Film Review #153: The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
2005/DVD 2006
Director: Cristi Puiu
Cast: Luminita Gheorghiu, Ion Fiscuteanu, Daru Ana
Both films are about unwanted teen pregnancy, but there’s no mistaking the new and widely respected Romanian film, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days – which has just briefly played at Manlius Cinema – with Juno. That mere blink of an eye in which Ellen Page’s chatty teen-ager considers and dismisses the possibility of abortion? Cristian Mungiu’s film is all about that “option” as it played out in 1987, in the depths of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s dysfunctional regime, two years before the dictator’s own bloody demise. Mungiu’s film is harrowing and in one late section, when the student roommate, a soberingly indomitable young woman, is traversing some dark alleys and stairwells to dispose of her friend’s fetus, you find yourself filled with dread, for her safety and really for the well-being of us all.
Inscrutably passed over for Oscar nomination – much to the consternation and surprise of numerous reviewers – Mungiu’s film is part of the surge of new Romanian cinema that came to our attention several years ago with Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005). Mungiu uses the same cinematographer, Oleg Mutu, so both films have a similar look and feel – there’s the strange sensation of events on the brink of chaos that a camera has locked onto, as if only the shoot itself holds things together. And again, there’s a female performance and character of understated yet profound humanity. Luminita Gheorghiu’s portrayal of Mioara Avram, the nurse-paramedic who accompanies Dante Lazarescu (Ion Fiscuteanu) on his final night’s journey through four different city hospital emergency rooms, is itself reason enough to rent this movie.
Red-haired and a little blowsy, in her mid-50s, smoking whenever she can and bothered all night by her own gall-bladder pain (nasty, by the way, especially when your job entails hauling heavy bodies around through a night shift in a cold, lurching ambulance), Mioara arrives at Lazarescu’s dismal high-rise at ten o’clock on a late October Saturday night. He has a terrific headache, his stomach hurts, he smells of alcohol and he vomits several times.
Lazarescu has three cats whom the neighbor’s wife hates and you know will not be safe in his absence. He has a busy sister in another city who wants his pension check, a married daughter in Toronto, and lost his wife eight years ago. His gentle neighbor, Sandu (Daru Ana), is so huge he must stoop, emphasizing how tiny Lazarescu’s flat is. Focused, patient, fairly astute medically, Mioara decides Lazarescu must indeed go with her, but first she’s tempted – like every over-worked medical person he encounters – to dismiss his pains as drunkenness.
A huge accident in which a bus carrying children crashes complicates their journey. That carnage overwhelms all the hospitals ahead of them. At St. Spiridon, one doctor calls Lazarescu “you pig” for requesting more courteous treatment. At University Hospital, a morose figure in a flowing black cape meets the ambulance in the parking lot with, “Please go away.” At Filaret Hospital, doctors determine Lazarescu needs surgery after wasting long moments chastising Mioara for challenging their authority by suggesting it. At Bagdasar Hospital, near the end of the night shift, he’s finally prepped for surgery.
Along the way, Lazarescu deteriorates, wets himself, begins to speak deliriously, lapses into coma just before dawn. He’s stripped, washed, his torso draped with a clean sheet. An aide pats his newly shaved skull, calls him “Handsome.” Instead of leaving him at any number of acceptable junctures, Mioara sticks by him, even defends him, touches him from time to time with a reflex that finally becomes tender. They exchange the kind of personal details, largely at Lazarescu’s persistent prompting – Mioara says early on, “This one likes to chat” – that make it hard to see another as an object and send out for croissants, as one doctor does, before his gurney’s out the door.
With great economy, Puiu provides the weary emergency room staffs through whose hands Lazarescu passes with enough traits that they light up for their few moments as individuals. The first physician who lectures and derides Lazarescu wears a haughty pompadour. One young doctor’s constant cracking of his chewing gum somehow summarizes his youth and energy. One woman physician secures a needed test for Lazarescu by tapping into her supervisor’s amorous intentions, while at the next stop the model-glamorous blond doctor – she of the croissants – is locked in a power-fueled stalemate with her male superior that poisons every interaction in their vicinity like fall-out. The aides who finally wash Lazarescu’s body, unlike many of the previous younger women, are older, heavier, their thick hands and waists evoking some rural village where the women wash the dead for burial.
All these deft minor strokes evoke another, more classical journey through the underworld also famously peopled by vivid cameos. Puiu brackets his film early and late with this defining reference, identifying his main character’s full name as “Dante Remus Lazarescu” and the orderly called at the closing to “take him across” as Virgil. Puiu says he also called on the series ER for ambiance and background of a different sort – it’s a favorite of his, serialized on Romanian TV.
After a boatload of international prizes and US DVD release in 2006, this film has not done terribly well here, perhaps because of misguided marketing as an “acclaimed black comedy.” The DVD contains the US trailer with its hyper-edited snatches of dialogue and shots that create a wholly misleading slapstick impression. But Puiu says Romanian audiences did laugh at initial festival screenings, which he allows “surprised” him. If the film at Manlius is no Juno, this one isn’t The Bucket List either. Based on a real incident in which an ambulance visited six Bucharest hospitals in one night – Puiu says the repetition provided a structure that let him explore variations – this launches six films that will portray kinds of love. Puiu starts that series with “love of humanity.” Comedy yes - but of the divine sort.
*******
This review appeared in the 3/13/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, March 09, 2008
Film Review #152: Barrio Cuba
Director: Humberto Solás
Cast: Luisa María Jimenez, Mario Limonta, Jorge Perugorria, Adela Legra, Rafael Lahera
2005/DVD 2008
It’s remarkable how you remember some films, how you find they are crisp and clear in your mind much later and just as good now as when you first watched them, surprised and unsuspecting. Cuban director Humberto Solás’ Barrio Cuba, just out on DVD here, screened almost exactly a year ago – March 3, 2007 – at the DC Independent Film Festival in Washington, thanks to the persistence of DCIFF’s founder and director, Carol Bidault. She had seen Barrio Cuba abroad at another festival and endured lengthy negotiations to make the DC appearance happen. Barrio Cuba had its international theatrical premier later – in mid-July – in Spain. Perhaps needless to say, it has never opened theatrically here.
Two staff attached to the Washington Cuba Section Office came with the film that Saturday night, keeping to themselves in a strategic corner of the mezzanine balcony overlooking the main lobby on the University of the District of Columbia campus in northwest DC – this year’s DCIFF opens this weekend at George Mason University – even during the lively, pretty much continuous reception between and during screenings. The second in a trilogy of films about life in Havana’s slums, Barrio Cuba was extremely well-received by that festival crowd.
Many seemed to know Solás’ most recent previous film, Honey for Oshun, about a young man who searches for his lost mother after he discovers he was taken out of Cuba illegally as a child by his father. Honey for Oshun released in 2001, the year after the notorious Elián González affair in which a boy brought to Miami by his mother was returned to his Cuban father after court battles by Miami relatives and middle of the night seizures by federal agents. I had seen Honey, which shares four principal cast members with the newer film, at a May Memorial Church fund-raiser several years ago and watching Solás at work in Barrio brought memories rushing back. Whatever else has been going on under Fidel, the 67-year-old Solás – who started his film career in 1961 with shorts and docs, appreciates and explores women as few male directors do, and survived Cuba’s aggressively anti-gay state policies that began in the 1970s – can sure still make movies.
In the past year since DCIFF, three have become available in the US, notably through First Run Features’ 5-disc Cuban Masterworks set, which has come out one disc at a time: A Successful Man (1987), about two brothers’ divergent political paths and their family newspaper from the 1930s through Castro’s revolution; Amada (1982), about a cross-class Havana romance in 1914; and Cecilia (1981), about racial tensions circa 1830. Solás’ 1968 sensation about three women who embody three critical time periods, Lucía, exists on DVD but sadly not in US format.
The plotline of Barrio Cuba also revolves around three women and their trials, partings, longing for children, family, connection and reconciliation. The nurse Magalis (Luisa María Jimenez) rides her bicycle to the hospital – already exhausted by her father’s bickering with her younger brother Willy over his decision to come out as a gay man and by husband Alfonso’s wandering – past the shop where much older Ignacio (Mario Limonta) watches her daily, besotted. Chino (Jorge Perugorria) picks up Vivian (Isabel Santos) from her all-night shift at the pharmacy. Prodigiously passionate, their marriage breaks under the strain of her miscarriage and his own family’s grief as a younger brother leaves Cuba, taking the young grandsons with him. Amparo (Adela Legra) welcomes the pregnant wife Maria (Ana Dominguez) of her son Santo (Rafael Lahera) into her tiny barrio home, only to have Maria die in childbirth. We measure the film’s time frame – years longer than we might think without this yardstick – by the growth of the boy Miguelito, whom Santo leaves with Amparo when he takes to the road, unable to bear Maria’s death.
We meet all of these characters, save Miguelito, in the film’s opening moments, as Havana sets out en masse, gamely, even energetically for its worn, tattered day. One of the shocks of this film, which steals over you gradually, is the depth of material privation in everyday Cuban life after decades of embargoes and sanctions. Yet this city is gorgeously filmed and these emotional lives rich, full-bodied, nuanced, utterly convincing. Every major character weeps at some turning point. Esteban Puebla provides a musical score of startling lush emotional power. Such filmmaking has a confidence and sweep that leaves much of American mall cinema seeming rotely hesitant by comparison, even in Solás’ refusal to create artificial connections among his subplots. Instead, he simply pans across the sky to the next location, picking up that story where he left off, relying on the momentum of emotional resonance to keep its balance. Remember that first time you rode without training wheels?
*******
This review appeared in the 3/6/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Director: Humberto Solás
Cast: Luisa María Jimenez, Mario Limonta, Jorge Perugorria, Adela Legra, Rafael Lahera
2005/DVD 2008
It’s remarkable how you remember some films, how you find they are crisp and clear in your mind much later and just as good now as when you first watched them, surprised and unsuspecting. Cuban director Humberto Solás’ Barrio Cuba, just out on DVD here, screened almost exactly a year ago – March 3, 2007 – at the DC Independent Film Festival in Washington, thanks to the persistence of DCIFF’s founder and director, Carol Bidault. She had seen Barrio Cuba abroad at another festival and endured lengthy negotiations to make the DC appearance happen. Barrio Cuba had its international theatrical premier later – in mid-July – in Spain. Perhaps needless to say, it has never opened theatrically here.
Two staff attached to the Washington Cuba Section Office came with the film that Saturday night, keeping to themselves in a strategic corner of the mezzanine balcony overlooking the main lobby on the University of the District of Columbia campus in northwest DC – this year’s DCIFF opens this weekend at George Mason University – even during the lively, pretty much continuous reception between and during screenings. The second in a trilogy of films about life in Havana’s slums, Barrio Cuba was extremely well-received by that festival crowd.
Many seemed to know Solás’ most recent previous film, Honey for Oshun, about a young man who searches for his lost mother after he discovers he was taken out of Cuba illegally as a child by his father. Honey for Oshun released in 2001, the year after the notorious Elián González affair in which a boy brought to Miami by his mother was returned to his Cuban father after court battles by Miami relatives and middle of the night seizures by federal agents. I had seen Honey, which shares four principal cast members with the newer film, at a May Memorial Church fund-raiser several years ago and watching Solás at work in Barrio brought memories rushing back. Whatever else has been going on under Fidel, the 67-year-old Solás – who started his film career in 1961 with shorts and docs, appreciates and explores women as few male directors do, and survived Cuba’s aggressively anti-gay state policies that began in the 1970s – can sure still make movies.
In the past year since DCIFF, three have become available in the US, notably through First Run Features’ 5-disc Cuban Masterworks set, which has come out one disc at a time: A Successful Man (1987), about two brothers’ divergent political paths and their family newspaper from the 1930s through Castro’s revolution; Amada (1982), about a cross-class Havana romance in 1914; and Cecilia (1981), about racial tensions circa 1830. Solás’ 1968 sensation about three women who embody three critical time periods, Lucía, exists on DVD but sadly not in US format.
The plotline of Barrio Cuba also revolves around three women and their trials, partings, longing for children, family, connection and reconciliation. The nurse Magalis (Luisa María Jimenez) rides her bicycle to the hospital – already exhausted by her father’s bickering with her younger brother Willy over his decision to come out as a gay man and by husband Alfonso’s wandering – past the shop where much older Ignacio (Mario Limonta) watches her daily, besotted. Chino (Jorge Perugorria) picks up Vivian (Isabel Santos) from her all-night shift at the pharmacy. Prodigiously passionate, their marriage breaks under the strain of her miscarriage and his own family’s grief as a younger brother leaves Cuba, taking the young grandsons with him. Amparo (Adela Legra) welcomes the pregnant wife Maria (Ana Dominguez) of her son Santo (Rafael Lahera) into her tiny barrio home, only to have Maria die in childbirth. We measure the film’s time frame – years longer than we might think without this yardstick – by the growth of the boy Miguelito, whom Santo leaves with Amparo when he takes to the road, unable to bear Maria’s death.
We meet all of these characters, save Miguelito, in the film’s opening moments, as Havana sets out en masse, gamely, even energetically for its worn, tattered day. One of the shocks of this film, which steals over you gradually, is the depth of material privation in everyday Cuban life after decades of embargoes and sanctions. Yet this city is gorgeously filmed and these emotional lives rich, full-bodied, nuanced, utterly convincing. Every major character weeps at some turning point. Esteban Puebla provides a musical score of startling lush emotional power. Such filmmaking has a confidence and sweep that leaves much of American mall cinema seeming rotely hesitant by comparison, even in Solás’ refusal to create artificial connections among his subplots. Instead, he simply pans across the sky to the next location, picking up that story where he left off, relying on the momentum of emotional resonance to keep its balance. Remember that first time you rode without training wheels?
*******
This review appeared in the 3/6/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, February 29, 2008
Film Review #151: Resisting Paradise
2003
Director: Barbara Hammer
Cast: Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez, Marguerite Matisse, Henri Matisse
It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. When filmmaker Barbara Hammer went to France in the spring of 1999 to Cassis, a few miles east of the port city of Marseilles, famous for its limestone cliffs and its wine, she intended to investigate the unique quality of light that had drawn painters to that region. For example, the painter Pierre Bonnard left Paris for good in 1910 for the southern coast, and Henri Matisse had moved south in 1917, settling near Nice. They carried on a lively correspondence into their later years – living until 1947 and 1954 respectively – about the light and landscape that so nurtured their palettes, and both refused to budge during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. We have all probably seen light a little differently since the Impressionists, whether we realize it or not. And for Hammer, this project would be a natural investigation. A painter once herself, she’s engaged in experiments with light, editing, format, film emulsions, and approaches to subject matter in 80-some videos and films over the last four decades. She even notes Matisse’s remark that cinema “has advantages” over painting.
Once there, Hammer discovered others had moved through Cassis and the southern coast during World War II besides painters hunting perfect light – refugees fleeing the Nazis, and resisters, both in the thousands. While Matisse painted, his estranged wife Amélie, his son Jean and his daughter Marguerite were part of the French Resistance. The Gestapo caught and tortured Marguerite, who drove to Paris three times a week with messages, and shipped her to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
As Hammer uncovered an aging network of survivors from those years – Lisa Fittko took Jewish refugees on foot through the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez supplied identity papers and food stamps from her City Hall office – another convergence de-railed her film plans.
In March 1999, NATO began bombing the break-away Serbian province of Kosovo, intending to drive out the Serbian police and paramilitaries engaged in atrocities against the majority Albanian population, the latest convulsion in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia that had stretched across the 1990s.
Every night in Cassis, Hammer says, she watched Kosovar refugees on French TV as they fled “ethnic cleansing.” When they streamed home again in June, revenge killings against the Serbs started, even as the UN tried to organize elections. So the film that Hammer finished in 2003 – and is bringing to Syracuse next week for two guest screenings – is not what she set out to make. Instead she decided to investigate these questions: What are our responsibilities during war? How can art exist during political crisis?
Convincingly gorgeous, Resisting Paradise captures what could so visually intoxicate Bonnard that he could “drown” in the landscape there. Hammer’s capacity to recreate this on-screen endows her questions with a power that carries this film well past the standard educational documentary. To address those questions, she creates a kind of dialogue between the painters, with snatches read from their correspondence, and “ordinary people,” made up of re-enactments, readings and voice-overs, archival footage, new interviews and footage that imagines the transformation of what’s seen to what’s painted.
The comparison is unsettling and challenging. Matisse writes to Bonnard that “a little painting no bigger than your hand sold for 100,000 francs – this is a golden age for artists!” His grandson follows, describing his mother’s torture (and it sounds like water-boarding to me). Lisa Fittko describes the seemingly failed escape and suicide by morphine tablets of philosopher Walter Benjamin, whom she guided to Spain’s border, where the Spanish police stopped his party and held them overnight in order to send them back. Forger of identity papers and food stamps Marie-Ange Rodriguez, who says she is “87 ½” and in fact died shortly after Hammer’s interview, recalls, “I was never afraid. Everyone knew and no one betrayed me, never, even those on the side of the Germans.”
That comparison also made some artists at Harvard, to whom she showed the film while it was still a work in progress, feel “attacked.” In order to soften Matisse, she added more footage of his grandchildren. Though Jacqueline Matisse Monnier and Claude Duthuit provide the details of their mother’s and grandmother’s treatment at the hands of the Gestapo, they also insist that Matisse – given his health – could do nothing other than he did.
Now we can hardly miss more synchronicity in Hammer’s bringing this film to Syracuse at this point. After years under UN administration, Kosovo finally declared independence on February 17th. Within days, 150, 000 Serbs protested in their capital’s streets, burned and looted foreign shops, and fire-bombed embassies of nations supporting Kosovo (ours included).
Hammer hasn’t been to Kosovo, but last May she was in Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro, where traveling in a car with Serbian plates meant hurled eggs and angry shouts. Speaking by phone on Monday from Woodstock, where she lives when not in Manhattan, Hammer said these events of recent weeks “really bring this full circle and may lead to a situation similar to 1999.”
Hammer visits Onondaga Community College in Syracuse on March 6th as the guest of the Reel World documentary series, part of Art Across Campus. Reel World brings indie documentaries with limited release to campus with screenings that welcome the wider community; this year’s Art Across Campus explores how artistic expression documents wartime experience. Faculty organizer Linda Herbert says Hammer’s vast body of work – experimental documentaries and queer cinema landmarks like Nitrate Kisses (1992) – and the start of Women’s History Month all make this “a perfect fit.”
Renting Hammer’s films is hard – netflix.com only offers History Lessons (2000), the third in her trilogy of experimental documentaries about lesbian and gay history (besides Nitrate Kisses, 1995’s Tender Fictions) – but Women Make Movies carries her earlier films, some are for sale on her website (barbarahammerfilms.com), and she’s considering other commercial DVD distribution. She’s also represented in the landmark WACK! international exhibition of 1970’s Feminist art, on view now until May at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, where she’ll speak on a panel of experimental filmmakers this Saturday.
Hammer has also just finished two films about the dying tradition of women deep-sea divers of the matriarchal Korean island of Jen-Ju Do. Like Resisting Paradise itself and My Babushka (2001), which documents her search for her Ukrainian roots, the two Jen-Ju Do films address concerns ranging wider than queer history. On Monday Hammer commented that Lover Other, her 2006 film about two women who were both artists and lovers and resisted the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey during World War II, is “really a coda” to Resisting Paradise, which had no lesbian or gay figures in it. “I went as far as I could go with lesbian history,” Hammer says. “I’m also an artist, a resister myself.”
*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the 2/28/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Resisting Paradise has two screenings at OCC, Thursday, March 6th in Storer Auditorium, Ferrante Hall, 2:00 & 7:00 PM. Q&A with Barbara Hammer at both screenings & DVDs available of Resisting Paradise, plus Nitrate Kisses, Lover Other and Dyketactics. Film & parking are free.
2003
Director: Barbara Hammer
Cast: Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez, Marguerite Matisse, Henri Matisse
It was a case of being in the right place at the right time. When filmmaker Barbara Hammer went to France in the spring of 1999 to Cassis, a few miles east of the port city of Marseilles, famous for its limestone cliffs and its wine, she intended to investigate the unique quality of light that had drawn painters to that region. For example, the painter Pierre Bonnard left Paris for good in 1910 for the southern coast, and Henri Matisse had moved south in 1917, settling near Nice. They carried on a lively correspondence into their later years – living until 1947 and 1954 respectively – about the light and landscape that so nurtured their palettes, and both refused to budge during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. We have all probably seen light a little differently since the Impressionists, whether we realize it or not. And for Hammer, this project would be a natural investigation. A painter once herself, she’s engaged in experiments with light, editing, format, film emulsions, and approaches to subject matter in 80-some videos and films over the last four decades. She even notes Matisse’s remark that cinema “has advantages” over painting.
Once there, Hammer discovered others had moved through Cassis and the southern coast during World War II besides painters hunting perfect light – refugees fleeing the Nazis, and resisters, both in the thousands. While Matisse painted, his estranged wife Amélie, his son Jean and his daughter Marguerite were part of the French Resistance. The Gestapo caught and tortured Marguerite, who drove to Paris three times a week with messages, and shipped her to Ravensbrück concentration camp.
As Hammer uncovered an aging network of survivors from those years – Lisa Fittko took Jewish refugees on foot through the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, Marie-Ange Allibert Rodriguez supplied identity papers and food stamps from her City Hall office – another convergence de-railed her film plans.
In March 1999, NATO began bombing the break-away Serbian province of Kosovo, intending to drive out the Serbian police and paramilitaries engaged in atrocities against the majority Albanian population, the latest convulsion in the break-up of the former Yugoslavia that had stretched across the 1990s.
Every night in Cassis, Hammer says, she watched Kosovar refugees on French TV as they fled “ethnic cleansing.” When they streamed home again in June, revenge killings against the Serbs started, even as the UN tried to organize elections. So the film that Hammer finished in 2003 – and is bringing to Syracuse next week for two guest screenings – is not what she set out to make. Instead she decided to investigate these questions: What are our responsibilities during war? How can art exist during political crisis?
Convincingly gorgeous, Resisting Paradise captures what could so visually intoxicate Bonnard that he could “drown” in the landscape there. Hammer’s capacity to recreate this on-screen endows her questions with a power that carries this film well past the standard educational documentary. To address those questions, she creates a kind of dialogue between the painters, with snatches read from their correspondence, and “ordinary people,” made up of re-enactments, readings and voice-overs, archival footage, new interviews and footage that imagines the transformation of what’s seen to what’s painted.
The comparison is unsettling and challenging. Matisse writes to Bonnard that “a little painting no bigger than your hand sold for 100,000 francs – this is a golden age for artists!” His grandson follows, describing his mother’s torture (and it sounds like water-boarding to me). Lisa Fittko describes the seemingly failed escape and suicide by morphine tablets of philosopher Walter Benjamin, whom she guided to Spain’s border, where the Spanish police stopped his party and held them overnight in order to send them back. Forger of identity papers and food stamps Marie-Ange Rodriguez, who says she is “87 ½” and in fact died shortly after Hammer’s interview, recalls, “I was never afraid. Everyone knew and no one betrayed me, never, even those on the side of the Germans.”
That comparison also made some artists at Harvard, to whom she showed the film while it was still a work in progress, feel “attacked.” In order to soften Matisse, she added more footage of his grandchildren. Though Jacqueline Matisse Monnier and Claude Duthuit provide the details of their mother’s and grandmother’s treatment at the hands of the Gestapo, they also insist that Matisse – given his health – could do nothing other than he did.
Now we can hardly miss more synchronicity in Hammer’s bringing this film to Syracuse at this point. After years under UN administration, Kosovo finally declared independence on February 17th. Within days, 150, 000 Serbs protested in their capital’s streets, burned and looted foreign shops, and fire-bombed embassies of nations supporting Kosovo (ours included).
Hammer hasn’t been to Kosovo, but last May she was in Serbia, Croatia and Montenegro, where traveling in a car with Serbian plates meant hurled eggs and angry shouts. Speaking by phone on Monday from Woodstock, where she lives when not in Manhattan, Hammer said these events of recent weeks “really bring this full circle and may lead to a situation similar to 1999.”
Hammer visits Onondaga Community College in Syracuse on March 6th as the guest of the Reel World documentary series, part of Art Across Campus. Reel World brings indie documentaries with limited release to campus with screenings that welcome the wider community; this year’s Art Across Campus explores how artistic expression documents wartime experience. Faculty organizer Linda Herbert says Hammer’s vast body of work – experimental documentaries and queer cinema landmarks like Nitrate Kisses (1992) – and the start of Women’s History Month all make this “a perfect fit.”
Renting Hammer’s films is hard – netflix.com only offers History Lessons (2000), the third in her trilogy of experimental documentaries about lesbian and gay history (besides Nitrate Kisses, 1995’s Tender Fictions) – but Women Make Movies carries her earlier films, some are for sale on her website (barbarahammerfilms.com), and she’s considering other commercial DVD distribution. She’s also represented in the landmark WACK! international exhibition of 1970’s Feminist art, on view now until May at the Museum of Modern Art’s PS1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, where she’ll speak on a panel of experimental filmmakers this Saturday.
Hammer has also just finished two films about the dying tradition of women deep-sea divers of the matriarchal Korean island of Jen-Ju Do. Like Resisting Paradise itself and My Babushka (2001), which documents her search for her Ukrainian roots, the two Jen-Ju Do films address concerns ranging wider than queer history. On Monday Hammer commented that Lover Other, her 2006 film about two women who were both artists and lovers and resisted the Nazi occupation of the island of Jersey during World War II, is “really a coda” to Resisting Paradise, which had no lesbian or gay figures in it. “I went as far as I could go with lesbian history,” Hammer says. “I’m also an artist, a resister myself.”
*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the 2/28/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Resisting Paradise has two screenings at OCC, Thursday, March 6th in Storer Auditorium, Ferrante Hall, 2:00 & 7:00 PM. Q&A with Barbara Hammer at both screenings & DVDs available of Resisting Paradise, plus Nitrate Kisses, Lover Other and Dyketactics. Film & parking are free.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Film Review #150: Billy Elliot
2000/DVD 2001
Director: Stephen Daldry
Cast: Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Gary Lewis
Stephen Daldry, who switched from stage directing to movies with the Oscar-nominated Billy Elliot and went on to literary cinema like The Hours (2002), says that Billy Elliot is “not really a dance film.” Something like the 1935 Fred Astaire vehicle, Top Hat, is his idea of a dance film. There are clips from Top Hat inserted into this gritty tale of an 11-year-old miner’s son who secretly leaves Saturday boxing lessons to learn ballet, pirouetting in and out the white-tutus in the midst of the UK’s worst labor strike since World War II. Set in northeast England in 1984-85, this story does not employ clips of classic Hollywood fantasy about tuxedo-clad high society to embody Billy’s aspirations. No, they appear only as remote, grainy images flickering on the tiny TV of Billy’s addled old grandmother, whose recurrent line, regretful and longing, is, “They always said I could’ve danced professionally if I’d only had the training.”
Those old musicals trafficked in a little vaudeville melodrama, but audiences were after the escapist entertainment when Fred, Ginger and all those supporting extras took flight. Instead, Billy Elliot – though it has three or four wonderful dance sequences – repays a second look eight years later because it’s a surprisingly complex and savvy drama about how men struggle with social constraints – from wildly divergent styles of fatherhood, convictions about men’s aggressive nature that spring from hard times and class friction, and whatever largely consigning the “artistic side of life” to women comes to mean about the sexuality of artistic men.
Daldry’s cast is superior. For the title role, he reportedly combed through some 2,000 auditions to find relative newcomer Jamie Bell (now appearing in Jumper as Griffin), also a native of Billy’s northeast England, who hid the ballet aspect of this role from his own school mates during filming. Julie Walters – Molly Weasely in the Harry Potter films – plays the prickly, chain-smoking dance teacher Mrs. Wilkinson, who gives Billy private lessons and puts the Royal Ballet in his head. Pitch perfect as the profoundly reticent, still-grieving widower wrenched by disturbing emotion, Gary Lewis (Prime Suspect: The Final Act) is Billy’s dad Jackie.
It was a savage time. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives closed many open pit mines in the nationalized coal industry to increase efficiency and profit. Over 11,000 strikers were arrested. Ten died in the running battles with police that swept through housing projects. Swaths of northeastern England and southern Wales remain virulently anti-police. Billy gets his letter of acceptance from the Royal Ballet the same day – March 3, 1985 – that the forever-after weakened miners’ union “caved in,” ending the strike.
Daldry takes some care depicting this violence on both sides: police and strikers in ferocious, shouting tugs of war on picket lines, phalanxes of police beating their shields with batons – Billy’s rough hothead older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) is clubbed bloody – and enraged strikers pelting scab-carrying buses with eggs and rocks. The strike also caused extreme privation. Billy’s father Jackie weeps twice during this story, first when he’s forced to smash his late wife’s piano with a sledge hammer to burn the wood for heat on Christmas Eve, the second time from fear when he rides the scabs’ bus to work so he can buy Billy’s bus ticket to London. In this life – nasty, brutish and short – men fight tooth and nail, 11-year-old boys take boxing lessons, and an incensed father who’s never been to London because “they don’t have mines there” equates ballet with “poofs.”
Billy isn’t gay. That’s why Mrs. Wilkinson’s precocious daughter Debbie is in this film, starting a pillow fight with Billy that fills the air with feathers and looks forward to the sexual charge of Billy’s breathtaking leap onto stage years later in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. But his forlorn friend Michael (Stuart Wells), whom we first meet refusing to box, is. At first sharply put off, Billy’s growing comfort with Michael parallels his growing acceptance of his own desire to dance. And one of the film’s pleasures is the increasing physical affection among the Elliot men as their definitions of manliness expand and they start supporting Billy’s dancing.
The role of women in the film is less satisfying. Formerly, all Billy’s support has come from women – from Mrs. Wilkinson, from his mother Jenny’s example, from his grandmother’s love of dance. Even the pivotal question at his Royal Ballet audition, which restores this tongue-tied boy’s voice – “How do you feel when you dance?” – comes from the sole woman on the interview panel. And moved as Jackie Elliot is by how good Billy’s gotten, the deal maker is that “his mother would’ve let him.” Still, Mrs. Wilkinson disappears from the story abruptly and for good after Jackie’s conversion – I would at least have liked to see her in the final scene that gathers many of the principals together ten years later – as if Daldry insists that men must not delegate some matters.
Interestingly, the film delays powerfully muscular, masculine ballet until the end, fast forwarding to Billy at age 25 by splicing in footage of dancer Adam Cooper in Matthew Bourne’s 1995 all-male revival of Swan Lake. This production on Broadway earned Adam Cooper a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical and was extremely popular with teen-age boys, causing a minor surge in dance lessons. Young Billy’s major dance sequences – his sense of self and skill still awkward works in progress – instead rely on dazzling tap work down the bleak brick alleys of his town, danced not in toe shoes but laced-up boots, especially his raw anguish when his father at first forbids the Royal Ballet audition. We get to watch both men grow up.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/21/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent films that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2000/DVD 2001
Director: Stephen Daldry
Cast: Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, Gary Lewis
Stephen Daldry, who switched from stage directing to movies with the Oscar-nominated Billy Elliot and went on to literary cinema like The Hours (2002), says that Billy Elliot is “not really a dance film.” Something like the 1935 Fred Astaire vehicle, Top Hat, is his idea of a dance film. There are clips from Top Hat inserted into this gritty tale of an 11-year-old miner’s son who secretly leaves Saturday boxing lessons to learn ballet, pirouetting in and out the white-tutus in the midst of the UK’s worst labor strike since World War II. Set in northeast England in 1984-85, this story does not employ clips of classic Hollywood fantasy about tuxedo-clad high society to embody Billy’s aspirations. No, they appear only as remote, grainy images flickering on the tiny TV of Billy’s addled old grandmother, whose recurrent line, regretful and longing, is, “They always said I could’ve danced professionally if I’d only had the training.”
Those old musicals trafficked in a little vaudeville melodrama, but audiences were after the escapist entertainment when Fred, Ginger and all those supporting extras took flight. Instead, Billy Elliot – though it has three or four wonderful dance sequences – repays a second look eight years later because it’s a surprisingly complex and savvy drama about how men struggle with social constraints – from wildly divergent styles of fatherhood, convictions about men’s aggressive nature that spring from hard times and class friction, and whatever largely consigning the “artistic side of life” to women comes to mean about the sexuality of artistic men.
Daldry’s cast is superior. For the title role, he reportedly combed through some 2,000 auditions to find relative newcomer Jamie Bell (now appearing in Jumper as Griffin), also a native of Billy’s northeast England, who hid the ballet aspect of this role from his own school mates during filming. Julie Walters – Molly Weasely in the Harry Potter films – plays the prickly, chain-smoking dance teacher Mrs. Wilkinson, who gives Billy private lessons and puts the Royal Ballet in his head. Pitch perfect as the profoundly reticent, still-grieving widower wrenched by disturbing emotion, Gary Lewis (Prime Suspect: The Final Act) is Billy’s dad Jackie.
It was a savage time. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives closed many open pit mines in the nationalized coal industry to increase efficiency and profit. Over 11,000 strikers were arrested. Ten died in the running battles with police that swept through housing projects. Swaths of northeastern England and southern Wales remain virulently anti-police. Billy gets his letter of acceptance from the Royal Ballet the same day – March 3, 1985 – that the forever-after weakened miners’ union “caved in,” ending the strike.
Daldry takes some care depicting this violence on both sides: police and strikers in ferocious, shouting tugs of war on picket lines, phalanxes of police beating their shields with batons – Billy’s rough hothead older brother Tony (Jamie Draven) is clubbed bloody – and enraged strikers pelting scab-carrying buses with eggs and rocks. The strike also caused extreme privation. Billy’s father Jackie weeps twice during this story, first when he’s forced to smash his late wife’s piano with a sledge hammer to burn the wood for heat on Christmas Eve, the second time from fear when he rides the scabs’ bus to work so he can buy Billy’s bus ticket to London. In this life – nasty, brutish and short – men fight tooth and nail, 11-year-old boys take boxing lessons, and an incensed father who’s never been to London because “they don’t have mines there” equates ballet with “poofs.”
Billy isn’t gay. That’s why Mrs. Wilkinson’s precocious daughter Debbie is in this film, starting a pillow fight with Billy that fills the air with feathers and looks forward to the sexual charge of Billy’s breathtaking leap onto stage years later in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. But his forlorn friend Michael (Stuart Wells), whom we first meet refusing to box, is. At first sharply put off, Billy’s growing comfort with Michael parallels his growing acceptance of his own desire to dance. And one of the film’s pleasures is the increasing physical affection among the Elliot men as their definitions of manliness expand and they start supporting Billy’s dancing.
The role of women in the film is less satisfying. Formerly, all Billy’s support has come from women – from Mrs. Wilkinson, from his mother Jenny’s example, from his grandmother’s love of dance. Even the pivotal question at his Royal Ballet audition, which restores this tongue-tied boy’s voice – “How do you feel when you dance?” – comes from the sole woman on the interview panel. And moved as Jackie Elliot is by how good Billy’s gotten, the deal maker is that “his mother would’ve let him.” Still, Mrs. Wilkinson disappears from the story abruptly and for good after Jackie’s conversion – I would at least have liked to see her in the final scene that gathers many of the principals together ten years later – as if Daldry insists that men must not delegate some matters.
Interestingly, the film delays powerfully muscular, masculine ballet until the end, fast forwarding to Billy at age 25 by splicing in footage of dancer Adam Cooper in Matthew Bourne’s 1995 all-male revival of Swan Lake. This production on Broadway earned Adam Cooper a Tony nomination for best actor in a musical and was extremely popular with teen-age boys, causing a minor surge in dance lessons. Young Billy’s major dance sequences – his sense of self and skill still awkward works in progress – instead rely on dazzling tap work down the bleak brick alleys of his town, danced not in toe shoes but laced-up boots, especially his raw anguish when his father at first forbids the Royal Ballet audition. We get to watch both men grow up.
*******
This review appeared in the 2/21/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing recent films that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Sunday, February 17, 2008
Film Review #149: Keepin’ it Reel ‘08: Exploring Hip-Hop
Annual film fest at Community Folk Art Center, Syracuse, NY, 2/14-17/2008
“There is a huge love for Hip Hop,” Diane Weathers told WAER Syracuse in a phone interview in early March 2005, “based on its early exuberance, diversity and creativity. We wanted to be clear we wouldn’t allow this to be used by people who wanted to attack Hip Hop – that wouldn’t work with this group. We were just women bothered by what we saw who wanted to talk about it. And the response was global.”
That January, Essence Magazine had launched its Take Back the Music campaign, aimed at gangsta rap that disparaged women and glorified pimps. Then editor-in-chief of the magazine celebrating its 35th anniversary, Weathers had just been in Atlanta, where Essence joined with Spelman College in late February 2005 for an historic, overflow town meeting on the topic. The previous spring, Spelman’s student government “disinvited” the Hip Hop performer Nellie from visiting campus when he refused to meet with them about “Tip Drill,” the music video in which he “swiped” a credit card down the bare backside of a young thong-wearing woman.
Efforts so far this decade to reclaim Hip Hop's giddy inventiveness and freedom also focused on women’s positive participation. Gwendolyn Pough’s Check it While I Wreck It, published just before she moved to Syracuse in 2004, detailed a lineage of strong Black women’s verbal eloquence and framed women's Hip Hop participation as an extension of that. New York City-based Martha Cooper, who’d photographed the Hip Hop scene from its earliest days in 1970s South Bronx, brought out a new book, We B*Girlz (2005), about the world-wide phenomenon of women dancers’ crews and battles. Performers like Jean Grae and Missy Elliot emerged. Vibe Magazine published Hip Hop Divas.
The movies getting under way at the same time tell a story wider yet. Byron Hurt includes the infamous “Tip Drill” clip in Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), which kicks off the Community Folk Art Center’s annual film festival this Thursday. Besides cinematic critiques of thug misogyny and homophobia, the smartly-chosen program goes a long way toward busting narrow commercial stereotypes. There’s African Hip Hop, the rise of graffiti, the world of women deejays, Hip Hop as youth mentoring tool, Christian Hip Hop. And 16-year-old local filmmaker Zakharii Willets, who goes by Ziggy, debuts his short, Hip Hop: My Generation, just before Hurt’s film on Thursday.
Award-winning and PBS-aired, Beyond Beats and Rhymes puts an accomplished, sophisticated overview right up front, and Hurt will be here in person for discussion. On-screen, the ex-quarterback is articulate and persuasive (“I love Hip Hop,” he begins, “but we’re in this box, manhood…”). He says he first confronted this when he worked as a counselor to prevent male violence against women. His movie's exploration ranges from decades of violent white movie heroes to the lengthy construction Cross-Bronx Expressway, started in 1946, that ripped a borough in half and was surely as much a factor in the rise of Hip Hop as any reaction to affluent white disco music (one interviewee opines, “If they put an expressway through your neighborhood, then you understand Hip Hop.”).
Hip Hop's culture thrives globally, from Brazil to Tokyo to Germany to Australia and New Zealand to the Middle East, where much far-below-the-radar peace work is getting done by young Israeli and Palestinian rappers. Michael Wanguhu packs Hip Hop Colony (2006) with historical context and thoughtful interviews about equatorial Kenya, which got Western-style FM radio in 1995. Three years later, Kalamashaka made the first Kenyan hip-hop album. But this film’s best moments are the segments of rough footage of a joyous back-yard jam among Kalamashaka, Big Mike, Bamboo and the great Harry Kimani. Matter-of-factly un-gangsta, the film’s “dedicated to our moms.”
Asian-American Danny Lee’s Rock Fresh (2004) documents the international scope and methods of serious graffiti as Hip Hop's visual style and expression, following five artists. Rock Fresh screens Saturday afternoon following a free workshop for high school youth. Lee’s King of Hollywood opens later this year.
Liberian-born, New York-based Dante Kaba will be just back from Ghana when he travels to Syracuse on Saturday to screen Mistress X (2005), his portrait of women Hip Hop deejays.
Matt Ruskin’s The Hip Hop Project (2006) covers four years with Bahamas-born Chris “Kazi” Rolle, who grew up homeless in Brooklyn, and the Hip Hop-based program for at-risk youth he founded in 1999.
Finally, Christopher “Play” Martin “takes the Gospel to the streets” in Holy Hip Hop (2006), revealing robust urban ministries and radio programming in eight major US cities.
You could call this film festival a Valentine for love vindicated.
*******
This review appears in the 2/14/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column, usually reviewing DVDs. Nancy interviewed Diane Weathers for Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM, aired 3/10/05. Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Hip Hop Colony, Holy Hip Hop, & Rock Fresh are available now on DVD, & both The Hip Hop Project & Mistress X soon will be.
Annual film fest at Community Folk Art Center, Syracuse, NY, 2/14-17/2008
“There is a huge love for Hip Hop,” Diane Weathers told WAER Syracuse in a phone interview in early March 2005, “based on its early exuberance, diversity and creativity. We wanted to be clear we wouldn’t allow this to be used by people who wanted to attack Hip Hop – that wouldn’t work with this group. We were just women bothered by what we saw who wanted to talk about it. And the response was global.”
That January, Essence Magazine had launched its Take Back the Music campaign, aimed at gangsta rap that disparaged women and glorified pimps. Then editor-in-chief of the magazine celebrating its 35th anniversary, Weathers had just been in Atlanta, where Essence joined with Spelman College in late February 2005 for an historic, overflow town meeting on the topic. The previous spring, Spelman’s student government “disinvited” the Hip Hop performer Nellie from visiting campus when he refused to meet with them about “Tip Drill,” the music video in which he “swiped” a credit card down the bare backside of a young thong-wearing woman.
Efforts so far this decade to reclaim Hip Hop's giddy inventiveness and freedom also focused on women’s positive participation. Gwendolyn Pough’s Check it While I Wreck It, published just before she moved to Syracuse in 2004, detailed a lineage of strong Black women’s verbal eloquence and framed women's Hip Hop participation as an extension of that. New York City-based Martha Cooper, who’d photographed the Hip Hop scene from its earliest days in 1970s South Bronx, brought out a new book, We B*Girlz (2005), about the world-wide phenomenon of women dancers’ crews and battles. Performers like Jean Grae and Missy Elliot emerged. Vibe Magazine published Hip Hop Divas.
The movies getting under way at the same time tell a story wider yet. Byron Hurt includes the infamous “Tip Drill” clip in Beyond Beats and Rhymes (2006), which kicks off the Community Folk Art Center’s annual film festival this Thursday. Besides cinematic critiques of thug misogyny and homophobia, the smartly-chosen program goes a long way toward busting narrow commercial stereotypes. There’s African Hip Hop, the rise of graffiti, the world of women deejays, Hip Hop as youth mentoring tool, Christian Hip Hop. And 16-year-old local filmmaker Zakharii Willets, who goes by Ziggy, debuts his short, Hip Hop: My Generation, just before Hurt’s film on Thursday.
Award-winning and PBS-aired, Beyond Beats and Rhymes puts an accomplished, sophisticated overview right up front, and Hurt will be here in person for discussion. On-screen, the ex-quarterback is articulate and persuasive (“I love Hip Hop,” he begins, “but we’re in this box, manhood…”). He says he first confronted this when he worked as a counselor to prevent male violence against women. His movie's exploration ranges from decades of violent white movie heroes to the lengthy construction Cross-Bronx Expressway, started in 1946, that ripped a borough in half and was surely as much a factor in the rise of Hip Hop as any reaction to affluent white disco music (one interviewee opines, “If they put an expressway through your neighborhood, then you understand Hip Hop.”).
Hip Hop's culture thrives globally, from Brazil to Tokyo to Germany to Australia and New Zealand to the Middle East, where much far-below-the-radar peace work is getting done by young Israeli and Palestinian rappers. Michael Wanguhu packs Hip Hop Colony (2006) with historical context and thoughtful interviews about equatorial Kenya, which got Western-style FM radio in 1995. Three years later, Kalamashaka made the first Kenyan hip-hop album. But this film’s best moments are the segments of rough footage of a joyous back-yard jam among Kalamashaka, Big Mike, Bamboo and the great Harry Kimani. Matter-of-factly un-gangsta, the film’s “dedicated to our moms.”
Asian-American Danny Lee’s Rock Fresh (2004) documents the international scope and methods of serious graffiti as Hip Hop's visual style and expression, following five artists. Rock Fresh screens Saturday afternoon following a free workshop for high school youth. Lee’s King of Hollywood opens later this year.
Liberian-born, New York-based Dante Kaba will be just back from Ghana when he travels to Syracuse on Saturday to screen Mistress X (2005), his portrait of women Hip Hop deejays.
Matt Ruskin’s The Hip Hop Project (2006) covers four years with Bahamas-born Chris “Kazi” Rolle, who grew up homeless in Brooklyn, and the Hip Hop-based program for at-risk youth he founded in 1999.
Finally, Christopher “Play” Martin “takes the Gospel to the streets” in Holy Hip Hop (2006), revealing robust urban ministries and radio programming in eight major US cities.
You could call this film festival a Valentine for love vindicated.
*******
This review appears in the 2/14/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column, usually reviewing DVDs. Nancy interviewed Diane Weathers for Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM, aired 3/10/05. Beyond Beats and Rhymes, Hip Hop Colony, Holy Hip Hop, & Rock Fresh are available now on DVD, & both The Hip Hop Project & Mistress X soon will be.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Film Review #148: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Andrew Dominick
Cast: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard
Theirs is one of our favorite stories of sidekicks-gone-wrong. Not quite 20 in September 1881, Bob Ford met his childhood idol near Blue Cut, Missouri, just as Jesse James and his older brother Frank were embarking on what they intended would be their last train robbery before retirement. At 34, Jesse James (Brad Pitt) had robbed over 25 trains since 1867. Other than Frank (Sam Shepard), who soon left him, and some feckless younger cousins, the rest of his gang was dead or locked up. Bob (Casey Affleck) hoped for a chance to show his “daring and grit,” and insinuated himself with a little set speech not unlike a novice job-seeker today. Initially rebuffed in no uncertain turns – Frank tells him “Scat!” and pulls a gun, and Jesse’s crew stands up en masse from a campfire when Bob tries to casually sit down with them – Bob had a way of glancing off into space so as to miss rejection, and he persisted.
Eight months later almost to the day, Bob shot Jesse James in the back of the head with a six-shooter Jesse had just given him while the domestically fastidious robber stood on a parlor chair after breakfast to dust a framed print of a horse. Because his older brother Charley (Sam Rockwell) had also raised a gun, Bob shot Jesse quickly, so as not to miss out on the reward and fame. He also feared Jesse’s revenge for other disloyalties just come to light and anyway his love had been souring for some time. Later, the Fords toured the US, re-enacting their betrayal on stage more than 800 times, until Charley committed suicide and Bob – running a tent saloon ten years later outside the silver mines in Creede, Colorado – was himself shot to death by another fame-seeker.
New Zealand native Andrew Dominick wrote and directed this film from Rob Hansen’s novel. Previously Dominick worked in Australia, seven years ago making Chopper, based on another violent, charismatic thug’s exploits and celebrity. (Aussie ex-convict Mark Read’s inventory of murders actually exceeds that of Jesse James, and he’s lived so far to enjoy lucrative profits as a pulp fiction writer and rap artist.) Now this film, released last October to disappointing box office, closely follows historical events but adds a rich, layered imagining of Jesse’s symphonic mood swings and Bob Ford’s evolving infatuation and resentment. This year’s Oscar nominations have their glaring omissions – Brad Pitt’s excellent Jesse among them – but Casey Affleck’s Bob Ford earns his spot for Best Supporting Actor and then some.
The great Roger Deakins is cinematographer. He’s Oscar-nominated this year a second time for the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, but his work here is clearly superior and more daring. I watched this film with an art historian whose exclamations of pure visual pleasure punctuated the film’s lengthy running time. In Deakins’ use of extreme shadow and focused light for what are essentially intensely still portrait studies, she saw Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt. Unlike the Western movie’s classic landscape with those sweeping Texas vistas – see No Country – Deakins here offers two sharply contrasting world visions. Often Jesse appears against the open sky, wading in wind-rippled prairie grass. The prospects of others are pinched, muddy and bleak. Door frames truncate their vistas, intervening upright posts and roofs chop their frame into halves and thirds, short-sightedness blurs their peripheries, chill emptiness washes out their colors to near abstraction. Whatever Jesse may evoke, for most folks frontier life was monotonous, harsh, and flat. It’s no stretch to imagine Bob Ford – all his dreams hidden scraps inside a shoe-box that his brothers tease him for – in one of today’s bombed-out urban cores.
Over 20 films – the first made in 1921, starring Jesse James, Jr. – have recounted these events. Long at 160 minutes, difficult, rewarding, with far less “action” that we expect from Westerns, this film requires some commitment to watch. Both the dialogue and voice-over narrative (actor Hugh Ross delivers a meditative, often sparely lyrical reading that’s also at odds with an action film’s expectations) make you want to jot down line after line. Very early, for example, we hear of Jesse, “Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rain fell straighter, clocks slowed.”
Quickly, Dominick's version of the Blue Cut train robbery lives up to this kind of heightening. In real life, Jesse barely escaped the Blue Cut fiasco in one piece. On-screen, with the train’s light shivering through the forest, the rolling fog conjuring sudden silhouettes, Jesse’s almond-shaped eyes glittering out of the night, brutes stalking up the aisle among passengers – well, right here’s our home-grown hi-jacker, fearsome, deeply sadistic, both alluring and repellant.
Civil War Missouri was a border state ripped apart by guerilla fighting. Jesse’s own family was tortured and Frank James rode with the Quantrill’s Raiders irregular militia. Jesse was probably an actual terrorist too – in 2003 biographer T.J. Stiles argued persuasively for this – long recalcitrant after a war whose breadth of death and brutality we are only lately discovering. Scholar Drew Gilpin Faust’s new and revelatory This Republic of Suffering just got a two-page spread in Newsweek. Dominick’s film includes a taken-for-granted overlap of that Civil War, its aftermath and the settling of the West that has bracingly reappeared in recent Westerns – Seraphim Falls and David Milch’s Deadwood, for example. For many years classic Hollywood Westerns, as I have written elsewhere, glanced away from this continuum - not unlike Bob Ford, really - as if settling the West were an opportunity to forget, both in its new beginning and its on-screen portrayal.
Those impatient with the time national reconciliation is taking elsewhere need only look within.
*******
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was released last Tuesday on DVD. This review appeared in the 2/7/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Andrew Dominick
Cast: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard
Theirs is one of our favorite stories of sidekicks-gone-wrong. Not quite 20 in September 1881, Bob Ford met his childhood idol near Blue Cut, Missouri, just as Jesse James and his older brother Frank were embarking on what they intended would be their last train robbery before retirement. At 34, Jesse James (Brad Pitt) had robbed over 25 trains since 1867. Other than Frank (Sam Shepard), who soon left him, and some feckless younger cousins, the rest of his gang was dead or locked up. Bob (Casey Affleck) hoped for a chance to show his “daring and grit,” and insinuated himself with a little set speech not unlike a novice job-seeker today. Initially rebuffed in no uncertain turns – Frank tells him “Scat!” and pulls a gun, and Jesse’s crew stands up en masse from a campfire when Bob tries to casually sit down with them – Bob had a way of glancing off into space so as to miss rejection, and he persisted.
Eight months later almost to the day, Bob shot Jesse James in the back of the head with a six-shooter Jesse had just given him while the domestically fastidious robber stood on a parlor chair after breakfast to dust a framed print of a horse. Because his older brother Charley (Sam Rockwell) had also raised a gun, Bob shot Jesse quickly, so as not to miss out on the reward and fame. He also feared Jesse’s revenge for other disloyalties just come to light and anyway his love had been souring for some time. Later, the Fords toured the US, re-enacting their betrayal on stage more than 800 times, until Charley committed suicide and Bob – running a tent saloon ten years later outside the silver mines in Creede, Colorado – was himself shot to death by another fame-seeker.
New Zealand native Andrew Dominick wrote and directed this film from Rob Hansen’s novel. Previously Dominick worked in Australia, seven years ago making Chopper, based on another violent, charismatic thug’s exploits and celebrity. (Aussie ex-convict Mark Read’s inventory of murders actually exceeds that of Jesse James, and he’s lived so far to enjoy lucrative profits as a pulp fiction writer and rap artist.) Now this film, released last October to disappointing box office, closely follows historical events but adds a rich, layered imagining of Jesse’s symphonic mood swings and Bob Ford’s evolving infatuation and resentment. This year’s Oscar nominations have their glaring omissions – Brad Pitt’s excellent Jesse among them – but Casey Affleck’s Bob Ford earns his spot for Best Supporting Actor and then some.
The great Roger Deakins is cinematographer. He’s Oscar-nominated this year a second time for the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, but his work here is clearly superior and more daring. I watched this film with an art historian whose exclamations of pure visual pleasure punctuated the film’s lengthy running time. In Deakins’ use of extreme shadow and focused light for what are essentially intensely still portrait studies, she saw Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt. Unlike the Western movie’s classic landscape with those sweeping Texas vistas – see No Country – Deakins here offers two sharply contrasting world visions. Often Jesse appears against the open sky, wading in wind-rippled prairie grass. The prospects of others are pinched, muddy and bleak. Door frames truncate their vistas, intervening upright posts and roofs chop their frame into halves and thirds, short-sightedness blurs their peripheries, chill emptiness washes out their colors to near abstraction. Whatever Jesse may evoke, for most folks frontier life was monotonous, harsh, and flat. It’s no stretch to imagine Bob Ford – all his dreams hidden scraps inside a shoe-box that his brothers tease him for – in one of today’s bombed-out urban cores.
Over 20 films – the first made in 1921, starring Jesse James, Jr. – have recounted these events. Long at 160 minutes, difficult, rewarding, with far less “action” that we expect from Westerns, this film requires some commitment to watch. Both the dialogue and voice-over narrative (actor Hugh Ross delivers a meditative, often sparely lyrical reading that’s also at odds with an action film’s expectations) make you want to jot down line after line. Very early, for example, we hear of Jesse, “Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rain fell straighter, clocks slowed.”
Quickly, Dominick's version of the Blue Cut train robbery lives up to this kind of heightening. In real life, Jesse barely escaped the Blue Cut fiasco in one piece. On-screen, with the train’s light shivering through the forest, the rolling fog conjuring sudden silhouettes, Jesse’s almond-shaped eyes glittering out of the night, brutes stalking up the aisle among passengers – well, right here’s our home-grown hi-jacker, fearsome, deeply sadistic, both alluring and repellant.
Civil War Missouri was a border state ripped apart by guerilla fighting. Jesse’s own family was tortured and Frank James rode with the Quantrill’s Raiders irregular militia. Jesse was probably an actual terrorist too – in 2003 biographer T.J. Stiles argued persuasively for this – long recalcitrant after a war whose breadth of death and brutality we are only lately discovering. Scholar Drew Gilpin Faust’s new and revelatory This Republic of Suffering just got a two-page spread in Newsweek. Dominick’s film includes a taken-for-granted overlap of that Civil War, its aftermath and the settling of the West that has bracingly reappeared in recent Westerns – Seraphim Falls and David Milch’s Deadwood, for example. For many years classic Hollywood Westerns, as I have written elsewhere, glanced away from this continuum - not unlike Bob Ford, really - as if settling the West were an opportunity to forget, both in its new beginning and its on-screen portrayal.
Those impatient with the time national reconciliation is taking elsewhere need only look within.
*******
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was released last Tuesday on DVD. This review appeared in the 2/7/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent films that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #147: Golden Door
2006/US DVD 2008
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Cast: Vincenzo Amato, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Filippo Pucillo
There has never been a ship-launching on screen quite like this. Sicilian peasant Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) gathers his two teen-aged boys, his mother, and a couple pretty young neighbors – mail-order brides under his protection until Ellis Island – on deck. He’d collared his younger son Pietro (Filippo Pucillo) when the boy panicked on the swaying gang-plank. Now the rough chaos of hundreds boarding subsides and the crowd drops away as the camera pulls straight up. From a hundred dizzying feet above, the crowd on deck and land merge as one mass and pause together, listening maybe for the steamer’s whistle, poised to edge away. In this hush, just the wind and some gulls crying, and the ship’s own mournful creaking as it shifts and starts to glide out. A ribbon of sea opens, dark in the shadow of the dock, then parts the crowd in two. Flashing like a blade, the widening gap reflects the sky’s light, and suddenly, the immensity of this step, this journey.
Italian director Emanuele Crialese says he had this scene – its God’s-eye view so easily the central image for both his film and any immigrant’s undertaking – planned out and fully story-boarded two years before he started shooting in Buenos Aires, whose port stood in for the Italy of a century ago. National cinemas all have their visual vocabularies. One reason that Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men is so mesmerizing stems from cinematographer Roger Deakins’ sprawling vistas, which restore – even if subliminally – the specifically American frontier landscape of early Westerns. The Coens’ new vision of American “possibility” may be terrifying, but we’re still more at ease with that open space in our origin stories.
This resonates elegantly with Crialese’s filmmaking and subject. One thing we’ve learned from Italian cinema – from Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) onward – is that you first look for that horizon. No sky on-screen, no hope or future.
Golden Door is persistently filled with sky. As the Mancusos leave their village forever, Crialese films them from below, looking up at them perched sorrowfully atop a cart, dressed in the cast-off boots of a local baron and the cloaks of dead bandits so they take the spirits of their dead with them, with only the sky’s coming storm behind them. Salvatore and the mysterious, resourceful, large-spirited English redhead Lucy Reed (Charlotte Gainsbourg, as magnetic here as in I’m Not There) enact their silent courtship pacing on-deck against the sea’s golden horizon. Upon first tasting American white bread, Salvatore – already long sustained on dreams – says, “It’s like eating a cloud.” Crialese casts the New World’s uncertainty as the steamer’s fog-shrouded deck when they enter New York’s harbor, and the frosted windows in the solarium at Ellis that hide the near-by city. Salvatore and another newcomer scale the massive window frame, peer through clear panes near the ceiling at Manhattan’s tall structures, speculate on taking their livestock up elevators, and Salvatore muses, “I’d like to live in the sky.”
Golden Door recounts his anguished decision to leave home, the harrowing week-long passage in steerage, and survival of Ellis Island processing. He has two sons, Angelo (Francesco Casisa), perhaps 20, and the younger, Pietro. Others assume Pietro is deaf-mute but he’s clearly neither; we first meet him imitating bird songs to tease some girls on a rocky hillside and he will find his voice at a critica moment on Ellis. Salvatore’s twin brother left for America after Pietro’s birth; Salvatore’s wife may have died in that childbirth. His mother Fortunata (Aurora Quattrocchi) argues the spirits are angry about the coming move because they fear the sea. Eventually she relents but cannot adjust. Her “resistance to rules” – she erupts in rage when a nurse attempts a rectal exam without warning her of what’s coming – gets her deported as “feebleminded.”
Golden Door occurs roughly in 1913, midway through a decades-long tide of immigration that straddled the century's turn to a jittery US. For one thing, single women weren’t allowed to enter unaccompanied. Hence the shipboard industry of the marriage broker Don Luigi (the great character actor Vincent Schiavelli, whose death during filming cut off a larger subplot). Lucy Reed refuses his efforts at recruitment in favor of finding her own prospect. And hence the nerve-wracking procedures of men claiming their intended fiancés at Ellis – neither of the village girls Salvatore chaperones are pleased with their mates – and an improvised exchange between Salvatore and Lucy across the crowded hearing room that hints at how well they’ll compliment one another in their new life.
Second, the pseudo-scientific “fitness” testing regimes that occur on-screen were put in place after eugenics pioneer Henry Goddard visited Ellis Island in 1910 and his doctored-up book on the Kallikak family appeared in 1912. Goddard’s views on inherited feeble-mindedness and moral degeneracy led to immigration quotas based on favored nationalities and to sterilization laws that the Nazis later admired and copied. Crialese brilliantly contrasts the ritual-infused Sicilians and their visions with such official and officious white-coated voodoo in the name of progress. When the doctors bizarrely instruct Pietro to open a door that has a brick wall behind it in one such exam, this supposedly primitive boy shoots them a look that says, “These people are crazy.” Crialese's gift for juxtaposition extends as well to his startling - and near-perfect - use of Nina Simone's "Sinner Man" in the soundtrack. See this film before deciding on the candidates' immigration prescriptions.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/21/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2006/US DVD 2008
Director: Emanuele Crialese
Cast: Vincenzo Amato, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Filippo Pucillo
There has never been a ship-launching on screen quite like this. Sicilian peasant Salvatore Mancuso (Vincenzo Amato) gathers his two teen-aged boys, his mother, and a couple pretty young neighbors – mail-order brides under his protection until Ellis Island – on deck. He’d collared his younger son Pietro (Filippo Pucillo) when the boy panicked on the swaying gang-plank. Now the rough chaos of hundreds boarding subsides and the crowd drops away as the camera pulls straight up. From a hundred dizzying feet above, the crowd on deck and land merge as one mass and pause together, listening maybe for the steamer’s whistle, poised to edge away. In this hush, just the wind and some gulls crying, and the ship’s own mournful creaking as it shifts and starts to glide out. A ribbon of sea opens, dark in the shadow of the dock, then parts the crowd in two. Flashing like a blade, the widening gap reflects the sky’s light, and suddenly, the immensity of this step, this journey.
Italian director Emanuele Crialese says he had this scene – its God’s-eye view so easily the central image for both his film and any immigrant’s undertaking – planned out and fully story-boarded two years before he started shooting in Buenos Aires, whose port stood in for the Italy of a century ago. National cinemas all have their visual vocabularies. One reason that Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men is so mesmerizing stems from cinematographer Roger Deakins’ sprawling vistas, which restore – even if subliminally – the specifically American frontier landscape of early Westerns. The Coens’ new vision of American “possibility” may be terrifying, but we’re still more at ease with that open space in our origin stories.
This resonates elegantly with Crialese’s filmmaking and subject. One thing we’ve learned from Italian cinema – from Rossellini’s Rome Open City (1945) onward – is that you first look for that horizon. No sky on-screen, no hope or future.
Golden Door is persistently filled with sky. As the Mancusos leave their village forever, Crialese films them from below, looking up at them perched sorrowfully atop a cart, dressed in the cast-off boots of a local baron and the cloaks of dead bandits so they take the spirits of their dead with them, with only the sky’s coming storm behind them. Salvatore and the mysterious, resourceful, large-spirited English redhead Lucy Reed (Charlotte Gainsbourg, as magnetic here as in I’m Not There) enact their silent courtship pacing on-deck against the sea’s golden horizon. Upon first tasting American white bread, Salvatore – already long sustained on dreams – says, “It’s like eating a cloud.” Crialese casts the New World’s uncertainty as the steamer’s fog-shrouded deck when they enter New York’s harbor, and the frosted windows in the solarium at Ellis that hide the near-by city. Salvatore and another newcomer scale the massive window frame, peer through clear panes near the ceiling at Manhattan’s tall structures, speculate on taking their livestock up elevators, and Salvatore muses, “I’d like to live in the sky.”
Golden Door recounts his anguished decision to leave home, the harrowing week-long passage in steerage, and survival of Ellis Island processing. He has two sons, Angelo (Francesco Casisa), perhaps 20, and the younger, Pietro. Others assume Pietro is deaf-mute but he’s clearly neither; we first meet him imitating bird songs to tease some girls on a rocky hillside and he will find his voice at a critica moment on Ellis. Salvatore’s twin brother left for America after Pietro’s birth; Salvatore’s wife may have died in that childbirth. His mother Fortunata (Aurora Quattrocchi) argues the spirits are angry about the coming move because they fear the sea. Eventually she relents but cannot adjust. Her “resistance to rules” – she erupts in rage when a nurse attempts a rectal exam without warning her of what’s coming – gets her deported as “feebleminded.”
Golden Door occurs roughly in 1913, midway through a decades-long tide of immigration that straddled the century's turn to a jittery US. For one thing, single women weren’t allowed to enter unaccompanied. Hence the shipboard industry of the marriage broker Don Luigi (the great character actor Vincent Schiavelli, whose death during filming cut off a larger subplot). Lucy Reed refuses his efforts at recruitment in favor of finding her own prospect. And hence the nerve-wracking procedures of men claiming their intended fiancés at Ellis – neither of the village girls Salvatore chaperones are pleased with their mates – and an improvised exchange between Salvatore and Lucy across the crowded hearing room that hints at how well they’ll compliment one another in their new life.
Second, the pseudo-scientific “fitness” testing regimes that occur on-screen were put in place after eugenics pioneer Henry Goddard visited Ellis Island in 1910 and his doctored-up book on the Kallikak family appeared in 1912. Goddard’s views on inherited feeble-mindedness and moral degeneracy led to immigration quotas based on favored nationalities and to sterilization laws that the Nazis later admired and copied. Crialese brilliantly contrasts the ritual-infused Sicilians and their visions with such official and officious white-coated voodoo in the name of progress. When the doctors bizarrely instruct Pietro to open a door that has a brick wall behind it in one such exam, this supposedly primitive boy shoots them a look that says, “These people are crazy.” Crialese's gift for juxtaposition extends as well to his startling - and near-perfect - use of Nina Simone's "Sinner Man" in the soundtrack. See this film before deciding on the candidates' immigration prescriptions.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/21/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #146: Molière
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Laurent Tirard
Cast: Romain Duris, Laura Morante, Fabrice Luchini
Clearly he’s sincere. Pelted with cat-calls and rotten fruit – his chin drips with the juice – this actor carries on with his tragic lines, declaiming, deep-voiced, and sorrowful. Thirteen years later, famous and called to Paris to entertain the royal court, he’ll still hanker after serious high art; Madeleine, his long-time mistress and partner in leading this acting troupe, informs him he’s still terrible at it. Meanwhile, things are really not going his way. As the crowd turns belligerent, two officers of the law barge in on his faltering performance with one of their own – a solemn march on stage, a scroll unfurled, a portentous declaration of charges against him. Like many a young man suddenly cornered by creditors and facing arrest, the young Molière improvises desperately. We’ve seen this somewhere – yes, maybe in old Marx Brothers movies or on Saturday mornings with Bugs Bunny – the prankster leaping behind some ponderous authority figure, seeming to vanish, tapping him from behind so one cop swings around and slugs the other. Pleased with himself and the chaos he’s stirred up after a few rounds of this, Molière bows lavishly, basks in applause. Cut to Molière flying through the air, heaved into a dungeon’s pile of straw.
Maybe a victim of American angst with subtitles, bad memories of high school English class and stereotypes that historical film biographies are dull, 40-year-old French director Laurent Tirard’s second feature was not the stateside summer comedy hit it deserved to be. Now on DVD, this funny and winning little film gets another chance to shine.
Molière arises – much like Shakespeare in Love (1998) and last year’s couple of Jane Austen movies – from a missing chunk of time in the 17th century playwright’s résumé and the invention of events that, inserted with some mysterious lost love into that gap, explain his career. This way of accounting for art has its enemies; it can be formulaic, sentimental and, when you think about, it suggests that an artist’s imaginative reach is really not so powerful after all. But Molière has abundant redeeming qualities.
Tirard makes this dead white European male – he calls his approach “anti-rock star” – worth getting to know. Molière was just 22 in 1644 when he went to debtors’ prison and then disappeared for a while. He had already joined forces with the theatrical Bejárt family to form Illustre Theatre – French audiences likely know that Madeleine is the historical Madeleine Bejárt – the rep company with which he toured southern France, honing his comic stage-craft. As celebrated as Molière later became for his hilarious, biting social mockery in a dozen full-length comedies and other shorter farces, Tirard’s young playwright searches, sometimes clumsily, for work worth doing and for what purpose art has in a society starting to crack apart. US audiences might easily confuse this film’s time frame with Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette, but more than a century was to pass between the mutual contempt and envy of this film’s aristocrats and rising merchant class and the savagely bloody eruption of 1789.
Tirard’s ensemble cast is a quiet triumph, starting with Romain Duris as Molière. After 30-some films abroad, Duris’ arrived here in Russian Dolls and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (both 2005); Gypsy cinema fans also know him from several Tony Gatliff films. Fabrice Luchini is Jourdain, the rich merchant who plucks Molière from prison to provide some secret drama coaching – under his wife’s nose (he spirits Molière into his household as Tartuffe, a priest-tutor) – in his far-fetched quest to seduce a younger and more glamourous woman. As Jourdain’s wife Elmire, Laura Morante is a gracious, wise older woman who briefly loses her head over Molière, understands his gift, and sees him a last time when he returns to Paris. Edouard Baer is Count Dorante. His chateau roof leaking, his pockets empty, and his son wanting – scandalously – to “work,” the predatory nobleman sizes up Jourdain as his meal ticket.
The film’s comedy and unexpected generosity toward women provide a window on Molière’s work that may make the playwright’s work more inviting. Elmire may stay in her “place” with her husband, but Molière’s youthful country interlude concludes by turning on his agreement to secure Elmire’s daughter’s happiness in return for his own departure. Tirard lifts and adapts scenes from those later plays that rely on reversals, mistaken identity, perfect comic timing and penetrating observation of others. The funniest explore “acting” itself – on stage (in a marvelous jab at “method” acting exercises, Jourdain plays a dewdrop hanging from a leaf that Molière counters with a spirited demonstration of three horses), as social place and social climbing (Elmire howls when Molière mimics her husband’s pretensions), as unattractive cold deception, as comical bad acting, and as a zestful plot in service of tricking the evil Dorante and saving Jourdain’s daughter from an ill-advised arranged marriage. You might give all of comedy a second look.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2007/DVD 2008
Director: Laurent Tirard
Cast: Romain Duris, Laura Morante, Fabrice Luchini
Clearly he’s sincere. Pelted with cat-calls and rotten fruit – his chin drips with the juice – this actor carries on with his tragic lines, declaiming, deep-voiced, and sorrowful. Thirteen years later, famous and called to Paris to entertain the royal court, he’ll still hanker after serious high art; Madeleine, his long-time mistress and partner in leading this acting troupe, informs him he’s still terrible at it. Meanwhile, things are really not going his way. As the crowd turns belligerent, two officers of the law barge in on his faltering performance with one of their own – a solemn march on stage, a scroll unfurled, a portentous declaration of charges against him. Like many a young man suddenly cornered by creditors and facing arrest, the young Molière improvises desperately. We’ve seen this somewhere – yes, maybe in old Marx Brothers movies or on Saturday mornings with Bugs Bunny – the prankster leaping behind some ponderous authority figure, seeming to vanish, tapping him from behind so one cop swings around and slugs the other. Pleased with himself and the chaos he’s stirred up after a few rounds of this, Molière bows lavishly, basks in applause. Cut to Molière flying through the air, heaved into a dungeon’s pile of straw.
Maybe a victim of American angst with subtitles, bad memories of high school English class and stereotypes that historical film biographies are dull, 40-year-old French director Laurent Tirard’s second feature was not the stateside summer comedy hit it deserved to be. Now on DVD, this funny and winning little film gets another chance to shine.
Molière arises – much like Shakespeare in Love (1998) and last year’s couple of Jane Austen movies – from a missing chunk of time in the 17th century playwright’s résumé and the invention of events that, inserted with some mysterious lost love into that gap, explain his career. This way of accounting for art has its enemies; it can be formulaic, sentimental and, when you think about, it suggests that an artist’s imaginative reach is really not so powerful after all. But Molière has abundant redeeming qualities.
Tirard makes this dead white European male – he calls his approach “anti-rock star” – worth getting to know. Molière was just 22 in 1644 when he went to debtors’ prison and then disappeared for a while. He had already joined forces with the theatrical Bejárt family to form Illustre Theatre – French audiences likely know that Madeleine is the historical Madeleine Bejárt – the rep company with which he toured southern France, honing his comic stage-craft. As celebrated as Molière later became for his hilarious, biting social mockery in a dozen full-length comedies and other shorter farces, Tirard’s young playwright searches, sometimes clumsily, for work worth doing and for what purpose art has in a society starting to crack apart. US audiences might easily confuse this film’s time frame with Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette, but more than a century was to pass between the mutual contempt and envy of this film’s aristocrats and rising merchant class and the savagely bloody eruption of 1789.
Tirard’s ensemble cast is a quiet triumph, starting with Romain Duris as Molière. After 30-some films abroad, Duris’ arrived here in Russian Dolls and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (both 2005); Gypsy cinema fans also know him from several Tony Gatliff films. Fabrice Luchini is Jourdain, the rich merchant who plucks Molière from prison to provide some secret drama coaching – under his wife’s nose (he spirits Molière into his household as Tartuffe, a priest-tutor) – in his far-fetched quest to seduce a younger and more glamourous woman. As Jourdain’s wife Elmire, Laura Morante is a gracious, wise older woman who briefly loses her head over Molière, understands his gift, and sees him a last time when he returns to Paris. Edouard Baer is Count Dorante. His chateau roof leaking, his pockets empty, and his son wanting – scandalously – to “work,” the predatory nobleman sizes up Jourdain as his meal ticket.
The film’s comedy and unexpected generosity toward women provide a window on Molière’s work that may make the playwright’s work more inviting. Elmire may stay in her “place” with her husband, but Molière’s youthful country interlude concludes by turning on his agreement to secure Elmire’s daughter’s happiness in return for his own departure. Tirard lifts and adapts scenes from those later plays that rely on reversals, mistaken identity, perfect comic timing and penetrating observation of others. The funniest explore “acting” itself – on stage (in a marvelous jab at “method” acting exercises, Jourdain plays a dewdrop hanging from a leaf that Molière counters with a spirited demonstration of three horses), as social place and social climbing (Elmire howls when Molière mimics her husband’s pretensions), as unattractive cold deception, as comical bad acting, and as a zestful plot in service of tricking the evil Dorante and saving Jourdain’s daughter from an ill-advised arranged marriage. You might give all of comedy a second look.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/24/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #145: The Battle of Algiers
1966/DVD 2004
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Cast: Saadi Yacef, Brahim Hadjadj, Jean Martin
If you’ve happened to hear that as a young man the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo was inspired to forsake photojournalism and take up making movies by watching a single decisive film, and you’re lucky enough to find a copy of Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 Paisá, you will see from the very opening scene what attracted the sensibility of one who also studied composing, grew up under Mussolini, led an anti-Fascist resistance in the city of Milan during World War II and went on to make the legendary cinema vérité-like epic of Algeria’s independence, The Battle of Algiers (1966). I was lucky enough to borrow a personal VHS copy of the European release version, with the English-language dialogue of American GIs and British troops subtitled in Italian, and right there – in the opening scene, where the Yanks are advancing through the narrow, twisting stone alleys of Sicily at night, rifles at the ready, and then up to a ruined seaside fortress in the moonlight, in the first leg of the liberation of Italy – you can see a cinematic vision that fed Pontecorvo’s filming of the running battle through the twisted streets and over the rooftops of the Arab quarter – the Casbah – in Algiers.
Paisá is – criminally – not available on US format DVD right now. An anthology of six episodes set in different parts of Italy from 1943-45, it chronicles the Allied liberation of Fascist Italy from the perspective of ordinary people interacting with, primarily, US GIs, often turning on misunderstandings due to language and O’Henry-like twists. Paisá also exposed Pontecorvo to the long tracking action shots that provide a deep visual pleasure that today’s jump cutting can’t approach, and to unashamedly moving music as backdrop. A good deal of the emotional heft of The Battle of Algiers, for example, comes – one realizes afterward – from the fact that Ennio Morricone’s score gives the same dirge-like music to Arab and European deaths alike, all equally tragic and wasteful.
There is also a strange shock of recognition in Rossellini’s film, which curiously the subtitles seem to spark first. We’re not used to English speech translated into another language in the text crawling under the action. It seems backwards somehow, snags your attention. But here is a film with American characters that an outsider made, and he got us right. This is one of Paisá’s many exhilarating pleasures and, as significant, one cause of an accumulating deep trust in the director’s vision. While it’s harder to track than a particular visual approach, this capacity to portray those who are different so that they recognize themselves – and experience themselves as seen by an outsider – may be the more important lesson that Pontecorvo took from Rossellini. Despite initial French furor - they walked out of the Venice Film Festival when the film premiered there, and the film was effectively banned in France until 1971 - this quality has since earned The Battle of Algiers unque respect across factions, nationalities and shades of opinion, from the Pentagon to Al-Jazeera.
This is worth mentioning at some length because Pontecorvo’s film has been so decisively influential among filmmakers working today. The Criterion’s 2004 DVD set – highly expansive with three discs – includes interviews with Spike lee, Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone and Mira Nair. The Indian director says Battle of Algiers is “the one film in the world that I wish I had directed.” So how these two Italian directors perceived and filmed war and liberation has come to gradually permeate what’s on our screens. What is further remarkable is how little the course of war and its political justifications have changed.
The Battle of Algiers covers the years 1954-57, culminating in the title’s battle, and largely following the conversion to politics and rise to leadership of a young street thug, Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj), after he witnesses from his cell what was actually a pivotal execution by guillotine of two Algerians in the prison’s courtyard which inflamed public opinion because it treated men who defined themselves as prisoners of war as criminals. Most of the Algerian characters in Battle portray actual historical figures – some, such as Ali, named literally – and all nonprofessional actors. Saadi Yacef, who sought Pontecorvo to propose making Battle, plays a character in the film named Jaffar who is essentially modeled on himself. The French paratrooper commander, Col. Mathieu, is a composite of French commanders, played by the French film actor Jean Martin. An booklet that's part of the Criterion set sorts out the fine points of correlations between historical and composite characters.
Dramatically, soon after the film opens we see Ali La Pointe trapped behind a building’s inner wall in a crawl-space hide-out, ordered to come out by waiting French troops. Ali La Pointe did not come out. The resulting explosion entombed him and his little band. Three years after the end of this war, Pontecorvo rebuilt the house where Ali died on the same spot and blew it up again for this film.
Pontecorvo structured The Battle of Algiers as a flashback from this moment in 1957, when fresh French paratroopers had arrived, surge-like, in response to escalating attacks against police and troops and – a new tactic – three women had planted bombs that detonated in public gathering places that Europeans frequented. Pontecorvo was especially intent to portray the role of women in Algerian independence; the powerful montage in which they prepare for and carry out the three public bombings occurs without dialogue and backed by the Algerian anthem, “Baba Salem.” French troops, whose use of torture in interrogation has of course compared to more recent controversies, then arrived to break a looming national strike called by the National Liberation Front (FLN), which was timed to coincide with United Nations debate on Algerian independence.
Criterion outdoes itself with this set’s bonus features, which more than repay the several evenings you’ll spend watching them and which will leave you angry at what you didn’t learn in school, and aghast at how old and familiar the argument is that terrorism justifies torture. These include a string of interviews with surviving French officers and nationals – the yet unrepentant colonel who headed the death and torture squad, the French officer (a decorated hero in French Indochina) who resigned and exposed atrocities, the French-born newspaper editor who was himself tortured for siding with the Algerians – as well as recent interviews with Saadi Yacef and Zohra Drif-Bitat (one of the three women bombers), both of whom sat in the Algerian parliament at the time of this DVD release. There’s a short 1989 documentary that Pontecorvo made upon revisiting Algeria, a documentary about his film career narrated by Edward Said, and a conversation among ABC News’ Chris Isham, former national security coordinator Richard Clarke and the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator Michael Sheehan, film in May 2004.
But first watch the movie itself.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/17/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1966/DVD 2004
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Cast: Saadi Yacef, Brahim Hadjadj, Jean Martin
If you’ve happened to hear that as a young man the Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo was inspired to forsake photojournalism and take up making movies by watching a single decisive film, and you’re lucky enough to find a copy of Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 Paisá, you will see from the very opening scene what attracted the sensibility of one who also studied composing, grew up under Mussolini, led an anti-Fascist resistance in the city of Milan during World War II and went on to make the legendary cinema vérité-like epic of Algeria’s independence, The Battle of Algiers (1966). I was lucky enough to borrow a personal VHS copy of the European release version, with the English-language dialogue of American GIs and British troops subtitled in Italian, and right there – in the opening scene, where the Yanks are advancing through the narrow, twisting stone alleys of Sicily at night, rifles at the ready, and then up to a ruined seaside fortress in the moonlight, in the first leg of the liberation of Italy – you can see a cinematic vision that fed Pontecorvo’s filming of the running battle through the twisted streets and over the rooftops of the Arab quarter – the Casbah – in Algiers.
Paisá is – criminally – not available on US format DVD right now. An anthology of six episodes set in different parts of Italy from 1943-45, it chronicles the Allied liberation of Fascist Italy from the perspective of ordinary people interacting with, primarily, US GIs, often turning on misunderstandings due to language and O’Henry-like twists. Paisá also exposed Pontecorvo to the long tracking action shots that provide a deep visual pleasure that today’s jump cutting can’t approach, and to unashamedly moving music as backdrop. A good deal of the emotional heft of The Battle of Algiers, for example, comes – one realizes afterward – from the fact that Ennio Morricone’s score gives the same dirge-like music to Arab and European deaths alike, all equally tragic and wasteful.
There is also a strange shock of recognition in Rossellini’s film, which curiously the subtitles seem to spark first. We’re not used to English speech translated into another language in the text crawling under the action. It seems backwards somehow, snags your attention. But here is a film with American characters that an outsider made, and he got us right. This is one of Paisá’s many exhilarating pleasures and, as significant, one cause of an accumulating deep trust in the director’s vision. While it’s harder to track than a particular visual approach, this capacity to portray those who are different so that they recognize themselves – and experience themselves as seen by an outsider – may be the more important lesson that Pontecorvo took from Rossellini. Despite initial French furor - they walked out of the Venice Film Festival when the film premiered there, and the film was effectively banned in France until 1971 - this quality has since earned The Battle of Algiers unque respect across factions, nationalities and shades of opinion, from the Pentagon to Al-Jazeera.
This is worth mentioning at some length because Pontecorvo’s film has been so decisively influential among filmmakers working today. The Criterion’s 2004 DVD set – highly expansive with three discs – includes interviews with Spike lee, Julian Schnabel, Steven Soderbergh, Oliver Stone and Mira Nair. The Indian director says Battle of Algiers is “the one film in the world that I wish I had directed.” So how these two Italian directors perceived and filmed war and liberation has come to gradually permeate what’s on our screens. What is further remarkable is how little the course of war and its political justifications have changed.
The Battle of Algiers covers the years 1954-57, culminating in the title’s battle, and largely following the conversion to politics and rise to leadership of a young street thug, Ali La Pointe (Brahim Hadjadj), after he witnesses from his cell what was actually a pivotal execution by guillotine of two Algerians in the prison’s courtyard which inflamed public opinion because it treated men who defined themselves as prisoners of war as criminals. Most of the Algerian characters in Battle portray actual historical figures – some, such as Ali, named literally – and all nonprofessional actors. Saadi Yacef, who sought Pontecorvo to propose making Battle, plays a character in the film named Jaffar who is essentially modeled on himself. The French paratrooper commander, Col. Mathieu, is a composite of French commanders, played by the French film actor Jean Martin. An booklet that's part of the Criterion set sorts out the fine points of correlations between historical and composite characters.
Dramatically, soon after the film opens we see Ali La Pointe trapped behind a building’s inner wall in a crawl-space hide-out, ordered to come out by waiting French troops. Ali La Pointe did not come out. The resulting explosion entombed him and his little band. Three years after the end of this war, Pontecorvo rebuilt the house where Ali died on the same spot and blew it up again for this film.
Pontecorvo structured The Battle of Algiers as a flashback from this moment in 1957, when fresh French paratroopers had arrived, surge-like, in response to escalating attacks against police and troops and – a new tactic – three women had planted bombs that detonated in public gathering places that Europeans frequented. Pontecorvo was especially intent to portray the role of women in Algerian independence; the powerful montage in which they prepare for and carry out the three public bombings occurs without dialogue and backed by the Algerian anthem, “Baba Salem.” French troops, whose use of torture in interrogation has of course compared to more recent controversies, then arrived to break a looming national strike called by the National Liberation Front (FLN), which was timed to coincide with United Nations debate on Algerian independence.
Criterion outdoes itself with this set’s bonus features, which more than repay the several evenings you’ll spend watching them and which will leave you angry at what you didn’t learn in school, and aghast at how old and familiar the argument is that terrorism justifies torture. These include a string of interviews with surviving French officers and nationals – the yet unrepentant colonel who headed the death and torture squad, the French officer (a decorated hero in French Indochina) who resigned and exposed atrocities, the French-born newspaper editor who was himself tortured for siding with the Algerians – as well as recent interviews with Saadi Yacef and Zohra Drif-Bitat (one of the three women bombers), both of whom sat in the Algerian parliament at the time of this DVD release. There’s a short 1989 documentary that Pontecorvo made upon revisiting Algeria, a documentary about his film career narrated by Edward Said, and a conversation among ABC News’ Chris Isham, former national security coordinator Richard Clarke and the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator Michael Sheehan, film in May 2004.
But first watch the movie itself.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/17/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a weekly column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, January 11, 2008
Film Review #144: Burn!
1969/2004
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Cast: Marlon Brando, Evaristo Márquez, Renato Salvatori
If we didn’t already compare Iraq to Vietnam, this 1969 movie would conjure the parallels for us with its proxy story of 19th century colonialism. It’s 1855 on the island of Queimada, a fictional former Portuguese colony in the Caribbean. A British “military advisor” to the embattled young republic, sent by the Royal Sugar Company to quell a six-year insurgency by former slaves, coolly surveys the smoking ruins of a village and its surrounding blackened forest. A decade earlier, Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) first approaching this island to instigate revolt, stood on a ship’s deck as the captain explained that Queimada translates from the Portuguese as “burnt,” commemorating how the first Europeans there rid this island of its resistant indigenous people before replacing them with slave labor, half of whom died on the voyage from Africa.
Sometimes, Walker observes now, as much to himself as the soldier beside him, you have to destroy a village to save it.
Even with Brando in the lead – a performance he called his best, in a project he chose over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – Burn! was just a short blip on a few US screens when United Artists quietly released an “American version” in 1970, excised of twenty minutes from Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s own final cut. A 1991 VHS of that version still surfaces in a few rental shops.
Then, after the US invasion of Iraq, Pontecorvo’s monumental, better-known film about a pivotal moment in the end of French rule in North Africa, The Battle of Algiers (1966), began screening at US festivals, and Criterion’s three-disc DVD set followed in 2005. Bedfellows as strange as the IRA and the Pentagon have used The Battle of Algiers for training in guerilla warfare. That film’s resurgence surely pulled Burn! along with it, boosted further by a reappraisal of Brando’s work after his 2004 death and then Pontecorvo’s death in 2006.
Pontecorvo filmed The Battle of Algiers with a cinema vérité look at the scene of historical action less than five years after Algeria’s independence – real-life rebel leader Saadi Yacef sought Pontecorvo to propose making such a film and largely plays himself in the movie – while Burn! instead recapitulates the process of colonialism costumed as an adventure yarn.
Brando does affect long blond curls and a series of blue and lavender silk neck scarves, but there’s little swash-buckling. Instead, we join Walker with his own late arrival on the island. He has come seeking to aid a rebel leader named Santiago, whom he sees executed gruesomely, first by garrote and then beheading, in the courtyard below his hotel room - the first of several executions foretold by gallows on the beach in the opening montage. Walker follows Santiago’s widow and headless body to a remote mountain village. (One the film’s most stunning shots encompasses a close-up of this resolutely silent woman and her small children hauling the cart that bears Santiago’s body beneath a bloody shroud, with the fore-shortened Portuguese fort rising massively behind them next to the ocean and beyond, on the horizon, the tiny silhouette of Walker on horseback.) But Santiago’s fighters have melted back into everyday life.
So Walker improvises: having lost his rebel, he sets out to identify a promising replacement and create a new one. This would be Jose Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, in his only film role), the porter who first carried Walker’s bags when he arrived.
Walker tricks Dolores into revolutionary action and consciousness by degrees, turning a sham bank robbery into a real village defense. Surprising himself (but surely not Walker), Dolores even blurts out a sort of stump speech rallying the villagers to be “real men.” Later Walker explains to Dolores what he has done. (This neatly illustrates a favorite Western assumption that enslaved peoples would not think of freedom on their own). Walker persuades assassination, installs Queimada’s first puppet president in the person of Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori), and brokers English take-over of the sugar plantations.
A decade later, the people starve. Dolores has again taken up arms. Teddy Sanchez, actually swayed by some genuine liberal ideal, balks at English instructions and their distasteful consequences. Located mid-brawl in a London pub, Walker returns to Queimada and addresses all these parties with dispassionate, lethal dispatch. His next assignment will be Indochina.
Though Brando rated this his best performance, Pontecorvo found the actor difficult. They quarreled over noisy sets (Brando wore ear plugs) and close-ups (Brando didn’t want them), but mostly over the character of Walker. Their perseverance produced a masterful, many-layered performance.
In Brando’s mouth Walker’s dialogue is convincing as real human speech rather than political theory. Walker the operative reduces most things to “a simple calculation." In explaining his plan to burn the island’s forests and mountain villages a second time, he notes that a guerilla has “20, 30, maybe 50 times as much” commitment as a regular solider. Earlier, recruiting Teddy Sanchez and the other plantation owners to establish their republic and abolish slavery as their first act, he compares the economic advantage of hiring whores over marrying wives to the long-term benefit of paying wages over keeping slaves. Walker’s intriguing recognition of common ground between the lot of women and slaves, of course, is a mirror image of the alliances stirring at the same time to the north in the US abolitionist movement.
And Walker’s emotional attachment to Jose Dolores – Brando’s contribution – is equally powerful as Walker’s instrumental view of policy. This bond lights up their triumphant horse-back meeting on the beach amidst Dolores’ ragtag army, later prompts Walker’s gesture to let the defeated rebel ride rather than stumble behind on foot and deepens such various moments as when Walker contemplates shooting Dolores or begs him to flee rather than accept hanging.
Film critic Amy Taubin likens Walker’s methods to seduction, suggesting that Brando plays him as a closeted gay man, echoing his own role two years before in Reflections in a Golden Eye. Their eyes do lock across a crowded marketplace as Walker cruises likely prospects. Whether we accept Taubin’s reading literally or take the sexual undercurrent as something merely suggestive, it contributes to fleshing out the film’s politics and extends other sexual images already there. In this light, for example, when Dolores puts on the vanquished Portuguese general’s fancy jacket, it becomes a kind of political drag as much as a more obvious reference to Franz Fanon’s notion of the oppressed copying their oppressors.
Not a bad film for this Primary season, as we ponder what “change” really means. Come back next week for The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo’s visual sweep and Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/10/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1969/2004
Director: Gillo Pontecorvo
Cast: Marlon Brando, Evaristo Márquez, Renato Salvatori
If we didn’t already compare Iraq to Vietnam, this 1969 movie would conjure the parallels for us with its proxy story of 19th century colonialism. It’s 1855 on the island of Queimada, a fictional former Portuguese colony in the Caribbean. A British “military advisor” to the embattled young republic, sent by the Royal Sugar Company to quell a six-year insurgency by former slaves, coolly surveys the smoking ruins of a village and its surrounding blackened forest. A decade earlier, Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) first approaching this island to instigate revolt, stood on a ship’s deck as the captain explained that Queimada translates from the Portuguese as “burnt,” commemorating how the first Europeans there rid this island of its resistant indigenous people before replacing them with slave labor, half of whom died on the voyage from Africa.
Sometimes, Walker observes now, as much to himself as the soldier beside him, you have to destroy a village to save it.
Even with Brando in the lead – a performance he called his best, in a project he chose over Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – Burn! was just a short blip on a few US screens when United Artists quietly released an “American version” in 1970, excised of twenty minutes from Italian filmmaker Gillo Pontecorvo’s own final cut. A 1991 VHS of that version still surfaces in a few rental shops.
Then, after the US invasion of Iraq, Pontecorvo’s monumental, better-known film about a pivotal moment in the end of French rule in North Africa, The Battle of Algiers (1966), began screening at US festivals, and Criterion’s three-disc DVD set followed in 2005. Bedfellows as strange as the IRA and the Pentagon have used The Battle of Algiers for training in guerilla warfare. That film’s resurgence surely pulled Burn! along with it, boosted further by a reappraisal of Brando’s work after his 2004 death and then Pontecorvo’s death in 2006.
Pontecorvo filmed The Battle of Algiers with a cinema vérité look at the scene of historical action less than five years after Algeria’s independence – real-life rebel leader Saadi Yacef sought Pontecorvo to propose making such a film and largely plays himself in the movie – while Burn! instead recapitulates the process of colonialism costumed as an adventure yarn.
Brando does affect long blond curls and a series of blue and lavender silk neck scarves, but there’s little swash-buckling. Instead, we join Walker with his own late arrival on the island. He has come seeking to aid a rebel leader named Santiago, whom he sees executed gruesomely, first by garrote and then beheading, in the courtyard below his hotel room - the first of several executions foretold by gallows on the beach in the opening montage. Walker follows Santiago’s widow and headless body to a remote mountain village. (One the film’s most stunning shots encompasses a close-up of this resolutely silent woman and her small children hauling the cart that bears Santiago’s body beneath a bloody shroud, with the fore-shortened Portuguese fort rising massively behind them next to the ocean and beyond, on the horizon, the tiny silhouette of Walker on horseback.) But Santiago’s fighters have melted back into everyday life.
So Walker improvises: having lost his rebel, he sets out to identify a promising replacement and create a new one. This would be Jose Dolores (Evaristo Márquez, in his only film role), the porter who first carried Walker’s bags when he arrived.
Walker tricks Dolores into revolutionary action and consciousness by degrees, turning a sham bank robbery into a real village defense. Surprising himself (but surely not Walker), Dolores even blurts out a sort of stump speech rallying the villagers to be “real men.” Later Walker explains to Dolores what he has done. (This neatly illustrates a favorite Western assumption that enslaved peoples would not think of freedom on their own). Walker persuades assassination, installs Queimada’s first puppet president in the person of Teddy Sanchez (Renato Salvatori), and brokers English take-over of the sugar plantations.
A decade later, the people starve. Dolores has again taken up arms. Teddy Sanchez, actually swayed by some genuine liberal ideal, balks at English instructions and their distasteful consequences. Located mid-brawl in a London pub, Walker returns to Queimada and addresses all these parties with dispassionate, lethal dispatch. His next assignment will be Indochina.
Though Brando rated this his best performance, Pontecorvo found the actor difficult. They quarreled over noisy sets (Brando wore ear plugs) and close-ups (Brando didn’t want them), but mostly over the character of Walker. Their perseverance produced a masterful, many-layered performance.
In Brando’s mouth Walker’s dialogue is convincing as real human speech rather than political theory. Walker the operative reduces most things to “a simple calculation." In explaining his plan to burn the island’s forests and mountain villages a second time, he notes that a guerilla has “20, 30, maybe 50 times as much” commitment as a regular solider. Earlier, recruiting Teddy Sanchez and the other plantation owners to establish their republic and abolish slavery as their first act, he compares the economic advantage of hiring whores over marrying wives to the long-term benefit of paying wages over keeping slaves. Walker’s intriguing recognition of common ground between the lot of women and slaves, of course, is a mirror image of the alliances stirring at the same time to the north in the US abolitionist movement.
And Walker’s emotional attachment to Jose Dolores – Brando’s contribution – is equally powerful as Walker’s instrumental view of policy. This bond lights up their triumphant horse-back meeting on the beach amidst Dolores’ ragtag army, later prompts Walker’s gesture to let the defeated rebel ride rather than stumble behind on foot and deepens such various moments as when Walker contemplates shooting Dolores or begs him to flee rather than accept hanging.
Film critic Amy Taubin likens Walker’s methods to seduction, suggesting that Brando plays him as a closeted gay man, echoing his own role two years before in Reflections in a Golden Eye. Their eyes do lock across a crowded marketplace as Walker cruises likely prospects. Whether we accept Taubin’s reading literally or take the sexual undercurrent as something merely suggestive, it contributes to fleshing out the film’s politics and extends other sexual images already there. In this light, for example, when Dolores puts on the vanquished Portuguese general’s fancy jacket, it becomes a kind of political drag as much as a more obvious reference to Franz Fanon’s notion of the oppressed copying their oppressors.
Not a bad film for this Primary season, as we ponder what “change” really means. Come back next week for The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo’s visual sweep and Ennio Morricone’s soundtracks.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/10/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Friday, January 04, 2008
Film Review #143: Interview
2007
Director: Steve Buscemi
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Sienna Miller
Curiously, several reviews of Steve Buscemi’s latest directing project, in which he also acts the male lead as corrosively angry journalist Pierre Peders, inform readers that Peders and TV star named Katya (Sienna Miller) – main characters in the ill-fated interview at hand – once they are soaked in alcohol and dusted in cocaine, eventually have sex. What’s curious – unless you count one strenuous but fast aborted embrace – is that they don’t. Aside from alerting us that some reviewers don’t thoroughly watch the films they pass judgment on, such reports signal something more. That is the degree of dramatic sexual tension achieved in a full-length feature almost entirely comprising one marathon conversation that occurs mostly within one large Manhattan loft.
Here the plot turns on revelations, real and supposed, rather than action in the usual cinematic sense. An older journalist in serious withdrawal from politics who seriously doesn’t like women, Pierre cools his heels while a crisis unfolds in Washington. Instead his editor assigns him what he considers a fluff piece on a popular TV star. She is late. He quickly insults her – he’s watched none of her work – and she walks out. A mishap on the street that bloodies his head gains Pierre entrance to her near-by loft, where they engage in some hours of cat-and-mouse, he seeking dirt to print and she, more serious an actor than he knows, seeking insurance.
Interview is actor Buscemi’s ninth directing effort since Tree’s Lounge (1996); his most recent feature was 2005’s Lonesome Jim. Interview reprises late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s 2003 film of the same title starring Dutch TV celebrity Katja Schuurman, filmed over five nights in Schuurman’s own loft. Buscemi’s re-make is the first of “Triple Theo,” a project that van Gogh envisioned before he died in 2004 at age 47 to re-make three of his films about difficulties between men and women, set in New York City and directed by invited US actor-directors.
Offered his pick first, Buscemi chose Interview – for its celebrity and media focus, and for its exploration of “who we seek connection with and how quickly both Pierre and Katya betray that connection.” He asked for Sienna Miller (Factory Girl, the new Alfie, Layer Cake), the UK-raised actor whose mother Jo ran Lee Strasberg’s London Actors’ Studio. Like Katya, Miller would be underestimated as mere eye candy. (Stanley Tucci directs and, with Patricia Clarkson, stars in the re-make of van Gogh’s Blind Date, which premieres this month at Sundance. John Turturro will direct and act in the third.)
Van Gogh’s long-time producer Gijs van de Westelaken carried Triple Theo forward. The project exemplifies a European-style collaboration over several films, with Buscemi employing many of the original Dutch crew. As previously, cinematographer Thomas Kist employed three digital cameras shooting simultaneously, a method allowing very long takes that both Buscemi and Miller say approximate the experience of stage acting. There are visual carry-overs too. Schuurman appears in the last scene, exiting a limo, and a framed snapshot of her with van Gogh sits among what we assume are family photos in Katya’s loft.
Van Gogh’s work is not yet well-known here. Buscemi’s Interview opened state-side in July for a non-spectacular three-month art house run – with DVD release three weeks ago – but it’s going to nearly 30 other countries so far, keenly anticipated both for its lineage and as a parable beyond obvious portrayal of two nasty people with secrets.
One source of that interest is van Gogh’s notoriety. An extremist shot and stabbed him to death in Amsterdam two months after his 10-minute English-language exposé about Islamic violence toward women aired on Dutch TV. Submission, which superimposed Koranic verses about misbehaving women on images of their bodies, emerged from collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament whose memoir Infidel uncovers her own earlier life as a Muslim woman. Van Gogh’s work was provocative and political; some compared his documentary work to Michael Moore’s.
Buscemi, known more for personal, quirky films than message-themed “serious” projects, here successfully makes the transition to that kind of larger parable that van Gogh himself worked toward. Curiously, Buscemi’s Interview has a ready companion in Brian DePalma’s recent Iraq war film Redacted. Both films explore the kinds and degrees of extreme violence toward women that abide within some very mainstream men, including the accountability of the witness who does nothing and leaves the scene. Both films address how media refract, distort and depersonalize what we see. Both use sound and images from laptops, camcorders, cell phones and TV – Interview sometimes has several versions running at once on-screen. And Interview goes further, beyond the easy enough illusion that the media mechanistically does all this on its own. Buscemi’s Interview exposes, in the character of the hard-bitten newsroom veteran Pierre Peders, how part of journalistic culture even promotes and drives a specifically, aggressively macho worldview – ironically, in the heart of a profession dedicated to seeking, a worldview that springs precisely from hostility and fear of curiosity.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/3/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t have a theatrical opening in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Steve Buscemi’s re-make of Theo van Gogh’s Interview was released on DVD 12/11/07; the original is available online with English subtitles in non-USA format for those who have zone-free DVD players.
2007
Director: Steve Buscemi
Cast: Steve Buscemi, Sienna Miller
Curiously, several reviews of Steve Buscemi’s latest directing project, in which he also acts the male lead as corrosively angry journalist Pierre Peders, inform readers that Peders and TV star named Katya (Sienna Miller) – main characters in the ill-fated interview at hand – once they are soaked in alcohol and dusted in cocaine, eventually have sex. What’s curious – unless you count one strenuous but fast aborted embrace – is that they don’t. Aside from alerting us that some reviewers don’t thoroughly watch the films they pass judgment on, such reports signal something more. That is the degree of dramatic sexual tension achieved in a full-length feature almost entirely comprising one marathon conversation that occurs mostly within one large Manhattan loft.
Here the plot turns on revelations, real and supposed, rather than action in the usual cinematic sense. An older journalist in serious withdrawal from politics who seriously doesn’t like women, Pierre cools his heels while a crisis unfolds in Washington. Instead his editor assigns him what he considers a fluff piece on a popular TV star. She is late. He quickly insults her – he’s watched none of her work – and she walks out. A mishap on the street that bloodies his head gains Pierre entrance to her near-by loft, where they engage in some hours of cat-and-mouse, he seeking dirt to print and she, more serious an actor than he knows, seeking insurance.
Interview is actor Buscemi’s ninth directing effort since Tree’s Lounge (1996); his most recent feature was 2005’s Lonesome Jim. Interview reprises late Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh’s 2003 film of the same title starring Dutch TV celebrity Katja Schuurman, filmed over five nights in Schuurman’s own loft. Buscemi’s re-make is the first of “Triple Theo,” a project that van Gogh envisioned before he died in 2004 at age 47 to re-make three of his films about difficulties between men and women, set in New York City and directed by invited US actor-directors.
Offered his pick first, Buscemi chose Interview – for its celebrity and media focus, and for its exploration of “who we seek connection with and how quickly both Pierre and Katya betray that connection.” He asked for Sienna Miller (Factory Girl, the new Alfie, Layer Cake), the UK-raised actor whose mother Jo ran Lee Strasberg’s London Actors’ Studio. Like Katya, Miller would be underestimated as mere eye candy. (Stanley Tucci directs and, with Patricia Clarkson, stars in the re-make of van Gogh’s Blind Date, which premieres this month at Sundance. John Turturro will direct and act in the third.)
Van Gogh’s long-time producer Gijs van de Westelaken carried Triple Theo forward. The project exemplifies a European-style collaboration over several films, with Buscemi employing many of the original Dutch crew. As previously, cinematographer Thomas Kist employed three digital cameras shooting simultaneously, a method allowing very long takes that both Buscemi and Miller say approximate the experience of stage acting. There are visual carry-overs too. Schuurman appears in the last scene, exiting a limo, and a framed snapshot of her with van Gogh sits among what we assume are family photos in Katya’s loft.
Van Gogh’s work is not yet well-known here. Buscemi’s Interview opened state-side in July for a non-spectacular three-month art house run – with DVD release three weeks ago – but it’s going to nearly 30 other countries so far, keenly anticipated both for its lineage and as a parable beyond obvious portrayal of two nasty people with secrets.
One source of that interest is van Gogh’s notoriety. An extremist shot and stabbed him to death in Amsterdam two months after his 10-minute English-language exposé about Islamic violence toward women aired on Dutch TV. Submission, which superimposed Koranic verses about misbehaving women on images of their bodies, emerged from collaboration with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Somali-born member of the Dutch parliament whose memoir Infidel uncovers her own earlier life as a Muslim woman. Van Gogh’s work was provocative and political; some compared his documentary work to Michael Moore’s.
Buscemi, known more for personal, quirky films than message-themed “serious” projects, here successfully makes the transition to that kind of larger parable that van Gogh himself worked toward. Curiously, Buscemi’s Interview has a ready companion in Brian DePalma’s recent Iraq war film Redacted. Both films explore the kinds and degrees of extreme violence toward women that abide within some very mainstream men, including the accountability of the witness who does nothing and leaves the scene. Both films address how media refract, distort and depersonalize what we see. Both use sound and images from laptops, camcorders, cell phones and TV – Interview sometimes has several versions running at once on-screen. And Interview goes further, beyond the easy enough illusion that the media mechanistically does all this on its own. Buscemi’s Interview exposes, in the character of the hard-bitten newsroom veteran Pierre Peders, how part of journalistic culture even promotes and drives a specifically, aggressively macho worldview – ironically, in the heart of a profession dedicated to seeking, a worldview that springs precisely from hostility and fear of curiosity.
*******
This review appeared in the 1/3/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t have a theatrical opening in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Steve Buscemi’s re-make of Theo van Gogh’s Interview was released on DVD 12/11/07; the original is available online with English subtitles in non-USA format for those who have zone-free DVD players.
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Film Review #142: Two Lane Blacktop
1971/Criterion DVD 2007
Director Monte Hellman
Cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, Laura Bird
There’s something perfect about musicians playing the two leads in this most enduring and mystique-laden of road movies, just re-released again two weeks before Christmas by Criterion on a snazzy two-disc set. It was also the only screen performance by either man. Director Monte Hellman first spotted his choice for the character called just “the driver” on a Los Angeles billboard advertising James Taylor’s 1968 debut album, and Taylor kept his flowing locks for the part. These days, you can get the singer’s newest CD compilation of live tracks with your latté at Starbucks. Beach Boys drummer-composer Dennis Wilson played “the mechanic,” also nameless. The anniversary of Wilson’s drowning in 1983, shortly after his 39th birthday, is actually Friday.
As for the rest of the main cast, Hellman regular Warren Oates died a year before Wilson. Young and very slender here, he plays the garrulous, ever self-reinventing “GTO,” nick-named for the gold car he drives in the film. And cast as “the girl,” a hitch-hiker who works her way through all three men during the cross-country contest between the Pontiac and the customized matte gray ’55 Chevy, Laura Bird made just two more films after this one, dying by suicide at age 25 in 1979. Harry Dean Stanton, who got his start with Hellman and here has a memorable cameo as a gay hitch-hiker who weeps when GTO rejects him, is now in his 80s. Hellman remains as wiry and frizzy-haired as ever, zestfully teaching film directing at the California Institute of the Arts. He calls Two Lane Blacktop, filmed over seven weeks in the early fall of 1970 for under one million dollars, a “time capsule” – for its youthful glimpse of this cast, its story filmed along the fabled and now largely disappeared old Route 66, and its dark watershed post-60s mood.
Two Lane Blacktop starts in Los Angeles at one of the LA Street Racers’ rowdy, well-attended and very illegal midnight drag matches. Police sirens sour what starts off looking like a good evening for the driver and the mechanic, two lanky guys in jeans and tee-shirts without much attention span for anything but fast cars who finance a rambling lifestyle by racing their souped-up Chevy. Whether on local dirt tracks, at street drag club events or in ad hoc contests struck up in gas stations along the way, their adversaries routinely under-estimate both the car and the young men. Without much specific intention they head east – a reversal of the mythic American way west that underscores the moment’s alienation.
One morning during breakfast, they watch a blond teenager through a diner window. Just feet away in the parking lot, she hauls her duffel from an old van and dumps it into their back seat for no better reason than it’s the closest car available. Before long, in a deceptively simple and languid maneuver that Hellman says is the real start of the film, these three set the hook for GTO in a desert gas station. He’s been eying that Chevy in the passing lane himself and so proposes a race to Washington, DC. They’ll race “for pinks” – what’s at stake is the losing car’s pink registration card.
Along the way, the three men vie irritably for the girl’s wandering attentions, race other cars, narrowly avoid crashes and cops, meet odd folk in backwaters, stop for repairs and occasionally day-dream about a vague future after Washington that may consist of checking out Florida’s beaches or maybe “run over to Arizona and build a house.” As laconic as the driver and the mechanic both are – Hellman says their lines are more soundtrack than dialogue, not meant to move the story any more than the songs on their car’s radio – GTO is talkative. With each new stranger, GTO effortlessly spins himself a colorful new history and purpose. Soon we’re anticipating this as each new encounter gets under way. Similarly, by the time this quartet lands in the movie’s final diner, we know who that girl’s going with next simply because there’s a motorcycle parked out front.
Warren Oates, though not the lead here, made four films for Hellman – besides Two Lane Blacktop, two Westerns, The Shooting (1966) and China 9, Liberty 37 (1978), and the contemporary Southern Gothic-tinged Cockfighter (1974). Arguably all are road movies, a genre too often dismissed as low budget primitive. An excellent companion to Hellman’s work is Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman’s 2005 documentary, Wanderlust – an absorbing 90 minutes that’s only a Netflix click away – with filmmakers like Callie Kouri (screenwriter, Thelma and Louise), who sees the road movie emerge quite organically from the Western, and Walter Salles (director, The Motorcycle Diaries) notices that young countries with unsettled identities make these movies (“You never see a Swiss road movie.”), and Alison Anders (director, Gas Food Lodging and a commentary track speaker for Two Lane Blacktop) remarks that the only place irony-phobic Americans willingly tolerate shades of gray is the road.
Proving he’s still got chops, Hellman directed the bonus features. A film teacher, he speaks especially well about making movies. Early on he piles five Cal Arts grad students into his van to visit the film’s shooting locations. He explains how shooting in Technoscope provided the best depth of field for a story where often he’s got two or three characters inside a car or in three different planes and wants them all in focus (you’ll watch for this next time you’re at the movies, promise). Or elsewhere, how filming in a pelting rainstorm unexpectedly infused his favorite gas station scene with enormous energy because throughout this scene all the cast members ran from spot to spot to avoid getting wet. He and James Taylor, facing off in simple wooden chairs, ask one another the questions each has harbored for 37 years. When Taylor – now short-haired and balding, he still hadn’t seen Two Lane Blacktop during this conversation – diffidently apologizes for his youthful bursts of temper, Hellman laughs it off with the kind of generosity that you sense informs his classrooms now as it once must have his movie sets. And the producers discuss how the 60s unraveled – that, as one puts it, “America was having a nervous breakdown, and lots of the people wandering around never stopped.” For once, “blast from the past” lives up to its name.
*******
This review appeared in the 12/27/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
1971/Criterion DVD 2007
Director Monte Hellman
Cast: James Taylor, Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, Laura Bird
There’s something perfect about musicians playing the two leads in this most enduring and mystique-laden of road movies, just re-released again two weeks before Christmas by Criterion on a snazzy two-disc set. It was also the only screen performance by either man. Director Monte Hellman first spotted his choice for the character called just “the driver” on a Los Angeles billboard advertising James Taylor’s 1968 debut album, and Taylor kept his flowing locks for the part. These days, you can get the singer’s newest CD compilation of live tracks with your latté at Starbucks. Beach Boys drummer-composer Dennis Wilson played “the mechanic,” also nameless. The anniversary of Wilson’s drowning in 1983, shortly after his 39th birthday, is actually Friday.
As for the rest of the main cast, Hellman regular Warren Oates died a year before Wilson. Young and very slender here, he plays the garrulous, ever self-reinventing “GTO,” nick-named for the gold car he drives in the film. And cast as “the girl,” a hitch-hiker who works her way through all three men during the cross-country contest between the Pontiac and the customized matte gray ’55 Chevy, Laura Bird made just two more films after this one, dying by suicide at age 25 in 1979. Harry Dean Stanton, who got his start with Hellman and here has a memorable cameo as a gay hitch-hiker who weeps when GTO rejects him, is now in his 80s. Hellman remains as wiry and frizzy-haired as ever, zestfully teaching film directing at the California Institute of the Arts. He calls Two Lane Blacktop, filmed over seven weeks in the early fall of 1970 for under one million dollars, a “time capsule” – for its youthful glimpse of this cast, its story filmed along the fabled and now largely disappeared old Route 66, and its dark watershed post-60s mood.
Two Lane Blacktop starts in Los Angeles at one of the LA Street Racers’ rowdy, well-attended and very illegal midnight drag matches. Police sirens sour what starts off looking like a good evening for the driver and the mechanic, two lanky guys in jeans and tee-shirts without much attention span for anything but fast cars who finance a rambling lifestyle by racing their souped-up Chevy. Whether on local dirt tracks, at street drag club events or in ad hoc contests struck up in gas stations along the way, their adversaries routinely under-estimate both the car and the young men. Without much specific intention they head east – a reversal of the mythic American way west that underscores the moment’s alienation.
One morning during breakfast, they watch a blond teenager through a diner window. Just feet away in the parking lot, she hauls her duffel from an old van and dumps it into their back seat for no better reason than it’s the closest car available. Before long, in a deceptively simple and languid maneuver that Hellman says is the real start of the film, these three set the hook for GTO in a desert gas station. He’s been eying that Chevy in the passing lane himself and so proposes a race to Washington, DC. They’ll race “for pinks” – what’s at stake is the losing car’s pink registration card.
Along the way, the three men vie irritably for the girl’s wandering attentions, race other cars, narrowly avoid crashes and cops, meet odd folk in backwaters, stop for repairs and occasionally day-dream about a vague future after Washington that may consist of checking out Florida’s beaches or maybe “run over to Arizona and build a house.” As laconic as the driver and the mechanic both are – Hellman says their lines are more soundtrack than dialogue, not meant to move the story any more than the songs on their car’s radio – GTO is talkative. With each new stranger, GTO effortlessly spins himself a colorful new history and purpose. Soon we’re anticipating this as each new encounter gets under way. Similarly, by the time this quartet lands in the movie’s final diner, we know who that girl’s going with next simply because there’s a motorcycle parked out front.
Warren Oates, though not the lead here, made four films for Hellman – besides Two Lane Blacktop, two Westerns, The Shooting (1966) and China 9, Liberty 37 (1978), and the contemporary Southern Gothic-tinged Cockfighter (1974). Arguably all are road movies, a genre too often dismissed as low budget primitive. An excellent companion to Hellman’s work is Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman’s 2005 documentary, Wanderlust – an absorbing 90 minutes that’s only a Netflix click away – with filmmakers like Callie Kouri (screenwriter, Thelma and Louise), who sees the road movie emerge quite organically from the Western, and Walter Salles (director, The Motorcycle Diaries) notices that young countries with unsettled identities make these movies (“You never see a Swiss road movie.”), and Alison Anders (director, Gas Food Lodging and a commentary track speaker for Two Lane Blacktop) remarks that the only place irony-phobic Americans willingly tolerate shades of gray is the road.
Proving he’s still got chops, Hellman directed the bonus features. A film teacher, he speaks especially well about making movies. Early on he piles five Cal Arts grad students into his van to visit the film’s shooting locations. He explains how shooting in Technoscope provided the best depth of field for a story where often he’s got two or three characters inside a car or in three different planes and wants them all in focus (you’ll watch for this next time you’re at the movies, promise). Or elsewhere, how filming in a pelting rainstorm unexpectedly infused his favorite gas station scene with enormous energy because throughout this scene all the cast members ran from spot to spot to avoid getting wet. He and James Taylor, facing off in simple wooden chairs, ask one another the questions each has harbored for 37 years. When Taylor – now short-haired and balding, he still hadn’t seen Two Lane Blacktop during this conversation – diffidently apologizes for his youthful bursts of temper, Hellman laughs it off with the kind of generosity that you sense informs his classrooms now as it once must have his movie sets. And the producers discuss how the 60s unraveled – that, as one puts it, “America was having a nervous breakdown, and lots of the people wandering around never stopped.” For once, “blast from the past” lives up to its name.
*******
This review appeared in the 12/27/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Film Review #141: Into Great Silence
2005/DVD 2007
Director: Philip Gröning
Cast: The monks of the Grand Chartreuse monastery
For reasons unrelated to this story, my next youngest sister and I went to different high schools – she to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a girls’ boarding school in Albany run by nuns. She had the same dorm room the entire time, over-looking the hillside cemetery behind the school. Among her first letters home, one reported the convent’s fall custom of digging three new graves in case any of the nuns died during the winter when the ground was frozen. Even my grandmother, with her nearly infinite trust in the judgment of nuns, agreed when my mother said, “Making a teen-ager stare out her bedroom window at open graves all winter is morbid.”
So, early in German director Philip Gröning’s 2005 documentary of the Grand Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble in the French Alps – which begins in deep winter – when a stooped, elderly monk goes into a fenced yard and starts shoveling snow out of the first of three oblong pits, my mind leaped confidently back to Albany.
This film’s distance from our daily experience at first tempts you to seek such ways in. The US trailer emphasizes this removal and a sort of ancientness. It’s full of long shots – a zooming sky time-lapsed over the stone monastery dwarfed far below, the cloister’s long arched hallways and their massive blocks dwarfing the cowled figures within them – and offers the same spare text, white on black, as that which occurs at the very end of this very long film. In 1984 Gröning asked permission to film. The Carthusians said it was too soon. Sixteen years later they called back. After two years’ prep, the shoot took three visits over another year, and post-production two more.
Running 167 minutes, Into Great Silence has no voice-over commentary, no soundtrack other than ambient sound, no artificial lighting – besides these conditions, the monks allowed no crew except Gröning – and no explanatory captions along the way to make it easier. You simply need to keep watching to discover that old monk is getting his seedling beds ready for spring’s sunlit thaw. You learn this by adjusting yourself to the film’s rhythms. In due course he’s sorting seed packets whose orange carrots flash gregariously in the barn’s gloom – getting ready for life, not impending death. Released on a two-disc DVD set in late October with loads of extras, Into Great Silence has still been absorbing enough by its bare-bones arcane self to stay in some US theater from March till early December.
St. Bernard of Cologne’s founded the Carthusian order in 1084. Destroyed by avalanche once, by fire five times, rebuilt last in 1688, this monastery’s now home to an order of 19 houses with 370 monks in Europe, the US, Latin America and Korea (in the film one monk flies to Seoul). Grand Chartreuse can hold 30 monks; during filming four newcomers arrived. In a stroke of synchronicity, the nuns in the order’s five convents – once considered “too communal by nature” for private cells – achieved their long-sought goal of equal solitude in 1970, just as feminism blossomed elsewhere.
The film says nothing of such demographics, nor one word about Chartreuse, the herbal liquor whose manufacture supports the order. No summary tells you the routine includes rising at midnight for the first of the day’s three Masses, or weekly hours-long tramps through the countryside during which the monks converse. Instead of such explanations, ecstatic verses periodically appear where other films carry subtitles and we see a succession of images about this life ranging from austere to homely to lush.
Framed at beginning and end by the same quiet shot of a single young monk kneeling in his cell, the film incorporates roughly the first year of a young African novice named Benjamin from his arrival, and appears to conclude – Gröning last shot in December 2003 – with Christmas Eve’s midnight candle-lit, incense-infused procession and Mass. These monks’ daily lives are very physical, these cooks, gardeners, tailors, wood-choppers, protectors of barn cats and throwers of snowballs. Yet, entirely at ease in a mostly silent life, their gaze into the camera – Gröning periodically inserts portrait-like studies – is initially unnerving, eventually a source of serenity. Benjamin’s “portrait,” appearing near the end of the film and presumably shot near the end of his first year, is remarkable for the subtle change that has occurred.
Of course, Into Great Silence is “Catholic” only by coincidence. Gröning says he first wanted to do a film with “a feel for time usually masked in film by language and story,” only later hitting on the subject of the most ascetic of Catholic orders as a way to explore that cinematically. From their earliest days, experimental film and video makers have wrestled with this issue of duration and capturing the present moment. And of course all spiritual practices aim for such states of calm alertness. The rapt, dilated attention generated in the old High Latin Mass or from Gregorian chants reappears in the presence of some art, both in its experience and in its making.
Gröning meant this film for the “large darkness” of the theater, but I watched it through Sunday’s storm, where it became an antidote to Saturday’s frenzies in Carousel and Wegman’s. Treat yourself.
*******
This review appears in the 12/20/issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
2005/DVD 2007
Director: Philip Gröning
Cast: The monks of the Grand Chartreuse monastery
For reasons unrelated to this story, my next youngest sister and I went to different high schools – she to the Academy of the Sacred Heart, a girls’ boarding school in Albany run by nuns. She had the same dorm room the entire time, over-looking the hillside cemetery behind the school. Among her first letters home, one reported the convent’s fall custom of digging three new graves in case any of the nuns died during the winter when the ground was frozen. Even my grandmother, with her nearly infinite trust in the judgment of nuns, agreed when my mother said, “Making a teen-ager stare out her bedroom window at open graves all winter is morbid.”
So, early in German director Philip Gröning’s 2005 documentary of the Grand Chartreuse monastery near Grenoble in the French Alps – which begins in deep winter – when a stooped, elderly monk goes into a fenced yard and starts shoveling snow out of the first of three oblong pits, my mind leaped confidently back to Albany.
This film’s distance from our daily experience at first tempts you to seek such ways in. The US trailer emphasizes this removal and a sort of ancientness. It’s full of long shots – a zooming sky time-lapsed over the stone monastery dwarfed far below, the cloister’s long arched hallways and their massive blocks dwarfing the cowled figures within them – and offers the same spare text, white on black, as that which occurs at the very end of this very long film. In 1984 Gröning asked permission to film. The Carthusians said it was too soon. Sixteen years later they called back. After two years’ prep, the shoot took three visits over another year, and post-production two more.
Running 167 minutes, Into Great Silence has no voice-over commentary, no soundtrack other than ambient sound, no artificial lighting – besides these conditions, the monks allowed no crew except Gröning – and no explanatory captions along the way to make it easier. You simply need to keep watching to discover that old monk is getting his seedling beds ready for spring’s sunlit thaw. You learn this by adjusting yourself to the film’s rhythms. In due course he’s sorting seed packets whose orange carrots flash gregariously in the barn’s gloom – getting ready for life, not impending death. Released on a two-disc DVD set in late October with loads of extras, Into Great Silence has still been absorbing enough by its bare-bones arcane self to stay in some US theater from March till early December.
St. Bernard of Cologne’s founded the Carthusian order in 1084. Destroyed by avalanche once, by fire five times, rebuilt last in 1688, this monastery’s now home to an order of 19 houses with 370 monks in Europe, the US, Latin America and Korea (in the film one monk flies to Seoul). Grand Chartreuse can hold 30 monks; during filming four newcomers arrived. In a stroke of synchronicity, the nuns in the order’s five convents – once considered “too communal by nature” for private cells – achieved their long-sought goal of equal solitude in 1970, just as feminism blossomed elsewhere.
The film says nothing of such demographics, nor one word about Chartreuse, the herbal liquor whose manufacture supports the order. No summary tells you the routine includes rising at midnight for the first of the day’s three Masses, or weekly hours-long tramps through the countryside during which the monks converse. Instead of such explanations, ecstatic verses periodically appear where other films carry subtitles and we see a succession of images about this life ranging from austere to homely to lush.
Framed at beginning and end by the same quiet shot of a single young monk kneeling in his cell, the film incorporates roughly the first year of a young African novice named Benjamin from his arrival, and appears to conclude – Gröning last shot in December 2003 – with Christmas Eve’s midnight candle-lit, incense-infused procession and Mass. These monks’ daily lives are very physical, these cooks, gardeners, tailors, wood-choppers, protectors of barn cats and throwers of snowballs. Yet, entirely at ease in a mostly silent life, their gaze into the camera – Gröning periodically inserts portrait-like studies – is initially unnerving, eventually a source of serenity. Benjamin’s “portrait,” appearing near the end of the film and presumably shot near the end of his first year, is remarkable for the subtle change that has occurred.
Of course, Into Great Silence is “Catholic” only by coincidence. Gröning says he first wanted to do a film with “a feel for time usually masked in film by language and story,” only later hitting on the subject of the most ascetic of Catholic orders as a way to explore that cinematically. From their earliest days, experimental film and video makers have wrestled with this issue of duration and capturing the present moment. And of course all spiritual practices aim for such states of calm alertness. The rapt, dilated attention generated in the old High Latin Mass or from Gregorian chants reappears in the presence of some art, both in its experience and in its making.
Gröning meant this film for the “large darkness” of the theater, but I watched it through Sunday’s storm, where it became an antidote to Saturday’s frenzies in Carousel and Wegman’s. Treat yourself.
*******
This review appears in the 12/20/issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.
Film Review #140: This is England
2006/2007 US DVD
Director: Shane Meadows
Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Rosamund Hanson
It’s one of those shabby, low-ceilinged country bars, out of the way down a dirt road with no traffic, that you’d reach after a drive through slow, monotonous rain blurring fields edged with scrub trees. In the muddy yard, men with shaved heads and black leather and tattoos on their faces mill around, then go respectfully silent when the guest candidate arrives. Inside, before posters for the National Front party, keeping his topcoat on against the damp and the dirt, he rails, “Our country has been stolen.” His wind-up draws cheers: “There is a forgotten word, a forbidden word – I want to revive the word Englishmen.”
In his audience, dragged way out here from his small town home along with some other new “troops” by the persuasive, unstable Combo (Stephen Graham), 11-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), still grieving the father he lost to war and thrilled that schoolyard bullies now avoid him, is so far a willing convert.
This year US movies have examined the volatile, double-edged hero worship that needy and impressionable young men have for violent criminals as one facet of the Westerns revival – think Casey Affleck’s Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward… and Ben Foster’s Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma. Indeed the template for that specific longing and frustration available in the genre’s revisionist incarnations may be part of its contemporary appeal, even fifteen years ago in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, with the self-styled Scholfield Kid running after Eastwood’s retired gunslinger. Although British director Shane Meadows has visited the romance of the Western to great satiric effect in his riff on Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002), here he goes straight to the more recent parallels of his own youth, letting back-country pub echo the frontier in more muted ways.
What goes around, comes around. This is England is set in 1983 in the English Midlands, home territory of the National Front, a far-right party founded in 1967 that opposed immigration, multicultural policies and membership in the UN and NATO. Ronald Reagan’s friend Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister. Though Thatcher’s own rise and her heartily conservative policies at first deflated support for the extremist National Front, by 1983 it’s making a come-back. It’s a little more than a year since the end of what Meadows calls “another pointless war,” England’s invasion of the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, made vivid by archival footage of horrific battle injuries book-ending the film. Unemployment stands at about 3 ½ million. There’s a racist-tinged resurgence of skinhead gangs (more militant in prisons, where Combo’s been) – ironic, since Jamaica’s ska and reggae music had heavily influenced early skinhead culture – plus increased hate crimes and noisy demonstrations across the land against newcomers from Commonwealth countries such as Pakistan.
This is England walks some razor edges. First, it is that rare film whose story is set just far enough away in time and place to take the defensive edge off watching it, long enough to let the parallels with our own day sink in. This 2006 film finally reached US theaters in August and released on DVD last month. Because it portrays scenes of extreme violence and racist invective, it had difficulty initially in England getting cleared so adolescents – arguably a major target audience – could see it. But it’s also that rare film which makes a clear distinction between accounting for behavior and approving it.
Meadows – now in his mid-30s and still shaving his head – says his main ambition at age 11 was going to prison. Instead, he makes movies set in the small towns of his native Midlands, often containing violence (which he says is more traumatic in village and rural settings because unexpected), usually reserving Hell’s hottest places for the bystander who does nothing, and aiming to portray skinhead culture in its complexity rather than as a straw man plot device.
Shaun’s story is fairly straightforward. A loner who’s developing quite a temper, he’s taken in by some older, mildly skinhead kids, led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), whose second in command is an easy-going young Jamaican named Milky (Andrew Shim, a fine natural actor cast in most Meadows films but seemingly nowhere else). There’s an assortment of younger teens, and an auxiliary girl gang led by Woody’s girl Lol (Vicky McClure, another Meadows veteran), a hair stylist who keeps everyone shorn. Sometimes over the line of merely boisterous – one day they gleefully trash abandoned apartments with an energy and ferocity that gives you pause – this crew gets what many gangs provide: companionship, belonging, plenty of affirmation and rough physical affection, a curb on their more destructive impulses toward one another.
A film very much about young men, This is England nonetheless supplies three decisively strong and fully drawn female characters. Shaun’s mother Cynthia (Jo Hartley), though judging the haircut “not good,” okays her son’s bond with them after a confrontation in the village cafe. Members also get initiation into grown-up ways. Shaun has his first girlfriend, an older, quite a bit taller girl with huge hair and black lipstick. A bit outlandish if you met them on the street, Shaun and Smell (Rosamund Hanson) enjoy a surprisingly delicate, hesitant courtship. Even with her lipstick smeared garishly after their first kissing session, Smell maintains great dignity and sweetness. The hairdresser Lol, having survived what was clearly a brutal rape by Combo several years back, bluntly sets him straight when he attempts new advances. The strength and clarity of Lol’s experience – “the worst night of my life” – illuminates how deluded is Combo's hopeful recollection of the “best night” of his life.
Trouble comes in this person of Combo, one of the more riveting, complex portraits of a needy, manipulative sociopath found anywhere on screen, and one of the best explorations of precisely how such a figure works his will by dividing others according to their own fears and hopes. His first wedge when he returns from prison is his verbal attack on Milky, after which he effectively splits the group by sneering as Woody for "letting me abuse” the Jamaican. Similarly disorienting to Shaun is Combo’s praise of the boy for swinging at him when he disparages Falklands War veterans.
Intriguingly, Meadows has Combo rehearse his “troops.” He has the boys prepare for their invasion on a convenience store – the middle-aged Pakistani owner has banned Shaun – as if it were a stage performance. They get their lines, they work on their stances and delivery, they discover how having a role manages their anxiety. Meadows writes and directs very tight, pivotal scenes that advance his story. He also intersperses them with evocative musical montages that provide depth of field. Besides collaging images from the era – the opening of This is England is particularly brilliant – his musical montages often contain slow-motion images of the characters themselves, composed in ways that remarkably resemble album covers of bands – one imagines this is also how these characters would like to be seen – again underscoring of the importance of performance to adolescents. This and his use of contemporary music and montage have been among Meadows’ most consistent strengths, here blended in his choices of The Clash’s “This is England,” Jamaican classics from Toots and the Maytals and the Upsetters, pop from Percy Sledge, The Specials, Strawberry Switchblade, and Clayhill’s new cover of The Smith’s “Please, Please, Please.”
And the next diatribe you hear on the campaign trail about being soft on illegal immigrants? Remember, what goes around, comes around.
*******
This review appeared in the 12/13/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Of Meadows’ previous feature films, Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) & Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) are both available on DVD via Netflix. A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) is available on-line in non-US DVD format if you have a zone-free player. TwentyFourSeven (1997) can be found in VHS online. His next project, in which he again works with a frequent collaborator, the actor Paddy Considine, involves a Gypsy story set in Eastern Europe.
2006/2007 US DVD
Director: Shane Meadows
Cast: Thomas Turgoose, Stephen Graham, Rosamund Hanson
It’s one of those shabby, low-ceilinged country bars, out of the way down a dirt road with no traffic, that you’d reach after a drive through slow, monotonous rain blurring fields edged with scrub trees. In the muddy yard, men with shaved heads and black leather and tattoos on their faces mill around, then go respectfully silent when the guest candidate arrives. Inside, before posters for the National Front party, keeping his topcoat on against the damp and the dirt, he rails, “Our country has been stolen.” His wind-up draws cheers: “There is a forgotten word, a forbidden word – I want to revive the word Englishmen.”
In his audience, dragged way out here from his small town home along with some other new “troops” by the persuasive, unstable Combo (Stephen Graham), 11-year-old Shaun (Thomas Turgoose), still grieving the father he lost to war and thrilled that schoolyard bullies now avoid him, is so far a willing convert.
This year US movies have examined the volatile, double-edged hero worship that needy and impressionable young men have for violent criminals as one facet of the Westerns revival – think Casey Affleck’s Robert Ford in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward… and Ben Foster’s Charlie Prince in 3:10 to Yuma. Indeed the template for that specific longing and frustration available in the genre’s revisionist incarnations may be part of its contemporary appeal, even fifteen years ago in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, with the self-styled Scholfield Kid running after Eastwood’s retired gunslinger. Although British director Shane Meadows has visited the romance of the Western to great satiric effect in his riff on Sergio Leone, Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002), here he goes straight to the more recent parallels of his own youth, letting back-country pub echo the frontier in more muted ways.
What goes around, comes around. This is England is set in 1983 in the English Midlands, home territory of the National Front, a far-right party founded in 1967 that opposed immigration, multicultural policies and membership in the UN and NATO. Ronald Reagan’s friend Margaret Thatcher is Prime Minister. Though Thatcher’s own rise and her heartily conservative policies at first deflated support for the extremist National Front, by 1983 it’s making a come-back. It’s a little more than a year since the end of what Meadows calls “another pointless war,” England’s invasion of the Falkland Islands off the coast of Argentina, made vivid by archival footage of horrific battle injuries book-ending the film. Unemployment stands at about 3 ½ million. There’s a racist-tinged resurgence of skinhead gangs (more militant in prisons, where Combo’s been) – ironic, since Jamaica’s ska and reggae music had heavily influenced early skinhead culture – plus increased hate crimes and noisy demonstrations across the land against newcomers from Commonwealth countries such as Pakistan.
This is England walks some razor edges. First, it is that rare film whose story is set just far enough away in time and place to take the defensive edge off watching it, long enough to let the parallels with our own day sink in. This 2006 film finally reached US theaters in August and released on DVD last month. Because it portrays scenes of extreme violence and racist invective, it had difficulty initially in England getting cleared so adolescents – arguably a major target audience – could see it. But it’s also that rare film which makes a clear distinction between accounting for behavior and approving it.
Meadows – now in his mid-30s and still shaving his head – says his main ambition at age 11 was going to prison. Instead, he makes movies set in the small towns of his native Midlands, often containing violence (which he says is more traumatic in village and rural settings because unexpected), usually reserving Hell’s hottest places for the bystander who does nothing, and aiming to portray skinhead culture in its complexity rather than as a straw man plot device.
Shaun’s story is fairly straightforward. A loner who’s developing quite a temper, he’s taken in by some older, mildly skinhead kids, led by Woody (Joe Gilgun), whose second in command is an easy-going young Jamaican named Milky (Andrew Shim, a fine natural actor cast in most Meadows films but seemingly nowhere else). There’s an assortment of younger teens, and an auxiliary girl gang led by Woody’s girl Lol (Vicky McClure, another Meadows veteran), a hair stylist who keeps everyone shorn. Sometimes over the line of merely boisterous – one day they gleefully trash abandoned apartments with an energy and ferocity that gives you pause – this crew gets what many gangs provide: companionship, belonging, plenty of affirmation and rough physical affection, a curb on their more destructive impulses toward one another.
A film very much about young men, This is England nonetheless supplies three decisively strong and fully drawn female characters. Shaun’s mother Cynthia (Jo Hartley), though judging the haircut “not good,” okays her son’s bond with them after a confrontation in the village cafe. Members also get initiation into grown-up ways. Shaun has his first girlfriend, an older, quite a bit taller girl with huge hair and black lipstick. A bit outlandish if you met them on the street, Shaun and Smell (Rosamund Hanson) enjoy a surprisingly delicate, hesitant courtship. Even with her lipstick smeared garishly after their first kissing session, Smell maintains great dignity and sweetness. The hairdresser Lol, having survived what was clearly a brutal rape by Combo several years back, bluntly sets him straight when he attempts new advances. The strength and clarity of Lol’s experience – “the worst night of my life” – illuminates how deluded is Combo's hopeful recollection of the “best night” of his life.
Trouble comes in this person of Combo, one of the more riveting, complex portraits of a needy, manipulative sociopath found anywhere on screen, and one of the best explorations of precisely how such a figure works his will by dividing others according to their own fears and hopes. His first wedge when he returns from prison is his verbal attack on Milky, after which he effectively splits the group by sneering as Woody for "letting me abuse” the Jamaican. Similarly disorienting to Shaun is Combo’s praise of the boy for swinging at him when he disparages Falklands War veterans.
Intriguingly, Meadows has Combo rehearse his “troops.” He has the boys prepare for their invasion on a convenience store – the middle-aged Pakistani owner has banned Shaun – as if it were a stage performance. They get their lines, they work on their stances and delivery, they discover how having a role manages their anxiety. Meadows writes and directs very tight, pivotal scenes that advance his story. He also intersperses them with evocative musical montages that provide depth of field. Besides collaging images from the era – the opening of This is England is particularly brilliant – his musical montages often contain slow-motion images of the characters themselves, composed in ways that remarkably resemble album covers of bands – one imagines this is also how these characters would like to be seen – again underscoring of the importance of performance to adolescents. This and his use of contemporary music and montage have been among Meadows’ most consistent strengths, here blended in his choices of The Clash’s “This is England,” Jamaican classics from Toots and the Maytals and the Upsetters, pop from Percy Sledge, The Specials, Strawberry Switchblade, and Clayhill’s new cover of The Smith’s “Please, Please, Please.”
And the next diatribe you hear on the campaign trail about being soft on illegal immigrants? Remember, what goes around, comes around.
*******
This review appeared in the 12/13/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth. Of Meadows’ previous feature films, Dead Man’s Shoes (2004) & Once Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002) are both available on DVD via Netflix. A Room for Romeo Brass (1999) is available on-line in non-US DVD format if you have a zone-free player. TwentyFourSeven (1997) can be found in VHS online. His next project, in which he again works with a frequent collaborator, the actor Paddy Considine, involves a Gypsy story set in Eastern Europe.
Saturday, December 08, 2007
New Maps of the New World
2007
Director: Roger Warren Beebe
See an interview with this experimental filmmaker, related to his Fall 2007 East Coast tour of 36 cities in 14 states & his new DVD collection of films made since 2001. Published 12/6/2007 in The Fanzine:
http://www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=film&id=197&a=articles
2007
Director: Roger Warren Beebe
See an interview with this experimental filmmaker, related to his Fall 2007 East Coast tour of 36 cities in 14 states & his new DVD collection of films made since 2001. Published 12/6/2007 in The Fanzine:
http://www.thefanzine.com/sections.php?s=film&id=197&a=articles
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Film Review #139: Blame it on Fidel
2006
Director: Julie Gavras
Cast: Nina Kervel-Bey, Julie Depardieu, Stefano Acorsi
It’s one of those furious, dramatic exits, more exhilarating because the one stalking out is all of ten years old. As befits a school-girl trained by French nuns to stand when the priest enters – elsewhere another pupil demonstrates hilarious mastery of the single raised eyebrow as comment on unseemly adult behavior – Anna (Nina Kervel-Bey) marches head down, her silence incendiary, dragging five-year-old brother François (Benjamin Feuillet) by one wrist, out the door and into the streets of Paris.
Bad enough her parents took away her garden, her normal food, her catechism classes, and her beloved Cuban nanny Filomena (Marie-Noelle Bordeaux), who lost everything to Castro and supplies the story’s title. Bad enough they move to a cramped, shabby apartment, host nightly meetings of bearded men preaching “group solidarity,” and her attorney father leaves for months on end to assist Chile’s new Socialist regime. The breaking point comes amidst tears and shouts as her parents fight, the one rupture this little girl will not abide.
For some time she and François sit quietly on a park bench, their feet dangling as tall grown-ups pass. Then they go home. Their young parents meet them at the door with anguished relief. She has gotten their attention and we believe it, even smiling a little at them – one outcome of filmmaker Julie Gavras and casting director Coralie Amedeo testing almost 500 girls to find their right Anna.
A French import that screened early this year at Sundance and then Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, played in US art-houses from August till November and just released on DVD, Blame it on Fidel is being marketed here as a comedy about generational friction and political excess. A sensible child fumes and rolls her eyes as her idealistic parents go over the edge in sudden enthusiasm for lefty causes. Papa Fernando (Stefano Acorsi) carries some guilt. He fled a wealthy Spanish background to France, even sat out 1968’s student protests, rather than join his sister Marga (Mar Sodupe) in resisting Franco’s fascists. Now Marga’s arrival – her husband has disappeared – sparks Fernando’s confused awakening. He then objects when wife Marie (Julie Depardieu) is more publically feminist than he likes, signing an abortion petition that embarrasses him and leads to that fight.
But Anna’s parents are never buffoons. Decent, affectionate and generous young people, they try to be good parents, role models and, perhaps belatedly, citizens in the best sense. And Gavras frames her film with the deaths of two presidents; each breaks the hearts of a different generation, and in that mirrored grief finds a common aspiration that lingers and raises Gavras’ first feature well above guffaws at the expense of novice activism. When Anna’s grandfather (Oliver Perrier), a Bordeaux vineyard owner, says that “France is orphaned” by the death of Charles DeGaulle, his grief recalls the French Resistance that helped defeat World War II’s Nazi occupation. DeGaulle died just six days after Chile elected Salvatore Allende in November 1970. Chile’s military overthrew this popular reformer on September 11, 1973. Gavras excerpts Allende’s riveting last address to his nation, along with news footage of the coup and Allende’s death, which Anna’s parents and their friends watch, huddled around the TV, as sorrowful as Anna’s grandfather had been two years earlier. By the time this occurs, Anna has moved from resentment to some appreciation and, notably, choses to change schools. (Ironically, soon after Gavras wrapped her film, former dictator Augustin Pinochet, who supplanted Allende, also died.)
Gavras based Blame it on Fidel on Domitilla Calamai’s novel of the same name, which she read after meeting Calamai in Italy. Daughter of Oscar-winning Greek political filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, Missing) and producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, she initially resisted feature filmmaking, first with law school, then working in production and documentaries, until a story brought her home. In adapting Calamai’s novel to the screen, Gavras herself added the Allende storyline to her script. She was just twelve in 1982 when her father made Missing. On the DVD’s excellent extras (see also how the children were cast and directed, and what Julie Depardieu thought of growing up with Gerard’s rising stardom), she recalls that film – in which Sissy Spacek played an outspoken young American whose husband disappears during the Allende coup, bickering with Jack Lemmon as her judgmental, conservative father-in-law – was her own “political awakening.” Gavras also sees the enduring legacy of the 70s as women’s liberation, so filmed Blame it on Fidel from Anna’s point of view and made her parents’ pivotal quarrel about a feminist issue like abortion.
Gavras comes of age in good company this year. Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter Sofia already has her own shelf in the famous directors’ section at some rental shops. Zoe (John) Cassavetes’ Broken English is newly out on DVD, and Alison (Clint) Eastwood’s Rails and Ties opened last month. All daughters coming home.
*******
This review appears in the 12/6/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.
2006
Director: Julie Gavras
Cast: Nina Kervel-Bey, Julie Depardieu, Stefano Acorsi
It’s one of those furious, dramatic exits, more exhilarating because the one stalking out is all of ten years old. As befits a school-girl trained by French nuns to stand when the priest enters – elsewhere another pupil demonstrates hilarious mastery of the single raised eyebrow as comment on unseemly adult behavior – Anna (Nina Kervel-Bey) marches head down, her silence incendiary, dragging five-year-old brother François (Benjamin Feuillet) by one wrist, out the door and into the streets of Paris.
Bad enough her parents took away her garden, her normal food, her catechism classes, and her beloved Cuban nanny Filomena (Marie-Noelle Bordeaux), who lost everything to Castro and supplies the story’s title. Bad enough they move to a cramped, shabby apartment, host nightly meetings of bearded men preaching “group solidarity,” and her attorney father leaves for months on end to assist Chile’s new Socialist regime. The breaking point comes amidst tears and shouts as her parents fight, the one rupture this little girl will not abide.
For some time she and François sit quietly on a park bench, their feet dangling as tall grown-ups pass. Then they go home. Their young parents meet them at the door with anguished relief. She has gotten their attention and we believe it, even smiling a little at them – one outcome of filmmaker Julie Gavras and casting director Coralie Amedeo testing almost 500 girls to find their right Anna.
A French import that screened early this year at Sundance and then Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, played in US art-houses from August till November and just released on DVD, Blame it on Fidel is being marketed here as a comedy about generational friction and political excess. A sensible child fumes and rolls her eyes as her idealistic parents go over the edge in sudden enthusiasm for lefty causes. Papa Fernando (Stefano Acorsi) carries some guilt. He fled a wealthy Spanish background to France, even sat out 1968’s student protests, rather than join his sister Marga (Mar Sodupe) in resisting Franco’s fascists. Now Marga’s arrival – her husband has disappeared – sparks Fernando’s confused awakening. He then objects when wife Marie (Julie Depardieu) is more publically feminist than he likes, signing an abortion petition that embarrasses him and leads to that fight.
But Anna’s parents are never buffoons. Decent, affectionate and generous young people, they try to be good parents, role models and, perhaps belatedly, citizens in the best sense. And Gavras frames her film with the deaths of two presidents; each breaks the hearts of a different generation, and in that mirrored grief finds a common aspiration that lingers and raises Gavras’ first feature well above guffaws at the expense of novice activism. When Anna’s grandfather (Oliver Perrier), a Bordeaux vineyard owner, says that “France is orphaned” by the death of Charles DeGaulle, his grief recalls the French Resistance that helped defeat World War II’s Nazi occupation. DeGaulle died just six days after Chile elected Salvatore Allende in November 1970. Chile’s military overthrew this popular reformer on September 11, 1973. Gavras excerpts Allende’s riveting last address to his nation, along with news footage of the coup and Allende’s death, which Anna’s parents and their friends watch, huddled around the TV, as sorrowful as Anna’s grandfather had been two years earlier. By the time this occurs, Anna has moved from resentment to some appreciation and, notably, choses to change schools. (Ironically, soon after Gavras wrapped her film, former dictator Augustin Pinochet, who supplanted Allende, also died.)
Gavras based Blame it on Fidel on Domitilla Calamai’s novel of the same name, which she read after meeting Calamai in Italy. Daughter of Oscar-winning Greek political filmmaker Constantin Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, Missing) and producer Michèle Ray-Gavras, she initially resisted feature filmmaking, first with law school, then working in production and documentaries, until a story brought her home. In adapting Calamai’s novel to the screen, Gavras herself added the Allende storyline to her script. She was just twelve in 1982 when her father made Missing. On the DVD’s excellent extras (see also how the children were cast and directed, and what Julie Depardieu thought of growing up with Gerard’s rising stardom), she recalls that film – in which Sissy Spacek played an outspoken young American whose husband disappears during the Allende coup, bickering with Jack Lemmon as her judgmental, conservative father-in-law – was her own “political awakening.” Gavras also sees the enduring legacy of the 70s as women’s liberation, so filmed Blame it on Fidel from Anna’s point of view and made her parents’ pivotal quarrel about a feminist issue like abortion.
Gavras comes of age in good company this year. Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter Sofia already has her own shelf in the famous directors’ section at some rental shops. Zoe (John) Cassavetes’ Broken English is newly out on DVD, and Alison (Clint) Eastwood’s Rails and Ties opened last month. All daughters coming home.
*******
This review appears in the 12/6/07 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that didn’t open theatrically in Central New York & older films of enduring worth.
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