#36: “On MATCH POINT: In a 1950’s State of Mind” * 1/19/2006 * Woody Allen’s MATCH POINT, which opens in Syracuse tomorrow, transports his typical chance-afflicted, contemporary New Yorkers to London. Now, beware – what happens follows here. If you don’t want to know what happens in advance, stop right here – but go see this movie! Otherwise, stay with me, because this is a rich & thoughtful work, & I think Allen’s in a 1950’s state of mind. Okay – London. We have Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an Irish tennis pro who’s quit the tournament circuit to give lessons to the rich. His client Tom Hewitt soon invites him to the opera. Diffident & attentive, Chris ingratiates himself, especially with Tom’s sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer). Marriage ensues & a rising spot in the family business. Early on, during an aspiring American actress’ short engagement to Tom, Chris has also hooked up with the sultry, unstable Nola Rice (Scarlett Johansson). Once pregnant, Nola demands Chris leave Chloe (also pregnant), & he murders her. Although one cop figures it out, when Chris pleads impending fatherhood & family position, they back off. But, given that he’s killed off the one person who understood him, Chris is more truly alone at the top than “free.” We could see MATCH POINT as a refined, modern-day riff on classic bandit romances like 1967’s BONNIE & CLYDE or Terence Malick’s 1973 film, BADLANDS, in which an outlaw couple find solace in one another even as they dispense & meet with violence. After all, Allen has rather undemocratically depicted Chris & Nola as social bandits in their aspirations. She astutely tells him, just before they first have sex in a ran-soaked field just beyond the Hewitts’ manicured gardens, “You’ll do very well for yourself if you don’t blow it by making a pass at me.” These two, who’ve both been outsiders for a long time, intuitively know one another to the bone, & that strikes some hot sparks. * But I think MATCH POINT is something more too, something rather retro – about the twin bedevilments of seeing ourselves & our ages as both unique & universal & the kind of emotional McCarthyism that flows from that. Allen’s done history effectively before. One of my favorites is his 1990 film, SWEET & LOW DOWN. Set in the 1930’s, this departure from quintessential modern life in the Big Apple starred Sean Penn as itinerant guitarist Emmet Ray & Samantha Morton as his long-suffering poor girlfriend Hattie. A rich socialite (played by Uma Thurman) turned our protagonist’s head in that movie too, & Allen uses jazz in the earlier film is ways similar to his use of opera in MATCH POINT. * Film critic David Denby wrote recently about MATCH POINT that “the poor boy from the provinces who storms the city & . . . then gets in trouble has been fiction’s bedrock for two centuries.” He notes that MATCH POINT “resembles” Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel, AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY – itself based on actual 1906 events in near-by Cortland. But try watching the DVD of director George Stevens’ 1951 film adaptation of the novel, A PLACE IN THE SUN. No one has yet said that MATCH POINT is a re-make of A PLACE IN THE SUN yet, but it could be, with Montgomery Clift as young striver George Eastman, Elizabeth Taylor as socialite Angela Vickers, & Shelley Winters as ill-fated factory girl Alice Tripp. * Allen’s plot follows the 1951 film quite closely in many respects. And whether it’s 1951 or 2005, it’s striking that a woman demanding what she assumes is her rightful place gets killed, & a young man achieving a toehold in a world with leisure promptly uses the toys of that leisure (whether Adirondack resort boating or British grouse-shooting) as his murder weapon. * But in some significant ways, MATCH POINT’s plot departs from the Stevens film, suggesting just how dark & cautionary his version is. * For example, reversing George’s 1951 besotted obsession with his socialite, Chris cares for Chloe but actually loves his working girl. Driving home the point that promising relationships are her real day job, Nola tells him that “no one’s ever wanted their money back” after being involved with her. And in MATCH POINT, it’s the woman who has breeched the walls of privilege first. Given the outcome, so much for social democracy’s promise. For example, unlike Shelley Winters’ gullible 1951 factory girl, Nola seems to know the score. So much for consciousness-raising. * For example, in the 1951 film (actually in all previous versions of this story), the would-be killer’s nerve fails at the last minute & murder crumbles into bungling accidental death. But Chris Wilton, though his nerves are a mess, kills twice. * In 1951, director George Stevens used camera angles masterfully to heighten point-of-view & ironic contradiction in PLACE. Consider Angela’s visit to George as he awaits execution, shot entirely over Montgomery Clift’s shoulder so that we never see his face. And consider the shot where the Vickers’ motor boat passes the dock where a radio blares bulletins of the unfolding murder investigation. * Woody Allen has clearly paid attention. In a prime example, we pointedly never see Nola during Nola’s murder – not her flash of recognition of her fate, her death, her body. Visually, she is amputated, disappeared, tossed away. * And MATCH POINT’s killer gets away – no cleansing ritual of trial & execution here. Whatever ghosts linger for Chris will visit him privately. Loving opera’s elegant public enactment, these characters find a tawdry end to tawdry lives. * Why set a 1950’s story in today’s London? Partly because that decade occupies a kind of limbo, a curious blind spot in our cultural memory. It’s too close to be historical in the same way that World War II is, yet hard to identify with if one’s not old enough to recall that era. We seem to be grappling with that lately. As it happens, there’s a new opera by Tobias Picker based on Dreiser’s novel at the Met right now. Surely part of GOOD NIGHT & GOOD LUCK’s power resides in the shock that its politics are so timely – as if they somehow wouldn’t be. While in New York earlier this month I also saw the play LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA. For many twenty-somethings, this 1950’s story – based on a novel & earlier film – simply doesn’t connect. But with all that architecture, all those centuries-old lawns, London provides the past – a contrast for characters who might otherwise simply fade into the background in Manhattan – than can parallel what today’s characters might experience in the 50’s. And you know that old saw about the past repeating itself. * (1,094)

#35: On BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN * Nancy Keefe Rhodes Broadcast 12/29/05 * Screenwriter Diana Ossana first encountered Annie Proulx’s short story, “Brokeback Mountain,” in a middle-of-the-night fit of insomnia in 1997. It was printed in the “The New Yorker” magazine, and right away she wanted to adapt it for the screen with her writing partner, the Western novelist Larry McMurtry. Last week, “Brokeback Mountain” was named Best Film of 2005 by a US critics group for the seventh time. Ironically on the same day, the press reported on pop star Elton John’s wedding and celebrity-studded celebration in England, where a new law now provides same-sex couples with civil unions. I saw “Brokeback Mountain,” directed by Ang Lee, two Sundays ago at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, just north of New York City, during a Christmas family weekend. I can report that after this haunting film, my sister has now forgiven me for dragging her to see “Open Water” two summers ago. But we privately decided it was best that we hadn’t taken along my brother-in-law, although “The Birdcage” is one of his favorite movies. “Brokeback” spans two decades, from the 1963 summer that Ennis Del Mar (played by Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) spend tending sheep on an isolated Wyoming mountain-side, where they become lovers, through their marriages, reunion and affair, Jack’s perhaps questionable death, and Ennis’ trip to Jack’s parents. The short story is structured as a flashback through Ennis Del Mar’s eyes one bitterly cold, desolate morning. The principal changes the film makes are to begin with that first summer and to flesh out the women characters – each man’s wife, Jack’s mother, and Ennis’ daughters. Annie Proulx has nothing but good things to say about the screen version. And “Brokeback” is nothing like “The Birdcage” at all – that is, it’s not a worldly, comfortable, post-Stonewall urban gay farce that we can feel satisfied about. No. Elton John’s wedding is not thinkable in this film. Curiously, this puts us as viewers on roughly the same footing as its two subjects. They embark upon their life-changing love affair without any social context for this possibility, despite Jack’s persistent dream that they could somehow ranch together. This means they have to figure it out as they go along. While they don’t do very well in the execution, it means we get to figure it out along with them. It’s a pretty bruising ride. And it makes Ennis and Jack two remarkably accessible male characters for women viewers, because the movie’s success, like the story, hinges on making them human. Indeed the key moment in both story and film is one that Ennis recalls as “sexless,” when he held Jack and rocked him, really more like a mother, during their first summer. This takes us back – insofar as it’s possible – to the discovery that love can be new and brave. This might help account for the extreme power of gay stories that are set in the West and play off the conventions, violence and myths of the Western genre. “Boys Don’t Cry,” made in 1999, was set in Nebraska, and of course there’s “The Laramie Project,” the play adapted to film in 2002 by HBO – both fact-based. Like them, “Brokeback” has outbursts of merciless violence. Like them, “Brokeback” also has scenes of barely-restrained threat after which you’ll never see the classically tongue-tied cowboy quite the same again – notably when Jack carefully backs out of the office of a boss who’s found him out, when Ennis faces Jack’s father over a kitchen table, and even the varieties of silence each man’s wife keeps. Annie Proulx says “Brokeback” isn’t a Western per se, but about two confused kids who fall pretty short of the cowboy persona each aspires to, and who get into “deeper water” than they can handle. This occurs against a breath-taking rural landscape where people’s lives are immensely harsh & hard. Co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry has reflected that this mythical Western landscape is something that seduces us into over-looking the difficult lives of its people. But Ang Lee’s direction zooms in to show this hard, harsh life unflinchingly and in visually stunning detail. Significantly, Ennis’ fear about making ends meet helps drive him and Jack apart because he finally won’t risk losing a job to meet Jack. In the end, it’s his sudden decision to quit a job so he can go to his daughter’s wedding that holds out the thinnest sliver of hope for him. You know, “Brokeback Mountain” isn’t even scheduled to play in Syracuse. It does open for a run at The Little Film Society in Rochester next week. Maybe a few Golden Globes and Oscars later, it’ll come here. I encourage you to get on the phone to Nat Tobin, who runs the Westcott & Manlius Cinemas, and to Michael Heagerty at The Palace in Eastwood, and see if one of them can’t get this gem here. In 2006, let’s get Syracuse back on the movie map. * (823)

#34: “Seeing What the Jungle Teaches: Brazil’s Babenco & Jackson’s KONG” * 12/15/05 * I confess that I spent three hours yesterday afternoon, mostly on the edge of my seat, at KING KONG. It’s a bandwagon sort of movie, & mostly I agree with the raves, for KONG’s sheer story-telling power, its intelligent self-awareness, & its take on entertainment in times of social crisis. We know Peter Jackson wanted to make his own KONG since he was nine years old & saw the original. This probably helps explain the updated, expanded character of movie-maker Carl Denham, surprisingly well-played by Jack Black. In particular, Denham’s extreme pursuit of the movie-making moment & his eye for opportunity is paired with the final scene’s take-off on Kong’s death as a media event. Jackson perfectly catches the public’s gullibility & rowdy, volatile nature of the Great Depression era’s young, twin industries of celluloid fantasy-creation & news coverage. This analysis makes KONG as much worth seeing as the heart-stopping, nerve-wracking parts, & there are many. But Jackson’s media analysis also makes the way KONG treats race even more disturbing. I forgive the bizarrely-exaggerated jungle chorus line at Denham’s Broadway show as period nostalgia. And strategically, the film’s wisest character – arguably the phrase “most socially evolved” fits best here – is the ship’s Black first mate, who protects the orphaned cabin boy & even lends him a copy of Conrad’s HEART OF DARKNESS. So, how about those Skull Island natives? Though specifically located in the far South Pacific, I’ll tell you, these islanders are undeniably African-featured. Their remorseless, zombie-like behavior provides the scene that I personally found most terrifying in the whole movie. They are so evil, it’s not far-fetched to see Ann Darrow’s arrival as rescuing Kong’s “better side” from their clutches. More than any other aspect of KONG, the Black islanders stand for uncontrolled Nature’s worst potentials. I have trouble imagining Jackson failed to see this in a movie that’s a virtuoso demonstration of artistic choice. By odd coincidence, there’s another three-hour jungle movie out there too, director/screenwriter Hector Babenco’s 1991 adaptation of Peter Matthiessen’s big handful of a novel, AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD. AT PLAY is set, & was filmed in, Brazil’s Amazon jungle. I’ve been watching Babenco’s films again lately & AT PLAY just came in the mail this week. It’s hard to find, & like Babenco’s 1987 film, IRONWEED, only available in VHS format. Babenco learned his craft in the 1970’s making documentaries & helped shape Brazil’s socially-conscious “cinema novo” movement. Here, he’s best known for a trio of prison films. His 1981 tale of street kids, PIXOTE, provided Babenco the international boost to make KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN in 1985 for Hollywood, with Raul Julia & Oscar-winning William Hurt as the movie-obsessed transvestite Molina. Most recently, Babenco returned to US screens in 2003 with CARANDIRU, based on a 1990’s prison massacre. The classic enclosure tale is as old as Chaucer’s travelers, stranded by the Plague, who tell stories to pass the time. Babenco uses this durable plot device to portray complex characters trapped by society’s worst excesses, who survive, even flourish, by imagination. It’s these three movies you can rent pretty easily on DVD. After SPIDER WOMAN, Babenco made AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD & then IRONWEED. Both adaptations of English-language novels with first-rate Hollywood casts, they suggest that civilization’s greed beat any jungle out there for barbarism & feature Babenco’s most memorable women characters. While nobody beats Jackson’s camera for swooping around anymore, Babenco likes the God’s-eye view too. CARANDIRU zeros in on the prison from high above the city, and early in IRONWEED we see Jack Nicholson’s character praying at his infant son’s grave as the son’s ghost might look down on him. In AT PLAY, Babenco makes use of the plot containing two itinerant bush pilots, one a half-breed American Indian named Moon, played by Tom Berenger. The pilots collide with an Army plan to push natives deeper into a shrinking jungle, even as some evangelical missionaries want to convert them. Early on there’s an extended, lovely sequence in which Moon’s tiny, dilapidated plane soars over the jungle’s vast expanse. Then, almost out of gas, he bails out – parachutes out of God’s eye, out of civilization itself. Once on the jungle floor, Moon casts off his clothes, entering naked a shy native community whose spears are initially poised. While transvestites populate his prison films, AT PLAY gives us one of Babenco’s brilliant women in a missionary wife played by Kathy Bates. Hazel Quarrier’s raging, fearsome unraveling explains just how easily some demonize & destroy wild places without blinking. For jungles close to home, Babenco’s adaptation of William Kennedy’s novel IRONWOOD endures, one of the finest ensemble recreations of the Great Depression on film, both visually & dramatically. Helen Archer rates among Meryl Streep’s best roles - a fragile former singer, living hour to hour on 1938 Albany’s frigid streets – like Hazel, unraveling, enraged, terrified. There’s as much violence in Helen’s short brawl with Francis as in that first clash between islanders & expedition in KONG. In our own cold winter of increasing gulfs, revisiting Babenco’s films reminds us. The jungle’s in us, you know. * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * (860)

#33: “Many Fronts, One Struggle: On RIZE & YESTERDAY” * 12/01/05 * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * Welcome back to Women’s Voices Radio. On this International Human Rights Day, World AIDS Day & anniversary of Mother Rosa keeping her seat, tonight’s show has been about art & cultural upheaval. In that spirit, some film clips in brief. If you’d like to watch some of the dancing that Martha Cooper documents in her book, WE B* GIRLZ, there’s RIZE – with a Z – the first feature documentary by fashion photographer/music video director David LaChapelle. RIZE depicts the break-dancing battles that one participant calls “ghetto ballet.” RIZE debuted to standing ovations at last year’s Sundance Festival. Despite some tantalizing previews, it never screened locally but now it’s on DVD. RIZE is about as overtly tied to upheaval as can be. It opens with news footage of burning buildings in South Central L.A. – first the 1965 Watts riots, then the fires that followed the 1992 Rodney King police verdicts. Instead of a voice-over narrator, the dancers speak for themselves about what that means, & what choices there are, in communities whose schools have – beyond more obvious woes – zero arts budgets. RIZE manages to portray women who dance – Miss Prissy, Daisy, La Nina, Termite & others – as both integral & articulate. Ostensibly RIZE is about Tommy the Clown, Dragon, Lil C, their crews, & the styles of clown, krump & stripper dancing. But RIZE interviews a number of dancer’s mothers. After the third one appeared seated formally on her “good” couch in the living room, it dawned on me how deeply RIZE is about endangered families & taking seriously the chance to be heard. RIZE is a mother’s film, perhaps even about Mother Africa in a weird, spine-tingling way. Documentaries often carry disclaimers about digital special effects, but RIZE is the first I’ve seen that starts out promising nothing has been speeded up. The dancing itself is incredibly fast, strenuous, gorgeous. The organized “battles,” where contestants dance “at” each other in front of sometimes stadium-sized audiences, provide a sizzling enactment & transcendence of aggression. The moments that cut back & forth between LA dance battles & almost mirror-image footage of West African dancing are riveting. If you don’t think these South Central kids are channeling something, check yourself for a pulse. Then there’s another mother’s story, the South African movie that debuted Monday evening on HBO & will air again – on PBS – January 4th. YESTERDAY stars Leleti Khumalo, the memorable South African actress from 1992’s SARAFINA!, as a woman named Yesterday. She & her small daughter Beauty live in a remote village while her husband works in the mines outside Johannesburg. On a rare trip home, he infected her with HIV. The film covers a year’s time, from her persistent cough to Beauty’s first day of school. Although the film addresses Yesterday’s marriage & her husband’s death, it really concerns how women get on with one another when the men are gone. Some are gentle & brave, some fearful, some superstitious & petty. There is one lovely, resonant image of Yesterday & her only friend, the teacher, meeting one another on the road each takes through life. The story-telling is spare. A great deal is told by the land’s vast expanses, the ever-present barbed-wire fences, & the quiet, nuanced acting of the principles. If you’ve opened the paper or turned on the news today, you’ve heard again the statistics. South Africa has figured prominently in this year’s HIV/IADS observances. More than a million there have died, five million may be HIV positive & women are now about three times more likely to be infected than men. But this one simple story, manages – as Wendi Alexis Modeste used to tell us here in Syracuse – to put a face on the epidemic. There are many fronts, one struggle. (624)

#32: On WALK THE LINE * 11/24/05 * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * James Mangold’s terrific Johnny Cash biopic, “Walk the Line,” opens just before Cash goes on-stage for the historic Folsom Prison concert on February 11, 1968, the same year he married singer June Carter. Cash’s pre-concert moment of reflection frames a flashback that rapidly sketches in his Arkansas boyhood, an Air Force hitch in Germany, his first marriage and start at Sun Records in 1950’s Memphis. But the real heart of the film is the pivotal six years before Folsom Prison, spanning Cash’s first encounter with June backstage at the Grand Ole Opry, their early music tours and problematic courtship (both were married to others), and his recovery from amphetamines. Most reviewers praise Joaquin Phoenix & Reese Witherspoon as the leads, but some grumble that “Walk the Line” focuses too much on the romance’s complications at the music’s expense. I think the literalism of this complaint ignores where Cash’s music comes from, a tradition of overlapping family relationships, performance & stewardship of the music itself through generations. For many in their original Southern audience, the power of Johnny Cash marrying into the “first family of country music” stems from this tradition. The closest thing to it we have locally would be the “Old Tyme Fiddlin’” families of the North Country in northern New York. And for Cash, this involved women – his mother Carrie, who passed on shape notes to him, June herself, and Mother Maybelle Carter, who encouraged their relationship. If you’ve seen the film “Almost Famous,” imagine your average 60’s rock star taking his in-laws, and later his children, along on tour, as Cash often did. There’s a deceptively simple scene early on, when June Carter stops in a small-town hardware store for a fishing pole. Before it’s over, she’ll run into Johnny on another aisle. They compare coloring books their respective small daughters might like, and then go fishing. It’s Johnny’s first time with a store-bought pole and she shows him how to cast the line. June is often the one teaching him, though later photos frequently show her leaning into his sheltering bulk. This scene also recalls – and seems to suggest that June’s presence will begin healing – another summer afternoon that still haunts the grown man, when his brother was fatally injured elsewhere and Johnny blamed because he off fishing. But, I’m ahead of myself. Back in that creaky-floored hardware store it’s still Bible Belt America, even if it’s the Sixties elsewhere – before Johnny and June can go fishing, a store clerk accosts June with a cutting remark about June’s recent divorce. So far, the story has established June as decent and self-possessed. But she seems to wilt here, deprived of the buffering distance of the footlights, answering, “I’m sorry I let you down, ma’am.” There’s a tantalizing tension, however, in wondering whether, as critic David Sterritt has suggested, this might instead be June simply performing “June Carter” without missing a beat. Either way, I should say here that this movie doesn’t let anyone down. Neither does Reese Witherspoon – who finds it perplexing that everyone’s so surprised now that she can act. The hardware store and fishing trip scenes show struggles that Carter and Cash faced as members of a community that was sometimes contradictory, even harshly judgmental – and at odds in some ways with the social turmoil and musical innovation of the Sixties. Certainly there are more dramatic scenes, like Johnny’s pill withdrawal, when Carter’s family guard him from drug dealers with shotguns. But I like the small details of how these two haltingly found each other before the fame and reverence set in. There’s even a Thanksgiving at Johnny’s new , empty house, when the Carters bring dinner in a couple covered baskets, set behind the cab in their pick-up truck’s bed. Another thing: having Phoenix and Witherspoon actually sing pays off gloriously. Mangold says he insisted on this risky course in hopes of evoking on-screen the legendary chemistry of Cash and Carter on-stage. The film’s exhilarating duets are pure, sashaying abundance. Yes I know they’re not really Johnny and June. I know some of the details got left out. But in those moments on-stage together, I don’t care. There’s an emotional truth generated which is why we come to art in the first place. After all, didn’t the music save Johnny and June? It saves the movie too, and explains why, for his part, Cash always looked – even in his later photos – like he still couldn’t quite believe his luck that she was with him. In 1997, after Cash published his autobiography, Terry Gross interviewed him on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” She asked him about marrying into a whole family who already understood “the performing life.” His answer tells me that Mangold’s merging of music & family was intuitively correct. Cash said this: “Well, there’s something about families singing together that is just better than any other groups you can pick up or make. If it’s family, if it’s blood-on-blood, then it’s gonna be better. The voices, singing their parts, are going to be tighter, and they’re going to be on pitch. It’s blood-line on blood-line.” * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * (850)

#30: On Hany Abu-Assad’s PARADISE NOW * 11/17/2005 * Last Saturday afternoon, Manlius Cinema cancelled their three o’clock matinee showing of Hany Abu-Assad’s new film, PARADISE NOW, because they lacked the minimum four ticket-buyers. I thought this wasn’t a good sign for this movie’s local prospects, even though it had miraculously shown up in Central New York barely a week after its US release date of November 4th, in itself almost unheard of. Then, Sunday night’s audience was skimpy. Grimly, I advised a few friends that if they wanted to see this film, deservedly well-received & anticipated elsewhere, they should make it this week. I’m pleased that this morning’s paper announces PARADISE NOW will be at Manlius at least one more week. This film had a hard birth to begin with. Other reviewers mostly attach the word “risky” to it, because the task Abu-Assad has set is so difficult – unintelligible to some, even – in these times of for-us-or-against-us thinking. Set in the West Bank town of Nablus, this story of two Palestinian suicide bombers’ final day after getting their mission orders to target Tel Aviv was risky artistically & cinematically, yes, but pretty risky on the ground too. Abu-Assad’s 25 days filming on location in Nablus were so riddled with harassment & competing suspicions from Israelis, various Palestinian factions and actual run-ins with real incidents of street fighting & raids, that part of his European crew quit. He was forced to move filming for the final 15 days to the relative quiet of Nazareth. Safely in the can & on-screen, PARADISE NOW illustrates that accounting for reprehensible behavior does not equal excusing it. Young Palestinians Said (played by Kais Nashef) and Khaled (played by Ali Suliman), are long-time friends, fellow car mechanics & terrorist foot soldiers. They’ve asked that when they’re sent on their suicide assignments, they may go together. Plans go awry when they try to slip over the border, disguised as Israeli settlers with explosives strapped around their torsos. And mid-way through the story, the two young men convincingly switch roles of true believer and skeptic. Tellingly, the story begins with Suha (played by Lubna Azabal), a young woman who’s just returned to the West Bank after years abroad. There is some spark of warmth between her & Said, enough to make him hesitate. The daughter of a revered Palestinian “martyr,” Suha tries to dissuade their mission. We see that this is, after all, an old war is such personal ways. As a surviving daughter, Suha asks what becomes of those left behind – those left alive, that is. And the outcome turns on Said’s struggle with his own demons as someone’s son. A word about the cinematography & editing, by Antoine Heberle’ & Sander Vos, respectively. There is excellent physical acting in this film – so right & consistent in a film that’s about how words have faltered & come up so short. But this is supported, as nearly as I can tell, by a series of nearly flawless decisions about how to unobtrusively film each scene from the best distance & then edit them all so the action conveys a rightness about the march of time – the count-down, really. There are several scenes where Said runs for some distance that are wonderful – he has a rangy elegance that puts me in mind of Yeats’ line, “Both beautiful, one a gazelle.” These are as effective as the more noticed scenes depicting the rituals of the bombers’ last meal, the video-taped speech, and Said & Khaled’s eerie transformation into very passable Isrealis. After last summer’s London subway bombings, Boston film critic Martha Bayles urged her “Serious Popcorn” blog readers to see Indian director Santosh Sivan’s THE TERRORIST, a 1999 film whose approach is similar and whose ending is identical to PARADISE NOW. That film was about a lesser-known insurgency, the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, but it illustrates my hunch about PARADISE NOW – that the arguments of the specific politics are less compelling that the human cost when the blast arrives. Maybe PARADISE NOW had bad timing. After all, it regrettably opened in Central New York on Veterans Day. A second strike against it was the triple hotel suicide bombing in Amman, Jordan last Wednesday, two days before its opening here. We may have little taste for such tales right now, but unless we seek understanding we’re likely to make little progress to peace. * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * (725)

#29: Not Just a Walk in the Park: On Tsai Ming-liang’s VIVE L’AMOUR * 8/18/05 * This past week NPR featured stories about the rising tensions on Taiwan, the little island off the coast of China that’s operated since 1949 as if it’s independent, brazening its way to a stale-mate with its giant would-be boss with Western backing. Tensions are up because Taiwan’s president ran & won on a pro-independence platform, suggesting things may come to a boil. This context is helpful & timely for the Syracuse movie-going public, because on August 28 the film VIVE L’AMOUR begins a run through late September at The Redhouse. Indeed the writer-director of VIVE L’AMOUR, Tsai Ming-liang, has said that he considers the uncertainty of the political situation the Taiwanese endure to be a paramount problem, although his films don’t address this in the conventional sense. Instead we see the radical disconnection that occurs when community is deeply, pervasively undermined. VIVE L’AMOUR tells the story of three people who unwittingly share a vacant apartment in Taiwan’s capital city, Taipei, a city that saw a huge real estate boom in the 80’s & now, despite an enormous, tightly packed population, has many vacant apartments. May is a real estate saleswoman who picks up Ah-jung, a street vendor, for casual sex. Also staying in the apartment is Hsaio-kang, played by the actor Lee Kang-sheng, who appears in all Tsai’s films as this same rootless, restless character in ever-changing circumstances. Hsaio & Ah-jung discover one another & something like a romance ensues, at least for Hsaio. Mostly the characters don’t speak. They interact as least as much with the architecture & space as with each other, & their most profound interactions with one another are secret. May keeps a hard exterior until the final shot, which is six minutes long & tracks her, coming slowly into focus from a long way off & gaining substantiality, stalking through a desolate construction site to a set of bleachers where she finally weeps - & weeps. There is one other person there, a man reading a newspaper. He never interrupts her sorrow. If this sounds straight-forward – this walking & weeping - the final moments of her break-down have stunning & quite unexpected power. There have been a number of retrospectives in recent years of Tsai Ming-liang’s award-winning work, at festivals & last winter at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He’s been producing about a film a year lately. Last year’s GOODBYE DRAGON INN, an homage to old-style fight movies, is out in DVD, & his 2005 film, THE WAYWARD CLOUD, is making the festival rounds. Born in Malaysia, he has lived & worked in Taiwan for a couple decades. Some consider him to define Taiwanese New Wave cinema. In fact his favorite movie is Truffaut’s THE 400 BLOWS & any interview in print with him makes clear immediately the very breadth of his knowledge of world film. But Tsai’s work is a wonderful example of the difficulty of negotiating cultures without some guide. He has developed a number of characteristic approaches to filming modern urban desperation & isolation that are technical in nature & make his films, especially the later ones, hard to decipher for novices. There is little dialogue, great attention to spatial relations, endless long tracking shots & a camera that doesn’t necessarily follow the human drama. THE RIVER & WHAT TIME IS IT THERE? in particular will be hard for American audiences. Many of his films’ anchors seem to be specifically cultural in nature, such as Buddhist ceremonies, use of familiar & repeated characters & landmarks with Taiwanese references. These balance some of his visual techniques & keep the viewer engaged, even if only subliminally. VIVE L’AMOUR is a wise choice. Though made back in 1994, it’s crisp enough & - at least in Tsai’s world – fast moving enough to act as an introduction to this intriguing director. Nancy Keefe Rhodes (640)

#28: Countering Cultures: On OFF THE MAP & THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE * 8/18/05 * Two films about counter-cultural living schemes & their aftermath have just landed on rental racks through DVD release in such quick succession that it’s pretty hard not to hold them side by side in the mind’s eye. Both originally released last March, Campbell Scott’s OFF THE MAP & Rebecca Miller’s THE BALLAD OF JACK & ROSE invite comparison in other ways too. Both are stories of daughters who look back on their childhood’s critical turn within families that attempted to leave the world during 1960’s-inspired back-to-the-land efforts. In both, the central image is explicitly a return to the Garden of Eden. This suggests an irony: the most resonant way to tell a story of rejecting one’s culture is through the images central to that culture. In both films the daughter must become her own person at a moment when her father is gravely ill. On a 1970’s New Mexico farm, 12-year-old Bo Grodin’s father Charley slid into deep depression. After some protest, he takes his medicine & makes a graceful return. Off the New England coast in the mid-80’s, 16-year-old Rose Slavin’s dreadfully gaunt father Jack is about to keel over from a failing heart. He keeps on smoking, keeps on raging. These films share major images, themes & junctures: the land & its stewardship, the idea of escape by sea, the relationship of money to morality, the inescapable rituals that surround death & sex, indeed death & sex themselves. The point at which patience parts company from obsession is where one film leaves the other. Here’s how. Each film features an intruder into the Garden , wanting to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s. Tax auditor Gibbs arrives because the Grodins are so poor they haven’t filed taxes for years. Converted by the sight of Arlene naked in the garden so fast it does make his head spin, Gibbs stays on, takes up painting, and delicately shifts the balance. On the Slavins’ island it’s hard to keep all the intruders straight, but chief among them for symbolic purposes is Marty the evil land developer. Unwittingly teaching Rose how to handle what she opposes, Jack shoots at Marty’s workers & later bulldozes the model house that Rose says she likes in a moment of disloyalty to Jack’s ideals. And one skirmish with the poisonous copperhead would’ve been enough for me. Never made until 2003, OFF THE MAP then sat undistributed until March of this year. It didn’t do well at the box-office. It offers complex, enormously patient performances from Sam Elliot as father Charley, new-comer Valentina de Angelis as Bo, Jim True-Frost as the innocent, William Gibbs. Bo’s mom Arlene might be Joan Allen’s best performance, one that finally lets her heat & grace loose on the screen. The WASHINGTON POST’s Desson Thomson calls it “a lowercase paradise.” OFF THE MAP’s steady unfolding explains its staying power. In a single understated moment, Bo squirms & looks away from her naked father in the kitchen. Arlene tells Gibbs, “We’re casual around here.” But it’s the last time Charley does it. I suspect Jack & Charley face similar anguish having to do with daughters growing up, but Jack Slavin steps on the brake so late in the trip that he’s already crashed. BALLAD gives us a whole movie-full of looks so smoldering, it’s no wonder Rose finally burns the house down. I’m not completely convinced this is to-notch directing or acting. Daniel Day-Lewis’ extraordinary Jack – the hippie who writes checks to get his way – suffers wrenching moments of self-recognition, yes, yet there are half a dozen times you want to ask, “What did you THINK would happen here?” Jack’s a run-away character inside a run-away film. Really a film about obsession, BALLAD’s confusion is that it tries to make the counter-culture take the rap. In the epilogue, a silent Rose tends flowers in another commune’s greenhouse two years later. Bo Grodin, we realize, has grown up to be her own story’s narrator. Nancy Keefe Rhodes (661)

Film Review #27: The Gleaners and I
2001
Director: Agnes Varda

Here's my favorite scene from Agnes Varda's 2001 documentary The Gleaners and I. Varda, who's been making films for over 50 years, rolls down a French highway behind a truck, glancing at the passing landscape and fiddling with her new hand-held digital video cam, the instrument which has allowed her to embark on this trek. With one hand she films the other, reaching up with thumb and forefinger, playfully framing the image of the truck.

Many filmmakers might throw away this grainy, unsteady shot, but it pulls together what's come before with such economy and good spirit that I'm not surprised when other people love it too. Writer Jake Wilson says "this most lyrical shot virtually negates the difference between grasping an object with one's hands & approaching it with a camera."

Gleaners is about throwing things away, about the ancient, once-communal practice of gleaning, about how art and scavenging are alike. In 1554 a royal edict established the French people's right to glean. Varda titles her film after Jean-Francois Millet's 1867 painting of three women bending down to gather leftover wheat. She also films herself costumed like the painter Andre Breton's upright gleaner, and pointedly lays down her sheaf of wheat and picks up her camera. From the fall of '99 to the next May, she traveled France with a tiny crew, filming those who scavenge potatoes, sheep's wool and grapes in the countryside, oysters at the shore, appliances, eggs and vegetables from city curbsides and markets. There's actually a French Hip-Hop song about gleaning, and gleaners among gypsies, literacy teachers, the very poor, the very political and one highly-rated chef who doesn't trust the grocer.

I happened across Agnes Varda fresh, thanks to the painter Susan Roth, whom I'd just met and who liked a lot of the same films and directors I do. What a discovery! Afterward I read what Australian filmmaker Helen Carter wrote after the 2001 Sydney Film Festival, that "somehow the grandmother of the French New Wave had escaped my attention – she wasn't mentioned in any of the documentary classes."

So for me The Gleaners makes a start in answering how one might experience good art if encountered out walking the world anonymously – stealth art, if you will. Sometimes you're lucky enough to meet an artist's work clean like this, which is not to say that she herself did her work unmindful of other art. Now, Varda's had a renaissance over the past five years or so. In its first two years on the circuit, Gleaners screened in about 350 film festivals, and was named Best Documentary of 2001 by half a dozen film critics groups. Varda began getting bookings for retrospectives of the nearly 30 films she's made. Three weeks at Film Forum in New York City, then the Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the 2003 Venice Biennial, among others. There were special awards in Thailand, Mexico, and this year's Singapore Film festival. In her late 70's, Agnes Varda now teaches an intensive summer course at the European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland.

She came to filmmaking from studying art history and working for a decade as a photojournalist. She'd seen fewer than 20 movies when she made her first one in 1954. She's tried them in many lengths, as features and documentaries, on an enormously wide range of subjects. In the last several weeks, thanks to Emerald City Video and Netflix, I've been able to get my hands on several.

In 1961 Varda made Cleo from 5 to 7, about a pop singer awaiting cancer test results. She walks around Paris, plays her own songs in jukeboxes, fears her beauty won't save her. Traces of elements present in Gleaners showed up early. Cleo uses the human hand as the image and instrument of making one's own fate, starting with a God's eye color shot of hands laying out Tarot cards. The rest of the film, in black and white, is played in "real time," as a journey. Varda began disassembling the artistic process early too – Cleo meets up with an artist's model who literally steps out of her pose so they can go driving & talk.

Any gathering of women's buddy films should include One Sings, the Other Doesn't,made in 1977, which traces a 14-year friendship. As men come and go, Suzanne establishes a women's clinic and Pauline – who later takes the stage name Apple – tours the provinces with a women's band. Whether art nurtures its makers and the people near it is up for grabs in this film, and there's constant reference to films of that era and the turning point of the 1968 Paris student riots in which cinema figured as a political force.

Vagabond, made in 1985, foretells Gleaners too. Though fictional, it has a documentary's look and Varda used many non-actors. Sandrine Bonnaire plays the ill-fated Mona, a low-end loner whose aimless road-trip unravels during the coldest winter on record. Described as "painterly," the film's opening shot of a serene country field comes finally to rest on Mona's dead body – much as Breughal's painting "The Fall of Icarus" finally reveals an almost overlooked foot in the waves. Again, hands – Mona's grubby ones and a woman professor's beautiful manicure. Like the British director Carol Morley's Alcohol Years, Vagabond is as much about how others remember us as how we were. Mona's unstable "place in the picture" matches her unsteady walk in and out of the screen's frame, shots like Scorcese used in Taxi Driverto signify not fitting anywhere.

In 1995 The World of Jacques Demy was Varda's second film about her husband, the director Jacques Demy, who died of AIDS in 1990 and had made Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Lola, and Bay of Angels. It says much of Varda's view of art's function that she treats the rude and smelly Mona as tenderly as her husband. She has described her relationship with movie-goers to Andrea Meyer of Indiewire this way: "They do behave like an intelligent audience with me. They raise beautiful questions, speak to me after screenings, and tell me personal things."

This weekend is a flood of opening new films, with The Island, Hustle and Flow, March of the Penguins, and Miranda July's You and Me and Everybody We Know. But with Varda you can see something that's new in a different way. *******
Aired on 7/21/05 in regular film comment slot on "Women's Voices Radio," WAER FM 88.3, Syracuse, New York.

#26: On MR. & MRS. SMITH 6/16/2005 “A bored married couple is surprised to learn that both are assassins hired to kill each other,” reads the POST STANDARD’s blurb for MR & MRS SMITH, rated at three stars & listed as a comedy. It’s been called stylish & witty eye candy, a sophisticated romp, & a parable of modern marriage. But Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt’s star vehicle owes less to Tracy & Hepburn – or the recent WAR OF THE ROSES - than it does to Butch & Sundance. And its comedic sparkle covers a sobering degree of violence that gives new meaning to “kick her when she’s down.” The comedy in MR & MRS SMITH both frames & contains the violence in this tale of professional killers provoked by rival agencies into turning on each other – a story book-ended by marriage counseling sessions in which Jane & John are unforthcoming. Timing in comedy is a little like sharps & flats in music, riling up our emotions & heightening our attention. The understated exchanges, measured pauses & spare expressions – a tight smile here, a sidelong glance there – soon do their work. These scenes are focused, funny & well-directed. Between this before & after therapy, the story’s action unfolds & the bickering competition accelerates. They tussle over who’s calling the shots, who’s in the drivers seat – well, list a string of such stock phrases about fighting for control & you’ll pretty much have the script. Their secret out, John & Jane get to know each other better during a wild car chase. Past the requisite questions about infidelity, they advance to guilt. Jane asks if John ever has trouble sleeping “afterward,” that is, after killing people. Never, he says. After just a breath, she says never too. But I wondered about that, if banishing guilt is another skill one acquires after practice, like sharp shooting or mountain-climbing. Violence? Well, there’s much noise & mayhem, many explosions - some of it played for laughs, deceiving us that there’s not much real pain here. When the Smiths are first blasting holes in the walls while aiming for each other, Jane calls out sweetly during a lull, “Are you okay, honey?” They might be playing paint-ball. Such ease in destroying things gives the spectacle of their collapsing mansion an emotional distance akin to video games or smart bombs. But suddenly hand to hand combat is underway, at the same speed & volume. In this runaway scene, before you know it, John kicks Jane with all his might while she’s down – three times. Inscrutably, several reviewers call this stomach-turning moment one of the film’s best “guilty pleasures.” Critic Manohla Dargis has said, “At the heart of horror is the spectacle of pain, & the pleasure we take in that spectacle is often more unsettling than anything in the actual movie.” Any one of these kicks would’ve broken Jane’s ribs, not seen her popping up for the hottest make-up sex on-screen in a long time. I remain ungrateful for both the scene & the message, because I know this is a date movie. Comedy muffles our response to violence, & so can evoking past familiar movies. In this case it’s really the buddy action flick, with a final shoot-out straight out of BUTCH CASSIDY & THE SUNDANCE KID. Our modern outlaws emerge from a domesticated garden shed instead of a Wild West-era Mexican stable. But we know how it ended for Butch & Sundance. Primed as we are for their final comeuppance after all those get-aways, the Smiths surprise. In a near-perfectly choreographed, slow motion scene, they whirl, fire & prevail. In one suspended & iconic moment, they simultaneously embrace & fire behind each other. I wonder if anchoring the climatic scene in male-bonding flicks suggests some confusion about expanded gender roles - & resentment too. Did Jane have those kicks coming? Otherwise why the pointless garden party scene that dwells on her awkwardness & dislike in holding a new baby. What is feminine anyway? In one scene skilled mountain-climber Jane effortlessly adjusts living room drapes while balancing in stiletto heels on the thin wooden arms of a rocking chair – director Gerard Moses used a similar visual in The Redhouse’s recent production of the play PROOF to establish another self-possessed woman. But I started feeling that such moments just cleverly echoed her double life & added some trapping of PC, because really the film snipes at Jane too often to respect her much, despite her fierceness, her athleticism, her all-girl crew of top-flight operatives & my own suspicion she could whip Brad’s buns. Seen on the job as assassin, Jane’s disguised as a dominatrix, & the next scene reduces her tell-tale fishnet stockings to looking ridiculous. The Smiths never do learn their lesson. Back in marriage counseling at the end, they’re still leaving stuff out. With a gesture he hides from Jane, John brags that there’s lots of great sex now. Then Jane adds, “Oh, & we did the house over.” This deft understatement does lots of work after the smoking ruins of their home. The idea that she’s happy now, domesticated & deeper undercover, is less convincing. It makes you long for Tony Soprano’s shrink. (863)

#25: “Rough Trips: On THE WOODSMAN & CRASH” 5/19/05 A new exhibition opened today in Harlem about Malcolm X at the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, on what would have been his 80th birthday. Framed as a journey, it includes his pilgrimage to Mecca, which accelerated Malcolm’s rethinking of his views toward a more international concept of race, beyond black & white. Not all travel leads quickly to understanding. Two recent films by first-time directors use travel to examine difference in US culture. Nicole Kassell’s THE WOODSMAN opened last December. Releasing this film at peak Oscar-nomination time may have back-fired, since the subject matter clashes so harshly with the holiday season. This story of child molester (played by Kevin Bacon) returning after 12 years in prison never screened locally, but it’s been out a few weeks on DVD. The other is Paul Haggis’ ensemble tale of coincidence, road rage & racial pile-ups on or near Los Angeles freeways. CRASH opened nationally last week & is already playing at several malls here. I find both films largely successful projects about hugely difficult subjects. Both have uniformly memorable performances – some from our best actors & some from those you didn’t know beforehand belonged in that category. The deleted & extended scenes on THE WOODSMAN DVD suggest what a good director Nicole Kassell already is. But there’s a curious thing about these films. Other movie reviewers either love or hate them. Each film presents extremely gruelling material in blunt, unvarnished fashion. Some of the most devastating moments involve the brand of intimate violence – both verbal & physical - born of sudden self-loathing, that occurs when no other target is close enough. Because they deal confrontationally with harshly uncomfortable topics, both THE WOODSMAN & CRASH are labeled “naturalistic” & then criticized for plots that don’t match that approach. One example - A.O.Scott of the NEW YORK TIMES writes off the coincidences that drive CRASH’s narrative as logically “preposterous.” There’s plenty in THE WOODSMAN that’s unrealistic – on supervised parole, Walter’s allowed to live in an apartment overlooking a school playground & go the bars, & though he has a full-time job he’s constantly watching the schoolyard during weekdays. I think such grumbling misses the intent of both films & sidesteps the unsettling, often contradictory responses each evokes in its audience. Instead, consider whether both films are closer to a kind of magical realism, allowing us to suspend disbelief & thereby bear to watch, integrate & emerge from such difficult subject matter. THE WOODSMAN overtly uses Little Red Riding Hood as a major image. Sgt. Lucas talks to Walter about the fairy tale. Walter & his girlfriend Vickie (played by Kyra Sedhewick, Bacon’s wife) go into the woods. The 12-year-old girl Robin wears a red jacket & she recasts Walter’s life into fairy-tale language, remarking that he was “banished.” And Walter sees things that haunt him. Another fairy tale occurred to me during the park scene with Robin. Walter’s prison years have left him fairly wooden. Although one reviewer says it’s “creepy” that Walter becomes the most “functional” when he’s with this child, I couldn’t help thinking that here in where this Pinnochio becomes a real live boy, & out of that manages to decide to act differently. CRASH frankly uses coincidence, other plot contrivances & devices to lift the story into magic. The musical score constantly works in this way. The linked tale of the Mexican locksmith Daniel’s daughter & the Iranian storekeeper is entirely cast in magical terms as we see it happen. Daniel has reassured his little girl with his story of the invisible protective cloak. That she survives the storekeeper’s point-blank gunshot seems miraculous. To me this hopeful, elegant vignette is the movie’s heart & women its saviors. Mirror-like, both Daniel & the storekeeper moved to protect their daughters & both daughters act protectively in return. Even the so-called logical explanation is prophetic - it turns out the storekeeper’s daughter (a physician & healer) secretly loaded the pistol with blanks, her version of a magic cloak. And the Iranian says the little girls’ survival makes her his angel, redeeming him from his anger. Now, what’s the use of these contrivances in the midst of gritty realism? Walter’s apartment above the schoolyard – however unnerving it may be for us - allows dramatically for him to watch & sort out possible versions of himself, like the man he calls Candy who’s after young boys. As Walter works out in his mind his own mixed feelings, he & we are getting ready for his scene in the park with Robin. Likewise, the ever-tightening loops of coincidence in CRASH come to embody dramatically the emotional truth of the phrase, “We are all connected.” It’s too pallid to say this in the face of grown men struggling not to weep, as happens not once but several times in CRASH. Oddly I’ve heard no criticism – or even mention -of the plot device that makes Walter less an anomaly by having almost every female character in the film emerge as the victim of previous or potential sexual abuse, especially his girlfriend Vickie (all three of her brothers) & of course Robin herself. Neither preposterous nor overwrought, this facet of the film provides a complex portrait of how re-victimization occurs, of how we unwittingly choose our fellow travellers. Travel, after all, is the plot contrivance in our own lives as well, the thing that takes us where we wouldn’t be. I’m Nancy Keefe Rhodes for Focus on Film. (903)

#24: On PARIS WAS A WOMAN 5/12/05 Next Sunday The Redhouse in Armory Square is opening the 1995 documentary, PARIS WAS A WOMAN, as its next film offering on Sunday & Tuesday evenings. Greta Schiller directed & edited, & Andrea Weiss adapted the screenplay from her book of the same title. Both have stellar credentials as documentary filmmakers before & since this collaboration, as partners in Jezebel Productions since 1984, when they made the classic BEFORE STONEWALL as well as their acclaimed trilogy of films about women jazz musicians. PARIS is short - just 73 minutes long - so hopefully The Redhouse will also run a selection of the excellent special features on the DVD edition. PARIS WAS A WOMAN has screened at 150 film festivals throughout the world. It had theatrical release here in the US, New Zealand & several European nations. PARIS WAS A WOMAN portrays the community of women artists who flocked to the so-called Left Bank district in Paris in the early decades of the 20th century. Mostly we think of this crowd in terms of the “Roaring 20’s,” but many of the women were there earlier & stayed much longer, even past World War II. The films is divided into sections about individuals – Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas, journalist Janet Flanner, poet Nathalie Barney & painter Romaine Brooks, novelist Djuna Barnes, bookstore owners Sylvia Beach & Adrienne Monnier. Photographer Giselle Fruend & scholars Shari Benstock & Catherine Stimpson offer comments. There’s a wealth of still photos, home movies, audio clips & music. A map periodically shows where people lived – within blocks of each another. The narrative line is a tad meandering but I didn’t mind, because there’s such a vivid & thoughtful appreciation of that world. One of the possible pitfalls with the film lies in the audience. A decade ago when the film was still new, one reviewer suggested a better title would be HOW LESBIANS CHANGED WESTERN CIVILIZATION, because it deals matter-of-factly with the personal relationships of many of these figures. This is a pretty celebrated film in the gay community. Watching it, I was struck instead with how this is simply a part of things, not the topic of the movie. I’m hoping a very wide audience will want to see it. PARIS can tell Central New York a great deal at what I think is a critical moment in our cultural life, about how a creative class rises & what kind of synergy & innovation can occur, surviving even periods of severe disruption like war. I particularly liked how the film follows the long career of Janet Flanner. Her weekly column in THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE under the pen name Genet, really pioneered arts journalism & she also explained the competing movements of fascism & communism to Americans. The examination of how Beach & Monnier’s bookstores supported the artistic community may be more useful that rehashing Gertrude & Alice’s Saturday night salons one again. If you’re not movied out, go see this one, & thank The Redhouse folks for their perfect timing. (505)

#23: On VERA DRAKE 4/21/05 Just before its commercial release last October, the British film VERA DRAKE screened at the New York Film Festival, as did MOOLAADE from Senegal. Both films went on to wide acclaim & awards, including Oscar nominations. Mike Leigh’s VERA DRAKE recounts the 1950 demise of a working class, grandmotherly London abortionist (played by Imelda Staunton in a wrenching performance among an ensemble of wrenching performances). Ousmane Sembene’s MOOLAADE portrays one woman’s challenge to West African practices of female genital mutilation. Reporting on that festival, THE VILLAGE VOICE’s J. Hoberman reviewed both films together as artistically ‘the two punchiest movies in a generally strong line-up ‘ & provided some international context for the U.S. election season by noting that, ‘The rise of religious fundamentalism has effectively re-politicized issues of female autonomy. ‘‘ Now, released on DVD three weeks before Pope Benedict’s election, VERA DRAKE seems to be flying off Central New York rental shelves as fast as THE MAGDALENE SISTERS did when that DVD came out, also circumventing local theatres’ failure to screen such fare. Briefly, this film’s first half follows Vera about her rounds of work as a cleaning lady, family care & neighborhood good deeds - including an abortion every week or so, arranged by her friend Lilly who pockets a fee unbeknownst to Vera. After an old acquaintance’s daughter winds up in hospital, the police arrest Vera during her own daughter’s engagement party. The second half recounts Vera’s confession, how her utterly stunned family variously deal with this revelation, her trial & imprisonment. Vera’s decency & martyrdom are meticulously detailed, & exposure undoes her almost completely. But this film is not so easily cast as a pro-choice tract. Writer-director Mike Leigh has spoken widely in interviews about the abortion issue’s complexity & his own belief that abortion constitutes the taking of life. He dedicates the film to his physician father & mid-wife mother (although the film’s doctors are hardly heroic). And Leigh says that using a historic period’s setting aims not to distance the issue from today’s audience but to “heighten & get to its essence.” 1950 is post-war England, a frayed moment mid-stride between World War II - with blitzkrieg bombings of London, still-fresh battle frights that Vera’s ex-soldier husband Stan confides to her in bed at night, the privations of food rations, a persisting black market - & the new turmoil & progress of the 1960’s. Abortion became legal in England in 1967, overturning statutes dating from 1814 & 1861 that criminalized “helping out young girls in trouble.” Such law was part of the 19th century consolidation of healing into the male-dominated medical profession, weeding out homeopaths & midwives, specifically targeting women practitioners. Barbara Ehrenreich for example has written extensively - three books, I think - of parallel developments in the US. Vera Drake goes to prison for using a centuries-old, common home remedy called “quickening” - carbolic soap, or lye - that, in her words, “brings on the bleeding.” At one point, Vera indignantly tells the police she would never use dangerous metal instruments on other women. As movie police go, these are unexpectedly & painstakingly gentle with her. The inspector astutely guesses Vera herself was once in the same spot as her clients. And the young police matron’s care & compassion movingly echo what Vera had shown her own often distraught clients. That echo, I think, turns out to be crucial. In those instants, it is not just Vera singly who is stopped dead in her tracks & struck dumb. An equivalence with her clients emerges – all trapped socially by convention, by circumstances, by looming ostracism & all that entails & will cost. One senses that moment of fervent bargaining in Vera’s past - this eminently fair-minded though simple woman’s promise to help out other young women in trouble, launching a double life of 20 years that constantly risked an equal catastrophe of discovery. In that world, the only thing as bad as “getting in trouble” would be helping someone else escape its judgment. Such unforgiving social arrangements produce abortion, and other amputations - of expression, of feeling, of connection. Vera’s own briskness somehow undercuts her generosity & turns out to be something queasily akin to avoidance. She is so always on her way to the next thing, humming. Can she possibly never imagine anyone before Miss Barnes was injured? Or that her family wouldn’t find out? Such social arrangements also produce collateral damage galore in this already tattered family. Vera’s husband Stan rises to stand by her, but even son Sid, arguably the character with the broadest horizons, has quite a struggle. There’s enormous dramatic tension over whether the scandal will ruin shy - well, perpetually cringing - daughter Ethel’s only chance for marriage. Mike Leigh has been making movies since the 70’s. In the past decade alone think of such films as NAKED, SECRETS & LIES, & TOPSY-TURVEY. His method entails months of improvising roles & script with his ensemble casts before actual filming. VERA DRAKE is a movie with no narrative fat on it. A cascade of short, tightly edited scenes provide mostly visual exposition. Later moments of longer close-ups skid you to rest with a jolt. Conveying the complexity of character & relationships has its foundation in a kind of visual layering. Very often what you see is one character’s reactions literally framed by action in the foreground - between two people speaking, you see Ethel in the background bidding good-bye to Reg. During the interrogation that produces Vera’s confession to the police & then her husband, in the background the inspector glances at his watch, mops his brow. Sid’s initial condemnation of Vera, so based in quick cliche, provokes a single angry, impatient glance from his sister Ethel, more eloquent than any utterance by her throughout the film. In this present age of Bush & Benedict - it sounds like a law firm & I suppose in some way it is - VERA DRAKE helps us remember that these things are not so simple. (1006)

# 22: On MARIA FULL OF GRACE 3/17/2005 Released last July, writer-director Joshua Marston’s first feature film, MARIA FULL OF GRACE, was Oscar-nominated & didn’t win. This Spanish-language film about Maria Alvarez, a regnant 17-year-old who impulsively quits her sweatshop job dethorning roses in a Bogota suburb & winds up working as a drug mule smuggling cocaine into the wilds of New Jersey, has also gotten lots of nominations & awards from the Berlin Film Festival, Sundance, the Indie Spirit Awards & others. I thought it was about the drug trade too when I first saw it late last year, but now it’s been out for a little while on DVD, while the hook might be the drug trade – that stereotype to which Colombia is so often reduced – I think it’s about a lot more than that. Marston wrote the first draft of his script, he says, in about 48 hours, & then spent five years making this film, which of course introduces the luminous Catalina Sandino Moreno in the lead as Maria Alvarez. The poster featuring Maria gazing at a pellet of cocaine as though it were a communion wafer is certainly compelling, a visual image that summons up our capacity for obsession, faith, addiction & how all of them can morph together. Marston was initially hooked by the dramatic potential of the practice of “shot-gunning,” whereby drug runners intentionally send a number of young women who have ingested pellets of cocaine on the same plane, realizing that if one gets caught the others may make it through. This plays out on Maria’s flight, where she’s joined by her hometown friend Blanca, who’s caught wind of this scheme, the sad & ill-fated Lucy, & another woman who outfit suggests she may have been set up to get caught. Incredibly tense & ultimately tragic though the flight & its motel aftermath are, there’s still a lot of movie left when Blanca & Maria set out for Lucy’s sister in Queens. In Queens they find the pregnant Carla & Don Fernando, a community activist & “fixer” who helps out the poor immigrant & largely shadow community with little jobs, places to stay, information, tidbits of whatever one needs. He also sends dead mules home to Colombia, & the man who plays Don Fernando – a real community fixer whom Marston found during his research – reports he has sent home some 400 bodies over the years, just to give you an idea of the scope. But if you look at the film’s structure, Don Fernando on one shore is mirrored by the drug lord Javier back in Bogota, who also helps young people find work & get ahead. They are part of a film constructed around the idea of showing that globalization may have backfired in a way we could applaud. Marston is no fan of globalization, but he’s discovered that part f what has happened is a mutual penetration of cultures that allows, first, Maria & Blanca & Lucy’s sister Carla & women like them to move more easily into this one, & second, ultimately allows us to identify with them. This is done in three ways. First, by structuring the film so that Bogota & New York/New Jersey/Queens mirror one another – in what people wear, in rides into the cities where Maria watches green overhead route signs & exit signs, in cityscapes that are really very similar, & in stresses of motherhood both here & back in Bogota. Secondly & curiously, he achieves identification by making this a Spanish-language film. It could have been otherwise, but there’s just enough English in it to create an odd sense of the bilingual & of the feeling off kilter with what others are saying – much as Maria might feel herself. Finally, we find ourselves rooting for Maria as she progressively stands up for herself in moments that are leaps of faith that the truth will bear her over the abyss. She is a woman who wakes up – from a dead-end boyfriend who doesn’t love her - & who stands up, again & again. In the end, she’s on her own two feet, heading back to America from the airport. And, just as last year’s MYSTIC RIVER was really much more about the relationships of its four women than you might have noticed the first time through, MARIA FULL OF GRACE presents an ensemble of women who leave home to make another home, & whose obligations as mothers strain their reach toward sisterhood & fray their bonds. If you haven’t seen this film, it’s well worth your time. (755)

#21: On DEADWOOD & How We Civilize Ourselves 2/17/05 Now some of you might be expecting comment tonight on the upcoming Oscars. But we’re going to do something different tonight. When jazz cellist Karen Patterson talks about “art & the cultivated community,” she’s coming at the question, “How do we civilize ourselves?” Recently I some film critic commented that American crime shows are really a modern extension of the genre of the “Western.” I began looking at my favorites – CSI: MIAMI, for one – a little harder, differently, after that. But it really makes sense when you have a master cop show-maker producing a Western. If you have HBO, maybe you could watch the first season of DEADWOOD on Sunday nights starting last March. I don’t have HBO, but I’ve pricked up my ears over this series, created by David Milch, who came up with, for example, NYPD BLUE & some other cop shows. Last Tuesday the first season of DEADWOOD came out on DVD. I’ve just compressed three months’ worth of weekly viewing into the last several days. Since DEADWOOD’s story line picks up the action in each episode pretty much where it left off the previous week, this method actually gives you an added, unplanned sense of two things. First, this show & others like it are really serialized novels, & I think fairly self-aware ones. Second, you grasp the rush of change in this Dakota Black Hills renegade camp just two weeks after Custer’s massacre at Little Big Horn. Historical documents tell us that in March of 1876 there were no whites in that Sioux Territory & by July, thanks to gold strikes, there were 10, 000. So there really was a Deadwood, & on this show it’s populated with a mixture of fictional & real historical figures. Wild Bill Hickock (Keith Carradine) is shot in the back during a card game a third of the way through the first season, but he’s so compelling that his shadow colors the remaining narrative. Saloon-owner/pimp/boss/emergent civic pillar Al Swearingen – played by Ian McShane, who collected the 2004 Golden Globe for best actor in a TV dramatic series – is based on a real man, & also, David Milch says, on the Shakespearean character Falstaff from the Henry Five plays. Even this suggestion has expanded my conception of Falstaff as nothing previously & made me highly suspicious of how the classics are taught in this country. Don’t watch this series expecting that ridiculous fat guy you saw in watered-down high school productions. There’s Seth Bullock (Tim Oliphant), a man of “active conscience,” according to Wild Bill. Seth leaves the US – that is, Montana – for the wild territory, & leaves his old job of marshal, to make his fortune running a hardware store. He resumes marshalling, but that’s later on. There’s Brad Dourif as Doc Cochran, a secretly traumatized Civil War refugee doing his best in this wild place. The women comprise an ensemble who, over the course of 12 episodes, come together to overcome immense brutality & abuse in their own histories & present everyday lives, supporting one another & rescuing an orphaned girl literally encircled by wolves in the opening show. In 1876, 95% of the white women in the Dakotas were prostitutes, & women of higher class through the country were routinely kept drugged on laudanum (opium & alcohol). There are lots of whores in Deadwood – Trixie (Paula Malcolmson) risks Swearingen’s wrath to help Alma Garrett (Molly Parker) kick her habit, save her gold claim & assume mothering of little Sofia. Madame Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens) – incidentally, a character born in Syracuse - is a complex woman with a knack for forming real friendships with men who then help her strike out on her own from saloonkeeper Cy Tolliver. Robin Weigert plays Calamity Jane, a sewer-mouth drunk, enormously vulnerable, with a healing gift that Doc puts to work during the smallpox epidemic. The crippled Jewel has a fragility that illuminates kindness in unexpected places in Deadwood. This six-disc DVD collection has several well-done actor commentaries & interviews about production. David Milch wanted to do a series based on cops in ancient Rome during Nero’s reign, when there was no law except force. HBO was already doing something on Rome, so he set this project in the Old West instead. He did not study old Western movies as part of his research at all. Milch surmises that the Hayes Code of decency, which rated movies from the 30’s through 1988, had created the stereotype of the “laconic cowboy,” that man of few words & complicated morality who actually bore little resemblance to what we’d find in a town like Deadwood. I understand that now there’s a whole website devoted to counting the number of “F-words” in each DEADWOOD episode. A flood of obscenity co-habitates, as Milch puts it, with the ornate Victorian language that the literate learned to read with in 1876. In the absence of government, says Milch, who speaks well will lead. A number of episodes focus on characters wrestling with dilemmas of convention, effectiveness & presumed audience in how to articulate pubic issues. These struggles are mirrored in the vocabulary of social customs, such as ways of handling the dead, probably the first quasi-religious practice attended to in settling new communities. Milch often locates important turning points in the story at the town cemetery. Seth Bullock’s revelatory fight-to-the-death with a Sioux outside town relates to afterlife beliefs. And Swearingen maintains his primitive hold on his underlings not so much by merely killing the disobedient as by feeding their bodies to pigs. Deadwood is an illegal town. During the show’s first season the community improvises its own first government when an impending treaty with the Sioux, in the aftermath of Little Big Horn, means that law & government will come anyway. One might say that socially they have been addicted to liberty & they start to sober up by faking it till they make it, by guessing at what would be normal publicly. Privately, these characters, who have abandoned & left behind old lives & identities, indicate they will stick around by the advent of infinitely delicate self-revelations to one another. How do we civilize ourselves indeed? The program’s lovely opening sequence follows an escaped horse galloping through the camp, spooked & throwing its head, finally halting on Main Street, where its seen in reflection in a pool of water. Just so can film show us ourselves. There are lots of Deadwoods out there today too. (1078)

#20: Film Festival’s Bollywood Offering Re-opens Eastwood’s Palace Theatre 1/20/05 Tomorrow morning at 11, the Syracuse International Film & Video Festival holds a press conference at the newly renovated Palace Theater on James Street in Eastwood. The Festival program itself – with about 150 films & videos in competition plus workshops, international judges & film world guests, & special screenings - doesn’t officially occur until April, but organizers have approached this year’s task as a year-round process rather than a single annual event. Organizers have cultivated widespread community involvement. And they began last spring with the first festival’s screenings to create a model whereby the festival actually happened all over the city of Syracuse – besides Syracuse University’s campus, at the Everson Museum, the IMAX in Armory Square, the Landmark, the Westcott – even on the walls of downtown banks. The venerable Palace, a homegrown movie house if ever there was one, now joins the list. Given the festival’s vision, there’s hardly a more fitting place for tomorrow’s press conference. Built in 1924 by Alfred Dibella when Eastwood was still a village, the Palace reportedly never closed for more than a week until last April. Dibella’s daughter Frances ran it for 45 years after her father. When she died last April, her nephew Michael Heagerty, part owner of Armory Square’s Pastabilities restaurant, announced that he’d keep the Palace going after “a couple weeks” of cleaning & renovation. Eight months & half a million dollars later, the Eastwood grande dame is almost ready for her debut. Besides the symbolic choice of locating tomorrow’s press conference at the Palace, the film festival is sponsoring the first screening there on Sunday afternoon, January 30th – Indian writer/director Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s HUM DIL DE CHUKE SANAM (in English, STRAIGHT FROM THE HEART). The choice of a Bollywood extravaganza is fitting too, in keeping with the festival’s international scope & a nod to the Palace’s past. After all, Frances Dibella’s favorite movie was another extravaganza, the 1939 Civil War epic, GONE WITH THE WIND, which actually runs longer than HUM DIL’s 188 minutes. The term Bollywood refers to India’s enormous film industry, based in Bombay & only just recently becoming available with any regularity on Central New York theater screens. These are often films of marathon length, some featuring large-scale musical production numbers. Without much fanfare, Desi Productions & the local store Kashmiri Imports recently began sponsoring packed, one-time screenings of popular Indian films at Mattydale’s Hollywood Theater. This Saturday that series moves to the Westcott Theater for a 5:30 p.m. screening of the drama RAINCOAT, which incidentally also stars Aishwarya Rai & Ajay Devgan, two of the principals in HUM DIL. Interviewed two weeks ago on CBS 60 MINUTES, Aishwarya Rai is a former Miss World who’s successfully transitioned to international modeling & filmmaking. Bhansali cast her again in subsequent films after she won multiple best actress awards for HUM DIL, & writer/director Gurinder Chadha (of BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM) has also cast her in the starring role in the much anticipated new film BRIDE & PREJUDICE. HUM DIL DE CHUK SANAM is Sanjay Bhansali’s second major feature film. It swept dozens of Bollywood awards in the couple years following its 1999 release. The plot is fairly simple - the working out of a love triangle. Half-Indian Sameer travels to India from Italy to learn classical singing from a master singer who’s ensconced in a lavish compound filled with a large family. He quickly falls in love with the singer’s daughter, Nandini, who’s ordered to marry the more suitable Vanraj. Vanraj undertakes to reunite the lovers once he discovers Nandini’s secret love. This entails their journey to Italy – though filming was done in Budapest - a robbery & shooting, reunions, & Nandini’s discovery of real love. Along the way, there are numerous festivals & a great deal of drama – some would say melodrama, even soap opera, but I think that’s too harsh. The point of this film is the music. Bhansali spent two years working on the music, which reflects traditional music & rituals of the Gujurat region, before turning to the frankly stock story line. The soundtrack has been reviewed nearly as often & enthusiastically as the film, so one disappointment of watching the film is that only the spoken dialogue is subtitled. But the musical production numbers are visually stunning, involving scores of participants & sometimes multiple costume changes within single songs – a glorious kite festival goes for ten minutes across rooftops, for example. I thought that the movie CHICAGO marked a watershed - it was the first time I’d seen a movie musical take that such full advantage of the technology of cinematography. But clearly Bollywood is quite at ease with this! This screening was originally planned as a fund-raiser for the film festival. Earlier this month managing director Christine Fawcett announced that the bulk of the screening’s profit would go to the December 26th tsunami relief efforts,, primarily through two organizations, India’s Asha for Education (www.ashanet.org) & the International Federation of Red Cross & Red Crescent Societies. Don’t miss out on this event, where so much that is large converges. (846)

#19: Redhouse’s Offering of STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY Exactly Right for the Holidays 12/16/2004 When Cynthia Scott’s film STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY opened in New York City in 1991, film critic Janet Maslin said it was a “patient film.” It’s playing at the Redhouse in Syracuse’s Armory Square right now, & it might be just what you need in this frazzled season. STRANGERS opens quietly: some elderly women & their 30-ish bus driver emerge from a mist, trudge across a bumpy meadow, hauling their pocketbooks & leaning on one another. One laughs, “Put your glasses on!” The most elderly passenger on this day-trip outing, Constance, had suggested a small detour to the lake-side cottage where she spent summers 80 years ago. Under a long canopy of green, the rickety bus breaks down, & they must seek shelter in an abandoned house. Catherine, a country-reared nun handy with tools, sings hymns along with her Walkman while she coaxes the engine back to life. There is not much of a plot. They spend three days & nights while Catherine fixes the bus, it fails again, & she walks 20 miles out to bring help back by plane. They figure out bedding, try to fish in several hilarious ways, talk about life, death, sex, loss, the aches & pains & pills of old age. Constance worries the others are furious with her for stranding them. They come from different classes & backgrounds. There’s a Mohawk woman who fishes with pantyhose. An aged lesbian comes out & one feels in another life that she & the nun would have connected deeply. A former cabaret singer gets them all dancing to the swing tune “In the Mood.” I’m going to tell you that in the end they are rescued. And the bus driver, who’s the youngest, sustains the only serious injury in the first five minutes when she falls & twists her ankle. The others really are old & frail – there’s even a nurse listed in the film’s final credits – but in this wilderness they are much too careful to trip as Michelle did. It is one of this film’s great strengths that director Cynthia Scott had made four previous movies about dance, including the 1984 Oscar short-documentary-winner FLAMENCO AT 5:15, for she allows us to see the frailty of great age as yet another dance. And the setting is hardly idyllic – the abandoned house they find is like one of those lonely, forbidding Edwin Hopper houses, dark & isolated. It takes their connections to bring it into sunlight three days later. One of the women in this film has written that it’s a “semi- documentary.” Writer Gloria Demers set up the situation, but the lives of the women in the film furnish the material for how they will interact. Indeed, they share as collaborators in the film by interviewing one another, usually the filmmaker’s job. It gradually dawns on you that these aren’t professional actors – they don’t use their voices as instruments, don’t have the economy & intention of movement that actors & dancers possess. The technical excellence in this film comes from the crisp colors, the cinematography, the painterly framing of scenes, the editing, the stunning musical score by Marie Bernard that puts Ravel & Schubert together with some slyly comic Big Band Swing. Why show this film during December? The Redhouse’s artistic director Gerard Moses says that the kind of connections in STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY are what it’s all about. During the holidays many of us spend our time & attention zigzagging, zooming between highs & lows. The kind of calm alertness this film creates is like that floor that we pass time after time on the way up & down the elevator. Lately I’ve been thinking that the movies available about now in the malls are like that too. It’s the Oscar-season nominations that influence the release dates of many films about this time of year. Mike Nichols’ CLOSER springs to mind – inscrutably, the New Times describes this bleak tale as “saucy.” Despite its stunning performances (especially Natalie Portman & Julia Roberts) & its cinematography, I suspect CLOSER would not draw huge crowds in July. It is a film about relationships, like the equally excellent IN THE BEDROOM of a couple years ago, that I adamantly don’t want to see twice. Just this week, two similarly excellent but bleak films about marriage were released on DVD, THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR & WE DON’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE. I don’t want to watch them twice because well-made as they are, they lack redemption. Unlike Patty Jenkins’ MONSTER, though also bleak. Turning to comedies doesn’t help. Calling this the season of cynicism in the NEW YORK TIMES this week, Sharon Waxman noted that movies like SURVIVING XMAS, XMAS WITH THE KRANKS & last year’s BAD SANTA (1 & 2, no less) are partly the result of the youth market that would find A WONDERFUL LIFE corny. Waxman says this trend really started in 1990 with HOME ALONE, which treated real people to the type of unrelenting extreme physical injury usually sustained by cartoon characters. Well, in 1990 Cynthia Scott was making this quiet, patient film up in Canada that has now come to Syracuse remind us of who we really are. STRANGERS IN GOOD COMPANY has been playing Sunday & Tuesday evenings at 7 o’clock at the Redhouse this month, & continues this weekend. It returns in February for another seven screening dates beginning on the 1st. Now that The Redhouse film program is up & running, the local papers have pretty much got straightened out how to include them correctly in the movie listings. Like me, The Redhouse picks one or two films a month. I hope I choose what films to tell listeners about as well as they are choosing what to show. This is Nancy Keefe Rhodes for Focus on Film. As the Mohawk Alice says when it’s time for good-byes, “Ohna-Gee Wah-hee.” (980)

#18: On ANGELS IN AMERICA 11/25/2004 Shortly after the election, one of my sisters emailed me Thomas Jefferson’s remarks to the broken-hearted losers of 1796’s presidential election. Jefferson wrote: “A little patience, & we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, & the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles.” As you fight fire with fire, we answer the reign of witches with wings! I’m grateful for the recent DVD release of ANGELS IN AMERICA. This is Mike Nichols’ 2003 film adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play about the AIDS epidemic in Ronald Reagan’s America – there’s love, politics, the letter & spirit of the law, the toll of faith & the deep sorrow of abandonment that underlies American migration & progress. And right now, this soaring, brutal & hilarious film has enormous resonance. As two 4-hour plays, MILLENIUM APPROACHES & PERESTROIKA, ANGELS opened on Broadway in 1993 & 1994, winning Tony Awards two years in a row along with the Pultizer Prize. The film pares ANGELS down to six hours, debuting last December on HBO. Despite a cascade of awards, some critics grumble now that it’s “uneven” & “melodramatic.” There’s a curious fixation with Emma Thompson’s angel wings being “unrealistic,” which I think misses the point. Like much of ANGELS’ hilarity, the Messenger’s unwieldy wings avoid any danger of lapsing into earnestness at a high camp moment. Such complaints might stem from stuffing all that communal grandeur onto a TV screen with mostly solitary watchers. But I’ll take the trade-off because a lot of people can see this now. Set in New York City with what Mike Nichols calls his “dream cast,” ANGELS recounts interlocking stories of lives that whirl ever closer & eventually intertwine. Here’s a bare-bones recap. After his grandmother’s death, Louis abandons his HIV-stricken lover Prior & pursues Mormon lawyer Joe, whose wife Harper unravels. Joe’s boss is the only factually-based character, McCarthyite lawyer Roy Cohn. Played by Al Pacino as the best slimeball since Ben Kingsley in SEXY BEAST, Roy Cohn dies of AIDS, the male nurse Belize & Ethel Rosenberg’s gloating ghost, played by Meryl Streep, who also plays Joe’s mother Hannah Pitt, who arrives from Salt Lake City. Hannah Pitt coaxes Harper back from madness & takes up with Prior, who’s been visited by an angel. The angel explains that God has abandoned America for not staying put –certainly a classic conservative stance, but a dilemma for a nation of pioneers, even more so for two religions whose survival has depended on wandering. Now, this sounds a lot like a Robert Altman movie. Altman’s networks often illuminate women’s evolving relationships & show something that is socially very American, these made-up families that compete with blood, often with garish incongruity. It’s no surprise that Kushner talked with Altman first about getting ANGELS on-screen. But the production is such an extravaganza that we could miss the fairly elegant structure it’s hung on without Mike Nichols’ cooler strategy, which here emphasizes doubling – mirrors, parallels, twin situation, different sides of one emotion, all sorts of puns. One of my favorite examples of this doubling is that several actors play two or more characters who echo one another, notably Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson & Jeffrey Wright. This device, deeply pleasurable because it incarnates those echoes, isn’t much used in film - & could be. Thompson & Wright as the pair of nurses are pivotal as “angels of mercy” during an epidemic. And Wright’s black queen, Belize, is the only character with enough earned moral heft to hold his own against Roy Cohn. There’s an abundance of extremely well written turning point scenes between two-somes. They’re often about keeping faith or abandonment, & hinge on human action mattering deeply. Language matters as a kind of action too, & Kushner’s is gorgeous. Comprehending one another is key & the film visually shows emerging points of view. Long tracking shots carry the viewer great distances, literally connecting the dots in the landscape [map?]. In the final scene at Bethesda Fountain’s angel statue in Central Park, Prior looks the audience in the face & the camera dips beneath him, conferring angel perspective: [Start Tr. 2 from pause & play underneath] “This disease will kill many of us, but not all. We will commemorate the dead & we will not live secret lives anymore. We are not going away. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens.” On Thanksgiving Day, ANGELS IN AMERICA is good for ails us all. (748)

#17: On Women & Documentaries in the New Afghan Cinema 11/18/04 Earlier this month I was excited to read a small sidebar in Sunday’s PARADE Magazine announcing this week’s PBS Television national premiere, as part of the Independent Lens series, of AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED, a 52-minute documentary about Afghan women made largely by young Afghan women just learning to be journalists. This is the film Laura Bush mentioned last summer during her Republican Convention speech, after she met personally with two of the young journalists – the kind of attention that should also spur early DVD release. I was excited because I had the great luck to see this film last June here in Syracuse, thanks to a visit from Deborah Alexander between her stints to Kabul. Former Syracusan & WVR guest several times, Deborah’s worked in Afghanistan twice recently, first for the US State Department’s Agency for International Development & most recently consulting on the election. We’ve shared her email reflections from time to time on-air too. One of her projects with USAID had involved collaboration with several groups – the Asia Foundation, UNESCO & the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs – in supporting this effort to teach young Afghan women video journalism & get this film made. The women’s camera training course was launched in the summer of 2002 under auspices of an NGO founded to repair the war’s mental & cultural destruction called Aine, the Afghan Media & Cultural Center. Aine means “mirror” in the Farsi language, & Deborah was enthusiastic about the resulting film’s accuracy. “This really shows Afghanistan,” she told me, “the people & the country that I saw there.” Well, AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED didn’t air here in Central New York on Tuesday night at 10 p.m. The program on post 9/11 architecture had been slated “for months.” But WCNY, Channel 24 will air it on Saturday, December 18th at 6 o’clock. And its premiere in the US is important. French TV journalist Brigitte Brault, who directed AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED, began training 14 Afghan women in their late teens to be video journalists less than a year after 9/11. The film follows seven of them as they collect oral histories of other women in four locales. She noted in Tuesday’s NEW YORK TIMES that teaching the women to use cameras themselves was “deeply provocative.” None of these young women had ever traveled outside Kabul before. The film documents firsts plane rides, first river-fordings, first horseback trips. But this isn’t a “what-I-did-last-summer” movie. In Bamyan, where the Taliban dynamited ancient giant Buddhas carved into the cliffs, they visit families living in caves. These are the Hazzaras, an ethnically obscure tribe whose history includes women warriors on horseback who guarded the Buddhas. The Taliban pursued the Hazzaras with particular viciousness. Besides killing the men during the 2001 massacre, Taliban burned & bulldozed houses with women & children inside, cut off women’s breasts, & dismembered one woman’s male infant. Making tea by firelight, one old woman named Zanaib challenges the young journalists to visit even more ravaged spots. Relations with men vary widely both by region & individual. Herat is just an hour’s journey from Kabul by air, but at that point was the bailiwick of the warlord Ishmael Khan, & fiercely conservative. Even the men there are reluctant to bring their women for interviews. In Jalalabad, the Pashtun chief Faridoon escorts & guards the group as long as they are in his territory, finally negotiating with one local elder to permit interviews with the nomadic Koochi women. In Badakshan, home of poppies, legendary hospitality & the polo-like sport of buzkashi, they encounter a woman who describes the mutilation, rape & death she once risked if she refused an arranged marriage. Also in Badakshan, 20 year-old Mehria Aziz – who at 8 lost her mother to a stray mujahadeen bullet & who’s now visited Laura Bush - stands up to an angry crowd of men & informs them that the Koran actually does not require women to wear the floor-length chadori. Throughout, these young women are keenly aware of what they do. Mehria says simply, “We are the first women journalists in our country.” They deeply feel what other Afghan women have endured & they weep on camera. Afghan cinema has not been indifferent to Afghan women. Despite invasions & civil war, despite the Taliban closing the movie theatres & banning film for six years, Kabul’s small but vigorous & cosmopolitan film industry dates from the 1960’s. When the national film organization’s head, Siddiq Barmak, returned from exile after the Taliban regime fell, his first film project was the stunning Golden Globe-winner OSAMA, about a young girl who disguises herself as a boy & is found out. Barmak’s cast was entirely amateur, including former Taliban soldiers who participated to make amends & the pre-teen lead whom Barmak discovered surviving as a street beggar. Films like Majid Majidi’s BARAN, British director Michael Winterbottom’s IN THIS WORLD, the haunting Canadian KANDAHAR, & others made in collaboration with filmmakers from neighboring Iran, Tajikistan, & India, have reached US audiences through limited release in large cities, regional festivals, discerning DVD shops & now PBS. Last spring New York City’s Tribeca Festival screened two new documentaries about Afghan women, THE BEAUTY SCHOOL OF KABUL & AFGHANISTAN: THE LOST TRUTH, the latter following Iranian actress/director Yassamin Maleknasr as she interviewed women across the country. In fact, I saw AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED soon after Syracuse’s own first Film & Video Fest, which offered a rich crop of documentaries, many women-made, including a sequel, RETURN TO KANDAHAR. Zana Briskie’s BORN INTO BROTHELS, now going into theatrical release around the turn of the new year, also screened at the Syracuse festival. A good companion piece to AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED, Briskie’s film chronicles her project to teach photography to street children in India. Both films open with a group of short profiles of their young students - conventionally unlikely candidates - then follow them through the learning & application of their craft as they in turn document life around them. No doubt in the course of their work they will find the next generation too. Whether presented as documentary or fiction, this “nested box” narrative of the continual apprenticeship of our storytellers is one the most compelling ways for cultures in crisis to start to right themselves. AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED as provocative as a film & as a project because it refreshes our ideas about the forms & purposes of documentaries. Beyond a center position of “objectivity,” a documentary’s stance can expand on either side. In one direction, strategically “personal” stories further audience identification, with the filmmaker actively composing the narrative. This approaches the richness of good cinematic fiction. In the US Ross McEllwee’s documentary work has done this, for example. In the other direction are political commentary & interpretation. Conveying the true breadth of subject-as-citizen, you just might need both wings. Either so-called “non-objective” stance has risks, especially with novices. In particular, venturing into the personal magnifies novice status & can look self-indulgent. A slippery slope ensues, because in this light any technical awkwardness becomes more glaring. The Western women who directed, narrated & edited this film mostly keep themselves our of the spotlight. They know exactly whose personal story is the point here, so that AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED deftly side steps the pitfalls of the personal. Here, I think, is what that offers us & why it works. This film acknowledges the historic nature, dignity & danger of the work undertaken by the young journalists. I have rarely seen any “We are the first” embodied with such visceral immediacy. Putting the journalist apprentices themselves so centrally on-screen makes their evolving & reciprocal conversation with the women they encounter & record itself a subject of the film rather than just an interesting, even if heart-warming, by-product. This has the function of role modeling the training of journalists & their relationship with their own communities. What will the care & feeding of a free media & its practitioners look like in this new, fragile & much beleaguered democracy? Just holding elections is the quick & dirty version of nation building. AFGHANISTAN UNVEILED is one of the strongest arguments I’ve seen for nurturing other institutions in civil society & one of the greatest justifications for some of the projects undertaken in Afghanistan that never make our own front pages. And this film is anything but technically awkward. Indeed, the film’s visual fluency is one of its strongest features. I suspect this comes of the practice & demands of working wartime journalism. The young Afghan women have mentors who use their cameras every day, under extreme pressure in shifting conditions, meeting deadlines, of necessity communicating in flexible, arresting & economical ways. Here is the source of the fire-lit close-ups & the sweeping panoramas, both at the right moment, & just the right balance of show & tell. Don’t miss AFGHNAISTAN UNVEILED on the 18th of December on WCNY Channel 24. We’ll remind you. (1481)