Film Review #159: The Last Winter
2006/DVD 2008
Director: Larry Fessenden
Cast: Ron Perlman, James LeGros, Connie Britton

My baby don’t care for shows,
My baby don’t care for clothes,
My baby just cares for me.

Nina Simone’s throaty, caressing ballad, with its soft percussion and piano back-up, belongs to some smoky jazz club. It’s startling in the vast, snowy Alaskan night, especially at a point where we expect something different – sound that will do the dramatic work that, say, the driving theme in Jaws did for that film’s first moonlight swim.

Exactly ten minutes into Larry Fessenden’s horror parable on global warming, The Last Winter, a sequence commences that lasts nearly two and a half patient minutes. Rooted in horror movie conventions, it produces a more complex, unsettling result.

North Oil’s advance team intends to re-open an old drilling site inside Alaska’s remote eastern wild-life refuge. Project boss Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) has flown back to camp with orders to step up the pace. He clashes with Jim Hoffman (James Le Gros) and Elliot (Jamie Harrold), environmental scientists contracted by North Oil whom he expects to rubber-stamp his plans. Hoffman’s also romancing Pollack’s girl Abby (Connie Britton). The North Oil CEO’s son Maxwell (Zach Gilford), sent out here to “toughen up,” is acting strange. The weather’s fluctuating bizarrely and unaccountably. There’s a mechanic named Motor (Kevin Corrigan) who drinks too much and two Inuit - roustabout Lee (Pato Hoffman) and nurse-cook Dawn Russell (Joanne Shenandoah) - who may see significance in certain signs before the others.

The Last Winter opens with Pollack’s plane flying into camp over the tundra. Ten minutes in, we see the camp from above again through the eyes of something large, something able to sweep gracefully through the air at great heights yet spy in each window at the crew – as that Nina Simone track entwines with wind and snow. This long arcing shot ends up behind Maxwell, outside again, staring back at the night, then twists around to share his view. Here is where the piano flourish runs seamlessly into distant thundering, a ghostly caribou stampede across the black horizon. Here’s where we’re supposed to see monsters.

Instead, Fessenden has replaced that standard gambit with a longing and sadness familiar to anyone who’s ever looked into warmly-lit houses from a cold, dark street. The Manhattan-based filmmaker sees such disconnection at the heart of Earth’s ecological crisis. It’s an undertow that moves through every Fessenden movie since his first videos from the late 70s. Gruesome disaster ensues in The Last Winter – death by freezing, fiery plane crash and ravenous crows – but Fessenden’s interested in how a “reinvigorated” horror genre can serve environmental ends.

Though set in Alaska, The Last Winter was shot mostly in Iceland. Premiering at Toronto International Film Festival in September 2006, The Last Winter opened theatrically in New York City last September. Since then it’s continued to screen in limited release and at festivals. This February, the film came to Syracuse’s Palace Theater in Eastwood as part of a Native American film festival organized by Joanne Shenandoah, who plays Dawn Russell in the film.

The same day The Last Winter premiered in Toronto, Fessenden launched his extensive ecology-themed website, RunningOutofRoad.com, a leap beyond Low Impact Filmmaking, his 1992 guide for filmmakers that details ecologically sound production and uses his film No Telling (1991) as a case example. Released abroad as The Frankenstein Complex, that film explored the arrogance of unchecked animal experimentation against a backdrop of toxic pesticide manufacturers’ profit-driven and equally arrogant contamination of upstate farmland. Fessenden also starred in Habit (1997), his riff on vampirism in society set largely in his own Lower East Side with forays to Long Island and Central Park. Wendigo (2001) completed the decade-long “horror trilogy” with another upstate tale, this one about an angry deer god that attacks a transgressing vacationer from the city but spares – for now – his artifact-carrying son.

This should be a good year for Fessenden. In late March Image Comics released The Last Winter as a graphic novel. Fessenden acts in several forthcoming films produced by Scareflix, the ultra low-budget division of his Glass Eye Pix, including Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead (with Ron Perlman and Dominic Monaghan) and Graham Reznick’s I Can See You. He’s a producer for, and has a part in, Kelly Reichardt’s new road trip movie, Wendy and Lucy, which premiers at Cannes this month. And he’s directing an episode of NBC’s summer anthology series, Fear Itself, which starts airing Thursdays at 10 PM on June 5th. He’s a taste worth acquiring.

*******
This review appeared in the 5/15/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly & is a shorter version of the introduction to an interview with Larry Fessenden published on 5/18/08 at FilmSlashmagazine.com. The Last Winter releases on rental DVD on May 20 as a Blockbuster Exclusive (for sale elsewhere, with many extras, on July 22). “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of recent movies that did not have a CNY theatrical opening & older films of enduring worth.

Puerto Rican comedy hit worth staying up for
Maldeamores a late film fest entry on Friday night
(Syracuse City Eagle weekly, 5/1/2008)

Tere Paniagua, who manages Point of Contact Gallery and many of the details that make the Syracuse International Film Festival hum, said she and her sister, Rita, who directs the West Side’s La Liga, were “rolling on the floor.”

This was just a week ago, right after Puerto Rico’s official 2008 Oscar entry for best foreign language film, Maldeamores, skidded into town. The ensemble comedy, executive-produced by Benicio del Toro and featuring the great character actor Luis Guzman, wasn’t even on SIFF’s screening schedule. But a handful of festival folk plus one sister made room to watch the 85-minute screener in the hurried days just before Friday’s opening and – along with repeated outbursts of, “You gotta see this movie!” – quickly shoe-horned Maldeamores into a midnight screening slot Friday night at the Syracuse Center 4 the Arts on East Genesee Street, just a short walk across Foreman Park from the Renaissance Hotel, which lodges many filmmakers and other festival visitors.

Maldeamores is beautifully shot and edited, uniformly well-acted, and has a smart, witty, large-spirited script that turns on a dime. Like the Cuban cinema its makers admire, it combines tragedy and laughter in ways seemingly lost on Hollywood. It’s the first feature film from San Juan’s Pajaritos Peñaos Films, the indie production company of husband and wife team Carlitos Ruiz Ruiz and Mariem Pérez Riera. A four-year project shot in May 2006, it’s among early beneficiaries of Puerto Rico’s 2001 legislation to encourage the island’s film industry via tax credits, interest-free loans and other services to filmmakers. That environment plus the hands-on support of Puerto Rican native del Toro got Maldeamores made.

The film shuttles gracefully among three parallel stories about love’s troubles, framed by a hilarious young couple bickering in a car – uncredited and de-glamorized, these two suspiciously resemble Ruiz and Pérez – whose brief story runs before opening titles and again after closing credits. First, young Ismaelito (Fernando Tarrazo) is stuck tearfully in a car with his parents Lourdes (Teresa Hernandez) and Ismael (Luis Guzman), forced to leave what looked like the baseball championships by his great-grandmother’s sudden death. Although he gets his first kiss after the wake, his father’s dalliance with Lourdes’ cousin Tati (Eduali Figueroa) comes explosively to light. Meanwhile, forlorn Miguel (Luis Gonzaga), who’s been stalking bus-driver Marta (Dolores Pedro), proposes marriage and takes the bus hostage to provide incentive. Also meanwhile, 72-year-old Flora (Silvia Brito, who will be at Saturday’s screening) is already housing one ex-husband, Cirilo (Chavito Marrero), when she reluctantly takes in wayward first spouse Pellín (Miguel Alvarez) after 30 years’ absence. A rum-soaked birthday party, a rooster’s attack in the shower, and a big-hearted accommodation ensue.

Maldeamores premiered last April at Tribeca – all screenings sold out – and had a short San Juan theatrical release in September to qualify for the Oscars – also sold out. Limited theatrical release here in the States followed in March along with the festival circuit, where Brito has taken honors for her Flora and the film has been an audience favorite. Although there’s no US distributor yet for a wide release, the sound track is on CD and DVD follows in September.

Carlitos Ruiz spent last Friday at bread-and-butter work – shooting a commercial – but Saturday afternoon he spoke by phone from San Juan. Here’s part of our conversation:

How did you come to make this film?
Well Mariem, my wife, made the story. There is no film school here in Puerto Rico, though our parents are actors and musicians. I was raised in a theater and raised on Latin American film. The first time I saw Cuban films, I said, that’s what I want to do. Mariem studied film in Cuba and New York City and me, in Chicago. We realized we liked the same films. We had not known each other during film school, only afterward. We wanted to make a film about real love, about the claustrophobic journey. We Latin Americans enjoy suffering more than love itself! Actually we wrote the script with friends – the actor Israel Lugo and the writer Jorge Gonzalez – over four months together. We wanted several stories only united by the theme of love. Two weeks into the project, we weren’t finding the right stories, so we asked each other, how was your first kiss? We told each other stories. The grandmother with two lovers, the first kiss – these became stories about every stage of life. They were simple and tender and showed that even with the bad aspects of love, it doesn’t matter how hard it is to get there. We’re all film freaks and what we get the most satisfaction from is how audiences have connected with the film. We’ve just been invited to Bosnia. And it’s shown in many festivals since Tribeca – in Argentina, Spain, the US, Cairo, Israel, Italy, France.

The film had a limited theatrical release earlier this year too?
Yes. In Puerto Rico it’s broken all the records. It’s still in theaters here after two and a half months. Also it’s been in New York and Orlando. We opened last fall for one week in San Juan in time to qualify for Oscar entry and people stood in line for six hours.

Can you talk about Benicio del Toro's involvement?
Actually he commissioned the film. He’d seen my film school thesis – a short that played in a theater here. Then we developed a professional relationship. We developed a workshop on film for kids here and after two years he said, “You have to make your own film.” He was really the godfather – his name, he helped with casting, he and Mariem edited the film. At first we had three chronological stories – he suggested parallel stories. We didn’t want to be compared to Alejandro González Iñárritu [whose 2006 film Babel with Brad Pitt chopped up both chronology and multiple plots], but he said, “Hey, it’s your first feature! If you are compared to Iñárritu, that’s not so bad.” When Mariem started adapting the stories that way, the film started talking back to us. And I love the editing – it’s like a symphony the way it moves among the stories.

The cast are local actors?
Puerto Rican actors and two Cubans – one was Silvia Brito. Benicio found her in New York City. A lot of the actresses said no to that role – at her age, living with two men – because they were too conservative. The other Cuban actress plays the bus driver. We have great actors here, but one of the weaknesses of Puerto Rican films is sometimes the acting because of weak dialogue in our scripts. We wanted real acting. We did a lot of work-shopping and rehearsing. It’s not an improvised film – 95 % of the film is scripted. Then we shot the three stories separately over a total of 18 days.

Can you talk about the scene on the bus where Miguel takes Marta and the riders hostage? When I was watching the film I was immediately struck by how difficult that scene would be to shoot and how very well it flowed.
It’s a very claustrophobic scene. I believe the camera works for the actors, the actors don’t work for the camera. We shot that scene with a very small camera – a 16mm A-minima – so it’s not that intrusive. The whole film was story-boarded. Another thing, the actors in each story didn’t know the other stories – I only gave them their part of the script. So the first story – the kid’s story – is very laid back. When we had the wrap they all caught up on each other’s parts and they were amazed. I wanted the actors to feel closed in for eight hours. And we told the hostages in the bus scene not to talk to the main actor in that scene between takes.

Are you working on a next project?
Yes, we’ve started a comedy, set in America. In fact we have three projects in development. We are making the films we want to make. We’re here to make films. We are storytellers. It’s hard to distribute Spanish language films in the States, but we’re moving on. You know, the name of our company – Pajaritos Peñaos Films – in English that’s “pregnant birds,” and we have a saying that it stands for possibilities.

*******

Film Review #158: Moolaadé
2004/DVD 2008
Director: Ousmane Sembene
Cast: Fatoumata Coulibaly, Maimouna Hélène Diarra, Théophile Sowié

Many thundering, indignant tirades have rained upon another’s head already by the time Ciré Bathily’s first wife Kharjatou (Maimouna Hélène Diarra) finally loses her temper with his middle wife Collé (Fatoumata Coulibaly), whom she cherishes, lies for sometimes and secretly agrees with. Stopping the second wife dead in her tracks with an icy glare and pointed finger, Kharjatou commands Collé never to raise her voice again and banishes the younger woman to her quarters. And Collé meekly goes.

When this startling exchange occurs, Collé has the entire contemporary West African village of Djerisso in an uproar. In their husband’s absence, she’s allowed four runaway girls to seek refuge in the Bathily family compound, avoiding the purification rite of female circumcision that their local custom requires. (Two other little girls who also ran away threw themselves down the village well rather than submit to cutting.) Oumy, Diatou, Awa and Nafi – who look to be somewhere between the ages of five and maybe eight – tell Collé they sought her out because they’d heard that seven years ago Collé refused her own daughter’s purification. Then, Ciré (Rasmane Ouedraogo) and Kharjatou both let that defiance pass.

Now, with the simple act of tying a rope across the outer gate to their compound – so low that toddlers, chickens and baby goats routinely step right over it – Collé invokes the indigenous, ancient protection of “moolaadé” that only she can lift by uttering a single word aloud. Moolaadé alone trumps the relative new-comer Islam and leaves the red-robed Salindana – dour women who perform the circumcisions – thwarted, fuming, cooling their heels beyond the rope.

Worse, this all coincides with the triumphant return from Paris of Ibrahima Doucouré (Théophile Sowié), who passes out currency, pays his prominent father’s debts to the peddler Mercenaire (Dominique Zeïda) and expects to marry Collé’s daughter Amsatou (Salimata Traoré). He is undeterred that she is “bilakora” (uncut). His father initially let that pass too, despite several brief, wry scenes in which the older men vigorously reassure one another that they would never consider intimacy with such a woman.

More dramatic events follow – a public flogging, Ibrahima’s disinheritance, the forced and fatal cutting of little asylum-seeker Diatou (lured from safety by her mother), the peddler’s murder for interference, the furious confiscation and burning of the women’s radios. Guttenberg’s printing press sparked Europe’s Protestant Reformation by making Holy Scripture available to whoever could read. In remote Djerisso, this analogue of subversive blend of literacy with forbidden knowledge boils over when Collé tells the assembled village that – on the radio – she has heard the Grand Imam himself say that Islam does not require cutting. For good measure, she reports that a million uncut women make the pilgrimage to Mecca themselves every year, to which one elder responds, “You are Satan!”

Set in the West African nation of Burkina Faso and made in 2003, Senegalese writer and director Ousmane Sembene’s final film, honored first at Cannes and many times since, actually came to Syracuse last April, when Jean Jonassaint, liaison for French-language films to the Syracuse International Film Festival, screened it late one afternoon at Syracuse University’s Hall of Languages. Long available on DVD in Canada because of Quebec’s robust French-language cinema – indeed, films made in French hail from several continents and the Caribbean – Moolaadé only recently made it to US DVD.

It’s tempting to draw parallels between this film and current headlines on the basis of surface similarities – the seizure of children in Texas from the polygamous Fundamentalist Church of the Latter Day Saints over possible sexual abuse and on-going custody hearings – but that lens can be distorting. Last June we lost Sembene, an old lion’s death overshadowed here by the twin losses in July of Bergman and Antonioni, both – shades of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson – on the same day. Moolaadé is a good place to start if you don’t know Sembene’s work, with its finely calibrated performances and characters torn by the real dilemmas of personal affection competing with rigorous custom. With all the larger furor in their village, Collé earns Kharjatou’s rebuke because she embarrasses the older woman before her adult son with a moment of demanding, insistent inquiries, much as Ciré’s harsh older brother goads him into bullying Collé – his favorite wife – and so on. It’s a lovely and important film, likely to bust your categories.

*******
Find Moolaadé as well as Sembene’s Black Girl, Xala, &Mandabi at Netflix.com. Jean Jonassaint reports that SIFF plans a Sembene retrospective as part of its 2009 program. This review appeared in the 4/24/2008 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.

Film Review #157: Madame Rosa
1977/DVD forthcoming
Director: Moshe Mizrahi
Cast: Simone Signoret, Samy Ben-Youb, Michal Bat-Adam

When the jittery, shifty-eyed Kadir Youssef shows up, banging at Madame Rosa’s door eleven years after leaving his toddler son in her care, Madame Rosa (the incomparable Simone Signoret) improvises a demonstration for the boy so he can choose whether he wishes this man to be his father. Kadir Youssef is just released from the psychiatric hospital that held him all those years after he shot his wife, who turned fifteen tricks a day for him in the Paris streets. Now 65, in badly failing health and destitute, Madame Rosa has just two boys left from her international brood, children of younger, still working prostitutes left with her for a monthly fee. Roughly the same age, one is a Jewish boy in a skull cap, the other a Muslim boy named Momo (Samy Ben-Youb’s only film role), who has lately taken to introducing himself as “Algerian” to satisfy his own questions.

As a make-shift foster mother, Madame Rosa has conscientiously attached each of her charges to someone from their own background – a Vietnamese boy to a Vietnamese grocer, an African child to the jovial Senegalese pimp Amèdée (musician Ibrahim Seek), and Momo to Mr. Hamil (Gabriel Jabbour), an elderly Arab rug dealer fond of Victor Hugo whose admonitions include the idea that one cannot live without love. Madame Rosa herself survived Auschwitz to return to Paris after World War II. (In one harrowing scene, her mind fragile, she imagines she’s again ordered to take just one bag and report for the train trip east.) She boasts she now keeps identity papers that go back many generations and prove she’s not Jewish, just in case. Madame Rosa also has a secret, locked cellar room with a Menorah that she calls her “Jewish hide-away.” She retreats there when plagued by nightmares or, with Momo’s help, when the aged Dr. Katz (Claude Dauphin) tries to put her in the hospital, where she fears she’d be kept alive for experiments.

So Madame Rosa has not mixed up these boys. But she tells Kadir Youssef, shrugging after she checks her records – here we see the contents of that battered suitcase – and nodding toward Moïse, who’s clearly accustomed to going along with her tales to strangers, “I made a mistake. I mixed up the religions. I brought up Mohamed as a good little Jew. He’s a little bit Jewish, he’s still your son.”

An apoplectic Kadir Youssef screams, “I want my son back in an Arab state!”

Serenely, Madame Rosa answers, “In this household we have no Jewish states or Arab states.”

In this moment, the luminous Madame Rosa – she who retired from prostituting after age 50 “for aesthetic reasons” – also alters each boy from his past enough that he becomes free to choose it, to change his own beginning and hence his own ending. Israeli filmmaker Moshe Mizrahi makes such self-invention a means of transcendence, a species of art itself. Thus for example Momo’s concocted alibi about Madame Rosa’s long-lost Israeli relatives sending for her. Or his grieving, distracted exchange with the statuesque black hooker Madame Lola (Stella Annicette), whom he tells he's stopped eating. When Lola, an ex-boxer who “took injections,” scoffs that hunger is a law of nature, Momo retorts, “I could care less about nature’s laws!” After a beat, Lola laughs, “Well, neither could I!” And when Momo follows the young film editor Nadine, who becomes his life-line (Michal Bat-Adam, herself a noted filmmaker, Mizrahi’s wife and later his frequent lead), he’s mesmerized precisely by cinema’s capacity to “make the world go backwards.”

Winner of 1978’s Oscar for Best Foreign Film, Madame Rosa is hard to find in the US unless you’re willing to pay big bucks on-line. Only a handful of Mizrahi’s films are currently available in the US, some on netflix and several more on-line. Lately Netflix has promised a new DVD of Madame Rosa that you can reserve, maybe because Mizrahi has a new film entitled Weekend in Galilee. See both on the big screen right here in Syracuse later this month, with Mizrahi himself making the trip too, thanks to the Syracuse International Film Festival.

*******
Madame Rosa is part of SIFF 2008’s retrospective honoring Moshe Mizrahi. Screenings include I Love You Rosa, Madame Rosa, Every Time We Say Good-bye & the USA premier of Mizrahi’s new film, Weekend in Galilee. USA premier of Michal Bat-Adam’s new film, Rita Working Title also at SIFF. Complete SIFF schedule at syrfilm.com.

Film Review #156: The Night of the Shooting Stars
1982/DVD 2008
Directors: Paolo & Vittorio Taviani
Cast: Omero Antonutti, Margarita Lozano, Mauro Monni

As of last week, a colleague in Italy advises by email, the latest film by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, filmmaker brothers from Tuscany, had not yet been sold to a US distributor. Set in 1915 during the historic Armenian genocide by the Ottoman Turks, Skylark’s Farm premiered in February 2007 at the Berlin Film Festival, albeit outside the main line-up and greeted with “stony silence.” This was shortly after the sensational assassination of outspoken Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, during threats and even criminal charges in Turkey against Turkish novelists Orhan Pamuk, Elif Shafak and others. The growing movement there among artists, journalists and writers to speak openly about “the Armenian question” – something Turkey’s government has long officially denied – has been fanned by the issue of whether Turkey would join the European Union.

So making a film about the Armenian genocide – a project of artistic solidarity – would be right up the Taviani brothers’ alley. A year-plus after Berlin, Skylark’s Farm has opened in seven other countries and opens in Russia in late April. So the time is about right for Skylark’s Farm to show up state-side. Perhaps anticipating this, on April 1st Koch Lorber released a three-disc DVD set of three major Taviani films. Their signature film and certainly the best-known here, The Night of the Shooting Stars (1982) has screened for years in Italian cinema courses on US college campuses. Kaos (1984) and Fiorile (1993) took more hunting to find, the first a three-hour adaptation of four Pirandello stories tied by the flight of the ill-omened raven, the second following a family curse over several generations and starring Michael Vartan (well before his spy in TV’s Alias) as a Napoleonic soldier and two of his spitting-image descendants, a role reminiscent of Ralph Fiennes’ similar turn in the Hungarian Itzvan Szabo’s wonderful Sunshine.

It’s a good sign that Emerald City Video immediately got this set on their racks. Releasing these three films together – watching them in a row is a fine way to spend three evenings – refreshes familiarity with one of the most fruitful and enduring partnerships in movie-making, highlights the resonance of shared locales and actors over a body of work, and prepares us for what may be an important cinematic response to the long-festering political and ethnic impasse in Turkey.

Beginning in 1954 – a yeasty time for Italian cinema – Paolo and Vittorio Taviani made the first of over 20 films, most set in Italy. Like so much of Italy's art since World War II, the Taviani’s work has wrestled deeply and expansively with the process of Fascism’s growth and its echoing consequences across families and communities. Their own home village of San Miniato and a neighboring village, Sant’Angelo, in the northwest region of Tuscany, figure prominently in both Night of the Shooting Stars and Fiorile, while the three-hour-long Kaos is set in 19th century Sicily. In the DVD interview on this set, Vittorio Taviani relates that their parents took them to Florence to see a Pirandello play when they were barely ten or eleven. This would have been the early 1940s. Intriguingly, the crystallizing experience of performed drama, he says – as Fascism roiled on every side – “was the end of our childhood – discovering the world is not as it seems.”

Taviani films are always good yarns, many narrated by a storytelling character. In Night of the Shooting Stars, a grown-up character named Cecilia recalls to her own sleeping infant how San Miniato split during a crucial moment in 1944, when she was a child and one man decided he should not believe the assurances of authority, even delivered from his bishop’s mouth. At that time, US troops were fighting their way up Italy's boot and San Miniato tensely awaited liberation. Ordered by the Germans to gather inside the cathedral, the plain, poor, elderly Galvano (Omero Antonutti) instead proposes they flee and takes half the village with him by night. When the few injured survivors of those who remained stagger from the dynamited cathedral, the bishop and a townswoman briefly struggle in the square, their eyes locked in grief and anger, over the body of a young pregnant bride whose modest wedding opened the film. The rigors of the road allow Galvano and childhood sweetheart Concetta (Margarita Lozano), now far above him in means and status, a brief and lovely moment out of time when their hosts in another town mistake them for a married couple and offer them their own room for the night. And Night of the Shooting Stars offers one of cinema's most memorable and mythically charged battles, when partisans and Fascists clash over one bloody afternoon in a golden wheat field, as neighbors and brothers and friends battle one another, conjuring the very heroes of Troy. With moviemaking this good, you don't mind knowing the end.

*******
This review appeared in the 4/10/08 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 #155: Time of the Wolf
2003/DVD 2006
Director: Michael Haneke
Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Hakim Taleb, Lucas Biscombe
In early January 2006, I saw my first Michael Haneke film at Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in New York City one cold, slushy night. There’s a moment in Caché – in English, it means Hidden – where, utterly without warning, a man slits his own throat, loosing a jet of blood across a kitchen. Even now, I feel my own head jerk back, how my hands clenched the seat arms, hear our – the rest of the audience’s – noisy collective gasp. The success of Caché – with its meditation on how camera surveillance has penetrated our lives and its riff on the costs of colonialism at a time when North African migrant workers were rioting in French suburbs – introduced the Austrian’s work to a wider US audience. DVD release of earlier Haneke films quickly followed that spring. Tellingly, Caché’s own DVD cover features a white background rent with a single jagged red slash.

Such moments of disorienting recoil are Haneke’s calling cards. In The Piano Teacher (2001), a film with certainly more than one such moment, my candidate for most viscerally gasp-inducing is that in which Isabelle Huppert’s teacher leaves the auditorium during her nervous star pupil’s dazzling recital and booby-traps the girl’s coat pocket with shards of broken glass. Somehow this moment is more unsettling than successive ones - it's as though Haneke has broken the act itself into shards - in which we first hear her scream, then see the blood-drenched hand held mid-air.

Haneke’s most violent moments sometimes occur just off-screen – we see the resulting bloodspray, after which his women, literally unable to stomach events, vomit – or the violence is other than merely physical. That gash on Caché’s DVD cover as much represents another boundary violated: the breaking of the “fourth wall” convention of live drama – from which Haneke comes to cinema – in which action spills off the stage, characters speak directly to audiences or some provocation occurs that transforms one’s safe spectator experience to participatory immediacy. Haneke opens the cage door. And from The Seventh Continent (1989) on, in most of his scripts – except for adapting novels twice – this occurs over and over with characters named some variant of Anne and Georges Laurent; their children, when present, often named Ben and Eva. As if, as a culture, we keep not getting the lesson right.

In Haneke’s new Funny Games, set on Long Island and pretty much a shot-for-shot re-make of his 1997 film of the same title, the moment of most recoil for me arrives near the end. As Ann (Naomi Watts) – bound, gagged, her husband and son dead – crosses a small lake in her sailboat, perched on the edge of the deck, one of her captors, Paul (Michael Pitt), with a cheery “Ciao, bella!” and not so much as a glance in her direction, shoves her overboard. (She drops from sight as quickly, as disposably, as that first kid shot in the library dropped from the frame in Gus Van Sant’s 2003 Columbine-inspired Elephant). But much of what repulses people about this film, with its veneer of opera scores and lovely God’s-eye cinematography, occurs earlier – during the three times Paul or Peter turn to the camera to taunt the audience about torture-as-entertainment and then during a truly disorienting sequence in which Ann shoots one kidnapper, we may momentarily exult and Paul uses a TV remote to re-wind – erase – that possible outcome. Funny Games is assaultive, masterful and left Carousel quickly. In the shorthand parlance of my group of regular movie buddies, it’s “not for Laurinda.”

Despite making Funny Games anew – and he’s working on a film now about how ritual punishment in a rural northern German school in 1913 contributed to Fascism’s rise, the working title of which is The Teacher’s Tale – Haneke did make one film – his first after 9/11 – that’s gentler, comparatively easier on his women, and full of grief for us all. Well, it’s not exactly without its violence. But one appreciates Time of the Wolf (2003) more, understanding Haneke’s usual bent.

Here, affluent city-dweller Anne Laurent (Isabelle Huppert) – a panicked looter shoots husband Georges very early - crosses the French countryside with teen-aged daughter Eva (Anaïs Demoustier) and young son Ben (Lucas Biscombe) after some convulsive catastrophe turns Europe to wasteland. Because she has “behaved correctly” in the past to a local woman we assume was a shopkeeper or maid, Anne receives a bag of biscuits through a narrowly cracked door. A violent feral boy (Hakim Taleb) hesitantly joins them and soon pulls an overcoat from a corpse which he offers to Eva. Initially she’s repulsed, but in the next scene she’s wearing it, and Eva remains this boy’s single tenuous thread to any make-shift community. An unstopping refugee train zooms by but he guides them to a country train station. Several incidents of frail generosity occur, flickering before the tide of chaos – an old man shares a cup of milk with his wife, one woman calms another down, in a fitful night there’s a faint, scratchy Beethoven sonata on a tape recorder.

Fragile, traumatized, increasingly given to wandering off, Ben hears garbled talk from some travelers of the Jewish legend of “the Just” – those 36 humans whose presence offsets all humanity’s evil-doing – and decides to sacrifice himself. Beside a signal fire on the tracks in a vast night, a sentry stops him, cradles him, says his willingness is enough. Then someone watches from an open box-car door, rumbling monotonously across an empty land. Haneke’s endings are aggressively ambiguous. Of course we might prefer it meant the next train stopped for Anne and her children. But it’s hard not think that “Never again” is the simple lesson that we’re still missing, all of us fellow travelers.

*******
This review appeared in the 4/3/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.

Film Review #154: Taste of Cherry
1997/DVD 1999
Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Cast: Homayoun Ershadi, Abdolrahman Bagheri, Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari

Years ago one of my sisters sent me a postcard from a Boston museum of a John Singer Sargent painting of a simple, square, sun-washed stucco house, I think in Capri, across whose clean, rectangular lines fell the shadow of a tree, sinuous and lacey. I’ve never seen that painting again and I can no longer locate the postcard. But I remember staring at the painting and the sudden blossoming pleasure I had in seeing it was as much a painting of the tree as the house.

It’s no surprise, really, that Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami – also a landscape photographer of considerable renown who leans toward stark, nearly abstract groupings of trees against fields of snow – should come up with a similar image late in Taste of Cherry, his 1997 tale of a lonely, modern city-dweller who spends his last day alive seeking, with singular tunnel vision, someone to cover his grave. By the time Kiarostami trains his camera on Mr. Badii’s living room window, we’ve spent the day with this man and we know his plan.

Beginning in downtown Tehran at a street-corner labor pool whose beseeching swarms of supplicants he passes by, the finicky Mr. Badii (Homayoun Ershadi) drives on, out of the city’s center to the outskirts. There he offers money to a construction foreman at a deserted site who’s been talking in a phone booth that's incongruously planted in the middle of a muddy field. This man, apparently with his own money problems, mistakes Badii’s offer for a sexual advance and angrily turns him away. It’s a huge sum Badii offers – 200,000 tomans, nearly six months wages for the average Iranian worker.

Mr. Badii drives on, picks up a young soldier (Afshin Khorshid Bakhtiari) who’s walked all night from his Kurdish village to get back to his post on time for his duty. Badii fondly remembers his own military service, but he makes the slender boy increasingly nervous. Dropping his not-quite-jelled military reserve, the boy sprints down the hill in panic once he sees the open grave. Badii stops a while with a construction site guard, an Afghani refugee who offers to make him tea in his rickety shack on stilts at the foot of towering slope from which a bull-dozer’s constant din and dust rains down. The guard’s fellow refugee, a seminarian, turns Badii down and fails to dissuade him. But even here, in this construction site as vast and desolate as any on-screen since those of Taiwan’s Tsai Ming-liang in his 1994 Vive L’Amour, simple hospitality abides. And when Badii’s wheel goes off the edge of the road, muddy laborers cheerfully haul him back.

At last, Mr. Bagheri (Abdolrahman Bagheri), an old Turk who’s been out on foot hunting quail for his taxidermy students at the national natural history museum – a place of ornate, scrolled gates and deep, serene lawns, the only site of man-made order and beauty in this city – agrees to the deal, after relating his own close call with suicide decades ago and the sick child whose care Badii’s money will secure.

It’s Bagheri – after all, he’s also found some famously nervous birds in a most unlikely spot too – who supplies the film’s title, the culmination of his inventory of nature’s bounty. “The world isn’t the way you see it,” he asserts. “Do you want to refuse all that? Do you want to give up the taste of cherries?”

Now, after dark, Mr. Badii paces in that living room, straightens up some items, picks up some papers from a desk and then puts them away, perhaps in a drawer, before he shuts off the light and leaves the building to descend his front steps and drive in his tan American Range Rover through a black night to that fresh hillside grave overlooking a glittering Tehran.

This living room scene is a layered, triply remarkable image. First, Kiarostami shoots it through sheer curtains, so we watch Mr. Badii in silhouette. Like many aspects of this film – the long shots, the vast, raw construction sites on the city’s expanding outskirts where much of the story occurs, or the fact that Badii is almost never in the same frame with the person he’s talking with – this heightens his isolation. But there’s more than that. It’s hard not to think later – this is a film that stays with you, unfolding in the next days – of the image of the ancient cave with its fire-thrown, flickering shadows – illusions that we mistake for what’s real. Perhaps no matter how modern our architecture becomes, we are still in that cave.

Second, there’s that old saying about the eyes being the windows to the soul. That strikes you suddenly near the end of this scene, when Mr. Badii turns the lights off and his living room window goes dark and blank – just as he intends to do in short order. It’s a moment startling in finality – he means to do this – and unexpectedly, because now you see how much you’ve hoped he’ll change his mind, sad.

Finally, throughout this scene, across the front of Mr. Badii’s house falls the graceful shadow of a young tree trunk and branches, swaying faintly in a rising wind that signals rain. Like the golden sunset that Mr. Badii watched earlier – shimmering above a really deeply ugly cluster of squat, new cement boxes – this tree illuminates both the effortlessness of the natural world and how she casts her shadow across all the progress that we make and do.

Taste of Cherry was the first Iranian film to take top honors at Cannes, and even then critics argued about its ending, a brilliant extension of the thread that all is not as it seems. That ending – with its hillside lushly green, its cherry trees in bloom, its young soldiers lounging, its film crew chatting and Louis Armstrong’s “Saint James Infirmary Blues” exulting – so moved Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum that he insisted defiantly that for once he would too write about the ending.

Martin Hogue, who teaches architecture, screens this film on Monday, April 7th at the Warehouse Auditorium downtown at 7:00 PM, part of his course, The City in Film, an extended exploration of how the city has functioned in movies as a character of shifting identities rather than a mere backdrop - appropriate work, it seems to me, for a school of architecture that has moved itself off its lofty hilltop and into the city's urban core, and some of whose students are still grumbling about that inconvenience. He’s wouldn’t mind if you dropped in to watch either.

*******
This review appeared in the 3/27/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing DVDs of movies that didn’t open theatrically in CNY & older films of enduring worth.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.