Film Review #87: The Wind That Shakes the Barley
2006
Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Pádraic Delaney, Orla Fitzgerald
Director Ken Loach’s film about Ireland’s convulsions in the early 1920s arrives on US shores nearly a year after winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The Wind That Shakes the Barley depicts one stage in the birth of the modern Irish state, including the island’s partition by the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, through the lives of fictional brothers Damien and Teddy O’Donovan (Cillian Murphy and Pádraic Delaney). Two criticisms leveled at the film plus some unfamiliarity with the history might put a dent in American audiences who would otherwise head for this masterfully acted and affecting film.
Immediate, furious accusations that the film portrays British behavior in an excessively brutal light took center stage at Cannes. Making no bones about his intent to draw parallels with the current war in Iraq, Loach focuses on the several groups of British military forces at work in Ireland: the Black and Tans (so nick-named for their uniform colors and comprised mainly of demobilized World War I British troops) who terrorized the countryside, the Royal Irish Constabulary who interrogated suspected rebels, and the Auxiliary troops. None come off as gallant, but then neither does the Irish Free State army.
A more muted complaint – perhaps disappointment is more accurate – concerned expectations about cinema’s approach to history. For example, writing last May from Cannes for Variety, Derek Elley called The Wind That Shakes the Barley an “essentially small-scale pic [that] lacks the involving sweep of Loach’s earlier historical-political yarn, Land and Freedom, and looks likely to reap only modest returns in general arenas.”
One could argue that there are some fairly sweeping landscape shots and one thrilling scene in which the sound of marching Irish rebels precedes them emerging from the fog. Yet it’s true that Loach sets this film in the deceptively quiet county-side with a relatively small cast. Instead of scanning a vast historical horizon, Loach instead plunges deep into memory’s vertical shaft. Irish efforts at independence span more than eight centuries, so Loach’s fitting approach refreshes our understanding of why the image of the well so often stands for a nourishing, sustaining collective memory.
One scene illustrates this particularly. It’s evening at a tiny, poor mountain farm in County Cork – actually a center of resistance to British rule. Damien has abandoned his plan to study medicine in London to join the Irish rebels in which his older, ever critical brother Teddy is already a leader. Damien has walked all day into these remote hills to this safe house, entrusted with two hostages. Chris is a young farm hand who informed on the rebels when police threatened his family with arrest and eviction. Chris and Damien grew up together. The other hostage is the wealthy landowner Hamilton, who helped police locate and pressure Chris. The old couple has a few goats, a crippled dog and three pictures on their wall. The old farmer asks Hamilton about what Hamilton’s land produces – as portraits of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet and the Scared Heart of Jesus look on. Hamilton – the old farmer calls him “a fat one – looks like Henry VIII” – insists the land was handed down in his family. Finally the old farmer remarks, “My people once had land down there too. Sure it’s very good of you to come up the mountain for a little visit to the original owners.”
An Irish audience would recognize those three portraits and the depth they provide to the old farmer’s exchange with Hamilton well before the old man’s tone turns sarcastic. The Sacred Heart of Jesus is defiantly Roman Catholic in the context of occupation by Protestant England. As head of the United Irishmen, Wolfe Tone, a Protestant from the loyalist north, supported the revolt of 1798 – a moral stand in clear contrast to the Protestant landowner Hamilton’s collusion with the English. Robert Emmet, who escaped to France after the 1798 revolt, returned in 1803 only to face torture, and execution. Unlike young Chris, who caves in quickly to police demands, Emmet’s housekeeper Anne Devlin endured torture and her entire family’s jailing – a nine-year-old brother died in the harsh conditions – rather than inform on Emmet. Those portraits on the isolated hovel’s wall are like the trio of “Abraham, Martin and John” gracing many African American parlors dating from the US Civil Rights era – an era that also gave us the observation, “When you are fighting for justice, it helps to know your grandmother would approve.”
Despite what it costs him, Damien executes Chris and Hamilton and then walks all day back into these hills again to bring Chris’ mother to her son’s grave. The Wind That Shakes the Barley may be framed on its surface as a brothers-in-arms story. Damien joins Teddy’s cause, then refuses the compromise Anglo-Irish Treaty, setting him at odds with Teddy and the Irish Free State army during the short, bloody civil war. But the film’s real pitch is intergenerational.
Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty accomplish this greater depth by using women characters much as they used those portraits on the farmhouse wall. Damien’s life-long friendship with Sinéad (Orla Fitzgerald) evolves to intimacy as he takes increasingly clearer stands, but after all he has grown up nearly adopted by this household of women. Sinéad’s elderly grandmother Peggy (Mary O’Riordan) is counterpart to the old farmer on the mountain. Both literally feed the young rebels, but their keen memory and their example are equally sustaining. Loach and Laverty provide women characters whose activities personify the support for independence deeply embedded in the community. As part of the organized women’s group Cumman na mBann, Sinéad hides and transports rifles, delivers messages on her bicycle after flirting with British guards, and acts as a magistrate in a village-level court set up in opposition to the British system officially in place. Working out justice on that so-called small scale – Sinéad and Teddy disagree on how to handle a shopkeeper who charges excessive interest to customers but buy rifles for the IRA – may tell us more about which side is really winning a war than large-scale battles.
Turkey’s government still officially denies the 1915 Armenian genocide while many Turkish artists, journalists and intellectuals move toward more open discussion of those years. Similarly, there remains extreme resistance in England to acknowledging the reign of terror by the Black and Tans during Ireland’s transitional period – and some films like this one explore this knot. Loach has approached the Irish question before, in his gripping 1990 film Hidden Agenda about political intrigue in Belfast (a wonderful role for Brian Cox, lately of HBO's Deadwood), and he has a long trail of films that address social and political issues at a micro level. So because this is what Orla Fitzgerald calls “a Ken film,” Damien meets the train engineer Dan (Liam Cunningham) during the railroad union’s refusal to transport British troops and it’s then Dan, whose own past as a poor man, labor organizer and socialist unfolds, who most often accompanies – and interprets events to – this young doctor already prone to see war through the lens of individual suffering.
The National Photo Archives in Dublin had an exhibit last spring of photos from the Irish towns and countryside during the period this film covers. There’s no denying Loach has captured the look of that time and place and its people. He has also captured what animates us still about those days.
*******
This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 3/2/07, the date of the US limited release of The Wind That Shakes the Barley.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
Film Review #86: Machuca
2004
Director: Andrés Woods
Cast: Ariel Mateluna, Matias Quer, Manuela Martelli
It should come as no surprise that other nations have their own 9/11’s. On that date in 1973, Chile’s fighter planes strafed the presidential palace in Santiago. Thus began General Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the popularly elected president of three years, Salvador Allende. Under Pinochet’s regime, an estimated 3,000 died and another 30,000 were kidnapped, tortured and disappeared. Pinochet left power in 1990, but the first of several hundred charges for human rights abuses and corruption were not brought against him in Chile’s own courts until December 2004.
With perfect timing, Chilean director Andrés Woods’ feature film about the unlikely collision of three children’s lives during the run-up to Pinochet’s coup opened in New York less than a month after those 2004 charges were filed. The second biggest box-office draw ever in Chile, popular here and in twenty other countries, Machuca was Chile’s official 2005 Oscar entry. What is surprising is that this memorable, important film hasn’t made the stateside leap to DVD until now. Pinochet’s death two and a half months ago may have spurred Passion River Films, a relatively young distributor of independent and foreign films, to make that welcome move.
Machuca recounts the days leading up to Pinochet’s coup through the eyes of 11-year-old Gonzalo Infante (Matías Quer), a watchful, chubby, red-haired student at an expensive private school. The sole reason Gonzalo ever meets the poor Indian boy Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) is that Father McEnroe, in sympathy with Allende’s social reforms, takes it in his head to invite five boys “from the neighborhood” to attend St. Patrick’s on scholarship. A core of students immediately and vehemently resist this scheme, turning recess period and the athletic fields into gauntlets and prompting several baffled, saddened and insistent lectures from Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran). As Chile becomes ever more polarized, crowds of angry parents, including Gonzalo’s mother, protest the priest’s innovations too.
A sharp, tough kid without an ounce of apology anywhere on him, Machuca knows the deal and holds his own. Gradually he and Gonzalo become friends, relaxing, laughing, each crossing a threshold of risk and trust when he takes the other home. Fresh from nearly gagging in Machuca’s pungent outdoor latrine, Gonzalo meets Silvana (Manuela Martelli), who’s just enough older than both boys to get them going. Thus begins the more worldly education of Gonzalo. He learns kissing from Silvana on the riverbank and from Machuca, the varieties of standing up. The latter lessons include facing down bullies, joining in the entrepreneurial projects of Silvana’s father – the kids sell flags at all the political marches – and absorbing instant rebukes for thoughtless insults. When the military takes over St. Patrick’s and roughly throw Father McEnroe out, it’s Machuca whose simple word of farewell galvanizes the assembled boys. When that same military invades the shantytown, burning, arresting, viciously beating her father, Silvana is a lioness.
As a sleeper image that finally detonates during this climactic shantytown rampage, “clothes makes the man” occurs early. We first meet Gonzalo dressing himself carefully in his school uniform. At first we don’t see his face and then just his reflection in the mirror. Later during the raid, one soldier starts to arrest him too, until Gonzalo insists on the self-evident, shouting simply, “Look at me!” Woods’ pitiless camera fills the screen with Machuca’s long stare.
Woods attended such a school himself – he was eight when Pinochet came to power – and he dedicates Machuca to Father Gerardo Whelan, presumably McEnroe’s model, whose date of death is noted without further comment as 1973. Therefore his film is a kind of emotional memoir. But telling this story through these characters allows Woods to focus on the human cost of Chile’s upheaval. There are just enough snatches of overheard newscasts, political banners, a wall along the highway with graffiti – and those two fighter planes streaking over Gonzalo’s head on their way to the presidential palace – to frame this politically saturated moment. For kids, it really was scary, and the adults really were out of control. There are other films you could watch – Patricio Guzman’s documentaries (though they are hard to find) and Costa Gavras’ Missing (1982), based on a real American journalist’s disappearance during the coup. But Machuca will fly under all your radar about political labels and reach something more elemental.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/22/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing films that never opened locally & older films of enduring worth. Machuca releases on DVD on March 6.
2004
Director: Andrés Woods
Cast: Ariel Mateluna, Matias Quer, Manuela Martelli
It should come as no surprise that other nations have their own 9/11’s. On that date in 1973, Chile’s fighter planes strafed the presidential palace in Santiago. Thus began General Augusto Pinochet’s coup against the popularly elected president of three years, Salvador Allende. Under Pinochet’s regime, an estimated 3,000 died and another 30,000 were kidnapped, tortured and disappeared. Pinochet left power in 1990, but the first of several hundred charges for human rights abuses and corruption were not brought against him in Chile’s own courts until December 2004.
With perfect timing, Chilean director Andrés Woods’ feature film about the unlikely collision of three children’s lives during the run-up to Pinochet’s coup opened in New York less than a month after those 2004 charges were filed. The second biggest box-office draw ever in Chile, popular here and in twenty other countries, Machuca was Chile’s official 2005 Oscar entry. What is surprising is that this memorable, important film hasn’t made the stateside leap to DVD until now. Pinochet’s death two and a half months ago may have spurred Passion River Films, a relatively young distributor of independent and foreign films, to make that welcome move.
Machuca recounts the days leading up to Pinochet’s coup through the eyes of 11-year-old Gonzalo Infante (Matías Quer), a watchful, chubby, red-haired student at an expensive private school. The sole reason Gonzalo ever meets the poor Indian boy Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) is that Father McEnroe, in sympathy with Allende’s social reforms, takes it in his head to invite five boys “from the neighborhood” to attend St. Patrick’s on scholarship. A core of students immediately and vehemently resist this scheme, turning recess period and the athletic fields into gauntlets and prompting several baffled, saddened and insistent lectures from Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran). As Chile becomes ever more polarized, crowds of angry parents, including Gonzalo’s mother, protest the priest’s innovations too.
A sharp, tough kid without an ounce of apology anywhere on him, Machuca knows the deal and holds his own. Gradually he and Gonzalo become friends, relaxing, laughing, each crossing a threshold of risk and trust when he takes the other home. Fresh from nearly gagging in Machuca’s pungent outdoor latrine, Gonzalo meets Silvana (Manuela Martelli), who’s just enough older than both boys to get them going. Thus begins the more worldly education of Gonzalo. He learns kissing from Silvana on the riverbank and from Machuca, the varieties of standing up. The latter lessons include facing down bullies, joining in the entrepreneurial projects of Silvana’s father – the kids sell flags at all the political marches – and absorbing instant rebukes for thoughtless insults. When the military takes over St. Patrick’s and roughly throw Father McEnroe out, it’s Machuca whose simple word of farewell galvanizes the assembled boys. When that same military invades the shantytown, burning, arresting, viciously beating her father, Silvana is a lioness.
As a sleeper image that finally detonates during this climactic shantytown rampage, “clothes makes the man” occurs early. We first meet Gonzalo dressing himself carefully in his school uniform. At first we don’t see his face and then just his reflection in the mirror. Later during the raid, one soldier starts to arrest him too, until Gonzalo insists on the self-evident, shouting simply, “Look at me!” Woods’ pitiless camera fills the screen with Machuca’s long stare.
Woods attended such a school himself – he was eight when Pinochet came to power – and he dedicates Machuca to Father Gerardo Whelan, presumably McEnroe’s model, whose date of death is noted without further comment as 1973. Therefore his film is a kind of emotional memoir. But telling this story through these characters allows Woods to focus on the human cost of Chile’s upheaval. There are just enough snatches of overheard newscasts, political banners, a wall along the highway with graffiti – and those two fighter planes streaking over Gonzalo’s head on their way to the presidential palace – to frame this politically saturated moment. For kids, it really was scary, and the adults really were out of control. There are other films you could watch – Patricio Guzman’s documentaries (though they are hard to find) and Costa Gavras’ Missing (1982), based on a real American journalist’s disappearance during the coup. But Machuca will fly under all your radar about political labels and reach something more elemental.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/22/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing films that never opened locally & older films of enduring worth. Machuca releases on DVD on March 6.
Film Review #85: Close to Home
2005
Directors: Dalia Hager & Vidi Bilu
Cast: Smadar Sayar, Naama Schendar, Irit Suki
Vidi Bilu, who is half of this film’s writing-directing team, says that the opening scene in Close to Home is her favorite. Given that she started her career as a still photographer before moving on to film editing and directing docs, one can see why. For that first long moment, the screen is split in two by what is essentially a photographer’s image, nearly without movement and sound. On the right hand side, an attractive, mature Palestinian woman’s face in extreme close-up – resentful, alert, controlled, her jaw set. Occupying the left-hand half of the screen, the curtain behind which she stands and looks out. Pulling back that curtain both sets the story in motion and reveals the other half of the interaction underway.
Arab women and their children entering the gates of Jerusalem must pass through this room, lined with small green-curtained booths like a department store’s fitting room. Inside these booths, young female Israeli soldiers dump their handbags, undo their packages and strip-search them. Here, the Palestinian woman submits stoically to Smadar (Smadar Sayar), an awkward, hesitant soldier who might be a daughter’s age. Her own eyes hooded with resentment, Smadar pays attention as her sergeant, Dubek (Irit Suki), teaches her the ropes. Nearby, another soldier named Dana, faced with stripping an elderly woman, suddenly protests that she cannot do this anymore. Dubek insists, “You have no choice. Now do your job.” Pandemonium: Dana opens the double doors, sweeps a flood of long-robed women through. In the tense restored order – Dana is quickly arrested – Mirit (Naama Schendar) breaks the silence first to assure the pacing commander, “I didn’t participate.”
Despite the scene’s brief eruption, what Bilu likes best here is how much detail and quiet can accomplish toward focusing attention. Close to Home is a well-made, unassuming film, better in retrospect than you first think with its sometimes flat, news-reely look. In their first feature film together, Bilu and Hager quickly establish the sense that we are watching something we haven’t seen on-screen before. This isn’t Private Benjamin. In fact, this study of Israel’s compulsory military service for women – two years starting at age 18 – is the first time Israeli cinema addresses a practice in place for over half a century. Bilu and Hager shot Close to Home in just three weeks in late 2004, after six years of requests for financing to the highly competitive Israel Film Fund. Life-long military bonding may be a norm for men, but Bilu says, “It is very rare in Israel for women to talk about what they did in the army. It’s men’s talk.”
Soon after their orientation in the green-curtained booths, Smadar and Mirit are patrolling a few blocks of Jerusalem near the city’s gates. Their job is to randomly check the papers of Palestinian men on the street and record the details. They must rely on these men to cooperate with their uniform’s power. They must avoid Dubek’s surprise check-ups on how well they too follow an array of stifling rules. Soon the traits each showed early on amplify until they are barely speaking. Mirit asks for a transfer – the officer gives her a long look when the meek girl voices fanciful hopes of commanding tanks – and Smadar’s shoplifting for thrills escalates.
One day Smadar walks angril away when Mirit insists she do her share of the work. She races back when a terrorist bomb explodes that knocks Mirit out. This sets them on a different course that will include a handsome stranger, separation when Mirit serves time for leaving her post to go dancing and a final incident in which the uniform’s authority is pitifully useless.
Except for one visit from a male officer who addresses the assembled all-woman company, Close to Home remains focused on the lives of women soldiers. This allows Hager and Bilu to explore aspects of Israeli women’s military experience with unusual clarity and detail.
Close to Home takes the friendship between Smadar and Mirit seriously as a genuine emotional attachment. They have several reversals as one gets hurt or annoyed and rebuffs the other – sometimes cruelly – before making up. They talk about that attachment, though not easily. Each experiments with what supporting, forgiving and missing the other means. It’s not that Smadar and Mirit have a romance – though American audiences might think that’s what’s coming, because friendship between young women rarely gets this space in our films.
Conventional wisdom that army service makes you a man means films generally frame these stories as coming-of-age tales. But the combined pressure, boredom and strictures that these young women endure instead bring out their immaturity. There are scenes of each young woman riding in the back seat of Mirit’s father’s car with him driving, reminding us they are daughters. In fact, the film's title comes from Israeli military slang for postings that allow troops to live at home with their families while serving. Mirit’s grand romance is a bit of bragging to impress Smadar. One day they round a corner on patrol and almost collide with Dubek torridly kissing a civilian in an alley. Both freeze wide-eyed until Dubek releases them, brazenly tossing her hair – a moment easily plucked from a high school corridor where neither student manages the aplomb of the grown-up teacher.
Finally Close to Home explores the apprenticeship in authority that compulsory military service is for an entire culture at a critical age – both for its young people and its nation. From the first crisis with Dana’s melt-down in the green-curtained search booths to the final scene, women soldiers repeat, “You have no choice.” Even the formerly rebellious Smadar tries mimicking that line late in the story. Part of this film’s punch is depicting how often that assertion is really a bluff – swaggering, tenuous, itself adolescent – while at the same time underlining that neither young woman would have stuck around on her own. This is a filmmaking team worth watching.
*******
This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com. Close to Home opened in limited theatrical release in New York City on February 16th. An IFC First Take Films release, Close to Home is also available via Cablevision video on demand.
2005
Directors: Dalia Hager & Vidi Bilu
Cast: Smadar Sayar, Naama Schendar, Irit Suki
Vidi Bilu, who is half of this film’s writing-directing team, says that the opening scene in Close to Home is her favorite. Given that she started her career as a still photographer before moving on to film editing and directing docs, one can see why. For that first long moment, the screen is split in two by what is essentially a photographer’s image, nearly without movement and sound. On the right hand side, an attractive, mature Palestinian woman’s face in extreme close-up – resentful, alert, controlled, her jaw set. Occupying the left-hand half of the screen, the curtain behind which she stands and looks out. Pulling back that curtain both sets the story in motion and reveals the other half of the interaction underway.
Arab women and their children entering the gates of Jerusalem must pass through this room, lined with small green-curtained booths like a department store’s fitting room. Inside these booths, young female Israeli soldiers dump their handbags, undo their packages and strip-search them. Here, the Palestinian woman submits stoically to Smadar (Smadar Sayar), an awkward, hesitant soldier who might be a daughter’s age. Her own eyes hooded with resentment, Smadar pays attention as her sergeant, Dubek (Irit Suki), teaches her the ropes. Nearby, another soldier named Dana, faced with stripping an elderly woman, suddenly protests that she cannot do this anymore. Dubek insists, “You have no choice. Now do your job.” Pandemonium: Dana opens the double doors, sweeps a flood of long-robed women through. In the tense restored order – Dana is quickly arrested – Mirit (Naama Schendar) breaks the silence first to assure the pacing commander, “I didn’t participate.”
Despite the scene’s brief eruption, what Bilu likes best here is how much detail and quiet can accomplish toward focusing attention. Close to Home is a well-made, unassuming film, better in retrospect than you first think with its sometimes flat, news-reely look. In their first feature film together, Bilu and Hager quickly establish the sense that we are watching something we haven’t seen on-screen before. This isn’t Private Benjamin. In fact, this study of Israel’s compulsory military service for women – two years starting at age 18 – is the first time Israeli cinema addresses a practice in place for over half a century. Bilu and Hager shot Close to Home in just three weeks in late 2004, after six years of requests for financing to the highly competitive Israel Film Fund. Life-long military bonding may be a norm for men, but Bilu says, “It is very rare in Israel for women to talk about what they did in the army. It’s men’s talk.”
Soon after their orientation in the green-curtained booths, Smadar and Mirit are patrolling a few blocks of Jerusalem near the city’s gates. Their job is to randomly check the papers of Palestinian men on the street and record the details. They must rely on these men to cooperate with their uniform’s power. They must avoid Dubek’s surprise check-ups on how well they too follow an array of stifling rules. Soon the traits each showed early on amplify until they are barely speaking. Mirit asks for a transfer – the officer gives her a long look when the meek girl voices fanciful hopes of commanding tanks – and Smadar’s shoplifting for thrills escalates.
One day Smadar walks angril away when Mirit insists she do her share of the work. She races back when a terrorist bomb explodes that knocks Mirit out. This sets them on a different course that will include a handsome stranger, separation when Mirit serves time for leaving her post to go dancing and a final incident in which the uniform’s authority is pitifully useless.
Except for one visit from a male officer who addresses the assembled all-woman company, Close to Home remains focused on the lives of women soldiers. This allows Hager and Bilu to explore aspects of Israeli women’s military experience with unusual clarity and detail.
Close to Home takes the friendship between Smadar and Mirit seriously as a genuine emotional attachment. They have several reversals as one gets hurt or annoyed and rebuffs the other – sometimes cruelly – before making up. They talk about that attachment, though not easily. Each experiments with what supporting, forgiving and missing the other means. It’s not that Smadar and Mirit have a romance – though American audiences might think that’s what’s coming, because friendship between young women rarely gets this space in our films.
Conventional wisdom that army service makes you a man means films generally frame these stories as coming-of-age tales. But the combined pressure, boredom and strictures that these young women endure instead bring out their immaturity. There are scenes of each young woman riding in the back seat of Mirit’s father’s car with him driving, reminding us they are daughters. In fact, the film's title comes from Israeli military slang for postings that allow troops to live at home with their families while serving. Mirit’s grand romance is a bit of bragging to impress Smadar. One day they round a corner on patrol and almost collide with Dubek torridly kissing a civilian in an alley. Both freeze wide-eyed until Dubek releases them, brazenly tossing her hair – a moment easily plucked from a high school corridor where neither student manages the aplomb of the grown-up teacher.
Finally Close to Home explores the apprenticeship in authority that compulsory military service is for an entire culture at a critical age – both for its young people and its nation. From the first crisis with Dana’s melt-down in the green-curtained search booths to the final scene, women soldiers repeat, “You have no choice.” Even the formerly rebellious Smadar tries mimicking that line late in the story. Part of this film’s punch is depicting how often that assertion is really a bluff – swaggering, tenuous, itself adolescent – while at the same time underlining that neither young woman would have stuck around on her own. This is a filmmaking team worth watching.
*******
This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com. Close to Home opened in limited theatrical release in New York City on February 16th. An IFC First Take Films release, Close to Home is also available via Cablevision video on demand.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Film Review #84: The Conversation
1974
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Terri Garr
It may take awhile until it reaches Syracuse, but last week it was hard to miss national print and radio enthusiasm about a young first-time German director’s film called The Lives of Others. Just opened in New York City and Los Angeles, and Oscar-nominated for best foreign picture, The Lives of Others is about the East German state police – the Stasi – and how one of their dedicated, crack agents penetrates the lives of a playwright and his leading lady in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This film has enjoyed unusually large audiences in Germany as public soul-searching about the GDR’s old Communist regime accelerates. The Lives of Others comes here during debate over Bush administration policies like warrantless wire-tapping.
There’s an older, quintessentially American film worth seeing. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation opened in early April 1974 with Gene Hackman as the sax-playing electronic eavesdropping specialist, Harry Caul. Coppola wrote his script in the 60s and largely shot the film in 1972 (the Watergate “plumbers” were arrested in June 1972), but consider national events as The Conversation first played US theaters. In late April, the White House released edited transcripts of secret tapes. In June, Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men was published. In July the House Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment. On August 9th, Richard Nixon quit. Coppola’s film has just split-second mention of Nixon – frenzied Harry turns on TV news in a hotel room to blot out what he thinks he just overheard – but in 1974 no US viewer would miss it.
Cinematically The Conversation anticipates The Lives of Others too. Coppola says he wanted to show both the technology of surveillance and the people involved in such work. Both films depict radically, compulsively solitary men, the best in their business, moved to intervene to rescue their subjects. Both films depict a man who confidently assumes his immunity and later tears his home apart searching for the bug that betrayed him. And each film makes striking use of music in telling its story.
In The Conversation’s long opening, Harry’s team records a young couple we assume are having an affair. Mark and Ann (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) circle San Francisco’s Union Square during a Christmas season lunch-time Dixieland jazz performance. The meaning of their conversation hinges on the intonation in what Mark says about Ann’s tycoon husband (Robert Duvall) – “He’d kill us if he had the chance” – as they apparently plan a romantic meeting that Sunday afternoon in at the Jack Tar Hotel.
Coppola says he owes much to Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), in which a photographer enhances a photo to reveal a murder. The more obvious reference is American jazz. Harry tinkers with the tape’s sound so he can retrieve Ann and Mark’s exchange while visual scraps and audio phrases of that original conversation repeat jazz-like throughout the film. Punctuating David Shire’s meditative piano score, Harry plays along with various tenor sax artists from his record collection in his sunny bay window. This is more than background music. Coppola brilliantly uses jazz to embody how Harry experiences and thinks through the disparate evidence he has and recalls. This illustrates with equal briliance how jazz itself is a process of musically thinking through an idea.
This reaches its most satisfying in the complex, suspenseful scene when Harry hosts an impromptu late-night party in his office, housed on the remote upper floor of an otherwise empty warehouse. There’s a weekend convention of surveillance industry types where Harry meets his greatest rival, the entrepreneurial William P. Moran (Allen Garfield), who’s just tried to hire Harry’s disgruntled assistant Stan (John Cazale). As soon as all arrive, Harry knows this was a bad idea. Amidst the confusion, the alcohol, Moran’s challenges and revelations about Harry’s past and his assistant’s amorous pursuit of Harry, Harry’s attention returns obsessively to the week’s assignment and his fear about the safety of “these two young people.” When the scene comes to rest, you know before Harry stumbles over to the tape deck that those tapes are gone.
I hope The Lives of Others wins that Oscar. Meantime, American cinema has richly addressed similar concerns. The Conversation is one tip of that iceberg. The 2000 DVD has excellent commentaries by both Coppola and supervising editor Walter Murch, whose 1995 book, In the Blink of an Eye, has been a basic primer for many younger filmmakers.
*******
Written for the 2/15/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly for “Make it Snappy,” a weekly column reviewing recent films that never opened locally and older films of enduring worth.
1974
Director: Francis Ford Coppola
Cast: Gene Hackman, John Cazale, Terri Garr
It may take awhile until it reaches Syracuse, but last week it was hard to miss national print and radio enthusiasm about a young first-time German director’s film called The Lives of Others. Just opened in New York City and Los Angeles, and Oscar-nominated for best foreign picture, The Lives of Others is about the East German state police – the Stasi – and how one of their dedicated, crack agents penetrates the lives of a playwright and his leading lady in 1984, five years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This film has enjoyed unusually large audiences in Germany as public soul-searching about the GDR’s old Communist regime accelerates. The Lives of Others comes here during debate over Bush administration policies like warrantless wire-tapping.
There’s an older, quintessentially American film worth seeing. Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation opened in early April 1974 with Gene Hackman as the sax-playing electronic eavesdropping specialist, Harry Caul. Coppola wrote his script in the 60s and largely shot the film in 1972 (the Watergate “plumbers” were arrested in June 1972), but consider national events as The Conversation first played US theaters. In late April, the White House released edited transcripts of secret tapes. In June, Woodward and Bernstein’s All the President’s Men was published. In July the House Judiciary Committee passed articles of impeachment. On August 9th, Richard Nixon quit. Coppola’s film has just split-second mention of Nixon – frenzied Harry turns on TV news in a hotel room to blot out what he thinks he just overheard – but in 1974 no US viewer would miss it.
Cinematically The Conversation anticipates The Lives of Others too. Coppola says he wanted to show both the technology of surveillance and the people involved in such work. Both films depict radically, compulsively solitary men, the best in their business, moved to intervene to rescue their subjects. Both films depict a man who confidently assumes his immunity and later tears his home apart searching for the bug that betrayed him. And each film makes striking use of music in telling its story.
In The Conversation’s long opening, Harry’s team records a young couple we assume are having an affair. Mark and Ann (Frederic Forrest and Cindy Williams) circle San Francisco’s Union Square during a Christmas season lunch-time Dixieland jazz performance. The meaning of their conversation hinges on the intonation in what Mark says about Ann’s tycoon husband (Robert Duvall) – “He’d kill us if he had the chance” – as they apparently plan a romantic meeting that Sunday afternoon in at the Jack Tar Hotel.
Coppola says he owes much to Antonioni’s Blowup (1966), in which a photographer enhances a photo to reveal a murder. The more obvious reference is American jazz. Harry tinkers with the tape’s sound so he can retrieve Ann and Mark’s exchange while visual scraps and audio phrases of that original conversation repeat jazz-like throughout the film. Punctuating David Shire’s meditative piano score, Harry plays along with various tenor sax artists from his record collection in his sunny bay window. This is more than background music. Coppola brilliantly uses jazz to embody how Harry experiences and thinks through the disparate evidence he has and recalls. This illustrates with equal briliance how jazz itself is a process of musically thinking through an idea.
This reaches its most satisfying in the complex, suspenseful scene when Harry hosts an impromptu late-night party in his office, housed on the remote upper floor of an otherwise empty warehouse. There’s a weekend convention of surveillance industry types where Harry meets his greatest rival, the entrepreneurial William P. Moran (Allen Garfield), who’s just tried to hire Harry’s disgruntled assistant Stan (John Cazale). As soon as all arrive, Harry knows this was a bad idea. Amidst the confusion, the alcohol, Moran’s challenges and revelations about Harry’s past and his assistant’s amorous pursuit of Harry, Harry’s attention returns obsessively to the week’s assignment and his fear about the safety of “these two young people.” When the scene comes to rest, you know before Harry stumbles over to the tape deck that those tapes are gone.
I hope The Lives of Others wins that Oscar. Meantime, American cinema has richly addressed similar concerns. The Conversation is one tip of that iceberg. The 2000 DVD has excellent commentaries by both Coppola and supervising editor Walter Murch, whose 1995 book, In the Blink of an Eye, has been a basic primer for many younger filmmakers.
*******
Written for the 2/15/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly for “Make it Snappy,” a weekly column reviewing recent films that never opened locally and older films of enduring worth.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Film Review #83: The Italian
2005
Director: Andrei Kravchuk
Cast: Kolya Spiridonov, Maria Kuznetsova, Sasha Syrotkin
In the most obviously dramatic scene in Andrei Kravchuk’s debut feature film, a runaway six-year-old Russian boy, Vanya – the nickname bestowed at the orphanage when a couple from Italy express a desire to adopt him provides the film’s title – is cornered in a debris-strewn courtyard by the surly chauffeur sent to recapture him. Panting and disheveled, both bear assorted rips, cuts and bruises from a long chase by rail, car and foot. Wildly outstripped, Vanya turns to fight. He smashes a bottle and shrieks, “I’ll kill you!” As Sery closes in, Vanya slashes his own arm. The hulking man – still bandaged after a thrashing from some tramps who roared, “We don’t sell children!” – wraps Vanya in a desperate, suddenly tender embrace. With new respect he asks Vanya where the boy learned that move.
“From the thieves,” says Vanya. Advising the boy not to do that again, Sery adds, “If you hit an artery, it’s all over.”
A long-time documentary and television filmmaker, Kravchuk made The Italian with a script based on a newspaper article about an orphan who learned to read so he could search for his mother. Kravchuk shot his film at a state-run provincial orphanage in Russia’s snowy northwest. He cast many of the featured roles with children living there, though Kolya Spiridonov, who plays Vanya and easily rivals Enzo Staoila’s little Bruno in De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, is not an orphan.
The story is straightforward enough. This post-Soviet backwater is relentlessly bleak, damp and cold. Perhaps riding a circuit of such orphanages in her new American Range Rover, Madam (Maria Kuznetsova) and her driver Sery (Sasha Syrotkin) periodically emerge from the fog with prospective parents from the West in tow. Pudgy and very focused, Madam is selling. In one scene that mocks industrialization, Madam has set up an assembly line for photos that will advertise the little ones. She uses the same teddy bear over and over as a prop, each time ripped from the hands of the last child who cradled it. Woe to the reluctant boy who hopes his own mother may come back for him. Upstairs, a wraith of a headmaster with washed-out eyes runs the place as Madam tells him. His most frequent word to the kids: “Scram!”
From the dark, holding forth from a perpetual card game next to the boiler, older teen Kolyan (Denis Moiseenko) collects the wages of all the orphans who work. Vanya sponges headlights and windshields all day at a gas station near the highway. Irka, eleven or twelve, climbs up the sides of towering diesel rigs into the cabs like a little monkey, where she spends her days servicing the drivers. Irka (Olga Shuvalova) teaches Vanya to read so he can steal his records from the office. She helps him escape, buys him a red jacket at a flea-market and lies for him when she’s caught so he can get on the train for his mother’s hometown. Irka has frizzy red curls, long matchstick legs below her mini-skirt and a momentarily kind face destined to turn hard and blotchy with sores before she’s twenty.
Despite general admiration for this film, reviewers keep calling The Italian “Dickensian” or describing it as a fairy-tale. Really it is neither. How often “Dickensian” on-screen applies to stories placed at some historical remove that renders the characters’ rags as costumes and their surroundings as exotic. Assorted deformities and those incomparably punned British names become jauntily, benignly eccentric – except for Polanksi’s Oliver Twist, but he was an orphan himself. Calling this story a fairy tale suggests Vanya doesn’t face real dangers.
Although Madam and Sery have ridiculous moments, their orphanage isn’t faintly picturesque. This is no nostalgic workers’ collective that the squat Kolyan has going in the basement. Short-boned, junk-fed prince of a new Russia, Kolyan is like Deadwood’s saloon-owner and whore-keeper Al Swearingen – another miner of orphanages – in wanting the camp just stable enough so he can rob it blind. So in what’s supposed to be a school, Kolyan punishes Vanya for learning to read. The novels of Martin Cruz Smith seem more apt than Dickens here, with post-Soviet detective Arkady Renko finding a corrosive, grimy, home-grown corruption as deadly as any terrorism.
Part of Kravchuk’s gift is that he has cast and directed players who evoke their characters’ past and future ages with a vividness usually found in those curious fatigued moments of loosened associations on a bus or subway, those odd moments when you look at a child and see the grown-up he will be, or vice versa. As a work of self-reflective national cinema, it’s extraordinary to note that The Italian was Russia’s official Oscar entry for best foreign language picture. It is possible to miss the extent of this achievement, distracted by the notion it’s only about an orphan boy who finds his mom.
*******
The Italian opened in limited release on January 19th. This review appeared on 2/14/07 at Stylusmagazine.com.
2005
Director: Andrei Kravchuk
Cast: Kolya Spiridonov, Maria Kuznetsova, Sasha Syrotkin
In the most obviously dramatic scene in Andrei Kravchuk’s debut feature film, a runaway six-year-old Russian boy, Vanya – the nickname bestowed at the orphanage when a couple from Italy express a desire to adopt him provides the film’s title – is cornered in a debris-strewn courtyard by the surly chauffeur sent to recapture him. Panting and disheveled, both bear assorted rips, cuts and bruises from a long chase by rail, car and foot. Wildly outstripped, Vanya turns to fight. He smashes a bottle and shrieks, “I’ll kill you!” As Sery closes in, Vanya slashes his own arm. The hulking man – still bandaged after a thrashing from some tramps who roared, “We don’t sell children!” – wraps Vanya in a desperate, suddenly tender embrace. With new respect he asks Vanya where the boy learned that move.
“From the thieves,” says Vanya. Advising the boy not to do that again, Sery adds, “If you hit an artery, it’s all over.”
A long-time documentary and television filmmaker, Kravchuk made The Italian with a script based on a newspaper article about an orphan who learned to read so he could search for his mother. Kravchuk shot his film at a state-run provincial orphanage in Russia’s snowy northwest. He cast many of the featured roles with children living there, though Kolya Spiridonov, who plays Vanya and easily rivals Enzo Staoila’s little Bruno in De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, is not an orphan.
The story is straightforward enough. This post-Soviet backwater is relentlessly bleak, damp and cold. Perhaps riding a circuit of such orphanages in her new American Range Rover, Madam (Maria Kuznetsova) and her driver Sery (Sasha Syrotkin) periodically emerge from the fog with prospective parents from the West in tow. Pudgy and very focused, Madam is selling. In one scene that mocks industrialization, Madam has set up an assembly line for photos that will advertise the little ones. She uses the same teddy bear over and over as a prop, each time ripped from the hands of the last child who cradled it. Woe to the reluctant boy who hopes his own mother may come back for him. Upstairs, a wraith of a headmaster with washed-out eyes runs the place as Madam tells him. His most frequent word to the kids: “Scram!”
From the dark, holding forth from a perpetual card game next to the boiler, older teen Kolyan (Denis Moiseenko) collects the wages of all the orphans who work. Vanya sponges headlights and windshields all day at a gas station near the highway. Irka, eleven or twelve, climbs up the sides of towering diesel rigs into the cabs like a little monkey, where she spends her days servicing the drivers. Irka (Olga Shuvalova) teaches Vanya to read so he can steal his records from the office. She helps him escape, buys him a red jacket at a flea-market and lies for him when she’s caught so he can get on the train for his mother’s hometown. Irka has frizzy red curls, long matchstick legs below her mini-skirt and a momentarily kind face destined to turn hard and blotchy with sores before she’s twenty.
Despite general admiration for this film, reviewers keep calling The Italian “Dickensian” or describing it as a fairy-tale. Really it is neither. How often “Dickensian” on-screen applies to stories placed at some historical remove that renders the characters’ rags as costumes and their surroundings as exotic. Assorted deformities and those incomparably punned British names become jauntily, benignly eccentric – except for Polanksi’s Oliver Twist, but he was an orphan himself. Calling this story a fairy tale suggests Vanya doesn’t face real dangers.
Although Madam and Sery have ridiculous moments, their orphanage isn’t faintly picturesque. This is no nostalgic workers’ collective that the squat Kolyan has going in the basement. Short-boned, junk-fed prince of a new Russia, Kolyan is like Deadwood’s saloon-owner and whore-keeper Al Swearingen – another miner of orphanages – in wanting the camp just stable enough so he can rob it blind. So in what’s supposed to be a school, Kolyan punishes Vanya for learning to read. The novels of Martin Cruz Smith seem more apt than Dickens here, with post-Soviet detective Arkady Renko finding a corrosive, grimy, home-grown corruption as deadly as any terrorism.
Part of Kravchuk’s gift is that he has cast and directed players who evoke their characters’ past and future ages with a vividness usually found in those curious fatigued moments of loosened associations on a bus or subway, those odd moments when you look at a child and see the grown-up he will be, or vice versa. As a work of self-reflective national cinema, it’s extraordinary to note that The Italian was Russia’s official Oscar entry for best foreign language picture. It is possible to miss the extent of this achievement, distracted by the notion it’s only about an orphan boy who finds his mom.
*******
The Italian opened in limited release on January 19th. This review appeared on 2/14/07 at Stylusmagazine.com.
Friday, February 09, 2007
Film Review #82: The Lives of Others/ The Decomposition of the Soul
2006/2003
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck/ Nina Toussaint & Massimo Iannetta
Cast: Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck/ Sigrid Paul, Harmut Richter
The first time that playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) has his flat searched by the Stasi, the East German state police, one officer discovers and holds up a volume of Brecht’s writings in silent accusation. Dreyman replies evenly, with a little sigh and smile, “It was given to me by Margaret Honecker.” Margaret Honecker was wife of Erich Honecker, the Communist Party boss of the harshly repressive German Democratic Republic in 1984. Remember this detail for a moment.
The bulk of first-time director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, set in East Berlin, takes place in that year, five years before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A two-part epilogue brings us to 1991, with Germany reunited. The film traces the transformation of a Stasi officer, Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), one of the GDR’s star prison interrogators, when he is assigned to spy on Dreyman and is thereby exposed to the art and intimacy of the playwright’s private life. In the epilogue, Dreyman, now able to read his Stasi files, discovers the scope of the Stasi agent’s actions, including those meriting unexpected acknowledgement, and he performs an act of gratitude that is fittingly artistic.
The Lives of Others turns first on an aesthetic dilemma and Donnersmarck says he simply used the Stasi’s role in the GDR as a setting to explore that. But the film’s release here – following huge European audiences and many awards, even after initial skittish rejection by the Berlin Film Festival – has propitious timing. Last November former Stasi foreign intelligence director Markus Wolf died, 17 years to the day after the Berlin Wall fell. Later that month, German legislators voted to extend a law requiring investigation for possible Stasi links of Germans applying for senior public service jobs but considerably narrowed the law’s coverage. This film comes during a period when Germany struggles with uncovering the GDR’s Communist past, for which there is some nostalgia.
The aesthetic dilemma Donnersmarck used was Lenin’s complaint to the writer Maxim Gorky that he could no longer listen to Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata (his favorite music) because it aroused a tenderness and empathy that interfered with his revolutionary aims – it made him want to “stroke” heads instead of “smash” them. Indeed, a character in the film relates this anecdote. In forcing his Stasi officer to absorb the softening influence of art, Donnersmarck also gives Wiesler a surveillance subject with whom he is well-matched. The Lives of Others is actually the story of two men who grow into dissent and the woman who acts as a pivot for their undoing along with her own. Dreyman’s leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), is also his live-in girlfriend.
Back to Dreyman’s statement about Margaret Honecker, intended to preempt the Stasi. Importantly, when this film opens, he is neither a dissident artist nor entirely likable. He routinely moves in elite circles where Honecker’s wife might present him with books considered seditious in other people’s hands. That little sigh before the name-drop – pure early, know-it-all Al Gore. Yet, neither Dreyman nor Captain Wiesler is corrupt or hypocritical. Each believes in the regime. Each has made accommodations that allow him to do work he is good at. Each works conscientiously, fastidiously even. Each has the demeanor of the entitled yet is radically separated. In this they are naïve, men who are not yet good.
The film echoes Lenin’s dilemma with another piano sonata. When Dreyman learns of a respected dissident colleague’s suicide, he turns to his piano and plays Sonata for a Good Man (part of Gabriel Yared’s wonderfully effective score). This music cracks open a fissure inside Wiesler, who is listening through headphones in the attic. He has already stolen Dreyman’s Brecht volume so he can read it himself – he’s hardly on Margaret Honecker’s gift list – and he already appreciates Christa-Maria Sieland’s stage artistry and her secret turmoil.
Part of this film’s great power is that art is never immutable, never the predetermined winner in this struggle for souls. Dreyman must be shaken from a kind of cocoon that art can become. His colleague’s suicide provokes Dreyman. He contacts other dissidents – they have awaited his awakening – and undertakes political writing to be smuggled to the West. Christa-Maria, high-strung, unsure of her own talent, easily over-run, undoes them both. After a rapacious party minister in a black limo picks her over and Dreyman’s reassurances stop working, she becomes Wiesler’s target in an interrogation room, and gives Dreyman up.
The music having done its work, Wiesler’s most electric connections occur with the actress. One night he overhears Dreyman comfort the anxious Sieland, and he later impulsively approaches her in a bar, uttering, almost verbatim, the words Dreyman spoke about her gifts as an artist. Once they meet inside the interrogation cell, Wiesler half-pleads with her to "remember your public.” Behind the one-way mirror, Wiesler’s boss snorts incredulously, “Her public! What strange ideas he has!”
This film also comes to the US along with a 2003 Belgian documentary about the Stasi’s chief prison and interrogation center, the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. If you see The Decomposition of the Soul, as I did, before you see The Lives of Others, you will sit up with a jolt as Donnersmarck’s characters walk down real hallways in that prison, for you know with a surge up the back of your neck what’s coming for them.
During a National Public Radio interview, Donnersmarck told David Davies that Wiesler’s assignment to spy on Dreyman’s flat makes him a novice out of his depth. Wiesler had engaged people extracted from their lives, forced to sit on their hands during marathon sessions so they could not even gesture as they spoke. This aptly distinguishes the difference between the two films. As expansive, imaginative and majestic as The Lives of Others is, The Decomposition of the Soul is cramped and brooding.
The guidelines for Hohenschönhausen staff, quoted at some length in the documentary, lay out systematic procedures that aim to “decompose” subjects. The 82-minute film was shot in 2002 with support from ARTE, the French-German television collaborative. The film’s title and much of the explanatory text come from a book by ex-prisoner Jürgen Fuchs. Framed with images of a tree branch outside the prison – first denuded in wintry bluster and ending with a green-budded sunniness bespeaking a new hopeful national morning – Decomposition focuses on two ex-prisoners, Sigrid Paul and Harmut Richter. Toussaint and Iannetta visually recreate arrest and confinement during the 1960s, with voice-overs, alternating footage of the two conducting facility tours for the viewer. Paul and Richter actually do this job in the present-day museum that part of the prison has become.
The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane says that if there is any justice, The Lives of Others will take best foreign picture Oscar, a view I share. Such justice should include a DVD edition that carries both films.
********
This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 2/9/07. The Decomposition of the Soul screens for one week at Film Forum in New York City, February 7-13. The Lives of Others opens in New York City & Los Angeles on February 9, & also at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester County, New York.
2006/2003
Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck/ Nina Toussaint & Massimo Iannetta
Cast: Ulrich Mühe, Sebastian Koch, Martina Gedeck/ Sigrid Paul, Harmut Richter
The first time that playwright Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) has his flat searched by the Stasi, the East German state police, one officer discovers and holds up a volume of Brecht’s writings in silent accusation. Dreyman replies evenly, with a little sigh and smile, “It was given to me by Margaret Honecker.” Margaret Honecker was wife of Erich Honecker, the Communist Party boss of the harshly repressive German Democratic Republic in 1984. Remember this detail for a moment.
The bulk of first-time director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, set in East Berlin, takes place in that year, five years before Glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. A two-part epilogue brings us to 1991, with Germany reunited. The film traces the transformation of a Stasi officer, Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), one of the GDR’s star prison interrogators, when he is assigned to spy on Dreyman and is thereby exposed to the art and intimacy of the playwright’s private life. In the epilogue, Dreyman, now able to read his Stasi files, discovers the scope of the Stasi agent’s actions, including those meriting unexpected acknowledgement, and he performs an act of gratitude that is fittingly artistic.
The Lives of Others turns first on an aesthetic dilemma and Donnersmarck says he simply used the Stasi’s role in the GDR as a setting to explore that. But the film’s release here – following huge European audiences and many awards, even after initial skittish rejection by the Berlin Film Festival – has propitious timing. Last November former Stasi foreign intelligence director Markus Wolf died, 17 years to the day after the Berlin Wall fell. Later that month, German legislators voted to extend a law requiring investigation for possible Stasi links of Germans applying for senior public service jobs but considerably narrowed the law’s coverage. This film comes during a period when Germany struggles with uncovering the GDR’s Communist past, for which there is some nostalgia.
The aesthetic dilemma Donnersmarck used was Lenin’s complaint to the writer Maxim Gorky that he could no longer listen to Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata (his favorite music) because it aroused a tenderness and empathy that interfered with his revolutionary aims – it made him want to “stroke” heads instead of “smash” them. Indeed, a character in the film relates this anecdote. In forcing his Stasi officer to absorb the softening influence of art, Donnersmarck also gives Wiesler a surveillance subject with whom he is well-matched. The Lives of Others is actually the story of two men who grow into dissent and the woman who acts as a pivot for their undoing along with her own. Dreyman’s leading lady, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), is also his live-in girlfriend.
Back to Dreyman’s statement about Margaret Honecker, intended to preempt the Stasi. Importantly, when this film opens, he is neither a dissident artist nor entirely likable. He routinely moves in elite circles where Honecker’s wife might present him with books considered seditious in other people’s hands. That little sigh before the name-drop – pure early, know-it-all Al Gore. Yet, neither Dreyman nor Captain Wiesler is corrupt or hypocritical. Each believes in the regime. Each has made accommodations that allow him to do work he is good at. Each works conscientiously, fastidiously even. Each has the demeanor of the entitled yet is radically separated. In this they are naïve, men who are not yet good.
The film echoes Lenin’s dilemma with another piano sonata. When Dreyman learns of a respected dissident colleague’s suicide, he turns to his piano and plays Sonata for a Good Man (part of Gabriel Yared’s wonderfully effective score). This music cracks open a fissure inside Wiesler, who is listening through headphones in the attic. He has already stolen Dreyman’s Brecht volume so he can read it himself – he’s hardly on Margaret Honecker’s gift list – and he already appreciates Christa-Maria Sieland’s stage artistry and her secret turmoil.
Part of this film’s great power is that art is never immutable, never the predetermined winner in this struggle for souls. Dreyman must be shaken from a kind of cocoon that art can become. His colleague’s suicide provokes Dreyman. He contacts other dissidents – they have awaited his awakening – and undertakes political writing to be smuggled to the West. Christa-Maria, high-strung, unsure of her own talent, easily over-run, undoes them both. After a rapacious party minister in a black limo picks her over and Dreyman’s reassurances stop working, she becomes Wiesler’s target in an interrogation room, and gives Dreyman up.
The music having done its work, Wiesler’s most electric connections occur with the actress. One night he overhears Dreyman comfort the anxious Sieland, and he later impulsively approaches her in a bar, uttering, almost verbatim, the words Dreyman spoke about her gifts as an artist. Once they meet inside the interrogation cell, Wiesler half-pleads with her to "remember your public.” Behind the one-way mirror, Wiesler’s boss snorts incredulously, “Her public! What strange ideas he has!”
This film also comes to the US along with a 2003 Belgian documentary about the Stasi’s chief prison and interrogation center, the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. If you see The Decomposition of the Soul, as I did, before you see The Lives of Others, you will sit up with a jolt as Donnersmarck’s characters walk down real hallways in that prison, for you know with a surge up the back of your neck what’s coming for them.
During a National Public Radio interview, Donnersmarck told David Davies that Wiesler’s assignment to spy on Dreyman’s flat makes him a novice out of his depth. Wiesler had engaged people extracted from their lives, forced to sit on their hands during marathon sessions so they could not even gesture as they spoke. This aptly distinguishes the difference between the two films. As expansive, imaginative and majestic as The Lives of Others is, The Decomposition of the Soul is cramped and brooding.
The guidelines for Hohenschönhausen staff, quoted at some length in the documentary, lay out systematic procedures that aim to “decompose” subjects. The 82-minute film was shot in 2002 with support from ARTE, the French-German television collaborative. The film’s title and much of the explanatory text come from a book by ex-prisoner Jürgen Fuchs. Framed with images of a tree branch outside the prison – first denuded in wintry bluster and ending with a green-budded sunniness bespeaking a new hopeful national morning – Decomposition focuses on two ex-prisoners, Sigrid Paul and Harmut Richter. Toussaint and Iannetta visually recreate arrest and confinement during the 1960s, with voice-overs, alternating footage of the two conducting facility tours for the viewer. Paul and Richter actually do this job in the present-day museum that part of the prison has become.
The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane says that if there is any justice, The Lives of Others will take best foreign picture Oscar, a view I share. Such justice should include a DVD edition that carries both films.
********
This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 2/9/07. The Decomposition of the Soul screens for one week at Film Forum in New York City, February 7-13. The Lives of Others opens in New York City & Los Angeles on February 9, & also at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester County, New York.
Film Review #81: Murderball
2005
Directors: Dana Adam Shapiro & Henry-Alex Rubin
Cast: Mark Zupan, Joe Soares, Keith Cavill
This marvelous sports film opens with what its creators call “the Clark Kent moment.” First seen sitting in a wheelchair, Mark Zupan is changing into shorts and a tee-shirt. Laboriously, he eases one leg at a time from his trousers. Then the left leg emerges, encased from knee to ankle in Maori-style tattoo. The heavy, swirling lines recall an ancient warrior’s armor. Then the sweatshirt comes off, his bare arms and torso bulging. Another tattoo drapes around one shoulder like a cape. Cut to Zupan’s garage workshop. There, the Austin civil engineer who wears a red buzz-cut and goatee mounts the wheels on his other wheelchair. These are heavy, solid discs that resemble bronze gladiator shields. When that garage door rises above Zupan, ready to roll, for just a flash you see the Man of Steel darting out of his phone booth.
Zupan broke his neck at 18 after falling asleep in the bed of his best friend’s pick-up truck during some post-soccer celebrating. Unaware he had a rider, the friend headed home and swerved badly, hurling Zupan over a fence into a canal. His neck broken, Zupan clung to a low tree branch for thirteen and a half hours before rescue. Zupan is heading for the 2002 world wheelchair rugby championships in Sweden when this film opens, captain of the US all-stars team. Later he says of his friend, “He’s my quad father – he made me.”
First called “murderball” for its full-tilt, full-contact ferocity, quad rugby was developed in Canada in the late 1970s for athletes having damage to all four limbs. The game has four eight-minute quarters. Players intercept the other team by knocking them over. Nobody wears helmets or pads.
Americans began playing in the 90s. When Murderball opens, no one has beaten them in ten years. Canada has the best chance, coached by Joe Soares, who left in a huff when Team USA dropped him after twelve years. On-court, Zupan and others routinely taunt the hair-triggered, hard-driving Soares, calling him “Benedict Arnold.”
2005
Directors: Dana Adam Shapiro & Henry-Alex Rubin
Cast: Mark Zupan, Joe Soares, Keith Cavill
This marvelous sports film opens with what its creators call “the Clark Kent moment.” First seen sitting in a wheelchair, Mark Zupan is changing into shorts and a tee-shirt. Laboriously, he eases one leg at a time from his trousers. Then the left leg emerges, encased from knee to ankle in Maori-style tattoo. The heavy, swirling lines recall an ancient warrior’s armor. Then the sweatshirt comes off, his bare arms and torso bulging. Another tattoo drapes around one shoulder like a cape. Cut to Zupan’s garage workshop. There, the Austin civil engineer who wears a red buzz-cut and goatee mounts the wheels on his other wheelchair. These are heavy, solid discs that resemble bronze gladiator shields. When that garage door rises above Zupan, ready to roll, for just a flash you see the Man of Steel darting out of his phone booth.
Zupan broke his neck at 18 after falling asleep in the bed of his best friend’s pick-up truck during some post-soccer celebrating. Unaware he had a rider, the friend headed home and swerved badly, hurling Zupan over a fence into a canal. His neck broken, Zupan clung to a low tree branch for thirteen and a half hours before rescue. Zupan is heading for the 2002 world wheelchair rugby championships in Sweden when this film opens, captain of the US all-stars team. Later he says of his friend, “He’s my quad father – he made me.”
First called “murderball” for its full-tilt, full-contact ferocity, quad rugby was developed in Canada in the late 1970s for athletes having damage to all four limbs. The game has four eight-minute quarters. Players intercept the other team by knocking them over. Nobody wears helmets or pads.
Americans began playing in the 90s. When Murderball opens, no one has beaten them in ten years. Canada has the best chance, coached by Joe Soares, who left in a huff when Team USA dropped him after twelve years. On-court, Zupan and others routinely taunt the hair-triggered, hard-driving Soares, calling him “Benedict Arnold.”
Murderball follows this grudge from Sweden through the 2004 Athens Summer Games and highlights Soares, five Team USA members and a new recruit. Dana Adam Shapiro, a former editor at Spin Magazine, went to Sweden to cover that meet for print. He took along award-winning doc-maker Henry-Alex Rubin, and the two went on to co-direct. Rubin shot the film mostly at “ass-level,” using wheelchairs the way other film crews use dollies for his two cameras. In one too-brief scene, a camera whizzes inches above the court, strapped beneath a player’s seat.
A year into filming, Zupan met ex-Motocross rider Keith Cavill while visiting New Jersey’s Kessler Rehab Center. He let Cavill sit in his rugby chariot and Cavill’s eyes lit up. Cavill’s dark, tentative early days as a quadriplegic puts flesh on what the others, now so self-possessed, got past.
Shapiro and Rubin’s work shares a quality with films by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. They made Brother’s Keeper (1992) about Madison County’s Ward brothers and the excellent Some Kind of Monster (2004) about the band Metallica. Throughout Murderball, you wonder how these guys got access to such unguarded, perfect moments. Besides the stings of defeat, glorious pranks and slyly joyous grins over success with young women figure prominently here. Player Scott Hogsett relates how once a young nurse giving him a bath “ran and got my mother to see my woody.” A baffled wisp of Camp Fire girl asks player Bob Lujano, “How do you eat your pizza with your elbows?” Charged relationships play out – Zupan and Joe, Joe and his viola-playing son Robert, Zupan and his friend Chris. And the neck and neck scores during crucial final seconds were made in heaven.
Murderball premiered at Sundance and survived in a different movie climate from today’s run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, already underway. Besides awarding four Oscars to Million Dollar Baby in early 2005, the Academy named a Spanish film, The Sea Inside, as best foreign film. Both those movies had paralyzed main characters who fought vehemently to die. Since then, Murderball has traveled to a dozen other countries and opens in French theaters next month, surely stoking Beijing anticipation. You know Zupan and most of his guys were training already.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/8/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, in “Make it Snappy,” a weekly column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Film Review #80: Pandora’s Box
1929
Director: G.W.Pabst
Cast: Louise Brooks, Carl Goetz, Francis Lederer
When I stopped at the International Center of Photography last Friday afternoon in mid-town Manhattan, by far the most crowded exhibit was that housed in the smallest room on the lower level. “Louise Brooks and the New Woman in Weimar Cinema” is just 25 film stills, not very large – most of them from the Austrian director G.W. Pabst’s 1929 Pandora’s Box – then a couple film magazines from that era, and Pandora’s Box itself, looping continuously on a tiny wall monitor.
No matter – those watching it stood rapt. In the role of ill-fated Lulu, Kansas-born Louise Brooks personified both the aspirations and dire warnings attached to modern women’s abrupt shift in status between the world wars. And it is distinctly her “look” we see in classic screen flappers from Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in Cabaret (1972) on. At the ICP, one woman sighed and said, “I saw this in 35 millimeter on the big screen in June. Gorgeous!”
Set in the late 1880’s (we know this because the London murders of Jack the Ripper eventually figure intimately in the plot), Pandora’s Box depicts the tragic fall of Lulu in eight acts. We first meet her dressed in satin with a whiskey bottle under one arm and a purse full of money under the other, juggling gentleman callers in a ritzy Berlin apartment. She hustles one out to welcome in the elderly, tattered Schigolch (Carl Goetz) - she variously describes him as her “first patron” and her father - who at once helps himself to her purse. She’s also juggling the rich editor Schön, who tries to leave her to marry respectably, and his stage producer son Alwa. Schön the elder lectures his son, “You don’t marry women like that. It would be suicide!”
This kind of line is always prophetic. Schön does die by gun-shot on the night of his wedding to Lulu and a court finds her guilty. Although Lulu actually is innocent, the prosecutor likens her magnetic sensuality to that of the ancient goddess Pandora, who unleashed evil upon the world. With Alwa, Schigolch and yet another admirer, Countess Geschwitz, in tow, Lulu escapes from the courtroom. Aboard a tramp steamer, an Egyptian brothel-owner almost buys Lulu for Alwa’s gambling debts. Lulu and her band arrive finally in a London slum with posters that warn of women disappearing and snow gusting through the skylight on Christmas Eve. Now frankly a street-walker, Lulu has a last, momentarily romantic date with Jack.
As the woman in the ICP mentioned, Pandora’s Box had a two-week theatrical run in New York City last spring, anticipating its November release in a sumptuous two-disc DVD edition with a restored, 133-minute print. This includes Richard Leacock's documentary and another made in 1998 for Turner Classic Films, plus four newly commissioned options for musical accompaniment.
Partly this DVD celebrates the centennial of Brooks’ birth and the latter-day revival of her reputation – both the film and the woman languished in obscurity for years before the George Eastman House in Rochester re-discovered both in the 1950’s. (In fact Brooks lived in Rochester for the last couple decades of her life, where she wrote a respected, still-in-print memoir of the film industry, Lulu in Hollywood.)
Partly there is wider interest lately in Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-33) for the mixture of political upheaval, economic panic, artistic creativity and decadence that preceded Hitler’s rise, and for parallels with our own time. Besides the ICP show, the Metropolitan’s “Glitter and Doom” exhibition of Weimar-era portraits runs until next month.
And partly Pandora’s Box is, like the lady said, just gorgeous. If you have never seen a silent movie, this is a good place to start. You can see how film is related to photo in a direct way that is largely lost to us in most modern movies – undistracted by color, spoken dialogue and sound effects, you are returned to film in its original visual innocence and splendor, with musical accompaniment just to keep the pace. Although based on a popular stage play, Pandora’s Box is an experience in image, not language.
Pabst chose Brooks over Marlene Dietrich for Lulu's role, and drew from her a performance full of spark, grace and subtlety. Brooks happened to be free only because she walked out of her Paramount contract in a dispute over converting the first modern detective film, The Canary Murder Case, into a talkie. Thank goodness the Eastman House found this movie.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/1/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly for “Make it Snappy: DVDs You Should Get Around To,” a weekly column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse and older films of enduring worth.
1929
Director: G.W.Pabst
Cast: Louise Brooks, Carl Goetz, Francis Lederer
When I stopped at the International Center of Photography last Friday afternoon in mid-town Manhattan, by far the most crowded exhibit was that housed in the smallest room on the lower level. “Louise Brooks and the New Woman in Weimar Cinema” is just 25 film stills, not very large – most of them from the Austrian director G.W. Pabst’s 1929 Pandora’s Box – then a couple film magazines from that era, and Pandora’s Box itself, looping continuously on a tiny wall monitor.
No matter – those watching it stood rapt. In the role of ill-fated Lulu, Kansas-born Louise Brooks personified both the aspirations and dire warnings attached to modern women’s abrupt shift in status between the world wars. And it is distinctly her “look” we see in classic screen flappers from Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles in Cabaret (1972) on. At the ICP, one woman sighed and said, “I saw this in 35 millimeter on the big screen in June. Gorgeous!”
Set in the late 1880’s (we know this because the London murders of Jack the Ripper eventually figure intimately in the plot), Pandora’s Box depicts the tragic fall of Lulu in eight acts. We first meet her dressed in satin with a whiskey bottle under one arm and a purse full of money under the other, juggling gentleman callers in a ritzy Berlin apartment. She hustles one out to welcome in the elderly, tattered Schigolch (Carl Goetz) - she variously describes him as her “first patron” and her father - who at once helps himself to her purse. She’s also juggling the rich editor Schön, who tries to leave her to marry respectably, and his stage producer son Alwa. Schön the elder lectures his son, “You don’t marry women like that. It would be suicide!”
This kind of line is always prophetic. Schön does die by gun-shot on the night of his wedding to Lulu and a court finds her guilty. Although Lulu actually is innocent, the prosecutor likens her magnetic sensuality to that of the ancient goddess Pandora, who unleashed evil upon the world. With Alwa, Schigolch and yet another admirer, Countess Geschwitz, in tow, Lulu escapes from the courtroom. Aboard a tramp steamer, an Egyptian brothel-owner almost buys Lulu for Alwa’s gambling debts. Lulu and her band arrive finally in a London slum with posters that warn of women disappearing and snow gusting through the skylight on Christmas Eve. Now frankly a street-walker, Lulu has a last, momentarily romantic date with Jack.
As the woman in the ICP mentioned, Pandora’s Box had a two-week theatrical run in New York City last spring, anticipating its November release in a sumptuous two-disc DVD edition with a restored, 133-minute print. This includes Richard Leacock's documentary and another made in 1998 for Turner Classic Films, plus four newly commissioned options for musical accompaniment.
Partly this DVD celebrates the centennial of Brooks’ birth and the latter-day revival of her reputation – both the film and the woman languished in obscurity for years before the George Eastman House in Rochester re-discovered both in the 1950’s. (In fact Brooks lived in Rochester for the last couple decades of her life, where she wrote a respected, still-in-print memoir of the film industry, Lulu in Hollywood.)
Partly there is wider interest lately in Germany’s Weimar Republic (1918-33) for the mixture of political upheaval, economic panic, artistic creativity and decadence that preceded Hitler’s rise, and for parallels with our own time. Besides the ICP show, the Metropolitan’s “Glitter and Doom” exhibition of Weimar-era portraits runs until next month.
And partly Pandora’s Box is, like the lady said, just gorgeous. If you have never seen a silent movie, this is a good place to start. You can see how film is related to photo in a direct way that is largely lost to us in most modern movies – undistracted by color, spoken dialogue and sound effects, you are returned to film in its original visual innocence and splendor, with musical accompaniment just to keep the pace. Although based on a popular stage play, Pandora’s Box is an experience in image, not language.
Pabst chose Brooks over Marlene Dietrich for Lulu's role, and drew from her a performance full of spark, grace and subtlety. Brooks happened to be free only because she walked out of her Paramount contract in a dispute over converting the first modern detective film, The Canary Murder Case, into a talkie. Thank goodness the Eastman House found this movie.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/1/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly for “Make it Snappy: DVDs You Should Get Around To,” a weekly column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse and older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, January 28, 2007
Film Review #79: The Dead Girl
2006
Director: Karen Moncrieff
Cast: Brittany Murphy, Marsha Gay Harden, Rose Byrne
It’s all in the lede, print editors will tell you. This rule of thumb for securing rapid attention applies to cinema too in an impatient, information-glutted age. For example, Film Comment’s current issue lists last year’s 20 Best Unreleased Films, a nod to those made elsewhere that haven’t gotten to the US yet or even found a distributor here. The New York Times’ A.O Scott has just written about this shrinking film horizon. And it’s a rare film festival anymore whose application process lingers past watching a prospective entrant’s first five minutes – although where I live, the burgeoning three-year-old Syracuse International Film Festival has reversed this trend by offering a time and labor-intensive round of preview screenings for community input into the final mid-April competition program.
One casualty of the growing habit of giving up early may be director Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl. A much better film than either critics or audiences are giving it credit for, this minor key miracle of ensemble acting and gracefully mirrored, incisive structure released theatrically in late December in Manhattan. I fear it may not see its early 2007 national roll-out because its opening vignette is so off-putting and grim. An anthology of five interlocking stories comprise The Dead Girl, about a serial killer’s young addict-prostitute victim and those people her death touches. We don’t actually see Krista (Brittany Murphy) until the final vignette, except fleetingly as a corpse in the opening.
Announced simply as The Stranger, this opening depicts the grisly discovery on a seedier stretch of sea-side dunes near Los Angeles by Arden, a lank-haired, radically depressed woman trapped in tending her sadistic, wheelchair-bound mother (Piper Laurie). First I thought, we have seen Toni Collette in roles like this too often. Really it’s just that roles like the one she had in The Night Listener go such a long way. Off-setting that, Giovanni Ribisi is thoroughly startling as Rudy, lean, tattooed, overly pushy grocery clerk aroused by Arden’s mere proximity to murder, a character whose reversal alerts us to look past easy plot predictions.
Four more distinct segments get us finally to Krista herself and her final day. Such interlocking stories are increasingly common as one departure from straightforward narrative. Rodrigo Garcia, most recently in Nine Lives, and Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity come quickly to mind, and of course Babel. The Dead Girl is also first cousin to Emilio Estevez’ Bobby, which structures its assassination tale by examining the network of people surrounding the event, yet leaves the mystery at its heart intact.
But it’s more than that. People leaving the theater during the opening vignette is especially ironic because The Dead Girl, more than another exercise in chopping up narrative, is really a film that meditates on cinematic endings. Last summer the Washington Post’s Charles Taylor wrote thoughtfully about how Hollywood fetishizes endings and how some films now resist that – Michael Haneke’s Caché, for example, or Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. As Taylor notes, other art forms like opera print the ending right in the program. The so-called problem of “spoiling the ending” often constricts filmmakers and certainly audiences. The Dead Girl is one of the more successful efforts I’ve seen to explore this in the sense that, if you hang around past the opening vignette, its shifting point of view maintains a requisite suspense even in the face of knowing Krista’s end.
After The Stranger, the subsequent vignettes are these. In The Sister, Rose Byrne plays Leah, a young student whose desperation to solve her older sister’s disappearance years ago has driven her to working in a morgue and performing post-mortem exams. Her parents’ obsessed belief – especially her mother (Mary Steenburgen) – that the sister will return alive has them all on hold. Fleetingly – most hope in this film seems fleeting – a physical similarity convinces Leah this corpse is her lost sister. As fleetingly, attentive watchers will see the sister’s drivers’ license among the killer’s memorabilia twice, the second time as it burns.
In The Wife, Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt, in a performance widely admired but surpassed by several others here) wastes away waiting for her silent, often missing husband to return to their trailer with its storage container business in the back, her fears and anger coiling ever tighter. As Melora in The Mother, Marcia Gay Harden (one such surpassing performance, along with Rose Byrne’s and, finally, Murphy herself) seeks out the effects of her runaway daughter Krista, discovering a girlfriend (an excellent Kerry Washington) and a child. Terrified, awkward, often nearly overcome, she inches forward with each revelation. This is some of Harden’s best work ever.
All these characters are women whose lives have been held in abeyance, who make a leap of faith. Most don’t clear the chasm. The literal presence of a morgue and then a storage container business as occupational settings in such a film is risky, but Moncrieff – who cut her directing teeth on episodes of HBO’s Six Feet Under after breaking out of an acting career on daytime soaps – finesses this handily.
It’s no wonder that Brittany Murphy works a lot (she has five features releasing in 2007, including Sin City 2). Here, she nails a certain jittery, gulping energy as Krista’s strung-out, impulsive, sometimes violent, needy prostitute, trying to get a stuffed animal to her little girl. Knowing what we do when Krista finally arrives, full-tilt, nothing gets in the way of this last clean slice of action. “Yes, I’ll take you, but first I have to make a stop,” the driver tells Krista. It’s not that you like it, but it’s worth the wait.
*******
The Dead Girl is playing in limited release. Also see Agnes Bruckner, precocious star of Moncrieff's first feature, Blue Car, all grown up in the new release, Blood and Chocolate. This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared on 1/25/07.
2006
Director: Karen Moncrieff
Cast: Brittany Murphy, Marsha Gay Harden, Rose Byrne
It’s all in the lede, print editors will tell you. This rule of thumb for securing rapid attention applies to cinema too in an impatient, information-glutted age. For example, Film Comment’s current issue lists last year’s 20 Best Unreleased Films, a nod to those made elsewhere that haven’t gotten to the US yet or even found a distributor here. The New York Times’ A.O Scott has just written about this shrinking film horizon. And it’s a rare film festival anymore whose application process lingers past watching a prospective entrant’s first five minutes – although where I live, the burgeoning three-year-old Syracuse International Film Festival has reversed this trend by offering a time and labor-intensive round of preview screenings for community input into the final mid-April competition program.
One casualty of the growing habit of giving up early may be director Karen Moncrieff’s The Dead Girl. A much better film than either critics or audiences are giving it credit for, this minor key miracle of ensemble acting and gracefully mirrored, incisive structure released theatrically in late December in Manhattan. I fear it may not see its early 2007 national roll-out because its opening vignette is so off-putting and grim. An anthology of five interlocking stories comprise The Dead Girl, about a serial killer’s young addict-prostitute victim and those people her death touches. We don’t actually see Krista (Brittany Murphy) until the final vignette, except fleetingly as a corpse in the opening.
Announced simply as The Stranger, this opening depicts the grisly discovery on a seedier stretch of sea-side dunes near Los Angeles by Arden, a lank-haired, radically depressed woman trapped in tending her sadistic, wheelchair-bound mother (Piper Laurie). First I thought, we have seen Toni Collette in roles like this too often. Really it’s just that roles like the one she had in The Night Listener go such a long way. Off-setting that, Giovanni Ribisi is thoroughly startling as Rudy, lean, tattooed, overly pushy grocery clerk aroused by Arden’s mere proximity to murder, a character whose reversal alerts us to look past easy plot predictions.
Four more distinct segments get us finally to Krista herself and her final day. Such interlocking stories are increasingly common as one departure from straightforward narrative. Rodrigo Garcia, most recently in Nine Lives, and Rebecca Miller’s Personal Velocity come quickly to mind, and of course Babel. The Dead Girl is also first cousin to Emilio Estevez’ Bobby, which structures its assassination tale by examining the network of people surrounding the event, yet leaves the mystery at its heart intact.
But it’s more than that. People leaving the theater during the opening vignette is especially ironic because The Dead Girl, more than another exercise in chopping up narrative, is really a film that meditates on cinematic endings. Last summer the Washington Post’s Charles Taylor wrote thoughtfully about how Hollywood fetishizes endings and how some films now resist that – Michael Haneke’s Caché, for example, or Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. As Taylor notes, other art forms like opera print the ending right in the program. The so-called problem of “spoiling the ending” often constricts filmmakers and certainly audiences. The Dead Girl is one of the more successful efforts I’ve seen to explore this in the sense that, if you hang around past the opening vignette, its shifting point of view maintains a requisite suspense even in the face of knowing Krista’s end.
After The Stranger, the subsequent vignettes are these. In The Sister, Rose Byrne plays Leah, a young student whose desperation to solve her older sister’s disappearance years ago has driven her to working in a morgue and performing post-mortem exams. Her parents’ obsessed belief – especially her mother (Mary Steenburgen) – that the sister will return alive has them all on hold. Fleetingly – most hope in this film seems fleeting – a physical similarity convinces Leah this corpse is her lost sister. As fleetingly, attentive watchers will see the sister’s drivers’ license among the killer’s memorabilia twice, the second time as it burns.
In The Wife, Ruth (Mary Beth Hurt, in a performance widely admired but surpassed by several others here) wastes away waiting for her silent, often missing husband to return to their trailer with its storage container business in the back, her fears and anger coiling ever tighter. As Melora in The Mother, Marcia Gay Harden (one such surpassing performance, along with Rose Byrne’s and, finally, Murphy herself) seeks out the effects of her runaway daughter Krista, discovering a girlfriend (an excellent Kerry Washington) and a child. Terrified, awkward, often nearly overcome, she inches forward with each revelation. This is some of Harden’s best work ever.
All these characters are women whose lives have been held in abeyance, who make a leap of faith. Most don’t clear the chasm. The literal presence of a morgue and then a storage container business as occupational settings in such a film is risky, but Moncrieff – who cut her directing teeth on episodes of HBO’s Six Feet Under after breaking out of an acting career on daytime soaps – finesses this handily.
It’s no wonder that Brittany Murphy works a lot (she has five features releasing in 2007, including Sin City 2). Here, she nails a certain jittery, gulping energy as Krista’s strung-out, impulsive, sometimes violent, needy prostitute, trying to get a stuffed animal to her little girl. Knowing what we do when Krista finally arrives, full-tilt, nothing gets in the way of this last clean slice of action. “Yes, I’ll take you, but first I have to make a stop,” the driver tells Krista. It’s not that you like it, but it’s worth the wait.
*******
The Dead Girl is playing in limited release. Also see Agnes Bruckner, precocious star of Moncrieff's first feature, Blue Car, all grown up in the new release, Blood and Chocolate. This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, where it appeared on 1/25/07.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Film Review #78: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
2005
Director: Marc Rothemund
Cast: Julia Jentsch, Fabian Hinrichs, Alexander Held
Two young German students have their ears against a radio speaker, straining for the lyrics of an American jazz tune. Their foreheads almost touch, swaying side to side with the beat. “Sugar, my sugar. . .” The dark-haired one, Sophie, though she’s laughing too, is concentrating hard. She’s the one who catches the chorus and sings the fast part perfectly. The next day, when the Gestapo arrest Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and her medical student brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University, Sophie’s stunned friend Gisela looks away as Sophie passes close by.
Director Marc Rothemund’s dramatization of the capture, interrogation and show trial of three members of The White Rose does not use the heavy, tragic Wagnerian score you’d expect from Hollywood for such a subject. Besides the opening scene’s light-hearted jazz, Sophie listens to Schubert. Then a spare, percussive theme recurs – it first infuses the moments when she and her brother place stacks of flyers in the university’s massive stone atrium with a sudden electric tension about the danger of an action we take for granted. The same theme repeats austerely, accompanying this small woman as she’s hustled across vast plazas and into tiny cells in the story’s straightforward march to execution.
Already having won major European awards for Best Director and Best Actress, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days opened in the US last February on the anniversary date of that arrest and was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
German audiences know the story of the White Rose well and particularly revere Sophie for her grit. On February 17, 1943, Sophie and Hans were caught almost at once after she impulsively shoved one stack of flyers from a balcony ledge, thereby catching an irate janitor’s attention just as students from a huge lecture poured into the hall’s center atrium. During the first of three days’ questioning, this self-possessed 21-year-old out-foxes her seasoned interrogator, Robert Mohr (Alexander Held). Once Mohr shows her Hans’ signed confession, she reverses herself and confesses too, but proves more than Mohr’s match as he tries to argue and offer her a way out. Apparently Mohr really did wash his hands in a corner sink when she refused to save herself.
Rothemund says dialogue between Sophie and Mohr comes almost verbatim from Gestapo transcripts, accessed in 1990 after East Germany’s regime fell. Though both Jentsch and Held are adept stage actors, they manage a riveting, understated dual in close-up. Two previous German films – Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose and Percy Adlon’s Five Last Days (both 1982) – do not attempt to imagine these sessions and conclude, respectively, at Sophie’s arrest and before the trial.
Hans, Sophie and a third resister, Christian Probst, went before Roland Freisler (Andre Hennicke) – that judge’s first chance to impress Hitler by conducting a show trial intended to deter others. The DVD, released in November, has extra archival footage of Freisler’s trademark savage tirades in another proceeding. Far from crumbling in tears, Sophie answers that the German people want peace and dignity. Rothemund’s camera pans the courtroom’s mostly military audience when she says this and catches a ripple of fidgeting and looking down. All three were beheaded on February 23rd, six days after Sophie learned that jazz tune.
In late January 1943, Germany was reeling from hideous military defeat at Stalingrad, Russia, with 230,000 casualties. Official claims of victory persisted until February 3rd, when the Reich simply broadcast funeral music. On the 17th, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called for “total war” – we hear snatches of this speech on radios when police are first processing Sophie. The White Rose had friends in six German cities and hoped to contact other resistance groups outside Germany, but were essentially a handful of student friends and their Munich professor, Kurt Huber. Sophie’s younger sister Elizabeth and White Rose survivor Franz Muller, both interviewed on the DVD, don’t make Sophie’s motivation a big mystery. Says Muller, “Anyone could tell the nation was headed over a cliff.”
If the film also has fewer Nazi trappings than you’d expect, this is more than low-key cinematic style. Rothemund, who says he makes films “to explore current issues,” wanted audiences to “slip right into the action” instead of watching from a safe historical distance. As if history is ever safe.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/25/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in Make it Snappy: DVDs You Should Get Around To, a weekly DVD column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
2005
Director: Marc Rothemund
Cast: Julia Jentsch, Fabian Hinrichs, Alexander Held
Two young German students have their ears against a radio speaker, straining for the lyrics of an American jazz tune. Their foreheads almost touch, swaying side to side with the beat. “Sugar, my sugar. . .” The dark-haired one, Sophie, though she’s laughing too, is concentrating hard. She’s the one who catches the chorus and sings the fast part perfectly. The next day, when the Gestapo arrest Sophie Scholl (Julia Jentsch) and her medical student brother Hans (Fabian Hinrichs) for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilian University, Sophie’s stunned friend Gisela looks away as Sophie passes close by.
Director Marc Rothemund’s dramatization of the capture, interrogation and show trial of three members of The White Rose does not use the heavy, tragic Wagnerian score you’d expect from Hollywood for such a subject. Besides the opening scene’s light-hearted jazz, Sophie listens to Schubert. Then a spare, percussive theme recurs – it first infuses the moments when she and her brother place stacks of flyers in the university’s massive stone atrium with a sudden electric tension about the danger of an action we take for granted. The same theme repeats austerely, accompanying this small woman as she’s hustled across vast plazas and into tiny cells in the story’s straightforward march to execution.
Already having won major European awards for Best Director and Best Actress, Sophie Scholl: The Final Days opened in the US last February on the anniversary date of that arrest and was Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
German audiences know the story of the White Rose well and particularly revere Sophie for her grit. On February 17, 1943, Sophie and Hans were caught almost at once after she impulsively shoved one stack of flyers from a balcony ledge, thereby catching an irate janitor’s attention just as students from a huge lecture poured into the hall’s center atrium. During the first of three days’ questioning, this self-possessed 21-year-old out-foxes her seasoned interrogator, Robert Mohr (Alexander Held). Once Mohr shows her Hans’ signed confession, she reverses herself and confesses too, but proves more than Mohr’s match as he tries to argue and offer her a way out. Apparently Mohr really did wash his hands in a corner sink when she refused to save herself.
Rothemund says dialogue between Sophie and Mohr comes almost verbatim from Gestapo transcripts, accessed in 1990 after East Germany’s regime fell. Though both Jentsch and Held are adept stage actors, they manage a riveting, understated dual in close-up. Two previous German films – Michael Verhoeven’s The White Rose and Percy Adlon’s Five Last Days (both 1982) – do not attempt to imagine these sessions and conclude, respectively, at Sophie’s arrest and before the trial.
Hans, Sophie and a third resister, Christian Probst, went before Roland Freisler (Andre Hennicke) – that judge’s first chance to impress Hitler by conducting a show trial intended to deter others. The DVD, released in November, has extra archival footage of Freisler’s trademark savage tirades in another proceeding. Far from crumbling in tears, Sophie answers that the German people want peace and dignity. Rothemund’s camera pans the courtroom’s mostly military audience when she says this and catches a ripple of fidgeting and looking down. All three were beheaded on February 23rd, six days after Sophie learned that jazz tune.
In late January 1943, Germany was reeling from hideous military defeat at Stalingrad, Russia, with 230,000 casualties. Official claims of victory persisted until February 3rd, when the Reich simply broadcast funeral music. On the 17th, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels called for “total war” – we hear snatches of this speech on radios when police are first processing Sophie. The White Rose had friends in six German cities and hoped to contact other resistance groups outside Germany, but were essentially a handful of student friends and their Munich professor, Kurt Huber. Sophie’s younger sister Elizabeth and White Rose survivor Franz Muller, both interviewed on the DVD, don’t make Sophie’s motivation a big mystery. Says Muller, “Anyone could tell the nation was headed over a cliff.”
If the film also has fewer Nazi trappings than you’d expect, this is more than low-key cinematic style. Rothemund, who says he makes films “to explore current issues,” wanted audiences to “slip right into the action” instead of watching from a safe historical distance. As if history is ever safe.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/25/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in Make it Snappy: DVDs You Should Get Around To, a weekly DVD column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Best Film of 2006: Children of Men
Perhaps all mothers see their sons as Michelangelo saw David. Amidst horrific collapse and mass grief for a childless future, director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men provides a moment of startling access to that vision. The priceless marble statue sits horded in a citadel called the Ark of the Arts. Damaged in its rescue and transport, part of the left leg is gone. A shiny metal rod connects the foot and knee – as if David had crossed paths with an IED on his way to meet Goliath. For a rushing, brilliant instant you glimpse how irreplaceable, in his mothers’ eyes, is every young soldier. This helps set up the plausibility later when soldiers lay down their weapons at the sight of a baby.
In another scene, Clive Owen’s Theo walks down an abandoned school hallway over trash, muck and crunching broken glass. Minutes ago he had put on flip-flops, the only footwear around. Cuarón’s strategy to have us take in panoramic devastation involves such details. Without ever showing Theo’s feet during this short walk, Cuarón has you curling your own toes, squeamish about those nearly naked feet.
Another scene: around a corner Theo refills his whiskey pint and overhears his friend Jasper tell the pregnant ‘fugee girl Kee how Theo’s son Dylan died. Echoing the boy’s mother Julian, also dead now, Kee says about the baby’s photo, “He has Theo’s eyes,” while Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children plays over Jasper’s stereo.
I had been fiddling with a likely list of top films, no single one quite away from the pack, when I saw this one. Beyond “I know it when I see it,” it may be the unflagging aesthetic precision and the reciprocity of such images, that finally earned my tears. Not everyone agrees – it takes a willingness to let the film have you, like the wary affection that grows up between Theo and Kee. Theo and Julian met at a 60’s protest rally – of course their son was named after the singer Bob. At the end, when Kee names her little girl Dylan, I thought instead about the poet not going gentle into that good night.
*******
Written for StylusMagazine.com's Top 15 Films of 2006, published there 1/16/2007.
Perhaps all mothers see their sons as Michelangelo saw David. Amidst horrific collapse and mass grief for a childless future, director Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men provides a moment of startling access to that vision. The priceless marble statue sits horded in a citadel called the Ark of the Arts. Damaged in its rescue and transport, part of the left leg is gone. A shiny metal rod connects the foot and knee – as if David had crossed paths with an IED on his way to meet Goliath. For a rushing, brilliant instant you glimpse how irreplaceable, in his mothers’ eyes, is every young soldier. This helps set up the plausibility later when soldiers lay down their weapons at the sight of a baby.
In another scene, Clive Owen’s Theo walks down an abandoned school hallway over trash, muck and crunching broken glass. Minutes ago he had put on flip-flops, the only footwear around. Cuarón’s strategy to have us take in panoramic devastation involves such details. Without ever showing Theo’s feet during this short walk, Cuarón has you curling your own toes, squeamish about those nearly naked feet.
Another scene: around a corner Theo refills his whiskey pint and overhears his friend Jasper tell the pregnant ‘fugee girl Kee how Theo’s son Dylan died. Echoing the boy’s mother Julian, also dead now, Kee says about the baby’s photo, “He has Theo’s eyes,” while Mahler’s Songs on the Death of Children plays over Jasper’s stereo.
I had been fiddling with a likely list of top films, no single one quite away from the pack, when I saw this one. Beyond “I know it when I see it,” it may be the unflagging aesthetic precision and the reciprocity of such images, that finally earned my tears. Not everyone agrees – it takes a willingness to let the film have you, like the wary affection that grows up between Theo and Kee. Theo and Julian met at a 60’s protest rally – of course their son was named after the singer Bob. At the end, when Kee names her little girl Dylan, I thought instead about the poet not going gentle into that good night.
*******
Written for StylusMagazine.com's Top 15 Films of 2006, published there 1/16/2007.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Film Review #77: One-Eyed Jacks
1961
Director: Marlon Brando
Cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Katy Jurado
We first meet Rio (Marlon Brando) lounging elegantly against a counter, eating a banana. After he drops the peel, the camera pulls back. He’s covering two women with his six-shooter as Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) empties the bank’s gold into saddle-bags. Though 1880s Sonora, Mexico is a likely enough spot for a 1961 Hollywood Western, the story will move to Monterey, California – as several characters pointedly remark, those 800 miles are a long way from Sonora.
Back in the bank, one of Rio’s hostages tries to hide a diamond ring in her bag; Rio smirks and takes it. As soon as he starts walking, Rio’s spurs jingle. Whether it’s fancy spurs or prisoner’s chains, some musical sound usually accompanies Rio’s movements. There’s the rushing wind too, rustling his long neck-scarves. Later, the Pacific’s crashing surf is a backdrop. It’s always a fresh revelation to see the young Brando. (In one scene he drops cat-like over a second-floor balcony.) But One-Eyed Jacks also shows him tattered and smelly from a prison break, his back bloodied by a public flogging and his gun hand smashed with a rifle butt. One-Eyed Jacks is much more than a vanity project, and as a young thug in gaudy, ill-gotten finery, Rio merges with biker Johnny in The Wild One (1953), even achieves an Alpha Dog immediacy.
One-Eyed Jacks is the only movie Marlon Brando ever directed, and its first scenes quickly sadden you about that fact. While he gets the action rolling, he packs in rich details of visual style, sound and character that unfold and echo throughout, like that ring Rio steals and the differing ways he and Dad approach women. Before long, a Mexican posse traps them; Dad abandons Rio to five years of prison and “picking the maggots out of the sores on my ankles every morning.” A gorgeously-shot sequence sets this pursuit and capture in a swirling dust-storm that literally dissolves the landscape and story expectations along with it.
Five years later Rio arrives in Monterey. Dad Longworth is now the sheriff, lounging in a hammock on his own ill-gotten porch by the beach. Like some sleazily charismatic ex-addict preacher, Dad brags, “Everybody knows I was a bandit once.” Dad has a Mexican wife (Katy Jurado) and step-daughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer). Part of the film’s suspense and contemporary punch is its complex working out of Rio’s plan for revenge in tandem with his evolving relationship with Louisa. This film is remarkably like James Marsh’s 2006 film The King, about a modern-day half-Mexican, Elvis (Gael Garcia Bernal), abandoned by his now respectable preacher father, whose revenge includes impregnating his half-sister. As David Sterritt writes in Guiltless Pleasures, much of Rio’s story is about performance, rehearsing, bluffing and reinvention – like the Wild West itself. His exchanges with Dad sizzle with anger. But Rio’s struggle to get real means that neither Rio nor we know for some time whether he really loves Louisa.
That swirling dust in Sonora made Dad’s betrayal less genre-bound, more universal. Moving to the Pacific coast accomplishes more. Classic Hollywood Westerns were set in landscapes of grandeur, mountains or (once John Ford started using Monument Valley) generic deserts or prairies often simply labeled Texas or Mexico. Part of revising Westerns was changing and cramping the place – landmark efforts like Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), for example, both occur in Pacific Northwest forests. Moving Rio’s story to Monterey highlights often absent historical Spanish California (several characters display anti-Mexican racism; Rio hides out with immigrant Japanese fishermen up the coast). It also backs that mythical endless frontier right up against the surf. This is a surprisingly relevant image about the outcome of national dreams – just have a look at last year’s modern-day California riff on the Western, Down in the Valley.
For years, critics called the Western movie dead. But in a post-9/11 world looking more and more like the Wild West, we’re also seeing HBO’s Deadwood, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Australian John Hillcoate’s brilliant The Proposition, and the upcoming Seraphim Falls. Brando starred in four other Westerns too, but of them all One-Eyed Jacks is perhaps most a film for today.
*******
Besides earlier VHS editions, One-Eyed Jacks has been released on DVD at least ten times between 1999 & 2003. This review was written for Make it Snappy, a weekly DVD column reviewing recent films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth; it ran in the 1/18/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.
1961
Director: Marlon Brando
Cast: Marlon Brando, Karl Malden, Katy Jurado
We first meet Rio (Marlon Brando) lounging elegantly against a counter, eating a banana. After he drops the peel, the camera pulls back. He’s covering two women with his six-shooter as Dad Longworth (Karl Malden) empties the bank’s gold into saddle-bags. Though 1880s Sonora, Mexico is a likely enough spot for a 1961 Hollywood Western, the story will move to Monterey, California – as several characters pointedly remark, those 800 miles are a long way from Sonora.
Back in the bank, one of Rio’s hostages tries to hide a diamond ring in her bag; Rio smirks and takes it. As soon as he starts walking, Rio’s spurs jingle. Whether it’s fancy spurs or prisoner’s chains, some musical sound usually accompanies Rio’s movements. There’s the rushing wind too, rustling his long neck-scarves. Later, the Pacific’s crashing surf is a backdrop. It’s always a fresh revelation to see the young Brando. (In one scene he drops cat-like over a second-floor balcony.) But One-Eyed Jacks also shows him tattered and smelly from a prison break, his back bloodied by a public flogging and his gun hand smashed with a rifle butt. One-Eyed Jacks is much more than a vanity project, and as a young thug in gaudy, ill-gotten finery, Rio merges with biker Johnny in The Wild One (1953), even achieves an Alpha Dog immediacy.
One-Eyed Jacks is the only movie Marlon Brando ever directed, and its first scenes quickly sadden you about that fact. While he gets the action rolling, he packs in rich details of visual style, sound and character that unfold and echo throughout, like that ring Rio steals and the differing ways he and Dad approach women. Before long, a Mexican posse traps them; Dad abandons Rio to five years of prison and “picking the maggots out of the sores on my ankles every morning.” A gorgeously-shot sequence sets this pursuit and capture in a swirling dust-storm that literally dissolves the landscape and story expectations along with it.
Five years later Rio arrives in Monterey. Dad Longworth is now the sheriff, lounging in a hammock on his own ill-gotten porch by the beach. Like some sleazily charismatic ex-addict preacher, Dad brags, “Everybody knows I was a bandit once.” Dad has a Mexican wife (Katy Jurado) and step-daughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer). Part of the film’s suspense and contemporary punch is its complex working out of Rio’s plan for revenge in tandem with his evolving relationship with Louisa. This film is remarkably like James Marsh’s 2006 film The King, about a modern-day half-Mexican, Elvis (Gael Garcia Bernal), abandoned by his now respectable preacher father, whose revenge includes impregnating his half-sister. As David Sterritt writes in Guiltless Pleasures, much of Rio’s story is about performance, rehearsing, bluffing and reinvention – like the Wild West itself. His exchanges with Dad sizzle with anger. But Rio’s struggle to get real means that neither Rio nor we know for some time whether he really loves Louisa.
That swirling dust in Sonora made Dad’s betrayal less genre-bound, more universal. Moving to the Pacific coast accomplishes more. Classic Hollywood Westerns were set in landscapes of grandeur, mountains or (once John Ford started using Monument Valley) generic deserts or prairies often simply labeled Texas or Mexico. Part of revising Westerns was changing and cramping the place – landmark efforts like Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995), for example, both occur in Pacific Northwest forests. Moving Rio’s story to Monterey highlights often absent historical Spanish California (several characters display anti-Mexican racism; Rio hides out with immigrant Japanese fishermen up the coast). It also backs that mythical endless frontier right up against the surf. This is a surprisingly relevant image about the outcome of national dreams – just have a look at last year’s modern-day California riff on the Western, Down in the Valley.
For years, critics called the Western movie dead. But in a post-9/11 world looking more and more like the Wild West, we’re also seeing HBO’s Deadwood, Tommy Lee Jones’ The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Australian John Hillcoate’s brilliant The Proposition, and the upcoming Seraphim Falls. Brando starred in four other Westerns too, but of them all One-Eyed Jacks is perhaps most a film for today.
*******
Besides earlier VHS editions, One-Eyed Jacks has been released on DVD at least ten times between 1999 & 2003. This review was written for Make it Snappy, a weekly DVD column reviewing recent films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth; it ran in the 1/18/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
Film Review #76: Notes on a Scandal
2006
Director: Richard Eyre
Cast: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Andrew Simpson
It’s almost a throw-away line, one you could easily miss from a lesser actor. But by now our eyes are glued, saucer-sized, to her every move as if we were in a check-out line, not a movie theater. History teacher Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) drops her consummate battle-ax thunder to a murmur and answers her visitor’s social banter. The younger, prettier woman, new art teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), trying always to please, has just exclaimed, “Oh you have a cat!”
“Standard issue for spinsters,” says Barbara softly, surgically, precisely. In a single phrase, she manages a disorienting half dozen or so messages. She’s acknowledged she fits a certain cliché, cast herself above it by saying so, suggested that Sheba can’t really be that surprised, made herself invitingly self-deprecating to the less confident woman, implicitly mocked the attitude that married women are happier, and denied her own deep affection for this cat, whose demise a ways down the pike will trigger a great deal of bodice-ripping and worse between these two so-called friends. For the longest time, Sheba is no match for “Bar.”
Nor for Steven Connolly (played by teen Andrew Simpson). In a film often called a guilty pleasure because it taps so accurately into our own wayward impulses, Sheba Hart has to juggle two stalkers. After some years married to Richard (Bill Nighy), the London college professor whose first marriage she broke up, Sheba’s now on the edge of middle age, with a pouty teen-aged daughter and a Down syndrome son. She’s inherited a nicer house than most of her teaching colleagues, half-heartedly turned the potting shed into a potter’s studio – “my lair,” she calls it – and now tries teaching. Nothing has really turned out. Her new students are unruly and won’t behave. Close-up, golden-haired Sheba – Barbara saves a single strand, tucked in her diary – has become indefinite and hesitant.
There is one boy, 15, whose family has come to London from the North of Ireland for factory work and lives in a high-rise project he doesn’t want Sheba to see. He pursues her with the same steamy single-mindedness one imagines she once applied to Richard. Cate Blanchett’s scenes with this boy are uncomfortably convincing. Meanwhile Barbara – as self-deluded as she is calculating – hopes Sheba’s desperate fear of exposure will somehow turn to gratitude and love. A string of melodramatic reversals, discoveries, manipulations and increasingly distraught confrontations ensue. Frankly I cannot imagine the whole thing not collapsing under its own weight, except for the edgy performances of Dench and Blanchett. And the long moment in their front doorway, when Nighy’s Richard finally lets Sheba back in to their marriage with the smallest jerk of his chin, nicely brackets the action by echoing Barbara’s early murmur about cats and spinsters.
Having solidly built his career upon stage-work, Richard Eyre has transitioned to television and film by directing classic drama adapted to screen, such as Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, King Lear) and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard). He’s worked with Dench before – see his 2001 film bio of novelist Iris Murdock – and he directed the witty, many-layered film, Stage Beauty (2004), about the tensions between natural and enacted femininity via Elizabethan-era theater conventions. We could expect Eyre to come up with a complex and stagy villain in Barbara Covett, adapted from Zoë Heller’s novel. Between Heller, screenwriter Patrick Marber, Eyre and Dench – like Blanchett, stage-trained – we have a Covett at home with her own villainy in the way that Richard III or Iago are at home with theirs. In an eerie mirror of the out-sized staginess of the characters, the attraction that both Covett and Steven feel for Sheba is really more that of a fan than an intimate – one’s connection and future together largely imagined and one’s thwarted adoration quickly turned to rage.
The grand staginess and tabloid blowsiness of Notes on a Scandal threaten to obscure something else. Like a number of recent British films, this one comments upon history and what we make of it. Some US films express similar concerns with stories both more literal and more removed – revisiting World War II and subsequent early Cold War spy days of a half century ago. But English films are tackling history’s meaning sideways and metaphorically, with tales of how the young fare in the possible near future (Children of Men) and the recent past (both Notes on a Scandal and The History Boys occur a couple decades ago – explicitly not now). One character in The History Boys argues that no era is more difficult to fathom than the recent past, but Barbara Covett – after all a history teacher – hands in a mere half-page curriculum report concluding that history at St. George’s School needs no revision whatsoever.
And the result of Barbara Covett’s brand of rote history, in her case a prism of class resentment that explains everything and examines nothing? When Sheba Hart is first getting to know Covett, the lonely younger woman relaxes into a too-easy confidence, telling Covett more about her personal life and disappointments in one rainy afternoon than wiser adults might. Covett contemptuously lays this to Sheba’s enervated, undisciplined upper-class background. A considerate person might stop Sheba, refrain from taking advantage of her shaky sense of self. Ever the entrepreneur of others’ weakness, Barbara gathers evidence instead of exercising empathy. Her relation to the arts, itself a kind of shorthand, is telling too. We last see her on a park bench dangling a Sunday night chamber concert – the trappings of a finer life, presumably – as bait before her next target. US audiences might easily miss Notes on a Scandal’s astute dissection of recent-past class shifts and attitudes, distracted by its more operatic side. That would be a shame.
*******
This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, for 1/18/07.
2006
Director: Richard Eyre
Cast: Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Andrew Simpson
It’s almost a throw-away line, one you could easily miss from a lesser actor. But by now our eyes are glued, saucer-sized, to her every move as if we were in a check-out line, not a movie theater. History teacher Barbara Covett (Judi Dench) drops her consummate battle-ax thunder to a murmur and answers her visitor’s social banter. The younger, prettier woman, new art teacher Sheba Hart (Cate Blanchett), trying always to please, has just exclaimed, “Oh you have a cat!”
“Standard issue for spinsters,” says Barbara softly, surgically, precisely. In a single phrase, she manages a disorienting half dozen or so messages. She’s acknowledged she fits a certain cliché, cast herself above it by saying so, suggested that Sheba can’t really be that surprised, made herself invitingly self-deprecating to the less confident woman, implicitly mocked the attitude that married women are happier, and denied her own deep affection for this cat, whose demise a ways down the pike will trigger a great deal of bodice-ripping and worse between these two so-called friends. For the longest time, Sheba is no match for “Bar.”
Nor for Steven Connolly (played by teen Andrew Simpson). In a film often called a guilty pleasure because it taps so accurately into our own wayward impulses, Sheba Hart has to juggle two stalkers. After some years married to Richard (Bill Nighy), the London college professor whose first marriage she broke up, Sheba’s now on the edge of middle age, with a pouty teen-aged daughter and a Down syndrome son. She’s inherited a nicer house than most of her teaching colleagues, half-heartedly turned the potting shed into a potter’s studio – “my lair,” she calls it – and now tries teaching. Nothing has really turned out. Her new students are unruly and won’t behave. Close-up, golden-haired Sheba – Barbara saves a single strand, tucked in her diary – has become indefinite and hesitant.
There is one boy, 15, whose family has come to London from the North of Ireland for factory work and lives in a high-rise project he doesn’t want Sheba to see. He pursues her with the same steamy single-mindedness one imagines she once applied to Richard. Cate Blanchett’s scenes with this boy are uncomfortably convincing. Meanwhile Barbara – as self-deluded as she is calculating – hopes Sheba’s desperate fear of exposure will somehow turn to gratitude and love. A string of melodramatic reversals, discoveries, manipulations and increasingly distraught confrontations ensue. Frankly I cannot imagine the whole thing not collapsing under its own weight, except for the edgy performances of Dench and Blanchett. And the long moment in their front doorway, when Nighy’s Richard finally lets Sheba back in to their marriage with the smallest jerk of his chin, nicely brackets the action by echoing Barbara’s early murmur about cats and spinsters.
Having solidly built his career upon stage-work, Richard Eyre has transitioned to television and film by directing classic drama adapted to screen, such as Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, King Lear) and Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard). He’s worked with Dench before – see his 2001 film bio of novelist Iris Murdock – and he directed the witty, many-layered film, Stage Beauty (2004), about the tensions between natural and enacted femininity via Elizabethan-era theater conventions. We could expect Eyre to come up with a complex and stagy villain in Barbara Covett, adapted from Zoë Heller’s novel. Between Heller, screenwriter Patrick Marber, Eyre and Dench – like Blanchett, stage-trained – we have a Covett at home with her own villainy in the way that Richard III or Iago are at home with theirs. In an eerie mirror of the out-sized staginess of the characters, the attraction that both Covett and Steven feel for Sheba is really more that of a fan than an intimate – one’s connection and future together largely imagined and one’s thwarted adoration quickly turned to rage.
The grand staginess and tabloid blowsiness of Notes on a Scandal threaten to obscure something else. Like a number of recent British films, this one comments upon history and what we make of it. Some US films express similar concerns with stories both more literal and more removed – revisiting World War II and subsequent early Cold War spy days of a half century ago. But English films are tackling history’s meaning sideways and metaphorically, with tales of how the young fare in the possible near future (Children of Men) and the recent past (both Notes on a Scandal and The History Boys occur a couple decades ago – explicitly not now). One character in The History Boys argues that no era is more difficult to fathom than the recent past, but Barbara Covett – after all a history teacher – hands in a mere half-page curriculum report concluding that history at St. George’s School needs no revision whatsoever.
And the result of Barbara Covett’s brand of rote history, in her case a prism of class resentment that explains everything and examines nothing? When Sheba Hart is first getting to know Covett, the lonely younger woman relaxes into a too-easy confidence, telling Covett more about her personal life and disappointments in one rainy afternoon than wiser adults might. Covett contemptuously lays this to Sheba’s enervated, undisciplined upper-class background. A considerate person might stop Sheba, refrain from taking advantage of her shaky sense of self. Ever the entrepreneur of others’ weakness, Barbara gathers evidence instead of exercising empathy. Her relation to the arts, itself a kind of shorthand, is telling too. We last see her on a park bench dangling a Sunday night chamber concert – the trappings of a finer life, presumably – as bait before her next target. US audiences might easily miss Notes on a Scandal’s astute dissection of recent-past class shifts and attitudes, distracted by its more operatic side. That would be a shame.
*******
This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com, for 1/18/07.
Friday, January 12, 2007
Film Review #75: Clean
2006
Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte
“I’m completely in your hands,” says Albrecht Hauser (Nick Nolte), the bear-sized boat-maker from Vancouver. He’s holding up his own rough hands, palms open, as he looks down at tiny Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) on a wintry Paris street. He’s taking a huge risk: he’s going to let Emily take her son Jay – the grandson he’s raised from birth – for the weekend, even though Emily is a heroin addict in shaky recovery, even though six-year-old Jay thinks she killed his musician father Lee, even though Albrecht told his wife, hospitalized in London, that he took the boy to Scotland for the weekend.
Only minutes ago Emily bolted, overcome with her own fears about this reunion – a long tracking shot follows her running down escalators and through a dense holiday shopping crowd before she changes her mind and returns, just as frantically, to find Albrecht. “You’ll have him back by the 3:40 train on Sunday?” asks Albrecht. It’s clear by this point in Clean that few people have ever spoken to Emily with such economy and direct force of attention. Emily promises she will have the boy back on time, and of course she nearly doesn’t.
Writer-director Olivier Assayas’ Clean opens a year or so earlier, as Emily and her partner Lee (in real life, musician James Johnston, who now plays with Nick Cave’s band The Bad Seeds) land in a small unspecified industrial city during an already fatiguing tour. Their motel’s dreary. The club they’re booked in is cramped and seedy. Their tempers are frayed. They argue and Lee reminds her that he’s 42 now. Their manager and other musicians think bitchy, dope-shooting Emily is the reason Lee’s career is skidding – an opinion that persists after he fatally overdoses, Emily spends six months in prison for possession, and nearly everyone writes her off.
Wisely, Assayas skips Emily’s prison time. Instead, we see the continuing jolt of her trying to put together a very different life after. She returns to Paris, waitresses in an uncle’s Chinese restaurant, works her way through methadone and pain killers, gets some scraps of help from old music friends while others blow her off, clerks in a mall boutique, harbors hopes of reviving her own music. Emily comes to grasp that she will never see her son until she gets clean.
Clean is one of several 2006 films that address the reliably devastating topic of addicted adults and the children within their reach. Besides Off the Black (another Nolte film just released last month), Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson portrays a crack-addicted teacher’s ambiguous relationship with a student who becomes his dealer (out on DVD on 2/13) and Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby features Maggie Gyllenhaal’s brilliant performance as another young ex-con addict who wants her small child back (out on DVD on 1/23).
Far less acclaimed than Fleck’s and Collyer’s US-set films, Clean burns longer than both. Clean portrays the pull that both music and heroin exert, and it relies less on the drama of downfall, more on enduringly quiet scenes: the near-documentary feel of rock’n’roll road life that Assayas establishes immediately, Albrecht’s confiding to his wife that kids scare him because “they know what you’re thinking before you say it,” Emily’s fragile persistence, Jay’s confrontation with her in the Paris zoo, and the wonderful exchanges between Emily and Albrecht.
Seeing Nick Nolte as Albrecht Hauser is startling after his memorable string of alcoholic-addict roles. He was harrowing in Affliction, droll and sorrowful in The Good Thief, and he carries last month’s Off the Black. Even though Maggie Cheung won Best Actress award at Cannes for Emily and there's some Oscar-buzz now, the pivot here is Nolte’s Albrecht, an artisan model for his musician son who also crafts a sturdily sea-worthy relationship with Emily.
Assayas has worked with Maggie Cheung before (they were married briefly before making Clean), first directing her in Irma Vep (1996) and expanding her international reputation beyond Hong Kong. Set in London, Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco, Clean has opened in nineteen other countries since its 2004 Cannes premiere and prior to its limited US theatrical release in late April 2006.
The DVD, also released last April, has excellent interviews with Assayas, Cheung, Nolte, the English pop star Tricky, and the band Metric (who play themselves in the opening scenes). Real musicians play all the musician roles in Clean. A Metric members reflects, “Music is more addictive than any substance – it will justify the most destitute existence.” How Assayas works that out on-screen is worth the trip.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/11/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a weekly DVD column reviewing recent films never released theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
2006
Director: Olivier Assayas
Cast: Maggie Cheung, Nick Nolte
“I’m completely in your hands,” says Albrecht Hauser (Nick Nolte), the bear-sized boat-maker from Vancouver. He’s holding up his own rough hands, palms open, as he looks down at tiny Emily Wang (Maggie Cheung) on a wintry Paris street. He’s taking a huge risk: he’s going to let Emily take her son Jay – the grandson he’s raised from birth – for the weekend, even though Emily is a heroin addict in shaky recovery, even though six-year-old Jay thinks she killed his musician father Lee, even though Albrecht told his wife, hospitalized in London, that he took the boy to Scotland for the weekend.
Only minutes ago Emily bolted, overcome with her own fears about this reunion – a long tracking shot follows her running down escalators and through a dense holiday shopping crowd before she changes her mind and returns, just as frantically, to find Albrecht. “You’ll have him back by the 3:40 train on Sunday?” asks Albrecht. It’s clear by this point in Clean that few people have ever spoken to Emily with such economy and direct force of attention. Emily promises she will have the boy back on time, and of course she nearly doesn’t.
Writer-director Olivier Assayas’ Clean opens a year or so earlier, as Emily and her partner Lee (in real life, musician James Johnston, who now plays with Nick Cave’s band The Bad Seeds) land in a small unspecified industrial city during an already fatiguing tour. Their motel’s dreary. The club they’re booked in is cramped and seedy. Their tempers are frayed. They argue and Lee reminds her that he’s 42 now. Their manager and other musicians think bitchy, dope-shooting Emily is the reason Lee’s career is skidding – an opinion that persists after he fatally overdoses, Emily spends six months in prison for possession, and nearly everyone writes her off.
Wisely, Assayas skips Emily’s prison time. Instead, we see the continuing jolt of her trying to put together a very different life after. She returns to Paris, waitresses in an uncle’s Chinese restaurant, works her way through methadone and pain killers, gets some scraps of help from old music friends while others blow her off, clerks in a mall boutique, harbors hopes of reviving her own music. Emily comes to grasp that she will never see her son until she gets clean.
Clean is one of several 2006 films that address the reliably devastating topic of addicted adults and the children within their reach. Besides Off the Black (another Nolte film just released last month), Ryan Fleck’s Half Nelson portrays a crack-addicted teacher’s ambiguous relationship with a student who becomes his dealer (out on DVD on 2/13) and Laurie Collyer’s Sherrybaby features Maggie Gyllenhaal’s brilliant performance as another young ex-con addict who wants her small child back (out on DVD on 1/23).
Far less acclaimed than Fleck’s and Collyer’s US-set films, Clean burns longer than both. Clean portrays the pull that both music and heroin exert, and it relies less on the drama of downfall, more on enduringly quiet scenes: the near-documentary feel of rock’n’roll road life that Assayas establishes immediately, Albrecht’s confiding to his wife that kids scare him because “they know what you’re thinking before you say it,” Emily’s fragile persistence, Jay’s confrontation with her in the Paris zoo, and the wonderful exchanges between Emily and Albrecht.
Seeing Nick Nolte as Albrecht Hauser is startling after his memorable string of alcoholic-addict roles. He was harrowing in Affliction, droll and sorrowful in The Good Thief, and he carries last month’s Off the Black. Even though Maggie Cheung won Best Actress award at Cannes for Emily and there's some Oscar-buzz now, the pivot here is Nolte’s Albrecht, an artisan model for his musician son who also crafts a sturdily sea-worthy relationship with Emily.
Assayas has worked with Maggie Cheung before (they were married briefly before making Clean), first directing her in Irma Vep (1996) and expanding her international reputation beyond Hong Kong. Set in London, Paris, Vancouver and San Francisco, Clean has opened in nineteen other countries since its 2004 Cannes premiere and prior to its limited US theatrical release in late April 2006.
The DVD, also released last April, has excellent interviews with Assayas, Cheung, Nolte, the English pop star Tricky, and the band Metric (who play themselves in the opening scenes). Real musicians play all the musician roles in Clean. A Metric members reflects, “Music is more addictive than any substance – it will justify the most destitute existence.” How Assayas works that out on-screen is worth the trip.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/11/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a weekly DVD column reviewing recent films never released theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Film Review #74: The Red Shoes
1948
Directors: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Cast: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring
I loved Rize, I can’t wait for Stomp the Yard, and that last dance number in Idlewild is dazzling even if the final credits do roll right over it – what were they thinking? The list is longer. We’ve had no shortage of good dancing on-screen over these last several years. But you have to go back a ways further for the mother of all dance films. The one that convinced director Brian DePalma he wanted to make movies. The one that Martin Scorsese looked to when he needed a template for fighter Jake LaMotta’s experience inside the ring for Raging Bull. The one that led to Gene Kelley’s 18-minute ballet finale to Gershwin in An American in Paris. The one whose empty theatre seats during rehearsals A Chorus Line copied when that Broadway production went on-screen. British filmmaker Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes was 50 years old in 1998. In observing that, the British Film Institute said it was still the definitive movie about ballet.
As ever, a young unknown gets a big break and must choose what their art means to them. Shortly after World War II ends, London dancer Vickie Page (Moira Shearer) joins the touring dance company of Russian impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). The figure of Lermontov is based loosely on Sergei Dhiagilev, charismatic and controlling manager of the historic Ballet Russe. Lermontov also brings on young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and commissions him to score a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale of the girl bewitched by magical red shoes who dances herself to death. Despite the show’s great success, Lermontov and Craster’s rivalry over Vickie provokes a split, an eventual reunion and showdown for her loyalty. Vickie’s seemingly bewitched death echoes her ballet role.
The Red Shoes includes a performance of the entire original ballet within the film, instead of a few abbreviated scenes where actors, with enough coaching and the right cutaway shots, might credibly pretend to be dancers, a few twirls at a time. Dhiagilev’s real company ballet master, Leonide Massine, has a major dancing role in the film, as does then-famed ballerina Ludmilla Tcherena. Moira Shearer had never acted in film and was reluctant to leave her own blossoming career as second dancer (after Margot Fonteyn) at Sadler Wells in London. On the 1994 Criterion Collection DVD’s rich and excellent commentary track, Shearer relates how Michael Powell pursued her for a year to play Vickie Page.
Moreover, Jake Cardiff – who had incidentally never filmed dance before The Red Shoes, though he was already England’s premiere color cinematographer – gives us an absorbing full dance performance that quickly morphs into fantasy and magic. No theater-bound audience could ever fully take in such a live performance’s changes of scene and perspective from their seats, nor logically believe them if they did. But then, The Red Shoes is about what dancers experience inside an artistic world and its consuming collaborative effort, and only afterward about whatever partial glimpse the audience has from beyond the footlights. In contrast, a film with similar themes adapted from the stage like last year’s Rent disappointed because its camera careened aimlessly, just because it could.
The Red Shoes emerged in a dance-receptive, post-war era when both British and US audiences looked to art and entertainment to relieve years of strain and privation. In 1946, when Powell and his Hungarian-born collaborator Emeric Pressburger launched this project, England created a national arts council. The same year George Balanchine started the New York City Ballet. Although ultimately popular in England, The Red Shoes perturbed film critics there at first, with its pioneering mix of genres and flights of fantasy and a tragic ending distastefully “out of place” in a musical. But opening stateside in October 1948, The Red Shoes filled New York City’s Bijou Theater for 110 weeks in a row, was Oscar-nominated for best picture and editing, and won for art direction and original score.
Powell and Pressburger, who wrote The Red Shoes script, made 22 films together in their production company, The Archers. The Red Shoes comes out of their richest period in the 1940s. Their war-themed films had already confounded critics and politicians with “overly sympathetic” portrayals of the enemy – good to recall when you see Clint Eastwood’s brand new Letters from Iwo Jima. The Red Shoes is an entrancing gateway.
*******
This review was published in the 1/4/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle in the column Make it Snappy, a weekly DVD review of recent films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
1948
Directors: Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger
Cast: Moira Shearer, Anton Walbrook, Marius Goring
I loved Rize, I can’t wait for Stomp the Yard, and that last dance number in Idlewild is dazzling even if the final credits do roll right over it – what were they thinking? The list is longer. We’ve had no shortage of good dancing on-screen over these last several years. But you have to go back a ways further for the mother of all dance films. The one that convinced director Brian DePalma he wanted to make movies. The one that Martin Scorsese looked to when he needed a template for fighter Jake LaMotta’s experience inside the ring for Raging Bull. The one that led to Gene Kelley’s 18-minute ballet finale to Gershwin in An American in Paris. The one whose empty theatre seats during rehearsals A Chorus Line copied when that Broadway production went on-screen. British filmmaker Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes was 50 years old in 1998. In observing that, the British Film Institute said it was still the definitive movie about ballet.
As ever, a young unknown gets a big break and must choose what their art means to them. Shortly after World War II ends, London dancer Vickie Page (Moira Shearer) joins the touring dance company of Russian impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook). The figure of Lermontov is based loosely on Sergei Dhiagilev, charismatic and controlling manager of the historic Ballet Russe. Lermontov also brings on young composer Julian Craster (Marius Goring) and commissions him to score a ballet based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy-tale of the girl bewitched by magical red shoes who dances herself to death. Despite the show’s great success, Lermontov and Craster’s rivalry over Vickie provokes a split, an eventual reunion and showdown for her loyalty. Vickie’s seemingly bewitched death echoes her ballet role.
The Red Shoes includes a performance of the entire original ballet within the film, instead of a few abbreviated scenes where actors, with enough coaching and the right cutaway shots, might credibly pretend to be dancers, a few twirls at a time. Dhiagilev’s real company ballet master, Leonide Massine, has a major dancing role in the film, as does then-famed ballerina Ludmilla Tcherena. Moira Shearer had never acted in film and was reluctant to leave her own blossoming career as second dancer (after Margot Fonteyn) at Sadler Wells in London. On the 1994 Criterion Collection DVD’s rich and excellent commentary track, Shearer relates how Michael Powell pursued her for a year to play Vickie Page.
Moreover, Jake Cardiff – who had incidentally never filmed dance before The Red Shoes, though he was already England’s premiere color cinematographer – gives us an absorbing full dance performance that quickly morphs into fantasy and magic. No theater-bound audience could ever fully take in such a live performance’s changes of scene and perspective from their seats, nor logically believe them if they did. But then, The Red Shoes is about what dancers experience inside an artistic world and its consuming collaborative effort, and only afterward about whatever partial glimpse the audience has from beyond the footlights. In contrast, a film with similar themes adapted from the stage like last year’s Rent disappointed because its camera careened aimlessly, just because it could.
The Red Shoes emerged in a dance-receptive, post-war era when both British and US audiences looked to art and entertainment to relieve years of strain and privation. In 1946, when Powell and his Hungarian-born collaborator Emeric Pressburger launched this project, England created a national arts council. The same year George Balanchine started the New York City Ballet. Although ultimately popular in England, The Red Shoes perturbed film critics there at first, with its pioneering mix of genres and flights of fantasy and a tragic ending distastefully “out of place” in a musical. But opening stateside in October 1948, The Red Shoes filled New York City’s Bijou Theater for 110 weeks in a row, was Oscar-nominated for best picture and editing, and won for art direction and original score.
Powell and Pressburger, who wrote The Red Shoes script, made 22 films together in their production company, The Archers. The Red Shoes comes out of their richest period in the 1940s. Their war-themed films had already confounded critics and politicians with “overly sympathetic” portrayals of the enemy – good to recall when you see Clint Eastwood’s brand new Letters from Iwo Jima. The Red Shoes is an entrancing gateway.
*******
This review was published in the 1/4/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle in the column Make it Snappy, a weekly DVD review of recent films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Film Review #73: Brother to Brother
2004
Director: Rodney Evans
Cast: Anthony Mackie, Roger Robinson, Daniel Sunjata
Film can be a double-edged sword. In 1991, when George Halliday’s videocam captured Los Angeles police beating Rodney King, it provided visual evidence that was intelligible and convincing to large portions of the public, which in turn arguably made possible the prosecution of four of the officers. At the same time, that grainy image reinforced other mainstream media stereotypes. Throughout the long Simi Valley trial, the LA riots that followed the officers’ acquittal in 1992, and the national soul-searching and community organizing about police behavior in the 90’s and since, Rodney King has been persistently reduced to that eternally transient, one-dimensional figure – a “motorist.” Mainstream movies have the same pull. Despite the chopped-up chronology and multiple story-lines of a film like Babel, more often audiences, reviewers and investors have remained uncomfortable with layered, messier plots that reveal connections instead of keeping life’s parts roped off.
With that thought in mind, it’s not surprising that we meet Brother to Brother’s main character, Perry (Anthony Mackie), on that East Coast equivalent of the LA freeway – New York City’s MTA. As Perry rides along sketching another passenger across the aisle – the two young black men eye each other just a little – an older man looks back and forth between them and smiles knowingly, nostalgically maybe, before he gets off. Perry’s father has kicked his gay son out and the shuffling, rumpled older man lives in a homeless shelter, but this is not going to be another story about rootless outsiders that stays in its box.
Perry is an art student at Columbia, talented, curious, seeking his own roots and his own way. Pretty soon Brother to Brother director-screenwriter Rodney Evans has Perry arguing in Black History class with another young man who doesn’t see why Perry must keep bringing up the gay black subculture at the heart of the 1920s cultural movement we call the Harlem Renaissance. Brother to Brother uses wonderfully shot and acted flashbacks of ground-breaking, now-revered figures like writers Langston Hughes (Daniel Sunjata), Zora Neale Hurston (Aunjanue Ellis) and Wallace Thurman (Ray Ford); they meet as excited, brilliant young people, live together in a brownstone they dub “Niggerati Manor,” struggle with artistic and commercial ethics, and publish a radical magazine called Fire!! that first earned them withering scorn for its style and content.
Perry learns about this vividly when he makes friends with that old guy from the train, a semi-fictionalized Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson, with Duane Boutte as the slender, elegant, younger version in the flashbacks). Nugent’s poetic short story, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade,” was the first published African American literary work on gay themes. He recites part of it and then Perry recognizes the passage, and his identity, in an anthology.
Nugent was also a painter; here, he takes Perry to the now-deserted building where he once lived and worked and the two artists paint one another – a profoundly loving act as imagined across the generations by Evans. The director spent two years researching this film at Harlem’s Schomburg Center and Nugent’s executor, Tom Wirth, gave him access to thirty hours of video interviews with Nugent.
Nugent died in 1987 and at first glance Brother to Brother is set roughly in the present, but it might as easily be a decade earlier – during Nugent’s life or in the early 90’s, contemporary with Rodney King’s era. Two movies that influenced Evans – Marlon Riggs’ great Tongues Untied and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho came out in that period (1990 and 1991 respectively); another, Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), came out as Evans shot this one. When the film premiered in late 2004, Evans said, “I am not really into films having one simple message.” Perry’s jolt of recognition that Nugent is not “just” an old bum – along with issues of class, interracial romance, straight friendship, family cut-offs, gay-bashing, and what gets into the classroom and the bookstores – comprise this film’s many anti-“motorist” moments.
Skittish investors meant Brother to Brother took six years to make. Then some jittery reviewers had reservations about those multiple themes. Experienced as a documentary director and editor, Evans followed a careful course of festival entries (Special Jury Prize at Sundance), limited theatrical release, national PBS airing (on Independent Lens in June 2005), then rapid DVD release. As Bruce Nugent did for young Perry, this film will open a world.
*******
The Syracuse City Eagle weekly published this review on 12/28/06 in Make it Snappy, a regular column reviewing DVDs.
2004
Director: Rodney Evans
Cast: Anthony Mackie, Roger Robinson, Daniel Sunjata
Film can be a double-edged sword. In 1991, when George Halliday’s videocam captured Los Angeles police beating Rodney King, it provided visual evidence that was intelligible and convincing to large portions of the public, which in turn arguably made possible the prosecution of four of the officers. At the same time, that grainy image reinforced other mainstream media stereotypes. Throughout the long Simi Valley trial, the LA riots that followed the officers’ acquittal in 1992, and the national soul-searching and community organizing about police behavior in the 90’s and since, Rodney King has been persistently reduced to that eternally transient, one-dimensional figure – a “motorist.” Mainstream movies have the same pull. Despite the chopped-up chronology and multiple story-lines of a film like Babel, more often audiences, reviewers and investors have remained uncomfortable with layered, messier plots that reveal connections instead of keeping life’s parts roped off.
With that thought in mind, it’s not surprising that we meet Brother to Brother’s main character, Perry (Anthony Mackie), on that East Coast equivalent of the LA freeway – New York City’s MTA. As Perry rides along sketching another passenger across the aisle – the two young black men eye each other just a little – an older man looks back and forth between them and smiles knowingly, nostalgically maybe, before he gets off. Perry’s father has kicked his gay son out and the shuffling, rumpled older man lives in a homeless shelter, but this is not going to be another story about rootless outsiders that stays in its box.
Perry is an art student at Columbia, talented, curious, seeking his own roots and his own way. Pretty soon Brother to Brother director-screenwriter Rodney Evans has Perry arguing in Black History class with another young man who doesn’t see why Perry must keep bringing up the gay black subculture at the heart of the 1920s cultural movement we call the Harlem Renaissance. Brother to Brother uses wonderfully shot and acted flashbacks of ground-breaking, now-revered figures like writers Langston Hughes (Daniel Sunjata), Zora Neale Hurston (Aunjanue Ellis) and Wallace Thurman (Ray Ford); they meet as excited, brilliant young people, live together in a brownstone they dub “Niggerati Manor,” struggle with artistic and commercial ethics, and publish a radical magazine called Fire!! that first earned them withering scorn for its style and content.
Perry learns about this vividly when he makes friends with that old guy from the train, a semi-fictionalized Bruce Nugent (Roger Robinson, with Duane Boutte as the slender, elegant, younger version in the flashbacks). Nugent’s poetic short story, “Smoke, Lillies and Jade,” was the first published African American literary work on gay themes. He recites part of it and then Perry recognizes the passage, and his identity, in an anthology.
Nugent was also a painter; here, he takes Perry to the now-deserted building where he once lived and worked and the two artists paint one another – a profoundly loving act as imagined across the generations by Evans. The director spent two years researching this film at Harlem’s Schomburg Center and Nugent’s executor, Tom Wirth, gave him access to thirty hours of video interviews with Nugent.
Nugent died in 1987 and at first glance Brother to Brother is set roughly in the present, but it might as easily be a decade earlier – during Nugent’s life or in the early 90’s, contemporary with Rodney King’s era. Two movies that influenced Evans – Marlon Riggs’ great Tongues Untied and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho came out in that period (1990 and 1991 respectively); another, Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), came out as Evans shot this one. When the film premiered in late 2004, Evans said, “I am not really into films having one simple message.” Perry’s jolt of recognition that Nugent is not “just” an old bum – along with issues of class, interracial romance, straight friendship, family cut-offs, gay-bashing, and what gets into the classroom and the bookstores – comprise this film’s many anti-“motorist” moments.
Skittish investors meant Brother to Brother took six years to make. Then some jittery reviewers had reservations about those multiple themes. Experienced as a documentary director and editor, Evans followed a careful course of festival entries (Special Jury Prize at Sundance), limited theatrical release, national PBS airing (on Independent Lens in June 2005), then rapid DVD release. As Bruce Nugent did for young Perry, this film will open a world.
*******
The Syracuse City Eagle weekly published this review on 12/28/06 in Make it Snappy, a regular column reviewing DVDs.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Film Review #72: The Best of Youth
2003 (Italy); 2005 (U.S.). Miramax DVD release 2/7/2006 (2 discs, 368 min., color, Italian & French language tracks with English & Spanish subtitles, Region 1).
Director: Marco Tullio Giordana
Screenplay: Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli
Cinematographer: Roberto Forza
Editor: Roberto Missiroli
Producer: Angelo Barbagallo
Cast: Luigi Lo Cascio (Nicola Carati), Alessio Boni (Matteo Carati), Jasmine Trinca (Giorgia), Sonia Bergamasco (Giulia), Maya Sausa (Mirella), Adriana Asti (Adriana Carati), Andrea Tidona (Angelo Carati), Fabrizio Gifuni (Carlo), Lidia Vitale (Giovanna Carati), Valentina Carnelutti (Francesca Carati)
Giordana’s The Best of Youth opens in Rome with rock music – the Animals’ "House of the Rising Sun" – as brothers Nicola and Matteo Carati prepare for college term exams and a summer trek to Norway’s remote North Cape. It’s 1966. After Matteo impulsively liberates the young woman Giorgia from a psychiatric clinic, their trip falls apart, though Nicola goes partway alone. In 2003 Matteo’s son Andrea completes that journey. In vignettes every few years between those dates, the Caratis and those dear to them endure Italy’s late 20th century convulsions. In Italian cinema, implicitly the family = the nation, especially the brothers. The Best of Youth falls firmly within a lineage of films such as Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), and Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers (1981) for its governing plot. And quite early, one scene establishes Giordana’s governing principle. Nicola Carati learns he passed his exam with an A “because of the sympathetic factor.” His medical professor says he means that “in the Greek sense – to share in the pathos.” To be unsympathetic, he tells Nicola, “is the worst thing a doctor can be.”
Giordana apparently thinks that goes for filmmakers too. In a movie covering decades that saw protesting students join labor strikes and clash with police, inflation, radical industrial reorganization, attacks by the terrorist Red Brigades, natural disasters like the winter floods of 1966 in Florence that threatened irreplaceable artistic treasures, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, the first trial in the world that allowed mental patients to testify about shock treatment, political scandals, and the Mafia wars, temptations to go two-dimensional with characters and events, or employ a certain condensed tunnel vision, must be constant.
As just one example of history’s weight, two recent documentaries have acquainted US filmgoers with matters that have been deeply polarizing in Italian life. Marco Turco’s Excellent Cadavers, also available on DVD, opened theatrically in Manhattan last July to warm reviews. Marco Amento’s The Last Godfather: The Ghost of Corleone has toured the festival circuit for the past year. With somewhat different emphases, both use the car-bombing of state prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and four passengers in Sicily on May 23, 1992, as centerpiece and narrative turning point.
It’s hard to overstate the flashpoint importance for contemporary Italy of Falcone’s assassination. Two factors especially served to concentrate public attention and revulsion. Photos of his bloody corpse, head thrown back and still seated in the car wreck, were repeatedly printed and televised, paralleling those of JFK’s assassination and of course the 9/11 plane strikes. Turco’s film highlights Sicilian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, whose thousands of photos of Mafia doings helped prepare the ground. Then, the widely seen, scorching outrage of Falcone’s bodyguard’s widow, Rosaria Schifani, who insisted that the Cardinal saying their funeral Mass publicly denounce the assassins, goaded comment from the Pope himself.
The resulting upheaval hardly destroyed the Mafia – Amento’s film investigates how Bernardo “Tractor” Provenzano eluded capture for decades – but it did uncover the Mafia’s long-time deal with ruling Christian Democrats to suppress Communists in the south since post-war days. And it led to some legal reforms, which Berlusconi, coming to power in 2001, promptly dismantled. Also in 2001, in October, the influential Aperture Gallery in New York exhibited Battaglia’s Mafia photos, querying what art can do about violence. Battaglia traveled to Manhattan too, expressly in solidarity with New Yorkers after 9/11; her photo book, with its cover portrait of the now-iconic Rosaria Schifani, was reissued here in 2003.
Such background may make watching this film richer and historically more coherent. The Best of Youth includes footage of Schifani, provides one scene that dramatizes how entire congregations recited anti-Mafia pledges at Mass, presents the oldest Carati sibling – Giovanna the magistrate – as having just joined Falcone’s team, and has (as the mother of Matteo’s son) Mirella, a photojournalist living in Palermo and covering these events. At the same time, there is something deeply satisfying in noticing that this film includes the Falcone assassination, but is not just about the Sicilian Mafia. I think The Best of Youth achieves a maturity and generosity toward its characters by this. Giordana’s work depends upon its Italian viewers to already possess some foundation about historic events. As for the national trauma that some have been, we could say that Giordana makes a film that is not stuck, that integrates horrific events into the whole with enough room left for characters of quite extraordinary detail and appeal. So for example, Giorgia remains in the brothers’ lives for many years in quite complex ways, calling forth the best and worst in each, actually grasping the brothers’ bond as no one else does. And Nicola sees how Matteo, who enters the army and then the police, is really most like his own lover Giulia, who leaves him and their four-year-old daughter Sara to fade into the Red Brigades. So at ease with nearly everyone, Nicola can interrupt neither the despair nor lethal choices of the two most dear to him. Growing up, Sara displays a streak that’s alarmingly like both. It’s not only that she’s ruthlessly competitive at cards and fencing. “Why are you so severe?” Nicola asks Sara when she’s happy to let her mother rot in Spoleto Maximum Security Prison – even though he has put Giulia there himself. Two days before Sara marries, Nicola effects her reconciliation with Giulia. “Are you happy? Then now is the time to be generous.” This might be either a rite of passage to adulthood or a nation integrating its past.
Originally envisioned as a television mini-series, The Best of Youth gains by the straightforwardness of that medium and by the current trend toward screening novelistic feature fiction film in various formats. Chance meetings and simple declarations about what happens next move things along economically that might as well so move. Adult characters age four decades mostly by the style and color of their hair; it seems a small matter.
On the other hand, The Best of Youth often displays considerable visual finesse. Giordana, cinematographer Roberto Forza and editor Roberto Missiroli have produced several remarkable intercut sequences that are tense and moving – particularly the moments leading up to Matteo’s New Year’s Eve suicide as he moves about his flat, waters his plants, surfs his TV, while the family he briefly visited celebrates elsewhere with a raucous card-game that humors the kids, then slips suddenly over the balcony rail as though casually stooping to tie a shoe.
The pervasive pleasure of other visual treatments emerges gradually. The motif of the courtyard – architecturally the heart of Italian structures – recurs repeatedly when characters look around some courtyard’s walls as though searching their own hearts, reinforcing that the name Carati has a root meaning heart as well. The day Nicola comes home to a grim, smoky political meeting in his living room and little Sara stashed in the kitchen, he scoots her out for some fresh air with a jovial dance step that echoes the Charlie Chaplin poster on the hallway wall. Characters who are emotionally outside frequently look in on intimate, warmly-lit scenes from a hallway, themselves shot in dark silhouette; this has the curious effect of joining us kindly with them, as though we were standing there in the hallway too. The night that Giulia leaves Nicola, she steps past him from their dark foyer through an open door that – illogically – lets in a blaze of red light, as though stepping into a furnace. When Nicola must tell Giorgia that Matteo is dead and Giulia arrested, Giorgia approaches the weeping man from behind as he sits on a garden bench; we watch parts of her come from over his shoulder – first her shambling feet, then one hand laid on his shoulder, then her palm on his cheek, after twenty years of not letting anyone touch her – long before we see her face. It is unsurprising that filmmakers so attuned to visual nuance would also give us characters – especially Matteo and Mirella – who make sense of the world by taking pictures.
The Best of Youth is a long film, here presented on two discs that run a tad over three hours each. Miramax has shaved a half hour plus off the European version, which runs at 6 hours, 40 minutes. This DVD set plays well on a large screen with lots of detail, rich color and good sound. The subtitles are legible; the end credits barely so. It has no extras at all.
*******
Cineaste Magazine published this review in its Winter 2006 issue.
2003 (Italy); 2005 (U.S.). Miramax DVD release 2/7/2006 (2 discs, 368 min., color, Italian & French language tracks with English & Spanish subtitles, Region 1).
Director: Marco Tullio Giordana
Screenplay: Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli
Cinematographer: Roberto Forza
Editor: Roberto Missiroli
Producer: Angelo Barbagallo
Cast: Luigi Lo Cascio (Nicola Carati), Alessio Boni (Matteo Carati), Jasmine Trinca (Giorgia), Sonia Bergamasco (Giulia), Maya Sausa (Mirella), Adriana Asti (Adriana Carati), Andrea Tidona (Angelo Carati), Fabrizio Gifuni (Carlo), Lidia Vitale (Giovanna Carati), Valentina Carnelutti (Francesca Carati)
Giordana’s The Best of Youth opens in Rome with rock music – the Animals’ "House of the Rising Sun" – as brothers Nicola and Matteo Carati prepare for college term exams and a summer trek to Norway’s remote North Cape. It’s 1966. After Matteo impulsively liberates the young woman Giorgia from a psychiatric clinic, their trip falls apart, though Nicola goes partway alone. In 2003 Matteo’s son Andrea completes that journey. In vignettes every few years between those dates, the Caratis and those dear to them endure Italy’s late 20th century convulsions. In Italian cinema, implicitly the family = the nation, especially the brothers. The Best of Youth falls firmly within a lineage of films such as Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960), Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), and Francesco Rosi’s Three Brothers (1981) for its governing plot. And quite early, one scene establishes Giordana’s governing principle. Nicola Carati learns he passed his exam with an A “because of the sympathetic factor.” His medical professor says he means that “in the Greek sense – to share in the pathos.” To be unsympathetic, he tells Nicola, “is the worst thing a doctor can be.”
Giordana apparently thinks that goes for filmmakers too. In a movie covering decades that saw protesting students join labor strikes and clash with police, inflation, radical industrial reorganization, attacks by the terrorist Red Brigades, natural disasters like the winter floods of 1966 in Florence that threatened irreplaceable artistic treasures, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, the first trial in the world that allowed mental patients to testify about shock treatment, political scandals, and the Mafia wars, temptations to go two-dimensional with characters and events, or employ a certain condensed tunnel vision, must be constant.
As just one example of history’s weight, two recent documentaries have acquainted US filmgoers with matters that have been deeply polarizing in Italian life. Marco Turco’s Excellent Cadavers, also available on DVD, opened theatrically in Manhattan last July to warm reviews. Marco Amento’s The Last Godfather: The Ghost of Corleone has toured the festival circuit for the past year. With somewhat different emphases, both use the car-bombing of state prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and four passengers in Sicily on May 23, 1992, as centerpiece and narrative turning point.
It’s hard to overstate the flashpoint importance for contemporary Italy of Falcone’s assassination. Two factors especially served to concentrate public attention and revulsion. Photos of his bloody corpse, head thrown back and still seated in the car wreck, were repeatedly printed and televised, paralleling those of JFK’s assassination and of course the 9/11 plane strikes. Turco’s film highlights Sicilian photojournalist Letizia Battaglia, whose thousands of photos of Mafia doings helped prepare the ground. Then, the widely seen, scorching outrage of Falcone’s bodyguard’s widow, Rosaria Schifani, who insisted that the Cardinal saying their funeral Mass publicly denounce the assassins, goaded comment from the Pope himself.
The resulting upheaval hardly destroyed the Mafia – Amento’s film investigates how Bernardo “Tractor” Provenzano eluded capture for decades – but it did uncover the Mafia’s long-time deal with ruling Christian Democrats to suppress Communists in the south since post-war days. And it led to some legal reforms, which Berlusconi, coming to power in 2001, promptly dismantled. Also in 2001, in October, the influential Aperture Gallery in New York exhibited Battaglia’s Mafia photos, querying what art can do about violence. Battaglia traveled to Manhattan too, expressly in solidarity with New Yorkers after 9/11; her photo book, with its cover portrait of the now-iconic Rosaria Schifani, was reissued here in 2003.
Such background may make watching this film richer and historically more coherent. The Best of Youth includes footage of Schifani, provides one scene that dramatizes how entire congregations recited anti-Mafia pledges at Mass, presents the oldest Carati sibling – Giovanna the magistrate – as having just joined Falcone’s team, and has (as the mother of Matteo’s son) Mirella, a photojournalist living in Palermo and covering these events. At the same time, there is something deeply satisfying in noticing that this film includes the Falcone assassination, but is not just about the Sicilian Mafia. I think The Best of Youth achieves a maturity and generosity toward its characters by this. Giordana’s work depends upon its Italian viewers to already possess some foundation about historic events. As for the national trauma that some have been, we could say that Giordana makes a film that is not stuck, that integrates horrific events into the whole with enough room left for characters of quite extraordinary detail and appeal. So for example, Giorgia remains in the brothers’ lives for many years in quite complex ways, calling forth the best and worst in each, actually grasping the brothers’ bond as no one else does. And Nicola sees how Matteo, who enters the army and then the police, is really most like his own lover Giulia, who leaves him and their four-year-old daughter Sara to fade into the Red Brigades. So at ease with nearly everyone, Nicola can interrupt neither the despair nor lethal choices of the two most dear to him. Growing up, Sara displays a streak that’s alarmingly like both. It’s not only that she’s ruthlessly competitive at cards and fencing. “Why are you so severe?” Nicola asks Sara when she’s happy to let her mother rot in Spoleto Maximum Security Prison – even though he has put Giulia there himself. Two days before Sara marries, Nicola effects her reconciliation with Giulia. “Are you happy? Then now is the time to be generous.” This might be either a rite of passage to adulthood or a nation integrating its past.
Originally envisioned as a television mini-series, The Best of Youth gains by the straightforwardness of that medium and by the current trend toward screening novelistic feature fiction film in various formats. Chance meetings and simple declarations about what happens next move things along economically that might as well so move. Adult characters age four decades mostly by the style and color of their hair; it seems a small matter.
On the other hand, The Best of Youth often displays considerable visual finesse. Giordana, cinematographer Roberto Forza and editor Roberto Missiroli have produced several remarkable intercut sequences that are tense and moving – particularly the moments leading up to Matteo’s New Year’s Eve suicide as he moves about his flat, waters his plants, surfs his TV, while the family he briefly visited celebrates elsewhere with a raucous card-game that humors the kids, then slips suddenly over the balcony rail as though casually stooping to tie a shoe.
The pervasive pleasure of other visual treatments emerges gradually. The motif of the courtyard – architecturally the heart of Italian structures – recurs repeatedly when characters look around some courtyard’s walls as though searching their own hearts, reinforcing that the name Carati has a root meaning heart as well. The day Nicola comes home to a grim, smoky political meeting in his living room and little Sara stashed in the kitchen, he scoots her out for some fresh air with a jovial dance step that echoes the Charlie Chaplin poster on the hallway wall. Characters who are emotionally outside frequently look in on intimate, warmly-lit scenes from a hallway, themselves shot in dark silhouette; this has the curious effect of joining us kindly with them, as though we were standing there in the hallway too. The night that Giulia leaves Nicola, she steps past him from their dark foyer through an open door that – illogically – lets in a blaze of red light, as though stepping into a furnace. When Nicola must tell Giorgia that Matteo is dead and Giulia arrested, Giorgia approaches the weeping man from behind as he sits on a garden bench; we watch parts of her come from over his shoulder – first her shambling feet, then one hand laid on his shoulder, then her palm on his cheek, after twenty years of not letting anyone touch her – long before we see her face. It is unsurprising that filmmakers so attuned to visual nuance would also give us characters – especially Matteo and Mirella – who make sense of the world by taking pictures.
The Best of Youth is a long film, here presented on two discs that run a tad over three hours each. Miramax has shaved a half hour plus off the European version, which runs at 6 hours, 40 minutes. This DVD set plays well on a large screen with lots of detail, rich color and good sound. The subtitles are legible; the end credits barely so. It has no extras at all.
*******
Cineaste Magazine published this review in its Winter 2006 issue.
Thursday, December 21, 2006
Film Review #71: Hail Mary
1985; DVD 2006
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Myriem Roussel, Thierry Rode, Philippe Lacoste, Juliette Binoche
Even with its holiday season release, The Nativity Story is faltering at multiplex box offices. What is has going for it is Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary (she debuted in the New Zealand film Whale Rider) and director Catherine Hardwicke, whose sharp eye for contemporary young people brought us Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown. But you have to go back twenty-one years for most bracingly modern Holy Family.
In Hail Mary, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1985 take on the Nativity, Joseph drives a night-shift cab from the airport. Marie, whom we first see during her high school basketball team’s game, works nights in her father’s gas station on the airport road. After two years at arm’s length, Joseph is desperate and confused. One day he flings at her, “You don’t even care if we’re together! You don’t care if I’m sick or I die!”
In the age-old way of young men in love, Joseph (Thierry Rode) is by turns tender, demanding, pleading, petulant and accusing, all to get in Marie’s pants. Then he threatens to drown himself. Marie (Myriem Roussel) is unperturbed, answers with a gentle smile that she doesn’t think he will really jump in the lake.
Part of Joseph’s confusion is that he has no model to understand Marie’s seeming lack of desire, except his own indifference to another young woman. A luminous young Juliette Binoche, not quite believable here as spurned, plays Juliette, whose fervent pursuit of Joseph mirrors his pursuit of Marie. He does not want sex with Juliette because he does not love her, so he decides that Marie does not love him. Joseph’s insecure panic over rivals surges when the stranger Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste) arrives by night plane – Marie hears his jetliner passing overhead and pauses mid-motion – to announce Marie’s pregnancy. Rough as a Dutch uncle, swarthy Gabriel materializes suddenly in rooms and yells at pouting Joseph about having trust. “And some love, you jerk!” he adds, shoving Joseph and slapping him in the back of the head. Godard also injects a parallel story about a professor’s doomed affair with his student that comments on how inadequately intellect alone explains our origins and satisfies our longings.
Hail Mary was modern in more than its dress and setting. Godard spear-headed the French New Wave in the 60’s with films like Weekend and Breathless; two years ago he directed his eighty-ninth movie. He made Hail Mary in an era when interest in psychology made possible this kind of exploration of Joseph and Marie’s inner turmoil with their destiny and one another – complete with symbolic trappings of radiant sunrises, the moon and wind rippling the marshes. Godard frankly drew on the writings of Francoişe Dolto’s 1977 book, The Gospel is Confronted by Psychoanalysis.
He also looked to the past, basing some views of Mary on Michelangelo’s Pieta and drenching the story with Bach’s and Dvorak’s soaring music. For all its neon and rain-soaked asphalt, Hail Mary contains surprisingly few trendy fashion details that would frankly date it as mid-80’s. With the hindsight of two decades now, Godard’s use of some modern components has had the reverse effect of creating a certain timelessness.
Pope John-Paul II condemned Hail Mary as blasphemous. Besides subtler subversions, the film contains scenes in which Mary is naked or close to it, including her crucial exchange with Joseph about love’s meaning in which she teaches him to pay attention, her gynecological examination by her doctor – accenting her youth, Godard has Mary keep on her school-girl knee-socks while in the stirrups – and a late scene in which Mary, her mother and her new baby swim naked together. The Boston Roman Catholic Diocese made sure the film didn’t play there. Like Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, made three years later, Hail Mary often faced pickets and protests at theaters.
In October, New Yorker Films issued Hail Mary on a new DVD that also contains an interview with Godard about his aims and sources and some clips from the filming, plus another short film. Avoid the multiplexes and head for the rental shops, where you can get the real deal on faith’s demands and pitfalls.
********
This review was written for Make it Snappy, a weekly DVD column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse and older films of enduring worth, in the 12/21/06 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.
1985; DVD 2006
Director: Jean-Luc Godard
Cast: Myriem Roussel, Thierry Rode, Philippe Lacoste, Juliette Binoche
Even with its holiday season release, The Nativity Story is faltering at multiplex box offices. What is has going for it is Keisha Castle-Hughes as Mary (she debuted in the New Zealand film Whale Rider) and director Catherine Hardwicke, whose sharp eye for contemporary young people brought us Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown. But you have to go back twenty-one years for most bracingly modern Holy Family.
In Hail Mary, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1985 take on the Nativity, Joseph drives a night-shift cab from the airport. Marie, whom we first see during her high school basketball team’s game, works nights in her father’s gas station on the airport road. After two years at arm’s length, Joseph is desperate and confused. One day he flings at her, “You don’t even care if we’re together! You don’t care if I’m sick or I die!”
In the age-old way of young men in love, Joseph (Thierry Rode) is by turns tender, demanding, pleading, petulant and accusing, all to get in Marie’s pants. Then he threatens to drown himself. Marie (Myriem Roussel) is unperturbed, answers with a gentle smile that she doesn’t think he will really jump in the lake.
Part of Joseph’s confusion is that he has no model to understand Marie’s seeming lack of desire, except his own indifference to another young woman. A luminous young Juliette Binoche, not quite believable here as spurned, plays Juliette, whose fervent pursuit of Joseph mirrors his pursuit of Marie. He does not want sex with Juliette because he does not love her, so he decides that Marie does not love him. Joseph’s insecure panic over rivals surges when the stranger Gabriel (Philippe Lacoste) arrives by night plane – Marie hears his jetliner passing overhead and pauses mid-motion – to announce Marie’s pregnancy. Rough as a Dutch uncle, swarthy Gabriel materializes suddenly in rooms and yells at pouting Joseph about having trust. “And some love, you jerk!” he adds, shoving Joseph and slapping him in the back of the head. Godard also injects a parallel story about a professor’s doomed affair with his student that comments on how inadequately intellect alone explains our origins and satisfies our longings.
Hail Mary was modern in more than its dress and setting. Godard spear-headed the French New Wave in the 60’s with films like Weekend and Breathless; two years ago he directed his eighty-ninth movie. He made Hail Mary in an era when interest in psychology made possible this kind of exploration of Joseph and Marie’s inner turmoil with their destiny and one another – complete with symbolic trappings of radiant sunrises, the moon and wind rippling the marshes. Godard frankly drew on the writings of Francoişe Dolto’s 1977 book, The Gospel is Confronted by Psychoanalysis.
He also looked to the past, basing some views of Mary on Michelangelo’s Pieta and drenching the story with Bach’s and Dvorak’s soaring music. For all its neon and rain-soaked asphalt, Hail Mary contains surprisingly few trendy fashion details that would frankly date it as mid-80’s. With the hindsight of two decades now, Godard’s use of some modern components has had the reverse effect of creating a certain timelessness.
Pope John-Paul II condemned Hail Mary as blasphemous. Besides subtler subversions, the film contains scenes in which Mary is naked or close to it, including her crucial exchange with Joseph about love’s meaning in which she teaches him to pay attention, her gynecological examination by her doctor – accenting her youth, Godard has Mary keep on her school-girl knee-socks while in the stirrups – and a late scene in which Mary, her mother and her new baby swim naked together. The Boston Roman Catholic Diocese made sure the film didn’t play there. Like Scorcese’s Last Temptation of Christ, made three years later, Hail Mary often faced pickets and protests at theaters.
In October, New Yorker Films issued Hail Mary on a new DVD that also contains an interview with Godard about his aims and sources and some clips from the filming, plus another short film. Avoid the multiplexes and head for the rental shops, where you can get the real deal on faith’s demands and pitfalls.
********
This review was written for Make it Snappy, a weekly DVD column reviewing films that never opened theatrically in Syracuse and older films of enduring worth, in the 12/21/06 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.
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