Film Review #66: Copying Beethoven
2006
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Cast: Ed Harris, Diane Kruger, Matthew Goode

For many years, I thought that director Martin Scorcese, whom I admire greatly, might have an evil twin. This was how I formulated for myself the seemingly inevitable presence of wildly fluctuating scenes within a single film – always at least one clunker in amongst the gems. With The Departed, Scorcese has laid that to rest, killing his darlings along with most of his characters. Though I would not normally pair these two directors, I bring up Scorcese’s split because Polish director Agnieszka Holland’s Copying Beethoven is a film that also seems at odds with itself.

I went to Copying Beethoven expecting, even wanting to like it. Some of it I did like. Immediately, Holland’s usually sure hand is evident in the magnificent opening scene. A closed carriage careens along a muddy road in the 19th century Austrian countryside, past poor trudging women who peer after it as they get out of the way, past fields and woods – past daily life – and beneath wheeling birds whose startled flight matches the passenger’s own urgency. It’s 1827 and young Anna Holtz (Diane Kruger), musical copyist and aspiring composer, is rushing to the death-bed of her “Maestro,” the renowned Beethoven (Ed Harris). But more than anything this carriage scene is about the vivid, almost overwhelming awakening of her senses. It’s chilly, and we are roughly thrown about in Anna’s careening coach along with her, catching flashes of sky and branch, nearly smelling the steaming horses, and above all, hearing everything. Every hoof beat, every crow’s call, every squeak of the carriage, every sudden brief lull, pant and rustle – all of it picked out clearly and then mingled with soaring music. Anna Holtz apprehends the world fully just as the man who’s shown it to her lies on the razor’s edge of death. You see, she has just grasped what he has to offer, barely in time to repay his gift by telling him she got it.

“I heard it like you hear it, Maestro,” she tells him, once she arrives in his cramped upper room, with the little window just over his shoulder past the bed. She is sure of it. At the film’s end – after the movie’s story, when Anna Holtz recalls the intervening three years – she’ll see her own reflection in that window and go out walking in a sunny meadow, rejoining the world. Meanwhile, somewhat miraculously, before the movie even really starts, Holland has made us hear it too, as if for the first time. Holland says this was her goal – a tall order when you consider that in our jaded age there are more than 100 recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to choose from (the one we hear in this film is the 1996 Decca recording with Bernard Haitink conducting). But this first dazzling scene of Anna in the carriage by herself is far more successful than most of what follows – even the centerpiece scene of Beethoven conducting the Ninth premiere that’s gotten the most attention – and it compactly mirrors how Beethoven’s own innovations disrupted the way people heard music.

Most of the action occurs in flashback to 1824, when the composer debuts his Ninth Symphony and then goes on to write his later string quartets. The Ninth turned out to be both a comeback for Beethoven and a hinge moment in music itself, audaciously adding chorus to symphony, extending symphonic length, rearranging its forms and more. The film places us in the frantic days before that debut, with sections of Budapest dating from the 12th century and other Hungarian locations standing in for Beethoven’s Vienna. Long made solitary by his hearing loss, ill-tempered and difficult in the extreme, disorganized, demanding, obsessed, Beethoven needs help to get his score copied out for the orchestra.

The film posits that a young woman has persuaded her respectable family to let her study musical composition. She is able to lodge at a Vienna convent because her aunt seems to be the Mother Superior there. Then Beethoven’s publisher recommends her as his new copyist. At first, and for quite a long time too, Beethoven is irascible, dismissive and living in the midst of trash and rats. (As an aside, while Ed Harris is convincingly boorish, I would not say he is convincingly Beethoven. Recently a local paper wrote that Scarlett Johansson was “too modern” for The Prestige, and after Copying Beethoven I know what they meant.) Anyway, Anna Holtz gets her chance, saves the day by secretly conducting the Ninth from the orchestra pit, and becomes his student and assistant in the writing of the later string quartets. Along the way, Beethoven demonstrates to Anna Holtz that her fiancé, Martin (Match Point’s Matthew Goode) is an untalented architect as well as a possessive boyfriend, and is himself fleeced by his cynical nephew Karl. Perhaps most creepy is the scene in which Beethoven, reclining Pieta-like, asks Anna Holtz to bathe him.

Some of this is historically true and some, not. As anyone knows who’s heard of this film, “Anna Holtz” is a composite figure, based on two male students who assisted Beethoven from time to time, and also inspired by the story of Karoline Unger, a singer at the debut of the Ninth who gently turned Beethoven to face the audience so that he could see the applause he could not hear.

It’s a subtle touch, but Beethoven calls Anna Holtz by both her names throughout the film. This suggests that he has trouble knowing quite where to place her. Anna Holtz is a problem, but I’ve decided this is not Diane Kruger’s fault. For US audiences who don’t know her work abroad, Kruger may still be living down Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy, but she quietly holds her own in this part and we’ll see more of her. As Anna, Kruger also plays a figure whom Holland holds with some congenial intimacy. Holland told GreenCine’s Steven Jenkins, when the film opened several weeks ago, that she had a maestro in film school herself. “I feel myself in Anna’s boots when she challenges Beethoven.”

The problem with Anna Holtz is larger and more amorphous than her character. She’s supposed to be a device that allows us to enter Beethoven’s solitary world, to personify a young audience’s encounter with his music. Instead, this film’s approach largely recasts the composer into the same marketing terms that many shrinking, cash-strapped US symphony orchestras are busy employing to attract a younger “demo.” In place of parties, dinners and prizes to draw subscribers to live performances, this film invents Anna Holtz. I’d like to know whether the investors or the character came first. At least her carriage ride crossed the screen first.

This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared on 12/6/06.

Film Review #65: Iraq in Fragments *** 2006 *** Director: James Longley *** The afternoon two weeks ago that I spoke with James Longley by phone, he was feeling pretty good. The Seattle-based Longley was in New York City, bunking in with his fellow filmmaker Andrew Berends for the theatrical premiere that night of his new documentary, Iraq in Fragments. It’s a film I hope will come to Central New York. Longley was going to do a Q & A after the 8 o’clock screening at Film Forum and so far opening reviews were sweet. The Village Voice’s Nathan Lee said this film would still be there when the war itself was long gone. Lee offered his own lyrical riff on Longley’s “rhyming” circle images – a boy’s eye echoed in the rotary blades of ubiquitous hovering choppers, a ceiling fan, sewing machine wheel, bullet holes and the burning auto tire of the film’s final moments. *** Longley filmed Iraq in Fragments between February 2003 and April 2005, first in Baghdad among the Sunnis, then in Naseriyah and Najaf among the Shiites during the uprising that coincided with the US siege of Falluja and the Abu Ghraib torture revelations, finally in the northern Kurdish settlement of Koretan near the city of Erbil, an area of farmers and brick-makers. *** Longley had been in Iraq earlier but unable to get permits to film in the last days of Saddam’s regime. So he left, paced out the US invasion from across the border, returning when it was possible to work unfettered. During this period Andrew Berends also shot a documentary set among the Shiites called The Blood of My Brother. Longley handed his cell phone to his old friend and Berends told me that they go way back; in college together, Longley was the cinematographer on Berends’ first student film. In Iraq each crossed paths and hung out with four still photographers who approached their work in the same guerilla fashion. Later, the Unembedded Project emerged – first a website and joint gallery exhibit among the six, then a book by the four photographers. *** Although Longley’s adult work has been about the moving image, he says his aesthetic is grounded in the photography and painting of his student days, so he is at home with the stillness of composed images and it shows. Time after time as I watched Iraq in Fragments I wanted to reach up and take some frame out of the film’s flow and hold it still. I think Nathan Lee was surrendering to the same sheer power of Longley’s arresting, lovely images too – like the little girl in the pink dress and the Kurdish boys throwing snowballs in the last third of the film that appear like sudden oases after a long desert march. *** Iraq in Fragments is made of three parts, each a resonant story of sons in a society both used to and suddenly free of a dictator who for decades cast himself as a fatherly disciplinarian. You see how confusing that might be on an intimate scale immediately. Like his 2001 film, Gaza Strip, this one begins with a boy named Mohammad. Eleven-year-old Mohammed Haithem of Baghdad has lost his policeman father, who spoke against Saddam and disappeared. He lives with his grandmother and works in a sweltering, grimy mechanic’s shop for a man whom he swears loves him like a father. Soon Mohammed is insisting on this through his own tears, repeatedly slapped and berated by the boss who growls that Saddam would never have allowed the chaos that surrounds them. Mohammed’s boss does not mind that Longley films him behaving this way. Just as you’re thinking this little boy should be in school, that fantasy is slapped away with unnerving, brutal swiftness by a trip to the regimented classroom that Mohammed sometimes attends at his boss’ behest – where he feels only stupid among the younger boys. Mohammed’s great revolt and liberation consists of leaving both the garage and the school behind by escaping to a distant uncle’s sweatshop. *** Moving south to the Shiite stronghold of Moqtada al-Sadr, himself a fortunate son with inherited power, Longley switches to a whip-lash cinematic style that manages to re-create the fresh sense of assault and visual overdrive first felt years ago with Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers. This matches the frenzy of the religious self-flagellation with whips and chains that Saddam forbade, in which masses of young Shiite men now freely indulge, the clamoring rallies, and a zealous arrest and beating of a suspected alcohol seller at a local market. For this section Longley followed Sheik Aws al Kafaji, a cooperative and thoughtful young cleric in charge of Sadr’s office in Naseriyah, Iraq’s fourth largest city. This section also features repeated, haunting glimpses of a sort of ghost boy, unidentified and peeking out from the chaos – as if there were no time or space for his story. *** This middle part of the film is strenuous and frightening, raising the obvious question of how one gets access. Longley says the months he spent establishing relationships is key; Andrew Berends elaborated, “Some of these boundaries we just imagine. After a while I realized, why wouldn’t they want us there? It’s easier than filming in New York City, where people are more self-conscious, aware of the camera, more private. People in Iraq are extremely hospitable and open.” *** This is easier to see when Longley goes north for the section he titles Kurdish Spring, to vast plains, skylines and fields. The billowing smoke from the ovens of the region’s brick-makers merges with images of Saddam’s burning of Kurdish villages, even as the sons of neighboring farmers walk hand in hand from school, tend their sheep and try to put into words how hard their fathers have worked. Across Iraq, old men play board games and criticize the politicians, and little boys carefully wash their feet from pumps and spigots, trying to do much with little. Among the Kurds Longley finds the space to contemplate those common national images, despite the commonly voiced belief that Iraq will inevitably pull apart. *** Longley himself says, “The best way to see it is in a theater. None of us wants our films seen on those little screens by people busy doing something else.” Opening at Manhattan’s Film Forum guarantees respect and savvy audiences. Besides that, Iraq in Fragments has opened this month in seven other major US cities after nearly 60 festival screenings. It hit three Best awards right off the bat at Sundance, and has more theaters slated for January. This is a substantial release for a documentary, so Iraq in Fragments will surely get a DVD issue. But you might say that Iraq in Fragments comes most into its essential movie-ness in its final Kurdish section, which is why I hope this film comes to Central New York. ***** This review was written for broadcast on Women's Voices Radio, 88.3 FM WAER Syracuse, on the Thanksgiving show, 11/23/06.

Film Review #64: Daughters of the Dust
1992 *** Director: Julie Dash *** “We all have our Julie Dash moments,” says filmmaker Yvonne Welbon, adding, “I worked mine into a film about living on Taiwan.” *** Welbon was in upstate New York last month for a screening of her own 2003 documentary about African American women filmmakers, Sisters in Cinema, at the Community Folk Art Center’s three-day film festival in Syracuse. It’s impossible, she said, to over-estimate the importance to other black women filmmakers of Dash’s tale of the Gullah, Daughters of the Dust. Its lavish visual feast, its climbing tendrils of narrative, and its attention to place that’s at once swooning and meticulous, marked a paradigm leap. *** Daughters of the Dust opened in January 1992 with no marketing to speak of and only a few mainstream reviews, but word of mouth kept it in theaters for six months. You would think this would lead to more movies, right? Dash herself appears in Sisters in Cinema, at one point describing her quest to get backing for new film projects in the 90’s. Remember this was the era when indie filmmaking opportunities for men – black and white alike – cracked wide open. “They’ll take you to lunch,” Dash says, “but they don’t follow through.” *** “Our Ellis Island” is what Dash has called the Sea Islands off the coast of Georgia and South Carolina. Initial landing points for the slave trade, they were also places of protective isolation for Africans who remained there, called Gullah. Besides working the rice and indigo plantations, the Gullah preserved West African cuisine, their unique Geechee tongue and a blend of Islam alongside African deities. The legend of Ibo Landing, in which one shipment of new slaves sized up the beach, turned around and in their chains walked en masse back into the Atlantic, is central to Daughters in the Dust, where it’s told twice. Dash’s film puts Ibo Landing on St. Helena. Even today, numerous Gullah communities in the islands claim to be the “real” site of Ibo Landing. Its legend resonates in every journey by boat this movie’s characters undertake. *** Daughters of the Dust unwraps the Peazant family history through the eyes, memories and visions of its women over two days in August 1902. The family gathers once more before most will migrate north via the mainland. This is another epochal crossing of the water, so a “modern” photographer, Mr. Sneed from Philadelphia, is there to record their last sea-side feast and matriarch Nana’s blessing. Nana and her unborn great-great-granddaughter recall this final reunion in voice-overs that also fill in past events and future developments in wry asides. Family members squabble over loyalties, secrets, prosperity’s lure in a new century, whether old ways are a “hoodoo mess,” and Yellow Mary, who’s come home with her pretty lover Trula. *** Dash used these squabbles and Mr. Sneed’s group poses in the dunes by the ocean as devices to sum up entire debates and anguished contradictions about what that migrating generation faced. We first see Yellow Mary arriving by water, languidly resting like some Cleopatra on her barge, but her own progress in the wider world has been deeply ambivalent, with a heavy price for her restless freedom. *** “All that yellow wasted,” spits one Baptist cousin, seeing no chances of light-skinned children from wayward Yellow Mary. It is hard to discern whether this contingent of cousins disapproves most of Yellow Mary’s own departure from the island years before, or her career as a high-end prostitute, or her girl friend. Only an outburst from the young pregnant wife Eula, who defends Yellow Mary as “one of us,” forces some reconciliation. And Eula’s Unborn Child, whom Nana calls into being to save the family, materializes as a ten-year-old with an indigo hair ribbon pouring through a fancy mail-order catalog. She observes wryly, “I was on a spiritual mission but I got distracted.” *** More than likely, you’ve seen Dash’s work since – on MTV, Encore and HBO. She works steadily, making about a film a year for hire on the small screen. But she’s never made another full-length feature of her own for theatrical release. Dash, whose father was Gullah, first conceived of Daughters of the Dust about 1975. In 1988 she got enough funding for a 28-day location shoot. Then lack of money delayed post-production another couple years. Daughters of the Dust was the first full-length indie feature by a black woman in wide release in the US. There wasn’t a DVD of Daughters of the Dust until Kino’s 2000 issue, which has excellent extras but disappointing sound quality. And Netflicks has only added this title to their inventory in the past year. *** But Dash’s persistence has continued to feed others. Yvonne Welbon is making a new feature film. Kasie Lemmons – who made Eve’s Bayou and Caveman’s Valentine – is shooting a new film in Toronto. And Nigerian-British filmmaker Ngozi Onwaruh, who gave us her own take on Ibo Landing’s legend in Welcome II The Terrordome, she’s making another movie too. ***** This review was written for broadcast on Women's Voices Radio on Thankgiving, 11/23/06. An abbreviated form appears in Stylusmagazine.com's staff feature, Out of Sight II: Twenty Films You Haven't Seen But Should on 11/20/06.

Film Review #63: The Giant Buddhas *** 2005 *** Director: Christian Frei *** What about Afghanistan? Five years ago this week, the Taliban fell and US troops entered Kabul. Since then, Iraq has gobbled up our money and attention, and engulfed the documentary market. Even doc superstar Errol Morris has just announced he'll start shooting a film about Abu Ghraib prison. *** Two years ago PBS broadcast the remarkable film, Afghanistan Unveiled, made by some young Afghani women – their country's first female journalists – NGO-funded, trained and mentored by Western journalists. Traveling about their own nation for the first time, they visited Bamiyan, home of the ancient cave-dwelling Hazaras, who traditionally guarded the giant Buddha statues carved into Bamiyan's cliffs 1500 years ago. The legacy of their women warriors on horse-back shows up even today. In all Afghanistan, only Bamiyan province has a woman governor. The Taliban were vicious with the Hazaras, whom they slaughtered instead of merely driving out when they took power. *** The omission of the Hazaras’ backstory is nearly the only flaw in Christian Frei's panoramic film The Giant Buddhas, which is about the statues' destruction six months before 9/11. It had its US debut at this year's Sundance but never picked up a theatrical run. I discovered it while trolling netflicks.com. *** Frei is a Swiss filmmaker who's developing a body of work that explores how politics and media intersect, from Cuban radio stations to ancient religious fine art. His 2001 film, War Photographer, profiles photojournalist James Nachtwey. It’s one of my personal top ten. *** Frei does his own sound and travels light with just cinematographer Peter Indergand. They began this film in March 2003, two weeks before the US invasion of Iraq, and also filmed in Europe, Toronto, and China, retracing some steps of a young Chinese Buddhist monk, Xuanzang, who passed through Bamiyan in 632 AD. Xuanzang's diaries are meticulously accurate about other ancient sites, so his reports about the gilt statues with ruby eyes have caught modern attention. UNESCO says the looting of Afghani antiquities is actually more lucrative than poppies. *** Frei constructs his narrative as a series of letters to Afghan-Canadian journalist Nelofer Pazira, herself the subject of the 2001 film, Kandahar. Here she reflects on her father's pilgrimage as a young man to Bamiyan as she pours over his scrapbooks and eventually travels from Toronto herself to gaze at the empty niches. After their globe-spanning correspondance, it is one of the film's most moving moments when she moves within sight of the Bamiyan cliffs and the empty niches within Frei's camera frame.*** At one point, Frei quotes an Iranian filmmaker, who says the Bamiyan Buddhas "crumbled to pieces out of shame for the West's lack of understanding.” And the film's opening is immediately sobering and embarrassing, with 19th century engravings of the statues, and words from the poets Lord Byron and Goethe. How should we take the legacy of these Romantics whose pursuit of foreign exoticism led Goethe to call the giant Buddhas "revolting beasts"? *** Bamiyan has been a crossroads for 2000 years, a convergence of the East’s regard and the West’s underestimation, a gateway of Silk Road trade and a major monastic center. Yet fanaticism wrought the following in the worst winter in 30 years, when the UN increased its sanctions on the isolated Taliban regime. Defiantly, Mullah Omar ordered the destruction of all non-Islamic idols in the country. *** At Bamiyan even local Taliban at first resisted. Then a truck convoy crossed the mountains - many Taliban froze to death on the way - and it took about two weeks to bring the Buddhas down. When grenades, artillery shells and land-mines failed, and they ran out of TNT, Pakistani and Saudi engineers came to finish the job. Local Hazara Sayyed Mirza says contemptuously that the Taliban couldn't blow up anything on their own. *** One of Frei’s coups is an interview with Al Jazeera's star reporter Taysir Alony and he uses some of Alony's footage of the explosions – clearly shot with great secrecy and anxiety – billowing across the valley's floor. Alony ponders on-screen his own quest for the Western-style big scoop and the contradictions which arose within him as he watched this murder unfold. *** We also see Afghanistan’s former chief archeologist, Zémaryalai Tarzi, who wanted to excavate Bamiyan in 1978 before the Soviet invasion. Tarzi believed Xuenzang's accounts of the 300 meters-long reclining Buddha that Hazara farmers still tell their children sleeps beneath their fields. Tarzi has begun now, a little each summer. *** UNESCO, which raised the alarm in the first place, funds the salvage and restoration effort, with the blessings of the country's elderly, respected former king. Frei's film is remarkably current about this elaborate high-tech project and its space-age options - 3-D computer models, night-time holograms bathed with flood-lights, and rock chunks exactly aligned by their mineral deposits. It could flow almost seamlessly into Renee Montagne’s NPR report later this month. *** Yes, what about Afghanistan? NPR has used this 5th anniversary of the Taliban's fall to ask that question. Instead of merely recoiling from Iraq let us re-think that question. This film is one good starting point. *** This review was broadcast on Women's Voices Radio, 88.3 FM WAER Syracuse, on 11/16/2006.

Film Review #62: Volver **** 2006 *** Director: Pedro Almodóvar *** Cast: Pénelope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Lola Dueñas, Yohana Cobo, Blanca Portilla, Chus Lampreave *** If ever a movie were widely heralded from a long way off, that would be Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver. Released last March in Spain, by September this film’s international din began to achieve seismic proportions. At Cannes the inspired festival judges awarded Best Screenplay to Almodóvar and then simply bestowed Best Actress collectively on the film’s ensemble of women’s remarkable performances. Later that month, 350 film critics from 60 countries voted Volver the Fipresci Grand Prix for year’s best film. State-side, September also saw the cinematic version of Paul Revere’s ride in Viva Pedro!, the ambitious theatrical re-launch of eight previous films in brand new prints, amounting to a traveling Almodóvar mini-fest. Viva Pedro! would let us bone up on his body of work and insure the best possible reception – after a final warning flash on the horizon at New York’s Film Festival last month – for Volver’s bi-coastal theatrical opening last week, with full nation-wide roll-out for the winter holidays. *** After all that, how ironic that Volver is Almodóvar’s most immediately accessible, sweetly transparent and beguilingly down to earth film yet – and the one most possible to watch for itself alone. From the opening scene, in which we begin to meet Volver’s women, energetically tending family graves, including their own, to a decidedly cheerful tune, there is a sense of delicious conspiracy. It’s as though Almodóvar has been granted entrance to the world of women’s secrets and in turn somehow stands aside, allowing his women to reveal themselves on-screen and passing those secrets on to us. *** His own notes about Volver confirm that this is true in concrete and metaphoric sense alike. The film’s title is often translated literally as the verb “to return,” but besides having chosen a word that slides easily into an earthy pun for English-speakers, Almodóvar himself uses the slightly more colloquial and evocative phrase “coming back.” He reports his sisters acted as advisers about village life in his family’s home region of La Mancha and regarding details of home hair salons, making meals and house-cleaning. He recalls his own childhood’s “happiest memories” as a toddler with his mother at a river’s edge among women doing laundry – and therefore Pénelope Cruz’s Raimunda magnanimously buries her husband on the riverbank where they met as children. In the character of Agustina (Blanca Portilla), the village’s buzz-cut first hippie who grows her own weed and knows Raimunda’s family like her own, he invokes the “solidarity of neighboring women” who most aided his own mother in her later years. In an over-arching way, he says he’s “come back” to women and to maternity itself as the source of his art. *** “Most importantly,” he says, since this is La Mancha, the dead mother comes back too. That would be Irene (Carmen Maura), mother of the sisters Raimunda and Sole (Lola Dueñas), grandmother of Raimunda’s daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo). Quite practically, Irene has come back to help her own frail elderly sister, Tía Paula (Chus Lampreave), with her cooking, though it turns out she also seeks Raimunda’s forgiveness for significant old hurts and omissions. Because this will be the most difficult and wrenching reunion, as well as that most flooded with relief, Raimunda is the last to know Irene is back. Irene reveals herself to the lonelier and mousier of the sisters first, after both assume their elderly aunt’s matter-of-fact statements about Irene’s cooking are some combination of harmless dementia and provincial superstition. A bit wild-haired at first from her journey back to life, Irene then ensconces herself with home hair-dresser Sole, who gives her a cute cut and a tint and puts her to work with customers. She frets about Raimunda’s discovering her, hides in car trunks and under beds, and is an easy, down to earth confidante to her granddaughter, who accepts her existence without fuss. *** This granddaughter has just been through worse. Volver’s few men are notable for their absences, departures and disappearances. There’s the restaurant owner who’s sweet on Raimunda but conveniently leaves town so that she can take over his café herself in a burst of sunny industry (for those who know the old melodrama Mildred Pierce with Joan Crawford and Ann Blythe as another mother and daughter in the restaurant business, Almodóvar’s own comparison of the two films is both witty on several levels and immensely more optimistic). There’s the young filmmaker for whom she does this so she can feed his crew, a bit of manna from the sky just when she’s really broke. There’s Raimunda’s deceased father, about whom more will be revealed as you watch. And there’s her husband Paco, ill-tempered and ill-fated. *** Early in the story, young Paula dispatches her father with a kitchen knife when his beer-fuelled disgruntlement over losing his job turns to lechery. Arriving home to a bloody kitchen, Raimunda instantly takes Paula’s side. This leads to one of those scenes among many that play havoc with simple, one-track response. Several reviewers have cited the moment when Raimunda, her clean-up operation interrupted by a caller at the door, shrugs off the blood smeared on her throat as “women’s troubles.” I still marvel at Raimunda mopping up the floor on her knees with paper towels – shot from above to take in what Almodóvar calls “one of the most spectacular cleavages in world cinema” – and rolling over the body, giving her head a disgusted little shake, and zipping up his fly. This scene sets the stage for Paco’s body’s progress, stashed in a freezer at the bustling, re-opened café and eventually laid to rest by the river in a hole dug by another stalwart female ally, the whore Regina. *** Volver occurs as wonderfully effective tale. In this the narrative style matches the content. The La Mancha villagers accept the presence of returned dead among them as perfectly natural. And the film’s kind of story-telling is what we recall from childhood in which the next thing simply happens in order to move us along to the next good stuff. So the sisters travel between Madrid and remote La Mancha by simply bustling back and forth across a plain full of modern wind-mills – while this inevitably calls up Quixote’s quests there is little tendentiousness about it all. This matter-of-factness is of course what allows Almodóvar to mix tones and genres so effectively – that and his evident large spirit. Good-night Irene, good-night. ***** This review was written for www.Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared 11/10/06.

Film Review #61: Climates *** Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan *** Cast: Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ebru Ceylan, Nazan Kesal *** This year we may at last pay better attention to Turkey. In the Middle East’s most secular democracy, the harbinger issue of entry into the European Union is irrevocably linked to arts and culture because of what novelist Elif Shafak has called a backlash by right-wing nationalists. They would prefer Turkey forego the EU, but not for reasons of Islamic fundamentalism. Still largely unreported in the West, Turkey’s artistic Renaissance of the past three decades helped produce Shafak herself as well as this year’s Nobel laureate, novelist Orhan Pamuk. Both are among the roughly 70 Turkish artists, intellectuals and journalists charged under the notorious Article 301 with “insulting Turkish identity” by open reference to the 1915 deportation and massacre of Turkish Armenians as “genocide.” Pamuk’s sentence last year was suspended. Although Shafak’s September 21st trial ended in acquittal in less than two hours, she was the first person prosecuted under Turkey’s criminal code for dialogue uttered by fictional characters (in The Bastard of Istanbul, due out in the US in early 2007). *** But these things can go either way. Turkey’s roiling, complicated cultural moment has also produced filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. His body of work, already seen abroad as hefty, is remarkable for what he accomplishes while largely eschewing the spoken word. Only his fourth feature, Climates was released theatrically last Friday, having just screened at the New York Film Festival. Like his previous films, Climates won a host of international festival and critics’ awards before arriving in the US. *** Ceylan was a photographer before he took up cinema in 1995 and it shows in his expansive and elegiac landscape use, constant attention to visual composition and ease with long-held shots. His new 80-print photo exhibit, Turkey Cinemascope, debuts in Greece next week along with a retrospective of all his films at the Thessalonica International Film Festival. Ceylan emerges a minimalist in both method and cinematic style. Climates is the first of his films that he did not both shoot and produce himself – besides writing, directing, financing, and much of the editing. He usually casts family members, shot his last feature in his own home (Distant, 2002), and since the 2003 death of his cousin and usual lead, Mehmet Emin Toprak, Ceylan now also acts. *** Climates is nothing if not distilled, with a straightforward narrative in three acts, only hints of its characters’ histories and scant dialogue. Like his first feature Kasaba (The Small Town, 1997), it’s structured around the four seasons. And like his next two features, Clouds of May (1999) and Distant, Climates’ protagonist makes his way in life with a camera. The damp, chilly, snowy Turkish winter especially evokes uncommon isolation and vulnerability in Ceylan’s films as his characters travel ever deeper into disconnection. *** Climates opens in summer as Isa (Ceylan), a middle-aged art history instructor and doctoral candidate, is photographing ruins outside the tourist resort of Kas on Turkey’s southern coast. He quarrels with his deeply unhappy younger partner Bahar (Ebru Ceylan, the filmmaker’s wife), and breaks up with her at the beach. Riding back to Istanbul together on his scooter, they crash after she impulsively covers his eyes with her hands; he roughly threatens to throw her off the road-side cliff into the sea. She leaves him there and walks back to Istanbul herself. *** In the rainy fall capital, Isa spies on Bahar, who works as a TV art director. He returns to campus and chitchat with his office mate about keeping girlfriends in line. He resumes a flirtation with another friend’s girlfriend, Serap (Nazan Kesal). This leads to a single long breath-stopping take in which it’s never quite clear whether the rough sex between Isa and Serap is welcomed by her or not, and which overlaps – just as one dares take a breath in relief – with the staccato sound of a sewing machine’s needle penetrating fabric. It’s his mother, repairing Isa’s ripped trousers the next day. *** As winter descends, Isa follows Bahar east to Agri, where he has heard from Serap she is working on a TV series shoot. Isa’s plane lands in an overwhelming blizzard. He trails Bahar through a town so small that she strolls through the cattle in a street to a tea shop. Despite her chill and wary reception – Bahar’s name means “spring” in Turkish and surely she represents the promise of a portable “climate” in Isa’s life – he persists in his idea that they reunite. In another of Ceylan’s virtuoso single-take scenes, Isa makes his rehearsed speech about how he has changed in a van where he has cornered her at the TV shoot location, as she weeps, pressed against the window, and the crew interrupts to load equipment. But when Bahar asks “just one thing” – whether he has slept with Serap again – his nerve fails him and he lies. Feeling he has failed, Isa climbs to a chilly precipice and photographs the nearby famed Ishakpasa palace ruins. As he had been with Serap after what was, after all, only the more obvious assault, Isa is not prepared for Behar’s reconsideration when she turns up at his hotel the night before he leaves. *** The most obvious comparison of style here is with Antonioni’s post-war films. Ceylan’s aesthetic has a more varied pedigree and his attitude toward his characters is more compassionate – he says Chekhov guides his scriptwriting. His long takes and the visually accumulating feelings of his characters also recall Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang, especially Vive L’Amour, and the radical disconnection that occurs with rapid movement to cities in times of financial hardship and uncertain regimes. Ceylan has widely discussed these conditions as they apply to contemporary Turkey and it is more challenging to see his films in this light than as safely derivative. *** Ceylan is also a filmmaker who began his career “loving” close-ups and who has subsequently grown away from them. In the interview following Distant on that film’s DVD, he describes the simple discipline he has instead set for himself and by extension for us, “You should have a good reason for a close-up and for a cut. If not, don’t do it.” Looking away out of discomfort is evidently not one of those good reasons – a form of lying similar to cheap talk. You will not hear ordinary film dialogue the same way again. ***** Climates opened at Film Forum in New York City on October 27th. This review was written for www.Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared 11/6/2006.

Film Review #60: Marie Antoinette *** 2006 *** Director: Sofia Coppola *** Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Danny Huston *** Originally slated for theatrical release on October 16th to coincide with the anniversary of its subject’s beheading during the French Revolution, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette ironically had to make do with a regular Friday opening, a market convention aimed at maximizing first weekend box office returns. After all, a largely French audience at Cannes booed this film, and some dismissive stateside reviews seem to confuse the film’s subject with its writer/director. Still, last Friday night I had to pick my way to the geographic center of a multiplex theater to find two seats together. *** We can dispense straightforwardly with what ails this movie-as-just-a-movie. At 123 minutes, it’s a good 20 minutes too long and generally handles the passing of time awkwardly. Some blame here goes to repeating scenes of Marie’s partying and fashion excess. I don’t mind that the seven years during which Marie’s marriage to Louis XVI went unconsummated are compressed on-screen for cinematic effect, but the last third of the film grows confusing. Historically Marie Antoinette covers the period from 14-year-old Austro-Hungarian archduchess’ journey from Vienna to Versailles to marry Louis-Auguste, who becomes Louis XVI, until they flee Versailles twenty-one years later. But there is little explicit anchoring time-frame on-screen and events like their first son’s death go unexplained (we merely glimpse a small blue-and-white draped coffin). What’s more glaring after her every move is watched by throngs of courtiers, midway through the story Marie (Kirsten Dunst) abruptly has enough private time to take a visiting Swedish count as lover. *** But why the resentment of French viewers at Cannes toward this flawed film by a young American woman director? First, there’s the perception that Coppola trivializes their history by softening a notorious, still highly-charged figure into a frivolous but likable Valley Girl. Much baleful irritation has been hurled at elements like the soundtrack’s mingling of today’s pop groups with period music, but frankly I found this inventive, effective and unobtrusive. Really, we’ve have enough Hamlet and Antigone in modern dress to handle this. *** Then, Coppola reduces the French Revolution to one mob scene in Versailles’ courtyard and a sacked royal bedroom before closing credits. On a slightly different tack, US dismissal assumes Coppola herself is – if not outright empty-headed – at best flimsy and unserious (see for example Nathan Lee’s remarks in Film Comment.) No one accused Bergman, just now coming back into fashion, of being apolitical when he made his Vietnam parable, Persona, or more recently, Laurent Cantet of ignoring Haiti’s murderous Duvalier regime in Heading South. *** One of this film’s most fascinating cultural markers is an article in November’s Vanity Fair by British historian Antonia Fraser, whose 2001 biography of Marie Antoinette is the primary source for Coppola’s film. Disguised as a chatty, inside peek at movie adaptation, Fraser’s article is actually the vetting of Sofia Coppola by the intellectual power couple that she and her husband playwright Harold Pinter comprise. The Nobel laureate used his acceptance speech last year to attack US foreign policy, and of his reaction to this film, maligned as light-weight, Fraser confides, “Harold loved it.” Fraser describes a stream of emails between herself and the director once Coppola optioned the book and began the screenplay. As a final stroke, this biographer of historical political figures reveals that Coppola calls her the movie’s “godmother,” a reference to Coppola’s own family legacy that moves Marie Antoinette away from the realm of ephemeral entertainment. This reminds me of Aliens, when Ripley, clad in her giant forklift, defends the orphaned child Newt, uttering to the acid-drooling monster, “Get away from her, you bitch!” *** Whatever film one wishes Coppola had made instead, it seems fair to start with the one she did make, which has politics to spare for those who look. With three features to her credit now, Coppola has built each around some outsider’s point of view and inherent issues of access and power. She has always included some prenaturally lovely creature whom the men surrounding her have, really, no idea what to do with. So the neighborhood boys in The Virgin Suicides (1999) who recollect worshiping Lux Lisbon (Kirsten Dunst) and her sisters from afar twenty-five years ago actually have much in common with the celebrity photographer John of Lost in Translation (2003), who neglects his new wife Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), leaving her adrift inside Tokyo’s giant, disorienting Park Hyatt Hotel – and with the fumbling French dauphin (Jason Schwartzman). Lost in Translation additionally presents its marooned Americans with bizarre popular Japanese interpretations of American culture, as when Bill Murray’s Bob Harris encounters the TV talk show host. *** In Marie Antoinette, Coppola portrays how an outsider enters, is engulfed and transformed by the French court. As in previous Coppola films – I especially love Bob Harris’ barest split-second hesitation before he closes the door to passed-out Charlotte’s hotel room after he gets her safely home – some of Marie Antoinette’s best moments flow from the quietly tuned performances of its principals. Indeed the film opens with Marie being awakened – her sleep intruded upon – a situation repeated throughout the film. Dunst scowls slightly, her eyes narrowed. You can almost hear the adolescent muttering, “Who are these people?” at each successive awakening. She is left to shiver naked while her ladies in waiting wrangle over who has the honor of handing her a chemise, and she sensibly bursts out, “This is ridiculous!” Her minder counters, “This is France!” *** Marie wears that same quizzical little scowl when she first hears the mob clamoring in the courtyard and goes out to meet them. This is arguably Marie’s most overtly political moment in the movie. Answering their pitchforks and howls, she makes a simple gesture. The queen bows from her waist, prostrating herself on her balcony railing and briefly quieting them. Too little, too late – other than a graceful impulse, she has no more idea what to do with her people than her husband had with her. But scarier than the gulf across which Marie Antoinette peered are those heads of state today who still see “the masses” as she saw them from that balcony, and we have some. *** Jason Schwartzman’s Louis retains the still, watchful air of a child oppressively scrutinized from his earliest days. Short enough to pass for a stocky boy, Louis jounces on horseback, represses his glee at a good billiards shot, and hilariously switches his sword like any nervous 12-year-old pretending nonchalance might when Marie’s older brother Joseph (Danny Huston) embarks on a fatherly discussion of sex. When you and your cousins run the continent, such talk is political conversation – just as the court protocols that have witnesses watching royal childbirth simply insure that no last-minute substitutions occur, a form of check and balance. *** For those who know Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution – a source not cited in Fraser’s book – the film’s most tantalizingly suggestive political thread concerns Louis XVI’s considerations about supporting the rebelling American colonists. Although he suspects it unwise to fund the example of overthrowing another sovereign, Louis happily sticks it to England. But in a film that leaves out so much, one has to wonder what this iceberg tip of a scene is doing there. *** Arendt contrasted the two revolutions as fundamentally different, with the American notion of freedom really an expansion of already-existing notions of freedom to participate in public life. And the Americans only wished to leave, not literally separate George III’s head from the body politic. The North American colonies never had the numbers of people starving that France did, nor the murderous potential that rumors about the crown’s spending – and a queen’s comments on cake – might provoke. The French Revolution transformed forever the meaning of political freedom to include freedom from want, an utterly new idea. In this context, excavating the seductive excess of the Bourbon court is anything but frivolous, and no, the French aren’t over it yet. I think Coppola’s Marie Antoinette makes this less distant and inexplicable to us. There is a moment when Coppola has Marie cross a vast vaulted hall whose floor is a grid of black and white parquet tiles. She pauses in the middle – surely a figure as frozen is historical convention as any priceless museum piece surrounded by green sensor beams. Of course there had to be a revolution. *** This review appeared in www.Stylusmagazine.com on 10/24/06.

Film Review #59: Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple *** Director: Stanley Nelson *** For a fleeting moment not too far into Jonestown, the Reverend Jim Jones reminds me of Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad. In scratchy archival footage of Jones preaching theatrically to his heated congregation, he thunders, “Wherever there are people struggling for justice, there I am!” *** It is tempting to wonder whether Jim Jones—at whose behest 909 followers downed cyanide-laced Kool-Aid in the jungles of Guyana in November 1978—might have seen The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and that scene where Tom Joad assures his mother that he’s not really leaving, that even dead he’d somehow be present, dissolved into the ferment of the masses. It is one of Fonda’s most often-cited speeches: “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there.” *** Departing from conventional views of the Peoples Temple as simply “foreign” and “crazy,” this film makes excruciatingly clear that, besides echoing Tom Joad’s words, Jones and his followers came right out of America’s heartland—down to their Okie-like cross-country caravan to the promised land of California when, in 1965, the deep Midwest of his native Indiana became too inhospitable for Jones’ racially integrated church. *** Stanley Nelson has had his own journey. This new documentary opens October 20 at Quad Cinema in New York City, followed by week-long runs in—so far—eleven other cities nationwide before its April 2007 television broadcast on PBS’ American Experience. Whether the film’s tell-tale earmarks of a larger turning point for Nelson prove out, it marks at least some clear departures. In contrast to longer-simmering films, this one came together quickly after Nelson heard some Peoples Temples members on the radio three years ago talking about the event’s 25th anniversary. And besides the leap to theatrical release, the project required adjusting his working habits. *** Speaking recently by phone from Berkeley, where his and partner Marcia Smith’s production company, Firelight Media, maintains its west coast office, Nelson said that, for the first time ever, he had turned down other film projects while making Jonestown. Nelson’s work ethic is legendary. He’s been reliably churning out highly respected, award-winning PBS docs at the rate of about one each year for some time now, an output he maintains by always having at least three projects—in pre-production, production, and post-production—in the air simultaneously, “and probably, if you can, one film you’re going to festivals with.” But with Jonestown, he says, “I don’t know how I could possibly have made this film while I was doing something else.” Fortunately, receiving a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award just before embarking on this project made that choice possible. Finally, Nelson has been steadily and systematically amassing an encyclopedic body of work that focuses on African American experience. He has said simply that he makes films about what he knows that have universal themes, but in this case, tackled the project before he recalled that the Peoples Temple membership was some 80% black. Now Nelson has begun work on one segment of a massive, five-part PBS project covering Natives Americans. *** Jonestown works as a documentary by Nelson’s signature techniques. Although he structures his narrative by chronological segments—the early years of 1931-65 in Jones’ native Indiana, the northern California farm years in Ukiah from 1965-74, the 1974-77 period of heady public influence and increasing controversy in San Francisco, and then the final mass flight to South America—he intersperses archival stills, video footage, and audio recordings with current interviews. Nelson doesn’t use actors for dramatic re-enactment; his interview clips are lively, telling, succinct, and placed with unerring aim in the story’s precisely edited flow. He is a master at achieving movement by panning across the frame and zeroing in to pick out details in stills and highlight chunks of text. *** Nelson also had access to a stash of videos with soundtracks that surviving Peoples Temple members themselves saved—besides the five who escaped into the forest, another 80 or so were elsewhere that November 1978 day—or which have been recently declassified by government investigators, such as film shot by journalists accompanying Congressman Leo Ryan on the visit to Jonestown that disintegrated so horrifically. Besides providing the film’s tense last half-hour, devoted to the events of those final two November days, this trove of footage provides frequent juxtapositions of interview subjects—over 20 church members with friends and relations—alongside younger versions of themselves speaking from the past. In one riveting scene, a woman describes how Jones had one of his secretaries masquerade as a cripple whom he heals during a service while the church-made video documenting this runs on-screen. Other older, wiser members recount their growing dismay at Jones’ sexual behavior and increasingly paranoid controls. With enormously wise restraint, Nelson allows the emotional resonance created by these pairs of younger and older selves to accumulate throughout the film before his stark revelations of exactly who they lost, which roll in installments between the final credits. *** Nelson told me that his striking first impression of the Peoples Temple survivors on that radio show three years ago was their rationality. On screen now, that holds up. One after another, these bright, decent, candid people who have aged with a measure of earned grace, look you in the eye as they recount what happened, where they lost themselves, what getting themselves back cost them. Some went to Peoples Temple accomplished already; some have become so since. Deborah Layton, whose 1999 memoir Seductive Poison details her seven years with Jones and her subsequent escape, provides incisive commentary, as does Jim Jones, Jr., the preacher’s adopted black son. Nelson also secured invaluable interviews with figures such as Marshal Kilduff, whose New West Magazine exposé literally drove Jones to leave San Francisco in the middle of the night; Congressional aide Jackie Spiers, who survived being shot at point blank range on Jonestown’s landing strip (Ryan himself was killed); and journalist Tim Reiterman, who accompanied the Ryan group, too. *** As for the Tom Joad factor in this, there’s no doubt that Nelson won both the access and the material by deeply grasping the desire among Peoples Temple members for community, social justice, and something larger than themselves. Far from aberrant, these things comprise a broad streak in American character that surfaces from time to time, startling us much as those younger selves that arise on-screen, via cinematic editing, beside the now graying Peoples Temple members. Jonestown invites us to see that same streak, with its wildly swinging potential, in ourselves and others. Near the end of our conversation, I asked Nelson if he thought people might draw parallels between Jonestown and our post-9/11 world. With a little half laugh, he said at once, “I hope so!” ***** Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple opens October 20 at Quad Cinema in New York City for one week, with other engagements in Los Angeles and nationwide through early next year. It airs on PBS on April 9, 2007. This review, with an accompanying interview with the filmmaker, appeared on 10/19/2006 in Stylusmagazine.com.

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.