Film Review #195: Mere-bi/Mother of All

2009

Director: Ousmane William Mbaye

Cast: Annette Mbaye d'Erneville

There is a wonderful scene late in the new film Mère-bi (Mother of All), Ousmane William Mbaye’s portrait of the charismatic Annette Mbaye d’Erneville, in which she is sitting with her grandson, Laity Ahmet Mbaye, teaching him to recite poetry. He looks to be about 14. In the poem at hand, she praises her own son – Laity’s father, who’s also filming this conversation – for getting through his circumcision at about age six without crying. She wants her grandson to read one line with more verve and shows him what she means, drawing one phrase out with an elegant sweep of her arm. He reads the line as she did and goes on; when he’s done, he asks her about the ceremony.

“This man, the Namane, he puts sand on your lap to see if you’re trembling,” she says. Laity listens intently, his eyes wide and the corners of his mouth pulled back a little in apprehension. When she reaches the part where “he cuts it in one go!” and demonstrates with another sweep of her arm – she adds, “The blood gushes!” – Laity’s head snaps back at the thought of it, after which the old woman and young teen relish a laugh together.

Now 82, d’Erneville says in the film that with grandchildren “you have this feeling of infinity.” She still directs the Henriette Bathily Museum of Women, named for her close friend and colleague, which she founded in 1994 at the historic slave port at Gorée Island, and she says her sole ambition now is that her magazine Ciné Culture Afrique be printed regularly and survive.

Mbaye, 58, distilled this film – first about 90 minutes long and now 55 – from 50 hours of footage shot over 15 years. Besides being a poet, D’Erneville was Senegal’s first degreed journalist, valedictorian of the program founded by Pierre Schaeffer in 1952 when he headed radio broadcasting for overseas France. That year she began broadcasting to West Africa from Paris, to which she had gone in the late 40s as a student. She continued as a journalist when she returned to Senegal in 1957 with her husband and the first two of four children. Léopold Sédar Senghor – poet, major intellectual in the emergence of the Négritude movement, Senegal’s first president, and d’Erneville’s tutor in Paris – had exhorted Senegalese ex-pats to go home and build their newly independent country. There, D’Erneville founded Senegal’s first women’s magazine, Awa, was Radio Senegal’s program head, a prime mover in the film festival RECIDAK, a founder of the national writers association, a poet and writer of children’s books and a teacher. The mother of four, d’Erneville divorced her husband, whom she had met in France, when he tried to curtail her many public activities. Mbaye treats this matter-of-factly in his film, including a number of clips of his father during which Ndakhte Mbaye adds his comments.

Mère-bi has screened just twice in the US recently before Mbaye took it back to Africa and Europe for upcoming festivals in Cameroon, Spain, Milan, Brussels and Cannes. It’s been airing on national television in Senegal and in June will air on TV5-World. One of the two US screenings occurred during Syracuse International Film Festival (SYRFILM), the result of its having been recommended by Senegal’s Ben Diogaye Beye, SYRFILM’s African liaison and a visiting artist here last year.

Mbaye brought the film to Syracuse directly from Old Dominion University’s ONFilm Festival in Virginia, where his sister, Mariè-Pierre Myrick, lives. As it happens, the poem in that scene with her grandson is “Kassacks,” written in 1958, from d’Erneville’s book Kaddu. “Kassacks” appears in A Rain of Words, the new anthology of 47 women poets from 12 French-speaking African nations, published late last year by the University of Virginia Press, edited by Irène Assiba d’Almeida and translated by Janis Mayes.

Mayes teaches at Syracuse University and takes students abroad for Paris Noir, the program focused on the mid-century cultural and political ferment in Paris among African intellectuals who gathered there to study, from which emerged the movement called Négritude. Mayes was alerted to the Syracuse screening by Myrick and d’Almeida, and in turn alerted others. The film, which screened in the same time slot as the crowd-drawing Appaloosa, still had a sizable and enthusiastic audience, and Mbaye sold DVDs of the film while here.

Mayes said afterward that the “audience response was fantastic,” adding that “women especially have not received the artistic and scholarly attention they have earned and deserve. Mère-bi is a stunning record of the force of her decisions, and more. My very favorite part of the documentary is at the end, when this beautiful, dynamic woman responds in Wolof – in poetic verse – to her son's teasing question, ‘What do I mean to you?’ And my next favorite part is the response she gives when asked if she regrets not having married again! Wow. ‘Have you seen my photographs? Believe me, I had opportunities.”

Greg Thomas, who also teaches at SU and has a new book out himself, attended the Syracuse screening and calls d’Erneville “legendary.” He says the film “is the best of tributes in the great Pan-African tradition – just beautifully and custom made for the whole Pan-African world.”

In one scene Mbaye asks Myrick for one word to sum up their mother and she replies, “Multicultural.”

Mbaye spends considerable time on this subject in the years well before d’Erneville ever reached Paris, from tracing his family’s roots – both the Serer tribe and the Frenchman “who began a family in Senegal in 1780” – to the effects of d’Erneville attending the teachers’ training school at Rufisque run by the ardent Gaullist, Germaine Le Goff, who “taught us to straddle two worlds” by loving both Africa and France, a revolutionary idea at the time that had its detractors among both Europeans and Africans. There is a wonderful scene, apparently filmed three or four years ago, in which d’Erneville reminisces with three of her old classmates; you can only be grateful that Mbaye, who cut his film by a third to fit television length, spared this conversation.

Later, driving through Dakar, d’Erneville reflects. “Each time I hear ‘La Marseillaise,’ I feel something inside,” she says, adding that it’s the same with “Pincez tous vos Koras,” Senegal’s national anthem. “I like Samba Diabare Samb, I like Youssou N’Dour. But I also like Charles Aznavour, Yves Montand. I can’t say it’s a duality. There’s no struggle. It’s a symbiosis.”

D’Erneville also hosted for many years a weekly salon called Club Africa in the large courtyard of her Dakar home, modeled on gatherings she’d attended during her student days in Paris, both at the homes of French intellectuals and artists like the young actress Simone Signoret and those among African students living in the Latin Quarter. These gatherings of young artists, intellectuals, activists and journalists in Dakar particularly earned d’Erneville the nick-name “Mère-bi.”

Contacted in Dakar by email before I sat down with Mbaye at the Renaissance Hotel the morning he left Syracuse, filmmaker Ben Beye – who also appears in the film – wrote back quickly, “I'm very glad you met my friend Willy and that you'll interview him. We did lot of things together and not only in the film business. Mère-bi – his mother – was my boss when I was working as a radio broadcaster. I can say that she's also MY mother. In fact she is the mother of everybody from Willy's generation. Tell him that his friend Ben wants him to make Syracuse people know about Club Africa.”

Like Ben Beye, Mbaye has been coming to the US for some years as part of an on-going exchange between African and African American filmmakers as well as to visit friends and his sister on holidays in Virginia. Beye first came in 1978, invited by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art as one of a group of Senegalese filmmakers. Then Mbaye first came in 1981 – Ben Beye also made that trip – for a gathering hosted by the National Black Program and Consortium. The opportunity to meet colleagues in a relaxed setting was a huge draw for Mbaye to come to Syracuse, along with the film’s editor, Laurence Attali. Here’s part of our conversation.

NKR: I understand that your film was recommended by Ben Beye, who was here last year.

OWM: Yes, he talked to Owen Shapiro and my film was accepted. I am really happy to be here because at this festival I meet many filmmakers of different nationalities, and it’s difficult to meet them in other places. Here we have time to talk with them and we are in the same hotel, so it’s easier to make contacts. I think it’s a good thing. I’m really happy.

NKR: How did you come to make this film? You’ve been working on it for some time.

OWM: Yes, for many, many years. About 15 years, over 50 hours of footage. I made this portrait as an example to young people. I think it’s time now to show to young people the people who believe in something, who fight for something, and who win. Because now I think young people think it’s not possible. But sometimes you make some sacrifices in your life and in your love, but if you have an idea, you can follow the idea and win. And it is to show African youth that now you can be African and be emancipated. Some Africans think to be open about the world is to take on the culture of others. You can keep your culture and be open and attain modern life, you know? That’s the example I want to show.

NKR: Your sister uses the word “multicultural” to sum up your mother. And that comes through very strongly, that your mother has been able to move between cultures and to be very accomplished in each one.<br>

OWM: Yes, exactly. It’s that I want to show young people. You can have your culture, you can have your religion, and be open to others. And if you’re not open, you have a terrorist. If you are not open, you become a fanatic. We have the capacity – you can be Muslim, you can be Catholic, and also give the other their choice to be what they want to be. My mother and her generation traveled. She was born in the village. She went to school at St. Louis – in Senegal – after which she went to France. She returned to Senegal for independence and tried to make something for the country and the people. That’s why she’s open. And I think the young people today who travel can go anywhere, but they don’t open their eyes.

NKR: She was in Paris at a very important moment and you were yourself born in France.

OWM: I don’t remember my childhood in France. I just remember my education in Senegal. But Senghor and the Négritude movement – a cultural movement – they were with French intellectuals. You see that Picasso opened his eyes. He came to see African art and took its influence – because he’s open. If you are not open, you cannot make a body of work. And I think the best period was Négritude because they mixed African, they mixed Caribbean, they mixed French – and they spoke the same language. After, the same people wanted to create unity in Africa. But the French colonists didn’t want Africa unified. French colonization worked to break old alliances, old confederations among tribes.

NKR: The French wanted you to fight with each other.

OWM: Yes. And they broke the unity. It’s why Africa has so many problems. The United States is very strong because it’s united. Now you can’t name any country that can be strong alone.

NKR: The area that your mother work in and emphasized was arts and culture. Was there a choice on her part to emphasize arts and culture instead of politics?

OWM: Yes. Because my mother, when she come back to Senegal, she wanted to serve Senegal. She began with the women’s movement and culture. A little politics. But she didn’t want to be political, though all the Senegalese politicians met and talked with her. She made the first women’s association. She made the first journal about women. And the politicians were with her in Paris. They knew each other a long time ago.

NKR: Your mother is 82 now, very healthy and still working.

OWM: Yes. She is still working for the museum, because she doesn’t have money for the film journal. So she directs the museum in Gorée Island. And when you see her – [laughs] – when she goes to the meetings, she goes to the island, she takes the boat – she has energy.

NKR: Tell me a little bit more about your own filmmaking, because you’ve been making films for many years and have won some major awards at festivals such as Carthage, Milan and elsewhere.

OWM: Before Mother, the last movie I made was Fer et Verre in 2005, another portrait of a Senegalese woman, the painter Anta Germaine Gaye. Before that I made Xalima la Plume, a portrait of the Senegalese musician Seydina Insa Wade. Before that, my mother had organized a film festival in Senegal – RECIDAK – and I worked with her seven years. Before that I was Ben Beye’s assistant in his first film, the short film Les Princes noirs de Saint-Germaine des Prés. I worked on that film in Paris with Ben and also on his film Sey, Seyeti in Dakar. I made Dial-Diali, a short film about the aptitude of Senegalese women to charm the men. After that I made Fresque, about five Senegalese painters who go to Paris to make a fresco for a big salon near the Eiffel Tower. And I made Dakar Clando, which opened the Rotterdam Festival. I made Duunde Yakaar and my first film was a short film, Doomi Ngacc. That is about the village of my grandfather and the title means “child of.” I was also assistant director to Ousmane Sembene for his film Ceddo. I was assistant director for many films, also screenwriter, art director and producer.

NKR: You know I have emailed Ben Beye about meeting you and he said to ask you especially about the Africa Club. Would you tell me about the Africa Club?

OWM: You know, in Senegal, just after independence there was only one political party, with no opposition. And the young people – like us – formed a cultural group for talking to each other about politics without having a political party. We found the theater and cinema and conferences, you know, to talk to people. We didn’t have a party – instead we had a cultural and social club, and the name of this club was Africa. And my mother opened the house for the group Africa. And after that started I began working in cinema.

NKR: Ben said that your mother was his mother. And that she’s really the mother of your generation.

OWM: Yes.

NKR: And he said that Club Africa was where everybody met everybody else. How has that been for you?

OWM: Ben is a friend, but in Africa, Ben is my brother. Because my mother is the mother of all. My sister in Virginia, she put that on the poster for the film screening, “Mother of all.” Sometimes I say I have many sisters and brothers but we don’t have the same blood. But they are my sisters and brothers! Really, because they consider my mother like their own mother. If I see them, I say, ‘My sister! My brother!’ because we have the same education, the same upbringing. They were all the time in my mother’s house. I don’t know if Americans understand but in Africa it’s easy. Because Ben is my brother, I can’t fight Ben. Not only my friend and my colleague. There are other filmmakers – they are my colleagues, but Ben Beye is my brother.

NKR: One of the things I remember Ben talking about when he was here is that many of the movie theaters in Senegal have closed.

OWM: Yes, now the movie theaters are broken down. If you go to Dakar, you cannot see movies in the cinema. There’s no regular theater in Dakar. And Dakar was the city of cinema in Africa! We have tried to form “cine-clubs.” I started a cine-club in one restaurant in Dakar and some younger filmmakers started another cine-club in the cultural center. It’s really hard! And now you have a generation who never see a movie in the dark. They watch a movie on the computer or on TV. I say it’s a problem. For movies you must be in collectivity and in the dark. There’s movies, there’s television. It’s not the same. I think there is a transformation of the mentality of young filmmakers who don’t see movies in the dark. They don’t make movies like real movies. Because they are young now and they have rap songs, they make their films very fast, without concentration. A young filmmaker may make one, two, three films and never see a classic film.

NKR: When you were growing up there were lots of movies in Dakar.

OWM: Yes, yes. You would go with your girl friend, with your friends, with your family. If you had a meeting with anyone and you didn’t see a film, you were not happy. For two days after you go to see them, we would still talk about the film.

NKR: Are there some films you’ve seen here at this festival that you were glad to see?

OWM: I didn’t see many films because I have a problem with the language. My English is not good and I don’t understand the subtitles. But I understand that the editing makes the structure of the films. I saw a Hungarian film yesterday and two of Rob [Nilsson]’s, Need and Northern Lights. Yes – very beautiful. I liked his films very much.

NKR: Any rising young filmmakers in Senegal whose names we should know?

OWM: Yes, we have a young filmmaking generation and I think they can do well. I want to mention my partner – Laurent Attali, who did the editing of this film. She’s also co-producer, and she’s a filmmaker. She has directed many films in Senegal. We worked hard together because Mother is a film that only four persons made. Because there is the character, Annette d’Erneville, first. Me, I directed. Laurent Attali, editing. And the musician, Doudou Doukouré. It was enough – we four made this film.

NKR: And you shot it?

OWM: Yes, directed and shot and sound. It’s why this film is particular for me.

NKR: How did you come to work with Laurent?

OWM: Laurent came to RECIDAK after she come to Senegal to make a film, and I drove her around Senegal – for contacts for making a film – and I would tell her what I think, and we began to work on her film and after that, we continued to work on my film. She lives fifty percent in Senegal and fifty in France. Now she has Senegalese nationality. We go to Paris together today. She stays in Paris. I go on to Dakar and I come back for Cannes. Mère-bi will be at Cannes at the international market. The organization Culture France invited me.

*******

A shorter version of this article appeared in the May 14, 2009 print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle on page 17. & the full interview ran on the paper's website, www.cnylink.com - click Entertainment. Nancy covers the arts and writes the film column "Make it Snappy." She served on SYRFILM’s pre-screening committee this year’s festival and also in 2008.

Film Review #194: Tears for Sale/Čarlston za Ognjenku
2008
Director: Uroš Stojanović
Cast: Katarina Radivojević, Sonja Kolačarić, Stefan Kapičić, Nenad Jezdić

Cinema sometimes answers the horrors of modern war and its equally devastating aftermath in the countryside with fierce fantasy. US audiences will think readily of Guillermo del Toro’s 2006 Pan’s Labyrinth, for example. There, a lonely young girl took refuge in a protective parallel world based in myth and fairy tale as Franco’s Fascist regime held sway in the person of the sadistic Captain Vidal, whose mission was to root out resistance fighters among the mountain peasants. But even del Toro’s 1944 Spain is an orderly world when set next to the post-World War I Serbian mountains of director Uroš Stojanović’s debut feature.

Tears for Sale was added late to this year’s Syracuse International Film Festival (April 24 – May 3), so it’s missing from the printed program. Fortunately, there was room for it mid-evening on the first Sunday at the Palace Theater, where it’s the finale to the day’s program in that venue of experimental and fantasy shorts alternating with sober documentaries. Thus one arrives in the topsy-turvy world of Pokrp, the fictional mountain village in a nation that lost two-thirds of its male population in the trenches of the Great War. In Pokrp’s landscape, there seems to be no order save that of legend, curse, luck and their attendant obligations, even as distant Belgrade beckons throughout the story with its glittering new sky-scraper and its "new age" requiring a new dance.

The film opens in an ancient cemetery that’s largely underwater. On the shore, Ognjenka (Katarina Radivojević) and her sister Little Boginja (Sonja Kolačarić) bicker over whether taking a swim in such waters is cursed (the cemetery is flooded with the tears of their grandmother, a mourner by family profession). A voice-over meticulously, sometimes lyrically narrates how the family business has flourished. Only two men returned from the war in 1918 and the survivor of these two – more cemetery doings – blew himself sky-high after lacing the vineyard with land mines. Now, village women draw straws during harvest to enter the vineyard and, near the story’s end, one of the sisters will enter by choice to dance a last time – a tango – with her lover, after he ventures in by mistake.

These images continue. There is a great deal of mixing elemental life and death in Tears for Sale. Thus, the village inn keeps a specially potent “spider brandy” under lock and key, taken out to conjure up the village’s dead, zombie-like war veterans who retain their fatal injuries from the grave as they dance with the living. Thus a stately old hearse serves as a main conveyance in the sisters’ travels and love-making. The film has screened abroad as Funeral Brides and, a literal translation of its Serbian title, Charleston and Vendetta.

Like all good yarns, this one begs re-telling in all its twists and turns. But suffice it to say that Ognjenka and Little Boginja embark on a forced march, to return in three days with a man for the village to replace the late, lamented Grandpa Bisa. As they cross the map, other villages are similarly, comically afflicted. Then they encounter a two-man traveling side-show. Dragoljub Aleksic (Nenad Jezdić) makes his living being shot from a giant cannon as the "Man of Steel" – what better occupation and what more suitable image in a land destitute of virility? His side-kick is the bowler-hatted, mustachioed, initially shifty “King of the Charleston” (Stefan Kapičić), ostensibly the brains of the outfit. The four pair off and repeatedly consider slipping off to Belgrade, but return dutifully to Pokrp and there discover fidelity in the midst of riotous lust. A superb ensemble of women – an older executive type, a witch in a crow’s beak headdress who looses the grandmother's spirit as a flock of red birds from the open jaws of a cow's skull, a lusty young rival, that grandmother, and a bride whose groom was torn from her arms at the alter by the war – populate Tears for Sale.

New-comer Uroš Stojanović has made an extraordinarily accomplished and absorbing film. The son of veteran Serbian screen and TV actor Fedja Stojanović, he had considerable support and talent on-board besides the thoroughly committed cast. A joint production of France, Serbia and Gibraltar, the film had as major producer (and now European distributor) French filmmaker Luc Besson. Director’s Wong Kar-wai’s regular composer, Shigeru Umebayashi of Japan, did the score. Shot over three months in the fall of 2005 and taking three years for post-production, Tears for Sale is both Serbia’s most expensive film to date and its most successful indigenous box office hit. Despite some major festival screenings including Cannes and Toronto, except for January’s Santa Barbara festival it has been little seen in this country and it won’t get major European theatrical release until this summer. One day it’ll be on DVD, but don’t wait for that. Celebrate little Syracuse’s great luck to have it here.

********
See “Tears for Sale” on Sunday, April 26 at 8:45 PM at the Eastwood Palace, 2384 James Street, in Syracuse. This review was written for the Syracuse International Film Festival’s website, www.syrfilm.com, where other festival screenings & events are listed in detail.

Film Review #193: Appaloosa

2008
Director: Ed Harris

Cast: Ed Harris, Viggo Mortensen, Renee Zellweger, Ariadna Gil

It’s a scene that replays the second time as well as you remember the first. Announced by the whistle of the noonday train, the comely St. Louis widow, Mrs. Allison French (Renée Zellweger), unexpectedly alights in the town of Appaloosa, New Mexico Territory, 1882. Gliding through the incessant wind and dust, she crosses the broad main street, makes her way into the café. From his horse Deputy Marshall Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen) watches this, follows her with his eyes and his whole torso, cat-like, cranes his neck, almost forgets himself. Even his horse pricks its ears and prances, tightly reined. Heightening all this tension, there’s Jeff Beal’s light film score of strings plucked and bowed, woozy with sharps and flats.

These exhilarating few minutes are as witty and affecting a snapshot of a man’s sudden fascination as exists on film, and reason enough to see this one, although more exist. The movie is last year’s vastly underrated Western from Ed Harris, Appaloosa, adapted from Robert B. Parker’s 2005 novel. With mixed reviews from critics, Appaloosa still did well enough with audiences for a five-month theatrical run and has been out on DVD since January. But Central New Yorkers can see it again on the big screen at the Eastwood Palace during this year’s Syracuse International Film Festival. Afterward there’s a Q&A with actor Tom Bower, a returning friend of the film festival, co-screenwriter Robert Knott and film score composer and trumpeter Beal.

Ed Harris produced, co-scripted and, in his second such effort, directed Appaloosa. He also he stars as Virgil Cole, itinerant mercenary peace-keeper. But it’s Hitch’s voice-over that book-ends the film. If the two men often communicate with little more than nods and glances it’s not that Hitch is tongue-tied. This fastidious, disciplined man begins by informing us that he’d come West, a West Point graduate like his father before him, after the War Between the States. He did some Indian fighting – the Indian Wars also closed down Appaloosa’s copper mine some years back – then Hitch had joined up with Cole a dozen years ago. Appaloosa is the story of how the two hire out to rid this town of its resident warlord, Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), and his thugs, and how each in his way outgrows the other.

Led by hotel owner Abner Raines (Tom Bower), a trio of city fathers hire Cole and Hitch after two of Bragg’s louts accost a Chicago businessman who’s come to re-open the mine, murder him and rape his wife; Bragg murders the marshall when he tries to arrest them. Hitch and Cole settle in, the latter smitten by Mrs. French. Hitch passes time with a bar girl (the excellent Spaniard Ariadna Gil, who I wish had gotten a heftier role as Katie).

In a fairly traditional working-out of plot, Cole and Hitch catch Bragg. He’s convicted, escapes, is caught again and eventually returns to town - pardoned by the president - to set himself up as new owner of the town hotel-casino. These circumstances serve as the means for Hitch and Cole to work out their relationship and that which each has with Mrs. French, some of which centers around whether Hitch made a pass at her or vice versa.

Less traditional is that the promise of Hitch’s first glimpse of "Allie – she likes to be called Allie" does not play out in the usual way; Hitch wastes little time getting clear that pursuit of Mrs. French is not a good idea. But that lovely first glimpse means he has great empathy for the effect she has on Cole – enough to ask Cole at one point a most unusual question among men in a Western, "Are you alright – how do you feel?"

What is satisfying about this film is its more nuanced comment on American life than might have been the case. Ever the reliable measure and mirror of our national mood, the Western has enjoyed a come-back in the new millennium’s first decade of terrorism, "ungoverned spaces," nation-building and our deep recoil at our own violent behavior. Hence such rich successes as David Milch's Deadwood and the Cohen Brothers' No Country for Old Men, for example. The Western has both offered enough distance to work out how we feel about current conflicts abroad and related policies at home, and a ready slate for the reinvention and escape from history that frontiers promise. As a form, the Western often straddles a line between the two.

There are plenty of moments when Appaloosa veers toward literalism. For example, when Cole and Hitch make their bargain with the jittery town fathers, Cole says – easily evoking the last eight years – "We need a lot of laws to make it all legal." Intriguingly, the DVD extras suggest that Harris considered – certainly prepared and filmed – a number of scenes that could have taken Appaloosa much further in that direction. There’s a deleted scene that would've opened the film with the Chicago entrepreneur demonstrating how the town's re-opened copper mine will supply a new electrical industry just emerging back East, followed by the actual attack on him and his wife. And there’s a deleted scene in which Bragg reintroduces himself to the townspeople after his apparent transformation with words so common in public life in recent years, "I’ve been an evil man…. God had a plan for me."

Instead Harris has chosen another emphasis with greater imaginative possibilities. So for example, as a function of his bond with Hitch, Cole is comfortable enough to explore the new meanings that go with reinvention and will find their way into practice. One of these concerns Cole’s taste for broadening his vocabulary. Interestingly, while Mrs. French’s teasing leaves Cole flustered and angry because he’s not sure what she means, he’s confident enough of his standing with Hitch to ask for "the word I mean" when he falters. These exchanges involve concepts and discernment that one grows into with a frontier’s spaciousness – the opposite of using such space simply for blunt liberty as Bragg’s men do – concepts like "jurisdiction," "commiserate," "sequester," "disparage," "arduous," and the perhaps modern notion the killing is a "by-product" of enforcing the law.

Although the film festival prides itself on its internationalism, screening a film like Appaloosa and then offering the opportunity to talk about it provide a new appreciation of classic American cinema.

*******

A shorter version of this review appears in the April 16, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly print edition. Appaloosa screens at the Syracuse International Film Festival on Thursday, April 30 at 7:00 PM at the Palace Theater on James Street in Eastwood. Q&A afterward with the film’s co-writer/producer Robert Knott, cast member Tom Bower and film score composer Jeff Beal. Earlier Thursday, at 2:00 PM, Jeff Beal is part of a discussion on "Music and Sound in Film" in Hamlin Auditorium, Newhouse 3 on Waverly Avenue at Syracuse University, along with sound designer/editor Jane Tattersall, founder of Canada’s largest sound studio, Tattersall Sound. Check www.syrfilm.com for festival programming and special events.

Film Review #192: Need
2002/05
Director: Rob Nilsson
Cast: Diane Gaidry, Marianne Heath, Gabrielle Maltz Larkin, Brette McCabe, Cory Duval, David Fine

Of the four films by Rob Nilsson that the Syracuse International Film Festival (SIFF) screens this year, only Need comes from his 9 @ Night series, a film cycle of nine movies. Mostly 9 @ Night takes place in and around San Francisco’s red-light Tenderloin District – despite detours to Reno, Oakland, the docks, the aquarium and some other Bay neighborhoods – and roughly over the years 2000-2005. Overall, the cycle chronicles almost 50 characters living precariously on society’s fringe – hookers, homeless, forgers, pimps, vice cops, scammers of all sorts and a few tourists – with looping time and some recurring key scenes and people across films. The aging poet and stroke victim Phil Berkowitz (Teddy Weiler), for example, appears in six of the 9 @ Night films, returning as a ghost in Need after drowning in an earlier installment, and even briefly barges into an entirely separate film, Nilsson’s UC Berkeley campus tale, Security (also 2005). Another, the mysterious and threatening Schumacher (Ron Perlman), though mentioned often in tones of warning, actually appears just once.

In the fall of 2007, Nilsson called 9 @ Night done. Shot in somewhat different order than the completed line-up, it’s been screened a number of times now in entirety, usually three films a day over three days. If seeing Need prompts you to seek out the rest, available in a boxed DVD set from Nilsson’s Citizen Cinema in Berkeley, good.

Need is the cycle’s seventh film and centers on a quartet of women, all sex workers. Three – stripper Jane (Marianne Heath), her mother the prostitute Lou (Brette McCabe), and manager/phone sex worker Francesca (Gabrielle Maltz Larkin) – appear a number of times throughout the cycle; street-walker Petite (Diane Gaidry), who plies the aquarium’s shark tank walk-way for dates and seems unlikely to live long, only here. While some see Nilsson’s work as largely concerned with male protagonists and how they work out their father issues, that view misses much of his attention to women. A raw and gritty film, much of Need focuses the difficult relationships these women have with each other as well as the pursuit of Petite by the creepy Salowitz (David Fine, who at some disorienting moments seems to channel Ralph Fiennes’ Voldemort). Need also contains two scenes likely to stay with you a long time afterward for their sheer dignity and tenderness.

One I call Lou’s “Roethke moment.” Addicted to heroin, not getting many dates these days through Francesca’s escort service, and increasingly reckless, Lou takes her business back to the street and alleys. Chased and beaten by two pimps for working their territory, shooting up and crashing in fearsome spots, in the end wandering dazed, Lou has a moment that seems to promise redemption. A silver-haired college professor looks her up after “that night in Long Beach” and invites Lou to join him while, at long last, he writes his book. It’s one of Nilsson’s bitterest comments anywhere – and he’s an old English major from Harvard himself – on a certain form of predatory intellectualism. First, the professor tries softening Lou up with a poem he says she’s inspired him to write. Mightily startled when Lou points out that he’s quoting Theodore Roethke’s “I Knew a Woman,” the professor soldiers on, suggesting that “Stanley and Blanche could’ve worked out” and that she’ll have to “pull her weight” in their new domestic arrangement. He means he expects her to keep whoring. After a long and level, wordless gaze, Lou stands and walks away.

Another scene is a variation on one Nilsson inserts as a grace note near the end of several films, in which a couple lie embracing in bed. Here, one story thread concerns how Jane and the wheelchair-bound Bid Qualquiver (Cory Duval) circle one another. Bid appears in four 9 @ Night films, most elaborately in the sixth. Scheme C6 details the physically charismatic Bid’s fierce rebellion against his vice cop father Qually (Bruce Marovich), living on the street with his motorcycle, and the pivotal showdown – recurring several times through the cycle from different perspectives – that cripples him. For all her 9 @ Night appearances, Jane smiles only once as she does at Bid in Need. Having angrily insisted “I can’t” when he thinks Jane wants sex, Bid returns after he’s mugged. What we see afterward is the early morning sky lightening above them as they still sleep through the window that frames the Bay Bridge.

On paper, the 9 @ Night films begin to sound like one of those Russian novels that start off with a chart so you can keep all the characters straight, except that you don’t get lost. Instead, the on-screen recurrence of pivotal scenes, places and characters helps us enter and navigate this world. While not conventional exposition, it still serves to provide bearings. The NYU-based Macedonian filmmaker Milcho Manchevski – who has a similar interest in fracturing narrative time and whose latest feature, Shadows, screens at SIFF this year too – has achieved something similar in his growing body of work by returning repeatedly to some shooting locations and using many of the same actors.

The billiards film Chalk (1996) and then the 9 @ Night films were produced over 14 years time from Nilsson’s weekly acting workshop in San Francisco’s inner-city Tenderloin district, first called the Tenderloin Action Group and then, after moving to the district’s YMCA, the Tenderloin yGroup. Since Nilsson will be present for Q & A after festival screenings plus participate in the politics-and-film panel, plenty of discussion will occur during his time in Syracuse about his eager adoption of digital filmmaking, his reliance on editing to “discover” his films, and his “direct action” method of filmmaking, in which often non-professional players extensively workshop their characters’ back-stories but don’t rehearse the scenes that are actually filmed.

*******
This review was written for SIFF's website, www.syrfilm.com, which lists this year's festival program and events. In addition to Need, which screens on Friday, 5/1 at 5:15 PM at the Everson Museum on Harrison St., SIFF screens Nilsson's first feature film, Northern Lights (1979), on Wednesday, 4/29 at 7:00 PM at the Eastwood Palace Theater on James St. Also on Saturday, 5/2, both at the Everson Museum, last year's Frank Dead Souls at 12 noon & Presque Isle at 7:30 PM. Nilsson participates on SIFF's Politics & Film panel on Wednesday, 4/29 at 2:00 PM in Syracuse University's Newhouse 3 on Waverly Avenue in Herg Auditorium. Watch for my interview with Rob Nilsson in the Syracuse City Eagle weekly on 4/23, on-line at www.cnylink.com.

Film Review #191: Giving Voice
2009
Director: Mišo Suchý
Cast: Syracuse Community Choir

You’d need a heart of stone not to love this movie on the night it premiered at Art Rage in late January. Consider the event itself a kind of triple whammy. First the packed, enthusiastic crowd itself, which included many members and friends of the Community Choir. The audience lining the walls easily doubled those in the folded chairs filling the center of the room. The Community Choir’s 20th anniversary concert three years ago is the subject of Giving Voice, Mišo Suchý’s half-hour documentary.

Then, the gallery walls themselves held the exhibition Voices of Diversity, more than 100 of Lida Suchý’s black-and-white photos of Choir members. These are arresting and powerful, some large format single shots and some arranged in grids of up to twelve images. For a project whose subject is inclusive community-building, these simple and straight-on portraits are at first mildly disconcerting. They utterly lack the quality of "social grease" and over-amped affect that often marks the glib, ad-like visual style of such efforts. Instead, these are images of individual choir members at rest, both embraced and given space by the photographer’s patient attention. They are in every sense "stills" in whose presence you turn down your own volume in order to return that attention – and that ripens you for the film, which then sends you back to the stills.

The Suchýs now live and teach here in Syracuse – she at Onondaga Community College and he in Transmedia at Syracuse University. They met in Eastern Europe around the same time Karen Mihalyi was dreaming up the Community Choir. Lida was an American art-exchange student seeking the Ukrainian village in the Carpathian Mountains that her parents left when the Soviets took over. A native of the city of Bratislava – then part of pre-partition Czechoslovakia – Mišo was exploring the Eastern Slovakia region from which his father had come. Each has seen their own work published, exhibited and screened widely here and abroad. But from the start they also photographed together. Much of their work is collaboration and that often combines still and moving images. Their projects often focus on identity and the immigrant’s search for home and belonging, themes that certainly echo concerns of the Community Choir.

Sometimes these projects appear in print in magazines (for example, National Geographic and Life) or book format (Mišo’s 1997 When I Was and Was Not at Home gathers some of his earlier photo series and includes an illuminating afterword by the Slovakian photo critic Václav Macek, who runs the annual summer international Month of Photography festival in Bratislava). Some are film documentaries like his About Dogs and People (1999) or Home Movie: A diary for my American-born son (2003), which Suchý says chronicles how he became a Syracusan. The award-winning Pictograph (2007), available on DVD from Anthology Film Archives, offers both film and still gallery components with Lida’s images and drawings of a Ukrainian woman artist from the village of Kryvorivnya. They hope to mount movie-photo events like the Art Rage premiere again at film festivals and other galleries and eventually offer in a form that would publish the photos and include the film.

I’ve watched Giving Voice several times now since January – an earlier version screened last February at the Eastwood Palace along with Pictograph – and each time there’s something fresh to appreciate. These affectionate and immensely telling moments are often brief. In one of his favorite parts (and mine too), Mišo Suchý follows the passing of a collection basket among seated Choir members during a pause in a rehearsal. Elsewhere, a glorious spotlight finale cuts abruptly to the same performer (Colleen Kattau) industriously vacuuming in the background after rehearsal. A blind singer is excited by some new Braille lyrics and, running her fingers over the raised dots, she breathes, "Oh, this has ‘deep blue sea’ in it!" Over and over, people quietly make time and room for each other and Suchý’s camera finds them.

The DVD also has a five-minute short on the children’s section and a 16-minute interview with Mihalyi. The Community Choir’s back story is well known in Central New York and there’s not much of it in the film itself, so – while the film holds up without it – this material is valuable.

Mihalyi went to Nicaragua in 1984 and travelled widely in the villages there, witnessing efforts to use the arts to build community. By then, Mihalyi had spent a decade working in the Women’s Movement, a founder of Women’s Info – still the longest continuously operating independent women’s community resource center in the country – as well as the fondly-remembered annual summer gathering called Women’s Harvest. Such projects struggled with diversity of age, race, sexual preference, class and a spectrum of disabilities, as well as evolving peace, justice and green issues. The next year, after Mihalyi returned from Nicaragua, she decided to start a no-audition choir which anyone – really anyone – could join. In the early years of the Choir, she told Syracuse University researcher Bob Bogdan that the idea "just came to me." Later in the same interview, commenting on the effort that including everybody really takes, Mihalyi added wryly that the Choir had "singing disabled" members who needed extra help too.

Giving Voice devotes considerable space to this "making room at the table." And the DVD’s Mihalyi interview adds the dimension of nearly a quarter century’s perspective. Now 58, Mihalyi recalls how, before Nicaragua and the Women’s Movement, she’d grown up in a small town in northern New York and she had wanted to recreate in the Choir the same sense of knowing people all their lives.

"We’ve seen babies grow up and we’ve lost people too," she tells the filmmaker.

Though anyone watching this film will grasp that, locals will know its specifics. For example, there on-screen is the gracious, white-haired Quaker social worker Dick Mundy – Suchý has since filmed his memorial service in Hendricks Chapel – or the once-little Gabe, all grown up now and joining singer Colleen Kattau on-stage. These two women lead the choir rousingly in Jolie Rickman’s Emma Goldman song (you may know the chorus) –

You show up and you smile for no reason
It’s all so simple and clear
Like we’re the hope of a hundred generations
Like you and I have no fear.
Rocking in the soul of Emma Goldman…

This sequence, along with Kattau’s recollection of the singer-songwriter – lost to cancer before the film was made – is among the high points. In another musical segment, Sukosh Fearon’s rollicking piano drives another jubilant Choir favorite, "When All God’s Children Get Together."

Such sequences are built on cuts back and forth between a month's worth of rehearsal sessions and the Choir's 20th anniversary concert and they are among the best concert movie footage I have seen anywhere. In compressing performance in this way from the standard musical film play-list format, they depend on split-second timing that Suchý attributes to his former student, filmmaker and musician Ryan Tebo, who edited much of the film. Suchý – who joked recently that his early films were longer because "I was a young genius" – is clear this film is intentionally the story of how that concert came together and not yet the story of the Choir itself. But he applied recently for a grant that would expand this film into that one.

*******
A shorter version of this article appears in the March 19th print edition of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. The Voices of Diversity photo exhibition came down in mid-February, but the new film Giving Voice is available on DVD exclusively at Art Rage: The Norton Putter Gallery, at 505 Hawley Ave., Syracuse, 315.559.5387 or http://www.artragegallery.org/.

Film Review #190: Brick Lane
2007/DVD 2009
Director: Sarah Gavron
Cast: Tannishtha Chatterjee, Satish Kaushik, Christopher Simpson

“Why do you like me?” asks Nazneen (Bengali actress Tannishtha Chatterjee) one day of her younger lover, the hip, hunky, London-reared Karim (Christopher Simpson).

“Who says I like you?” he answers, suddenly shy. But when pressed into emotional territory Nazneen has never entered with her older husband, Karim says she’s unlike the modern girls with their mini-skirts or the religious girls, always arguing. He says she’s “the real thing” – a girl from a village in their homeland of Bangladesh.

It’s this exchange that a friend of mine recalled most vividly from Monica Ali’s 2003 novel, Brick Lane, an exchange that made it into director Sarah Gavron’s 2007 film version of the same title. But equally charged is a later scene between Nazneen and her husband Chanu (Bombay-based director and occasional actor Satish Kaushik), when he admits he’s never become the “big man” he felt he must before he could return home.

“What is this ‘big man’?” she says, grasping his shoulders. “Do you think that’s why I love you?”

In Nazneen’s world such choices have a steeper price than you might think. Except for flashbacks to Nazneen’s childhood, the film compresses the novel’s longer time-span to the year 2001. Having been sent from her village in the 80s to London at 17 to marry Chanu, Nazneen has lost an infant son and is raising two daughters. (As the elder, Shahana, Naeema Begum delivers a small gem of performance as a rebellious teen whose turmoil penetrates her mother.)

For those long years in chilly London, Nazneen has imagined love at second hand, mostly through intermittent, well-embroidered letters from her beloved younger sister Hasina. Around her affair with Karim and against growing backlash to the World Trade Center attacks, a series of criss-crossing reversals and decisions occur. Dutiful and retiring, Nazneen comes to see London, her husband and herself differently. Karim morphs from street entrepreneur to more observant Muslim community activist. And Chanu, admirer of novelists Thackeray and Proust and the philosopher David Hume, decides he cannot stay in the West, though for years he’s ignored Nazneen’s pleas to visit home.

The East London neighborhood called Brick Lane has always been what the Irish actor who plays Karim calls a “place of diaspora.” In the 1700s French Huguenots settled there, later Methodists, and then it became a Jewish enclave. The racial harassment portrayed in Brick Lane – Karim’s participation in the cultural group called the Bengal Tigers occurs partly in defense against a gang of harassing right-wing thugs who go by the name Lion Hearts – builds on a history of real attacks against the London Bangladeshis alone that dates from the 1950s, when they were a considerably smaller community.

By 2001, the Bangladeshi concentrated there numbered about 300,000, the vast majority Sunni Muslims from Bangladesh’s northwest Sylhet district. Many lived in the shabby, hulking, public housing high-rises the British call “estates.” The largest wave arrived in the 1970s following their war of independence from Pakistan, during which 3 million Bangladeshi died. This is slaughter that Chanu cites in his pivotal speech in the film, when he attends one of the Bengal Tigers’ community meetings – partly a challenge to Karim and partly an elder’s warning to the young – after which Nazneen, in simply taking his hand, shifts everything between them.

By last year, another shift had occurred. Brick Lane’s Bangladeshi population had nearly doubled from 2001 levels, making it one of the UK’s largest, youngest and fastest growing immigrant groups. And in the summer of 2006, when Gavron filmed her movie, Brick Lane’s ethnic shops and restaurants had also become tourist destinations.

Gavron has emphasized the support given the production by that community, and she credits assistant director Rahul Amin, himself a Brick Lane resident and filmmaker, with being able to finally make the film at all. Young men from the neighborhood met with Simpson as he prepared to play Karim, and Brick Lane women with Chatterjee. But some Brick Lane merchants objected so strenuously to the novel – saying it portrayed their community as “uneducated, illiterate and unclean” – that Gavron had to move even exterior shooting elsewhere.

But such complaints seem disingenuous. Chanu is devoted to learning and for years Nazneen’s tie to dreams beyond her own arranged life lies in the power of letters with her sister. And it’s another independent countrywoman, her Westernized friend Razia (Harvey Virdi) – who smokes cigarettes and has cut her hair (“all that brushing and brushing!”) – who offers Nazneen a job sewing if she decides to stay, a perhaps troubling example of encouragement.

Some commentators see objections to the novel and ensuing film as having more to do with Nazneen’s own journey, her creator’s telling tales – Ali was born in Bangledesh though reared mostly in England – and the similar reception other Muslim women artists have received from conservative elements in some European immigrant communities.

Paradoxically much of Brick Lane’s strength as a story stems from these cultural clashes. It’s not just that Nazneen is a woman imprisoned by convention (A.O. Scott says she echoes Emma Bovary.) It’s no coincidence that Chanu favors 19th century novels. This traditional, conservative man shares sensibilities with an era in which adultery mattered in plots and communities in ways it may not now. In a review of Ali’s novel – published pointedly on 9/11/03 in The New Republic – James Wood suggests the “ties of marriage, burdens of religion, obligations of civic duty and pressures of propriety” found in the some immigrant groups reinvigorate and clarify our Western stories precisely because they hark back to the themes and concerns and oppressions that helped generate the Western novel to begin with.

The Brick Lane DVD’s extensive commentaries – out since March 10th – are well worth seeking out. But Community Folk Art Center screens the film this Saturday afternoon with a talk afterward from Bangladesh-born Dr. Farhana Sultana of Syracuse University, who lived and taught in London during the film’s 2006 production controversy.

*******
Screening of Brick Lane on March 14 at 2:00 PM, Community Folk Art Center, 805 E. Genesee St. A shorter version of this review appears in the 3/12/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly.

Film Review #189: Wendy and Lucy
2008
Director: Kelly Reichardt
Cast: Michelle Willliams, Walter Dalton, Larry Fessenden

Not too far into Kelly Reichardt’s latest road trip film, Wendy Carroll (Michelle Williams), the slight, dark-haired drifter in cut-offs and hoodie, has been dragged into the manager’s office at Jack’s Market for stealing a roll and a can of I AM’s dog food. You can tell the manager would like to let this go.

"Well," he says with a sigh to his zealous clerk, "what are we talking here?"

But Andy (John Robinson), the blond teen-ager who’s "watched the whole thing," his face red and blotchy with indignation, the gold cross at his throat flashing, insists it’s not the money, it’s about setting an example.

"I’m not from around here," says Wendy quickly, sensing an opening that diffident apologies had not provided. "I can’t be an example."

The part about not being "from around here" is a line Wendy uses often, until it comes to resemble a song’s refrain. She’d used it the night before, chatting with another woman who asked her where the local store was, when searching for her dog Lucy led her to the campfire of some "gutter punks" by the railroad. (These are homeless teens who travel by hopping trains; the extras for this scene were hired from a camp near Portland’s rail-yards.) She’d used it that morning when the Walgreen’s security guard (Walter Dalton) wakes her up and says she can’t sleep in the parking lot and must move her car. It echoes as "just passing through" when she pays her shop-lifting fine and again when she gives her sister in Muncie’s address at the dog pound. Later Bill the car mechanic (Will Patton) will bounce the line back to her – "You’re a long way from home, aren’t you?" – and the security guard will sympathetically lament that "you can’t get a job without an address – it’s all fixed!"

Wendy and Lucy covers roughly three days during which Wendy Carroll’s already frayed and tattered life comes apart. Having set out in an ’88 Honda Accord from Great Bend, Indiana, she lands in Wilsonville, Oregon, an equally frayed and tattered former mill town just outside Portland along the railroad north. With $525 left, she’s heading for Alaska and a job in the fish canneries. In Salt Lake City, a guy had told her the car’s serpentine belt was going, but now the head gasket goes too. While occupied with the receiving end of setting an example for local scoff-laws, Wendy loses Lucy to the dog-catcher.

In the end, though Wendy finds Lucy lazing happily in the yard of a "foster" volunteer from the pound, she goes on alone, hopping a train into the chilly twilight. I have watched this film three times now since the awards season screener arrived in my mailbox in late November; knowing the end doesn’t prevent seeing it freshly each time. This time through, though it’s been called "serene" and is considerably softer than Michael Haneke’s 2003 Time of the Wolf, I couldn’t help thinking of his train rumbling through another ominous landscape.

After its premier last May at Cannes followed by some other top fests, Wendy and Lucy screened theatrically on the two coasts in December just long enough to qualify for Oscar nominations, and didn’t make it, despite other critical praise and some top ten lists. Regular theatrical release, starting in January, is now steadily underway, with bookings through the end of May.

Reichardt, who lives most of the year in Queens with Lucy, made this film in August 2007 for about $300,000. Michelle Williams worked for free and refrained from showers for the length of the 18-day shoot. Reichardt co-wrote the script with Portland author Jon Raymond, based on his story "Train Choir." Reichardt and Raymond got the idea from public discussion after Hurricane Katrina and the question of what we owe one another, but this theme is no less ingrained in the Pacific Northwest. While Lucy is still lost, Wendy sits in a diner making flyers to post as the camera pans past another patron reading Ken Kesey's saga of the Stamper logging family's fight against the unions, Sometimes a Great Notion.

Recently interviewed on NPR’s "Fresh Air," Reichardt said she used trains in place of music –"the sounds of commerce as a score" – except for the tune that Wendy hums (echoed in the closing credits and written by musician-actor Will Oldham, who plays the gutter punk Icky). This use of train sound climaxes in one brief terrifying night scene when Wendy crosses paths with a man in the woods (Larry Fessenden, in one of the film’s many performance gems).

Reichardt and Raymond worked together on Old Joy (2006) and have another feature underway with the working title Meek’s Cut-off, a Western "from a feminine perspective" set in 1845 Oregon, making a trilogy that Reichardt says explores the American dream. Most strangers Wendy encounters are decent, courteous folk. Some are generous – inch by inch, the security guard befriends her and this mechanic plays against type – but it only takes one Andy.

*******
This review appears in the March 5 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. See Wendy and Lucy at Manlius Cinema for one week starting March 6. Watch the trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vgjLIdcNxw. Wendy and Lucy opens in 17 other cities, including Ithaca, this week, and comes out on DVD in May. To read Nancy’s review of Old Joy on this site, click on 2007 in Archives and go to May.

Film Review #188: Hunger
2008
Director: Steve McQueen
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham, Stuart Graham
Midway through this film about Bobby Sands, the first of ten Irish nationalist prisoners to die in the 1981 hunger strike in the North of Ireland in a bid to reclaim P.O.W. status from their British jailers, Sands (Michael Fassbender) tells a priest about a trip he took as a boy.

Sands was a cross-country runner in school – Father Moran (Liam Cunningham) says this explains a lot – and at 12 crossed the border to lush, green Donegal, a chance to run against boys from the Irish Republic “and Protestants too.” Immersed in countryside unlike industrialized Belfast – listening, you feel this was his first naked contact with his own land – he’d gone for a warm-up jog in nearby woods along a stream. There Sands encountered “five boys from Cork, deliberating what to do” about a foal that had snapped its leg between some rocks in the water. Knowing he’d somehow get blamed for this mishap anyway and seeing the animal’s pain, Sands drowned the foal.

Sands recalls an irate priest dragged him back through those woods and tells Moran, “I could take the punishment for everyone and I had the respect of the other boys. I knew I did right by that foal.” A pause. “I’m clear on the repercussions.”

This scene – really the second of three acts in playwright Enda Walsh’s stylized script – comprises a 17-minute, single-take exchange between Sands and Moran shot nearly in silhouette, until the first lit close-up when Sands relates that Donegal incident. Between small talk about Moran’s younger brother – also a priest, a “pushy little twerp” – getting the parish assignment Moran wanted and Sands’ dry jokes about using Bible pages only from the Book of Lamentations to roll cigarettes, Moran tries every argument to dissuade Sands from the impending strike.

Much of the scene’s dramatic strength pivots finally on Sands’ recourse to resonant image. (When Sands later nears death, he first sees his 12-year-old self beside the infirmary bed, then returns to that now-foggy path in the woods.) Though itself a fiction, this scene with Moran seems faithful to Sands’ considerably well-developed poetic side – his vivid prison writings are available in paperback – and clarifies the approach to history taken by Walsh and director Steve McQueen, the son of West Indian immigrants and a British Turner Prize-winning visual artist.

Though punctuated with two chilling voice-over sound clips from British PM Margaret Thatcher’s speeches, this is not the literal historic treatment many wanted – not regarding Ireland’s ancient tradition of hunger strike as means of complaint (dating from pre-Christian times), its closer tie to Ireland’s early 20th century independence, civil war and partition (notably the 1920 death of Cork’s mayor, Terrence MacSwiney, which Gerry Adams says directly inspired Gandhi’s 17 hunger strikes) or even surrounding events in Long Kesh (McQueen’s scrolling text uses the British name, “Maze Prison”).

In the first act, which opens with guard Robert Lohan (Stuart Graham) washing his hands Pilate-like, depicts a pair of cell-mates living with the daily grind of monotony, filth and sudden brutality, and includes a boyish, helmeted riot trooper who flinches before naked prisoners as he strikes his plastic shield with his baton and bellows, Sands emerges only gradually. In the third act, instead of recounting the trips of high-level emissaries to Sands’ bedside (European Parliament members and the Pope’s secretary among them) or Sands’ in-absentia election to British Parliament (over 30,000 votes), McQueen and Walsh meditate on Sands’ excruciating wasting. As tenderly as some medical staff treat him, a beefy aide with “UDA” tattooed on his knuckles (for the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defense Association) lets Sands collapse naked on the floor and carries him, Pieta-like, back to bed. The accumulating visual imagery here is frank. When Sands opens his eyes one day, his vision deteriorating, to make out his mother dozing off, your mind goes straight to the apostles sleeping in Gethsemane.

Once specializing in short, often silent, gallery video installations, McQueen moved to feature-length cinema with his own west London boyhood recollections of TV bulletins that counted out Sands’ last 66 days and Goya’s war-time paintings as his model. He says Britain’s Channel 4 Film approached him with this project over five years ago, before Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo exposés. Although the Wall Street Journal (1/16) included Hunger among new European films that risk glorifying terrorism, McQueen and Walsh seem more intent on accounting for the enduring depth of response to Sands and the cost on all sides. (One of the most breath-stopping moments is built upon the guard Robert Lohan's sudden death in his invalid, unseeing mother's lap).

Hunger took the Camera d’Or for best first film at Cannes last year (with similar prizes in Sydney, Toronto and elsewhere, and spots on several annual Best lists). But it arrives here late, not opening theatrically in the US until March 20th in limited release. It screens locally next week, the finale in the Central New York Irish-American Cultural Institute’s annual film fest. Curator Jim MacKillop has provided a thread and some background by starting off with two films covering independence, civil war and partition, George Morrison’s seldom-seen 1961 documentary Saoirse?/Freedom? and Ken Loach’s 2006 drama – like Hunger, another Cannes-disrupter – The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

*******
A shorter version of this review appears in the 2/12/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the column “Make it Snappy.” Hunger screens next Tuesday, 2/17, 7:00 PM, Pebble Hill Presbyterian Church, 5299 Jamesville Rd., DeWitt (opposite Manlius Pebble Hill School), with discussion afterward. Thanks to Jim MacKillop for letting me preview this film. See 2007 entries on this site for my review of Loach's Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Film Review #187: The Wackness
2008
Director: Jonathan Levine
Cast: Ben Kingsley, Josh Peck, Olivia Thirlby

You might remember Robert De Niro as the drill instructor in Men of Honor, bellowing that line, willing Cuba Gooding, Jr. to his feet, “Stand up, Navy diver!”

George Tilman, Jr., hasn’t directed a film since 2000, when his Men of Honor portrayed the struggles of Carl Brashear, the first African American to successfully enter the ranks of deep sea Navy divers. So there’s plenty of anticipation now that his new film is about to open in wide release this Friday. That film is another biopic, Notorious, which relates the saga of Christopher Wallace – better known as The Notorious B.I.G. – and promises to vividly reanimate some aspects of the mid-90s Hip-Hop era. Notorious B.I.G. was gunned down in a rapper feud in 1997 at the age of 24, but in the summer of 1994 he was just exploding onto the New York City music scene and by that September had released his debut album, Ready to Die.

As a companion to Tilman’s Notorious, there’s a weird little movie just out on DVD January 6th that offers its own view of that sweltering New York City summer and the pervasive reach of B.I.G.’s music and Hip-Hop culture in general. The Wackness, writer-director Jonathan Levine’s second feature, opened theatrically last July to mixed reviews. Tellingly, the soundtrack CD release preceded the film in June - a classic compilation of tracks from B.I.G. himself plus Method Man (who has a minor part as a Jamaican drug dealer in the film), Faith Evans, Craig Mack, Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, KRS-One, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Raekwon, R. Kelly, Biz Markie and Wu-Tang Clan. The soundtrack CD leaves out the juke-box version of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” that figures as background in one bar scene of the film, but that may be just as well.

Such star power as The Wackness has derives from Ben Kingsley – not in his trademark shaved head but with flowing locks – as Dr. Jeffrey Squires, a private psychiatrist who barters therapy sessions for the product that marijuana dealer Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck) sells out of the shave-ice freezer cart he amiably pushes around Manhattan. Squires has a weekend house on Fire Island too, which figures prominently in Luke’s education as the summer of ’94 progresses.

The film spans the months between Luke’s high school graduation and his departure for his “safety school” – the college application seniors fall back on when their first and second choice schools don’t come through. Over these heat-soaked several months, Luke and Squires become friends of sorts, rambling around night-time Manhattan, getting stoned together, talking about life – this runs to Squires’ urgent advise to live in the moment – getting arrested at one point, and looking for girls. (Ben Kinsley making out with a blond dread-locked Mary-Kate Olsen in a bar’s phone booth is one of the creepier May-December screen duos within memory).

Both their lives undergo quiet but seismic shifts. In a scary economic climate reminiscent of today’s, Luke’s father losses his investments and the family’s eviction from the upper West Side rudely catapults them across the river to bunk in with Luke’s New Jersey grandmother. Shapiro and his wife Kristin (Famke Janssen) mutually decide to divorce after an excruciating get-away weekend. Then there is Squires’ step-daughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), the lovely, self-possessed girl who never noticed Luke all through high school and now has the summer on her hands. This starts hopefully enough – she’s gentle with his inexperience – but you needn’t be world-weary to soon know how it ends. He watches her run through the Fire Island surf, practices how he’ll inflect “I love you” over and over and, when he tells her, she retorts, “Grow up.”

It’s Ben Kingsley’s best line here when Squires, understanding that sting, tells Luke afterward, “How lucky she would have been.”

Modest as teen-age heroes go, Luke has the makings of a genuinely nice man. The Wackness is best appreciated as a modest film. Not the tell-all Hip-Hop movie, it still catches how open the moment was - and how varied the audience - for this music’s arrival. Quirkily but not brilliantly shot, it illustrates how a certain dark tone and its high contrasts might lead a filmmaker a few steps more into graphic novel land. Not in the running for any performance awards, The Wackness still presents in Peck and Thirlby two young actors whose work will be worth following the next time out.

*******
This review appeared in the January 15, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular film column reviewing current releases as well as DVDs both new and enduring. This review was the 100th edition of “Make it Snappy,” which began running in 2006.

Film Review #186: Gran Torino
2008
Director: Clint Eastwood
Cast: Clint Eastwood, Ahney Her, Bee Vang, Christopher Carley

It’s not what you expect after the trailer, which ran all through the holidays at Carousel Mall Regal Cinemas and on TV too, promising “vintage” Clint Eastwood, with him cocking his thumb Dirty Harry-style and, later, ordering gangbangers off his lawn with an M-1 rifle. No, at the end of Gran Torino, I found myself thinking that this sometimes violent movie is about the ways men still find to be tender with each another. And just then, as if answering my girly thoughts, the credits roll and with them the soft jazz title song by Eastwood’s son Kyle, who did the score, that starts out, “So tenderly the story ….”

Eastwood’s character in Gran Torino, which he also directed, is retired autoworker Walt Kowalski, still living in his “old neighborhood” of Highland Park in 2008, where Henry Ford established his flagship Model-T factory almost exactly a century ago. Nearly engulfed by the larger Detroit, Highland Park was once the fastest growing city in the US, with the best schools and the highest average income. Now – after a slide that really started in the 1940s, accelerated with Ford’s relocation in the late 1950s and Detroit’s 1967 race riots – it’s the most impoverished city in North America. And by 1972, the year Kowalski rolled his prized green Gran Torino off the assembly line, Highland Park’s prosperity was well in decline.

Now, under the stars and stripes on his front porch, Kowalski polishes his car, fertilizes his tiny front yard, drinks his Pabst, nurses a growing dislike for his two sons and their ditzy off-spring, and glares at the Hmong family that moves in next door on the day of his wife Dorothy’s funeral. The names he relentlessly and casually calls them and others, including his Italian barber, his apple-cheeked young pastor and his Irish construction foreman buddy, would make your eyes water. A little while later, after Kowalski’s rescued her from punks, the Hmong family’s stalwart teen-aged daughter Sue (Ahney Her) answers his demand to know what they’re doing there.

“It’s the Vietnam thing,” she says matter-of-factly. “We fought on your side, so when the Americans quit, we had to come here.”

“You’re alright,” Kowalski tells her after that, as if she’s passed some test. In his basement there’s a trunk where he keeps his Silver Star and other Korean War memorabilia, and on the trunk’s inside lid, a decal of the modern US Calvary’s motto, “Live the legend.”

There’s been so much attention on this maybe being Eastwood’s last acting role and how much it summarizes his career that the motto works just as well as wry comment on being Clint Eastwood. At least since Unforgiven (1992), when his retired gunslinger tells his wannabe fan he can’t remember his exploits because he was drunk most of the time, Eastwood has been revising that legend. By 2003, Mystic River’s trio of wives was such a collective rebuke to macho violence that a friend mused to me that Eastwood was apologizing for his younger films. Now, Eastwood offers an intriguing echo of the Old West in modern urban ruins – not with the heavy-handed panoramas some filmmakers might use, of abandoned factories and apartment buildings and vacant lots going back to woods that Detroit’s becoming known for – but in a single recurring city block that Thao takes home. Brush grows up through the chain link fence along the broken sidewalk and tufts of grass split the pavement here. On this a desolate stretch of today’s urban frontier his cousin’s gang repeatedly waylays him.

On its surface, Gran Torino is what the PR says: about how Kowalski grudgingly becomes the protector of the fatherless Hmong family next door. The trigger for this is Sue’s younger brother Thao (Bee Vang), a shy teen whose volatile cousin tries to bully him into joining an Asian gang. Eastwood doesn’t traffic much in fancy effects like flashbacks, but later on we learn what Kowalski is taken back to under the swinging light in his dark garage, hearing the faintest military drumbeat, when he catches Thao trying to steal the Gran Torino, and how close he comes a second time to shooting a boy in the face who was trying to surrender.

There are half a dozen other cliff-hangers like this. But Gran Torino’s hidden treasure is something else, a dance of intrepid and tender approach through hostile territory that occurs between characters willing to learn and enter each other’s world.

One of those is his young priest (a fine Christopher Carley), who mistakenly assumes that wearing a collar automatically grants him the familiarity of speaking to Kowalski on a first name basis. Father Janovich persists through several withering rounds of correction on this and an array of other generational discourtesies until – seemingly much less chubby and apple-cheeked – he finally earns a soft, “Call me Walt.” Gran Torino in fact is book-ended by the priest’s sermons at two funerals, the first full of certainty and the second a sharing of how much he’s figured out he doesn’t know.

But this exchange of learning plays out most richly between Kowalski and the two Hmong teens, in contrast to is own grandchildren. By painstaking inches, Kowalski allows Sue and Thao to teach him how to behave, what would insult their mother or their shaman, how to accept things ranging from neighborly barbeque to help moving a freezer to simple thanks.

As the quintessential second-generation American-born go-between, Sue is adept at explaining her people to Walt, sometimes in comically dead-pan terms (“Hmong girls tend to do better than the boys. The girls go to college and the boys go to prison.”). These comments shade on the one hand into gentle mockery (“I told you we don’t like to eat dog. We eat cats.”) and on the other reveal a canny survivor’s understanding of what really makes Walt tick. Sue’s got his number once she figures out that the quickest way to gain his agreement is to tag any suggestion with the phrase, “It would be an insult not to.”

Eastwood makes room for Kowalski to spend a perhaps inordinate amount of time on-screen getting Thao ready for that job the boy wants so he can go to school. There are more of these clean, short, often understated scenes between two reticent men about their tools and tool belts – think of it as detail work, maybe – than any straight action film depending on forward momentum really requires. Some of this provides the film’s unexpected lighter moments. There is a wonderful scene where – under cover of “manning Thao up” – they rehearse “how real men talk” with Kowalski’s barber so that Thao can pass that test with a construction boss. (He does pass too, trading expletive-laden horror stories about head gaskets, trannies and thieving car mechanics.) But when Thao admits he could use the loan of a roofing hammer after the gang steals his tools and Kowalski says, “Good. Go ahead and get it from my workshop,” that “Good” tells us they’ve gotten over some larger hurdle than whether the older man trusts Thao with the run of his workshop. A good Estwing roofing hammer costs almost fifty bucks these days. This and similar scenes methodically get us ready for the startling depth of Thao’s outburst near the end of the film, when Kowalski locks him in the cellar to keep him safe.

And Kowalski is thinking about what lesson he’s teaching Sue and Thao in the end too, in grown-up ways Dirty Harry never dreamed.

*******
A shorter version of this review appeared in the 1/8/09 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly, where “Make it Snappy” is a regular column reviewing current releases as well as DVDs both new and enduring. Gran Torino opened in Syracuse on January 9th. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

Film Review #185: White Dog
1982/2008
Director: Sam Fuller
Cast: Paul Winfield, Kristy McNichol, Burl Ives

Early in last fall’s Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee’s much under-rated homage to the all-Black 92nd Infantry’s role in the Allied Italian campaign of 1944, a group of Black US troops wades across a freezing Tuscan river at dawn while the Fascists on the other side broadcast a personalized message over loudspeakers. Through the fog, a woman’s heavily inflected voice taunts them about their choice to risk privation and death for a nation that still allowed segregation and worse, and urges their defection.

Lee’s long-standing feud with Clint Eastwood about screen portrayals of race issues generally and Black participation in past US wars in particular notwithstanding – I await the next volley since Gran Torino opens here in Syracuse next week – a strikingly similar but smaller-scale scene occurred decades earlier in Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1951).

The first US movie set in the Korean War, shot and rushed into theaters well before that conflict ended, The Steel Helmet was hardly your usual war-time propaganda flick. Instead, a captured North Korean Communist officer first taunts the Black American medic Thompson (James Edwards), in perfect English, about riding in the back of the bus back home, then moves on to remind Sgt. Tanaka (Richard Loo) about World War II-era West Coast internment camps for Japanese-Americans. These conversations occur beneath the inscrutable gaze of a giant gold Buddha in the temple where the US troops have taken refuge, a statue behind which they literally take cover when the shooting starts.

For Fuller, who earned a Purple Heart for infantry service during World War II, the Korean War was pivotal for portraying US race relations because it could dramatize the shift from segregated units to an integrated US Army, especially for “re-treads” like The Steel Helmet’s Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans’ first screen role) – World War II vets who went back for another hitch and then grappled painfully with changed comrade demographics.

A dozen years later and into the New Frontier, Fuller set Shock Corridor (1963) in a locked mental ward populated with casualties of mid-century American life. A Korean War vet, now believing he’s Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart, confides in a lucid moment that his Southern upbringing derailed him more than combat (“My parents fed me bigotry for breakfast – it was a cancer they put in me.”) But Shock Corridor’s real bravura performance belongs to Hari Rhodes as Trent, the delusional Black man who proclaims he founded the Ku Klux Klan and, pillowcase-clad, provokes a violent attack on the ward’s elderly Black janitor “before he marries my daughter.”

Among the juiciest of B-movie-makers, Fuller began as a tabloid crime reporter and pulp fiction novelist. He wrote and directed 29 movies of his own between 1949-89, as the studio system waned and its loosening allowed for the first indie projects. Fuller made full and bracing use of film noir’s lurid, sensational, free-wheeling style to portray social ills in confrontational ways. He took on war, crime, prostitution and, repeatedly, racism.

None of Fuller’s films was more controversial than the 1983 feature White Dog, in which the kindly old grandfather of two golden-ringletted little girls with ice cream cones trains man’s best friend to attack Black people and is terrifically proud of it – all to the melodramatic, spaghetti-Western-like strains of an Ennio Morricone score.

Here, former child star Kristy McNichol plays the itinerant actress Julie, whose car hits the white German shepherd late one night on a mountain road above L.A., takes him to a vet, and bonds with him after the dog intercepts an intruder. Paul Winfield is the trainer Keys, who attempts to de-program the animal (now named Mr. Hyde) at a down-at-the-heels animal park run by a crotchety Burl Ives. Mr. Hyde escapes, strays into a Black neighborhood and gruesomely kills a nattily-dressed man who seeks refuge inside a church against a backdrop that echoes The Steel Helmet’s Buddha, a stained-glass depiction of St. Francis and the beasts. Keys and Julie take the dog in one more time anyway, for a cliff-hanging final training session that evokes Shock Corridor’s lesson that racism – not just a matter of opinion and anything but natural – provokes madness.

Fuller’s script adapted French diplomat-novelist Romain Gary’s memoir White Dog, about his wife’s related experience. Curiously, the project made some Hollywoood rounds before landing with Fuller, who had discussed the Southern custom of training dogs to chase and attack runaway slaves – and its surviving modern permutations – with his old friend Gary when the writer was first at work on the story.

After many advance rumors, Criterion released White Dog on DVD in December, when it made NPR’s list of ten best DVDs of 2008. White Dog resurfaces again years after its brief, belated State-side premiere in 1991, when the still-jittery Paramount Pictures continued to cave to bizarre pressure that the film promoted racism. In any case, Fuller moved to France after Paramount locked up White Dog in 1983, never again making a movie here. Young French filmmakers – who saw White Dog and his other films in Europe – embraced him.

If Sam Fuller isn’t a cinematic taste you’ve acquired, dip in this year.

*******
This review appears in the January 1, 2009 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in “Make it Snappy,” a regular column reviewing films in current release plus DVDs both new and enduring. Find White Dog on DVD at Netflix, which has a decent selection of Sam Fuller’s other films. Fuller’s 2002 autobiography, A Third Face, is still in print and available at amazon.com, as is Lisa Dombrowski’s 2008 study of Fuller’s films. And you'll be able to catch Spike Lee’s Miracle at St. Anna on DVD on February 10.

Film Review #184: Doubt
2008
Director: John Patrick Shanley
Cast: Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Viola Davis

How do you know what you think you know? For much of John Patrick Shanley’s film Doubt, Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) evades answering that.

“I have my certainty,” she snaps at one point and “I know people!” at another, when asked for evidence that Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffmann) is molesting Donald Miller (Joseph Foster II), the first Black student admitted to St. Nicholas, an old Irish Catholic parish school in the Bronx – something she’s had in mind would happen well before this particular boy returns from the priest’s office to history class “in an unsettled state” with alcohol on his breath.

It’s 1964, just before Christmas, and a year since JKF’s assassination – as Father Flynn reminds the parish in the sermon that opens the film, about the ways doubt binds us together as strongly as faith. It’s also a couple years into Pope John XXIII’s Vatican II, whose liberal reformist winds of change at first seem personified both by the film’s frequent gale-force storms and Father Flynn’s conviction that “the Church needs to be friendlier – people need to feel we are part of their family.”

“But we are not part of their family,” counters Sister Aloysius matter-of-factly in a meeting ostensibly about the Christmas pageant. She also dismisses Father Flynn’s suggestion to include “Frosty the Snowman,” arguing the song promotes a pagan belief in magic. On the other hand, as the school’s battle-ax principal, she likes students to believe she has eyes in the back of her head. She later tells Sister James (Amy Adams), “That’s how it works,” when the young nun protests, “The children are all uniformly terrified of you!”

The story moves along as a series of escalating clashes between Sister Aloysius and others in her campaign to thwart and banish this priest – with Flynn himself, with the earnest, gentle Sister James and, in one brief powerhouse scene, with Donald’s mother (Viola Davis, my vote this Oscar season for best supporting actress).

Doubt also works on the growing contradiction between two psychological trajectories. The first is our own emerging discovery that Father Flynn – profoundly self-deluded, armed with a new era’s persuasive vocabulary and an ancient entitlement – was likely headed right where Sister Aloysius discerned him to be going; the second, that fighting fire with fire has its own cost. As our certainty rises, hers eventually – tragically is a workable word here – crumbles.

These trajectories cross when Mrs. Miller explains that she took Donald out of public school because she was afraid the boys there might actually kill him for “his nature – for the way God sent him” – which his father has beaten him for too – a report that seems inspired in part by Sister Aloysius’ own confidence – the single bit of personal history she shares with anyone – that she was once a married woman herself, widowed by World War II.

Shanley’s original play, Doubt: A Parable, opened in New York in 2004, a couple years after this country’s explosive exposes of childhood sexual abuse by some Catholic priests. Winning both a Pulitzer and four Tonies, among other prizes, the play then toured extensively. Shanley wrote and directed the screen version, returning to his own boyhood parish in the Bronx for exterior shots.

It’s Shanley’s first film in eighteen years and such problems as the film has seem rooted in translating stage to screen. Still, these are distracting. There are more symbolic wind storms than any movie set in the Bronx really needs. And even though the great Roger Deakins shot the film, which is frequently lovely, too often the camera swoops around at great heights for no obvious reason, except that – freed from live performance’s earth-bound lines of sight – it can.

Such distractions sometimes overshadow Shanley’s more subtle use of his settings to mirror other issues his story explores, such as the tension between the Church’s twin duties in providing both sanctuary and vigilance. While a great deal of these characters’ attention goes to enforcing rules and to watch-dogging each other’s often ostentatious adherence to procedures, the contrary tradition of offering refuge to law-breakers is equally strong. And by making the range of such “law-breaking” quite broad in this film, Shanley suggests the issue is anything but isolated and occasional. Here, the impulse to shelter another is more likely to undermine obedience to authority than anything else.

Clearly Mrs. Miller sees Catholic school as a sanctuary for her son from informally but sometimes violently enforced mainstream mores. For Father Flynn to claim he was protecting Donald from punishment for filching altar wine means he understands the strength of this strain of Catholicism. The priest’s appeal to Sister James that she guard her own compassion is really an appeal that she apply it to him. And Sister Aloysius actively shields another nun, the elderly Sister Veronica, frankly enlisting Sister James in the deception, because Father Flynn will make Veronica leave if he learns she is going blind - even though this might be for her own good and, to press that point, she has quite a bloody close call because she can't see. Shanley sets most scenes addressing this tension in either the principal’s office or the Church garden. A vivid exception has Sister Aloysius and Donald’s mother leave the grounds of St. Nicholas entirely and continue their conversation out in the world, where it will matter most to Donald in the end, while walking to Mrs. Miller’s job.

Anyway, there is a final showdown. Here, Father Flynn wrings from Sister Aloysius the specifics of her first suspicion. She’d watched him through a window as he grabbed the wrist of another boy, that boy had pulled away, and that scrap carried the force of revelation. But Shanley’s parable invites us to recognize that art works in much the same way. By the time this scene arrives, a series of similar brief flashes have also prepared us for the priest’s sudden agreement to request a transfer. And when Flynn tries pleading with her – has she never sinned herself? – and she falters, derailed for a beat by some remembered anguish, I know my mind leaped back to that other scrap of history, that small detail about her own marriage once. Was there a deeply-regretted war-time affair, guilt over her young husband’s death – had Sister Aloysius herself entered the convent for sanctuary, or for atonement?

There’s plenty more in this deeply satisfying film, which really is a gift. I’m just shaking the package for you.

*******
Doubt premiered on December 12 and should reach Syracuse any minute. A version of this review appears in the 12/18/2008 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly in the column, “Make it Snappy,” which regularly reviews both DVDs and current theatrical releases. Nancy is a member of the national Women Film Critics Circle. Reach her at nancykeeferhodes@gmail.com.

Film Review #183: Cadillac Records
2008
Director: Darnell Martin
Cast: Jeffrey Wright, Beyoncé Knowles, Adrian Brody

About half way through Darnell Martin’s Cadillac Records, there’s enough of a lull that you wonder suddenly, where is Beyoncé Knowles anyway? We’ve met Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright), Little Walter the teen-age mouth-harp prodigy (Columbus Short), Howlin’ Wolf (riveting British actor Eamonn Walker) and Chuck Berry (Mos Def). So where’s Beyoncé? After all, she’s one of the movie’s major draws as legendary platinum blond blues singer Etta James in her early days on Chicago’s Chess Records label. One of the most enduring discoveries of Chess’ founder, Polish immigrant Leonard Chess (Adrian Brody), multiple Grammy-winner James, spectacularly troubled then, has survived most of the film’s other characters. She released her most recent album, All the Way, in 2006, and her signature rendition of the torch song “At Last” graces more than twenty film and television sound-tracks.

So it’s one of the film’s pleasures – and its story-telling accomplishments – that just as you wonder where a character is, just when the story has unfolded in such a way as to demand her appearance, there she is.

In this richly ambiguous, compact scene, Chess – who scoured the South for Black talent during his label’s run from 1950-69 – meets James because she’s brought to his hotel room for an impromptu audition by his brother Phil (the only appearance in the film of Chess’ actual business partner, but more about that script decision below). The film is narrated by Chess Records’ major songwriter Willie Dixon (Cedric the Entertainer), who says as the hotel room door swings open - by way of transition from the last scene and setting up the double meanings about talent and sex and tenderness and money and resentment and gratitude and who’s in charge that thread through all the future interactions between James and Chess – that Leonard Chess “was looking for women too...”

Helping herself to a seat on his bed, James asks if “we’re gonna do it right now?” Yes, says Chess, he’s leaving town in the morning. Well, it’s hard, counters James, “when you’re not in the mood.” “She’s not in the mood!” mutters an exasperated Chess. Then James strolls into the bathroom and from there starts singing, shyly at first. Of course there are two revelations here – what the Chess brothers heard, and Beyoncé herself. Then Willie Dixon finishes his sentence: “… he was looking for a woman to go up against his men.”

This film might have unfolded in another, more expected way. Martin has said that Columbia Pictures wanted a standard Leonard Chess biopic. In that scenario, the doomed romance rumored between Chess and James would have taken center stage early, leaving little room for the four male musicians on whom Martin spends the first half of her film, and little sense of what going “up against them” might actually mean for James as a musician. James would hardly be a musician at all in that scenario, but instead – you know the type - a naïve, unschooled, rawly talented force of nature.

Instead of that standard biopic, Martin set out to portray the music and the musicians coming out of the great mid-century migration north (we meet Muddy Waters in 1941, share-cropping in Mississippi, listening to Alan Lomax’s quavery recording of himself, saying “I feel like I’m meeting myself for the first time,” before he lights out for Chicago), how R & B became “popular” and “crossed over” (besides appealing to white bobby-soxers, Chuck Berry successfully sued the Beach Boys for stealing his “Sweet Little 16” and passing it off as their own in the hit “Surfin’ USA”), how the music overlapped with and influenced the Civil Rights movement (Howlin’ Wolf immediately sets Chess straight about who gives orders to his band members and Little Walter’s response to white cops personifies a tidal shift). Since Martin makes room for these characters up front instead of using them as background – and they are all superbly played – when they find Chess is looting their royalties, that betrayal has real bite because you know them as well as you know him.

And by removing Phil Chess, Martin replaces the standard two-white-brothers narrative – a huge space occupier – with a very different “story of two men,” as Willie Dixon calls it at the start. By using alternating scenes to introduce and follow Chess in his pre-impresario days – junkyard owner dreaming of buying a bar – and Mississippi share-cropper Muddy Waters, Martin structurally underscores the parallel importance of their stories. And that’s only the beginning of dramatic parallels between them – for example, each has a decent and long-suffering wife, and brief but personal, nuanced exchanges of the sort that occur, when you think about it, between equals. Now some reviewers don’t like this movie, I suspect because it so disrupts expectations of what – and who – it “should” have been about. So you better see it quick. Like Bryan Barber’s Idlewild – remember how that film, so steeped in a wonderful fluency with its screen musical forebears, was dismissed by critics as “derivative”? – it might only be here for a minute.

*******
This review appeared in the 12/11/08 issue of the Syracuse City Eagle weekly. Darnell Martin wrote and directed two previous features, I Like it Like That (1994) and Prison Song (2001), and directed Suzan-Lori Parks’ script for Their Eyes Were Watching God (2005). All three are available on DVD.