club (with the fastest hip shimmy this side of David Lachapelle’s dance doc Rize). Actually the film’s opening titles first overlay a Batista security officer’s abrupt execution, performed in the name of the shadowy resistance fighter “Pelligra.” This turns out to be middle brother Luis (Nestor Carbonell). Luis is later assassinated in a breath-stopping scene on a windy roof-top amid bright white sheets on a clothes-line. *** Luis is pivotal to the story’s arc and resonance, a lost brother of such haunting stature that Castro and company always fall short. Fico engages a vivid but short-lived romance with Luis’ widow Aurore (Inés Sastre), eventually leaving her for New York City at his parents’ insistence as Castro’s reforms accelerate. Aurore joins the regime. The youngest Fellove, gullible, surly Ricardo (Enrique Murciano of Without a Trace), simply rides into the hills one day, correctly trusting Fidel’s men to find him. Fico tangles with US gangster Myer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman), loses his nightclub, and enjoys an enduring friendship with an unnamed oddball writer played by Bill Murray. *** Historical events often anchor The Lost City’s abundant plot. Luis’ participation in a doomed effort to storm Batista’s palace parallels that of March 1958. Castro’s land reforms did nationalize the large plantations; here, Ricardo blithely informs his uncle of the confiscation of land that is clearly the source of the Fellove’s wealth, causing the uncle’s collapse. Fidel and a large contingent did visit the United Nations in 1960, making plausible Aurore’s midnight visit to Fico in a New York City diner. *** But The Lost City’s striking treatment of revered lefty icon Ernesto Che Guevara stands out. At least Garcia and Infante – a disillusioned former cultural attaché for Fidel – are even-handed; their Batista is a chilling sadist. We meet beautiful Che (Jsu Garcia) casually shooting wounded Batista foot soldiers where they lay in the dirt as he passes. The film presents Che’s role at La Cabana prison where he supervised executions of Batista’s police. One is a boyhood friend of Fico’s. Che lets Fico to beg for his friend’s life, then enjoys telling him the man’s already dead. *** This has been a banner year for Che’s memory, given Walter Salles’ The Motorcycle Diaries, the retrospective exhibit of Che images at Manhattan’s International Center for Photography, and on-going gallery screenings of Leandro Katz’s remarkable 1997 short video about photographer Freddy Alborta, whose pictures documented Che’s body on display following his murder in Bolivia. Reconsideration of Che to this degree recalls the rocky fate of Jonathan Demme’s 2003 documentary The Agronomist, about Jean Dominique, assassinated founder of Radio Haiti. Soured on Aristide, the journalist confronts him on-camera and on-air about corruption within his party, Lavalas. This unflattering scene has gone largely unappreciated among what might have been a natural audience. *** That Garcia personifies Cuba as a woman – to be wooed, seduced, fought over, cherished, lost – makes his movie’s Che more disturbing. Che aggressively, intimately kisses Aurora at the garden party when Fico wants her to leave. And Fico, an avid photographer, is so mad to get Aurore’s close-up image on film that he follows her waist-deep into the surf at the beach – a microcosm of Garcia’s own abiding need to capture this receding era on celluloid, and of Fico’s “home movies” when he’s alone in snowy New York City. An especially magnificent sequence cross-cuts Luis’s dance-like assault on Batista’s palace – leaps up and down staircases – with Fico filming dancing women at his club. For brief flashes, Fico appears to be present at Batista’s palace, filming his brother’s head-long dash. As for Aurore, she finally prefers Che’s honorific title for her, Widow of the Revolution, to feeling decorative though prized – “useless.” (So might a country’s people.) *** Well, who can really blame her? Except for those who entertain on-stage, The Lost City’s women have little to do except cluster down the hall while their men discuss and decide. One female character at the Fellove household – perhaps a baby sister, perhaps Ricardo’s wife – never speaks at all. The most thick-headed aspects of Fidel’s regime appear in the person of a soldier (the fine actor Elizabeth Pena is an incongruous role) who tells Fico which musical instruments his club’s band may use. With revolutionary logic, she reviles the saxophone, based on what its inventors, the Belgians, did in the Congo. *** We should remember that this is a film emotionally based on memory and what a six-year-old lost. The Lost City relies heavily on the physical expression of emotion in, for many, a non-familiar culture. Greatly admired stage performers at Fico’s club include the old and the pot-bellied as well as the young and trim. The Fellove men are extravagantly affectionate with each other, hugging, cradling heads, stroking, embracing, kissing often. Ricardo shambles and lurches, mirroring the ill fit of the regime’s demands. Particularly in Fico, moments of great physical restraint and stillness offset great, fluid physicality. These extremes, derided by some as Garcia’s “wooden” acting, match other stretches of the film’s dilated perception, part of recollecting what’s lost – over-long, over-ripe, hazy scenes of Fico and Aurore strolling on a beach in fashionable hats, for example. Though not the final word on Cuba, who can blame him? ********** [1,285 words] *** This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com & published there 7/28/2006.

Film Review #50: THE BLOOD OF MY BROTHER *************** Although he has now made three documentary films, Brooklyn-based Andrew Berends is first and foremost a still photographer. This may account for both the major problems & the most memorable, haunting qualities in his film, The Blood of My Brother, about how one Iraqi family carries on after its eldest son is killed by a US military patrol in Baghdad. This striking 84-minute film is one of two that Berends shot during eight months in Iraq two years ago – the other, When Adnan Comes Home, follows the almost-lethal incarceration of a 16-year-old boy arrested for stealing a few yards of electrical cable. Blood of My Brother premiered at Amsterdam’s International Documentary Festival last December, made the prestige doc festival rounds in Tehran, Prague & Athens, & had its US debut at Manhattan’s Tribeca Film Festival in April. On June 30th, it opened in limited theatrical release. *** It did not do well. As a movie you see in a regular theater, The Blood of My Brother has come & gone. This is not for an atmosphere uncongenial to films about how ordinary Iraqis have fared during this increasingly unpopular war. Lincoln Center’s Human Rights Film Festival in early June particularly highlighted such films – not just Michael Winterbottom’s related Road to Guantanàmo, but the Spanish documentary Winter in Baghdad & James Longley’s Iraq in Fragments, winner of three Sundance awards. Coming up on August 4th is Laura Poitras’ anticipated My Country, My Country, whose footage & sound she shot entirely alone while following a Sunni physician during his inspections of Abu Ghraib prison, treatment of patients & run for legislative office. *** My point is that Blood of My Brother has been born into excellent movie-making company at a time when documentary audiences seek a view of life on the other side of the battle-lines, though if any war destroys the remnants of thinking in such neatly demarcated images, it is surely this one. *** The Blood of My Brother expresses that very chaos in its fragmented on-screen narrative. Here is what Berends’ film is about. The Iraqi portrait photographer Ra’ad al-Azawi, an eldest son, is about to open his own photo shop. The night before the big day, a US patrol kills him while he is guarding the Shiite mosque in the Kadhimya section of Baghdad. Ra’ad is dubbed a martyr, his funeral attended by thousands. Younger brother Ibrahim, 19, now responsible for the family, struggles with whether to maintain the shop – for which he has neither talent nor business aptitude – or join the forces of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mehdi militia. We see truly stunning footage of both insurgent gatherings & urban warfare – don’t forget, over 120 journalists have died covering this war – a demonstration for peace in Najaf, interviews with exceedingly young US soldiers, Ra’ad’s mother’s first visit to his grave, & Ibrahim’s eventual loss of the shop & descent to menial day labor. We do not see the story in anywhere near this order or clarity, but I’ll come back to that. *** There is a deep sadness at every turn in this film, from the opening moments in which Ibrahim awkwardly tries to persuade his bereft mother that it’s time to leave the cemetery. What emerges, & endures long after the film ends, is Andrew Berends’ felt kinship with Ra’ad al-Azawi as brother photographers. Ra’ad’s delicately colored portraits of children grace the screen from time to time, though initially it’s not clear they are his work. And, with what comes to seem like the filmmaker’s patience with Ibrahim, this movie finally becomes the intended generous act of a stand-in spiritual brother toward the slouchy, inarticulate, actually not very attractive young man. At some point, what flashes as vividly across the screen as the incessant deadly bursts of war is the sudden recognition that recording & telling another’s story is itself an act of kinship, a kind of looking-after the younger brother that Ra’ad himself might understand. *** These things emerge because Andrew Berends is a powerfully skillful and talented photographer whose subject is actually another photographer. The primary flaw in the film is that it’s nearly impossible to follow on its own. Because I had a press kit when I saw it, I had the benefit of Andrew Berends’ statement about his intentions as well as background information. I suspect this film has not done well in theaters because most movie-goers expect a film labeled “documentary” to have a minimally orderly narrative – even though many will recognize figures like Moqtada al-Sadr from newscasts, & even allowing for the film’s aesthetic expressing the chaotic experience it records. *** There’s another setting in which a film like this does fit. And that is where you will be able to see it. As gallery exhibits, films, videos & photos customarily have just such explanatory artists’ statements attached to them as Berends has written for this one. We expect these statements; they free visual art from demands for narrative order & provide context. Once I knew that Blood of My Brother is part of such a project, my discomfort relaxed. Inexplicably, this information was not part of the publicity during the film’s brief solo life as a feature movie. *** Unembedded is the name of the collective gallery project of Andrew Berends, filmmaker James Longley (whose doc, Iraq in Fragments, is also making a stab as a free-standing movie), & four other photographers. All have worked solo in Iraq since the US invasion. These include Rita Leistner, who covered a women’s unit in a Kurdish militia & more recently, women who seek refuge in Iraqi psychiatric wards to avoid honor killings; Kael Alford – she covered Baghdad during the shock & awe bombing; Thorne Anderson, & an Iraqi, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, whose training as an architect shows in his pictures. The exhibit presents 60 still photos plus the Berends & Longley films. Now on tour, it’s opening tonight, actually, at Orange County Community College in Middletown. It later goes to Phoenix, Detroit, & in October, to Yale University. You can buy the book, with all 150 photos, on-line. There’s a website with a generous sample of extraordinary photos. I’d like to see Embedded come to Syracuse – in my mind’s eye, it’s already right at home at LightWorks or the Lowe Gallery ot the Community Folk Art Gallery. Join me? * (1,050) *** This review was broadcast on Women's Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on 7/20/2006.

FILM REVIEW #49: HEADING SOUTH *** (2005) *** Director: Laurent Cantet *** Cast: Charlotte Rampling, Karen Young, Menothy Cesar, Louise Portal *** ******* For a couple reasons, you might be inspired to watch over again Ingmar Bergman’s scalding 1966 meditation on the Vietnam War, Persona. The writer Robert Emmet Long was on NPR just last week, talking about his new book of interviews with Liv Ullmann, Bergman’s long-time screen muse. Deceptively slender at just 82 minutes, Persona was Ullmann’s first film for the great Swedish director. There’s also a surprising echo on-screen right now. Discussing her work in Heading South by phone recently, New York City-based actor Karen Young said that Persona inspired French director Laurent Cantet’s approach to his film’s four monologues. That’s not the only similarity in these two movies about reversal. *** Heading South is set in steamy, late-1970’s Haiti during the last days of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s bloody regime. This seems far from the chilly Swedish coast, the late-night ramblings of Bibi Andersson’s Nurse Alma and the silent retreat of Ullmann’s troubled actress character, Elisabeth Vogler. Cantet’s tale assembles a group of well-off, older North American white women who repair to an insular beach resort and the favors of young, poor Haitian men. Karen Young’s Brenda is a Georgia divorcee who’s returned, seeking Legba (Methony Cesar). She tussles over him with Charlotte Rampling’s older Ellen, a French lit professor from Wellesley College. Affable, chunky Montrealer Sue (Louise Portal of The Barbarian Invasions) completes their trio. *** Direct depiction of Duvalier’s regime is spare but devastating. In Persona, Bergman needed only two short worldly references – a TV clip of a Buddhist monk’s self-immolation and an older photo of Nazis marching a five-year-old Jewish boy in a cap with his hands up – to make his point about private violence mirroring public events. Canter’s film opens in Port-au-Prince Airport as the resort’s gravely fastidious manager Albert (Lys Ambroise), there to pick up Brenda, fends off a woman trying to sell her daughter to get her out of Haiti. Later, Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes pursue Legba in a panicky, desperate chase through market and alley – we don’t know exactly why, though perhaps the terror matters more than the reason. Then, the morning after he rebuffs Ellen’s offers of protection, the thugs dump his body on the resort’s beach. Ellen is shattered. Brenda – whom Cantet calls, expressly without judgment, the most optimistic character in all his films – soon plans to move on to other islands. *** Heading South is based on Dany Laferrière’s La Chair du Maître (The Master’s Flesh), which Cantet read on the outbound flight from his first week-long trip to Haiti in 2001. Fresh from the Sundance Festival’s warm embrace of his film Time Out, Cantet went to visit his parents, retirees training Haitian teachers for an NGO project. The appalling poverty and class gaps he saw rapidly produced extreme discomfort. Laferrière’s book provided a ready framework for cinematic portrayal of the tourist’s position as spectator. Cantet cites Laferrière’s own remarks about physical desire and sex, as both political metaphor and the only means for contact in a society where relations between the classes are so “terrifying.” Indeed Heading South reminds us that this may seem more obvious when women are vulnerable, by opening with just such a gender reversal: the desperate mother and daughter in the airport. *** Laferrière’s short story collection already contained monologues. When Heading South screened in February at the Toronto Film Festival, that city’s Sun observed that the monologues – by each of the three women plus the older Haitian, Albert – create documentary-like interviews within a fiction film. But watching Persona illuminates Cantet’s remarks that Brenda especially struggles to put her sexual experience into language. He says, “It’s more unsettling to hear her talk about it than it is to watch the images of it.” This is much like Nurse Alma’s recitation of beach sex with boy strangers. Moreover, Brenda finds almost commensurate pleasure in finding the words. *** Albert’s monologue – he so hates whites that he won’t touch them without gloves on – sets the stage for Ellen’s private exchange with him after Legba’s death. She confides to this very proper man, whose rank means he must listen, that Legba could make her climax as soon as he touched her – an intimate detail somehow shocking exactly because Albert is her own age. Lest we think this deep sense of impropriety simmers only among old fogeys, Legba earlier stops an innuendo-laden dance between Brenda and a boy named Eddy. Eddy hotly protests, “You’re not my father!” But do the math – Cantet scrupulously provides ages and timelines – Legba was also about twelve when Ellen first hit town. *** Unfortunately most comment reduces Heading South to a story of “sexual tourism” or simply – luminous though she may be! – “Charlotte Rampling’s latest movie.” Both shortchange a film of considerably more layers. Karen Young says she never heard the phrase “sexual tourism” until the movie was three-quarter’s done, but allows it’s “an easy thing to sell it on.” *** If you too recall Young as FBI Agent Robyn Sanseverino in HBO’s The Sopranos, who first insinuated herself into ill-fated Adriana’s life while rifling a clothing rack in a pricey shop, her memorably arresting quality translates well to the big screen. She’s steadily worked in film and TV since 1981. Young found the part itself and collaboration with Cantet so satisfying that “it was hard to come back from” – despite a delayed shoot (Aristide’s chaotic 2004 fall from power), left-over gun-fighting, weather so unstable the schedule changed 27 times and a daily 45-minute drive by bad road to the resort’s set over the Dominican border. *** Brenda’s urgent searches for Legba – when she first arrives and later when he’s missing – frame the film’s central narrative. Her arrival startles all three women; somehow they’ve uncritically imagined their Haitian beach boys were not seeing other tourists when they went home. Among its other eventual reversals, Heading South is really more about Brenda. Her transformation contains a future, while Ellen transitions here to twilight. Young’s nuanced, often primarily physical performance is prodigious and should mark a turning point in appreciation and projects. *** Further, Heading South at first seems a departure from Cantet’s previous feature films, in which he overtly focuses on “the religion of work” – a naïve son’s come-uppance against a French factory’s shift to the 35-hour week in Human Resources (1999) and an unraveling executive’s pretense to his family that he’s working after being fired in Time Out (2001). Cantet notes about this film, “You do not have poor victims on the one hand and the bastards who manipulate them on the other. Everyone gets something out of it.” That Heading South is about these young men as “workers,” whose wages include food and attention, seeps into one’s consciousness like some hot blush. *** All Cantet’s films have US theatrical premieres that follow a testing of the waters at some Lincoln Center festival – this time, the RendezVous With French Cinema series in March. His features are all available from netflicks, as is the made-for-TV Les Sanguinaires (1998), one of seven pieces anticipating the Millennium that toured the globe in 1999. Even The Troubles We’ve Seen – young Cantet was, perhaps formatively, first assistant director of Marcel Ophuls’ doc on the history of combat journalism – screened in New York in 1994. His new project, a fiction film with non-professional actors, is based on interviews with Hurricane Katrina survivors. Probably no walk on the beach either. *** Heading South opened June 7 in Manhattan. It opens July 21 in Los Angeles and in limited release thereafter. Hear Nancy Keefe Rhodes’ interview with actor Karen Young broadcast on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on Thursday, July 27th at 8:00 p.m. DST via web-streaming on www.waer.org. This review was written for www.stylusmagazine.com.

Film Review #48: WHO KILLED THE ELECTRIC CAR? *** Director: Chris Paine *** Cast: Martin Sheen, Chelsea Sexton, Stan Ovshinsky *** There’s a scene in the 1991 satire Naked Gun 2 ½ in which a sinister Robert Goulet tells a roomful of shadowy big oil and coal executives that they are right to be frightened. He reels off a list of innovations – from light bulbs to electric cars – that could save vast amounts of money and energy, destroying their profits and making their products obsolete. Except, he assures them, no one will ever know. Naked Gun 2 ½ depicts a scheme to kidnap a scientist who advocates solar energy. First-time feature director Chris Paine uses this scene in his new documentary about a real-life plot unfolding at about the same time that climaxes with the kidnap and destruction of almost an entire fleet of such electric cars, the General Motors Saturn EV-1. *** Who Killed the Electric Car? is chocked full of details that provoke an “I never knew that!” response – where has the media been during all this? The movie also has three things going for it: a savvy understanding of America’s mixed relationship with the car, a crew of filmmakers who are both activists themselves and techno-literate enough to grasp some fairly intricate science and numbers, and the good fortune to premiere in the light cast by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The recent Los Angeles Film Festival even ran a Saturday double bill of both movies in downtown LA’s California Plaza as part of a Green Day with related parties and events. *** Between 1996 and 2003, the Saturn EV-1 was available to lease in California and Arizona. There were actually nine electric vehicles on the road during this period, from Honda, Toyota, Nissan, Ford and Chrysler. Among them only the Toyota RAV4 EV was for sale – one of the film’s producers bought the very last one sold. Paine concentrates on the Saturn EV-1 as the prototype and most important because of GM’s leadership in this whole affair. Actor Martin Sheen, adding The West Wing’s gravitas, narrates. *** In 1987, after GM won a solar-powered car race in Australia, CEO Roger Smith directed their Saturn division to come up with a commercial electric car. Developed completely in California – Alan Cocconi built its first battery in his garage – the project remained a secret, outside Detroit’s loop. The two-seater EV-1 was unveiled at the 1990 Los Angeles Auto Show. Shortly after, aware of EV-1 and eager to combat the worst levels of air pollution in the US, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed the Zero Emissions Mandate. This required 2% of all new vehicles sold in that state to be emission free by 1998 and 10% – estimated between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 – by 2003. *** But by 1996 – nine months before the Saturn EV-1 was actually offered to the public – GM had lobbied CARB to soften their mandate and base the quota on consumer demand instead of percentage sold. Paine’s movie portrays how GM, in concert with the oil industry and other car-makers, went about actively undermining and then denying that consumer demand. This took effort, since the EV-1 was immediately popular, generating long waiting lists. Paine features a host of engineering experts, colorful inventors, fresh-faced advocates and celebrities touting the EV-1 – on late-night TV, actor Tom Hanks tells David Letterman, “That sucker goes!”, then adds, “And I’m saving America!” *** The EV-1 was quite fast, silent, clean, fun to drive, cost only about $5 to re-charge and required little maintenance and parts replacement. Its brake system alone would cost the lucrative brake repair industry millions. When Stan Ovshinsky invented a battery that increased its range, GM bought the rights and told him to keep quiet about it – “I expected applause,” the white-haired, twinkly-eyed holder of 200 US patents ruefully tells Paine. Eventually Chevron/Texaco bought the battery and put it on the shelf. After all, GM had also bought up competing trolley car companies and shut them down, thereby creating urban demand for cars. *** There’s plenty of drama in Who Killed the Electric Car? Both drivers and sales teams were so fond of the EV-1 that they organized when GM re-called its 800-car lease fleet. They protested. They held a mock funeral. They offered GM $1.9 million to buy back one 78-car lot. Chris Paine hired a helicopter and filmed EV-1’s crushed at GM’s remote desert proving grounds. When GM sued CARB in 2002 to completely dismantle its emissions mandate, the Bush White House joined up, offering legal support, tax credits for SUV’s and the lure of hydrogen fuel cells. In one of the clearest sections, Paine demolishes the promise of hydrogen fuel cells – which are derived from fossil fuels and won’t be commercially viable for at least twenty years, enough time for the oil industry to get at the rest of those trillion barrels of oil still in the earth’s crust. *** Chris Paine and company understand America’s romance with cars but also our more everyday, enduring affection. Like all romances, this one has sometimes blinded us. There’s a wonderful montage of advertising and film clips that convey the illusion of mystery, wealth, glamour and open road that cars promised mid-century. Then the dramatic fog drifting around a vintage Caddy’s giant chromed tail fins morphs into the brown smog hanging over a grid-locked freeway – that “inconvenient truth.” But don’t forget this film appears during the summer of the wildly popular animated movie Cars, surely a descendant of The Little Engine That Could and all that conjures up. The EV-1 and its class-mates are zippy, compact, friendly. Easy to give personalities. Activist Chelsea Sexton, part of Saturn’s original and most successful 13-person sales team for EV-1 in California until laid off in 2001 and now executive director of Plug-in America, calls them “my babies.” *** Luckily (mostly) for audiences, Chris Paine and his crew came to this project already knowing the field. Most have driven electric vehicles. Paine and some of his producers are among the “digerati” who worked in computers and then turned to introduce digital innovation into filmmaking. They understand the science, have a coherent analysis of events and can articulate both. The text boxes and subtitles on-screen are hard to read and go by too quickly, but only occasionally does Paine let his own geek enthusiasm override good judgment about how much is too much. *** Really this is a cross-over film. In format a well-done but fairly conventional documentary, it might have enjoyed a modest theatrical run or screened on PBS. Instead, Who Killed the Electric Car? rides in the slipstream of Al Gore’s movie – and that, if you think about it, is really more a rock concert film than a documentary. That’s okay, because Gore’s film overcomes many people’s reluctance to listen to difficult, overwhelming and confusing material. Films like Paine’s will benefit from curious, fired-up audiences who now more readily connect some dots. *** Perhaps coincidentally, the activist organization MoveOn.org held some 300 rallies at gas stations around the US to demand that Congress stop accepting Big Oil’s money on the same day Who Killed the Electric Car? opened. In Washington, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History quietly removed its rare surviving EV-1 from display earlier this month. And violent rain squalls and flooding continue in much of the northeast. . . *** Who Killed the Electric Car? opened in New York and Los Angeles on June 28th & goes into wide release on July 21st. *** [1,234] This review was written for www.stylusmagazine.com.

THE ROAD TO GUANTÁNAMO *** Directors: Michael Winterbottom & Mat Whitecross *** Cast: Riz Ahmed as Shafiq Rasul, Arfan Usman as Asif Iqbal, Farhad Harun as Rhuhel Ahmed, Waqar Siddiqui as Monir. *** You can’t say we weren’t warned. *** This British film’s theatrical release in a dozen US cities on June 23rd has been a little like the arrival of a fleet of tall ships whose masts we have watched bear down on our shores from over the horizon. Just as film alone, Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ docudrama about post 9/11 detention of terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba arrives here already acclaimed (Silver Bear Award for Best Director at this year’s Berlin Film Festival), and to an unusual degree – at least in the New York City area – already seen. The Road to Guantánamo screened twice in early May at Tribeca Film Festival, and again last week at Human Rights Watch Film Festival at Lincoln Center, not to mention the five Manhattan press screenings in between. As political performance art, this movie - centering on four young, real-life British Muslims of Pakistani background swept up in the US invasion of Afghanistan - also resembles another recent British import. The film alternates enactments of what happened with interview snips from the surviving three and archival news footage. Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s 2004 play, Guantánamo – Honor Bound to Defend Freedom, presents enactments of four other young men imprisoned in Guantánamo, cobbled from their own statements and letters, and political figures like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Photos of real-life counterparts are projected on the set’s back wall. The play opened off-Broadway to coincide with the August 2004 GOP presidential convention, and then had healthy runs in Washington, San Francisco and, as recently as March, Chicago. The play’s title – Honor Bound to Defend Freedom – references a sign outside Guantánamo’s Camp X-Ray compound, which in light of growing charges can’t help but echo the “Arbeit Macht Frei” signs outside earlier camps. *** Spilling into its own larger context, the film’s opening now seems part of a powerful convergence of events. Growing calls to close Guantánamo from bodies both here and abroad include the U.N. Committee on Torture in Geneva, in May and again on June 23rd following the June 10th suicides of three Guantánamo detainees. The principals in Winterbottom’s film were quickly quoted by US media covering those suicides as sources about harsh psychological conditions there. *** Michael Winterbottom has said that his attraction to their story was of ordinary guys swept up in overwhelming events. Shafiq, Asif and Rhuhel – dubbed the Tipton Three for their hometown in the industrial Midlands region of England – are well-connected ordinary guys. Winterbottom first contacted them about a film project through their lawyer, Gareth Peirce. As a young British journalist, she was transformed by a stint in the 1960’s covering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., earned a law degree and has built a career on high-profile human rights and political defense work. She’s had other cases on-screen – for example, see Jim Sheridan’s 1993’s In the Name of the Father. In 2002, Shafiq and Asif were among plaintiffs in cases that resulted in the Supreme Court’s 2004 ruling that Guantánamo detainees have access to US courts to challenge their detentions. And last month, a US District Court cleared the way for their $10 million suit against the Bush Administration for violating their right under US law to practice their faith while in custody. *** Even so, I’m afraid such background doesn’t adequately prepare you for watching this movie. The Road to Guantánamo is important, remarkable and more disturbing than we usually want our movies. Here is what the film recounts. *** On September 10, 2001, Asif Iqbal’s mother returns to Tipton from a visit to Pakistan and tells him that she has chosen a young woman there for his wife. Nine days later, he leaves for Pakistan; soon after, friends Shafiq, Rhuhel and Monir follow. They rendezvous in Karachi, joined by Shafiq’s Pakistani cousin Zahid. During sight-seeing in the capital, Zahid takes them to a mosque. An imam urges them to join humanitarian groups heading for neighboring Afghanistan, which faces impending US invasion. They go. There, they encounter war-time chaos, illness, carpet bombing, bad directions and Northern Alliance troops who arrest them in November during the Taliban’s fall near Konduz, after first having traveled to Kandahar and Kabul – quite a lot of ground. Monir disappears in one evacuation. Zahid winds up in prison in Pakistan. *** So far, the young Brits – one wears a GAP hoodie over his indigenous clothes – have suffered primitive dangerous barbarism. Now they will survive high-tech dangerous barbarism. Shafiq, Asif and Rhuhel eventually wind up at Guantánamo. The film’s remainder depicts their transport, processing and graphically brutal imprisonment in wire cages and solitary, sessions with US and British interrogators, and eventual release back to England in March 2004. None was ever formally charged. *** An epilog follows the three as Asif returns to Pakistan for his long-delayed wedding. This section is unexpectedly satisfying because we see the actual young men in real time, in their own lives. Only then is the stress and confusion of seeing two of each character on-screen apparent. There is such figure-ground vibration in combination with witnessing human extremity that reviewing the film is hard. Some reviewers note in detail how upsetting, even physically grueling, watching it is – then turn around to criticize its cinematic competence. One reports experiencing “helplessness and dread” – the combination producing trauma – then crossly says the movie’s “far from great.” Another dismisses US detention practices as not much different from your standard-issue fraternity hazing, then oddly garbles his basic plot recap as if he wasn’t able to watch the screen. *** One feels unmoored in this film, but I lay that to its power and not to sloppy filmmaking. Adept throughout his career at crossing generic boundaries, Michael Winterbottom has made choices. He is explicit that he wasn’t making a documentary about the Tipton Three, but rather “their version of what happened to them.” Co-director Mat Whitecross spent a month interviewing the three, gathering 650 pages of transcript, and Winterbottom says, “We weren’t trying to independently check or cross-reference what they were saying.” *** So there are unanswered questions and dramatic gaps. Why weren’t at least their parents worried about such a trip on the eve of war? Maybe that Pakistani cousin was trying to recruit them to Al-Qaeda? Where were their families during all this? How come that bride waited for Asif? On the other hand, with one exception, the filmmakers also restrained themselves from easily-made, sarcastic side-swipes at George Bush and company – what might pass for telling the rest of the story in some documentaries. The story holds its own as emotional truth. *** Part of that emotional truth arises from the use of largely non-professional actors and on-location filming in Pakistan, Afghanistan and, because of its own well-developed film industry, Iran. Winterbottom’s long-time casting director, Wendy Brazington, sought students from the English Midlands. Only Rizwan Ahmed, who plays Shafiq, had acted before. They haven’t the dramatic focus or physical economy of trained actors. They supply an ungainliness and lack of pretense that conveys how ordinary late teens might grapple with such circumstances – even as many adults in the audience find composure elusive. So the characters are open. Open to a young soldier’s kindness in not startling a sleeping detainee while killing a poisonous spider in Cuba. Open as well to taking in the full colossal arrogance of an American female interrogator who suggests one of the three “work for us now.” *** Winterbottom doesn’t think films have a huge impact. I think this one might. I’m just probably not going to see it again for a while. *** (1,253) An abridged version of this review was published at www.stylusmagazine.com on 6/26/06.

Film Review #46: Adam and Steve – Broadcast 6/15/2006 on Women's Voices Radio WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM *** Originally the religious right linked the names “Adam and Steve” as part of their campaign against gay marriage. You might have heard them chanting the slogan, “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” In the time-honored tradition of oppressed groups taking back the language, Craig Chester has now made a movie with two gay protagonists named – well, Adam and Steve. Besides writing and directing the film, Craig Chester plays Adam. Malcolm Gets, formerly of TV’s Caroline in the City, plays Steve. Comedienne Parker Posey plays Adam’s ditzy best buddy Rhonda & Saturday Night Live’s Chris Kattan plays Steve’s ditzy straight roommate Michael. *** We should start with Craig Chester himself, a well-respected & hard-working actor on the indie scene since the 80’s. He’s been involved with Sundance projects, he played one of the leads in 1992’s Swoon, about the Loeb-Leopold child murder in the 1920’s – worth catching if you have netflicks, by the way. He’s also appeared in films like Mary Harron’s Who Shot Andy Warhol? You’ll find Chester quoted extensively in the new spring issue of Movie Maker Magazine in film critic David Sterritt's thoughtful article on the influence of Brokeback Mountain and other gay cinema. Craig Chester has now branched out from acting to writing & directing; he’s also got another film called Save Me! in production for 2007 release. *** So Adam and Steve is Craig Chester’s first feature film. It’s slated for DVD release in both the US & England on August 21st, although this week this relatively new film is playing at only three regular movie theaters in the country. I suspect that Adam and Steve will mostly do well on exactly the kind of platform it’s getting here in Syracuse – festivals & fund-raisers. I wish this were a cross-over film but alas, that is not likely. *** Adam and Steve begins in 1987 New York City, 17 years before the main story’s present-day romantic comedy plays out. In their younger incarnations, Adam & Rhonda were black-clad Goths, & Steve was a glitter dancer in a glam chorus line. This establishing pick-up between our two heroes ends disastrously, a point we’ll come back to. Fast forward to the present: Adam, now in recovery from coke, is an ornithologist with a dog named Burt. Steve’s a fastidious psychiatrist. Through a Rube Goldberg contraption of a plot twist, they hook up again & a really rather endearing romance ensues, complete with meeting both sets of quirky parents, struggles over commitment & a marriage proposal, Rhonda’s efforts at stand-up comedy in empty clubs, & AA meetings. *** Always lurking, however, are the neighborhood gay basher & the long-ago encounter, which neither at first recalls. The latter is not an insurmountable crisis: it all does work out & toward the end sort of morphs into a musical too. There’s a nod to Brokeback in a snazzy, impressive Western-themed dance number. There's also a moment when Steve, to prove his love, breaks into a song about how somewhere he must have done something good in his miserable childhood. You know the one – I think it’s from The Sound of Music. Actually a character in one of my favorite TV shows, Boston Legal, burst into this very same song during his wedding this spring, only Shirley Schmidt – that is, Candace Bergen – was on hand to whip her head around & squint in disbelief. *** There is a lot of that sort of thing in Adam and Steve – abrupt, vertigo-inducing swerves of tone, Saturday Night Live-style skits beamed down into the middle of serious scenes as though from the Enterprise itself. I don’t mind the changes in tone all that much, though some are ill-advised & clumsy. Some extremely serious filmmakers are working hard these days to inject a more life-like range of mood & tone in their films. That's legitimate, though Adam and Steve lacks a Candace Bergen to stand in for us all in marking the whiplash at its most extreme moments, a function not really served by Steve's own horror at his past. *** The love story is well-played & affecting, emerging periodically from a careening wackiness. But I wonder about that. How much is uproarious farce on-screen & how much is our own on-going blend of relief & hope that the worst might be over? No, the failure at cross-over appeal, I’m afraid, occurs right at the film’s beginning with its 1987 prologue. Most reviewers have handled this scene with the word “scatological,” making it an inside joke. So if you know anything about doing cocaine & cutting it with baby laxative, you’ll get it. Let’s be honest: this scene is offensive – down to the splash of Steve’s feces on Adam’s already heavily mascara-smudged face. *** A key here is that it’s offensive to Craig Chester too – the excesses, the foolishness & the posturing, the damage that people did themselves. Who among us does not look 17 years back without some mortification? Chester’s sense of camp & his eye for excess are both unerring, & although he says this film is supposed to be “dessert” after the “heavier meal” of Brokeback, I think his aims are more substantial. It’s worth watching to see how his grasp matches his reach in future efforts. But this is probably not the best next film for your brother-in-law who just loved La Cage aux Folies. *** Adam and Steve screens Sat., June 17th at the Eastwood Palace, 2384 James St., at 7:00 p.m. Sponsored by the Stonewall Committee as a fund-raiser for their LGBT booth at the New York State Fair.

Film Review #45: DOWN IN THE VALLEY (2006) *** Writer & director: David Jacobson *** Cast: Edward Norton, Evan Rachel Wood, David Morse, Rory Culkin *** Talking to NPR about his role as out-of-place modern cowboy Harlan Carruthers in Down in the Valley, the actor Edward Norton commented that “modern life entombs us and drives us to seek ways to start over.” *** Starting over is central to the myth of the Western, of course, and never far below the surface of any American story of reinvention – so powerful that it makes films like Malick’s The New World almost pre-quels. Norton, also a producer for this film, reportedly spent many hours with writer-director David Jacobson watching classic Westerns. So his Harlan undergoes a kind of deranged hyper-reinvention that is about taking the Western in the wrong way. *** Claiming he’s just arrived in L.A. from South Dakota, the 30-ish Harlan takes up with 15-year-old Tobe (Evan Rachel Wood). When she invites him to the beach, he quits his job to go. Soon he’ll lose his lodging and the remnants of his shaky, patched-together self over her too. Tobe has Harlan’s pants off as soon as she gets inside his seedy kitchenette. If Harlan is a time-bomb, Tobe is a handful. In one scene she throws a tantrum that requires her sheriff’s officer father, Wade (David Morse), to restrain her, reminiscent of the harrowing climactic scene in Wood’s 2003 breakout film Thirteen. But Harlan’s stories crumble, as Wade is sure they will, and Tobe pulls back from him on her own. Not soon enough: Harlan shoots her in an impulse terrifying for its very brevity and takes off with her little brother Lonnie into the hills. Wade pursues them on horseback to a bloody showdown. *** Well, unsurprisingly Harlan isn’t from South Dakota. He’s from just down the coast – Dan something, an identity so insubstantial that we barely catch his name or the town he’s really from. In this light, that he’s never been to the beach until Tobe takes him suggests the dreary confines of a life he’s tried to leave. *** Despite the easy reference to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver (1976) – both Harlan and Travis Bickle practice their fast-draw with Colt .45’s in front of a mirror – the setting here is distinctly West coast, and the tone cinematically older that 1970’s disaffection. Harlan reminds me more of Lee Marvin’s portrayals of young punks in Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Budd Boetticher’s recently resurrected Seven Men From Now (1956). Despite his capacity for belligerence, Harlan’s painstaking practice is about finding someplace to fit in. Harlan would like to be part of Tobe’s family, with a father who plays guitar and a little brother he could teach stuff to. When Tobe refuses to run off with him, Harlan quickly takes Lonnie instead, and it’s almost a more fitting match. *** Down in the Valley also presents another version of modern life’s “entombment” than the closed walls, dark hallways and dead-end alleys of New York City – a softer, deceptively open version. The first sound we hear is the whiz of traffic on the San Fernando Valley freeways. Jacobson puts Harlan, Tobe and Lonnie near these freeways right away, where they can see those round, brown California hills and that large California sky through the mesh fences and the netting of overhead wires. This is urban sprawl so rapid and haphazard that it’s left scraps of land like the ridges above the freeway and the tiny pocket beyond where old Charley (Bruce Dern) keeps a few horses. The freeways provide the illusion that you’re going somewhere, that you could get away – a constant provocation to the restless. Of course our cowpoke’s job is pumping gas, and of course Harlan and Tobe first glimpse one another through a car window – which for many Americans doubles as a sort of portable, street-level movie screen. *** Down in the Valley boasts always competent, sometimes excellent acting. As Tobe (“short for October”), Evan Rachel Wood is convincing both losing her head and coming back to her senses. She has three films opening in the next year, including the screen version of Augustin Burrough’s Running With Scissors, and this movie is reason to anticipate any future work she does. After years mired in TV type-casting and mostly forgettable films, David Morse deserves good character roles like this more often. Rory Culkin gives a finely directed, restrained performance as the watchful, susceptible little brother, Lonnie. Jacobson has fashioned particularly queasy possibilities for this youngest character. After target practice with Harlan, Lonnie could shoot somebody now. And in Harlan’s coaching in overcoming fear of the dark, we glimpse how the bond between John Muhammad and a younger John Lee Malvo might produce the DC snipers. *** Edward Norton’s Harlan is remarkable. He’s famously made his bread and butter since Primal Fear out of playing roles as much about performance itself as other aspects of character motivation. From their collaboration Jacobson has tailored his plot so that the film’s action follows and enlarges this by-now resonant side to Norton’s own work and so makes it the film’s heart. Just as Harlan is not what he claims, Down in the Valley’s plot works as a series of junctures at which we don’t know if what we see is what we get. We often share this uncertainty with those on-screen. When old Charley accuses Harlan of stealing the white horse, we wonder along with Tobe whether Charley’s playing a joke or off his medication. When Harlan shoots Tobe and later himself, the camera abruptly cuts away each time. When Harlan and Lonnie stumble onto a Western film set at dawn, Harlan’s eyes wide with wonder – for a disorienting moment, maybe this is, who knows, a dream sequence? *** Mostly Jacobson succeeds with – and survives, perhaps – these swerves into uncertainty; this film is far more engaging emotionally than its obvious recent mate, Wim Wenders’ disappointing Don’t Come Knocking. There is a trace of unwieldiness here, as when a singer’s voice isn’t quite under control. And Down in the Valley presents conventions from the Western movie in pretty distilled form. Both Harlan and Wade resort to guns. Harlan’s a man on a white horse. When he hides it in the garage of a tract house, the horse tries to kick its way out, and so on. Yes, clunky. But part of what I like about that hokey movie set that the characters pass through is the dimension it adds to the housing tract construction site – Americans are still building sets upon which to enact modern life, still practicing so we look right. *** [1,078] June 11, 2006: Written for www.stylusmagazine.com