Film Review #42: On SISTERS IN LAW *** Producer/writer/director/cinematographer: Kim Longinotto *** Co-director: Florence Ayisi *** Documentary, 2005 (104 minutes) *** Cast: Vera Ngassa, Beatrice Ntuba, Amina Abubakari *** Kim Longinotto’s SISTERS IN LAW had its US theatrical opening on April 12 at Film Forum in New York City’s South Village. Opening night featured a Q & A with Longinotto after the 8 p.m. screening, which played to an overflow audience, with some standing in the aisle. *** SISTERS IN LAW was my fourth movie that day and – therefore counter-intuitively – by far the best. Shot in mostly poor, mostly Muslim Kumba Township in the southwest corner of Cameroon over three and a half months in 2004, SISTERS IN LAW follows several cases involving women and children plaintiffs through the local justice court. Young Sonita was raped by a neighbor. Amina seeks divorce, fearing her husband will kill her if she’s sent home. Six-year-old Manka bears torso scars from coat-hanger beatings by her custodial aunt. Longinotto profiles prosecutor Vera Ngassa (also a judge and university law professor) and district court judge Beatrice Ntuba as they investigate and resolve these cases. Both women are entirely clear about the stakes for community and petitioners alike. *** At several points the camera rests on that universally-recognized scowl of bafflement some men wear when they are thwarted by women for the first time. The opening night audience laughed aloud at those moments, though Longinotto says for her that laughter is more “dark and bleak” than comedic. Speaking by phone last week from Colorado, the filmmaker said those men “didn’t mind being filmed – they didn’t see their behavior as wrong.” She recalled how one seemingly “urbane and educated” fellow acknowledged he beat his wife and added, “But I gave her medicines.” *** A handful of positive media reviews in early April paved SISTERS IN LAW's way to Film Forum. This theatrical release follows 120 festival appearances world-wide, with lots of prizes and accolades. Stella Pence, who runs Telluride’s Film Festival, calls it “one of the best documentaries of all times.” But SISTERS IN LAW is destined for classic status more for its women and their solutions than for exposing comfortable and clueless men as cads. *** The specific quality of justice portrayed here makes SISTERS IN LAW uncommon and instructive. Once, Vera leans over to softly ask a beaten down wife, whose purchase price was a pig – who was not, according to Longinotto, “even at her own wedding” – “Oh, Madame, what shall we do with these two men?” In another scene, a policewoman attached to the court investigates the child Manka’s family situation. Manka’s aunt claims the girl’s parents live in a countryside village, but then the officer also asks Manka, she reveals her parents are dead – so she is quite at her aunt’s mercy. While Longinotto calls this type of exchange “Vera’s democratic instinct,” any acquaintance with treating abuse would tell you that such direct questions – and believing the answers – also constitute the first intervention on the road to healing trauma. *** Longinotto takes the time as well to intersperse several short interludes in which Vera plays with her own son in her office. She attentively talks with him, touches him, teaches him colors and gently corrects his wrong answers, tickles him. Rather than have a narrator intone a list of policy solutions, Longinotto shows us specifically how the new men of Kumba are raised. From Colorado, she said the boy’s name is Moses, and that Vera adopted him when his young mother came to court’s attention because she tried to kill her baby. *** Lack of back-story and context crop up as the most common complaint about SISTERS IN LAW. Longinotto and her co-director for this film, International Film School Wales lecturer and native Cameroonian Florence Ayisi, shot in strict cinema verite style. A big fan of narration and context myself, I was surprised to notice that, this time, that complaint simply dropped away for me. Indeed, imposing such conventions would interfere with SISTERS IN LAW's capacity to connect as film. *** Having watched “practically all” of THE SOPRANOS, Longinotto notes that the HBO series’ viewers don’t expect history or statistics on the Mafia. She herself was aiming for “the power of fiction – the sense of danger and of immediacy and of freshness” that generate identification and emotional connection. The riveting experience of watching SISTERS IN LAW is one of the more striking arguments for this style of documentary that I have encountered. *** SISTERS IN LAW is also her third courtroom film and as such makes use of a genre that connects well with film audiences in the West if one’s aim is universality. She made DIVORCE IRANIAN-STYLE (1998) with co-director Ziba Mir-Hosseini, author of a book on Iranian divorce courts, to fill the gap between a surge of European films about Middle Eastern “fanatics” and “graceful, poetic” Iranian films such as those of Abbas Kiarostami. THE DAY I WILL NEVER FORGET (2002) follows a group of Kenyan schoolgirls who seek human rights workers’ help to escape genital mutilation. Trained in England’s National Film School, Longinotto has been making verite docs for a couple decades, often traveling outside the U.K. and Europe to do so when not writing for TV. *** Probable next trip is Pakistan, with a friend born there who’s writing a novel and wanted company, but also in response to what she sees as an “anti-Muslim crusade” in the West. As always, she’ll seek stories about women that might make a film. *** SISTERS IN LAW's limited theatrical release in the US through the end of May includes San Francisco, Boston, Seattle & Chicago. Check screenings at Women Make Movies’ website, http://www.wmm.com/. Hear Nancy’s interview with Kim Longinotto on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on June 1st at 8 p.m. EST via web-streaming at http://www.waer.org/. This review was written for Stylusmagazine.com & published there on 5/3/2006. [Text = 938 words]

Film Review #41 - On ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN * 1968 – 69 min., Director - Peter Lennon * 2005 U.K. DVD Release from Soda Pictures includes THE MAKING OF ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN (2004 – 27 min., Director – Paul Duane) * * * As Ireland celebrates the 90th anniversary of its historic 1916 Easter Rising on Monday, April 17th (the actual anniversary date is a week later on April 24th), one of cinema’s foremost responses to that short-lived but far-reaching rebellion is now widely available on DVD. I picked up Peter Lennon’s 1968 documentary, ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN, during a recent trip to Dublin at the Irish Film Institute’s bookshop, where it was centrally advertised with a huge hand-lettered sign – a far cry from nearly four decades of effective banning. The DVD includes the 1968 film, restored in 2003 by the Irish Film Board, and an excellent MAKING OF… companion documentary from 2004 directed by Paul Duane. Sometimes compared now with filmmaker Michael Moore, Lennon narrated ROCKY ROAD himself. In the midst of 1960’s cultural and political ferment, he argued that the “weight of heroes and clergy” had nearly sunk Ireland and long since hi-jacked the aims of 1916’s “poets and socialists.” He was explicit that a “republic” required a society to match its politics. ROCKY ROAD’s central question – “What do you do with your revolution once you’ve got it?” – becomes the film’s refrain, paralleling the popular pub song by The Dubliners that gives the film both its title and its musical backbone. Lennon has not mellowed; in a GUARDIAN article from last year, reprinted as the liner note, he called the Catholic Church “Ireland’s KGB.” Although I would prefer brisker editing in some spots, ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN has a sure and graceful look that it comes by rightfully. Lennon wanted a “personal” look with hand-held camera and minimal lighting. French New Wave cinematographer Raoul Coutard shot ROCKY ROAD in 1967 during his spare time, between work on Truffaut’s THE BRIDE WORE BLACK and Godard’s WEEKEND. Such openness to participating with new filmmakers on edgy projects was characteristic of the vibrant French film culture that exhilarated Peter Lennon, an Irish journalist working as a junior correspondent in 1960’s Paris. Lennon had never made a film before, but he grasped that the French used film as English-speaking writers used the pen – "cinema-stylo," they called it. Already Lennon’s visits home had produced a controversial series of 1964 articles in THE GUARDIAN examining Irish censorship, cultural isolationism and the clergy’s grip on education and family life, which he developed in the film. ROCKY ROAD establishes its satiric bent at once, opening with footage of Christian Brothers students reciting rote Catechism answers about the human condition with dour certainty: “Because of Adam’s sin we are born without sanctifying grace, our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened and our passions incline us to evil and we are subject to suffering and death.” One feels a peculiar vertigo; it is so easy to imagine these twelve-year-old boys morphing into pinched-faced old men with a whiff of Taliban about them – and just then the film cuts to The Dubliners’ rollicking title song. Later a list of writers, poets and playwrights banned in Ireland scrolls down a black screen, accompanied by tolling church bells. My Irish grandmother would call such juxtapositions “instigating,” and you can see right away that Lennon had insider knowledge about how to infuriate the earnest. ROCKY ROAD combines commentary, stills and archival footage, juxtapositions of music and segments, cinema verite slices of Irish life – class-based sports competitions (hurling and horse shows), life in pubs, street scenes and landscape, grim-faced couples at courtship dances and wedding receptions, a college discussion of censorship – with a series of telling interviews. These include writer Sean O’Faolain on Ireland’s “society of peasants,” a Gaelic Athletic Association spokesman explaining why it banned even watching “English games,” an elderly member of the censorship board, film director John Huston, and an extended visit with the “progressive, modern” priest the Church – incredibly – offered to Lennon for the film (“What was in their mind?” I can hear my grandmother asking). We first meet Father Michael Cleary performing his own syncopated version of “Chattanooga Shoeshine Boy” for a small hostage audience of patients and nurses in a women’s hospital ward, whose faces register either a creepy transport close to swooning or that singular stiff resignation present when endurance is the only option. The camera lingers drolly on the priest’s thigh jouncing as he keeps time. Father Cleary also orchestrates a wedding reception’s every turn, chats with grave-diggers, and acknowledges to Lennon with apparent energetic candor that, “Sure,” celibacy is hard, “but I had seven years to think about it.” As revealed in the DVD’s companion MAKING OF… special feature, Cleary was already sleeping with his teenage house-keeper during that interview. University College Dublin film lecturer Harvey O’Brien also writes in his 2004 history of the Irish documentary, THE REAL IRELAND, that she later published a sensational memoir about their affair and child "which turned out to be true." But the really arresting Father Cleary scene is that insinuating, self-infatuated hospital performance. I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. There’s a priest singing at a party in the opening scene of Peter Mullan’s film about 1960’s Ireland, THE MAGDALENA SISTERS (2002). His seductiveness, the damp-cheeked response of the women, and the arousal of the men watching – all cross the room visually in waves, leading to the back-room rape of a cousin that begins Mullan’s fictionalized account of the Irish Church’s wide-spread practice of simply locking up potentially wayward women for life in their chain of commercial laundries. It’s tantalizing to wonder if Mullan had seen ROCKY ROAD and made use of this emblematic scene. Entered independently at Cannes in 1968, ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN was the last film to screen before Truffaut, Claude Lelouche and others closed down the festival in solidarity with the student strikes in Paris. Those same students then screened ROCKY ROAD at the Sorbonne during the riots, launching the film’s outlaw popularity on the continent and in a few North American university film programs. Much of Ireland was furious. Although the film was never officially banned, theater managers simply refused to book it; most Irish critics attacked it. Following an initial Dublin screening, a tumultuous incident at Ireland’s Cork Film Festival and one packed, seven-week run, ROCKY ROAD sank from sight on home ground, stored in the Irish Film Archive until the Irish Film Board and Loopline Productions agreed to restoration in 2003. Paul Duane’s 27-minute MAKING OF…provides much of this invaluable context and more. I might be tempted to call his the better documentary, if only because it avoids ROCKY ROAD's several claustrophobia-inducing lengthy sequences. But perhaps Lennon and Coutard knew what they were doing after all, since those segments manage to convey the lock-down of their subjects’ existence. In the intervening years that ROCKY ROAD slept - at least on Irish soil - Ireland’s own film culture has blossomed. It boasts the second highest film attendance per capita in Europe and an international cinematic literacy and perspective the US should envy. A good scene for a home-coming. * * * If you’re not in Dublin yourself, you can get the U.K. DVD of ROCKY ROAD... (including the 27-minute companion doc) on-line at the Irish Film Institute’s bookshop (www.irishfilm.ie). The US distributor, First Run/Icarus Films (www.frif.com), sells the two docs separately or together. * * * This review is also published at www.Stylusmagazine.com (4/21/06).

Recovered Film Review #29-A: “Poof! You’re a Movie! On the Screen Adaptation of David Auburn’s Play, PROOF” * Nancy Keefe Rhodes * Broadcast on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM on 10/20/2005 And now “Poof! You’re a Movie!” – a look at what happened to David Auburn’s award-winning play, PROOF, on its way to the screen. You might be among the fortunate here in Central New York who saw The Redhouse’s wonderfully well-directed & acted stage production of this play about a year ago. It isn’t that you won’t recognize what’s on-screen out at Manlius Cinema, but there is good news & bad news about that transformation. I’m going to start with the bad news so you will fully appreciate the good. PROOF is the story of a young Chicago woman, Catherine, who must bury her brilliant but quite crazy father Robert on her birthday. Catherine has been rattling around in the house caring for Robert & neglecting her own life & talent. She & those around her fear she may have inherited his instability. Her claim that she has authored an astounding new a mathematical proof is disbelieved by both Robert’s graduate student, Hal, and Catherine’s sister Clair, who has flown in from New York for the funeral to get everybody in ship shape. That PROOF began life as a play means that putting it on-screen to begin with presents a problem. As you can see in this case, it isn’t just the basic problem that plays showing up on-screen suddenly seem way more talky than they ever did on-stage, but let’s start with that. The first rule of screen-writing is that showing trumps telling, because the ways movies & theater approach telling stories are just fundamentally different. Stage abstracts & enacts. It treats background differently than film does, so that the characters stand out & are enhanced. I had misgivings when I noticed that David Auburn’s co-author on this screen adaptation was Rebecca Miller. Two months ago I reviewed her film, THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE, here, a film with memorable & tremendously moving moments – also about the heart-wrenching, costly & misplaced love between a father & daughter, & a film with many of the same flaws that PROOF has. Yes, I blame Rebecca Miller for those flaws, though I can’t for the life of me figure out what turned David Auburn’s head so that he abandoned several of the finest parts of his meticulously constructed play. After a while it dawned on me that PROOF the movie is fiercely anti-stage. First, it abandons the porch upon which the play’s entire action occurs – that domestic outpost, that architectural metaphor for the border between our public & private lives. Then there are the times the film literally loses its characters in the camera’s frenzy at being free to wander about Chicago. It took me a moment to find Catherine & Clair in one crowded street scene – very distracting – & Catherine’s ride home from the airport near the end – she’s not in it. These are major mistakes & you’ll have to spend a lot of energy staying focused on what really are fairly nuanced actions. The other major metaphorical abandonment is that here in the film, Hal who seduces Catherine rather than the right way round. Theater not the only thing that travels poorly to the screen. Think about how genius travels, especially the sort that most of us can’t understand. Numbers make my eyes glaze over. When Hal & Catherine make cocktail chat out of prime numbers theory, that mostly leaves me in the dust. In Catherine’s surprising but plausible seduction of her father’s student, David Auburn provides a glimpse of how her mind might also be capable of moving – decisively, brilliantly, hiply – well, with genius. The film version takes the wind out of her sails as both a woman & as a prodigy. Now she is merely angry at times, although her anger is part of the good stuff. As in the scenes with her sister. Rarely has sisterly bickering had more bite & huff than Gwyneth Paltrow & Hope Davis bring it here. What the camera can do, when it settles down, is pay attention to some extraordinary acting at close quarters, especially from Paltrow, who also starred in the London stage production. So, is Catherine’s genius really any less exotic to us than such current movie characters as Domino the bounty hunter-model, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA, or Pocahontas in the forthcoming NEW WORLD? I wonder. But most of us do understand losing our grip. I’m grateful beyond measure that somehow Robert’s own final proof survived to the screen – though now it has a reading in a cozy study instead of the frigid winter-night lawn where it belongs. Here is what he’s been scribbling: “Let X equal the quantity of all quantities of X. Let X equal the cold. It is cold in December. The months of cold equal November through February. There are four months of cold & four months of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature. In February it snows. In March the lake is a lake of ice. In September the students come back & the bookstores are full. Let X equal the months of full bookstores. The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four. I will never be as cold now as I will in the future. The future of cold is infinite. The future of heat is the future of cold. The bookstores are infinite & so are never full except in September.” I felt sorrow & pity, which I guess is proof they still managed to pull it off. * [914]

#40: On Sally Potter’s YES * Written & directed by Sally Potter * United Kingdom 2004; US DVD release November 2005 * With Joan Allen, Simon Abkarian, Sam Neill * 110 minutes * This review also appears in the March 20, 2006 issue of stylusmagazine.com * Midway through Sally Potter’s latest film, YES, the lovers named only She (Joan Allen) and He (Simon Abkarian) engage in a wrenching argument in a deserted dark cavern of a parking garage. This was the scene Potter wrote first for her script, just after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks, and it serves as the film’s – and the larger parable’s – turning point. Until now, their’s has been a secret affair, undisturbing to the surface of their lives, ignorant and oblivious of each other’s origins. In picking this fight, He makes clear that the luxury of such denial has become impossible. Further, this is the only time that any character in YES mentions that they’re all speaking in rhyming iambic pentameter. Complaining that he has had to make all the cultural adjustments in their relationship, the man says, “I even rhyme in your tongue.” At first only panicky, she is suddenly curious, asking, ‘’Tell me more.’’ * Their background: She is a Belfast-born, U.S.-raised research biochemist, living in London and married to a British politician (Sam Neill) who cheats on her. He is a Lebanese surgeon who left Beirut to escape the war there. In London, He works as a chef, until an incident with a bigoted kitchen worker forces him to quit. They meet at a dinner party where he notices her distress – she is pacing, later weeps at the table over her husband’s unfaithfulness – and speaks gently to her. Their affair is rapid, lyrical, heated – but cannot escape the steaming, clanging bickering of the kitchen workers. * In the parking garage, He breaks it off following the kitchen incident. They each return ‘’home’’ – she to her aunt’s Belfast deathbed, he to his friend’s clinic and wedding celebration. Speaking by cell from the Belfast hospital corridor to a bombed-out street in Beirut, She asks him to meet her – of all places – in Havana. Arriving alone, hoping he’ll join her, She goes sight-seeing and night-club dancing in scenes intercut with his Beirut activities. A single musical sequence overlays and unites these alternating scenes, suggesting that his return to Beirut is somehow equivalent to her tourism. Early in their affair, He had called her his “true home.” Certainly their reunion suggests they complete each other, both literally and as parable. * Potter has referenced her film’s title in James Joyce’s Irish novel ULYSSES, the word falling at the beginning and end of Molly Bloom’s monologue about the transcendent joys of physical union, a monologue that pushed the limits of language in the early 20th century. That most of the film’s dialogue is written in verse steals across our awareness slowly – or possibly not at all. The dialogue has a measured cadence and sometimes obvious rhymes, but some viewers might recall the dialogue as merely “lyrical” or “poetic.” Potter says that she directed her cast to concentrate on their lines’ emotional content rather than count its formal beats. That is, except for the single reference, she preferred to leave the language’s structure submerged. And since the parking garage argument is about uncovering the social structures that make their relationship problematic – especially for him – putting this reference to the dialogue’s rhyme in the same spot is simple consistency. * The rhyming dialogue that Potter says is what made investors most reluctant – YES was made in the end for about half its original budget – should not scare audiences off. Sally Potter is an English musician, performance artist, singer, dancer, and stage actress who also makes movies – writing, directing, and sometimes scoring her own films. Her earlier films, the first in 1979, some shorts, a feature shot in Iceland with Julie Christie and an all-female crew (THE GOLD DIGGERS), and some documentaries, are mostly unavailable in the U.S. She is at home across art forms – her early short film THRILLER adapted Puccini’s LA BOEHME and her 1997 film THE TANGO LESSON (sadly a hard film to locate), stars herself as a screenwriter named Sally Potter who escapes writer’s block in dance lessons. She has worked with elaborate period pieces – notably ORLANDO, her 1992 adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel that recapitulates four centuries of British history, with actor Tilda Swinton in the title role, and 2000’s THE MAN WHO CRIED, a saga of European anti-Semitism. * At first glance her work might seem akin to the experimental cinema of British avante garde contemporaries like Peter Greenaway in its “high cultural” literacy and tone. But Potter has increasingly been part of the wider cinematic landscape since ORLANDO, and she developed her work over the same last quarter century as many internationally inspired indie filmmakers. Not for Potter the self-referential hand-held “home video” look, but there’s a similar concern with violence, enormous attention on re-working narrative, inventive camera angles and focus and speed, sound design that conveys aspects of narrative beyond straightforward plotting, and comedy alongside the serious (often some character turns to the camera mid-action for an ironic quip). Potter has increasingly used international crews and American actors interested in international projects; her current cinematographer worked with French director Alain Resnais on films such as LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD and NIGHT AND FOG. * YES is hardly a stiff, “arty,” esoteric film, either in itself or its pedigree. This begins immediately with its performances. With the possible exception of her “earth mother” role in 2003’s OFF THE MAP – I’m going to pass over THE UPSIDE OF ANGER here – YES’ She is a sensual and openly emotional Joan Allen as American audiences have rarely seen her, emerging from pinched, stodgier roles such as First Lady Pat Nixon, THE CONTENDER’s tight-lipped Senator, and THE CRUCIBLE’s silently suffering Elizabeth Proctor. Armenian-Lebanese actor Simon Abkarian is a graceful, loose-limbed man; He performs a Lebanese wedding dance for She after one of their trysts (a dance he’ll perform again later at a friend’s wedding in Beirut with obvious hesitation, perhaps conveying his recollection of dancing earlier for his lover). * But the paramount scene in YES for manifesting the tension that contains passion within structure occurs in a restaurant, where He’s hand beneath the table touching her causes She to climax. The polar opposite of that famous WHEN HARRY MET SALLY restaurant scene, in which Meg Ryan’s character loudly calls attention to herself by demonstrating how to fake an orgasm, here is a delicious demonstration of conveying more with less – just She’s hand tightening on his arm, her breath catching. “Delicious” must be the effect that Potter sought too; He licks his fingers playfully afterward, causing She to laugh. * Even intelligent U.S reviewers have not always praised YES. THE NEW YORK TIMES’ A.O. Scott accused Potter’s characters of “overblown tristesse” and her dialogue of “staggering banality” in his 6/24/05 review, just after YES had screened at the New York Film Festival. After a brief September theatrical release in the U.S., the DVD followed in November. But Scott also found the plot in Oscar-winning CRASH “implausible” in its neatly interlocking pieces – that CRASH is about the redemptive power and magic of love, not logistics, sailed over his head. And the heart of YES is not about metrics either. * [1,177]

#39: Greenhouse Effects: RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE & Brian Friel’s MOLLY SWEENEY * 3/3/06 Only this morning I’ve read two reviews in the local paper complaining that films opening here this weekend are formulaic rehashes. I think this quest for surprise is a tad pinched & short-sighted. After all, Fellini’s inventiveness built a whole cinematic career on the stock characters & plots of Italy’s commedia del arte. And the American Western movie largely depends on how a director interacts with its established conventions. Director Damien O’Donnell’s RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE is a 2004 Irish film that’s now available state-side on DVD. It opens Sunday afternoon at the Redhouse in Armory Square for a three week run there, ending right after St. Patrick’s Day. As often happens at the Redhouse, programming in one realm reflects another. J.T. Lee, who runs the film program there, intentionally paired RORY O’SHEA with the current stage production of Brian Friel’s 1994 play, MOLLY SWEENEY, which opened last week. The movie addresses one sort of physical disability (muscular dystrophy & cerebral palsy) & the play another (blindness), both of which occur for people who are ordinary rather than heroic. We meet RORY O’SHEA’s title character (played by James McAvoy) when he enters yet another nursing home at the age of 21. Quickly settled in, his Che posters & photos of himself with luscious babes proclaim a vanished lifestyle. He’s the one with muscular dystrophy. He makes friends with Michael (Steven Robertson) for initially instrumental reasons. Despite his severely spastic body, Michael is willing to spike Rory’s hair with gel when the nurses wear out on that chore, & Rory understands Michael’s garbled speech, thus providing him with a translator to navigate more widely in the world. There’s a girl who’s beyond reach, obstacles to be gotten around, & an authoritarian administrator (Brenda Fricker, ironically evoking this movie’s 1989 predecessor, MY LEFT FOOT, in which she had a very different role). Rory & Michael finagle a way to leave the home for their own apartment & Rory, having served his purpose by streaking across Michael’s dark horizon like a meteor, meets what his father says is his “expected” end. As the title pounds home, Rory’s purpose is to be remembered in another’s redeemed life, not to live his own. Yes, we’ve seen this plot before. For example, there’s Peter Chelsom’s small but admirable 1998 movie, THE MIGHTY, & another variation in the classic ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. And so on. Decried by some reviewers as emotionally excessive & manipulative, Rory’s “expected” death explains his impatience, his short temper & what his minders consider his bad adjustment. Since we expect the disabled – the stigmatized of all kinds – to do the work of making the rest of us comfortable, such stories really demand some device to rescue characters like Rory from simply being labeled poor sports. O’Donnell takes a deeper look at these boys as social outsiders, something he’s done before. His 1999 film, EAST IS EAST (1999), makes use of the stock plot of East Indian immigrants both adjusting to & clashing with London culture that has generated a lively sub-genre of similar films, such as the 1997 MY SON THE FANATIC & the better-known BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM (2002). In attempting to live on their own, Michael & Rory are certainly much like foreigners who resist ghetto confinement. Also edgier than we might think is director O’Donnell’s willingness to make us uncomfortable with Michael. Rory is an attractive young man – the phrase “happens to be sitting in a wheelchair” could actually apply to him in the bar scene. Michael’s another matter. Many viewers will have to admit they share the bar girls’ queasiness with him as a potential date. This deepens the abjectness of Michael’s heartbreak when one of those bar girls, Siobhan, who briefly winds up as the boys’ personal assistant, feels she must leave when his emotions become too hot for her. I suspect this was harder for a director to pull off. In a lazier movie, Michael would be the side-kick watching Siobhan & Rory, leaving us all less ruffled. Because of this discomfort, RORY O’SHEA WAS HERE is an apt companion to Friel’s MOLLY SWEENEY, even though we know this decent little film is not going to survive anywhere near as long as Friel’s great play. Especially as mounted at the Redhouse, MOLLY SWEENEY will engage you & make you more uncomfortable in its last moments than you imagined. Director Gerard Moses told me on opening night that the play “really is an Irish RASHOMON,” presenting three radically different versions of blind & large-hearted but rather ordinary title character Molly’s return to sight. Blindness as a rich, multi-hued metaphor goes back to the Greeks & beyond, of course, & it’s appeared before on the Irish stage, in Synge’s work, for one. MOLLY SWEENEY relies heavily on the work of Oliver Sacks with the blind, in particular with the adjustments they encounter when “sight” turns out to be different & harder than they expected, & not all that congenial. There are many things to admire about this production. We are used to Gerard Moses’ nuanced direction & physical characterizations, which often go well beyond what a script offers. But when you know how little guidance Friel’s text provides in this regard, & how quiet & devoid of sets & lighting other productions have been, you will appreciate more what’s been created here. In a deeply moving & arresting performance by Nicole Halmos, Molly doesn’t do well with her new sight. Friel’s language in her mouth is a joy. But look further: in the blocking of her movements, Halmos several times makes a simple, clean change in direction that serves to almost paragraph what’s happening on-stage, a repeated half-turn that could be described as “dancerly” (much the same as in film we see some cinematography as “painterly”). Molly is at home in her blindness & we spend a long, leisurely time with this woman, free to look her over. Then, in her brilliantly performed last scene, Halmos’ Molly turns once more, & we get a taste of how unexpectedly overwhelming acquiring vision might be. For once, I’m not going to tell you any more, but a tiny choice about how to play this provides the kind of shock that makes the best theater. You must see this. Both the movie & the play rely on formulas. Both are parables, & their stock elements relieve an audience of engaging with ambivalence & discomfort at a merely intellectual level – where opinions about political & social “issues” tend to harden – & instead fly under the radar of the audience’s own shame. I think this is a gift. (1,107)

#38 – Femininity as Performance: MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS & TRANSAMERICA * 2/16/06 * The poet Adrienne Rich argued in a classic feminist essay that sexuality really – that is, naturally – is a continuum that we all shuttle back and forth along, and not the rigid boxes that society works so hard to enforce precisely because they are not natural. “White-boy thinking,” she called it. Some movies remind us just how close to performance femininity can be, & also what an enduring tradition that notion has been in our culture. First released theatrically in October 2004, Richard Eyre’s STAGE BEAUTY went into DVD last year. It’s doing well enough that it’s still in the two-day rental sections locally. Set in 17th-century England when male actors played all dramatic roles, STAGE BEAUTY is based on the historical figure of British actor Ned Kynaston. His legendary portrayal of a swooning Desdemona is recreated on-screen, & as Kynaston, actor Billy Crudup shuttles back & forth along that continuum Adrienne Rich spoke of pretty convincingly. Kynaston was also a disciplined craftsman, & STAGE BEAUTY presents his indignant conviction that as such, he & his colleagues were better at playing female roles than real women. This was an age that literally took gender as a made thing, one whose success would be publicly confirmed by applause. Although Kynaston is thrown over by his female challenger (played by Claire Danes) & that exclusionary theater system toppled, there are delicious & astute scenes in which they play out which is the more knowledgeable & the more able to express femininity. STAGE BEAUTY is an intriguing precursor for what’s available on Central New York screens this weekend, and “delicious” is a Dame Judi Densch kind of word you’ll hear in one of the two films that are Oscar-nominated for best actress – films that again remind us how femininity shades into performance. Director Stephen Frear’s MRS HENDERSON PRESENTS has been doing quite well at the Manlius Cinema & makes the multiplex cross-over by opening tomorrow at Carousel Mall. In a role called “Oscar-bait,” Densch plays Laura Henderson, an upper-crust widow who buys a rundown London theatre in the 1930’s & teams up with theatre manager Vivian Van Dam. Based on real figures, between jousts they put on musical revues with naked women & get past the censor by passing them off as artistic still-lifes. In the 1930’s & 40’s (for the story continues into the London Blitz of World War II), advancing in English society required closeting one’s Jewish one’s background. As played superbly by actor Bob Hoskins, Van Dam has got his own role of Gentile down, though Mrs. Henderson figures him out as once. Also opening tomorrow at The Westcott is writer/director Duncan Tucker’s feature debut film, TRANSAMERICA, with Oscar-nominated Felicity Huffman as Bree. Her last minute, reluctantly undertaken detour to meet her long-lost son Toby before gender reassignment surgery generates a road trip from New York to LA by way of the hills of Kentucky and the swimming pools of Arizona. Toby is a surly, scruffy former hustler who discovers Bree’s sexual condition in one of the most ungainly moments imaginable. Then a wolf in hippie’s clothing steals their vehicle & they land on Bree’s parents’ doorstep. If ever a mother offered a feminine role model to rebel against, actress Fionnula Flannagan as Bree’s theatrically hypercontrolling, hysterical mother Elizabeth is that. Now a waffling ad campaign can kill a movie. When THE VILLAGE was opportunistically packaged last year as a monster movie to capitalize on director M. Night Shymalian’s previous films, audiences just felt ripped off. There’s an analogous unease about these movies’ billing. Fortunately, both are strong enough films to survive that, though you may not realize it until you’re still thinking about them days later. In a 2002 interview, the year his DIRTY, PRETTY THINGS was released, the serious Mr. Frears remarked that he couldn’t imagine doing a film set in Britain about the upper-class. But MRS. HENDERSON is really more than a whimsical bit of dance hall nostalgia. Beneath all those tart quips is a story about the prerogatives and missteps of her class and the strain of anti-Semitism among our British cousins that is way closer than is comfortable. Next to that, what does it mean to be “ a lady”? Likewise, TRANSAMERICA was gingerly billed in this morning’s paper as a “dramedy” – as if the hybrid nature of its heroine mirrored the film’s own form. Perhaps it’s that we don’t really know what to do here yet with transsexuals in a mainstream movie. But when I saw this film in January in New York City, even that worldly audience gasped collectively when Bree’s son catches her in the rearview mirror, peeing behind the car, skirt hiked up & girdle pulled down. Bree must learn to speak, walk, dress, move “like” a woman, recalling Ned Kynaston’s craftsmanship in the conscious construction of performance. Yet losing her hormone pills on the road creates panic, & creates a reminder for us that some of this isn’t made up. Interviewed yesterday afternoon on National Public Radio, Felicity Huffman said this tension is what intrigued her enormously about the role – far more than the obvious “transsexuals are people too” message, which she said still left two hours of movie to fill. Both films also use the male body as a foil in their exploration. In one scene at Mrs. Henderson’s theatre, the entire stage crew has gotten naked to make the rehearsing actresses more comfortable, including Van dam. “You ARE Jewish!” notes Mrs. Henderson, glancing at him immediately when she walks in on this. Now it takes being old enough to know that most Gentiles weren’t circumcised in that era to appreciate this line. But it’s Laura Henderson’s class that overrides the decorum of femininity & grants her permission to say it out loud to Van Dam in the presence of others. It’s from a different sense of who she is later that she keeps his secret, after she causes some damage that money & being on a first-name basis with the Lord Chamberlain won’t fix. Just as Bree had tried earnestly to execute her role as Stanley, Laura Henderson makes a serious stab at learning what she’s supposed to do as an aristocratic widow in 1930’s London. Both fail. Both have to sidle over & make a new space for themselves. This necessity is directly the source of each woman’s eventual deep compassion for the struggles of others – Bree for her son Toby & Mrs. Henderson for Van Dam. Now, there might be a lesson in that. * (1,087)

#37 – Preview of The Redhouse’s Asian Shorts Film Festival Tomorrow night the multi-arts venue in Armory Square, The Redhouse, opens their first & what they hope will be their annual Asian Shorts Film Festival. The Redhouse’s film programmer, JT Lee, a maker of shorts himself, is excited that he was able to put together this 118 minutes collection, which will show on Friday & Saturday nights this week-end at 7 p.m., on Sunday at 2 p.m., & the again on the 14th, 26th & 28th, with a talk-back discussion after the screening on the 28th. My thanks to JT for letting me take a look at this collection, which he hand-picked from the New York City-based Asian CineVision 2005-06 National Tour. This selection includes a number of films that have won major international festival prizes & we would not be able to see in Central New York otherwise. The Asian Shorts Film festival includes eleven films from China, Indian, Australia, Cambodia, & Asian filmmakers now living & working in the US. “The Little Terrorist” is a parable that was Oscar-nominated for best live-action short. Two animations are among my favorites, with really exciting graphic design & execution of movement; “The Way” turns already graceful Asian watercolor three-dimensional. A satire about dictator Pol Pot’s birthday party stays with you long after seeing it. Kevin Lee’s 13-minute documentary, “Dastaar,” presents the social difficulties that the Sikhs religious sect encounters in a post 911 New York when wearing their turbans. Two films by women, Kit Hui’s dramatic, blue-toned “Missing” & Geeta Malik’s droll comedy, “Aunty G,” are well worth the trip to this festival. The Asian Shorts Film festival illustrates the wide range of filmmaking tastes & styles & the cosmopolitan experiences of a group of largely young filmmakers not easily categorized. And the Redhouse announced yesterday that Syracuse university students with an ID card can get discounted tickets to their film & stage events at the Schine Student Center Box Office. The Redhouse is now scheduling its films well in advance & there are some real treats coming up in the months ahead. During March they’ll screen “Rory O’Shea” was here, a brand new film that’s another take on “My Left Foot” themes, in conjunction with their stage production of Brian Friel’s play “Molly Sweeney.” Nancy Keefe Rhodes Broadcast 2/9/06 on Women’s Voices Radio, WAER Syracuse 88.3 FM

#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)