Film Review #102: Straw Dogs
1971
Director: Sam Peckinpah
Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Susan George, Del Henney
Many movie-goers know director Sam Peckinpah best for his Westerns – those depicting the end of the Old West and especially his slow-motion choreographies of extreme violence. The signature example is 1969’s The Wild Bunch, with outlaws Pike Bishop (William Holden) and Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan) on collision course with each other and forces larger than themselves. Peckinpah was criticized for that film’s unsettling mixture of lingering with such balletic grace on detailed, hyper-realistic gore, even accused of glorifying violence. Films as diverse as George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (released only a couple months after The Wild Bunch) and Doug Limon’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) seem to have lifted their climatic shoot-outs from Peckinpah. But Peckinpah himself seems clearly to have meant the film as a cautionary tale, saying after its premiere, “Now they know what killing is really like.”
Two years after The Wild Bunch, in the holiday season just before New Year’s, Peckinpah released a modern-dress film. Starring Dustin Hoffman and the English actress Susan George as David and Amy Sumner, Straw Dogs depicts a contemporary young couple who have left the US to escape its violence and find “some quiet,” as David says, in the English countryside of Amy’s hometown at St. Buryan, Cornwall. Tea roses is not what they find.
David is a research mathematician. Algebraic formulas cover the blackboard in his study. Amy has a habit of erasing his plus signs on the blackboard and replacing them with minuses when she wanders through the room. He takes this not as affectionate, or even wanting attention, but as dismissive of his serious work. So she is immature, he defensive. Add to this that the locals – and Cornwall, its remote moors on the poorest, western-most tip of Briton, with its own ancient language and archeology, was fiercely insular and historically separatist – mostly regard David in his white sneakers and high-water pants much like an Eastern tender-foot, the stock fool in countless Westerns, and a coward.
At first these men smirk and taunt David in the pub. Some of the same men, ostensibly roofing the garage but mostly drinking and leering at Amy, hang her cat in the bedroom closet. They take David hunting in order to leave him lost on the moor, tripping over a borrowed gun. The loutish Charlie (Del Henney) and Norman (Ken Hutchison) move on to rape – a long scene that kept the film banned in England from 1984 until 2002, unsettling for its roughness and its deep ambiguity about whether Amy is aroused. There is an alcohol-soaked invasion of the Sumner house and David – who has actually been getting crosser for some time – defends his home, wife and a mentally fragile local man. The film’s tag-line calls David’s metamorphosis “the birth of a man,” while some reviewers call it a “homicidal rampage.” Neither catches Peckinpah’s far subtler direction or Hoffman’s performance, but you can see the battle lines drawn here, before Charles Bronson’s Death Wish franchise.
It’s worth recalling that a young couple – with or without particular social consciousness – might want to retreat from 1971 America, even then resembling the set of a Peckinpah classic in modern costume. Less than a year after the Kent State shootings, the Weather Underground blew up a restroom in the Capitol’s Senate wing in Washington, DC – this was the moment when Capitol police began checking all visitors for weapons. The US was still in Vietnam under Nixon, though our allies were withdrawing their forces and Nixon had to reduce troop levels. In 1971 a military tribunal convicted Lt. William Calley of murder in the 1968 deaths of twenty-two civilians at the Vietnamese village of My Lai. Sentenced to life in prison, Calley was freed by Nixon. And in September, just a few miles west of here in Wyoming County, 29 inmates and 10 hostages died when Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the re-taking of Attica Prison.
The Sumners sought an older, more civilized retreat to ride out America’s shock waves. The film’s opening shot, which comes into focus as slowly as a dawning realization, shows children playing ring-around-the-rosy in the village square’s cemetery. So Peckinpah moved from the end of the Old West to the death of the West itself. And right now Rod Lurie (The Contender) is directing the re-make.
*******
This review was published in the 5/17/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent films that didn’t open in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth. Recommended DVD edition is Criterion Collection’s 2003 2-disc set.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Film Review #101: Disappearances
2006
Director: Jay Craven
Cast: Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold, Charlie McDermott
Early in writer-director Jay Craven’s yarn about Prohibition-era whiskey smuggling across the Vermont-Quebec border, fifteen year-old “Wild Bill” Bonhomme – a grave and thoughtful young man played by Charlie McDermott, whose nickname comes more from his father’s dreams than his own temperament – seeks his Aunt Cordelia’s help. Hard times have driven Wild Bill’s father, Quebec Bill (Kris Kristofferson), back into the whiskey-running business, and the son wants in the worst way to go with his father, his Uncle Henry (Gary Farmer) and the quirky hired man, Muskrat Kinneson (William Sanderson), on this run for twenty cases they’ve heard are sitting there for the snatching. What fifteen-year-old would not want to canoe over the border with this crew, drink his first whiskey in a Quebec roadhouse with his Arcadian fiddlin’ dad, and race through the deep cedar woods in his Uncle Henry’s souped-up white Cadillac, outsmarting legendary, possibly supernatural bandits?
“Your mother treats you like a prize fish. Leave it to me,” says Cordelia (Genevieve Bujold), who agrees against her own better judgment to convince Wild Bills’ Cherokee mother Evangeline (Heather Rae) to let the boy visit a larger, wilder pond.
So Wild Bill goes with his father on a trip some would call ill-fated. Near the story’s end, the two are alone in the woods, Wild Bill hauling the wounded older man on a travois as the merciless and seemingly unkillable bandit Carcajou (Lothaire Bluteau) chases them. Quebec Bill directs his son to chop a frozen trout out of the brookside ice. Though the boy protests the fish is dead, Quebec Bill stashes it inside his coat and a little while later hands it back, wriggling, for Wild Bill to return to the stream. Perhaps underestimated as a mere man of action next to his mystical sister – Cordelia offers oracular advice, sees the future, and suddenly materializes and vanishes throughout the story – Quebec Bill delivers one of the film’s more graceful lessons on our illusions about the frozen present moment in the vast flow of time. Surrounded by revelations about lost fathers and whole freight trains gone missing, it’s a lesson more powerful because so modest.
Set in 1932 shortly before Prohibition ended, Disappearances completes what Jay Craven calls his “Vermont frontier trilogy,” three features based on interconnected novels by his old friend Howard Frank Mosher. Craven’s career has largely succeeded by his staking a claim as a regional filmmaker – he says “indigenous filmmaking” – and the frontier trilogy, along with some shorts and docs and The Year That Trembled (2002), an ensemble drama framed by the 1970 Kent State shootings, all come out of that aesthetic territory. His first feature, Where the Rivers Flow North (1993), is a brooding, atmospheric tale set in 1927 about a stubborn old woodsman and his long-time Native companion (Rip Torn and an incandescent Tantoo Cardinal) pitted against a hydroelectric project. A Stranger in the Kingdom (1999) depicts a World War II Black Army chaplain accused of murdering a white woman in a Vermont town. Craven has a pool of actors he works with often (the marvelously versatile Bill Raymond, for example) and typically lands much larger names who turn out to be old friends, believers in indie filmmaking, Vermont property-shoppers, and supporters of Craven’s summer camp for young filmmakers, Fledgling Films.
Mosher and Craven both live in Vermont – Craven teaches film at Marlboro College, and with his wife Bess O’Brien and producer Hathalee Higgs runs Kingdom County Productions – in the three-county area that residents traditionally call the “Northeast Kingdom,” also the setting for Mosher’s novels and Craven’s frontier trilogy. In their collaboration, this is an intricate, many-layered world. Disappearances was Mosher’s first novel – published in 1977 – but Craven may have left adapting this one till last because its thickets of criss-crossing, echoing symbols are more treacherous to film than to encounter on the page.
Craven likens the Disappearances film to a Western, with the Depression’s ragged hardship and Prohibition’s outlaw mentality transplanted to the lakes and woods along Canada’s border. The “magical realist whimsy” Craven finds in Mosher’s novel also dove-tails with his own fondness for dream-state cinema and the region’s already rich, trans-border blend of French Canadian and indigenous mythology – for example, the bandit Carcajou as menacing, shape-shifting loup garou and the snowy owl as signal of impending death.
There is an ambitious third anchor. Besides opening Disappearances with novelist William Faulkner’s warning – that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” – it’s clear that Craven and Mosher’s joint project aims to build a mythical world of Vermont’s “Kingdom County” that rivals Faulkner’s fictional “Yoknapatawpha County” in Mississippi. So one finds a “Faulknerian” web of associations, memory, family allusions and betrayals throughout Mosher’s novels that reverberate in Craven’s film adaptations. Wild Bill’s Uncle Henry Coville, brought so vividly to life here by Native actor Gary Farmer, appears briefly back in 1993’s Rivers Flow North film (played by another actor). Muskrat Kinneson’s clan occurs in several Mosher novels – including his newest, set in 1930 and titled On Kingdom Mountain, whose release in early July will coincide with the DVD release of Disappearances. Just as Faulkner’s novels carry an undertow of the South’s racial intermingling, the Vermont trilogy includes Native characters in sometimes sharply conflicted relations to white Vermonters, complicated all the more by the cross-border French factor. Like all American stories, then – to point to the tip of an iceberg – Disappearances is about disinheritance.
So Disappearances is ladled from a rich stew – its blessing and its major obstacle cinematically. Though it seems severe to say so, the film has loose ends – transitions that seem mechanical rather than organic, and moments when Kristofferson is coasting rather than moving the scene – that I can’t help thinking would have surfaced and been dealt with if less went on here. But mostly Disappearances is a welcome and often enough wondrous window on a corner of America that we really haven’t seen on-screen like this before Craven’s work. Disappearances did the festival run and – Craven’s done this with his other films too – spent last summer touring a hundred rural Vermont communities, filling the state’s relatively few movie theaters and church basements, Grange halls, and school auditoriums. Road-tested on home ground, the film is now one of twenty chosen by AFI as part of their 20/20 Project global film exchange for 2007.
*******
This review appeared on 5/14/07 in Stylusmagazine.com. Disappearances opened May 4th in San Francisco & Seattle & May 11th at Quad Cinema in New York City for one week runs, with subsequent limited theatrical release through June & DVD release in early July. Craven’s other features are available at netflicks.com.
2006
Director: Jay Craven
Cast: Kris Kristofferson, Genevieve Bujold, Charlie McDermott
Early in writer-director Jay Craven’s yarn about Prohibition-era whiskey smuggling across the Vermont-Quebec border, fifteen year-old “Wild Bill” Bonhomme – a grave and thoughtful young man played by Charlie McDermott, whose nickname comes more from his father’s dreams than his own temperament – seeks his Aunt Cordelia’s help. Hard times have driven Wild Bill’s father, Quebec Bill (Kris Kristofferson), back into the whiskey-running business, and the son wants in the worst way to go with his father, his Uncle Henry (Gary Farmer) and the quirky hired man, Muskrat Kinneson (William Sanderson), on this run for twenty cases they’ve heard are sitting there for the snatching. What fifteen-year-old would not want to canoe over the border with this crew, drink his first whiskey in a Quebec roadhouse with his Arcadian fiddlin’ dad, and race through the deep cedar woods in his Uncle Henry’s souped-up white Cadillac, outsmarting legendary, possibly supernatural bandits?
“Your mother treats you like a prize fish. Leave it to me,” says Cordelia (Genevieve Bujold), who agrees against her own better judgment to convince Wild Bills’ Cherokee mother Evangeline (Heather Rae) to let the boy visit a larger, wilder pond.
So Wild Bill goes with his father on a trip some would call ill-fated. Near the story’s end, the two are alone in the woods, Wild Bill hauling the wounded older man on a travois as the merciless and seemingly unkillable bandit Carcajou (Lothaire Bluteau) chases them. Quebec Bill directs his son to chop a frozen trout out of the brookside ice. Though the boy protests the fish is dead, Quebec Bill stashes it inside his coat and a little while later hands it back, wriggling, for Wild Bill to return to the stream. Perhaps underestimated as a mere man of action next to his mystical sister – Cordelia offers oracular advice, sees the future, and suddenly materializes and vanishes throughout the story – Quebec Bill delivers one of the film’s more graceful lessons on our illusions about the frozen present moment in the vast flow of time. Surrounded by revelations about lost fathers and whole freight trains gone missing, it’s a lesson more powerful because so modest.
Set in 1932 shortly before Prohibition ended, Disappearances completes what Jay Craven calls his “Vermont frontier trilogy,” three features based on interconnected novels by his old friend Howard Frank Mosher. Craven’s career has largely succeeded by his staking a claim as a regional filmmaker – he says “indigenous filmmaking” – and the frontier trilogy, along with some shorts and docs and The Year That Trembled (2002), an ensemble drama framed by the 1970 Kent State shootings, all come out of that aesthetic territory. His first feature, Where the Rivers Flow North (1993), is a brooding, atmospheric tale set in 1927 about a stubborn old woodsman and his long-time Native companion (Rip Torn and an incandescent Tantoo Cardinal) pitted against a hydroelectric project. A Stranger in the Kingdom (1999) depicts a World War II Black Army chaplain accused of murdering a white woman in a Vermont town. Craven has a pool of actors he works with often (the marvelously versatile Bill Raymond, for example) and typically lands much larger names who turn out to be old friends, believers in indie filmmaking, Vermont property-shoppers, and supporters of Craven’s summer camp for young filmmakers, Fledgling Films.
Mosher and Craven both live in Vermont – Craven teaches film at Marlboro College, and with his wife Bess O’Brien and producer Hathalee Higgs runs Kingdom County Productions – in the three-county area that residents traditionally call the “Northeast Kingdom,” also the setting for Mosher’s novels and Craven’s frontier trilogy. In their collaboration, this is an intricate, many-layered world. Disappearances was Mosher’s first novel – published in 1977 – but Craven may have left adapting this one till last because its thickets of criss-crossing, echoing symbols are more treacherous to film than to encounter on the page.
Craven likens the Disappearances film to a Western, with the Depression’s ragged hardship and Prohibition’s outlaw mentality transplanted to the lakes and woods along Canada’s border. The “magical realist whimsy” Craven finds in Mosher’s novel also dove-tails with his own fondness for dream-state cinema and the region’s already rich, trans-border blend of French Canadian and indigenous mythology – for example, the bandit Carcajou as menacing, shape-shifting loup garou and the snowy owl as signal of impending death.
There is an ambitious third anchor. Besides opening Disappearances with novelist William Faulkner’s warning – that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past” – it’s clear that Craven and Mosher’s joint project aims to build a mythical world of Vermont’s “Kingdom County” that rivals Faulkner’s fictional “Yoknapatawpha County” in Mississippi. So one finds a “Faulknerian” web of associations, memory, family allusions and betrayals throughout Mosher’s novels that reverberate in Craven’s film adaptations. Wild Bill’s Uncle Henry Coville, brought so vividly to life here by Native actor Gary Farmer, appears briefly back in 1993’s Rivers Flow North film (played by another actor). Muskrat Kinneson’s clan occurs in several Mosher novels – including his newest, set in 1930 and titled On Kingdom Mountain, whose release in early July will coincide with the DVD release of Disappearances. Just as Faulkner’s novels carry an undertow of the South’s racial intermingling, the Vermont trilogy includes Native characters in sometimes sharply conflicted relations to white Vermonters, complicated all the more by the cross-border French factor. Like all American stories, then – to point to the tip of an iceberg – Disappearances is about disinheritance.
So Disappearances is ladled from a rich stew – its blessing and its major obstacle cinematically. Though it seems severe to say so, the film has loose ends – transitions that seem mechanical rather than organic, and moments when Kristofferson is coasting rather than moving the scene – that I can’t help thinking would have surfaced and been dealt with if less went on here. But mostly Disappearances is a welcome and often enough wondrous window on a corner of America that we really haven’t seen on-screen like this before Craven’s work. Disappearances did the festival run and – Craven’s done this with his other films too – spent last summer touring a hundred rural Vermont communities, filling the state’s relatively few movie theaters and church basements, Grange halls, and school auditoriums. Road-tested on home ground, the film is now one of twenty chosen by AFI as part of their 20/20 Project global film exchange for 2007.
*******
This review appeared on 5/14/07 in Stylusmagazine.com. Disappearances opened May 4th in San Francisco & Seattle & May 11th at Quad Cinema in New York City for one week runs, with subsequent limited theatrical release through June & DVD release in early July. Craven’s other features are available at netflicks.com.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Film Review #100: Come Early Morning
2006
Director: Joey Lauren Adams
Cast: Ashley Judd, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Wilson
If you’re an HBO movie watcher, you can catch Joey Lauren Adams this Sunday as Addie in The Break-Up (the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Anniston romantic comedy) and remember her from a string of Kevin Smith films, beginning with Mallrats (1995) and then reprising Alyssa Jones from Chasing Amy (1995) through Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Clerks: The Lost Scene (2004). Now there’s a chance that Adams – who wrote the country songs she sang in Chasing Amy and laments the lack of good women’s roles – could quit her day job as comedic actress. Nearing forty, Adams has written and directed her first feature, starring Ashley Judd and shot on the outskirts of Adams’ home town, Little Rock.
This is a good deal for them both. Judd portrays Lucy Fowler, whom we meet waking up in a motel room, very hung over, next to a stranger. Unlike other recent films about women who imbibe too much, excellent though they are – Clean with Maggie Cheung and Sherrybaby with Maggie Gyllenhaal spring to mind – this one’s central character is neither an addict who must struggle through protracted recovery nor a tragic mother.
Lucy Fowler has hit thirty, shares a bungalow with an old friend named Kim (Laura Prepon), and drives a lime-green pick-up that’s seen its way around the construction sites she helps her boss Owen (Stacy Keach) manage. She’s sharp at what she does – Owen tells her she’s been running the business for the last four of the nine years she’s worked for him – and during the story she acquires this little business with his blessing. Lucy has a fractured family – her unhappily re-married mother (Diane Ladd), her nursing home-bound grandmother named Doll (Candyce Hinkle), an alcoholic father so shut down he’s practically mute (Scott Wilson), and her Uncle Tim (Tim Blake Nelson), who fills in the gaps for her about her father’s former glory days as guitarist who once played with Chet Atkins and named her for the song “Lucille.” Lucy would like to get closer to her father. In some of the film’s best scenes, she tries, but he can’t do it.
And Lucy spends too much time at The Forge, one of those unfancy strip hangouts selling beer, pool and pizza. One day she buys the juke box of “old songs” that’s being junked – the film is drenched in a gorgeous country soundtrack heavy on songs from composer Alan Brewer – and after she loads it on her truck, meets Cal (Jeffrey Donovan). New in town and a little reticent about why, he’d like an actual date and he wonders when she last kissed someone sober. They try, but they can’t do it.
Sometimes reviewers describe non-blockbusters as “closely observed,” a poppit-bead kind of term that’s stuck in when well-done little movies seem true-to-life and offer colorful detail in place of sweeping drama. Adams has written tight, purposeful scenes and directed her cast to clean, nuanced performances. The notion and value of paying attention to one another is embedded in the story itself. “Are you going somewhere? I see you have your gold shoes on,” says Lucy to her grandmother as soon as she walks in to visit one day. Kim and Lucy talk about getting to know the men they meet – wondering, as Kim says, “what his middle name is and what he looked like as a kid” – and you can see Lucy’s mind working as she asks questions of her life and tries out small, brand new behaviors.
Adams avoids mistaken short-cuts that would lead us through flashier but less satisfying territory. Lucy’s romance with Cal could work out, for example, or she could go with Owen to that newer, bigger company out of town. What happens instead seems truer, even more hopeful. Given that opening motel room moment, this could’ve also been a movie about men being rotten. A couple bad apples here don’t spoil Owen, Uncle Tim or Lucy’s older pool-table buddy Eli (Wally Welch), and along with Lucy, we are finally just deeply sorry for her father.
Previously beset by glamour, serial killers and possibly the most dramatic left eyebrow in film, Ashley Judd gets to act here. The job she does bodes well for her lead as Agnes White in William Friedkin’s just-released screen adaptation of Bug. And I hope Adams is somewhere working on her next script.
*******
Come Early Morning opened last November & went to DVD in late March. This review appears in the 5/10/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent movies that didn’t screen in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
2006
Director: Joey Lauren Adams
Cast: Ashley Judd, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Wilson
If you’re an HBO movie watcher, you can catch Joey Lauren Adams this Sunday as Addie in The Break-Up (the Vince Vaughn/Jennifer Anniston romantic comedy) and remember her from a string of Kevin Smith films, beginning with Mallrats (1995) and then reprising Alyssa Jones from Chasing Amy (1995) through Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001) and Clerks: The Lost Scene (2004). Now there’s a chance that Adams – who wrote the country songs she sang in Chasing Amy and laments the lack of good women’s roles – could quit her day job as comedic actress. Nearing forty, Adams has written and directed her first feature, starring Ashley Judd and shot on the outskirts of Adams’ home town, Little Rock.
This is a good deal for them both. Judd portrays Lucy Fowler, whom we meet waking up in a motel room, very hung over, next to a stranger. Unlike other recent films about women who imbibe too much, excellent though they are – Clean with Maggie Cheung and Sherrybaby with Maggie Gyllenhaal spring to mind – this one’s central character is neither an addict who must struggle through protracted recovery nor a tragic mother.
Lucy Fowler has hit thirty, shares a bungalow with an old friend named Kim (Laura Prepon), and drives a lime-green pick-up that’s seen its way around the construction sites she helps her boss Owen (Stacy Keach) manage. She’s sharp at what she does – Owen tells her she’s been running the business for the last four of the nine years she’s worked for him – and during the story she acquires this little business with his blessing. Lucy has a fractured family – her unhappily re-married mother (Diane Ladd), her nursing home-bound grandmother named Doll (Candyce Hinkle), an alcoholic father so shut down he’s practically mute (Scott Wilson), and her Uncle Tim (Tim Blake Nelson), who fills in the gaps for her about her father’s former glory days as guitarist who once played with Chet Atkins and named her for the song “Lucille.” Lucy would like to get closer to her father. In some of the film’s best scenes, she tries, but he can’t do it.
And Lucy spends too much time at The Forge, one of those unfancy strip hangouts selling beer, pool and pizza. One day she buys the juke box of “old songs” that’s being junked – the film is drenched in a gorgeous country soundtrack heavy on songs from composer Alan Brewer – and after she loads it on her truck, meets Cal (Jeffrey Donovan). New in town and a little reticent about why, he’d like an actual date and he wonders when she last kissed someone sober. They try, but they can’t do it.
Sometimes reviewers describe non-blockbusters as “closely observed,” a poppit-bead kind of term that’s stuck in when well-done little movies seem true-to-life and offer colorful detail in place of sweeping drama. Adams has written tight, purposeful scenes and directed her cast to clean, nuanced performances. The notion and value of paying attention to one another is embedded in the story itself. “Are you going somewhere? I see you have your gold shoes on,” says Lucy to her grandmother as soon as she walks in to visit one day. Kim and Lucy talk about getting to know the men they meet – wondering, as Kim says, “what his middle name is and what he looked like as a kid” – and you can see Lucy’s mind working as she asks questions of her life and tries out small, brand new behaviors.
Adams avoids mistaken short-cuts that would lead us through flashier but less satisfying territory. Lucy’s romance with Cal could work out, for example, or she could go with Owen to that newer, bigger company out of town. What happens instead seems truer, even more hopeful. Given that opening motel room moment, this could’ve also been a movie about men being rotten. A couple bad apples here don’t spoil Owen, Uncle Tim or Lucy’s older pool-table buddy Eli (Wally Welch), and along with Lucy, we are finally just deeply sorry for her father.
Previously beset by glamour, serial killers and possibly the most dramatic left eyebrow in film, Ashley Judd gets to act here. The job she does bodes well for her lead as Agnes White in William Friedkin’s just-released screen adaptation of Bug. And I hope Adams is somewhere working on her next script.
*******
Come Early Morning opened last November & went to DVD in late March. This review appears in the 5/10/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent movies that didn’t screen in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Film Review #99: The Aura
2005
Director: Fabián Bielinsky
Cast: Ricardo Darín, Dolores Fonzi, Alejandro Awada
Esteban is an odd bird all right. An amateur taxidermist living in Buenos Aires, tongue-tied to the point of dumbstruck much of the time, he shambles through life with a baffled squint. He is formidably imaginative though, with a nearly photographic memory. Scenes of the jewel heists and payroll robberies that fascinate him spring geyser-like from his mind’s eye and pour across the screen.
An epileptic, Esteban (Ricardo Darín) is likewise fascinated by “the aura,” those few vivid seconds that warn him a seizure is coming, when he says “everything stops and a door opens in your head.” Esteban must be goaded to defend himself, but he wades easily into another man’s life and the ready-made plot to rob a backwater casino’s armored truck when it stops at a one-woman brothel on a blank stretch of road. Having traveled impulsively to the desolate southern region of Patagonia with an acquaintance for a botched hunting trip, Esteban is deep in the woods now, running for his life. This trip itself is like the aura – a surrealistic step out of daily life and time before a bloody convulsion of violence.
As one source of inspiration for this 2005 film, Fabián Bielinsky cited John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). When the Argentine screenwriter/director suffered a fatal heart attack on a trip to Brazil last June to cast a TV commercial, he left just two feature-length movies of his own from twenty years of working in Argentina’s film and television production. His pair of films both starred Ricardo Darín, in a set of roles like day and night.
Darín was all wise-cracking, shameless surface as the self-described and self-deluded master crook Marcos in Nine Queens (2000). And Nine Queens, a dazzling con game of a story, is all switchbacks taken at red-line speed. While Marcos and another petty swindler, the sweet-faced Juan (Gastón Pauls), work each other – and an ever-expanding circle of accomplices – to unload a phony set of rare stamps on deadline in downtown Buenos Aires, a dark tussle of family revenge between Marcos and his sister Valeria boils and breaks the surface. Finally produced because Bielinsky won a screenwriting contest with the script and was thus able to shoot as he wanted, Nine Queens succeeded handily with ticket-buyers, festival juries and critics on home ground and then opened in Europe and the US to substantial enthusiasm.
Then last November, The Aura reached US theaters and played steadily in New York City for months. Despite a DVD release in early April, the film is still booked in some art house theaters around the country. Nine Queens and Bielinsky’s sudden early death guaranteed the second film a serious look, but The Aura is a decidedly different take on the heist movie formula and its star a radically different breed of crook this time.
Compared to its predecessor, The Aura proceeds at an almost stately pace. This story unfolds over seven carefully demarcated and labeled days – from Wednesday to Wednesday – and its screen time stretches almost two and a half hours. Stripped of his former mobilizing confidence, Ricardo Darín as the taxidermist Esteban has an identity so imprecise that his actual name appears only in the closing credits. Esteban first appears stretched prone upon the ground at night near an ATM after an epileptic seizure.
Next he’s squirreled away in his shop, fitting a cured fox pelt over a skull form and setting its glass eyes, his own face illuminated in the gloom by his work light. Beyond the door to his shop, where he keeps his clippings of celebrated thefts, there’s a woman waiting. He ignores her and the next day he’ll come home to find his wife has simply left. Goaded earlier about his freedom by his acquaintance Sontag (Alejandro Awada, also a gangster in Nine Queens), Esteban agrees to fly into Patagonia.
Once in the woods, Esteban finds that life falls away like an old overcoat. Other characters vanish or die silently, suddenly, without ceremony or grace. Touched by Diana (Dolores Fonzi), the much younger wife of the backwoods thug Dietrich whom he kills by mistake, Esteban has a moment of reaching out as convulsive as his seizures, and as passing. During Esteban's deep-woods dash for survival, Bielinksy turns his protagnist's capacity for visual conjuring into a switchback as dazzling as any in Nine Queens.
Worth seeing together, Bielinksy’s films are absorbing, technically masterful and unsettling parables of modern life.
*******
This review was published in the 5/3/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVD releases of recent films that did not have a regular theatrical run in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
2005
Director: Fabián Bielinsky
Cast: Ricardo Darín, Dolores Fonzi, Alejandro Awada
Esteban is an odd bird all right. An amateur taxidermist living in Buenos Aires, tongue-tied to the point of dumbstruck much of the time, he shambles through life with a baffled squint. He is formidably imaginative though, with a nearly photographic memory. Scenes of the jewel heists and payroll robberies that fascinate him spring geyser-like from his mind’s eye and pour across the screen.
An epileptic, Esteban (Ricardo Darín) is likewise fascinated by “the aura,” those few vivid seconds that warn him a seizure is coming, when he says “everything stops and a door opens in your head.” Esteban must be goaded to defend himself, but he wades easily into another man’s life and the ready-made plot to rob a backwater casino’s armored truck when it stops at a one-woman brothel on a blank stretch of road. Having traveled impulsively to the desolate southern region of Patagonia with an acquaintance for a botched hunting trip, Esteban is deep in the woods now, running for his life. This trip itself is like the aura – a surrealistic step out of daily life and time before a bloody convulsion of violence.
As one source of inspiration for this 2005 film, Fabián Bielinsky cited John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972). When the Argentine screenwriter/director suffered a fatal heart attack on a trip to Brazil last June to cast a TV commercial, he left just two feature-length movies of his own from twenty years of working in Argentina’s film and television production. His pair of films both starred Ricardo Darín, in a set of roles like day and night.
Darín was all wise-cracking, shameless surface as the self-described and self-deluded master crook Marcos in Nine Queens (2000). And Nine Queens, a dazzling con game of a story, is all switchbacks taken at red-line speed. While Marcos and another petty swindler, the sweet-faced Juan (Gastón Pauls), work each other – and an ever-expanding circle of accomplices – to unload a phony set of rare stamps on deadline in downtown Buenos Aires, a dark tussle of family revenge between Marcos and his sister Valeria boils and breaks the surface. Finally produced because Bielinsky won a screenwriting contest with the script and was thus able to shoot as he wanted, Nine Queens succeeded handily with ticket-buyers, festival juries and critics on home ground and then opened in Europe and the US to substantial enthusiasm.
Then last November, The Aura reached US theaters and played steadily in New York City for months. Despite a DVD release in early April, the film is still booked in some art house theaters around the country. Nine Queens and Bielinsky’s sudden early death guaranteed the second film a serious look, but The Aura is a decidedly different take on the heist movie formula and its star a radically different breed of crook this time.
Compared to its predecessor, The Aura proceeds at an almost stately pace. This story unfolds over seven carefully demarcated and labeled days – from Wednesday to Wednesday – and its screen time stretches almost two and a half hours. Stripped of his former mobilizing confidence, Ricardo Darín as the taxidermist Esteban has an identity so imprecise that his actual name appears only in the closing credits. Esteban first appears stretched prone upon the ground at night near an ATM after an epileptic seizure.
Next he’s squirreled away in his shop, fitting a cured fox pelt over a skull form and setting its glass eyes, his own face illuminated in the gloom by his work light. Beyond the door to his shop, where he keeps his clippings of celebrated thefts, there’s a woman waiting. He ignores her and the next day he’ll come home to find his wife has simply left. Goaded earlier about his freedom by his acquaintance Sontag (Alejandro Awada, also a gangster in Nine Queens), Esteban agrees to fly into Patagonia.
Once in the woods, Esteban finds that life falls away like an old overcoat. Other characters vanish or die silently, suddenly, without ceremony or grace. Touched by Diana (Dolores Fonzi), the much younger wife of the backwoods thug Dietrich whom he kills by mistake, Esteban has a moment of reaching out as convulsive as his seizures, and as passing. During Esteban's deep-woods dash for survival, Bielinksy turns his protagnist's capacity for visual conjuring into a switchback as dazzling as any in Nine Queens.
Worth seeing together, Bielinksy’s films are absorbing, technically masterful and unsettling parables of modern life.
*******
This review was published in the 5/3/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVD releases of recent films that did not have a regular theatrical run in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #98: The Namesake
2007
Director: Mira Nair
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Kal Penn
On its surface, The Namesake spans more than three decades and territorial points between Calcutta and the US. Focusing on the immigrant experience, its governing images are bridges (the 59th Street Bridge in New York City and Calcutta’s Howrah Bridge), trains and airports. But its range is implicitly even grander too, given that its inspiring source is a story by the 19th century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol about the idea of travel itself and that its plot unfolds as a clash between East and West as played out between generations in one Bengali family.
Indian director Mira Nair – who says she read Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2001 novel of the same title during a transatlantic flight and landed knowing she wanted to film it – insists vividly that “clash” is much more than a suggestive but conventional word choice. In the adaptation – which for example moves the US setting from Cambridge to Queens – Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala retain one defining event they might have cut. As a young man in 1974 dutifully visiting his grandfather, Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan, soon to be seen again in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart) survives an actual train wreck that occurs just after he’s read the Russian story and a mysterious stranger has advised him to travel. So we are perhaps in league with Ashoke – who indeed does travel, who names his son Gogol, and who is really the central character here – in anticipating something epic and portentous.
The Namesake’s title and plot certainly encourage us to see Ashoke’s son as the central character, as if the early marriage of Ashoke and Ashima (Tabu), with its struggles and loneliness in a strange culture, and the relatively painless progress of younger sister Sonali (Sahira Nair) serve to add background poignancy to his confusion. Rejecting the name Gogol in adolescence – his American schoolmates suggest it will be unhelpful with girls – he takes up his seemingly more versatile “good” name Nikhil, shortening that to an Americanized “Nic.” Of course this only echoes the Russian writer’s whole name – and Nic’s attempt to escape himself – more fully. Years later Ashoke tells his son about that defining train wreck and the name’s history, as Nic’s own full-circle journey begins to round the far turn. This involves young love with a blond named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) and brief marriage to the brainy, cosmopolitan Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson), who then leaves him for a European colleague.
Kal Penn, who has actually done quite a lot more that might recommend him for this role than the usually cited Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), plays this son. Penn’s performance is problematic in the same way that Tom Cruise’s Nathan Algren was problematic in The Last Samurai (2003). That is, Cruise did not have the heft to carry Algren successfully as heroic. Except for being unintentional, his portrayal of Algren as mostly self-centered, self-deluded and callow was pretty good. Penn’s performance strays in the same way. When Nic tells Maxine, “I don’t care what my parents want. It’s what I want,” it’s hard to see what she finds attractive in him in that moment and hard to see how the supremely empathetic Ashoke’s son will find his way back.
Unexpectedly, what is most memorable in this film and what animates its sense of intimacy, tenderness and loss are moments of extreme resonant delicacy that instead center on the older generation.
First there is the matter of the shoes, which elegantly brackets Ashoke’s life – first a young woman’s attempt to divine the essence of an arranged suitor and then the son’s attempt to know the father he often ignored. As a young woman who is torn herself – she really would prefer to pursue a musical career and not to marry, but wishes to escape her parent’s home – Ashima pauses in the hallway outside the formal visit at which she’ll meet Ashoke and his parents. Spying the American shoes he left at the doorway, Ashima slips into them, as if trying to slip inside the man. During the interview, one parent inquires whether Ashima won’t mind being far from home, all alone in New York City, and she replies, “But wouldn’t he be there with me?”
Years later, Ashoke dies suddenly, away from home in an anonymous Midwestern city where he’s gone for a semester to teach. It falls to Nic to collect his father’s body and effects. He gets only as far at the front door of this utterly temporary apartment and the loneliness of his father’s last months wash over him. In a single, echoing impulse, the son slides his feet into a pair of Ashoke’s shoes left by the door.
Then there is the matter of the locked door. This occurs early in Ashoke and Ashima’s marriage, where Ashima puts all the laundry in the dryer and shrinks Ashoke’s sweaters. Shocked and upset, he raises his voice. She, startled by this outburst, rushes tearfully into the bathroom and turns the lock. With the barest of pauses, Ashoke looks down those long years in wintry Queens – his face already scowling, his mouth forming the angry demand – and chooses another future. Carefully, he apologizes, coaxes Ashima to open the door, teases her gently until he has her smiling. Much more than a charming rendition of the immigrant’s innocence, this moment lays the foundation, for example, for the scene in which Ashoke’s sexual patience with Ashima is repaid by her sudden, genuine arousal. Few bedroom scenes on-screen get as much mileage from a single, deeply felt gasp.
Really the epic and the portentous serve such moments – impulses of curiosity and yearning, impulses to search for another’s essence over seemingly impassable gulfs, as much as to go and see the world.
*******
This review was published on 5/1/07 at Stylusmagazine.com.
2007
Director: Mira Nair
Cast: Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Kal Penn
On its surface, The Namesake spans more than three decades and territorial points between Calcutta and the US. Focusing on the immigrant experience, its governing images are bridges (the 59th Street Bridge in New York City and Calcutta’s Howrah Bridge), trains and airports. But its range is implicitly even grander too, given that its inspiring source is a story by the 19th century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol about the idea of travel itself and that its plot unfolds as a clash between East and West as played out between generations in one Bengali family.
Indian director Mira Nair – who says she read Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2001 novel of the same title during a transatlantic flight and landed knowing she wanted to film it – insists vividly that “clash” is much more than a suggestive but conventional word choice. In the adaptation – which for example moves the US setting from Cambridge to Queens – Nair and screenwriter Sooni Taraporevala retain one defining event they might have cut. As a young man in 1974 dutifully visiting his grandfather, Ashoke Ganguli (Irrfan Khan, soon to be seen again in Michael Winterbottom’s A Mighty Heart) survives an actual train wreck that occurs just after he’s read the Russian story and a mysterious stranger has advised him to travel. So we are perhaps in league with Ashoke – who indeed does travel, who names his son Gogol, and who is really the central character here – in anticipating something epic and portentous.
The Namesake’s title and plot certainly encourage us to see Ashoke’s son as the central character, as if the early marriage of Ashoke and Ashima (Tabu), with its struggles and loneliness in a strange culture, and the relatively painless progress of younger sister Sonali (Sahira Nair) serve to add background poignancy to his confusion. Rejecting the name Gogol in adolescence – his American schoolmates suggest it will be unhelpful with girls – he takes up his seemingly more versatile “good” name Nikhil, shortening that to an Americanized “Nic.” Of course this only echoes the Russian writer’s whole name – and Nic’s attempt to escape himself – more fully. Years later Ashoke tells his son about that defining train wreck and the name’s history, as Nic’s own full-circle journey begins to round the far turn. This involves young love with a blond named Maxine (Jacinda Barrett) and brief marriage to the brainy, cosmopolitan Moushumi (Zuleikha Robinson), who then leaves him for a European colleague.
Kal Penn, who has actually done quite a lot more that might recommend him for this role than the usually cited Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle (2004), plays this son. Penn’s performance is problematic in the same way that Tom Cruise’s Nathan Algren was problematic in The Last Samurai (2003). That is, Cruise did not have the heft to carry Algren successfully as heroic. Except for being unintentional, his portrayal of Algren as mostly self-centered, self-deluded and callow was pretty good. Penn’s performance strays in the same way. When Nic tells Maxine, “I don’t care what my parents want. It’s what I want,” it’s hard to see what she finds attractive in him in that moment and hard to see how the supremely empathetic Ashoke’s son will find his way back.
Unexpectedly, what is most memorable in this film and what animates its sense of intimacy, tenderness and loss are moments of extreme resonant delicacy that instead center on the older generation.
First there is the matter of the shoes, which elegantly brackets Ashoke’s life – first a young woman’s attempt to divine the essence of an arranged suitor and then the son’s attempt to know the father he often ignored. As a young woman who is torn herself – she really would prefer to pursue a musical career and not to marry, but wishes to escape her parent’s home – Ashima pauses in the hallway outside the formal visit at which she’ll meet Ashoke and his parents. Spying the American shoes he left at the doorway, Ashima slips into them, as if trying to slip inside the man. During the interview, one parent inquires whether Ashima won’t mind being far from home, all alone in New York City, and she replies, “But wouldn’t he be there with me?”
Years later, Ashoke dies suddenly, away from home in an anonymous Midwestern city where he’s gone for a semester to teach. It falls to Nic to collect his father’s body and effects. He gets only as far at the front door of this utterly temporary apartment and the loneliness of his father’s last months wash over him. In a single, echoing impulse, the son slides his feet into a pair of Ashoke’s shoes left by the door.
Then there is the matter of the locked door. This occurs early in Ashoke and Ashima’s marriage, where Ashima puts all the laundry in the dryer and shrinks Ashoke’s sweaters. Shocked and upset, he raises his voice. She, startled by this outburst, rushes tearfully into the bathroom and turns the lock. With the barest of pauses, Ashoke looks down those long years in wintry Queens – his face already scowling, his mouth forming the angry demand – and chooses another future. Carefully, he apologizes, coaxes Ashima to open the door, teases her gently until he has her smiling. Much more than a charming rendition of the immigrant’s innocence, this moment lays the foundation, for example, for the scene in which Ashoke’s sexual patience with Ashima is repaid by her sudden, genuine arousal. Few bedroom scenes on-screen get as much mileage from a single, deeply felt gasp.
Really the epic and the portentous serve such moments – impulses of curiosity and yearning, impulses to search for another’s essence over seemingly impassable gulfs, as much as to go and see the world.
*******
This review was published on 5/1/07 at Stylusmagazine.com.
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Film Fest Snapshots
If you count the first screening of Peter McAlevey’s documentary Screamers at the Westcott Theater almost two Sundays ago now, this year’s Syracuse International Film Festival – the fourth edition – stretched to a full week. SIFF typically screens a selection of features and shorts a second time, usually films expected to be award contenders. But Screamers was one of two “pre-festival events” so popular that people who didn’t get here till the official opening at the Landmark Theater downtown on Wednesday finally convinced organizers to schedule them again.
There’s no doubt this was a transitional year and that post-festival debriefings will have to include some shifts. But even with multiple screening venues, you didn’t have to read the numbers in the paper this year to envision the crowd you were part of. Four screenings sold out and turned people away. This meant, for example, that getting the whole crowd into the Bristol IMAX on Saturday night for the special Experimental Film and Music program - with returning filmmaker Elka Krajewska, Syracuse's own Carrie Mae Weems and others - delayed its start by about half an hour.
This year’s SIFF also had some obvious trophy catches – Michael Haneke’s Caché with Juliette Binoche, Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé from Senegal (both part of a special French-language cinema section from Africa, Quebec and France), Doug Block's 51 Birch Street (set to debut in early May on HBO) and Armenian Harutyun Khachatryan’s Return of the Poet. Here is a sampling of several other gems beneath the more obvious glitter.
Tuesday night at the Westcott
One result of SIFF’s growth was the presence of Argentine director Eliseo Subiela, who screened a roughcut of his new film Don’t Look Down at the Westcott Theater the night before SIFF officially opened. Since making Man Facing Southeast (1986), Subiela has won nearly 30 major international prizes – a trip to netflicks.com will get you four of them on DVD – and Mellen Press has just released a major retrospective study of his film career. Maybe most viewers last Tuesday night didn’t know that background, but entranced we were anyway. Subiela came to Syracuse to serve as an SIFF judge for feature-length entries and was a panelist on Thursday’s all-day forum on genocide in cinema. He says he made Don’t Look Down as a gift to his children, to reclaim the spirit of Eros in an age of commercialized, dehumanized sex. Don’t Look Down portrays a young man in mourning who takes to sleep-walking, falls into a girl’s bed through her skylight, and accepts her literally transporting lessons in intimacy. Once finished later this year, expect Don’t Look Down to premiere amidst great fanfare – though it probably won’t show up at Carousel Mall’s mutiplex.
Thursday at Lemoyne College
Sparsely attended in the morning, this all-day forum entitled “Images of Genocide in World Cinema” got the crowd it deserved after lunch. Syracuse University’s Beverly Allen, herself a screenwriter and scholar-activist (her book Rape Warfare influenced the Hague Tribunal’s decision to declare rape a war crime following Yugoslavia’s break-up), moderated with Lemoyne’s Barron Boyd. Panelists included Subiela, Senegalese filmmaker Ben Diogaye Beye (he screened clips from Raoul Peck’s film about Rwanda, Sometimes in April), Czech director Milan Cieslar, legal expert Diane Orentlicher and her husband, Clinton-era policy-maker Morton Halperin, and Native American actor Sonny Skyhawk.
Reflecting the next day about this panel, Allen commented, “It’s more clear than ever that where Eros – creativity, intimacy, contact – occurs, genocide cannot be there too. That is the real message of a film like Eliseo’s and the reason it’s such a gift.”
Three Films to Look Out For
Despite the brisk luncheon business spilling onto the sidewalk outside Alto Cinco on Saturday’s sunny afternoon, it was all happening in the magical dark inside the Westcott Cinema. Here are three films to watch for down the road on DVD.
The Professor and His Beloved Equation induced unembarrassed tears among many. Beautifully shot by Shoji Ueda –Kurosawa’s sometime cinematographer – this film is already available online in a Region 3 DVD if you have a zone-free player. After taking five SIFF prizes this year, it could wind up on the Facets label through SIFF’s fledgling DVD distribution project. This refined Japanese import has in common with the Adam Sandler comedy Fifty First Dates a major character’s daily amnesia, suggesting that modern desperation to get into the present moment goes beyond cultures.
Laura Muscardin’s Billo, Il Grand Dakhaar, fresh from taking the Jury Prize at Pierre Cardin’s Italian Film Festival in Paris, won SIFF’s best musical score (by Senegal’s acclaimed Youssou D’Nour). Based on his own story, the film stars Thierno Thiam as an immigrant to Rome who bridges two cultures and whose Muslim faith allows him two wives. The Rome-based Muscardin’s 2001 HIV-related film Days, available on DVD locally at Emerald City, won prizes at LA’s Outfest and Seattle LGBT festival.
Kujtim Çashku’s film Magic Eye brought many in Syracuse’s Albanian community to Westcott Street last weekend, playing to crowds both days. Çashku runs a film school and annual human rights film festival in Tirana. With accomplished performances and sustained suspense, centering on the media’s role in provoking violence in Albania’s 1997 civil war, this thriller is a major new addition to films about propaganda and its cost.
Next Year in Prague
Mary Angiolillo lives in the Czech Republic and teaches at FAMU, the National Academy of Film and Television in Prague, along with her husband, cinematographer Marek Jicha. A former Fulbright scholar to Paris with a doctorate in theater, she also grew up in Syracuse. During a family visit several years ago in April, she and her husband saw a storefront poster advertising a new film festival here. From this coincidence has grown a particularly strong partnership, with more trips to Syracuse every April, film entries in the festival, speakers like award-winning director Milan Cieslar for SIFF forums and, on a visit to Prague last summer by an SIFF-led group, the quiet but far-reaching beginnings of an exchange program between Syracuse University and FAMU film students.
“We are able to offer SU film students experience working with 35-millimeter film, which Syracuse doesn’t offer,” said Mary, “and we have the same approach to teaching film – that is, developing the total filmmaker to be able to handle all aspects of filmmaking. And I’ve been very impressed with the Syracuse students.”
Besides showing up all week at screenings and events, Mary went to the day-time forums on Thursday and Friday on genocide, animation and youth. She is an attentive listener who stays for the whole program and takes notes. Outside Eastwood’s Palace Theater on Sunday night before the closing ceremonies, she reflected on her week here. She said this year’s forums were timely. “You know, when our flight landed in New York, the first thing we saw was the big video monitor with the news crawl about Virginia Tech and the shootings there. This is so important, what’s offered here – the chance to talk about these topics.”
*******
Published in the 4/26/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.
If you count the first screening of Peter McAlevey’s documentary Screamers at the Westcott Theater almost two Sundays ago now, this year’s Syracuse International Film Festival – the fourth edition – stretched to a full week. SIFF typically screens a selection of features and shorts a second time, usually films expected to be award contenders. But Screamers was one of two “pre-festival events” so popular that people who didn’t get here till the official opening at the Landmark Theater downtown on Wednesday finally convinced organizers to schedule them again.
There’s no doubt this was a transitional year and that post-festival debriefings will have to include some shifts. But even with multiple screening venues, you didn’t have to read the numbers in the paper this year to envision the crowd you were part of. Four screenings sold out and turned people away. This meant, for example, that getting the whole crowd into the Bristol IMAX on Saturday night for the special Experimental Film and Music program - with returning filmmaker Elka Krajewska, Syracuse's own Carrie Mae Weems and others - delayed its start by about half an hour.
This year’s SIFF also had some obvious trophy catches – Michael Haneke’s Caché with Juliette Binoche, Ousmane Sembene’s Moolaadé from Senegal (both part of a special French-language cinema section from Africa, Quebec and France), Doug Block's 51 Birch Street (set to debut in early May on HBO) and Armenian Harutyun Khachatryan’s Return of the Poet. Here is a sampling of several other gems beneath the more obvious glitter.
Tuesday night at the Westcott
One result of SIFF’s growth was the presence of Argentine director Eliseo Subiela, who screened a roughcut of his new film Don’t Look Down at the Westcott Theater the night before SIFF officially opened. Since making Man Facing Southeast (1986), Subiela has won nearly 30 major international prizes – a trip to netflicks.com will get you four of them on DVD – and Mellen Press has just released a major retrospective study of his film career. Maybe most viewers last Tuesday night didn’t know that background, but entranced we were anyway. Subiela came to Syracuse to serve as an SIFF judge for feature-length entries and was a panelist on Thursday’s all-day forum on genocide in cinema. He says he made Don’t Look Down as a gift to his children, to reclaim the spirit of Eros in an age of commercialized, dehumanized sex. Don’t Look Down portrays a young man in mourning who takes to sleep-walking, falls into a girl’s bed through her skylight, and accepts her literally transporting lessons in intimacy. Once finished later this year, expect Don’t Look Down to premiere amidst great fanfare – though it probably won’t show up at Carousel Mall’s mutiplex.
Thursday at Lemoyne College
Sparsely attended in the morning, this all-day forum entitled “Images of Genocide in World Cinema” got the crowd it deserved after lunch. Syracuse University’s Beverly Allen, herself a screenwriter and scholar-activist (her book Rape Warfare influenced the Hague Tribunal’s decision to declare rape a war crime following Yugoslavia’s break-up), moderated with Lemoyne’s Barron Boyd. Panelists included Subiela, Senegalese filmmaker Ben Diogaye Beye (he screened clips from Raoul Peck’s film about Rwanda, Sometimes in April), Czech director Milan Cieslar, legal expert Diane Orentlicher and her husband, Clinton-era policy-maker Morton Halperin, and Native American actor Sonny Skyhawk.
Reflecting the next day about this panel, Allen commented, “It’s more clear than ever that where Eros – creativity, intimacy, contact – occurs, genocide cannot be there too. That is the real message of a film like Eliseo’s and the reason it’s such a gift.”
Three Films to Look Out For
Despite the brisk luncheon business spilling onto the sidewalk outside Alto Cinco on Saturday’s sunny afternoon, it was all happening in the magical dark inside the Westcott Cinema. Here are three films to watch for down the road on DVD.
The Professor and His Beloved Equation induced unembarrassed tears among many. Beautifully shot by Shoji Ueda –Kurosawa’s sometime cinematographer – this film is already available online in a Region 3 DVD if you have a zone-free player. After taking five SIFF prizes this year, it could wind up on the Facets label through SIFF’s fledgling DVD distribution project. This refined Japanese import has in common with the Adam Sandler comedy Fifty First Dates a major character’s daily amnesia, suggesting that modern desperation to get into the present moment goes beyond cultures.
Laura Muscardin’s Billo, Il Grand Dakhaar, fresh from taking the Jury Prize at Pierre Cardin’s Italian Film Festival in Paris, won SIFF’s best musical score (by Senegal’s acclaimed Youssou D’Nour). Based on his own story, the film stars Thierno Thiam as an immigrant to Rome who bridges two cultures and whose Muslim faith allows him two wives. The Rome-based Muscardin’s 2001 HIV-related film Days, available on DVD locally at Emerald City, won prizes at LA’s Outfest and Seattle LGBT festival.
Kujtim Çashku’s film Magic Eye brought many in Syracuse’s Albanian community to Westcott Street last weekend, playing to crowds both days. Çashku runs a film school and annual human rights film festival in Tirana. With accomplished performances and sustained suspense, centering on the media’s role in provoking violence in Albania’s 1997 civil war, this thriller is a major new addition to films about propaganda and its cost.
Next Year in Prague
Mary Angiolillo lives in the Czech Republic and teaches at FAMU, the National Academy of Film and Television in Prague, along with her husband, cinematographer Marek Jicha. A former Fulbright scholar to Paris with a doctorate in theater, she also grew up in Syracuse. During a family visit several years ago in April, she and her husband saw a storefront poster advertising a new film festival here. From this coincidence has grown a particularly strong partnership, with more trips to Syracuse every April, film entries in the festival, speakers like award-winning director Milan Cieslar for SIFF forums and, on a visit to Prague last summer by an SIFF-led group, the quiet but far-reaching beginnings of an exchange program between Syracuse University and FAMU film students.
“We are able to offer SU film students experience working with 35-millimeter film, which Syracuse doesn’t offer,” said Mary, “and we have the same approach to teaching film – that is, developing the total filmmaker to be able to handle all aspects of filmmaking. And I’ve been very impressed with the Syracuse students.”
Besides showing up all week at screenings and events, Mary went to the day-time forums on Thursday and Friday on genocide, animation and youth. She is an attentive listener who stays for the whole program and takes notes. Outside Eastwood’s Palace Theater on Sunday night before the closing ceremonies, she reflected on her week here. She said this year’s forums were timely. “You know, when our flight landed in New York, the first thing we saw was the big video monitor with the news crawl about Virginia Tech and the shootings there. This is so important, what’s offered here – the chance to talk about these topics.”
*******
Published in the 4/26/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.
Monday, April 23, 2007
Film Review #97: Lola
1989 (DVD 2007)
Director: María Novaro
Cast: Leticia Huijara, Alexandra Vargas, Roberto Sosa
It’s early in the day, and the Mexican beach is still uncrowded. As the old man plunges into the waves, three older women up on the beach smile behind their hands and roll their eyes. Each time he stands up in the crashing surf, open-mouthed with surprise and staggering, his shorts are around his knees. One pudgy woman touches a teen-ager on the shoulder and says, “Go help your grandfather tie up his shorts.” But the old man is embarrassed when the girl approaches and turns away. Soon his wife trudges out to him and they walk back up the beach, her arm around him.
Watching this scene of deep family affection is pretty young Lola (Leticia Huijara in her first film lead). Somber and terrifically hung over, Lola’s waiting for friends who left her when they took a man to the doctor during last night’s bonfire party after Lola broke a tequila bottle over his nose. We understand perfectly that now Lola is stung with sharp regret and misses her own little girl, Ana (Alexandra Vargas).
Frustrated with the cops’ constant harassment of herself and other street vendors, depressed because her rock guitarist husband Omar has left for Los Angeles, Lola asked her own mother to take Ana for a while. We know it’s herself that’s the problem, since Lola loves the little girl tenderly. And we know that, after watching this old couple at the beach, Lola will go retrieve five-year-old Ana.
It’s a truism that film acting is different from stage acting because the audience, immersed in the medium of the huge screen, does more of the work – we attribute much of the interior life to characters from what’s come before and what characters are responding to, even when their faces are still and there’s far less dialogue and explanation than we’d get from live drama.
In her first feature film – made in 1989 after a string of shorts and some workshopping at the Sundance Institute – the Mexican director María Novaro already enters confidently into this deep collaboration with her audience. Although they have not said much by the film’s end, these are undeniably complex and very human beings and we’ve met them intimately.
Watching Lola is a good way to start to see how this is done and how other parts of a film act in its support. For example, except for two beach trips, Lola is set in Mexico City after the great earthquake of 1985. Novaro uses its vast rubble piles and graffiti proclaiming, “Mexico is still standing!” as images for Lola’s experience that her own life has crumbled. Then, ever-yearning pop radio lyrics suffuse much of the film, except during Lola’s long walk through night streets carrying her sleeping child to her mother. Here, Novaro uses Vivaldi’s version of the haunting “Stabat Mater” as background, elevating this journey to a one with life-changing consequences.
Now in her mid-50s, Novaro is one of a generation of women writers and directors who have worked collaboratively and came into their own since the early 90s, after the Mexican Film Institute began encouraging indie film production. Lola has been out on DVD only since late March and this excellent edition features interviews with Novaro, lead actress Huijara and a now grown-up Ana, plus production notes by Romy Sutherland, who has written more extensively about Novaro for the online Australian film journal Senses of Cinema. Since Novaro continues serious work in short-form cinema, maybe those eleven films can now find their way onto a DVD collection too.
Meanwhile Novaro’s other three features – all road trips, as Lola really is – are worth seeking out. In Danzón (1991) a mousey woman’s sole outlet is a weekly formal dance. When her regular dance partner goes missing, she seeks him out in Vera Cruz, befriending Suzy the queen and taking a younger lover. Garden of Eden (1994) weaves several stories together of characters who gather in Tijuana, all imagining that life on the other side of the border will improve. In Without a Trace (2000), two very different women, both at the ends of their rope and both fugitives, forge an unlikely friendship.
Novaro has a past local connection through the Syracuse International Film Festival (SIFF). All set to visit here previously for one of SIFF’s filmmaker forums, she had to cancel that trip because of sudden health issues. Let’s hope we’ll see her here in the future.
*******
Not to be confused with a raft of films of the same title by Fassbinder, Jacques Demy, Max Ophuls, Tom Tykwer & others, María Novaro’s Lola is available at Emerald City Video, 3208 Erie Blvd. East, whose owner Jim Loperfido sits on SIFF’s board. SIFF has begun to issue a line of DVDs of selected SIFF films, which Emerald City stocks. This review appeared in the 4/19/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent films that did not have a regular theatrical run in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
1989 (DVD 2007)
Director: María Novaro
Cast: Leticia Huijara, Alexandra Vargas, Roberto Sosa
It’s early in the day, and the Mexican beach is still uncrowded. As the old man plunges into the waves, three older women up on the beach smile behind their hands and roll their eyes. Each time he stands up in the crashing surf, open-mouthed with surprise and staggering, his shorts are around his knees. One pudgy woman touches a teen-ager on the shoulder and says, “Go help your grandfather tie up his shorts.” But the old man is embarrassed when the girl approaches and turns away. Soon his wife trudges out to him and they walk back up the beach, her arm around him.
Watching this scene of deep family affection is pretty young Lola (Leticia Huijara in her first film lead). Somber and terrifically hung over, Lola’s waiting for friends who left her when they took a man to the doctor during last night’s bonfire party after Lola broke a tequila bottle over his nose. We understand perfectly that now Lola is stung with sharp regret and misses her own little girl, Ana (Alexandra Vargas).
Frustrated with the cops’ constant harassment of herself and other street vendors, depressed because her rock guitarist husband Omar has left for Los Angeles, Lola asked her own mother to take Ana for a while. We know it’s herself that’s the problem, since Lola loves the little girl tenderly. And we know that, after watching this old couple at the beach, Lola will go retrieve five-year-old Ana.
It’s a truism that film acting is different from stage acting because the audience, immersed in the medium of the huge screen, does more of the work – we attribute much of the interior life to characters from what’s come before and what characters are responding to, even when their faces are still and there’s far less dialogue and explanation than we’d get from live drama.
In her first feature film – made in 1989 after a string of shorts and some workshopping at the Sundance Institute – the Mexican director María Novaro already enters confidently into this deep collaboration with her audience. Although they have not said much by the film’s end, these are undeniably complex and very human beings and we’ve met them intimately.
Watching Lola is a good way to start to see how this is done and how other parts of a film act in its support. For example, except for two beach trips, Lola is set in Mexico City after the great earthquake of 1985. Novaro uses its vast rubble piles and graffiti proclaiming, “Mexico is still standing!” as images for Lola’s experience that her own life has crumbled. Then, ever-yearning pop radio lyrics suffuse much of the film, except during Lola’s long walk through night streets carrying her sleeping child to her mother. Here, Novaro uses Vivaldi’s version of the haunting “Stabat Mater” as background, elevating this journey to a one with life-changing consequences.
Now in her mid-50s, Novaro is one of a generation of women writers and directors who have worked collaboratively and came into their own since the early 90s, after the Mexican Film Institute began encouraging indie film production. Lola has been out on DVD only since late March and this excellent edition features interviews with Novaro, lead actress Huijara and a now grown-up Ana, plus production notes by Romy Sutherland, who has written more extensively about Novaro for the online Australian film journal Senses of Cinema. Since Novaro continues serious work in short-form cinema, maybe those eleven films can now find their way onto a DVD collection too.
Meanwhile Novaro’s other three features – all road trips, as Lola really is – are worth seeking out. In Danzón (1991) a mousey woman’s sole outlet is a weekly formal dance. When her regular dance partner goes missing, she seeks him out in Vera Cruz, befriending Suzy the queen and taking a younger lover. Garden of Eden (1994) weaves several stories together of characters who gather in Tijuana, all imagining that life on the other side of the border will improve. In Without a Trace (2000), two very different women, both at the ends of their rope and both fugitives, forge an unlikely friendship.
Novaro has a past local connection through the Syracuse International Film Festival (SIFF). All set to visit here previously for one of SIFF’s filmmaker forums, she had to cancel that trip because of sudden health issues. Let’s hope we’ll see her here in the future.
*******
Not to be confused with a raft of films of the same title by Fassbinder, Jacques Demy, Max Ophuls, Tom Tykwer & others, María Novaro’s Lola is available at Emerald City Video, 3208 Erie Blvd. East, whose owner Jim Loperfido sits on SIFF’s board. SIFF has begun to issue a line of DVDs of selected SIFF films, which Emerald City stocks. This review appeared in the 4/19/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent films that did not have a regular theatrical run in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Film Review #96: Black Book
2006
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman
Even in a post-Children of Men cinema, the capture of the young Dutch Resistance gun smugglers in the marketplace in Black Book is an impressive piece of movie-making about war. Set mostly in 1944 Nazi-occupied Holland – the “mostly” is key, because there’s a frame around the main story whose precise date suggests we should pay attention – this film has a slew of exciting skirmishes that pull us through its 145-minute running time. They all erupt during momentary lulls, steadily eroding our hope that any moment of peace could be other than passing and provisional.
Opening with an aerial dog-fight among Allied and Axis fighter planes that shatters a sunny afternoon sail, Black Book then turns a midnight boat trip of grateful, relieved reunion into a massacre shrouded with plumes of frozen breath, features several zero-to-sixty blazing shoot-outs, an underground prison break-out, a stairwell assassination, and the drugged heroine’s daring escape by stepping off a balcony into a seething crowd. Black Book closes with an Israeli kibbutz springing into lockdown siege after another reunion rich with evoked memories and what we thought – foolish audience! – looked like closure.
But the marketplace catastrophe stands out for the ways in which Verhoeven blends riveting, deftly-shot action with visual exposition of the story’s basic dilemmas. This scene occurs fairly early in the film. Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Jewish cabaret singer formerly of Berlin, has landed under Dutch Resistance fighter Gerben Kuipers’ protection following the murder of her family. Kuipers (Derek de Lint) has some kind of unspecified shop near the marketplace. People come and go and women in head-scarves sort piles of things. Its real purpose in the movie is its perfection as a setting – a warren of shabby hallways and rooms, sliding doors to duck behind and views of the street.
On this crucial day, a pick-up truck crosses the crowded marketplace carrying rifles hidden in straw and Kuipers’ son Tim (Ronald Armbrust) in its cab. There’s a mishap. The truck crashes against a building’s doorjamb, half-overturned. For agonizing moments, the trapped passengers struggle with the doors as rifles spill into the street, the marketplace crowd raises a cry and Gestapo thunderously arrive. Kuipers and his crew run from window to window, watching things fall apart in the street. Realizing they must not endanger their larger operation, Rachel helps others hold Kuipers back when Tim is arrested, beaten and hauled away.
Throughout this scene, Verhoeven’s cameras cut rapidly back and forth among these shifting points of view, embodying war’s messy, split-second contradictory demands and the competing, sometimes paralyzing human impulses they call forth. As the film goes on, Tim will reappear periodically – as a prisoner with bloody feet hustled down a hallway, as a tortured scream behind a door, finally as a just-identified corpse in a killing field. He is the contradictory symbol of all a Resistance fights to protect (or avenge), what trauma and helplessness an occupation imposes, how love can skew and undermine judgment as surely as greed lead to betrayal. It’s the elder Kuipers who suggests Rachel sleep with Gestapo chief Müntze (Sebastian Koch), and Kuipers himself who’s ready to risk Jewish lives and his own comrades to save Tim.
Verhoeven hasn’t made a Hollywood feature film since the fairly awful Hollow Man six years ago. Instead he returned to Holland after two decades to make a film about war’s slippery moral landscape – a Dutch Resistance now seen as less than thoroughly heroic, widespread Dutch collaboration with the Nazi regime, and barbaric treatment accorded those same collaborators after the war in Dutch prison camps.
Verhoeven was particularly inspired to make this film now by the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal and surrounding events. He also lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland as a child and in 1977 made the film Soldier of Orange about those years. With his long-time screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, he’s been researching documents and photo archives since the late 60s regarding the murky histories of Dutch collaboration and resistance alike. In that decade rumors surfaced of a missing “black book” like that in the film, listing individuals who made fortunes trading in Jewish lives. The marketplace is an apt metaphor.
Often ignoring uniformly fine performances from an international cast, a ripping good war-time intrigue, terrific editing and cinematography, some US reviewers have dismissed Black Book. For example, some decry the sympathetic portrayal of Gestapo chief Müntze as calloused on Verhoeven’s part and somehow historically impermissible. Quite a few assume Verhoeven lamely copied the movie Carrie’s bloodbath for one extreme scene in which Rachel is doused with a vat of excrement. But Verhoeven’s knowledge of the Dutch prison-camp practice of dumping feces on collaborators dates from the 60s too. Apparently able to take in and integrate Verhoeven’s shades of gray about their collective past, the Dutch movie-going public has rewarded Black Book with the largest box office in that country’s history (besides significant honors from the Dutch film community).
The bracket surrounding the film’s main 1944 story is also persuasive of a more thoughtful look at Black Book. Curiously, hardly any US reviewer has bothered to remark upon this bracket as other than a routine plot device that deprives us of suspense about Rachel’s fate. But Verhoeven gives us a bridge between the Second World War and the present day that does two things.
First, Rachel’s discovered alive in the Israeli kibbutz by her war-era friend Ronnie (Halima Reijn), a Dutch woman who lived through the occupation with Rachel by attaching herself to a Nazi officer – the gross, murderous Franken. Upon liberation, Ronnie immediately found herself a Canadian protector, and she shows up on the kibbutz tour having married him. This encounter triggers Rachel’s memory. As the story winds down and returns to Israel circa 1956, Rachel’s been sitting alone by water, thinking about things. While Verhoeven has filled in events Rachel didn’t see – she learned about Müntze’s execution afterward, for example, while we do see it onscreen – the tone of the story fits the tone of a flashback she might have. Some scenes are dizzying, a bit surrealistically tinged with neon around the edges. When Rachel next encounters Franken in Gestapo headquarters at a glittering party – having last peered through marshy reeds as he ransacked her family’s bodies for money and jewels in the riverbank mud – the room whirls. Recognizing him literally makes her sick. Black Book isn’t strictly a first person account, but its story is filtered through Rachel’s eyes, including how she may be able to tolerate recalling her own behavior and others. This certainly includes how she would recall both Münzte and her sometime Dutch lover, the dashing doctor Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), subject of the film’s most shocking reversal.
Secondly, the front-loaded notation “October 1956” provides a context for the sudden gunfire at the end. This is an Israeli kibbutz defending itself at a very specific moment. Verhoeven asks us to use the Nazi occupation as a starting point to reassess a vaster swath of history. He certainly references the complex cluster of events and international power shifts that we call the Suez Crisis. In October 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai in response to Nasser’s nationalization of Egypt’s Suez Canal; the UN responded by sending the first modern peace-keeping force, proposed by (Ronnie’s husband’s countryman) Canadian Lester Pearson. At that time Europe had been importing about two-thirds of its oil via the Suez Canal, a short-cut that saved ships 11,000 miles around Africa. Quite a collision in the marketplace.
*******
Black Book opened theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on April 4th, heading for release in 28 US and Canadian cities by the end of April. This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 4/17/07.
2006
Director: Paul Verhoeven
Cast: Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman
Even in a post-Children of Men cinema, the capture of the young Dutch Resistance gun smugglers in the marketplace in Black Book is an impressive piece of movie-making about war. Set mostly in 1944 Nazi-occupied Holland – the “mostly” is key, because there’s a frame around the main story whose precise date suggests we should pay attention – this film has a slew of exciting skirmishes that pull us through its 145-minute running time. They all erupt during momentary lulls, steadily eroding our hope that any moment of peace could be other than passing and provisional.
Opening with an aerial dog-fight among Allied and Axis fighter planes that shatters a sunny afternoon sail, Black Book then turns a midnight boat trip of grateful, relieved reunion into a massacre shrouded with plumes of frozen breath, features several zero-to-sixty blazing shoot-outs, an underground prison break-out, a stairwell assassination, and the drugged heroine’s daring escape by stepping off a balcony into a seething crowd. Black Book closes with an Israeli kibbutz springing into lockdown siege after another reunion rich with evoked memories and what we thought – foolish audience! – looked like closure.
But the marketplace catastrophe stands out for the ways in which Verhoeven blends riveting, deftly-shot action with visual exposition of the story’s basic dilemmas. This scene occurs fairly early in the film. Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), a Jewish cabaret singer formerly of Berlin, has landed under Dutch Resistance fighter Gerben Kuipers’ protection following the murder of her family. Kuipers (Derek de Lint) has some kind of unspecified shop near the marketplace. People come and go and women in head-scarves sort piles of things. Its real purpose in the movie is its perfection as a setting – a warren of shabby hallways and rooms, sliding doors to duck behind and views of the street.
On this crucial day, a pick-up truck crosses the crowded marketplace carrying rifles hidden in straw and Kuipers’ son Tim (Ronald Armbrust) in its cab. There’s a mishap. The truck crashes against a building’s doorjamb, half-overturned. For agonizing moments, the trapped passengers struggle with the doors as rifles spill into the street, the marketplace crowd raises a cry and Gestapo thunderously arrive. Kuipers and his crew run from window to window, watching things fall apart in the street. Realizing they must not endanger their larger operation, Rachel helps others hold Kuipers back when Tim is arrested, beaten and hauled away.
Throughout this scene, Verhoeven’s cameras cut rapidly back and forth among these shifting points of view, embodying war’s messy, split-second contradictory demands and the competing, sometimes paralyzing human impulses they call forth. As the film goes on, Tim will reappear periodically – as a prisoner with bloody feet hustled down a hallway, as a tortured scream behind a door, finally as a just-identified corpse in a killing field. He is the contradictory symbol of all a Resistance fights to protect (or avenge), what trauma and helplessness an occupation imposes, how love can skew and undermine judgment as surely as greed lead to betrayal. It’s the elder Kuipers who suggests Rachel sleep with Gestapo chief Müntze (Sebastian Koch), and Kuipers himself who’s ready to risk Jewish lives and his own comrades to save Tim.
Verhoeven hasn’t made a Hollywood feature film since the fairly awful Hollow Man six years ago. Instead he returned to Holland after two decades to make a film about war’s slippery moral landscape – a Dutch Resistance now seen as less than thoroughly heroic, widespread Dutch collaboration with the Nazi regime, and barbaric treatment accorded those same collaborators after the war in Dutch prison camps.
Verhoeven was particularly inspired to make this film now by the recent Abu Ghraib prison scandal and surrounding events. He also lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland as a child and in 1977 made the film Soldier of Orange about those years. With his long-time screenwriter Gerard Soeteman, he’s been researching documents and photo archives since the late 60s regarding the murky histories of Dutch collaboration and resistance alike. In that decade rumors surfaced of a missing “black book” like that in the film, listing individuals who made fortunes trading in Jewish lives. The marketplace is an apt metaphor.
Often ignoring uniformly fine performances from an international cast, a ripping good war-time intrigue, terrific editing and cinematography, some US reviewers have dismissed Black Book. For example, some decry the sympathetic portrayal of Gestapo chief Müntze as calloused on Verhoeven’s part and somehow historically impermissible. Quite a few assume Verhoeven lamely copied the movie Carrie’s bloodbath for one extreme scene in which Rachel is doused with a vat of excrement. But Verhoeven’s knowledge of the Dutch prison-camp practice of dumping feces on collaborators dates from the 60s too. Apparently able to take in and integrate Verhoeven’s shades of gray about their collective past, the Dutch movie-going public has rewarded Black Book with the largest box office in that country’s history (besides significant honors from the Dutch film community).
The bracket surrounding the film’s main 1944 story is also persuasive of a more thoughtful look at Black Book. Curiously, hardly any US reviewer has bothered to remark upon this bracket as other than a routine plot device that deprives us of suspense about Rachel’s fate. But Verhoeven gives us a bridge between the Second World War and the present day that does two things.
First, Rachel’s discovered alive in the Israeli kibbutz by her war-era friend Ronnie (Halima Reijn), a Dutch woman who lived through the occupation with Rachel by attaching herself to a Nazi officer – the gross, murderous Franken. Upon liberation, Ronnie immediately found herself a Canadian protector, and she shows up on the kibbutz tour having married him. This encounter triggers Rachel’s memory. As the story winds down and returns to Israel circa 1956, Rachel’s been sitting alone by water, thinking about things. While Verhoeven has filled in events Rachel didn’t see – she learned about Müntze’s execution afterward, for example, while we do see it onscreen – the tone of the story fits the tone of a flashback she might have. Some scenes are dizzying, a bit surrealistically tinged with neon around the edges. When Rachel next encounters Franken in Gestapo headquarters at a glittering party – having last peered through marshy reeds as he ransacked her family’s bodies for money and jewels in the riverbank mud – the room whirls. Recognizing him literally makes her sick. Black Book isn’t strictly a first person account, but its story is filtered through Rachel’s eyes, including how she may be able to tolerate recalling her own behavior and others. This certainly includes how she would recall both Münzte and her sometime Dutch lover, the dashing doctor Hans Akkermans (Thom Hoffman), subject of the film’s most shocking reversal.
Secondly, the front-loaded notation “October 1956” provides a context for the sudden gunfire at the end. This is an Israeli kibbutz defending itself at a very specific moment. Verhoeven asks us to use the Nazi occupation as a starting point to reassess a vaster swath of history. He certainly references the complex cluster of events and international power shifts that we call the Suez Crisis. In October 1956, Israel invaded the Sinai in response to Nasser’s nationalization of Egypt’s Suez Canal; the UN responded by sending the first modern peace-keeping force, proposed by (Ronnie’s husband’s countryman) Canadian Lester Pearson. At that time Europe had been importing about two-thirds of its oil via the Suez Canal, a short-cut that saved ships 11,000 miles around Africa. Quite a collision in the marketplace.
*******
Black Book opened theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on April 4th, heading for release in 28 US and Canadian cities by the end of April. This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 4/17/07.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Film Review #95: 13 Tzameti
2006
Director: Géla Babluani
Cast: Georges Babluani, Aurélien Recoing, Philippe Passon
Somewhere outside Paris, thirteen contestants gather in a circle, load their pistols, spin the chambers, and set the muzzles point-blank against the skull of the man in front. Against a frenzy of betting onlookers and a handler’s sharp orders, they wait for a hanging bulb to switch on, then fire. This repeats through three rounds. Then two finalists face each other for a point blank duel – the sarcastic, taunting Jacky (durable French character actor Aurélien Recoing) has survived three previous duels, managed by his own brother, and the shy young handyman Sébastien (Georges Babluani, the director’s younger brother, in his first film role) has walked into more than he bargained for.
On the wall, a poster of 1960s rock star Jim Morrison evokes an era of glamorized self-destruction. Shot in somber, finely detailed black and white – director Géla Babluani says color would be distracting – with almost no blood on-screen, 13 Tzameti meditates on chance, choice and human nature, sorrowing at all three.
Despite inevitable comparisons with director Michael Cimino’s classic 1978 film The Deer Hunter, Babluani insists he had not yet seen Cimino’s film when he made 13 Tzameti. The earlier Robert DeNiro-Christopher Walken vehicle follows a Russian-American enclave in a small town near Pittsburgh’s steel mills through the Vietnam War era. The Deer Hunter famously includes games of Russian roulette, first those the Vietcong imposed upon young US soldiers whom they held prisoner. Then Walken’s character remains in Saigon after the US pull-out. He has a heroin habit that he supports night after night via secret, high-stakes Russian roulette matches played very far off any beaten tourist track.
For those only just beginning to dig their way out of the Vietnam era’s quandaries by the late 70s, The Deer Hunter showed how far afield that war had taken an entire generation. Even more pointedly, that film commented on how the American dream held up for one community of immigrants, still not fully assimilated a generation after their parents fled Soviet repression.
13 Tzameti is the first feature film by writer-director Géla Babluani, in his late 20s and from Georgia, the former Soviet republic. “Tzameti” is Georgian for the number thirteen, universal sign of bad luck. Babluani’s close-knit working-class immigrants are transplanted to France, where any film depicting foreign workers assumes a tension these days. Babluani’s father, a prominent Georgian filmmaker himself, sent his children in France in the early 90s – to the “so-called civilized world,” Babluani says in the DVD interview. He says his generation fell into chaos after the violence of three domino-like civil wars in Georgia and the sudden free-fall into freedom they encountered in a post-Soviet world. Unlike the revolutionary but provincial thugs in The Deer Hunter, those organizing Russian roulette matches outside Paris are worldly men in shiny black cars, habituated to power and complaining that their sport’s golden era is past. Once a night’s match started with 42 contestants, laments one, and the opening bets in Istanbul were much larger.
Around the cramped table in their slope-ceilinged kitchen, Sébastien’s family has a bit of bread and soup to go around. They still speak Georgian at home. Sébastien loses his roofing job at a crumbing, walled villa on the beach when the owner overdoses on morphine and the sudden widow dismisses Sébastien without paying him. The wind fortuitously blows a letter into his hands, containing a train ticket, paid hotel reservation and mysterious instructions. Feeling cheated, Sébastien feels entitled to take his former employer’s place in what he discovers, too late to back out, is the heavily guarded Russian roulette match in the dark woods. His conviction that he’s entitled to overturn his luck of course also generates Sébastien’s later encounter with Jacky’s manager-brother, who feels similarly entitled.
13 Tzameti is meticulous filmmaking, with clean, understated performances. The tensest scenes are not necessarily those during the shooting matches. When detectives arrest Sébastien for questioning on his way home, he evades their confrontations, insists on his story, holds his gaze steady. Gradually it’s clear that mastering his own surging panic during the matches has inoculated this rather shy innocent against garden-variety threats and automatic obedience. To what end, at what cost is less clear.
*******
13 Tzameti opened in the US in July 2006 and released on DVD last month. This review appeared in the 4/12/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing films that have not had regular theatrical runs in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
2006
Director: Géla Babluani
Cast: Georges Babluani, Aurélien Recoing, Philippe Passon
Somewhere outside Paris, thirteen contestants gather in a circle, load their pistols, spin the chambers, and set the muzzles point-blank against the skull of the man in front. Against a frenzy of betting onlookers and a handler’s sharp orders, they wait for a hanging bulb to switch on, then fire. This repeats through three rounds. Then two finalists face each other for a point blank duel – the sarcastic, taunting Jacky (durable French character actor Aurélien Recoing) has survived three previous duels, managed by his own brother, and the shy young handyman Sébastien (Georges Babluani, the director’s younger brother, in his first film role) has walked into more than he bargained for.
On the wall, a poster of 1960s rock star Jim Morrison evokes an era of glamorized self-destruction. Shot in somber, finely detailed black and white – director Géla Babluani says color would be distracting – with almost no blood on-screen, 13 Tzameti meditates on chance, choice and human nature, sorrowing at all three.
Despite inevitable comparisons with director Michael Cimino’s classic 1978 film The Deer Hunter, Babluani insists he had not yet seen Cimino’s film when he made 13 Tzameti. The earlier Robert DeNiro-Christopher Walken vehicle follows a Russian-American enclave in a small town near Pittsburgh’s steel mills through the Vietnam War era. The Deer Hunter famously includes games of Russian roulette, first those the Vietcong imposed upon young US soldiers whom they held prisoner. Then Walken’s character remains in Saigon after the US pull-out. He has a heroin habit that he supports night after night via secret, high-stakes Russian roulette matches played very far off any beaten tourist track.
For those only just beginning to dig their way out of the Vietnam era’s quandaries by the late 70s, The Deer Hunter showed how far afield that war had taken an entire generation. Even more pointedly, that film commented on how the American dream held up for one community of immigrants, still not fully assimilated a generation after their parents fled Soviet repression.
13 Tzameti is the first feature film by writer-director Géla Babluani, in his late 20s and from Georgia, the former Soviet republic. “Tzameti” is Georgian for the number thirteen, universal sign of bad luck. Babluani’s close-knit working-class immigrants are transplanted to France, where any film depicting foreign workers assumes a tension these days. Babluani’s father, a prominent Georgian filmmaker himself, sent his children in France in the early 90s – to the “so-called civilized world,” Babluani says in the DVD interview. He says his generation fell into chaos after the violence of three domino-like civil wars in Georgia and the sudden free-fall into freedom they encountered in a post-Soviet world. Unlike the revolutionary but provincial thugs in The Deer Hunter, those organizing Russian roulette matches outside Paris are worldly men in shiny black cars, habituated to power and complaining that their sport’s golden era is past. Once a night’s match started with 42 contestants, laments one, and the opening bets in Istanbul were much larger.
Around the cramped table in their slope-ceilinged kitchen, Sébastien’s family has a bit of bread and soup to go around. They still speak Georgian at home. Sébastien loses his roofing job at a crumbing, walled villa on the beach when the owner overdoses on morphine and the sudden widow dismisses Sébastien without paying him. The wind fortuitously blows a letter into his hands, containing a train ticket, paid hotel reservation and mysterious instructions. Feeling cheated, Sébastien feels entitled to take his former employer’s place in what he discovers, too late to back out, is the heavily guarded Russian roulette match in the dark woods. His conviction that he’s entitled to overturn his luck of course also generates Sébastien’s later encounter with Jacky’s manager-brother, who feels similarly entitled.
13 Tzameti is meticulous filmmaking, with clean, understated performances. The tensest scenes are not necessarily those during the shooting matches. When detectives arrest Sébastien for questioning on his way home, he evades their confrontations, insists on his story, holds his gaze steady. Gradually it’s clear that mastering his own surging panic during the matches has inoculated this rather shy innocent against garden-variety threats and automatic obedience. To what end, at what cost is less clear.
*******
13 Tzameti opened in the US in July 2006 and released on DVD last month. This review appeared in the 4/12/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing films that have not had regular theatrical runs in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Monday, April 09, 2007
Film Review #94: The Challenge
2007
Director: Tim Scanlon
Cast: Tim Scanlon, Ray Rinaldi, Jennie Russo
“I’m forty years old and I trained for six weeks before we filmed,” said Tim Scanlon, who stars as aging boxer Irish Pat Reilly in The Challenge. Scanlon also wrote, directed and edited this new feature film. “Then the first day of shooting I overdid it and had to go to the hospital. It’s very hard work. I underestimated what it takes. I swam in college and I thought swimming was the ultimate. Now it’s boxing.”
Scanlon, a Cazenovia native, spent eight years in Los Angeles working in films as a stuntman, actor, set dresser and production assistant. A decade ago he came home to start Scanman Productions. Now a West-sider, he’s made eight comedies built upon his Billy Mahoney character and four action films. Speaking before last Friday night’s premiere of his newest at Eastwood’s Palace Theater, Scanlon said he was hopeful for a good crowd.
“The Palace staff tells me I hold the record there for an indie premiere – in October 2005 I had 245 people come to Reynolds City.”
An informal head-count suggested last Friday’s enthusiastic audience was a tad larger. The Challenge screened as a fund-raiser for Ray Rinaldi’s two Syracuse Golden Gloves boxing gyms, where Rinaldi coaches kids and young adults. Rinaldi wants the kids to stay in school and out of trouble. He also mentors boxers with talent and discipline enough to make a start on the pro circuit. Rinaldi holds the New York State franchise – outside New York City’s metro area – for Golden Gloves. He plays himself in The Challenge, a tale that pits his system of clean fighting values against the organized underground world of “street fighting” with its big gambling bucks and no-rules slugfests.
The easy-going, courtly Rinaldi doesn’t think much of himself as an actor, but he greeted people in the lobby and then got on stage with two of his students for a boxing demonstration. He said, “Now this is the real Rocky!” about the first kid, dark-haired Rocky Sardo, fast and wiry. He said the second, willowy, auburn-haired Caroline Buerkle, already has some fight dates. Scanlon MC’ed these preliminaries, which included an Australian buddy who’s a comic and singer Kristen Hoffmann, who drove up from New York for this. Her song “Temple” closes the film.
The Challenge starts with an underground fight that’s set in the basement of The Palace, “closed for twenty-one years” for the story’s purposes, in which Reilly whips the strapping Jorge Medina – in real life an auto detailer at Bresee Chevrolet on Old Liverpool Road – and gets scouted by trainer Mitch O’Malley (Carl Barber). O’Malley tells Rinaldi he can get Reilly in shape for real boxing again. Rinaldi doubts it. He says Reilly’s “a nutcase,” but he welcomes his once gifted student to his gym on South Geddes – there’s even a flashback of the two sparring years ago. Reilly’s girlfriend Tammy (Jennie Russo, whom you might’ve seen at the Spaghetti Warehouse doing dinner theater murder mysteries) also objects to Reilly’s bar brawling –another flashback of a nasty skirmish at Pooches Bar in Solvay features a stray ear. After some testy goading and circling, Reilly and Rinaldi’s grandson – real life pro boxer Damian Rinaldi – resolve matters in a suitably instructive way.
Friday’s crowd did lots of cheering. There’s such unexpected but undeniable pleasure in seeing your own town up there on-screen that you yearn for more locally produced movies. Radio DJs Ron Bee and Becky Palmer from 104.7 and 107.9’s Marty and Shannon are up there on-screen. Scenes occur in the Coffee Pavilion, Traffik nightclub, Canastota’s Boxing Hall of Fame – even Eagle Newspapers’ newsroom. Scanlon’s also made a film worth seeing. He says he worked on choreographing that first fight scene over three weeks, with extra help on blocking the crowd from local filmmaker Ron Bonk. Fine camera work from Rick Stern, who drove from Ohio four times, is especially evident there, in the nightclub scene and during the final showdown fight – itself a 12-hour shoot.
The Challenge may screen at Jazz Central too, but Scanlon was already selling DVDs in lobby Friday night. This DVD is a good deal. Had the excellent trailer run on local network TV, Friday’s crowd would’ve been bigger. There’s also an interview with Scanlon and a wonderful commentary track with Scanlon and producer David Schmidt (who also plays Reilly’s shady street fighter manager).
*******
The Challenge plus two earlier Scanlon features, Concrete Skies & Reynolds City, are available through Scanmanproductions.com. This review appeared in the 4/05/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing films without regular theatrical runs in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
2007
Director: Tim Scanlon
Cast: Tim Scanlon, Ray Rinaldi, Jennie Russo
“I’m forty years old and I trained for six weeks before we filmed,” said Tim Scanlon, who stars as aging boxer Irish Pat Reilly in The Challenge. Scanlon also wrote, directed and edited this new feature film. “Then the first day of shooting I overdid it and had to go to the hospital. It’s very hard work. I underestimated what it takes. I swam in college and I thought swimming was the ultimate. Now it’s boxing.”
Scanlon, a Cazenovia native, spent eight years in Los Angeles working in films as a stuntman, actor, set dresser and production assistant. A decade ago he came home to start Scanman Productions. Now a West-sider, he’s made eight comedies built upon his Billy Mahoney character and four action films. Speaking before last Friday night’s premiere of his newest at Eastwood’s Palace Theater, Scanlon said he was hopeful for a good crowd.
“The Palace staff tells me I hold the record there for an indie premiere – in October 2005 I had 245 people come to Reynolds City.”
An informal head-count suggested last Friday’s enthusiastic audience was a tad larger. The Challenge screened as a fund-raiser for Ray Rinaldi’s two Syracuse Golden Gloves boxing gyms, where Rinaldi coaches kids and young adults. Rinaldi wants the kids to stay in school and out of trouble. He also mentors boxers with talent and discipline enough to make a start on the pro circuit. Rinaldi holds the New York State franchise – outside New York City’s metro area – for Golden Gloves. He plays himself in The Challenge, a tale that pits his system of clean fighting values against the organized underground world of “street fighting” with its big gambling bucks and no-rules slugfests.
The easy-going, courtly Rinaldi doesn’t think much of himself as an actor, but he greeted people in the lobby and then got on stage with two of his students for a boxing demonstration. He said, “Now this is the real Rocky!” about the first kid, dark-haired Rocky Sardo, fast and wiry. He said the second, willowy, auburn-haired Caroline Buerkle, already has some fight dates. Scanlon MC’ed these preliminaries, which included an Australian buddy who’s a comic and singer Kristen Hoffmann, who drove up from New York for this. Her song “Temple” closes the film.
The Challenge starts with an underground fight that’s set in the basement of The Palace, “closed for twenty-one years” for the story’s purposes, in which Reilly whips the strapping Jorge Medina – in real life an auto detailer at Bresee Chevrolet on Old Liverpool Road – and gets scouted by trainer Mitch O’Malley (Carl Barber). O’Malley tells Rinaldi he can get Reilly in shape for real boxing again. Rinaldi doubts it. He says Reilly’s “a nutcase,” but he welcomes his once gifted student to his gym on South Geddes – there’s even a flashback of the two sparring years ago. Reilly’s girlfriend Tammy (Jennie Russo, whom you might’ve seen at the Spaghetti Warehouse doing dinner theater murder mysteries) also objects to Reilly’s bar brawling –another flashback of a nasty skirmish at Pooches Bar in Solvay features a stray ear. After some testy goading and circling, Reilly and Rinaldi’s grandson – real life pro boxer Damian Rinaldi – resolve matters in a suitably instructive way.
Friday’s crowd did lots of cheering. There’s such unexpected but undeniable pleasure in seeing your own town up there on-screen that you yearn for more locally produced movies. Radio DJs Ron Bee and Becky Palmer from 104.7 and 107.9’s Marty and Shannon are up there on-screen. Scenes occur in the Coffee Pavilion, Traffik nightclub, Canastota’s Boxing Hall of Fame – even Eagle Newspapers’ newsroom. Scanlon’s also made a film worth seeing. He says he worked on choreographing that first fight scene over three weeks, with extra help on blocking the crowd from local filmmaker Ron Bonk. Fine camera work from Rick Stern, who drove from Ohio four times, is especially evident there, in the nightclub scene and during the final showdown fight – itself a 12-hour shoot.
The Challenge may screen at Jazz Central too, but Scanlon was already selling DVDs in lobby Friday night. This DVD is a good deal. Had the excellent trailer run on local network TV, Friday’s crowd would’ve been bigger. There’s also an interview with Scanlon and a wonderful commentary track with Scanlon and producer David Schmidt (who also plays Reilly’s shady street fighter manager).
*******
The Challenge plus two earlier Scanlon features, Concrete Skies & Reynolds City, are available through Scanmanproductions.com. This review appeared in the 4/05/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing films without regular theatrical runs in Syracuse & older films of enduring worth.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Film Review #93: Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles
2005
Director: Zhang Yimou >br> Cast: Ken Takakura, Yang Zhenbo, Li Jiamin
Just released last month on DVD, this film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou is unlike the films that most American audiences know him for best. In his case, the absence of the usual channels our attention as much as what’s there. Part of the so-called “Fifth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers raised during China’s 1960s’ Cultural Revolution, Zhang wanted so much to make movies – he’d been assigned to rural labor – that he sold his own blood to buy his first camera. In Riding Alone, an older fisherman takes up his estranged son’s documentary filmmaking because the son is too ill to complete a last project about a Chinese opera singer's rendition of a particular song. The film’s title comes from that Chinese opera, which depicts a difficult journey undertaken out of loyalty.
Zhang turns his focus away from women in this tale of a remorseful father. While his son’s wife Rie courageously reaches out to him and the tourist guide Jasmine opens many doors for him, the real emotional journeys here occur for the deeply reticent Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura), his embittered folklorist son, the Chinese opera singer Li Jiamin (playing himself) and Li’s abandoned little boy Yang Yang (Yang Zhenbo). Perhaps Zhang suggests he and his audiences share the uncertainty of new cinematic ground when Takata’s quest takes him so far – to remote Yunnan province – that the very road itself is still under construction.
Zhang’s previous films were steeped in Chinese identity. This one begins and ends in Japan. Zhang wrote his lead role for a popular actor known as “Japan’s Clint Eastwood,” who plays against type. No longer playing a gangster, here Takakura is a decent outsider. In a larger sense, Riding Alone plays against Chinese cinema’s persistent negative portrayals of Japan, rooted in Japanese military aggression of the 1930s and 40s. Takata’s son is a respected scholar at Tokyo University and the Chinese villagers fondly recall his curiosity about their culture despite his personal aloofness, which they generously define as “loneliness.” Riding Alone asks Chinese audiences to see Japan freshly and Western audiences to distinguish among Asian characters.
Riding Alone is also an austere contemporary parable rather than Zhang’s signature historical action-dramas. In Raise the Red Lantern (1992), Zhang cast actress Li Gong as a woman condemned to misery as the youngest wife in a 1920’s Chinese household. The highest grossing Chinese film ever (starring Jet Li), Zhang’s 2002 Hero showcased actresses Maggie Cheung and Ziyi Zhang as assassins. The latter appeared again in Zhang’s 2004 Tang Dynasty potboiler House of Flying Daggers. Zhang’s new Curse of the Golden Flower brings back Li Gong in an emperor’s palace intrigue. Such genre films have been commercially successful and Zhang’s actresses have crossed over to roles in Clean and Miami Vice as well as Memoirs of a Geisha and higher-end art-house films like Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and In the Mood for Love.
In contrast, Riding Alone strips away this aura of sumptuous remove, confining the elaborate costumes and performance tradition to a small corner of a close-up story about modern characters who cannot communicate. Opera simply provides the potent image of the mask, universal sign of how roles at once protect and restrict social relations. Takata almost films the wrong opera singer – whereupon he learns Li Jiamin is away in prison – because one guide assumes it’s immaterial which actor is behind the mask. When Takata makes his own video to plead for admission to that prison, he covers his face with a ceremonial banner, but his tears and confession of past fault move the bureaucrats more. Takata’s son confides that folk operas were attractive because his own life was hidden behind masks. Elegantly closing the film, the opera's masked hero performs a dance as accompanying prison inmates swirl about him.
What makes Riding Alone so singular lies beyond emoting for its own sake or reciting the right words. At first Takata envies the hysterical Li Jiamin for his capacity to weep, but he eventually enacts the virtue of loyalty for his own son and Li Jiamin’s son too in quieter, more steadfast ways. Lost in the mountains with the resentful boy Yang Yang, Takata shares a humorous twitch of the nose with the little boy over smelly bathroom habits – an exchange that’s the very essence of dropping one’s proper poses. We may think such small moments change everything, but getting there was half the battle.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/29/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent films that didn’t screen locally & older films of enduring worth.
Director: Zhang Yimou >br> Cast: Ken Takakura, Yang Zhenbo, Li Jiamin
Just released last month on DVD, this film by Chinese director Zhang Yimou is unlike the films that most American audiences know him for best. In his case, the absence of the usual channels our attention as much as what’s there. Part of the so-called “Fifth Generation” of Chinese filmmakers raised during China’s 1960s’ Cultural Revolution, Zhang wanted so much to make movies – he’d been assigned to rural labor – that he sold his own blood to buy his first camera. In Riding Alone, an older fisherman takes up his estranged son’s documentary filmmaking because the son is too ill to complete a last project about a Chinese opera singer's rendition of a particular song. The film’s title comes from that Chinese opera, which depicts a difficult journey undertaken out of loyalty.
Zhang turns his focus away from women in this tale of a remorseful father. While his son’s wife Rie courageously reaches out to him and the tourist guide Jasmine opens many doors for him, the real emotional journeys here occur for the deeply reticent Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura), his embittered folklorist son, the Chinese opera singer Li Jiamin (playing himself) and Li’s abandoned little boy Yang Yang (Yang Zhenbo). Perhaps Zhang suggests he and his audiences share the uncertainty of new cinematic ground when Takata’s quest takes him so far – to remote Yunnan province – that the very road itself is still under construction.
Zhang’s previous films were steeped in Chinese identity. This one begins and ends in Japan. Zhang wrote his lead role for a popular actor known as “Japan’s Clint Eastwood,” who plays against type. No longer playing a gangster, here Takakura is a decent outsider. In a larger sense, Riding Alone plays against Chinese cinema’s persistent negative portrayals of Japan, rooted in Japanese military aggression of the 1930s and 40s. Takata’s son is a respected scholar at Tokyo University and the Chinese villagers fondly recall his curiosity about their culture despite his personal aloofness, which they generously define as “loneliness.” Riding Alone asks Chinese audiences to see Japan freshly and Western audiences to distinguish among Asian characters.
Riding Alone is also an austere contemporary parable rather than Zhang’s signature historical action-dramas. In Raise the Red Lantern (1992), Zhang cast actress Li Gong as a woman condemned to misery as the youngest wife in a 1920’s Chinese household. The highest grossing Chinese film ever (starring Jet Li), Zhang’s 2002 Hero showcased actresses Maggie Cheung and Ziyi Zhang as assassins. The latter appeared again in Zhang’s 2004 Tang Dynasty potboiler House of Flying Daggers. Zhang’s new Curse of the Golden Flower brings back Li Gong in an emperor’s palace intrigue. Such genre films have been commercially successful and Zhang’s actresses have crossed over to roles in Clean and Miami Vice as well as Memoirs of a Geisha and higher-end art-house films like Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 and In the Mood for Love.
In contrast, Riding Alone strips away this aura of sumptuous remove, confining the elaborate costumes and performance tradition to a small corner of a close-up story about modern characters who cannot communicate. Opera simply provides the potent image of the mask, universal sign of how roles at once protect and restrict social relations. Takata almost films the wrong opera singer – whereupon he learns Li Jiamin is away in prison – because one guide assumes it’s immaterial which actor is behind the mask. When Takata makes his own video to plead for admission to that prison, he covers his face with a ceremonial banner, but his tears and confession of past fault move the bureaucrats more. Takata’s son confides that folk operas were attractive because his own life was hidden behind masks. Elegantly closing the film, the opera's masked hero performs a dance as accompanying prison inmates swirl about him.
What makes Riding Alone so singular lies beyond emoting for its own sake or reciting the right words. At first Takata envies the hysterical Li Jiamin for his capacity to weep, but he eventually enacts the virtue of loyalty for his own son and Li Jiamin’s son too in quieter, more steadfast ways. Lost in the mountains with the resentful boy Yang Yang, Takata shares a humorous twitch of the nose with the little boy over smelly bathroom habits – an exchange that’s the very essence of dropping one’s proper poses. We may think such small moments change everything, but getting there was half the battle.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/29/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing recent films that didn’t screen locally & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Film Review #92: Black Snake Moan
2007
Director: Craig Brewer
Cast: Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson, Justin Timberlake
It’s one of those moments of raunchy splendor that – once seen – clarifies how far short most similar efforts fall. As Rae Duell, a bleached blonde Christina Ricci strides down a sleepy Tennessee road in the dappled morning sunlight under a canopy of branches. The Black Keys’ growling blues instrumental, “When the Lights Go Out” sets her pace. She’s got on her cowboy boots, cut-off jeans so tight she couldn’t walk at all if she hadn’t cut off the legs, and a scrap of tee-shirt on which dueling Confederate and Yankee flags nominally cover her breasts. There’s a duel going on in Rae’s heart too, of course, along with her dual nature. (And be patient, because soon a boozy night football game will reveal that tee-shirt’s promise in the tattooed floral vine coiling around her right nipple.) Rae’s got a little runway kick in each step and a dainty, almost prim smirk – Ricci’s repertoire with the muscles around her mouth alone is delicately remarkable – and pretty soon along behind her comes one of those huge green mowing tractors with a cab like you see all summer chugging endlessly up and down on interstate highway medians, blaring its horn. Never mind what it’s doing on this narrow country lane. Rae never turns around, steps aside or breaks her rhythm when she throws the driver her finger.
Rae must have that same electric guitar going on in her head. The story is that Rae has flashbacks of childhood sexual abuse that manifest as staggeringly voracious sexual – well, “fits” would be the closest word. But as in Hustle and Flow (2005), writer/director Craig Brewer’s longer, deeper concern is how music patches back together even the most bottomed out and woebegone. In Hustle and Flow, so easily dismissed by some as manipulative, Terrence Howard’s pimp DJay sees Hip Hop as his way out. As in this film, Brewer nails a certain type of breakable-glass women who – if they live long enough – crowd drug rehabs, struggling just not to storm out the door about twenty times a day. Now Brewer’s working on a third film in this evolving grand tour of Memphis-area musical styles, Maggie Lynn, about country honky-tonk.
Although Black Snake Moan begins with archival footage of legendary bluesman Son House defining “the only real blues is between a man and a woman” – that clip picks up later, intruding somewhat ham-fistedly, when a shooting seems imminent – the film is dedicated to northern rural Mississippi hill country bluesman R.L. Burnside, who died in Memphis in 2005. While Brewer establishes Rae’s predicament – she’s been left alone by Ronnie, who’s off to the National Guard, and soon tempts the idea of living long enough by getting beaten up and thrown in the road – he also overlays the action with a fat blues soundtrack and deftly cuts in scenes of Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), who will take Rae in. Lazarus’ world crumbles when his wife Rose walks off with his younger, spiffier brother. Lazarus’ gesture of defiance against fate also involves a tractor, when he lays waste to his wife Rose’s rose garden. Besides putting a preacher in the movie named Reverend R.L. (John Cothran), Brewer puts Lazarus in a real juke joint playing with Burnside’s slide guitar sideman Kenny Brown and grandson Cedric Burnside for a rousing, sweaty finale.
We cannot go further here without mentioning two things. One is that Rae and her boyfriend Ronnie Morgan (Justin Timberlake, fine and surprising here) have matching anxiety attacks. He leaves Rae in a heap on the lawn outside their trailer when he goes off to the National Guard. He arms them with sweet, pitiful black plastic watches that are supposed to beep at the same hour every night so they can think of each other. Instead, Rae’s going at it with strapping Tehronne (David Banna) within an hour and Ronnie falls apart on the firing range. It’s one measure of how circumscribed is their existence that Ronnie clarifies his anxiety attacks by jogging his friend Gil’s memory, “You know, like when I used to get sick before the games in school.” When Ronnie says, “You know Rae’s history,” even if many in the audience would use that term, Ronnie probably would not.
Secondly, there’s that chain Lazarus uses to tether Rae. Lurid pulp fiction-style poster graphics of a black man standing over a kneeling blond in chains preceded the film, priming the pump. That image marketed the CD soundtrack too, out two months before the film itself. That image practically double-dared a whole slew of groaning reviews: “Tied to a radiator for her own good!” That image drives the several raw ponderings between men in the film about what ails Rae and it prompts Lazarus’ disavowal, “My wick dry on this one!” Actually Jackson and Ricci have some wonderfully choreographed scenes around this chain, as when he takes her for a walk in his garden and who’s leading who passes back and forth between them. Just the very idea of that chain has us buffaloed. And it’s got every character in the movie buffaloed too. It almost brings on hot flashes. Notice that in the midst of such high salaciousness, Brewer manages a counterweight in the shyly gentle exchange between Lazarus and the matronly pharmacist Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson).
There is a lot wrong with this movie. In fact, I had to go back a second time to figure out how come I kept thinking about some scenes and telling other people to go see it. I’d say, “Here’s an odd one!” as if this excused a momentary soft spot for trash. Preposterous and overwrought, Black Snake Moan is also the early work of a filmmaker with big enough ideas to sin boldly.
*******
This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 3/24/07.
2007
Director: Craig Brewer
Cast: Christina Ricci, Samuel L. Jackson, Justin Timberlake
It’s one of those moments of raunchy splendor that – once seen – clarifies how far short most similar efforts fall. As Rae Duell, a bleached blonde Christina Ricci strides down a sleepy Tennessee road in the dappled morning sunlight under a canopy of branches. The Black Keys’ growling blues instrumental, “When the Lights Go Out” sets her pace. She’s got on her cowboy boots, cut-off jeans so tight she couldn’t walk at all if she hadn’t cut off the legs, and a scrap of tee-shirt on which dueling Confederate and Yankee flags nominally cover her breasts. There’s a duel going on in Rae’s heart too, of course, along with her dual nature. (And be patient, because soon a boozy night football game will reveal that tee-shirt’s promise in the tattooed floral vine coiling around her right nipple.) Rae’s got a little runway kick in each step and a dainty, almost prim smirk – Ricci’s repertoire with the muscles around her mouth alone is delicately remarkable – and pretty soon along behind her comes one of those huge green mowing tractors with a cab like you see all summer chugging endlessly up and down on interstate highway medians, blaring its horn. Never mind what it’s doing on this narrow country lane. Rae never turns around, steps aside or breaks her rhythm when she throws the driver her finger.
Rae must have that same electric guitar going on in her head. The story is that Rae has flashbacks of childhood sexual abuse that manifest as staggeringly voracious sexual – well, “fits” would be the closest word. But as in Hustle and Flow (2005), writer/director Craig Brewer’s longer, deeper concern is how music patches back together even the most bottomed out and woebegone. In Hustle and Flow, so easily dismissed by some as manipulative, Terrence Howard’s pimp DJay sees Hip Hop as his way out. As in this film, Brewer nails a certain type of breakable-glass women who – if they live long enough – crowd drug rehabs, struggling just not to storm out the door about twenty times a day. Now Brewer’s working on a third film in this evolving grand tour of Memphis-area musical styles, Maggie Lynn, about country honky-tonk.
Although Black Snake Moan begins with archival footage of legendary bluesman Son House defining “the only real blues is between a man and a woman” – that clip picks up later, intruding somewhat ham-fistedly, when a shooting seems imminent – the film is dedicated to northern rural Mississippi hill country bluesman R.L. Burnside, who died in Memphis in 2005. While Brewer establishes Rae’s predicament – she’s been left alone by Ronnie, who’s off to the National Guard, and soon tempts the idea of living long enough by getting beaten up and thrown in the road – he also overlays the action with a fat blues soundtrack and deftly cuts in scenes of Lazarus (Samuel L. Jackson), who will take Rae in. Lazarus’ world crumbles when his wife Rose walks off with his younger, spiffier brother. Lazarus’ gesture of defiance against fate also involves a tractor, when he lays waste to his wife Rose’s rose garden. Besides putting a preacher in the movie named Reverend R.L. (John Cothran), Brewer puts Lazarus in a real juke joint playing with Burnside’s slide guitar sideman Kenny Brown and grandson Cedric Burnside for a rousing, sweaty finale.
We cannot go further here without mentioning two things. One is that Rae and her boyfriend Ronnie Morgan (Justin Timberlake, fine and surprising here) have matching anxiety attacks. He leaves Rae in a heap on the lawn outside their trailer when he goes off to the National Guard. He arms them with sweet, pitiful black plastic watches that are supposed to beep at the same hour every night so they can think of each other. Instead, Rae’s going at it with strapping Tehronne (David Banna) within an hour and Ronnie falls apart on the firing range. It’s one measure of how circumscribed is their existence that Ronnie clarifies his anxiety attacks by jogging his friend Gil’s memory, “You know, like when I used to get sick before the games in school.” When Ronnie says, “You know Rae’s history,” even if many in the audience would use that term, Ronnie probably would not.
Secondly, there’s that chain Lazarus uses to tether Rae. Lurid pulp fiction-style poster graphics of a black man standing over a kneeling blond in chains preceded the film, priming the pump. That image marketed the CD soundtrack too, out two months before the film itself. That image practically double-dared a whole slew of groaning reviews: “Tied to a radiator for her own good!” That image drives the several raw ponderings between men in the film about what ails Rae and it prompts Lazarus’ disavowal, “My wick dry on this one!” Actually Jackson and Ricci have some wonderfully choreographed scenes around this chain, as when he takes her for a walk in his garden and who’s leading who passes back and forth between them. Just the very idea of that chain has us buffaloed. And it’s got every character in the movie buffaloed too. It almost brings on hot flashes. Notice that in the midst of such high salaciousness, Brewer manages a counterweight in the shyly gentle exchange between Lazarus and the matronly pharmacist Angela (S. Epatha Merkerson).
There is a lot wrong with this movie. In fact, I had to go back a second time to figure out how come I kept thinking about some scenes and telling other people to go see it. I’d say, “Here’s an odd one!” as if this excused a momentary soft spot for trash. Preposterous and overwrought, Black Snake Moan is also the early work of a filmmaker with big enough ideas to sin boldly.
*******
This review appeared in Stylusmagazine.com on 3/24/07.
Film Review #91: The Sea Hawk
1940
Director: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Errol Flynn, Flora Robson, Henry Daniell
The ocean has fascinated filmmakers from the earliest days of cinema. The first practitioners of the experimental technique that made a series of jerky, rapidly viewed single photos reproduce movement perhaps naturally chose subjects already popular among painters and draftsmen. But they had a special fondness for the sea in motion.
Right now in Washington, DC, the Phillips Collection has an exhibit called Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film that sets paintings from the period side by side with film clips from Eadweard Muybridge (with his famous galloping horse), Thomas Edison, the Lumiére Brothers and others. This revelatory exhibit confirms how deeply rooted in the visual image for its own sake cinema has always been, and how movies set at sea will have a certain edge no matter what stories we tack on for good measure.
Maybe you don’t have a trip to Washington planned for this spring, but there’s something quietly going on right here called Ocean Films, Wednesday eves at the Warehouse downtown. Ocean Films hasn’t been advertised beyond a few posters in the hallway, but there’s plenty of seats in the main floor community room so anyone can drop in, it’s free and there’s discussion afterward. Martin Hogue, who actually teaches architecture, put the series together. His occasional film seminars provide some of the best movie talk anywhere. Meanwhile, Emerald City Video has just about all the DVDs in the series.
Say you want a classic swashbuckler to round out your examples of how filmmakers use the ocean as both environment and character in its own right – and as counterpoint to Pirates of the Caribbean. Directed by Hungarian Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, The Sea Hawk is a great choice. Winding up a string of similar costume dramas, Errol Flynn plays the English privateer Captain Geoffrey Thorpe (a thinly disguised Sir Francis Drake). Claude Rains is the Spanish ambassador Alvarez, and the popular British stage actor Flora Robson is Queen Elizabeth. Three years later Curtiz directed Casablanca, in which Rains played an equally debonair but better coiffed Captain Renault.
Set in 1585, The Sea Hawk covers a crucial juncture in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, just before England’s new naval fleet whipped the Spanish Armada that King Phillip sent to remove the only serious barrier to his plans for world conquest. Preferring diplomacy to war, Elizabeth had resisted building a fleet. Thorpe – operating as Elizabeth’s Mission Impossible-style covert agent – provides proof of Spain’s impending secret attack. Along the way he romances the Spanish ambassador’s niece, leads an ill-fated expedition to Panama to “divert” some gold, serves time as a galley slave himself before a tense and daring escape, and unmasks Phillip’s spy in court, Lord Wolfingham (Henry Daniell). Flynn was an exhilarating, authentically expert fencer, and the sword fight in which Thorpe kills Wolfingham is made doubly magnificent by the camera work and lighting effects needed to hide how poor a match Daniell was.
The Sea Hawk opened in 1940 after England entered World War II. Certainly English and US audiences both heard Elizabeth’s speech about the “obligation of all free men” in that light. But this film is also saturated with young men’s yearning for ocean-going mastery. Thorpe’s crew is never more ungainly than when stranded in Panama. When they stumble out of the jungle, it’s completely convincing that they rush gratefully into the surf. After the 1986 Challenger disaster, President Reagan, quoting poetry, said that astronauts “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” When Thorpe and his crew finally recover command of a ship and hoist those sails for England, Curtiz lets us glimpse that sea-faring era as equally world-changing.
The Sea Hawk screens at the Warehouse on 3/28 at 8:30 p.m. The Ocean Films remaining after that are the Beatles’ 1968 Yellow Submarine on 4/4 and Wolfgang Petersen’s1981 three-hour German U-boat saga Das Boot on 4/11. The series began with Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and other previous films were The Endurance (2000), a saga of the 1914-16 Antarctic Shackleton expedition, A Night to Remember (1958), a pre-Titanic film about that disaster, Stacy Peralta’s exhilarating 2004 surfer doc Riding Giants, and last night the 2004 Bill Murray-Owen Wilson vehicle, Life Aquatic with Steve Zizou.
*******
This review appeared on 3/23/07 in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly DVD column reviewing recent films that haven’t opened in Syracuse theaters & older films of enduring worth.
1940
Director: Michael Curtiz
Cast: Errol Flynn, Flora Robson, Henry Daniell
The ocean has fascinated filmmakers from the earliest days of cinema. The first practitioners of the experimental technique that made a series of jerky, rapidly viewed single photos reproduce movement perhaps naturally chose subjects already popular among painters and draftsmen. But they had a special fondness for the sea in motion.
Right now in Washington, DC, the Phillips Collection has an exhibit called Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film that sets paintings from the period side by side with film clips from Eadweard Muybridge (with his famous galloping horse), Thomas Edison, the Lumiére Brothers and others. This revelatory exhibit confirms how deeply rooted in the visual image for its own sake cinema has always been, and how movies set at sea will have a certain edge no matter what stories we tack on for good measure.
Maybe you don’t have a trip to Washington planned for this spring, but there’s something quietly going on right here called Ocean Films, Wednesday eves at the Warehouse downtown. Ocean Films hasn’t been advertised beyond a few posters in the hallway, but there’s plenty of seats in the main floor community room so anyone can drop in, it’s free and there’s discussion afterward. Martin Hogue, who actually teaches architecture, put the series together. His occasional film seminars provide some of the best movie talk anywhere. Meanwhile, Emerald City Video has just about all the DVDs in the series.
Say you want a classic swashbuckler to round out your examples of how filmmakers use the ocean as both environment and character in its own right – and as counterpoint to Pirates of the Caribbean. Directed by Hungarian Michael Curtiz for Warner Brothers, The Sea Hawk is a great choice. Winding up a string of similar costume dramas, Errol Flynn plays the English privateer Captain Geoffrey Thorpe (a thinly disguised Sir Francis Drake). Claude Rains is the Spanish ambassador Alvarez, and the popular British stage actor Flora Robson is Queen Elizabeth. Three years later Curtiz directed Casablanca, in which Rains played an equally debonair but better coiffed Captain Renault.
Set in 1585, The Sea Hawk covers a crucial juncture in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, just before England’s new naval fleet whipped the Spanish Armada that King Phillip sent to remove the only serious barrier to his plans for world conquest. Preferring diplomacy to war, Elizabeth had resisted building a fleet. Thorpe – operating as Elizabeth’s Mission Impossible-style covert agent – provides proof of Spain’s impending secret attack. Along the way he romances the Spanish ambassador’s niece, leads an ill-fated expedition to Panama to “divert” some gold, serves time as a galley slave himself before a tense and daring escape, and unmasks Phillip’s spy in court, Lord Wolfingham (Henry Daniell). Flynn was an exhilarating, authentically expert fencer, and the sword fight in which Thorpe kills Wolfingham is made doubly magnificent by the camera work and lighting effects needed to hide how poor a match Daniell was.
The Sea Hawk opened in 1940 after England entered World War II. Certainly English and US audiences both heard Elizabeth’s speech about the “obligation of all free men” in that light. But this film is also saturated with young men’s yearning for ocean-going mastery. Thorpe’s crew is never more ungainly than when stranded in Panama. When they stumble out of the jungle, it’s completely convincing that they rush gratefully into the surf. After the 1986 Challenger disaster, President Reagan, quoting poetry, said that astronauts “slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.” When Thorpe and his crew finally recover command of a ship and hoist those sails for England, Curtiz lets us glimpse that sea-faring era as equally world-changing.
The Sea Hawk screens at the Warehouse on 3/28 at 8:30 p.m. The Ocean Films remaining after that are the Beatles’ 1968 Yellow Submarine on 4/4 and Wolfgang Petersen’s1981 three-hour German U-boat saga Das Boot on 4/11. The series began with Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and other previous films were The Endurance (2000), a saga of the 1914-16 Antarctic Shackleton expedition, A Night to Remember (1958), a pre-Titanic film about that disaster, Stacy Peralta’s exhilarating 2004 surfer doc Riding Giants, and last night the 2004 Bill Murray-Owen Wilson vehicle, Life Aquatic with Steve Zizou.
*******
This review appeared on 3/23/07 in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly DVD column reviewing recent films that haven’t opened in Syracuse theaters & older films of enduring worth.
Saturday, March 17, 2007
Film Review #90: The Cave of the Yellow Dog
2004
Director: Byambasuren Davaa
Cast: The Batchuluun family
Somewhere on the northwestern Mongolian steppes, the Batchuluun family’s two youngest kids have been left alone all day. Outside their warm, well-lit yurt with its patterned rugs and cabinets, a rain storm has gathered as night falls. Their father, Urindorj, has made the several days’ journey to town by motorcycle to sell the hides of two sheep killed by the region’s growing number of marauding wolves. Their mother, Batbayar, has taken the second of the family’s two horses out to look for Nansal, who did not return earlier with the sheep. Nansal, about six or seven and home from boarding school, was sent to herd in her father’s absence, perched on his horse and accompanied by Zochor, the stray puppy named for his spots that she stubbornly refuses to part with. The little ones left alone are her younger sister and brother. “Watch your brother,” says their mother as she rides off.
That’s what the little girl does. She keeps him inside – away from the prowling wolves we imagine are close-by – dancing with him, then correcting him gently when the restless toddler (his restlessness gets him in real danger later) spies the family’s painted ceramic statue of Buddha and starts biting its head. “No,” says his older sister, all of four, taking the statue from him. “You can’t play with God.”
In an interview on the DVD, Mongolian director Byambasuren Davaa cites this moment as one of those absurdly lucky accidents of documentary filmmaking that you couldn’t plan or even get such young nonprofessionals to perform anyway. On that day, the real Nansal had decided she “didn’t want to play” with the film crew anymore, so they were shooting footage of the other kids to pass the time.
The Cave of the Yellow Dog is Davaa’s second feature, a dramatized documentary built from following a real Mongolian family over two months. It comes to DVD release three months after its US theatrical release in New York, after reaching fifteen other countries. Davaa’s first film, The Story of the Weeping Camel, filmed in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, concerns another nomadic family, who must enlist a musician to persuade a camel to accept her new offspring. Weeping Camel was Oscar-nominated, and I remember a friend, familiar with that part of the world, calling me long distance and exclaiming, “You have to see this movie!”
After working on Mongolian National Television since 1989, Davaa studied at the film academy in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, in the late 90s. Not content, she moved to Germany in 2000 to study film at Munich. The Cave of the Yellow Dog is her graduation project, shot with a largely German crew, as was Weeping Camel.
Davaa’s method at first seems much like the pioneering documentary work of Robert Flaherty. His 1922 Nanook of the North, the first silent documentary, followed an Inuit family hunting walrus on Canada’s Hudson Bay. Man of Aran (1934) followed an Irish fishing family, also battling the elements to avoid starvation. (Both films are avaialble on DVD.) Flaherty’s films were borne of long shoots and much editing, but he also sometimes endangered his subjects and sometimes asked them to stage picturesque but largely abandoned practices. A member of the culture she records, Davaa is both more respectful of her subjects and more attentive to accuracy about a way of life she seeks to capture.
Because a major theme is reincarnation against a modernizing world, Yellow Dog begins with the puppy’s death and works backward to explain how Zochor won his honored place in this family. Nansal is unexpectedly assertive after boarding school, keeping the puppy her father fears will attract wolves, and it's true that her stubbornness and fondness for the puppy endangers herself and her family. She goes on a journey and is taken in by her grandmother to dry out, drink hot tea, and hear the same fable that Davaa’s grandmother told her. When the family breaks camp and the little brother is left behind, Zochor saves his life. Consistant with this gentle film, this rescue, while tense and suspenseful, is also largely implied.
The Cave of the Yellow Dog has an optional dubbed soundtrack in English so that kids can watch too without having to deal with the subtitles. You’ll want to watch this one with them.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/15/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of films that never opened locally and older films of enduring worth.
2004
Director: Byambasuren Davaa
Cast: The Batchuluun family
Somewhere on the northwestern Mongolian steppes, the Batchuluun family’s two youngest kids have been left alone all day. Outside their warm, well-lit yurt with its patterned rugs and cabinets, a rain storm has gathered as night falls. Their father, Urindorj, has made the several days’ journey to town by motorcycle to sell the hides of two sheep killed by the region’s growing number of marauding wolves. Their mother, Batbayar, has taken the second of the family’s two horses out to look for Nansal, who did not return earlier with the sheep. Nansal, about six or seven and home from boarding school, was sent to herd in her father’s absence, perched on his horse and accompanied by Zochor, the stray puppy named for his spots that she stubbornly refuses to part with. The little ones left alone are her younger sister and brother. “Watch your brother,” says their mother as she rides off.
That’s what the little girl does. She keeps him inside – away from the prowling wolves we imagine are close-by – dancing with him, then correcting him gently when the restless toddler (his restlessness gets him in real danger later) spies the family’s painted ceramic statue of Buddha and starts biting its head. “No,” says his older sister, all of four, taking the statue from him. “You can’t play with God.”
In an interview on the DVD, Mongolian director Byambasuren Davaa cites this moment as one of those absurdly lucky accidents of documentary filmmaking that you couldn’t plan or even get such young nonprofessionals to perform anyway. On that day, the real Nansal had decided she “didn’t want to play” with the film crew anymore, so they were shooting footage of the other kids to pass the time.
The Cave of the Yellow Dog is Davaa’s second feature, a dramatized documentary built from following a real Mongolian family over two months. It comes to DVD release three months after its US theatrical release in New York, after reaching fifteen other countries. Davaa’s first film, The Story of the Weeping Camel, filmed in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, concerns another nomadic family, who must enlist a musician to persuade a camel to accept her new offspring. Weeping Camel was Oscar-nominated, and I remember a friend, familiar with that part of the world, calling me long distance and exclaiming, “You have to see this movie!”
After working on Mongolian National Television since 1989, Davaa studied at the film academy in Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, in the late 90s. Not content, she moved to Germany in 2000 to study film at Munich. The Cave of the Yellow Dog is her graduation project, shot with a largely German crew, as was Weeping Camel.
Davaa’s method at first seems much like the pioneering documentary work of Robert Flaherty. His 1922 Nanook of the North, the first silent documentary, followed an Inuit family hunting walrus on Canada’s Hudson Bay. Man of Aran (1934) followed an Irish fishing family, also battling the elements to avoid starvation. (Both films are avaialble on DVD.) Flaherty’s films were borne of long shoots and much editing, but he also sometimes endangered his subjects and sometimes asked them to stage picturesque but largely abandoned practices. A member of the culture she records, Davaa is both more respectful of her subjects and more attentive to accuracy about a way of life she seeks to capture.
Because a major theme is reincarnation against a modernizing world, Yellow Dog begins with the puppy’s death and works backward to explain how Zochor won his honored place in this family. Nansal is unexpectedly assertive after boarding school, keeping the puppy her father fears will attract wolves, and it's true that her stubbornness and fondness for the puppy endangers herself and her family. She goes on a journey and is taken in by her grandmother to dry out, drink hot tea, and hear the same fable that Davaa’s grandmother told her. When the family breaks camp and the little brother is left behind, Zochor saves his life. Consistant with this gentle film, this rescue, while tense and suspenseful, is also largely implied.
The Cave of the Yellow Dog has an optional dubbed soundtrack in English so that kids can watch too without having to deal with the subtitles. You’ll want to watch this one with them.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/15/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where "Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of films that never opened locally and older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #89: The Proud Valley
1940
Director: Pen Tennyson
Cast: Paul Robeson, Edwad Chapman, Simon Lack
There’s a clip in Saul Turell’s Oscar-winning 1979 documentary Tribute to an Artist in which stage and screen actor-singer Paul Robeson tells assembled reporters, “No more pretty pictures.” By 1940, when he played itinerant sailor and coal-miner David Goliath in British director Pen Tennyson’s The Proud Valley, Robeson had turned down a string of lucrative US film studio offers so he could take on roles and projects with more progressive aims, including support of the labor movement here and abroad.
Meant as an expose of harsh, unsafe working conditions in the coal mines of Wales, The Proud Valley casts Robeson as an American who has jumped a train in the countryside and landed in the village of Blaendy. As he walks up the main street, David overhears men singing. During a lull he joins in, his rich bass-baritone soaring into the second-story room where miner Dick Parry (Edward Chapman) conducts the Blaendy men’s choir in practice for the important Welsh national Eisteddfod competition. He’s not been happy with their progress. But soon David and the singers are answering one another in a sort of transplanted call and response that peaks to a shiver-inducing cascade of sound. You can see from Parry’s excited face that he must have this voice – whose owner he’s not yet laid eyes on – for that competition. This moment seems tailor-made for the internationalist Robeson, bringing together the possibilities of music as a universal language and art’s capacity to lift up the poor, overcome difference and rally the struggle against injustice.
In hindsight, the plot seems commonplace, except for the twists of realistic working class characters and a black hero at a time when mainstream US films featured stock characters of the Stepin Fetchit variety. Dick Parry takes David home for supper, rents him a room and gets him a job on his crew in the mine. Parry overcomes his wife’s resistance to taking in a stranger and his crew’s resistance to a black man. “Aren’t we all black in the coal pit?” he asks them. After an explosion in the mine injures Parry fatally, David carries him out. He works the slag pile for scrap coal after the mine closes rather than desert the family that took him in. He is among those who walk to London to persuade the owners to re-open Blaendy’s pit since England will have to fight Hitler. And in the climactic cave-in, when Parry’s decent and enterprising son Emlyn (Simon Lack) seems doomed, we all know what David Goliath will do. Robeson said later that this was the film he was most proud of.
Robeson sings often here. Besides performing Mendelssohn’s religious chorales with the real-life Blaendy choir, Robeson’s David sings the spiritual “Deep River” at Dick Parry’s funeral and the Welsh folk song, “All Through the Night” in the mine. But in tailoring this film to Robeson’s talents and political inclinations, the filmmakers also made use of a long popular tradition of choral singing and musical performance in working class communities. Other British films about the persistent hardships of workers’ lives have used the same frame. In Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996), the unemployment-ridden coal mining village of Grimley’s brass ensemble wins a national competition. Laid-off steel-workers changed careers in The Full Monty (1997). Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000) sets a boy’s reach for his dream of dancing in the historic coal miners’ strike of 1984.
The Proud Valley was a collaboration that grew out of Robeson’s long association with left-leaning circles in the British stage and film community. The activist Unity Theatre’s Herbert Marshall and his wife Alfredda Brilliant wrote the part for Robeson. Director Pen Tennyson had founded a film-workers union and made a boxing expose as his first feature. Tennyson made the film at Ealing – one of only three British studios that made movies throughout World War II – where dedication to “ordinary heroes” and criticism of authority had high value.
At the same time Robeson agreed to work with photographer Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz on a docudrama about exploited workers and undermined civil liberties in the US. Besides providing songs, Robeson narrated Native Land (1942), his last film.
*******
The Proud Valley & Native Land are part of Criterion’s new 4-disc set, Paul Robeson: Portraits of an Artist. This review appeared in the 3/7/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing films that never screened locally and older films of enduring worth.
1940
Director: Pen Tennyson
Cast: Paul Robeson, Edwad Chapman, Simon Lack
There’s a clip in Saul Turell’s Oscar-winning 1979 documentary Tribute to an Artist in which stage and screen actor-singer Paul Robeson tells assembled reporters, “No more pretty pictures.” By 1940, when he played itinerant sailor and coal-miner David Goliath in British director Pen Tennyson’s The Proud Valley, Robeson had turned down a string of lucrative US film studio offers so he could take on roles and projects with more progressive aims, including support of the labor movement here and abroad.
Meant as an expose of harsh, unsafe working conditions in the coal mines of Wales, The Proud Valley casts Robeson as an American who has jumped a train in the countryside and landed in the village of Blaendy. As he walks up the main street, David overhears men singing. During a lull he joins in, his rich bass-baritone soaring into the second-story room where miner Dick Parry (Edward Chapman) conducts the Blaendy men’s choir in practice for the important Welsh national Eisteddfod competition. He’s not been happy with their progress. But soon David and the singers are answering one another in a sort of transplanted call and response that peaks to a shiver-inducing cascade of sound. You can see from Parry’s excited face that he must have this voice – whose owner he’s not yet laid eyes on – for that competition. This moment seems tailor-made for the internationalist Robeson, bringing together the possibilities of music as a universal language and art’s capacity to lift up the poor, overcome difference and rally the struggle against injustice.
In hindsight, the plot seems commonplace, except for the twists of realistic working class characters and a black hero at a time when mainstream US films featured stock characters of the Stepin Fetchit variety. Dick Parry takes David home for supper, rents him a room and gets him a job on his crew in the mine. Parry overcomes his wife’s resistance to taking in a stranger and his crew’s resistance to a black man. “Aren’t we all black in the coal pit?” he asks them. After an explosion in the mine injures Parry fatally, David carries him out. He works the slag pile for scrap coal after the mine closes rather than desert the family that took him in. He is among those who walk to London to persuade the owners to re-open Blaendy’s pit since England will have to fight Hitler. And in the climactic cave-in, when Parry’s decent and enterprising son Emlyn (Simon Lack) seems doomed, we all know what David Goliath will do. Robeson said later that this was the film he was most proud of.
Robeson sings often here. Besides performing Mendelssohn’s religious chorales with the real-life Blaendy choir, Robeson’s David sings the spiritual “Deep River” at Dick Parry’s funeral and the Welsh folk song, “All Through the Night” in the mine. But in tailoring this film to Robeson’s talents and political inclinations, the filmmakers also made use of a long popular tradition of choral singing and musical performance in working class communities. Other British films about the persistent hardships of workers’ lives have used the same frame. In Mark Herman’s Brassed Off (1996), the unemployment-ridden coal mining village of Grimley’s brass ensemble wins a national competition. Laid-off steel-workers changed careers in The Full Monty (1997). Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000) sets a boy’s reach for his dream of dancing in the historic coal miners’ strike of 1984.
The Proud Valley was a collaboration that grew out of Robeson’s long association with left-leaning circles in the British stage and film community. The activist Unity Theatre’s Herbert Marshall and his wife Alfredda Brilliant wrote the part for Robeson. Director Pen Tennyson had founded a film-workers union and made a boxing expose as his first feature. Tennyson made the film at Ealing – one of only three British studios that made movies throughout World War II – where dedication to “ordinary heroes” and criticism of authority had high value.
At the same time Robeson agreed to work with photographer Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz on a docudrama about exploited workers and undermined civil liberties in the US. Besides providing songs, Robeson narrated Native Land (1942), his last film.
*******
The Proud Valley & Native Land are part of Criterion’s new 4-disc set, Paul Robeson: Portraits of an Artist. This review appeared in the 3/7/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing films that never screened locally and older films of enduring worth.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Film Review #88: The Emperor Jones
1933
Director: Pen Tennyson
Cast: Paul Robeson, Fredi Washington
This year the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company, housed in the Community Folk Art Center across from Syracuse Stage, celebrates its 25th anniversary. When Bill Rowland and Roy Delemos founded PRPAC in 1982, they named it for the All-American athlete, lawyer, bass-baritone concert singer, stage and screen actor, writer, folklorist, speaker of twelve languages, human rights activist, and prodigious citizen of the world who had died only six years previously. Rowland and Delemos set the bar of theatrical aspiration high for their fledgling company. Robeson’s portrayal of the Moor in Othello in the mid-1940s remains the longest running Shakespearean production in Broadway history, though he first took that role to London in 1930 because US companies with otherwise white casts still would not put a black man in this lead.
Robeson had just finished the London Othello when he made The Emperor Jones.. In this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play, a vain American on the lam from a Southern chain gang takes over a small West Indies island, outfits his palace in feathers and mirrors, then goes mad in the forest as his subjects revolt. Robeson had performed the role in 1924 and O’Neill only agreed to a film version with Robeson as Brutus Jones. It was Robeson’s first talkie. In altering the play's story to begin with Jones’ humble Baptist beginnings, brief Pullman porter career, and downfall by “vixens” like Undine (Fredi Washington) and crooked crap games, DuBose Heyward’s script also built on Robeson’s fame in bringing old spirituals to the concert stage. Jones sings as seamlessly as breathing – in church, while working, to comfort himself – so it almost seems artificial to call this a “musical.”
Chances are most Central New Yorkers haven’t seen Robeson’s thirteen films. Though hugely popular and hotly debated, these were pulled from circulation decades ago as his political activism grew. Robeson spent much of the McCarthyite 1950’s blacklisted and unable to travel, his passport revoked because he wouldn’t promise not to give speeches outside the country. Syracuse’s International Film Festival did screen his first movie at The Palace, with Dave Burrell’s Trio performing an original jazz score. In Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul, Robeson played a conniving preacher in an outsized Stetson. Made between 1925 and 1942, his films straddled the shift to talkies. Mostly out of print, the survivors were rare, scratchy copies that censors often mangled before they hit the screen.
Now the Criterion Collection has just filled this yawning cinematic chasm with a four-DVD boxed set. Paul Robeson: Portraits of an Artist contains seven Robeson films, Saul Turell’s Oscar-winning 1979 documentary Tribute to an Artist (on the same disc as The Emperor Jones), and motherlode-quality interviews and commentaries. The restored Emperor Jones alone patches together missing scenes and soundtrack sections from six different sources.
Those missing sections suggest the depth of controversy over this film. When Brutus Jones kills the white chain gang foreman rather than follow his orders to beat another convict, the scene jerks abruptly because footage on which he actually strikes the blow was cut by nervous censors as too provocative.
The film was equally unsettling for stereotypes, ambivalence and overtones that will get today’s viewers thinking hard. The English trader Smithers, the island’s only white man, fills the air with the word “nigger,” an aspect of the script that Robeson did not object to, although four years later, during the filming of Showboat, he would insist on a change in lyrics taking that word out of the song, “Old Man River.” In this film, some viewers may still be uneasy with the era’s artistic “primitivism” that depicts a black man acting out a descent into madness in the jungle (though it was guilty regret for acts like killing his friend Jeff that called up those visions). The opening shot of African dancers fades quickly to the Baptist church’s line dancers, implying their Christianity is a veneer. Yet the 2005 film Rize has a similar scene with footage of West African dancers overlapping Los Angeles break dancers who proudly claim tribal roots.
Meanwhile, Paul Robeson remains riveting on-screen and The Emperor Jones is a tight, absorbing, beautifully shot film.
Emerald City Video already has the new Criterion set, so you can rent the discs right off the rack and settle in for a genuine feast. Besides Micheaux’s Body and Soul, the set has Borderline (1930), Sanders of the River (1935), Jericho (1937), The Proud Valley (1940), and Native Land (1942), which Robeson narrated. Because the release of this set is so important, we’ll return with another Paul Robeson film next week.
*******
This review was written for the 3/1/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly for “Make it Snappy,” a weekly column reviewing films that never opened locally and older films of enduring worth.
1933
Director: Pen Tennyson
Cast: Paul Robeson, Fredi Washington
This year the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company, housed in the Community Folk Art Center across from Syracuse Stage, celebrates its 25th anniversary. When Bill Rowland and Roy Delemos founded PRPAC in 1982, they named it for the All-American athlete, lawyer, bass-baritone concert singer, stage and screen actor, writer, folklorist, speaker of twelve languages, human rights activist, and prodigious citizen of the world who had died only six years previously. Rowland and Delemos set the bar of theatrical aspiration high for their fledgling company. Robeson’s portrayal of the Moor in Othello in the mid-1940s remains the longest running Shakespearean production in Broadway history, though he first took that role to London in 1930 because US companies with otherwise white casts still would not put a black man in this lead.
Robeson had just finished the London Othello when he made The Emperor Jones.. In this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play, a vain American on the lam from a Southern chain gang takes over a small West Indies island, outfits his palace in feathers and mirrors, then goes mad in the forest as his subjects revolt. Robeson had performed the role in 1924 and O’Neill only agreed to a film version with Robeson as Brutus Jones. It was Robeson’s first talkie. In altering the play's story to begin with Jones’ humble Baptist beginnings, brief Pullman porter career, and downfall by “vixens” like Undine (Fredi Washington) and crooked crap games, DuBose Heyward’s script also built on Robeson’s fame in bringing old spirituals to the concert stage. Jones sings as seamlessly as breathing – in church, while working, to comfort himself – so it almost seems artificial to call this a “musical.”
Chances are most Central New Yorkers haven’t seen Robeson’s thirteen films. Though hugely popular and hotly debated, these were pulled from circulation decades ago as his political activism grew. Robeson spent much of the McCarthyite 1950’s blacklisted and unable to travel, his passport revoked because he wouldn’t promise not to give speeches outside the country. Syracuse’s International Film Festival did screen his first movie at The Palace, with Dave Burrell’s Trio performing an original jazz score. In Oscar Micheaux’s Body and Soul, Robeson played a conniving preacher in an outsized Stetson. Made between 1925 and 1942, his films straddled the shift to talkies. Mostly out of print, the survivors were rare, scratchy copies that censors often mangled before they hit the screen.
Now the Criterion Collection has just filled this yawning cinematic chasm with a four-DVD boxed set. Paul Robeson: Portraits of an Artist contains seven Robeson films, Saul Turell’s Oscar-winning 1979 documentary Tribute to an Artist (on the same disc as The Emperor Jones), and motherlode-quality interviews and commentaries. The restored Emperor Jones alone patches together missing scenes and soundtrack sections from six different sources.
Those missing sections suggest the depth of controversy over this film. When Brutus Jones kills the white chain gang foreman rather than follow his orders to beat another convict, the scene jerks abruptly because footage on which he actually strikes the blow was cut by nervous censors as too provocative.
The film was equally unsettling for stereotypes, ambivalence and overtones that will get today’s viewers thinking hard. The English trader Smithers, the island’s only white man, fills the air with the word “nigger,” an aspect of the script that Robeson did not object to, although four years later, during the filming of Showboat, he would insist on a change in lyrics taking that word out of the song, “Old Man River.” In this film, some viewers may still be uneasy with the era’s artistic “primitivism” that depicts a black man acting out a descent into madness in the jungle (though it was guilty regret for acts like killing his friend Jeff that called up those visions). The opening shot of African dancers fades quickly to the Baptist church’s line dancers, implying their Christianity is a veneer. Yet the 2005 film Rize has a similar scene with footage of West African dancers overlapping Los Angeles break dancers who proudly claim tribal roots.
Meanwhile, Paul Robeson remains riveting on-screen and The Emperor Jones is a tight, absorbing, beautifully shot film.
Emerald City Video already has the new Criterion set, so you can rent the discs right off the rack and settle in for a genuine feast. Besides Micheaux’s Body and Soul, the set has Borderline (1930), Sanders of the River (1935), Jericho (1937), The Proud Valley (1940), and Native Land (1942), which Robeson narrated. Because the release of this set is so important, we’ll return with another Paul Robeson film next week.
*******
This review was written for the 3/1/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly for “Make it Snappy,” a weekly column reviewing films that never opened locally and older films of enduring worth.
Friday, March 02, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
