Directors:
Chantal Akerman, Fatih Akin, Robert Aldrich, Woody Allen, Pedro Almodóvar, Lisandro Alonso, Robert Altman, Alejandro Amenábar, Lindsay Anderson, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Theo Angelopoulos, Kenneth Anger,
Michelangelo Antonioni, Gregg Araki, Dario Argento, Andrea Arnold, Olivier Assayas, Jacques Audiard
Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad
THE CITY AND THE DREAM (Shehar Aur Sapna)
K.
A. Abbas (1914-1987) Carol Slingo
from Jump Cut
SEVEN INDIANS (Saat Hindustani)
User comments from imdb Author: BigB-Shahenshah from
United Kingdom
Saat Hindustani (
Amitabh Bachchan's first film, he plays a role of a Muslim poet (Anwar Ali
Anwar), who is 1 of seven, Indian freedom fighters. His character is one of a
coward and is a must see for all Amitabh fans. The other cast is also good
however the screenplay is slow.
Amitabh shows his ability is an up and coming actor and as a result won The
National Award for the most Promising Newcomer. Tinnu Anand was supposed to
play one of the seven protagonists in the movie, the director Khwaja Ahmad
Abbas decided to cast a newcomer Amitabh Bachchan over Tinnu Anand.
Abel, Dominique with Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy
L’ICEBERG B 84
an Eskimo tale
A
film with a unique perspective, a droll, near deadpan comedy that attempts to
tell a bizarre love story by focusing on a woman who spends a night locking
herself in a store freezer, who has surprising change of life issues
afterwards, attracted to all things cold, no longer interested in coming home
to her suburban husband and two kids, but becomes obsessed with frozen lockers
and wanders off, infatuated by a deaf sailor, drawing a picture of love on an
iceberg that she hopes he would understand, that becomes the basis for their
first love encounter. Within no time at
all, she has no use for her family and wants to spend every waking hour with
the sailor, hoping he takes her as far north as possible, beautifully expressed
through a restless night under the covers, eventually finding just the right
iceberg formation with the sheets that matches the image in her mind. The story is told entirely by Jacques Tati sight
gags, by brief hit or miss sketches that are occasionally hilarious, other
times awful, creating dead space. But it
hardly matters, as the characters are appealing and the physical slapstick comedy
always works, even when you know ahead of time what’s coming. The pratfalls in this movie are uproariously
funny.
This
is not like anything playing out in the multiplexes, as it has a style
peculiarly its own, led by a group of writers/performers that are trained in
pantomime and circus performance, so they excel at exquisite timing. The sad sack husband Julien (Dominique Abel)
can’t face seeing her go, as his wife Fiona (Fiona Gordon) takes him to the
ends of the world, turning into a road movie on water, pushing to the limits
the small lobster boat of René (Philippe Martz) called the Titanique (of course
it’s heading for an iceberg).
Beforehand, there’s a wild dance sequence, where Fiona’s happiness is
expressed in her body language, which is flailing all over the place. There’s a wonderful scene where she’s ecstatically
dancing with her sailor man, both are extending the limits of “Rite of Spring”
body contortions, where poor René keeps dancing after the music has
stopped. But when Julien becomes
overjoyed at the thought that he’s bringing his wife back home, she runs off on
him, heading back out to sea where he just misses the boat. But not to worry, there are Buster Keaton boat
shenanigans out of NAVIGATOR with hugely expressive cloud and sky formations
until the inevitable meeting with an iceberg.
It’s an uplifting journey, derailed from time to time by poor choices,
but always offering enough of a payoff to make this a rare film
experience.
The Village Voice [Jim Ridley]
If the sight gag is dead, this excruciatingly precious Belgian comedy is less a resurrection than an autopsy. Made by a troupe of actors with a background in pantomime and circus performance, it sounds delightful on paper: a largely wordless absurdist farce about a fast-food manager (Fiona Gordon) who sets sail for chilly adventure with a mute sea captain after she gets locked overnight in a freezer—and her robotic family doesn't notice she's gone. The performers (especially Dominique Abel as the husband, who has a face like pulled taffy) have the right pipe-cleaner look for physical comedy; the gag setups, from a scarf caught in the freezer door to fun with goofy back-projection screens, would have Buster Keaton doing a saber dance on banana peels. But there's nothing eruptive or disruptive about the slapstick: Every color-drenched neat-freak shot is as fussily framed as a New Yorker cartoon—Tati by way of Wes Anderson —and the result packs all the hilarity of a museum installation on The Semiotics of Silent Comedy.
Physical comedy in cinema, at least of recent vintage, so rarely rises above a kind of kick-the-cojones mediocrity (not, mind you, to completely devalue the groin shot—let us all now genuflect before The Simpsons's "George C. Scott in Man Getting Hit by Football"), so the Belgian production L'Iceberg is a more than welcome breath of fresh air. Make that Arctic air, for that's what inspires the impulsive actions of the film's gangly protagonist Fiona (Fiona Gordon, suggesting Tilda Swinton by way of Olive Oyl), who goes off in search of the titular landmass after accidentally locking herself in a walk-in freezer. Something of a stylistic throwback to Jacques Tati's stoic comedies of observation, L'Iceberg truly defies any attempts at encapsulation. Minimal dialogue and copious, often hilarious, rear-projection share space with stunning location footage, through which the film's varied Belgian and French landscapes become gag-filled playgrounds of insight into the human condition. Ostensibly a deadpan examination of bourgeois selfishness, L'Iceberg rather drolly reveals itself—via touchingly amateurish bookends—as an Inuit tribeswoman's (Lucy Tulugarjuk) recollection of how she first met her husband. Writer-directors Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy are clearly on the side of life's outsiders (note the particularly inspired gag at a border check), perfectly willing to play fate's fools so that an ineffable true love can find its fullest, most joyous cinematic expression.
New York Times (registration req'd) Matt Zoller Seitz
This debut feature by the filmmaking team of Dominique Abel,
Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy earns two adjectives that rarely go together:
breezy and bold. The film charts one woman's journey from dronelike suburban
mom and fast-food manager to would-be Arctic explorer. It starts when the
heroine, Fiona (Ms. Gordon), is trapped in a restaurant freezer overnight and
realizes she enjoyed the experience. She subjects herself to increasingly
severe endurance tests and becomes obsessed with images of icebergs, even
carving one in her freezer at home (like Richard Dreyfuss creating
The movie is structured as a series of brazenly metaphoric slapstick tableaus, with little music and less dialogue. Relying on static wide shots that pin the characters to their color-coded environments (a style choice that links the film to the work of Buster Keaton, Jacques Tati, Jim Jarmusch and other deadpan fabulists), "L'Iceberg" treats Fiona's journey as a mythic quest. Its simultaneously silly and grave tone finds humor in the characters' delusions and obsessions while celebrating their uniqueness.
The movie's high point is a scene in which a sleeping Fiona writhes beneath a sheet in her marital bed, her arms and legs jutting out in protoplasmic formations, an image of evolutionary transformation as eerie as the final shot of the Star Child in "2001," and much funnier.
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
If you’re not familiar with the traditions of clowning and the commedia dell’arte, you might peg the highly stylized, rambunctiously funny Belgian clown odyssey L’Iceberg as avant-garde. On the contrary, it is derrière-garde, like a kick in the derrière. It is to die and go to heaven—or at least the North Pole—for. That’s where its heroine, Fiona (Fiona Gordon), treks after she’s accidentally locked overnight in a walk-in freezer in her fast-food restaurant and emerges with a creeping aversion to her suburban rinky-tink house and suburban-zombie spouse, Julien (Dominique Abel). Drawn back—as if by cosmic force—to the freezer in which her emotional compass was upended, Fiona has a mystical vision of a twin-peaked iceberg. And so begins her journey north, in a refrigerator truck, then a busload of oldsters, and finally the lobster boat of a hangdog, deaf-mute sailor, René (Philippe Martz)—an unstable but very sweet lug who becomes the vessel for Fiona’s romantic obsessions.
The three directors—Abel, Gordon, and Bruno Romy—are prodigious performers, and the movie they’ve cooked up plays like a circusy hallucination on Ibsen’s A Doll’s House addled with Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I could throw in Laurel and Hardy and Jacques Tati, but the movie forges its own unique language. L’Iceberg is a procession of tableaux vivants: little proscenium stages, sometimes with rear-projected exteriors, on which enchanting slapstick routines erupt. There’s a giddy interplay of light and color and flabbergasting shapes, like the ovoid mouth of Abel as he yawns—the Munchian scream of yawns. I defy you not to gasp at Gordon’s wordless ballet under a white sheet, legs and limbs shooting every which way until the very image of the iceberg rises up from her bed. Not every sight gag works, and there’s a brief stretch in the middle where the action becomes landlocked. But once we’re out to sea the movie goes swimmingly—its three protagonists fighting, flailing, and often on the verge of drowning as their tiny skiff surges toward the land of the Inuit.
A skinny, freckled redhead, Fiona Gordon looks a little like Carol Burnett stretched out, and she has a similar dedication to her character’s lapses in sanity. Watch her ecstatic frug on the mud flats at low tide and marvel at those long, loose limbs, at the most lyrical spasticity in modern movies.
Backstory.
The heroine of L’Iceberg spends
the night in a walk-in freezer and lives to see the morning.
Impossible? Well, severe hypothermia doesn’t set in until the body’s core
temperature falls to 90 degrees Fahrenheit, and she does take some protective
measures. And arguably, stranger things have happened to people—and
animals—trapped in cold places. An
Spirituality & Health (Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Reel
Movie Critic [Pam and George Singleton]
RUMBA B- 82
This
is the kind of film you’d like to adore, as it has a unique appeal all of its
own, almost entirely wordless with continual sight gags. But for all its silent film originality, it doesn’t
entirely work as there’s a great deal of repetition and some of the material is
funnier and more provocative than other parts, making it difficult to string it
all together into one cohesive whole without much of a storyline. While in the throes of marital bliss, Dom and
Fiona (the directors using their real names) adore Latin ballroom dancing,
emblematic of their love for one another, and can be seen performing a wild
rhumba all decorated in a candy colored pastiche. Much of this resembles cartoonist Jules
Feiffer’s liberating depiction of “A Dance to Spring,” where Fiona especially
has a way of contorting her entire body like she’s an elastic woman. Dominique is more of a deadpan, and something
of a sad sap, reminding me sometimes of John Cleese without a voice, always a
little bit uncomfortable, as if restricted within the confines his own
body. From the outset, both teach
elementary kids at the same school until, as fate would have it, tragedy occurs
on the heels of their greatest success.
In perhaps the funniest sequence in the film, certainly one of the
darkest, Gerard (Philippe Martz) stands on the railroad tracks, suicide note in
hand, ready to end his life. But as he
stands alone on a tressel waiting for a train, all he can hear is a continual
parade of cars passing by just below. So
he hikes down a hill, puts his possessions aside, leaving his note on top, and
awaits the next car. Of course, next
thing he hears is a train whistle which whizzes by just before he has a chance
to get back on the tracks. I find this
kind of bleak tragedy to be utterly hilarious, as it’s a comment on the human
condition when a man is such a failure that he can’t even succeed in killing
himself. Instead, Dom and Fiona drive
into a bridge attempting to avoid Gerard standing mysteriously in the middle of
the road after dark.
She
ends up in traction, all but her face and right toes covered in a plaster cast,
while he suffers from amnesia and can’t remember anything. She’s delighted to see him, while he can’t
remember who she is, beautifully expressed in a wonderfully drawn out scene
where he asks if she’d like some coffee, but then gets confused, as he searches
the premises of his hospital room and can’t find any, only to turn around and
get startled at this mysterious stranger standing there, asking again if she’d
like some coffee, a scene that repeats itself three or four times. They return to school, but they’re not
themselves, as Fiona in particular reverts to slapstick physical comedy as she
attempts to manage two crutches, her notebook, and a chair before taking one
giant pratfall. Horrible things continue
to happen to them, until out of nowhere, they sing a duet together, an oddly
optimistic fireside camp rendition of Phil Phillips’s 1959 hit “Sea of Love,”
before things degenerate even further, as all manner of mayhem follows, with
little odd moments that are peculiarly funny.
Dom gets lost and can’t remember where he lives, so he ends up at the
beach, taking a turn into an oddly perverted tribute to Jacques Tati’s MONSIEUR
HULOT’S HOLIDAY (1953). One of the most charming aspects of the film are the
cheesy backdrops, seen in the windows of a car as the 1950’s looking production
values become the highlight of the scene, also a little hut on the beach with a
single window facing the ocean, which makes it look like they’re in the ocean,
not near it. While the use of romantic
Latin ballads oddly juxtaposed against a peculiar real life setting has been
used to perfection before by the likes of Wong Kar-wai in nearly every film, or
Tsai Ming-liang who literally toys with the concept in THE HOLE (1998), what
this group does with fiery love ballads by Benny Moré or Pérez Prado is counter
the romantic grandiosity with something altogether miniscule, yet still utterly
rewarding. There are plenty of ups and
downs here, where several of the bits go on too long or lose what’s funny about
it, but overall the wacky tone is upbeat and life affirming.
"Son Al Son"
Written by Portilla de la Luz
Performed by Orquesta Aragón featuring Cheo
Feliciano
Copyright by Seemsa, 1999 Lusafrica (courtesy of Lusafrica)
"Obsesion"
Written by Pedro Flores Cordova
Performed by Benny Moré and Pedro
Vargas
Copyright by Southern Publishing Co. Inc. Peermusic (Belgium) s. a.
"Tabù"
Written by Margarita Lecuona
Performed by Dámaso Pérez Prado
Copyright by Peer International Corporation
Courtesy of Sony BMG Music Entertainment
"Sea of love"
Written by P. Baptiste and George Khoury
Performed by Dominique Abel and Fiona
Gordon
Copyright by Fort Knox Music Inc/Trio Music Inc. Peermusic (Belgium)
Courtesy of Mk2 and Courage Mon amour
"Sombras"
Written ny C. Brito
Performed by Blanca Rosa Gil
Copyright by P.H.A.M.-Paramusic (
Courtesy of Egrem
"Obsesion"
Written by Pedro Flores Cordova
Performed by Daniel Santos and Julio
Jaramillo
Copyright by Southern Publishing Co. Inc. Peermusic (Belgium) s. a.
NewCity
Chicago Ray Pride
The directing-performing team behind “L’iceberg,” Dominique
Abel and Fiona Gordon, return with deadpan dance comedy “Rumba,” which
resembles Jarmusch or Kaurismaki, but with a tart, absurdist Belgian bent. The
duo plays schoolteachers fascinated by Latin dance. Despite resemblances and
parallels, minimalist comedy has a different affect depending on the culture;
their Tati-esque distortions of the human form have a bite that still seems
uniquely their own, especially when things turn black and blacker:
complications of a car crash lead to a lost leg and amnesia, among other
things. It’s the most inventive tragedy of the year! The fiery color palette is
a rush all on its own. 77m.
RUMBA Facets Multi Media
Through a series
of surreal jokes, a couple turns tragic accidents into a deadpan comedy
routine. Elementary school teachers by day, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon
(co-writers/directors going by their real first names) are trophy winning tango
dancers at night. They celebrate life in every way they can, mostly in dance
and loving each other, but after returning from the rumba competition that they
have won, their dancing careers are cut short by a car accident leaving both of
them seriously injured. Their future as a couple is threatened and then one
wonders if they ever be able to get back on their dancing feet again. However,
this near-silent comedy proves that optimism and love can overcome the most
serious obstacles, using music, creativity, and great comedic storytelling with
originality and flare. Directed by Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Remy,
Belgium/France, 2008, 35mm, 77 mins. In French with English subtitles.
Chicago Reader JR Jones
Whimsical and candy-colored, this French-Belgian comedy may immediately call to mind Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amelie (2001), but its stylized two-dimensionality--symmetrical compositions, geometric slapstick, characters flattened out like paper dolls--is more directly influenced by Buster Keaton's surreal silent shorts. Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, graceful and goofy physical performers, play an ardent married couple who spend their days teaching grade school and their nights tearing it up at Latin dance competitions, until an auto accident costs her a leg and him his short-term memory. The story plays out with an absolute minimum of dialogue, and the visual gags are highly inventive. In a comedy market dominated by crudity, sarcasm, and smug pop-culture references, laughs this pure hit like lightning. Abel directed. In French with subtitles. 74 min.
Little White Lies
magazine Laurene Boyce
In an age when cinema has become increasingly homogenised, it’s a rare thing indeed to find a film that feels quite unlike anything that has come before. While Rumba certainly displays a number of influences – from the physical comedy of Jacques Tati to the colourful aesthetic of Amélie – it is a wonderfully strange and unique movie that inhabits a little world of its own.
The film’s principle directors, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, take the lead roles as two teachers at a country school who harbour a deep love for each other and for Latin dance. Champions on the dance circuit, their existence is close to perfection. But after crashing their car in an attempt to avoid a suicidal pedestrian, their lives take a turn for the worse. Before long, cruel fate and the machinations of an unjust universe have unravelled the world in which they live. Will they ever re-discover paradise?
Rumba throws the audience into a universe in which dialogue is, by and large, redundant. This is a film that celebrates the joy of physicality, from the central characters’ love of dance to innumerable set pieces that are a joy to behold. One scene in particular, in which the protagonists change into their dancing gear while still driving their car, stands alongside some of the best physical comedy seen in the cinema for quite some time. And yet, in amongst the tone of optimism and wonderment that permeates the film, there’s a deliciously dark edge to proceedings that stops it drowning in mawkishness and sentimentality.
There is also something profoundly affecting about its personal nature. The fact that Abel and Gordon (a real life couple) play characters named Fiona and Dom suggests a real connection to the material that adds an extra level of fascination.
The cinematography is also top-notch, with a riot of colours that slowly turns darker as the situation for our heroes becomes grimmer. Indeed, it’s easy to forget that the cinema is primarily a visual language in which the simplest glance can convey a whole world of emotions. From the moments of bravura comedy to the tightly plotted series of coincidences, Rumba is a reminder just how powerful a medium it can be.
Guardian UK Peter Bradhsaw
Strictly Jacques Tati is the
order of the day for this engaging, gentle and lovable film about a married
couple who live for ballroom dancing. It really does grow on you. Rumba is created
by three writer-performers, Fiona Gordon, Dominique Abel and Bruno Romy, who
have worked a good deal in the theatre, and produced some short films. This is
their feature debut, and it's certainly a change of pace. In the movie
marketplace, comedy seems
often driven by cynicism and gouging the audience for laughs. Edgy
prankster-humorists are out to elicit some pleasurably scandalised gasps of
shock; the Apatow generation shrewdly spoon a little sentiment into the mix and
the romcom production line churns out films that are all rom and no com – and
not much genuine rom, either. But this film is different: it harks back to
silent and semi-silent genres with a quieter comic style, and it isn't all
about irony and alienation, but rather sympathetic assent.
Gordon and Abel play Fiona and
Dom, a married teacher-couple who are much loved by their pupils but live for
the Latin American ballroom competitions that they rule in the evenings and
weekends with their passionate rumba. There is a nice, relaxed sight gag about
the end of a school day: jubilant, cheering kids run in a seemingly endless
line out of the exit doors, followed by a short pause, and then a shorter line of
grown-up teachers follows them, cheering in exactly the same way. Fiona and Dom
have more to cheer about than most.
But driving home one night from a
typical trophy-winning success they encounter a dorky depressive, played by
Martz, who is attempting, incompetently, to take his own life. His appearance
brings about a catastrophe that causes their lives and relationship to unravel.
But finally, through a series of wacky coincidences – existential pratfalls of
fate – they are to be reunited, though a visual joke concerning a rubber ring
at the end of the final credits shows that the incorrigibly idiotic Martz is
still addicted to unsuccessful attempts at topping himself.
The general silent-movie-comedy
style, together with a couple of specific allusions to Mr Hulot's Holiday,
summon up the spirit of Tati, and these players are not embarrassed in his
company. Cleverly, Gordon and Abel enact a broken choreography of happenstance:
an absurd and chaotic dance of fate the characters are forced to undergo when a
chance disaster disrupts their happy marital two-step. You will need to be a
little patient and indulgent with this brand of comedy, but its sweetness of
nature will win you round. Other comics of the post-Borat/Brüno generation may
be going for in-your-face gags, but Abel, Gordon and Romy are trying to get out
of your face – and into your heart.
DVD Times
Noel Megahey
Moving
Pictures Magazine [Ron Holloway]
Rumba Lisa Nesselson at Cannes from Screendaily
Avuncular
American [Gerald Loftus]
Interview with Abel/Gordon Interview by
Dimitra Bouras and J-M. Vlaeminckx from Cineuropa September 8, 2008
The
Hollywood Reporter review Bernard
Besserglik
Variety Jordan
Mintzer
TimeOut Chicago
Hank Sartin
Time Out London
(David Jenkins) review [3/6]
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
Jules Feiffer - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
THE FAIRY (La Fee)
The
Fairy Fionnuala Halligan at Cannes
In their third feature, gifted physical comedians Abel, Gordon and Romy
gracefully build on their distinctive brand of burlesque humour. They have also
been building an audience base, and The Fairy (La
Fee)
- which opened Director’s Fortnight - is unlikely to buckle that trend with its
Chaplain-esque interludes set in an off-kilter, colour-drenched Le Havre.
Theirs is an old-fashioned, almost silent, routine (their first feature L’Iceberg was virtually wordless) blended beautifully with an arresting dance element. With their angular, exaggerated features, Brussels-based Gordon, Abel and Romy are akin to a circus clown troupe, vaudevillians who sprinkle the big screen with their art and unique aesthetic. The Fairy is not for everyone, but most people who try it should like it.
As with 2008’s Rumba, Gordon and Abel play Fiona and Dom. This time, they haven’t met yet. He’s a night porter at a run-down hotel; she’s a self-proclaimed fairy in a dirty tracksuit who rescues him from choking on a ketchup top in some particularly broad comic scenes. An Englishman (Martz) also checks into the same hotel with a dog hidden in his bag.
The Fairy soon ups the ante, with Fiona stealing some clothes and shoes from local shops for her date with Dom; the first of the film’s many amusing fixed-camera chases with the police ensues. Eventually they meet at the Love Is Blurred bar (L’Amour Flou), where they encounter its almost-blind manager (Romy). They fall in love, of course, in a dance sequence set underwater; the effects are worthy of a bathtub, but the performance itself is mesmerising.
By this time, the audience is completely on-side, and when Fiona
becomes pregnant their antics scale up a notch further, culminating in a
sequence worthy of the best of Tati or Keaton with a bar full of female rugby
players and a mad dash after a baby stuck on the bonnet of a car which is being
driven by a blind man with three illegal aliens in the boot. Only in
Rumba, which played out in the Quinzaine, notched over
100,000 admissions in
The
Fairy (La Fee): Cannes Review Jordan
Mintzer at Cannes Hollywood
Review, May 12, 2011
As they already revealed in their previous features, Iceberg and Rumba (which played the 2008 Critics’ Week), the team applies an old school approach to their light-hearted comic scenarios, lining up a series of slapstick episodes that hark back to the silent film era, and could justifiably work without any sound at all. While dialogue is sparingly and often cleverly used, music however plays an important role by allowing these acrobatic performers to engage in a handful of graceful dance sequences that serve as brief intermissions to the action.
Set in the gloomy port city of Le Havre, the film kicks off with
its most successfully extended number when we’re introduced to a hotel night
clerk, Dom (Abel), who’s pleasant soiree in front of the TV is interrupted with
the arrival of an English tourist (Philippe Martz), and then of a
svelte, shoeless woman (Gordon), who claims she’s a fairy and grants Dom three
wishes. Like any self-respecting Frenchman living outside of
Thus begins a series of skillfully executed, increasingly
irreverent bits which accompany Dom and the fairy as they try to reunite, and
in the process cross paths with African immigrants (Vladimir Zorano, Wilson
Goma) attempting to hop the ferry to
Though some of the gags fall short, and the story slows down about midway through, there’s enough ingenuity in the filmmakers’ approach to keep one guessing as to what will be the next brunt of the joke: a pen, a puppy, even a newborn baby are all up for grabs, and it’s encouraging to find humor that can be rowdy without dropping f-bombs or tossing out pairs of panties (which isn’t to say that the two are afraid to perform in the nude, or to simulate both a drug overdose and a live birth on the ledge of a four-story building.)
Tati’s hand is evident in the exceptionally precise art direction and camerawork by regulars Nicholas Girault and Claire Childeric, which allows each joke to build itself through repetition and the addition of unexpected elements. The retro attitude is further apparent in the recurrence of jazz standard “What a Difference a Day Makes,” as well as the use of rear projection in a road chase that may shock some in its all-out recklessness.
Abrahamson, Larry
ADAM & PAUL
Ireland (83 mi)
2004 Official
site
Adam & Paul | review,
synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Nigel Floyd
Mordantly funny and unexpectedly poignant, Lenny Abrahamson’s Dublin-set debut feature about two hapless junkies in search of a fix benefits greatly from his confident, low-key direction. There is some nicely judged acting, too, from Tom Murphy and Mark O’Halloran, the latter of whom wrote the script. Waking on an abandoned mattress in the middle of nowhere, the titular pair start their tragic-comic, city-wide search for the elusive, Godot-like ‘what’s-his-name’. Fusing the slapstick comedy and verbal misunderstandings of Laurel and Hardy with the bleak absurdities of Samuel Beckett is a tall order, but the film’s subtle modulations and unforced humour never lose sight of the pair’s last scraps of humanity. This is particularly hard to pull off, since Adam (O’Halloran) and Paul (Murphy) are so innately unsympathetic. Their inept attempts at thievery are played for laughs, as are Paul’s multiplying physical injuries, and their spiky conversation with a Bulgarian also down on his luck (‘I had to leave Sofia.’/‘Was she pregnant?’). These comic scenes, though, are contrasted with interludes of quiet tenderness, squirm-inducing awkwardness and alienating amorality. We learn, for example, that Adam and Paul have been too selfishly preoccupied with their drug habit to mourn the recent death of a childhood friend. Even more shocking is the desperate duo’s callous robbing of a vulnerable young lad with Down’s Syndrome. What might have been an indulgent or evasive comedy about two likeable but damaged drug addicts is saved by its unflinching honesty. And what looks like a fairytale ending turns credibly dark, cutting to the cruel heart of Adam and Paul’s squalid junkie existence.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
There are films that make you dance and films that make you sing. There are also films that make you want to kill yourself. Adam & Paul is one of these. If this review peters out in a jumble of negative phrases, you know what to do - call the ambulance.
Adam and Paul are known as "the tall one" and "the short one." Names are as irrelevant as hope, love, creativity, warmth and the sound of laughter. This is Ireland, Dublin possibly, a rainy city, where violence on the estates is endemic and petty crime the closest anyone is going to get to God's mercy. Survival for the dispossessed and the vagrants requires imagination and luck. "The tall one" and "the short one" have neither.
They drift aimlessly from one place to another, suffering the humiliation of rejection, occasionally encountering the generosity of strangers (a fag, a can of lager). "The short one" is a whiner and "the tall one" practically mute. They have no charm, charisma or interest. They are lost souls who can barely articulate their despair. Watching them is like watching slugs in slurry.
This film has been compared to Samuel Beckett. PERLEEEASE..!! There is poetry and humour in the works of Godot's man. There is nothing of the kind here, only bleakness and more bleakness and the promise of bleakness to come. Even the cinematography is bleak, rinsed colour, a rough video quality, half blurred images, darkened by the stain of blood.
Things move on, but because you don't care, it doesn't matter. Emotions dry up like overcooked semolina and the heartbeat slows. When final credits roll and the lights come up, you feel like a hedgehog awakening from a long winter.
What to say about the performances? Naturalistic is a word that covers it. Bravery, perhaps, because no actor wants to portray null, let alone void. The director (Lenny Abrahamson) and writer (Mark O'Halloran), who happens to be "the tall one," deserve to be congratulated for not compromising and for having the courage of their convictions. It doesn't make the film any easier on the eye.
When Mike Leigh made Naked in 1993, his protagonist (David Thewlis) had a passion and an anger that howled against the filth of his existence. These stumbling derelicts do not have the energy to wipe rat's faeces off their shoes.
A
Full Tank of Gas... [Richard Cross]
There’s something of Laurel & Hardy about Adam & Paul (Mark O’Halloran and the late Tom Murphy), a couple of hopeless Dublin heroin addicts whose entire lives are centred around finding enough money to buy their next fix. In fact, Murphy even appears to be doing a Stan Laurel impression as he sits on a bench listlessly munching on a pilfered baguette, and the slapstick elements of the story echo those of the vintage duo. But Adam & Paul are the flipside of Laurel & Hardy, the dark realism of a fanciful illusion; they’re pitiful ghosts, haunting the run-down council estates and the shiny tourist attractions of modern-day Dublin. They’re pathetic but likeable, and they humanise those sadly familiar figures found in every city.
The film is untroubled by a plot, following, instead, the aimless wanderings of the eponymous characters. Adam awakens from a night sleeping rough on a mattress to discover that some joker has glued his trousers and jacket to it. Once Paul has freed him, they immediately go in search of drugs, only to be chased out of a high-rise flat by the pusher they’re trying to score from. They come across a friend playing football in the park with his son, and then a group of friends who are less than thrilled to see
them. Adam & Paul are a considerable number of rungs further down the ladder than their friends, but there’s a hopelessness about them all, a sense of demons taking over all their lives. A picnic in the park for them consists of drinking cheap beer and smoking joints while the kids play football.
The film Adam & Paul continues in this vein for its relatively brief running time (around 82 minutes). The bleakness of its storyline and the environment in which it takes place is leavened by moments of unexpected humour. Paul suffers a number of physical mishaps throughout the day, and the pair of them have an encounter with a truculent Romanian. They then have a run-in with a thug who mistakenly believes they’re spreading the word around the City that he owes them money, which ends in an almost farcical situation when he press-gangs them into acting as lookouts while he and his mate trash a service station shop. Inevitably, some episodes are stronger than others – their attempt to sell a stolen television is particularly weak - but the scenes that work are particularly well handled. The duo’s attempted mugging of a mentally challenged youth is played low-key but it’s like a slap in the face to an audience that might have slowly found itself slowly warming towards the wretched duo. And then their tender handling of a young babe shows an altogether more palatable and sensitive side to their nature.
Jigsaw
Lounge [Neil Young] Ljubljana Film Festival
The
Spinning Image Jason Cook
Adam &
Paul | Variety Eddie Cockrell
BBCi
- Films Jamie Russell
Adam & Paul - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
GARAGE
Vitor Pinto from Cineuropa
Funny, moving and tragic, Garage,
the second feature collaboration between director Lenny Abrahamson and
scriptwriter Mark O'Holloran – after the award-winning Adam
& Paul (see news)
– was rumoured to be one of
Garage tells the story of Josie, a lonely man who looks after a
dilapidated petrol station in the Irish mid-west. Despite his lack of success
with women and being seen by the rest of the locals as being just another
harmless nobody, Josie is nevertheless optimistic. His life will suddenly gain
some colour when the teenage David comes to work with him during summer
holidays.
The film takes us on a poignant journey, beginning with a glimpse of the
locals’ tolerant attitude towards Josie, followed by the character's cheerful
transformation as he wanders around with teenagers having beers with them.
Actor Pat Shortt gives Josie an incredibly large human dimension, keeping his
performance deliberately away from easy stereotypes and judgemental satire.
"What attracted me to the role was his simplicity. I knew it was very
different to what had been done before about a character in a rural
community," said Shorrt. "But bringing such a character to life was
difficult. I was constantly trying to pull it back. In many ways the character
is like the ones I write myself, but the comedy is much, much quieter, and the
tragedy louder".
More than a portrait of loneliness, Garage also opens a subtle reflection
on the role small communities play in people's behaviour. "This is a film
about the transformations in rural
Garage is an Element
Pictures production for the Irish Film
Board, Film4,
RTÉ and the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland. International sales are managed
by Paris-based MK2.
Garage Peter Brunette from Screendaily
Calling Garage a "small" film would be true enough, but
the Hope diamond, all things considered, is awfully small as well. Both, in any
case, are gems.
The second feature of
director Lenny Abrahamson, following his well-received debut film Adam &
Paul, which won a slew of awards in the UK in 2005, Garage is an
ultra-minimalist drama about a sweet and gentle man named Josie (Shortt) who
works in a garage in rural Ireland and is treated, sometimes affectionately and
sometimes brutally, as the village idiot by all and sundry.
A beatific smile plastered
permanently on his face, the large but simple-minded Josie is taken advantage
of by his boss, who gets him to work extra hours for no extra pay, and made fun
of by his low-life chums in the local pub. When he befriends a new part-time
helper at the garage, the 15-year-old David (Ryan), Josie is delighted to have
a new drinking companion and fellow porn-watcher, not understanding that the
rules of the grown-up world don't permit this kind of relationship.
By conventional standards,
the film is quite slow, and won't be to everyone's liking. More patient
viewers, however, will appreciate the brilliance of director Abrahamson and
screenwriter Mark O'Halloran's calibration of the tiny ticks by means of which
the slight story slowly and almost invisibly turns from comedy to tragedy,
taking us emotionally along with it.
A great deal of the credit
must also be given to actor Pat Shortt who manages to keep our sympathy,
interest and identification throughout, while rarely altering expression. In
one painful scene, an old friend tries to tell Josie how much pain he is
suffering from ill health, but Josie doesn't understand and keeps returning the
conversation to the safe exchange of cliches.
The comic timing of the
first two thirds of the film, on the part of both actor and director, is
impeccable, and every once in a while Abrahamson treats us to a bit of
slapstick - as when Josie laboriously gathers up a bunch of empty beer cans,
then, finding no receptacle to place them in, throws them all back into the
high weeds. This allows us a moment of laughter to keep our focus sharp, yet
never belittles the character.
The director and
screenwriter are also good at planting little ideas, such as the drowning of
some unwanted puppies early on the film, which set up emotional moments that
will occur much later. Abrahamson also knows when to lay on the poetry - always
in discreet helpings - as with the horse that Josie feeds several times and who
appears again at the very end. Many scenes, maybe most of them, seem to be
about little more than two people sitting next to each other, staring straight
out and saying nothing. Yet they carry an understated resonance that combines
with the gorgeous but equally understated cinematography to supply us with a
lot more than at first glance meets the eye or the heart.
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Tom Huddleston]
DVD
Times Noel Megahey
EyeForFilm.co.uk Jennie Kermode
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Chicago
Reader [Andrea Gronvall]
Garage | review, synopsis,
book tickets ... - Time Out Wally
Hammond
BBCi
- Films Stella Papamichael
FRANK A- 94
Great Britain Ireland
(95 mi) 2014 ‘Scope Official
Site
One of the more
unconventional films dealing with outsider art, a social reality outside the
comprehension of most viewers, where the character Frank, Michael Fassbender in
a giant cartoon, papier-mâché head that he never takes off, is the leader of a
small, almost exclusively unseen and unheard of rock band called the Soronprfbs,
a name even the group itself can’t pronounce.
While they are the picture of dysfunction, playing a style of music that
defies definition or form, perhaps noise to some, they are a band where the
anti-social behavior habits are curiously intriguing, featuring Clara, the ever
dour and always angry Maggie Gyllenhaal (outstanding, literally carrying the
picture with her resolute defiance) in the Yoko Ono role as the outrageously
extreme Theremin and synthesizer player, two French-speaking bohemians (François
Civil and Carla Azar) on bass and drums that refuse to even speak most of the
time, and the artistic master Frank as the lead singer, a man they all seem to
worship, where the demented humor is so off-the-wall that it’s easily one of
the funniest films of the year. Jon
Burroughs, Domhnall Gleeson, son of actor Brendon Gleason and one-half of the
Weasley twins from HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS Pt’s I and II (2010,
11), is a more ordinary kid stuck in a small town in Ireland with ambitions to
write songs and play in a rock band. Purely
by chance, Jon happens to be at the beach one day when the keyboard player for
the band is seen knee deep in the water supposedly trying to commit suicide,
with the police and paramedics on the scene fishing him out of the water. When the band’s manager and guitar player Don
(Scoot McNairy) expresses remorse that they’ve lost a keyboard player, Jon
almost instinctively exclaims he’s a keyboard player. Don walks to a nearby van and confers with
the other members of the band before returning, asking, “You play C, F, and
G?” Nodding happily, Don invites him to
show up for a performance later that night.
The intersection of Jon’s mediocrity and the group’s outright weirdness
becomes the focal point of the film, where Jon becomes our man-on-the-scene narrator
offering insight into Frank and Soronprfbs, while also exploring hero worship
through a somewhat surreal, musical groupie mindset of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST
FAMOUS (2000). The film’s premise
borrows from a similar cartoon-headed character of Frank Sidebottom, the stage
persona of English musician and comedian Chris Sievey who appeared on British
television throughout the 80’s and 90’s, passing away in 2010. The film is dedicated to Sievey, using his
image as Frank, so to speak, while taking off from there into unforeseen
territory.
A decade ago this
director made his debut with ADAM & PAUL (2004), a likeable losers buddy
movie following two down-and-out heroin addicts around the streets of Dublin as
they drift aimlessly from fix to fix, suffering the humiliation of rejection
wherever they go, yet told in a hilarious and heartbreakingly realistic manner,
so Abrahamson is familiar with characters on the outer fringe of society. The writing team of Peter Straughan and Jon
Ronson deserve much of the credit for creating such a uniquely original look
inside the world of outsider artists, where Ronson based the film on his own
experiences playing keyboards for Chris Sievey’s Oh Blimey Big Band, using
Gleeson as a stand-in for his own real life character, adding elements of Daniel
Johnston, who’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and
also Captain Beefheart, whose own band eventually quit
on him due to his abusive conditions, but who also suffered from multiple
sclerosis during his career. From the
first show, however, it’s clear the band has hostility issues, (“Stay away from
my fucking Theremin!”) so when they explode in a fury of anger onstage, with
Clara breaking her instrument and throwing it at her other band mates, all
leaving the stage in an explosion of rage and confusion, Jon is left
appropriately stunned as they drive off in their van afterwards without a
word. But when Don invites him to join
the band, telling him Frank thought he brought something “cherishable” to the
group, Jon jumps at the chance, though what he apparently thought would be a
weekend performance turns into an eighteen month long retreat into seclusion at
a private estate in
As it turns out, Frank
is the heart and soul of the band, leading them all to their “farthest
corners,” where everyone is in awe of him, refusing to record a single note
until the entire album is ready, as instead he puts the group through rigorous
exercises which always seem to evolve into fights, where “Chinchilla!” is their
chosen safety word, though routinely ignored.
Don, we learn, has his own issues, as he has a history of doll
fetishism, where the relationship that he prefers most is with mannequins, as
otherwise women have to lie completely still.
Having met in a mental institution, Don thinks Frank is the sanest guy
he’s ever met, believing they all want to emulate him, but there can only be
one Frank. When an irate German family
arrives to their retreat, where Don acknowledges they’ve spent all the rent
money and were supposed to be out a month ago, Frank goes out to speak to them
in fluent German, not only calming them down, but as they leave voluntarily,
one of them is thanking him for “this new truth in my soul.” Jon’s dabbling on social media, however,
eventually accumulates an audience with 23,000 hits on one of the videos he
posted, so he secretly signs the group up for the SXSW music festival in
Austin, informing Frank that they have an “audience.” While Frank appears tempted by the idea of getting
his music in front of an actual audience, composing what he calls his most
“likeable” song, Frank 2014 - Frank's most
likable song ever YouTube (30 sec), the rest of the band has no interest in
money or fame, finding it a meaningless diversion which has nothing to due with
their true calling—making art—seeing it more as a sell out, the worst kind of
bourgeois capitulation. Shooting the
scenes in America in New Mexico and the mountainous plains of Kansas as a
substitute for Austin, Texas, Jon leads the band to the Mecca and supposed
promised land of indie music, where the film is an outrageous comedy of defied
expectations, becoming something more than theater of the absurd, where Jon’s
push for stardom and public interest has a detrimental effect on the others who
want no part of this publicity stunt, as they could care less about pandering
to an audience, eventually having some serious things to say about mental
illness, where we find ourselves asking, “How crazy is Frank?” Instead of this thunderous rush of SXSW Mardi
Gras excitement, it’s a plunge into a downbeat, Lynchian netherworld
reminiscent of BLUE VELVET (1986) with Maggie Gyllenhaal reprising the Isabella
Rossellini role onstage, singing a moody, super slow-motion version of “On Top
of Old Smoky” in some empty dive bar to drunks and derelicts that couldn’t be
farther away from where Jon wanted to take them, while Frank, without the
controlling help of Clara, veers totally out of control, and only then does Jon
finally realize he doesn’t “get it.”
It’s a look behind and under the mask, told without any fanfare, quietly
probing under the surface at the real anguish and pain that drives some of
these troubled artists, who are overcome by an assault of mangled nerves and
psychoses, where an audience finds entertainment in the performance of their
inner turmoil, unleashed as it is in a stream-of-conscience barrage (“Screeching
frequencies of pulsing infinity!”) of wounded psychedelic images that resemble
the crazed inner ramblings of Alan Ginsberg’s Howl,
leaving the audience transfixed in a haunted state of bewilderment.
Expectation is no small influence on the moviegoing experience, and perhaps it works in Frank‘s favor that it sounds, going in, so insufferable: the story of a bizarre band making peculiar music under the guidance of the titular frontman, who never removes his giant plastic mascot head. But tone is key, and Frank isn’t overly enamored with its own hipness; it’s a little daft and a lot of fun, with a well-proportioned dusting of serious undertones. Michael Fassbender gives an inspired physical and vocal performance as the guy under the fake head, while Maggie Gyllenhaal is wonderfully brittle and more than a little broken. Endearingly deadpan and approachably absurd, it’s a weird, bighearted treat.
Angeliki
Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]
also seen here: ReelInsights.co.uk
[Hannah McHaffie]
There are just too many things that have inspired and influenced Lenny Abrahamson’s Frank so I won’t even begin to go into them. But I will say this: this is not the biography of either Frank Sidebottom or Chris Sievey, although both have had an impact on the film in different ways. When Jon, a slave to the nine-to-five, gets the chance to play keyboard for a band whose name is unpronounceable he jumps at the opportunity. An aspiring musician who can’t get his songs to come out “not shit”, Jon eventually finds himself in a cabin with the band, recording their next album. What Jon believed to be a weekend trip to Scotland for a gig turns into eleven months of soul searching, music making, madness, genius and chaos.
The film is narrated by Jon and his twitter updates. The film centres on Jon for the most part, although it is Frank who we really want to know. The band is made up of a sulky French guitarist, and an equally moody French female drummer, a terrifying and twisted theremin and synthesiser player and Frank, the lead vocalist. Frank is the heart and soul of the band; the leader and the brains of the operation. It just so happens that these brains are hidden beneath a large paper-mache head. Nobody has seen what Frank looks like and what appears even more concerning than this is the fact that, apart from Jon, nobody else seems to want to.
Ten years ago, Lenny Abrahamson made his debut with Adam and Paul - a hilarious and heart-breaking story that followed two heroin addicts around Dublin as they attempt to make money, get a fix and cling to the edges of society. It has been suggested by much greater critics than I that Frank is also presenting such characters; individuals unable to fit in or be understood within the cultural norms.
Jon initially holds the story together, being perhaps the only recognisably “ordinary” character – or at least at first. As the film progresses, the lines grow blurrier. Is Frank a genius or just another victim of poor mental health? You’ll think you know at first but you’ll be questioning your own understanding of this film at around the forty-five minute mark. Frank is made brilliant by its actors. Domhnall Gleeson is surprisingly hilarious as Jon whose views we share for most of the journey. Michael Fassbender manages to bring a charisma and a striking personality to Frank despite the obstruction of a fake head.
Yet, it is Maggie Gyllenhaal who makes this movie. She never disappoints me and has proved, through Frank, just how simultaneously precise and erratic she can be as an actress. She gives a powerhouse performance that deserves a lot more attention. The film gets better and better and although I am not as bowled over by Frank as perhaps I should be, I do think this is a clever and unpredictable indie romp that climbs to extraordinary heights in its closing moments.
Sight
& Sound [Ryan Gilbey] May 9,
2014
Frank Sidebottom was a musical performer who combined parched Mancunian wit with avant-garde nuttiness and vaudevillian showmanship. His most striking feature was his spherical papier-mâché head with its painted-on features: saucer-sized blue eyes, pursed ruby lips and slicked-down, side-parted black hair. Created and portrayed by the late Chris Sievey, who died in 2010 aged 54, he epitomised the northern overlap between indie, punk and music hall along with the likes of Half Man Half Biscuit, John Cooper Clarke, Vic Reeves and Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights.
The journalist, author and broadcaster Jon Ronson wrote an article about his own spell in the late 1980s as a keyboard player in Frank’s Oh Blimey Big Band. This has now become the basis for Frank, co-written by Ronson and Peter Straughan (who collaborated previously on a screen adaptation of Ronson’s non-fiction book The Men Who Stare at Goats).
It marks a return to the study of tensions between the marginal and the mainstream for the Irish director Lenny Abrahamson. His last picture, What Richard Did (2012), focused on a young rugby player whose dazzling prospects are jeopardised when he commits a spontaneous act of violence. Prior to that, Abrahamson’s protagonists had been outsiders: the junkies of Adam & Paul (2004), the petrol-station attendant with learning difficulties in Garage (2007). Like those characters, Frank is at once in the world and hidden from it. Sequestered within that cartoon head he is simultaneously eye-catching and invisible.
The film, which is dedicated to Sievey, retains the rudiments of Frank’s story; other aspects have been fictionalised. Frank is now American, while the music of his group The Soronprfbs (it’s a running joke that even the band members don’t know how to pronounce the name) exudes not the real Frank’s amateurish Bontempi sensibility but the chugging, single-minded grind associated with The Fall or Krautrock bands Neu! and Can. Meanwhile his psychological condition aligns him with rock dropouts and outsiders such as Daniel Johnston and Syd Barrett. “What happened to him?” asks Jon (Domhnall Gleeson), the band’s keyboard player, near the end of the picture. “Nothing ‘happened’ to him,” Frank’s father replies, deflating any zaniness that has accumulated. “He has a mental illness.”
It isn’t exactly that this fact has been kept from us – more that it is one of several uncomfortable truths the film cleverly hides in plain sight. Until the final scenes, Frank’s behaviour is played either for laughs or a plangent strangeness. A pleasurably baggy section in the middle of the picture is devoted to a year-long recording session at a remote log cabin, where Frank’s mixture of perfectionism and eccentricity becomes both liberation and endurance test for the band. Its manager Don (Scoot McNairy) even commits suicide at the end of it, hanging himself while wearing one of Frank’s false heads, initially prompting fears that Frank himself is dead.
This idea of proxies, substitutes and inauthentic copies runs through the film. Jon is a replacement for the original keyboardist, who tries to drown himself after suffering a breakdown.
The sea always plays a pivotal part in Abrahamson’s work – there were deaths in or beside water in Adam & Paul and Garage, and an important beach scene in What Richard Did – so it’s significant that Frank starts with this near-death by drowning and later features a Norse-style funeral on a lake. Staring out to sea, Jon attempts to compose songs in his head in a series of painfully bad musical doodles to which we alone are privy. This leads to a breakthrough moment when he appears to have hit on a brilliant chord sequence, only for him to realise dejectedly that it is merely ripped off from ‘It Must Be Love’, which he was listening to only moments before. (Interestingly, Jon calls it “Madness’s ‘It Must Be Love’” – another reference to copies, since the original version is by Labi Siffre.)
Duplicates lurk in every corner of the film, beginning with Frank’s artificial head. To anyone who objects that his face is weird, he counters that real ones are just as odd. As if to prove that point, his bandmate and protector/enabler Clara (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has a face that seems even more immobile than Frank’s illustrated one. (Her severely cut black bob also resembles a parody of his ‘hairstyle’.)
“Would it help if I said my facial expressions out loud?” Frank asks Jon, offering by way of example “Welcoming smile” and “Big, non-threatening grin”. No wonder some members of the entourage have trouble distinguishing between real and bogus, human and artificial – Don, for example, has a penchant for sex with mannequins. Even in death, Don does not escape the curse of the copy: believing themselves to be scattering his ashes in the desert, his friends discover too late that they are instead distributing handfuls of Grownut powder.
This extends to the relationship between reality and pretence within the filmmaking process. Frank is, after all, a kind of deliberate biopic manqué: the Frank Sidebottom story and yet not. But it is also a celebration of uniqueness. Its actors are not only portraying musicians – as with Nashville, all the music we see and hear being performed by the onscreen band is being played by the people on screen.
A more pressing question of authenticity is bound to surround any film in which a major star spends the bulk of his screen time with his face hidden. Given that Frank’s head stays on for all but two scenes, it will be a trusting viewer who doesn’t wonder even for a second whether it’s really Michael Fassbender under there all along. It would be unfair to call the unveiling near the end of the film a failure of nerve, especially since Fassbender gives a finely textured performance both in and out of the head, but it’s hard not to wish that some way had been found to preserve that tension – to keep us tantalised, even suspicious, to the last.
At least Frank has another, more insidious trick up its sleeve, which it is in no hurry to reveal. In the figure of Jon, the film has an obvious stand-in for the audience: he acts as our proxy, our bewildered eyes and ears, as he is drawn deeper into Frank’s oddball world.
The position of main character is a privileged one but it can also be deceptive. Jon is gradually shown to be spectacularly under-talented. That much is made clear when Frank and Clara invite him to play some of the songs he claims to have written. To say that the bucket emerges empty from the well would be an understatement. But as Jon devotes his energy to posting surreptitious footage of the band on YouTube, and boosting his own Twitter following, his interests begin to diverge starkly from those of Frank and The Soronprfbs. Jon is commerce; Frank is art, perhaps even genius. The film is binary in its insistence that the two are unhappy bedfellows.
Jon may be a dope but he is a dangerous one, at least in this context, much like the budding young editor in Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art (1998) who exploits the legendary, washed-up photographer with whom she starts an affair. Not only is Jon devoid of talent or originality, he is an actively negative, compromising influence on Frank. It was brave of Ronson to write his own onscreen surrogate as the villain of the piece, albeit an unacknowledged and inadvertent one. Braver still of the film to argue that the rest of us will never understand what it’s like to be a genius, so we may as well stop trying to prise open the damaged heads of our heroes.
Film of the
Week: Frank | Film Comment Jonathan
Romney, August 7, 2014
Frank Sidebottom started life as a punk-generation songwriter and musician from Manchester, named Chris Sievey. Under his own name, Sievey had a number of minor successes with his band The Freshies (notably a brisk, Buzzcocks-y number called “I’m In Love With The Girl On The Manchester Virgin Megastore Check-Out Desk”), but in 1984, he devised one of the more bizarre self-reinventions in pop history. He donned a big painted papier-mâché head, and, adopting a high-pitched nasal Northern accent, assumed the role of Frank Sidebottom, an affable, childlike would-be showbiz personality whose knowingly rudimentary songs parodied current pop or hymned his home village of Timperley. In his Sidebottom guise, Sievey had a few droll ideas—not least an EP entitled Frank Sidebottom Salutes The Magic Of Freddie Mercury And Queen And Also Kylie Minogue (You Know, Her Off ‘Neighbours’)—and even achieved some degree of success as an oddball novelty act on British TV. He certainly had a talent as a conceptual or performance artist—one of Sievey’s peculiarities was that he would often keep the Frank head on, and keep up the Frank act, when there was no public to impress, but only members of his band present. And according to journalist-author Jon Ronson, who was at one time his keyboard player, Sievey/Sidebottom had a special talent for calamity, relishing commercial failure rather than success, which he never went out of his way to cultivate.
When Sievey died of cancer in 2010, some admirers hailed him as a genius, but it’s probably fairer to say that he was a sometimes inspired English eccentric and humorist who managed to make one cheap and cheerful gag work reasonably well for a surprisingly long time. But Sidebottom as an undiscovered god of alternative rock? That’s the unlikely conceit imagined in Frank, a new film opening next week, directed by Lenny Abrahamson (What Richard Did, 12; Garage, 07) and co-written by Ronson and Peter Straughan. Frank is not the Chris Sievey story, and doesn’t claim to be, but it is, after a fashion, the story of Ronson’s brief career as keyboard player (before he came to write extended essays in gonzo investigation such as “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” filmed by George Clooney in 2009).
The Ronson figure in Frank is Jon (Domhnall Gleeson, hugely likeable here), a young aspiring songwriter who spends his days ineptly attempting to cobble together ballads while staring at his computer screen in a dull office job (shades of Quadrophenia, decades on). Then a bunch of madcap bohemians come tumbling out of a van in his seaside town, and it turns out that a band unpronounceably named Soronprfbs, playing in town that night, need a new keyboard player. Jon answers yes to the question “You play C, F, and G?” and lands the gig (by all accounts, Ronson got his job with Sidebottom on the strength of pretty much those qualifications).
Before long, Jon is a fixture in the band, or rather the cult, since Soronprfbs are in the thrall of their mysterious, taciturn leader, Frank (Michael Fassbender), a man who wears a big globe head that almost exactly resembles Sidebottom’s—and never takes it off. That Frank’s Frank is not quite Sievey’s is apparent in the fact that this Frank is no kind of joker, but a very earnest and apparently disturbed Dada master who for a long time doesn’t speak at all—and who, when he’s at last heard singing, bursts into a rather butch agonized basso suggestive of Jim Morrison in one of his self-conscious poète maudit moments.
The extended joke of Frank is the notion, which everyone except us viewers buys into, that Frank is a deep magus whose guidance will lead his collaborators to find their “farthest corners” and make the great album that they have in them. Fame? That’s not so important, except for the more mundane-minded Jon; for his bandmates, the very idea of having an audience at all seems anathema, the worst kind of bourgeois capitulation.
The subsequent story follows Soronprfbs from their retreat in the Irish countryside, where Frank puts them through a program of character-building exercises and ramshackle rehearsals; through a trip across the Atlantic to SXSW, where Jon does the unthinkable in trying to muster public interest; and to Frank’s breakdown and beyond. At that point, Jon takes a break to ask himself some serious questions, while the other musicians reach an unexpected apotheosis: without Frank’s mania and Jon’s earnest competence, they actually sound like the Cowboy Junkies, only quieter, which is not a bad thing at all (their big moody super-slow number is actually “On Top of Old Smokey”). Overall, the narrative drifts like a mildly febrile dream—and it may be that an intense period spent in an unsuccessful band is indeed like a hallucination that abruptly ends, leaving you back in your day job, or in rehab, wondering where all the time and all your talent went.
With gentle wit, the film explores two key ideas. One is that it’s never fun to be the straight person in a band—the sensible, studious type who turns up for rehearsals, works hard on the chord changes, and assiduously posts rehearsal footage online to further the band’s career. It’s this behavior that earns Jon the contempt of his colleagues, who are either deranged social outsiders or work very hard at seeming that way (as quite a few rock musicians do, I’m told). Especially thorny is synthesizer player Clara—“Stay away from my fucking theremin!”—played by Maggie Gyllenhaal with a permanently enraged glare and all the sourness of a natural underground aristocrat who never got over being dropped by 4AD after one single.
The film’s other key idea is that we’re all fascinated by, and somewhat cowed by, the figure of the outsider rock genius, the exalted loser who heroically turns obscurity, failure, and possibly ineptitude into something glorious. We’re constantly hearing in the film that Frank is a creative maestro, though there’s little evidence to back this up; the band he’s assembled sounds pretty ropy as they crunch out their mix of stoner prog and indie thrash, and it’s hard to believe, as he intones his trippy divagations (“Screeching frequencies of pulsing infinity!”), that even his most impressionable acolytes are buying into this. The sheer inadequacy of Soronprfbs’ repertoire is one of the film’s running jokes, largely at the expense of Jon, who—despite being saner than anyone else—is more enthused than anyone (“I can’t wait to dive into the creative maelstrom!”). Yet every now and then, the film tries to persuade us that maybe, just maybe… For example, Frank manages to charm an irate German tourist—in fluent German—and before long, she’s thanking him for “this new truth in my soul.”
Not only do certain members of the band have histories of mental illness, but Frank’s refusal to remove his painted head is a pathological symptom. Jon, of course, is in awe: “Miserable childhood… Mental illness… Where do I find that sort of inspiration?” But the film pretty thoroughly defuses the myth of madness as a fount of poetic insight, and, along with it, the convention of the melodramatic, all-explaining backstory. “What happened to Frank?” Jon earnestly asks the singer’s father. “Nothing happened to him,” comes the reply. “He’s got a mental illness.”
The sad truth that Frank illuminates is that mental illness in artists can indeed be inspiring—but most often for those onlookers who relish the spectacular chaos of someone else’s life without themselves having to endure the pain. You can read the film’s Frank as mirroring any one of a long line of variously talented musical burnouts, drug casualties, mental patients, or would-be gurus (Syd Barrett, Skip Spence, Roky Erickson, Daniel Johnston, Wild Man Fischer, even that notorious failed folkie Charles Manson), or as having elements of the erratic but genuinely individual outsider figures who managed to sustain long-term careers, like Mark E. Smith, Captain Beefheart, Lee Perry, and Kevin Rowland (whose brief spell in a very unflattering dress may have inspired Frank’s SXSW appearance here). It’s through Jon’s naïvely trusting eyes, and his eventual disillusionment, that we get a chance to measure Frank against such fabled characters, and to find him—and the mad genius myth—wanting or otherwise.
In the end, Frank is revealed to be a middle-aged American with the face of Michael Fassbender (whom, as it happens, Chris Sievey did faintly resemble). And Frank does get a proper moment of glory, one that suggests that maybe Soronprfbs had a decent record in them after all—a thudding neo-psychedelic dirge called “I Love You All.”
Frank is directed with a light touch and few frills (apart from the odd on-screen tweet) by Abrahamson, an Irish filmmaker whose last film What Richard Did was a chillier, tougher dissection of a certain circle of privileged Dublin youth. Despite Irish Film Board funding and Irish stars Fassbender and Gleeson (the latter playing a nerdy English boy), Frank comes across much more like a British film (it was made under the Film 4 banner), with the attendant tendency to be somewhat flip and reassuring and to have some sort of transatlantic “relatability”—hence its American characters and U.S.-set final act. That’s to say that Frank the movie is a little more confused about its own identity than Frank the character. Still, it’s a rare film that gets the phenomenon of rock outsiderdom, and gets it right, but isn’t swayed by the mystique. It’s sweet, just pithy enough, and brings a touch of critical sanity to the question of insanity as performance—it’s a film that, you might say, has its head screwed on right.
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Fassbender in Frank, reviewed. - Slate
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FRANK
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ROOM B+ 92
Ireland Canada
(118 mi) 2015) Official
site
One of the most
devastating films you could possibly see, not at all easy to endure, leaving
viewers emotionally drained and exhausted afterwards, though in the process
making the appalling subject matter feel like essential viewing. Based on a 2010 novel by the same name from
Emma Donoghue, who also provided the screenplay, ROOM is a fictionalized
recreation seemingly inspired by real life sexual imprisonment cases like Josef
Fritzl who kept his own daughter imprisoned in a hidden cellar for
24-years, sexually abusing her the entire time, or Natascha
Kampusch and Sabine Dardenne, all survivors of the worst
abduction cases imaginable. A follow up
to Abrahamson’s uniquely compelling 2014
Top Ten List #10 Frank , whose expertise appears to be examining the lives
of damaged souls, it doesn’t take long to figure out what we’re dealing with is
a trapped existence, as the world onscreen identified as “Room” is a windowless
10-by-10 foot space with a skylight above that is too high to reach. Inside are a mother and child, with Brie
Larson from Short
Term 12 (2013) as Ma trying to make life as normal as possible for her
young 4-year old son Jack (Jacob Tremblay) who has lived his entire life
here. What’s immediately distinctive is
the discovery that this world is seen through young Jack’s eyes, providing his
own voiceover narration, where this is all he knows, where he’s learned to tell
the difference between life in Room and life on television, which is an
invented reality, but he has no conception whatsoever of a world outside. With his long hair below the shoulders that
constantly gets in his face, the film immerses us in his mood shifts and daily
routines, peppering his mom with incessant questions all day while they do
morning exercises, making him run back and forth from one side to the other,
play games together, sing songs, share a bath, eat rather common meals that
Jack grows tired of from time to time, while Ma reads him bedtime stories like The Count of Monte Cristo (which deals
with a prison escape) that challenge his imagination. Initially it’s all about establishing the
monotonous, unglamorized details of their ordinary existence, where each night
Jack says goodnight to his bed, toilet, closet, sink, table, chair, all the
things he’s intimately familiar with, and in doing so, provides the extent of
this claustrophobic, closed-in world.
It’s heart wrenching to see how Ma has spent every ounce of her energy
teaching, nurturing, and entertaining this child who loves to watch Dora the Explorer on TV, limiting the
time glued in front of the screen as otherwise they would both end up zombies,
though occasionally she’s too depressed to even get out of bed in the morning
and can spend hours sometimes simply staring out into space at nothing at
all.
In the evenings, Jack
sleeps in the cupboard behind wood shutters as Ma is visited by Old Nick (Sean
Bridgers), the one who kidnapped her 7-years ago when she was only 19, who
opens a steel fortified door locked by an electronic security code,
replenishing their meager food and supplies before forcing himself on her at will
while continually reminding her how grateful she should be for what little he
does bring, constantly complaining of their added “expense,” as he’s out of
work, growing violently irritable and quick-tempered if she actually asks for
anything they may need. Sometimes Jack
can be seen counting numbers until he leaves, at which point Ma moves him back
to the regular double bed where they sleep.
For his 5th birthday, they make a small cake together, but he’s
disappointed there are no candles, growing frustrated and temperamental at
times, but what’s explicitly clear is they each give one another a reason to
live. Now that he’s older, she tries to
expand the world inside to include the one outside, describing bits and pieces
of her childhood for him, but he can’t even imagine what’s on the other side of
the walls, as he’s never seen it, where the only outside images come from the
television. When the electric power is
turned off, she grows more desperate, forced to eat out of cans where frost can
be seen on their breath, so she teaches him how to wiggle out of being trapped
inside a rolled-up carpet, writing him a note to hand to someone, explaining
what to do once he’s finally on the outside, using him for her planned escape. From the slowed down pace where there was all
the time in the world, like their bath when they were splashing water on each
other, this rapidly accelerating pace adds a different dimension, creating
increasing tension and dread, as Jack is obviously afraid and doesn’t really
understand, where she wraps him in the carpet for old Nick’s next visit,
claiming he died during the power outage and needs a proper burial, telling him
to find someplace nice, where there’s plenty of trees around, growing
hysterical at the mere thought of him inspecting the merchandise, screaming to
get him out at once, as she can’t stand the sight, leaving her behind in a
shivering state of uncontrolled fear.
Once outside, Jack’s
perspective is shown through oblique and distorted angles, becoming an expression
of confusion as he’s thrown into the back of a pickup truck, shown from an
aerial view as he tries to wiggle out, replaying his mother’s instructions in
his head, told not to jump until the truck comes to a stop and then run towards
the first person he can find. But when
he’s finally outside, seeing the expanse of the blue sky above, it’s a
spectacular moment of complete and utter incomprehension, impossible to even
imagine, like waking up on another planet.
It’s a rare cinematic moment, as it should be filled with wonder and
rapturous joy, but he’s driven instead by an insane fear that is crippling and
paralyzing, as he can’t control where he is and what he’s doing, as every time
he tries to run, he stumbles and falls, allowing an angrily pissed off Old Nick
to grab him and snatch the note out of his hand, trying to drag him back to the
truck, where Jack’s voice fails him as well, as he can’t cry out, but a guy
walking his dog just happens to be there witnessing this odd spectacle, where
the barking dog appears to spook Nick, who also runs away in fear, leaving a
befuddled kid behind who can’t explain where he lives. It was a risky plan that surprisingly worked,
where a kindly female police officer is called onto the scene to try to sort
things out, where Jack remains a ball of confusion in exasperated turmoil,
unable to comprehend what he sees, where nothing makes sense to him. Somehow, Officer Parker (Amanda Brugel) is
able to decode Jack’s nearly indecipherable comments, turning into a more
recognizable rescue scene, where Jack and his panicked mother remain in a state
of shock, transported to a hospital room that may as well be a completely made
up world. The rest is harder to convey,
where Ma’s name ironically is Joy, as she just wants to be reunited with her
family, though the medical staff recommends a transitionary period of
adjustment, but they are whisked off instead to a new house somewhere in front
of a throng of well-wishers and television cameras swarming out front, creating
an utter spectacle that they’re not ready for just yet. While Joy guts it out, trying to remain a
strong presence, she discovers her own parents are divorced, Joan Allen and
William H. Macy, that they don’t live together anymore, instead Grandma is
living with a new friend Leo (Tom McCamus), all of which scares the living
bejesus out of Jack.
In something of a
surprise, the narrative is extended beyond the rescue, where there is obviously
more “behind” the story that the public rarely sees, where there are no easy
roads to travel, as instead it’s a mish mosh of guilt, blame, wrong turns and
recriminations, not to mention constantly adjusted expectations, where the
extraordinary patience displayed by the calmness of the grandparents is in
stark contrast to the tumultuous mood swings of Joy and Jack, whose behavior
couldn’t be more inconsistent, both likely even more seriously traumatized than
the film suggests, which may be the only serious flaw in making this material
accessible to the public. Overly timid
and uncommunicative, where men in particular are an intimidating threat, Jack
adapts quicker than his mother, where he learns to appreciate the kindness and
helpful nature of his grandparents, who offer some of the more tender moments
in the film. Joy, on the other hand, is
goaded into doing a misguided television interview for a big wad of badly
needed cash, feeling the need for financial independence and not be so
dependent on others, but she’s ill-equipped for the consequences, where she’s
more in denial than ever about her own emotional fragility, unable to make
sense of her parent’s split and the emotional distance that has come between
them, wrongly blaming herself, feeling worthless and overly guilty for allowing
what happened in the first place, as if it’s her fault, seeing herself more as
an abject failure, where now that Jack’s found the helping hand of others,
she’s not really needed anymore, going on a downward spiral where at some point
she simply collapses, requiring extensive hospitalization, where Jack for the
first time in his life must fend for himself without her. It’s a portrait of unbearable sadness, where
outside the Room there is so much space to fill, where both are overcome by the
vastness of it all that literally overwhelms them with a crushing force they
can’t hold off, where it seems there are too few therapists present, as this
should be a standard part of the recovery process, but they’re expected to
carry the weight of the world on their own.
While we are witness to really standout performances throughout, there’s
a beautifully poignant reunification scene between the mother and son when Jack
expresses an interest in returning to the Room, where he misses it. Under police presence, surrounded by evidence
tape, it’s hard for Jack to believe that this cramped, miniscule box was his
entire universe for the first years of his life, where he remembers it as being
so much more, but gone are all the drawings and personal attachments that made
it feel like home, where all that’s left is a starkly barren storage shed that
has been emptied of all its contents, where silently, under cover of a softly
falling snow, they hold hands and walk into the uncertain future together.
TIFF
2015 | Room (Lenny Abrahamson, Ireland/Canada ... Angela Murreda from Cinema Scope
The first thing a reader of Emma Donoghue’s novel Room will notice about Lenny Abrahamson’s mostly sturdy adaptation is a problem of perspective. The impressionistic early montage of mundane objects (a sink and a toilet, which soon become known to us as the talismanic idols Sink and Toilet) quickly gives way to a close-up of the person perceiving them, a 5-year-old boy named Jack (Jacob Tremblay) who narrates the harrowing events of Donoghue’s book in his untrained voice. For an adaptation of a novel distinguished precisely by its hermetically sealed worldview—that of a child born and raised in a small shed, where he and his kidnapped Ma (Brie Larson) live all their days—that omniscient look at Jack seems a cheat—a way to pre-emptively “open up” a text that is claustrophobic by design. Yet Abrahamson’s decision might well be the right one, given the intermittent stiltedness of Jack’s wonder-struck narration (which is transposed from the novel, a bit too faithfully, by Donoghue herself): the naively poetic quality of Jack’s musings, which sound like Terrence Malick by way of the Cat in the Hat, don’t square so well with the adolescent Tremblay’s otherwise nuanced performance.
Once Jack and Ma escape the homely prison of Ma’s captor and rapist Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), Room becomes more Abrahamson’s than Donoghue’s, and the film is all the better for it, ripening into a compelling if at times overly literal bildungsroman about the ways in which space and time shape people. It’s to Abrahamson’s credit (as well as to Ethan Tobman and Michelle Lannon’s finely tuned production design) that the eponymous Room and the pair’s subsequent, suffocatingly huge adoptive home genuinely feel like the separate planets that Jack initially assumes they are, capable of fostering and poisoning very different kinds of life. It goes without saying that Larson, an alert performer who hasn’t yet found a vehicle completely worthy of her, gives a fine performance while silently co-directing her young screen partner in the film’s symbiotic first act. But the most interesting thread of the film belongs to Tremblay and Joan Allen, who plays Jack’s grandmother and effective guardian once the outside world proves too much for Ma: their tentative, mostly wordless exchanges cut through the novel’s sometimes obnoxious nods to Joyce and Woolf, and nudge the film toward a more sensitive and convincing portrait of recovery.
Room (2015), directed by Lenny
Abrahamson | Movie review David
Ehrlich from Time Out
Brie Larson turns in a harrowing performance as a mother abducted and trapped in a tiny space for years.
Room is a fitting title for director Lenny Abrahamson’s potent and sensitive film about two characters who spend precious years of their lives trapped in one. But Room is also cruel shorthand for a story about two characters who aren’t afforded any. That one word expresses the grand sum of their shared universe, while also intimating the wide spectrum of the things they’ve been deprived. That duality extends to the eponymous box itself, a decrepit lawn shed serving as both prison and unlikely paradise for the mother and child locked inside.
The full picture emerges slowly, details arriving like the droplets of rain that dribble onto Room’s solitary skylight. But it’s clear from the start that Joy (Brie Larson) and her preteen son, Jack (the eerily intuitive Jacob Tremblay), are forcibly confined within the gray concrete walls of their grim enclosure. For exercise, Jack tumbles back and forth between two walls. For food, a man referred to as Old Nick delivers the essentials when he slips inside to rape Joy. For sanity, Joy tells her son that "room" is all that separates them from the infinity of outer space, and for survival she’ll eventually begin to teach him the truth. (If you want to experience the film without a more explicit indication of what happens next, stop reading here.)
Their inevitable escape makes for a harrowing sequence that exemplifies both the best of Larson’s raw-nerve performance and the worst of Abrahamson’s technique, which erratically fumbles between zooms and slow motion in its failure to match the primal anguish that flashes on his actor's face. But Room only blossoms into something special after it explodes into the vastness of the world beyond. Faithfully adapted from Emma Donoghue’s 2010 novel of the same name, the film reveals its layers when Joy is reunited with her stunned parents (Joan Allen and William H. Macy), who divorced in the wake of her abduction. Forced to resume her role as a daughter, Joy is powerless to reconcile the needle skip of returning to real life with the challenge of introducing her son to it, and Larson’s ability to articulate the excruciating limbo of being suspended between two generations is a thing to behold. Feral and maternal (often at the same time), she inextricably knots the petulance of being a child with the responsibility of raising one.
If Abrahamson were as gifted with a camera as he was with his cast (he inspires subtlety even from the tiny Tremblay), Room could have been truly worthy of the astonishing performances that provide its foundation. As it stands, the film is still a heartrending exploration of the worlds that parents create with their kids, the devastation that arises when those mountains move, and the ineffable fulfillment that results from climbing the peaks together.
Movie
Review: In 'Room,' Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay ... Sophie Gilbert from The Atlantic
It’s hard to think of a movie adaptation of a book that feels truer and more loyal to its source than Room. In part, that’s thanks to the precise environment Emma Donoghue crafted in her Orange Prize-winning 2010 novel, the majority of which was set in an 11-foot by 11-foot insulated space with a lone skylight. But the book was also narrated in its entirety by a 5-year-old boy, and much of its power and poignancy came from how well Donoghue captured the voice and perspective of such a small child—a much trickier endeavor for film, where childlike naivete and wonder can often become mawkish.
Room’s director, Lenny Abrahamson—whose previous film was the offbeat Frank, starring Michael Fassbender as an eccentric musician who wears a large papier-maché head—navigates the balance with remarkable finesse, working from a screenplay written by Donoghue. The movie opens with Jack (Jacob Tremblay) describing the events of his fifth birthday, and the details of the tiny universe he inhabits, Room. His Ma (Brie Larson), he explains, was alone in Room until he “zoomed down from heaven” to save her.
The agony of Donoghue’s book is in how long it takes to piece together the evidence given Jack’s limited capabilities as an interpreter, but here it’s soon clear that Ma and Jack are prisoners. Their only visitor is Old Nick (Sean Bridgers), who’s keeping them captive, and who rapes Ma while Jack sleeps in the closet.
When Old Nick reveals that he’s lost his job, and might also lose his house, Ma, realizing he will probably kill them both rather than let them escape, begins hatching a plan to set Jack free. In the space of a few days, she tries to teach Jack everything about the outside world—often a logical and philosophical conundrum as much as a practical one, since all he can see of it is empty sky. Room is unmistakably an allegory for the painful process of growing up, and here it’s rendered in rapid time, with Jack stubbornly resisting the puzzling, threatening barrage of new information, and Ma forced to move past his discomfort. Abrahamson suffuses these scenes with fierce suspense, adding urgency to Ma’s lessons in how to understand the world.
Perhaps it’s natural that an adult audience would see the events
unfolding much more from Ma’s point of view than Jack’s, but it’s also a
testament to Larson’s performance. She’s restrained but tightly coiled,
practical and maternal, but also unpredictable. The world that Ma and Jack live
in is one that Ma has made to protect and nourish her child as best she
can—they exercise in the small space, read, and watch TV only for an hour a
day, so it doesn’t “rot our brains,” as Jack explains. With Jack deprived of
any social contact, every single item in Room becomes his friend: Wardrobe,
Bed, Toilet, Lamp, Egg Snake (which they craft from leftover eggshells and hide
under the bed). Tremblay is equally extraordinary in his role, imbuing tiny
Jack with natural amounts of charm, courage, wit, and fear.
It’s hard to imagine that such a bleak scenario could be made so beautiful, but
Abrahamson finds poetry in the small details of Room, captured through grey
filters to emphasize the lack of light. More, though, the film captivates
because of its central duo, who are each other’s whole world. As much as the
audience empathizes with Jack, and feels his agony at losing what he interprets
as a safe and familiar environment, so too they feel Ma’s pain in having to
disrupt it.
Room is the kind of drama that feels tailor-made for theater, with its limited locales and emotional intensity. But it’s after Jack finally leaves the space for the first time that the potency of film is most felt—in its ability to express his wonder and confusion and discombobulation at seeing things he’d only experienced through a screen. It’s to Room’s credit that it makes that disorientation so visceral to viewers, communicating the angst and the elation of breaking free.
Movie Review: Room
-- Vulture David Edelstein
The title of this wrenching film is Room, not to prevent a mix-up with the riot-of-non-sequiturs Z-movie The Room but because its 5-year-old protagonist uses the word as a proper name. Every day, young Jack (Jacob Tremblay) pops out of bed and says, “Good morning, Room,” as well as, “Good morning, Lamp/TV/Sink/Brush,” a Goodnight Moon–like ritual that transforms an approximately ten-by-ten-foot locked space with a distant skylight into something alive, even nurturing. (The room-womb rhyme seems more apt than ever.) What Jack doesn’t understand is that his Ma (Brie Larson) has weaned him on the illusion that their cramped single room with its decrepit furniture — which is all he has ever seen — is the whole world instead of what it is: a prison fashioned by a sexual psychopath who took her seven years earlier.
Room is astonishing: It transmutes a lurid, true-crime
situation into a fairy tale in which fairy tales are a source of survival. The
Irish-born novelist Emma Donoghue (who also wrote the screenplay) has made a
career of reworking such tales, sometimes from an LGBT perspective and
generally from a way-outsider’s. In this case, she has merged the
imprisoned-damsel motif with something modern and sinister — inspired by the
sudden jolt experienced by Felix Fritzl, the youngest child of an Austrian
woman held captive by her father for 24 years. (There are similarities to the
Jaycee Dugard kidnapping and the abductions of three women by Ariel Castro —
although the latter story broke in 2013, three years after Room was
published.) Donoghue made the 5-year-old the novel’s narrator, which results in
evocatively strange formulations and an occasional flurry of twee. (“We move
Table over to beside Bath so we can sunbathe on Rug right under Skylight where
it’s extra warm … God’s yellow face makes red through my lids.”) Though the
movie drops most of the narration, the point comes through: By reading to him,
telling him stories, and encouraging him to write and draw his own, Ma has kept
Jack’s mind alive. The hair he has never cut is his “Strong.” He is like
Samson.
Donoghue has found the perfect
complementary collaborator in fellow Hibernian Lenny Abrahamson, whose last
film, Frank,
was a sad comedy in which the longing for connection is offset by the dread of
it. (The title character thrives in a rock-band commune — but only because he
hides under a giant fake head.) Abrahamson and his two main actors create a
seesaw of love and horror that upends you on all sorts of levels. “Room” is a
paradisiacal bubble — a marvel of mother-child intimacy, of mind over matter —
astride an abyss, broken by visits from the Devil himself.
Abrahamson keeps the rapes committed by
the man Ma calls “Old Nick” (Sean Bridgers) offscreen or viewed hazily through
cracks in the wardrobe where the boy is sent to sleep. (The only concession her
captor accepts is that he won’t see or touch his son.) But we sense the impact
of this tyrant in the bruises on Ma; the scarcity of food (he has been
unemployed for six months); and acts of pure cruelty, like turning off the
power (and heat) for two days after an altercation. Abrahamson knows when to
open up the space — creating a sense of expansiveness — and when to bring the
camera so close that even this most sacred of relationships chafes. The movie’s
lone flaw is a score heavy on childlike wonder, meant as a counterpoint to this
purgatory but too shimmering and piano-plinky, cuing the audience how to feel.
It would be wrong to reveal the midpoint
climax, which didn’t literally stop my heart but made me wish I had some
nitroglycerin tablets just in case. The second half of Room brings out
all the irreconcilables. The world outside has infinite space but limited
warmth, including a house (wittily designed by Ethan Tobman) that demonstrates
the sibling-closeness of affluence and alienation. Fine as young Tremblay is in
his early scenes, it’s the later, more difficult ones that show his range, his
ability to suggest profound dislocation with every step. And I don’t know how
to do justice to Brie Larson. Every time you see her, you forget you’ve seen
her before. Her Ma achieves an easy rapport with her son by a force of will,
but with everyone else, including herself, her rhythms are off — unyielding,
prickly. The clashing emotions she suggests in her final words — two syllables,
mouthed but silent — make me shiver even now.
The evil depicted in Room is
hard to fathom, but the good is even more mysterious: the capacity of a child —
when guarded by a loving parent — to project warmth onto the coldest, most
malevolent environment. We’ve seen survival stories featuring people on desert
islands or at sea, but it’s the boy sustained by a room that’s the most
amazing.
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Room,
reviewed: The movie adaptation of Emma ...
Dana Stevens from Slate
Strong
as Hell: 'Room' Is a Stellar Drama of a Woman ... - Village Voice Amy Nicholson from The Village Voice
Room
· Film Review An imprisoned mother and child adjust ... Noel Murray from The Onion A.V. Club
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Owen Van Spall]
Film
Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
calling it the tearjerker version of a badly-tuned slasher flick
Review:
Lenny Abrahamson's 'Room' | Vague Visages
Dylan Moses Griffin
Telluride
Review: Lenny Abrahamson's 'Room' Starring Brie ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
Reelviews.net
[James Berardinelli]
iNFLUX
Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
Room
review: the staggering power of horror and hope | The Verge Bryan Bishop
Movie
Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Slant
Magazine [Elise Nakhnikian]
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
The
History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2015 [Erik Beck]
Room - QNetwork
Entertainment Portal James Kendrick
Blu-ray.com
[Jeffrey Kauffman]
DVDizzy.com
- Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno]
AVForums
- Blu-ray [Cas Harlow]
Home
Theater Info Blu-ray/DVD [Douglas MacLean]
DoBlu.com
Blu-ray [Matt Paprocki]
The
Kim Newman Website (Kim Newman)
Alt
Film Guide [Timothy Cogshell]
Cinema365
[Carlos deVillalvilla]
Room :: Movies
:: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Nick Schager
Hannah
McHaffie [Hannah McHaffie] also seen
here: Reel
Insights [Hannah McHaffie]
Room | ByTowne Cinema Richard Lawson
Twitchfilm.com/Filmfest.ca
[Jason Gorber]
Digital
Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
Spectrum
Culture [Erica Peplin]
Talking
Pictures [Howard Schumann]
World
Socialist Web Site [Joanne Laurier]
Cinema
Romantico [Nick Prigge]
Georgia
Straight [Adrian Mack]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Daily
| Telluride + Toronto 2015 | Lenny Abrahamson's ROOM David Hudson from Fandor
'Room':
Telluride Review - The Hollywood Reporter
Todd McCarthy
'Room'
Review: Brie Larson Stars in Lenny Abrahamson's ... Justin Chang from Variety
Room,
film review: Visionary film-making defies ... - The Independent Geoffrey
Macnab
Room review - The Telegraph Tim Robey
Room
review: Brie Larson and Jacob Tremblay escape ... Nigel M. Smith from The Guardian
Room review – to see the world within four walls Mark Kermode from The Observer
The
Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
South
China Morning Post [James Mottram]
Toronto
Film Scene [Andrew Parker]
Examiner.com
[Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch
Drunk Critics [Travis Hopson]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Oregon
Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Review:
'Room' is exhausting, exhilarating and excellent ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Room Movie Review & Film
Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert Susan
Wlosczcyna
Review:
'Room,' Mother and Child in 100 Square Feet - The New York ... Manohla
Dargis from The New York Times
'Room,'
an Unlikely Crowd-Pleaser, Creates Oscar Buzz ... The New
York Times
Room (2015 film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Room (novel) - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Room
by Emma Donoghue | Book review - The Guardian Book review by Nicola Barr, July 31, 2010
Abrams, J.J.
STAR TREK B 84
One aspect of Star Trek that has been missing in the
movie versions is an understanding for why the TV show clicked, namely the
interrelations between the characters who couldn’t have been more different
from one another, where the racial and intergalactic diversity expressed each
week literally raised the bar in viewer social awareness. The show interestingly maintained a healthy
dose of personal barbs between the characters that created distinct
personalities at work in otherwise cramped, claustrophobic quarters, where from
time to time they amusingly got on each others nerves and would take verbal
swipes at one another. Some of the
legendary cracks between Medical Officer McCoy raising his suspicions about
half Vulcan, half human Spock’s overly rational brain reflecting the side of
him that wasn’t human became part of the running dialogue on the ship, and was
consistently used not only in the heat of battle but especially in the final
few seconds of each show’s epilogue to show that no matter what their
differences, all’s well that end’s well, as they survived another adventure
together. That is the one attribute that
this Star Trek movie pays particular
attention to and it feels like a welcoming home of the characters themselves,
as each is once more carefully defined by a certain aspect of their character
that is wonderfully appealing. Add to
this an astounding degree of physical resemblance to the original crew that is
simply extraordinary. What’s fun about
this version is that it comes before the regular crew of the Starship Enterprise was formed, where
each hadn’t yet developed into their now familiar roles. The back stories, bearing a Smallville Superman, the early years
resemblance, offers unique insight, even when it becomes hammy and so
deliciously exaggerated to the point of being operatic. The film does an excellent job pin-pointing
and merging the early years for both Captain Kirk (Chris Pine) and Mr. Spock
(Zachary Quinto) on their respective planets, one in Iowa, the other on planet Vulcan,
also providing an early action sequence that reveals how Kirk’s father was a
Starship captain for a mere handful of seconds, yet in a heroic effort saved
hundreds of lives in the process, including his wife and newborn.
One of the criticisms
of the Star Trek movies overall is
their over-reliance on special effects, where they love to show off where so
much of the money goes, and this film is no different. It gets carried away with the same adrenaline
rushes that fellow big budget Hollywood director Michael Bay is known for, also
supported by wailing voices and plenty of pounding percussion. The difference here is that the characters
are intriguing from the outset. When
Kirk recklessly races cars as a kid or Spock is subjected to relentless torment
from fellow Vulcans about his half human side, their personalities are being
formed by the way they overcompensate from what’s missing in their lives, Kirk
missing a father while Spock’s mother is not Vulcan. Kirk’s testy fight in the bar sequence and
his relentless approach to seducing any and all women he sees is laughably over
the top, but who would have thought Spock could be taunted into fisticuffs on
his home planet? There’s a familiar ring
to all of this, as Zoë Saldana’s sexy, but warmhearted Uhura is actually
romantically partnered with Spock here, not Kirk, amusingly seen giving last
minute kisses in the transportation deck.
Karl Urban is drop dead hilarious as Dr. McCoy injecting Kirk with a
virus to gain him access to an otherwise off limits Starship, following with a
succession of more injections due to his unforeseen symptoms, all while Kirk is
challenging a Captain’s decision and making perhaps the biggest decision in his
as yet undeveloped career. John Cho’s
fencing expertise as Sulu early on saves Kirk’s life, and Anton Yelchin’s
verbal mugging of the English language as the brilliant 17-year old thickly
Russian accented Chekov is exquisite.
Simon Pegg as the drink happy Chief Engineer Scott is deliriously happy
at discovering transporting can take place at warp speeds, not to mention that
he invented the scientific equation. And
Leonard Nimoy makes not just an appearance, but plays a significant role in
what this movie is about, that it’s not all accolades and successes of a
rewarding career, but life is all about the journey along the way.
One major beef,
however, is that it follows of the same formula that big Hollywood productions
seem destined to follow, which is to accentuate meaningless battle sequences
with plenty of explosions, including innumerable space ships, with objects
hurled through space, bodies flying, where death and destruction is a major
pattern to follow, as if that’s what holds an audience’s attention. No doubt for some, that’s the bottom line: was it exciting? Eric Bana is really very good as the rogue
Romulan outlaw Nero, whose brutal interrogation methods are Neanderthal, but
his mind is intensely psychological, scarred himself from losing his own
planet. Little by little the main
characters move their way into their familiar positions, predictably overcoming
all obstacles. Unfortunately, this is a
male heavy cast with few opportunities other than Uhura and Spock’s mother to
even have speaking roles, so for a film that features as one of its goals to
lead the way in presenting a diversified view of a utopian future society, they
certainly failed in this opportunity.
Very few creatures from other galaxies played any significant role as
well, so this was largely seen as the typical white man’s battle to save the
universe. Spock’s performance in particular
is impressive, especially because he is so full of doubt while also being the
smartest guy in the room, while Kirk is a gung ho thrill seeker from the
outset, the guy who routinely takes the greatest risks, yet whose self-centered
arrogance is more a trait of actor William Shatner, the original Kirk, whose
gargantuan ego preceded him wherever he went, as opposed to Pine who spends
most of the film engaged in fights, oftentimes on the losing end, whose first
response tendency toward reckless behavior does not exactly bode well for ship
morale. But as a blockbuster action
thriller costing $150 million, this at least goes for the tone and charming
character references of the original TV series.
Time
Out Chicago (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/6]
Geeks will rev
their engines, but the unexpected elegance of director Abrams’s reboot of the
franchise comes in its large-scale disavowal of easy nostalgia. Working with
screenwriters Alex
Kurtzman and Roberto
Orci, Abrams has done more than roll back the clock on the original crew of
the Enterprise, dewy cadets of Starfleet Academy. The director has also
stripped his brisk proceedings of the earlier movies’ glacial pomp. Of course,
we recognize these kids: Brash, horndoggish Kirk (Pine, no worse than Shatner),
quiet Spock (Quinto, beautifully concentrated), a surly rejecter of patronizing
Vulcan schoolmasters; cool-as-ice Sulu (Cho); the 17-year-old whiz kid Chekhov
(Yelchin).
Abrams milks Gene
Roddenberry’s egalitarianism for all its timeliness; today’s optimistic postracial
crew is inconceivable in an alternate political moment. (Yes, they so can.) A
galloping, occasionally vertiginous story—involving a black-hole time warp and
something do to with planet-consuming “red matter”—has been devised to propel
Kirk, a cheater on his exams, into the captain’s chair, as well as keep our
minds off the inevitable survival of all involved. Eric
Bana, capable of delicious menace in Chopper,
has less to work with as an underwritten Romulan warlord in a dark cape; you
wish the script found a way to refresh its antagonists. But certain plot
developments produce a real jolt, like an Uhura kiss too good to spoil and a
hurled insult from Bones that pushes fidelity perversely close to profanity:
“Are you out of your Vulcan mind?” Directorially speaking, Abrams has, without
doubt, boldly gone where no one has gone before—you should, too.
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
While not exactly a Trekkie, I've always preferred Gene Roddenberry’s futuristic humanism to George Lucas’s puppet space-operas. Like the recent Batman epics (and minus their strained seriousness, thankfully), J.J. Abrams' Star Trek aims to revive the spirit that’s dissipated after decades of syndication, sequels, and parodies. James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is born in the midst of an intergalactic skirmish that leaves him orphaned; his daddy hang-up lines up nicely with the mommy issues of Spock (Zachary Quinto), his half-Vulcan, half-human rival for command of the Starship Enterprise. The creatures include a Romulan renegade (Eric Bana) with a yen for drilling black holes into planets, a green-skinned hottie (Rachel Nichols), and a giant snow-crustacean quelled by the ravaged gravitas of the Original Cast Member Cameo. Part of me wants a Paul Verhoeven to tear this stuff to tatters, yet I’m heartened to see the wit and romance of the series treated lovingly, and with enough feisty confidence to have Kirk smack his head on the portal as he boards the vessel. Pine is blandly sensual and Quinto satisfactorily poised, but the rest of the Enterprise crew is piquant: Zoe Saldana is sexy and sharp as Uhura (glad somebody paid attention to The Terminal), Karl Urban is delectably splenetic as McCoy ("Ex-wife took the whole damn planet after the divorce"), John Cho is an inspired Sulu, and Simon Pegg (sputtering brogue) and Anton Yelchin (Russkie lilt) endear as Scotty and Chekov. The film’s most remarkable aspect, unfortunately, is its technical incompetence. Abrams doesn’t direct, he just whooshes the camera from side to side and flashes lights in your eyes -- Howard’s hack sprinting in Angels & Demons looks like an old master’s contemplative rhythms next to these toy-ad seizures. There's blood still left in Star Trek; next time get a filmmaker, not a film-shredder.
The
Sociology of Star Trek Mark Harris
responding to a May 7th Salon article by Jeff Greenwald comparing
Barack Obama to Leonard Nimoy's Spock, from Patrick Murtha’s Diary, May 7,
2009
I think that piece is spot on. I too was a first-generation
Star Trek fan, and it is only in retrospect that I see clearly how much it
shaped my world-view. I do wish Mr. Greenwald had given shout-outs in the essay
to Gene Roddenberry -- who maintained a dogged insistence on his startlingly
fresh multicultural vision in the face of network indifference and hostility --
and to Nichelle Nichols, whose performance as Lieutenant Uhura undoubtedly had
a special significance for Obama as it did for so many African-Americans (and
women), from astronaut Mae Jemison to Whoopi Goldberg (later a semi-regular on Star
Trek: The Next Generation, of course). Mr. Greenwald does quote Henry
Jenkins to the effect that he was formed by Star Trek and Martin Luther
King, and it is fascinating to realize that there is an actual linkage between
the two: King was a fan of the show and advised Nichols to stay with her as yet
not-fully-developed role because of its immense impact ("Once that door is
opened by someone, no one can close it again"). I have often thought how
cool it would be to be Nichelle Nichols or George Takei and realize that no
matter what else happened in my life, I had performed a true social good that
could never be erased.
When Star Trek premiered, I was eight years old. The races were seldom
mixed on television at all, and on the rare instances when they were, the
template was white master, black servant. Along comes this show in which all
races freely mixed, cooperated, and were of equal intellectual and ethical
stature. The subliminal impact of that on the nation's children, especially as
the show developed its cult status in re-runs moving into the Seventies, was
incalculably huge. We were being prepared for
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review
There are moments in the furious new Star Trek iteration in which the young actors who play Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest resemble Baby Looney Toons doing old shtick in disconcertingly high voices. Yet there are other, transcendent moments—time-benders. Suddenly, I found myself back in the days when I (and you?) enacted Star Trek in the basement: “Phasers on stun.” “Mr. Scott, we need that warp drive.” “I’m a doctor, not an escalator!” If you care about this universe (and I do, damn it), you won’t sit passively through J.J. Abrams’s restart Trek. You’ll marvel at the smarts and wince at the senselessness. You’ll nitpick it to death and thrill to it anyway.
Because, in the end, what choice is there? The first generation of Trekkers is elderly or gone to that most final of frontiers, the next generation is up in years, and the most memorable thing about the generation after that was the Borg with big breasts whose distaste for sex clubs helped elect Barack Obama. Either we accept this “reboot” or watch The Wrath of Khan for the thirty-eighth time. And Abrams and his writers (Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman) have come up with a way to make you dig the souped-up new scenery while pining for the familiar—a good thing. When Kirk gets bumped from the captain’s chair and trades insults with Spock, it’s funny and surprising and wrong wrong wrong. Which is the point. We’re rooting for Abrams to be less original—to give us back our Kirk and Spock.
The gimmick is a black hole, one of those handy
time-travel-enabling anomalies with which we sci-fi fans have a love-hate
relationship. A spiky black behemoth from the future hurtles through said hole
carrying a vengeful Romulan driller-killer called Nero (Eric Bana)—whereupon,
presto, history is altered. In this alternate-universe, James T. Kirk’s father
is dead, and Kirk (Chris Pine) grows up a daredevil ne’er-do-well. He doesn’t
want to go to
Hard to say, since the focus is more on mismatched buddies:
Young rule-breaker Kirk and young by-the-book Spock loathe each other on sight
and spend much of the film as antagonists. We’re always on Kirk’s side, though.
Behind those impudent baby blues, young Pine mugs like mad, but there’s wit in
the way he seizes the space: He seems to be both channeling and poking fun at
William Shatner’s mighty ego. He leads with his appetites. On the other hand,
Zachary Quinto plays the half-Vulcan, half-human Spock as the kind of
know-it-all even geeks want to slam into a locker. The problem might be as
basic as Quinto’s physiognomy. Where Leonard Nimoy adopted a semi-scrutable
(vaguely Eastern) mask, Quinto’s features settle into a sneer. Nimoy’s Spock
would tell his colleagues, “I have no feelings to hurt,” and we knew it was a
lie because Nimoy’s impassivity was so pregnant. But Quinto’s face telegraphs
disdain. He’s Kirk’s competitor—which might be more realistic but which utterly
changes the Star Trek dynamic. Kirk
is no longer the virile leader trying to find a balance between coolly
dispassionate logic (Spock) and urgent humanist emotion (Dr. McCoy). He’s
hardly even a plausible leader. (How does
he end up in the captain’s chair?) The doggone kids really have seized the
In fairness, it’s too soon to tell where the revamped Star Trek will go, since a lot of this first
installment is foreplay: Get ’em grown up (out of Iowa, off Vulcan), get ’em
out of school (bring on the final exam—the Kobayashi Maru!), get ’em onboard
the U.S.S. Enterprise, and bring on
the bad guy and space battles. The fights and photon-torpedoings are rousingly
done, and since the self-inflating Shatner famously had scripts rewritten to
make the other crew members ciphers, there’s room for actors to bring new stuff
to the party. Is she (Zoe Saldana)
Uhura? Yowza. Hey, look at that—Starfleet women in boots and miniskirts again!
What’s Harold doing on the
Scotty (the crackerjack comic actor Simon Pegg, of Shaun of the Dead) shows up an hour into the film, some time after Leonard Nimoy delivers the screen’s first exposition-via-mind-meld. That clarifies Nero’s motives, which turn out to be awfully thin. (It’s weird how Star Trek villains think nothing of blowing up planets to avenge their wives.) Nimoy, meanwhile, looks very old and happier than he has in years: He has finally decided he is Spock, and not even Zachary Quinto can deny him. So it’s in with the old and the new, and let’s give this crew another voyage.
PopMatters
(Bill Gibron) review
Talk about questionable prospects! Who could ever imagine
that
Even with the still popular possibilities of The Next Generation
(and to some extent, Deep Space Nine), fans both young and old
just can’t get enough of the 1960s series. And with prequels being so plentiful
(and usually unsuccessful), going back to the very beginning of Trek
would appear tenuous at best. Luckily, studio heads cleared enough to give Lost‘s
J.J. Abrams the creative Con - and it’s a good thing too. His Star Trek
instantly becomes one of the year’s best films.
Troubled and rebellious as a young boy, James Tiberius Kirk
can’t shake the feeling that he was meant for something more. Similarly, Vulcan
child Spock has difficulty deciphering his half-human, half-alien feelings. The
two end up at
When a mystery mining vessel carrying the angry Romulan Nero
breaks through the neutral zone and attacks Vulcan, Captain Pike pilots the
newly christened
It’s hard to express in mere words how wonderful J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot is, especially for a worn in the wool die-hard Trek head like yours truly. It’s a silly, grinning from ear to ear experience, a ‘wow’ that works overtime to keep from ever letting you down. From the moment we learn of our heroes’ hamstrung youth, to the final confrontation that will define their legacy for star dates to come, there is a reverence and a revitalization that finally turns Trek into everything founder Roddenberry - and his throngs of devotees - hoped for.
This is more than just a ‘remake’ or a ‘reimagining’. This is brilliant filmmaking artistry filtered through a deep appreciation for what Star Trek stands for, for the years it held the lantern for serious science fiction while other efforts traveled toward the ‘dark side’ of action adventure commerciality. Granted, Abrams pours on the thrills, but he doesn’t cheapen the mythology that made Kirk and company true cultural icons.
This is a movie that performs remarkably well on all levels - as an introduction to the seminal characters for newbies, a welcome return visit to younger versions of old friends, a highly sophisticated mainstream entertainment, a rock ‘em sock ‘em effects spectacle, and a reminder that ideas can be just as exciting and interesting as images. Abrams, working from an excellent script by frequent collaborators Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, takes his time with each element, letting information and concepts sink in before rapidly and rationally moving on.
The opening battle, which we catch more or less in mid-strategy, instantly encases us in the world we are about to enter. It also sets the emotional tone. By the time an underage Kirk runs his step-dad’s classic car up to (and over) the edge of a nearby ravine, we are ready to go anywhere with this story - and Abrams takes us there, both outside the characters and inside their deepest fears.
This is a true origin story, the kind which doesn’t skimp on the painful parts. Both Kirk and Spock are seen as deeply hurt by their childhood circumstance. It is a realistic foundation which explains a great deal of their later relationship. Similarly, we understand the motives of Uhura and McCoy, each one taking up defense for their friend. As actors, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are so note-perfect as our Trek titans that we often wonder if we are viewing Shatner and Nimoy through some kind of age-defying prism.
Also excellent are Zoe Saldana, John Cho, and in a last act appearance that’s a tad too brief, a wonderful Simon Pegg as everyone’s favorite “beamer” Scotty. Of particular note is Karl Urban. About a billion light years from Middle Earth (where he was Eomer), his McCoy is so delicious dead-on, so absolutely channeling the spirit and spunk of DeForest Kelly that he almost steals the film from everyone else.
But it’s Eric Bana who brings it all together. His villain with a heart hellbent on revenge is not some ridiculous raving psychopath. Instead, he’s someone who literally lost everything, and is determined to make those who he believes responsible pay in the exact same way. This leads to Trek‘s biggest surprise - the sheer scope and size of the threat. When we first realize what’s about to happen to one of the series well known places, the shock is matched only by the sensation of seeing it play out powerfully on the big screen. Star Trek is the very definition of a blockbuster, a larger than life experience that has to be seen theatrically to be fully appreciated. This is as epic an entertainment as The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the original Star Wars, and Christopher Nolan’s operatic Dark Knight.
Once again, long time Trekkies (or Trekkers), have no fear. No one has raped your memories this time around. If anything, Abrams has acknowledged and acquiesced to them, giving your love of the original series as much care and consideration as you do. And those unfamiliar with the voyages of the Starship Enterprise, you too should feel unafraid. Accessibility is the key here, the movie made so stunning in its ability to hook you and keep you happy that you’ll soon forget your four decades outside the obsessive Trek fray.
For all others in between, heed this advice - Star Trek is destined to be remembered as one of 2009’s biggest and best surprises, a gamble that beat both the house and those holding the cards to turn everyone into a winner. This is the reason why movies are magic. This is why some of us fell in love with the original series in the first place. Bless you J. J. Abrams. May you live long, and definitely prosper.
Critic
After Dark Noel Vera
The
House Next Door [Simon Abrams] May
10, 2009
The
House Next Door [Matt Maul] May 9,
2009
The
Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Obama
is Spock: It's quite logical - Barack Obama News - Salon.com Jeff Greenfeld from Salon, May 7, 2009
Asking the
Wrong Questions: Trek-Dump Abigail
Nussbaum from Asking the Wrong Questions, May 15, 2009
Star Trek
(2009) Adam Roberts from Punkadiddle,
May 16, 2009
Spockbama
and George T. Bush zunguzungu, May
18, 2009
Star
Trek: I Love You, Man.
Millicent from Millicent and Carla Fan, May 26, 2009
The
Underdetermined Death of Uhuru
zunguzungu, June 2, 2009
Slant Magazine
review Bill Weber
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
World Socialist
Web Site Hiram Lee
Salon
(Stephanie Zacharek) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
PopMatters (Cynthia
Fuchs) review
DVD Talk -
Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Pajiba (Daniel
Carlson) review
Goatdog's Movies
(Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [2.5/5]
eFilmCritic.com
(Mel Valentin) review [4/5]
Film Freak
Central review Walter Chaw
Reel.com
review [3.5/4] Sean O’Connell, also
seen here: filmcritic.com
(Sean O'Connell) review [4/5]
Twitch
(Rodney Perkins) review
Twitch review Canfield
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
The Wall Street
Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Screen
International review Mike Goodridge
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [2/5]
eFilmCritic.com
(Erik Childress) review [2/5]
Ain't It Cool Movie Reviews (Harry
Knowles) review
Q Network Film Desk
(James Kendrick) review [3.5/5]
A Nutshell
Review Stefan S
Cinefantasitque
Online John T. Stanhope
Movie Shark Deblore
[debbie lynn elias]
Ferdy on Films, etc. Roderick Heath
Confessions of
a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Movie-Vault.com
(LaRae Meadows) review
CHUD.com
(Devin Faraci) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
eFilmCritic.com
(David Cornelius) review [3/5]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy
Heilman) review [3/4]
CNN
Showbiz (Tom Charity) review
CBC.ca
Arts review Martin Morrow
About.com
Hollywood Movies (Rebecca Murray) review [A]
Monsters
and Critics Ann Brodie
FirstShowing.net
(Alex Billington) review [9/10]
DVDTalk Theatrical
Review [Tyler Foster]
Village
Voice (Robert Wilonsky) review
PopMatters
(Chris Barsanti) review
Christian Science
Monitor (Peter Rainer) review [B]
3
Black Chicks ("The Diva") review
The
Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Black Sheep
Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
The
L Magazine [Henry Stewart/Benjamin Sutton]
hoopla.nu review Stuart and Mark
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ruthless Reviews
(potentially offensive) Erich Schulte
Eye for Film
("Chris") review [3/5]
Entertainment Weekly
review [A-] Owen Gleiberman
The
Hollywood Reporter review Ray
Bennett
Variety
(Todd McCarthy) review
Time Out London
(Tom Huddleston) review [4/6]
Independent.co.uk
[Jonathan Romney]
Guardian/Observer
[Philip French]
The
Daily Telegraph (Mark Monahan) review [4/5]
The
Daily Telegraph (Tim Robey) review [4/5]
The
Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [3/4]
The Boston
Phoenix (Jeffrey Gantz) review
Boston
Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr
Washington
Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Austin
Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San
Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [3/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
SUPER 8 B 83
Much like this director
paid tribute to the Star Trek TV era,
especially good at catching the various personality traits of the major
players, this film pays tribute to the era of Spielberg, including several of
his notable movies. Again, Abrams does
some things extremely well, like catch the E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982)
innocent mood of the kids who continually hang out together with no adult
supervision, eventually tracing the presence of an alien presence in the
community while also establishing a great build up of suspense for the horrible
presence of an unseen monster in JAWS (1975), not to mention the U.S. military
creating a diversionary catastrophe from CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND
(1977) which sends the local community into mass hysteria while covering up
their real mission, which remains top secret.
While there is also a shared love for big box-office special effects,
like Abrams last film, there is an over-reliance on loud explosions, as if this
is the only way to cause adrenaline rushes, yet this kind of destructive mayhem
exists throughout the film, led by Noah Emmerich, perennial bad guy who heads
the secret Air Force unit, a guy who will stop at nothing in supposedly
tracking down public enemy number one, their top secret monster they’ve been
keeping under wraps that is suddenly missing and unleashed on the public,
refusing to share basic information, even as it destroys communities and
ravages the countryside. Unlike
Spielberg, this has a darker menace throughout, as there are constant images of
death, demolition, and destruction, where these kids are running through the
streets alone trying to avoid getting killed, which is a far cry from being
caught by their parents for doing something they’re not allowed. Like BAMBI (1942), the first Disney film to
kill off a helpless fawn’s mother, the audience quickly discovers that Joe Lamb
(Joel Courtney with a slight Ralph Macchio resemblance), the lead child’s
mother has also been killed, leaving him alone with his distant and
self-absorbed father, Kyle Chandler as the Sheriff’s Deputy, a man caught up in
the town’s hysteria with no answers to quell the maddening voices.
Set in 1979, the film
starts out innocently enough with a group of middle school kids led by Riley
Griffiths as Charles, who are trying to make a special effects Super 8 zombie
movie to enter into a local film contest, though they feel compelled to strain
for greater effects, since 15 and 16-year olds will also be competing. Sneaking out at night, they meet at the
railroad tracks, including the presence of Elle Fanning as Alice, the cute girl
that the boys think would never talk with them, surprising them all with her
own rebellious streak. Much like Drew
Barrymore in E.T., Fanning is a joy to watch, showing maturity beyond her
years, not to mention a charming talent in front of a camera, where despite
playing a ghoulish zombie, her beguiling presence unsettles the boys who have
been best friends for years. As if to
accentuate this imbalance, they witness a horrible train accident, where a
train carrying Air Force top secret materials gets derailed in spectacular
fashion, where they each defy death and somehow survive while unknowingly
capturing the event on film, making their escape before anyone is detected,
vowing to keep it a secret, as they believe something horrible will track down
their families. First animals go
missing, then appliances strangely disappear, entire car engines are pulled out
of cars before people start mysteriously disappearing as well, including the
sheriff, where only weird noises can be heard in the dark before a violent
attack of some kind snatches its prey.
This leaves Joe’s father in charge of these strange inexplicable random
events, but the military finds his incessant questioning curiously disturbing,
as if this was somehow preventing them from carrying out their mission. Unfortunately the warped world of the adults
is an unpleasant contrast to the more stellar ideas and enthusiasm shown by the
playfulness of the kids, who inherently trust one another, as opposed to the
world of adults where suspicion and the unending use of violence reigns.
Despite the plentiful
use of special effects sequences, the best thing in the film is the
smaller-world interaction of the kids, whose unique personalities add humor and
intrigue to the story, where they’re a close-knit group that draws the audience
in with their appeal, led by Joe, who can’t stop thinking about
Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Goonies,
E.T. - Steven Spielberg's influence on moviemaking is unmistakable. And
for director J.J. Abrams, who grew up fixing Spielberg's old 8-mm films, the
student/mentor relationship has finally culminated into Super 8, a
nostalgic sci-fi thriller involving a group of teenage friends in small town
Lillian, Ohio, who set out to make a zombie movie of their own only to stumble
upon an alien event that has the whole town in a frenzy. As savvy filmmakers,
the kids use the situation as fodder for their film while curiously
investigating alongside Lillian's deputy sheriff (played by Kyle Chandler). And
while Super 8 lacks some of the emotional punch and heart so masterfully
orchestrated by Spielberg, it does capture some of the magic, surprise, and
excitement of his early works. A coming-of-age monster movie for the masses, Super
8 brings the thrill and awe back to the summer Cineplex.
Super 8 | Film | Movie
Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps
For a stretch of the 1980s, there wasn’t enough Steven Spielberg to go around. While continuing to direct a movie every year or two, Spielberg produced films that had the look and feel of Spielberg-by-proxy, films filled with end-of-childhood adventures, suburbs, and small towns that doubled as unexpected sites of wonder or horror. In the best of them, directors like Joe Dante and Robert Zemeckis put their personal stamp on Spielbergian themes while creating popcorn-friendly films to rival their inspiration. Set in the streets, magic-hour-blanketed hills, and cluttered suburban homes of a small Ohio town as the 1970s edge into the ’80s, the J.J. Abrams-scripted-and-directed Super 8—which Spielberg produced—consciously, and successfully, looks back to an era of abundant Spielbergiana.
Joel Courtney leads a cast of talented, mostly unfamiliar kid actors as the
middle-school-aged son of Kyle Chandler, a sheriff’s deputy who struggles with
the demands of single parenthood after his wife dies in a steel-mill accident.
Courtney copes by escaping into a world of models and monster magazines, and
fills his free hours making a zombie film with his movie-mad pal Riley
Griffiths. Their film progresses nicely, especially after the addition of Elle
Fanning as their female lead, even though
Saying more would spoil Super 8’s carefully cultivated aura of surprise, but suffice it to say that what follows won’t be too surprising to those who have seen the films that lend Super 8 their DNA—Spielberg’s and others. That makes Abrams’ film both welcomingly and frustratingly familiar, and more the latter as it goes along. Abrams has a gift for capturing awe and dread—sometimes both at once—and a less-inspiring command of what to do with it. More troublingly, the film’s emotional elements feel more tacked-on than deeply considered, though the performances help rescue some thinly conceived relationships. (Fanning in particular deserves extra credit on this front.)
That said, of all the filmmakers who have tried to recapture the Spirit Of ’82, nobody has succeeded as well as Abrams does here. Super 8 constructs a believably complicated small-town world, fills it with the right period details (apart from an anachronism here and there), shoots it lushly, gives it a Michael Giacchino score filled with John Williams-isms, then tests its residents’ sense of order, righteousness, and willingness to stand up to authority with a chaotic element that could destroy them. Its pleasures are borrowed, but durable.
Already a few critics have jumped on this film, calling it
‘nostalgia porn’. It’s a worthless kind of complaint but it’s kind of easy to
understand. It’s the first collaboration between two giants of pop culture: JJ
Abrams, who writes and directs, and Steven Spielberg, who here produces. The
hype around Super 8 suggests a ‘70s style Spielberg pic with all that
that implies – kids, chases, ‘broken homes’, a suburban small town setting,
much paranoia and a storyline that swoops and dives across plot lines concerned
with military cover ups, teen adventure and What It Takes to Be a Good Father.
And yep, every single one of those stylistic tics and story quirks are present
and accounted for here. Which is another way of saying this is a big, loud and
busy movie. In a way, and I mean this as a compliment, this is one long movie
in-joke. Just about every scene is a conscious and loving ‘steal’ from another
movie, usually something directed by Spielberg – quotes from E.T.
and especially Close Encounters abound, but there’s also riffs on Jaws, Duel,
The Sugarland Express and even 1941! If you know these movies,
Super 8 plays like a party; it’s like pals and their secret jokes. The plot
itself is a parody of Blow Out and Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
Them! and War of the Worlds via Stand By Me.
What I suspect has given Super 8 an aura of movie ‘cool’ leading up to
its release is Abrams. He’s got the best kind of new age sci-fi credentials in Lost
and the Star
Trek re-boot of 2009. (You could throw in Cloverfield too, the
‘found footage’ chase-‘n’-hide monster from outer space movie he produced in
2008.) He’s a generation younger than Spielberg (the latter is now pushing 70)
and his sensibility is different too. His stuff is emotional, but in a
different way to Spielberg. He’s got a better feel for comedy than Spielberg
and his relationship with the material is more ironic, which makes it less
sentimental, and while there’s gee-wiz stuff, scares and action all over Super
8, it’s the comedy that keeps it alive and warm; it saves it from just
another exercise in studio summer blockbuster mechanics. What Spielberg and
Abrams seem to have in common is not just a love of the movies, but something
else that is deeper about the movie making process itself. Anyone who knows
anything about Spielberg understands that as a kid he was bullied and harassed.
Making super 8 movies, literally calling the shots and ‘pushing’ around the ‘cool’
guys, was Spielberg’s way of getting control of his life. It was a way of
making the world his. Abrams got started making super 8 movies too.
Obviously there’s a kinship.
The best thing about Super 8 isn’t just its sheer joy and pleasure in
special effects, suspense, and the exotic possibilities of sci-fi; it’s the way
it connects so directly and deeply with all the nerds out there who tried to
make sense of who they were by creating something. Distilled to
essentials, Super 8 is about how making movies can be a great way to
exorcise your demons and get control. It’s a fashionable theme; the need to
‘recover’ from some terrible angst is everywhere in American popular culture
and movies, but this is the first ‘therapy’ movie I’ve seen about kids making a
super 8 zombie movie!
The setting is a steel town in
While Joe and Charles and crew shoot a climatic scene at a deserted railway
station ‘real-life’ crashes in; there’s a train wreck, something terrible
escapes from the wreckage and their super 8 camera records the whole thing.
Enter the army and a backstory about secret and sinister experiments. Will Joe
step up for himself and his friends? Will he end up with
What follows has a predictable energy to it, but in a way that’s really
enjoyable since Abrams understands the conventions so well; he’s terrific at
putting something really unique or smart into every single ‘seen before’ moment.
Super 8 is kind of impossible to review in close detail since a lot of
the fun is in the plot and to talk about that here is entering spoiler
territory.
The performances are all fine, the scares are good, and it looks and sounds
like a cross between E.T. and Lost. Still, what’s best about it is the
way it taps the power of movies and stories. For Joe, filmmaking isn’t just
about making fantasy, it’s a liberation.
REVIEW: J.J. Abrams'
Spielberg Homage Super 8 Is Less ... - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Bloody Disgusting Horror -
"Super 8" Movie Info, Review, Headlines ... David Harley
Super 8 Review |
Pajiba: Reviews, News, Quotes & Cultural Commentary Dustin Rowles
Review:
Super 8 offers up charming character piece with ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny from HitFix
eFilmCritic.com
[Erik Childress]
Super 8 reviewed: J.J. Abrams tries to
make an E.T. for a new - Slate Dana
Stevens
The Reel Bits [Sarah Ward
and Richard Gray]
advancescreenings.com
[Matthew Fong]
Filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell
Super 8 (2011)
Movie Review | BeyondHollywood.com
Nix
Super 8
- Reelviews Movie Reviews James
Berardinelli
Film Reviews by Joe
Morgenstern The Wall Street Journal
New
York Magazine [David Edelstein]
FILM
REVIEW: Super 8 Eli Glasner from
CBC.ca Arts
Urban
Cinefile (Australia) [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
The Sci-Fi Movie Page [Brian
Orndorf] also seen here: BrianOrndorf.com
[Brian Orndorf] and here: Super 8 : DVD Talk Review
of the Theatrical
Corndog
Chats Cinema [Adam Kuhn]
www.screenspotlight.com
[Jonathan Jacobs]
Cinema Autopsy Thomas Caldwell
Monsters
and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Mark Reviews
Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Boxoffice
Magazine [Todd Gilchrist]
Super 8 : DVD Talk Review
of the Theatrical Tyler Foster
Super
8: movie review Peter Rainer from The Christian Science Monitor
The
Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Super 8 Review
| Movie Reviews and News | Summer Movies - Calendar ... Lisa Schwarzbaum
Super 8: Think Spielberg-lite, but with glimpses ... - Globe and Mail Rick Groen
Abrams's latest is
not so Super - Reviews - Boston Phoenix
Brett Michel
'Super 8' review: Hyped
summer 'blockbuster' occasionally loses ...
Chris Hewitt from The St. Paul
Pioneer Press
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
'Super
8' review: A+ for paean to B-movie sci-fi
Mick LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
'Super
8': Movie review - Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
Super
8 :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews Roger
Ebert
J.
J. Abrams's 'Super 8' Zooms In on a Dark Secret - Review ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS C 76
USA (132 mi)
2013 ‘Scope Paramount [us]
Lacking the humor and
flair of the earlier STAR TREK (2009), this second J.J. Abrams stab at Star Trek (1966 – 1969), the legendary
but now 37-year old Gene Roddenberry developed sci-fi TV show, more closely
resembles STAR WARS (1977 – present), and its computer generated action adventures
in outer space, where it’s no accident that Abrams has been chosen to direct
the next STAR WARS movie. Gone, however,
is any trace of personality or clever character development that defined both
the TV show and the earlier film, as this is pure stereotype throughout,
expressed entirely through worn out cliché’s that have all been done better
before. So in effect, what feels like
retread and rehashed TV is played out as purely conventional
The original 60’s Star Trek TV series was actually
conceived during the Vietnam War, where the Prime Directive, never explicitly
spelled out, but suggests modern cultures with their more advanced technologies
may not interfere in the evolution of another developing society, was actually
a reflection of the writer’s sentiments that America had no business in
Vietnam. While the Prime Directive was
routinely made light of, “I prefer to think of it as the Prime Suggestion,” by
Captain James T. Kirk, the truth of the matter is that while this was the ideal
objective in the abstract, it was, in reality, routinely ignored on any number
of occasions, whenever Kirk felt the end justified the means. In the post-Bush era of Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the
Afghanistan incursions, there’s something ugly and cynical about the ease by
which moral guidelines are routinely ignored in the movies, no doubt a mirror
reflection of society’s apathetic compliance, but these transgressions are
being made by the military branch’s flagship ambassador starship while
supposedly carrying out the highest ideals of civilization, where the
nonchalant hero (again Captain Kirk) seems to be saying oops, sorry about that,
with little more seriousness than the wink of an eye. It’s actually built into Kirk’s recalcitrant
character from the beginning that he’s a reckless and cocky, hot shot, becoming
the only student at Starfleet command to defeat the Kobayashi Maru test, earning a commendation
for original thinking when he reprogrammed the computer, making a “no-win
scenario” winnable. It’s this kind of
thinking that supposedly expresses Kirk’s stubborn individualism, where it’s a
fine line between swaggering heroism and being sent to the brig for
insubordination. The film opens with
exactly this kind of impossible situation, where against all odds the Captain
must consider the unthinkable, where rescuing a single member from his crew
could jeopardize the lives of all the others, and of course a brash and daring
rescue mission, even though successful (was there ever any doubt?), gets him in
trouble back home with Starfleet command, stripping him of his position as
captain of the Enterprise.
While improperly
maligned, seemingly unjust, and downright unthinkable (as who wants to watch an
episode with someone else in
command?), this quickly becomes the least of our concerns, as in true GODFATHER
III (1990) fashion, there is an intruder in the ranks, like Harry Potter’s Voldemort risen from the
dead files of the Starfleet archives, someone with near supernatural powers who
quickly threatens to destroy the balance of power and peaceful stabilization in
the universe. Escaping to an uninhabitable
region of Klingon territory, this outlaw, played with British calm by Benedict
Cumberbatch, turns out to be none other than the notorious villain Khan, played
originally on TV by Ricardo Montalbán, reprising the role in STAR TREK II: THE
WRATH OF KHAN (1982), though Cumberbatch bears no resemblance whatsoever to the
evil ruthlessness of the character. In
fact, in a curious twist, one of
Starfleet’s own megalomaniacal commanders goes even more haywire, Alexander Marcus,
played by Peter Weller, though it appears he’s channeling Richard Widmark’s
demented film noir persona. It is Marcus that revives the military trained Khan
from his cryogenic sleep, fearing war with the Klingons, where he works on
developing top secret Starfleet weapons and battleships under a cover identity
before he rebels, carrying out a series of attacks for the rest of the
picture. While there are plenty more
references to the TV series, most are lame, poorly written, and pitifully
undermined by the endless battle sequences that exclusively drive the action,
with a single exception. As the Enterprise, apparently sabotaged, comes
under a blistering attack, engines stalled, losing warp power and attack mode,
where the ship is in flames and people are dying by the second, Engineer Scotty
(Simon Pegg), who’s oblivious to what’s been happening as he’s been elsewhere,
is beamed onboard the ship as it suddenly goes into a nosedive from engine
failure, where he hilariously utters:
"One day I’ve been off this ship!
One bloody day!” STAR
TREK INTO DARKNESS - Character Profile - Scotty - YouTube (
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Stuart Crawford]
There's been a lot of speculation in recent months over whether Star Trek Into Darkness will see the return of a huge fan favourite to the franchise. It gives me great pleasure to announce that yes, the tribble is back. Sure, it only makes a cameo appearance, but it's a scene-stealer.
The tribble is not Benedict Cumberbatch.
Did everyone enjoy 2009's Star Trek reboot? I certainly did: it was an inherently enjoyable romp with more than enough charm to cover its many flaws. I'm still surprised when I find the occasional person who's indifferent or actively opposed. This time around: less charm, but fewer flaws.
Into Darkness ably addresses the two main criticisms leveled at its predecessor: the plot was nonsense and the villain was rubbish. The baddie's been beefed up, the plot's been pared down, but the emotional core which really sold the first film — the magnificent character interaction — remains unscathed. Everyone gets their own chance to shine, though the Kirk-Spock dynamic takes up most of the screentime.
There's plenty of screentime. Into Darkness weighs in at over two hours, and it doesn't mess about. We're into a ridiculous action set-piece from the get-go, in a scene that effortlessly captures the personality of the original series. Fan-pleasing references are littered throughout, from minor character names to major plot points to the aforementioned tribble, with some interesting role reversals and another cameo from Leonard Nimoy. It's impossible to say much more without spoiling the plot, but rest assured the film bounces along for the full two hours, holding attention principally through the strength of the key performances.
Cumberbatch carries on the grand tradition of British Hollywood villains, with flashes of both Hans Gruber and Dr Hannibal Lecktor evident in his portrayal of a charming sociopath. Lesser actors would struggle to keep up; it's a testament to Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto that they manage to hold their own. Another unexpected treat is Peter Weller, a criminally underrated actor who'll hopefully pick up some more high-profile roles off the back of this one.
As with the 2009 offering, the visuals are stunning, the cinematography dynamic and engaging, the vfx superb. At times it feels rather like watching someone else playing a videogame, but these scenes are few and thankfully brief. We may be going where we've already gone before, but we're plenty bold about it.
Afforded all the freedom in the 'verse to create their own
take on the Star Trek mythos, thanks to the alternate timeline
established by 2009's broad but reasonably clever reboot-quel, team Abrams
almost immediately sets about squandering all of that potential on superficial,
nostalgic fan-service thinly spread between layers of typical, mindless action
entertainment.
When Trekkies see where J.J. Abrams and company have taken their beloved
franchise, they're likely to explode in fury over the lightweight comedy (ha,
ha, Vulcans are different!) and illogical plot points (did you know that Spock
is tougher than a full platoon of Klingon warriors?). Or, contrarily, perhaps
they'll swoon in nerdgasmic ecstasy over shined-up, dumbed-down versions of
iconic story elements from days gone by that have been trotted out to trick the
faithful into believing that this is anything other than crass, brand-aware,
mass market entertainment.
Everyone involved has gone to great lengths to keep the film's secrets, but the
movie tips its hand fairly early on (and IMDB seems fine with spoilers), so the
big "surprise" at the heart of the embarrassingly titled Into
Darkness is hardly that. Even so, the writers half-heartedly try to throw
expectant viewers off the scent with an internal terrorist plot and a looming
Klingon war MacGuffin.
To start things off, after a colourful, kinetic opening sequence on a random
M-class planet that resets the adversarial logic-versus-gut-instinct side of
Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Kirk's (Chris Pine) relationship, we spend too much
time being reminded that Kirk is a cocky rule breaker in need of discipline.
The mentor/mentee dynamic between Colonel Pike (Bruce Greenwood) and our brash,
young captain is dusted off when Kirk is relieved of command for violating the
Prime Directive to save a crewmember.
This order is rendered moot almost as soon as it's handed down; tracking a
deadly murderer into Klingon territory is far more important than following
rules of non-interference with primitive cultures. Admiral Marcus and a comely
young science officer by the name of Carol (Alice Eve, proving that she
actually has a bit of range) have important parts to play in the mechanical and
frequently silly plot. However, the motivations of their characters are even
less developed than those of the mysterious John Harrison (Benedict
Cumberbatch, who steals every scene he's in with his rich, booming voice and
commanding presence).
Don't expect any intriguing science, mind games or thought experiments from Into
Darkness — this is Star Trek as pure action spectacle, where every
side character exists solely to sling bon mots intended to satiate audience
members hungry for the comfortable familiarity of repetition. The movie looks
fantastic, as long as you love lens flare, and has enough pointless,
large-scale destruction to compete with any Transformers film.
However, anyone looking for more than a modern military paranoia twist on a
pre-existing story — one that's overflowing with the most basic populist humour
imaginable — will be left feeling colder than a Vulcan in a cryo-tube.
The thrill and peril of revisiting and revising history served not only as a mission statement for J.J. Abrams's Star Trek, but also as the chief thematic concern of the narrative, involving dueling attempts to alter or recreate history rather than accept it. Abrams essentially successfully recreated popular myth by highlighting his own unease in undertaking such a tremendous task, and the result was a film that exceeded nearly every other filmic iteration of the series.
As such, it's not exactly surprising that Star Trek Into Darkness compounds that unease and further dismantles accepted mythology. Still, it's a reassuring sign that Abrams and his collaborators continue to chart their own distinct path through the final frontier. There's an ironic punch, then, to the film opening with Captain James T. Kirk (Christopher Pine) and First Officer Spock's (Zachary Quinto) inability to practice anonymity, following an exhilarating last-minute rescue of Spock from the gut of an active volcano. For Kirk, the issue is less the demotion he receives from father-figure Admiral Pike (Bruce Greenwood) than Spock's willingness to follow the prime directive, even at the expense of his life or their friendship. Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Spock's long-term partner, isn't very pleased with this either, as it turns out.
For Abrams, the Spock/Kirk dynamic serves as both central dramatic relationship and a perfect abstraction of the creative process of deciding when to indulge the mythology of the series created by Gene Rodenberry and when to trust one's own sense of creation—the personal versus the proven, played out as intergalactic action-melodrama. (Spoilers herein.) And like the film, Kirk is stripped of his own rebuilt sense of personal history early on, when Pike is murdered during an attack engineered by John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch), a mysterious traitor in the Starfleet ranks who's hiding out on Qo'noS, home planet of the Klingons. Left mourning and in need of vengeance, Kirk comes under the tutelage of Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller), who sends him to destroy Qo'noS and Harrison with a cadre of new weaponry.
Even more than its predecessor, Star Trek Into Darkness is densely plotted, and occasionally borders on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and action constantly percolating. This comes in handy when it's revealed that Harrison is, in fact, Khan, an engineered super-being awakened from cryogenic slumber to help create weaponry for Starfleet's attack on Qo'noS. The revelation of Admiral Marcus's warmongering, made by an initially helpful Khan, dismantles Kirk's newly reinforced ideal of Starfleet as do-gooders, but also bonds him to his enemy, and the script rebuilds the rivalry between Kirk and Khan with a rousing sense of moral complexity. Khan isn't sketched in terms of the perceived evil of his actions, but by his potent ideas and knowledge, which are corrupted by a need for violent vengeance.
Put simply, Khan is Kirk left to his own devices, without his trusted crewmembers to offer wisdom and counsel. His need for his crew is mirrored in Abrams's shrewdly democratic sense of developing action, the precision of which feels almost too perfectly calibrated at points. The ambitions and moral weight of the narrative, however, are so striking that the film never feels particularly overwrought. With less major set pieces than its predecessor and a scant amount of creatures, Star Trek Into Darkness strides like a sci-fi box-office behemoth, but has the emotional rigors of poison-tipped melodrama. In this, the inevitable comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back are absolutely justified.
This isn't to say that the film lacks muscle: a shoot-out with a battalion of Klingons, the Enterprise's powerless free fall, and Spock and Khan's climactic duel in the sky above San Francisco all afford thrilling action to match the emotional lacerations that the Enterprise crewmembers must endure, from without and within. At first glance, the film seems to just reiterate the structure and trials of its predecessor by focusing again on the battle between Kirk's ego and Spock's logic, but the stakes have clearly been raised, the moral knot further tightened and tangled. Kirk is no longer seeking an identity for himself, but also for those he must lead, as he watches his idols either die or become violent cowards. The struggle to become both an individual and a leader simultaneously, without the crutch of established honor, has obvious underpinnings for Abrams, a brilliant director who now finds himself watching George Lucas's throne. That struggle doesn't come to an easy, quick, or certain conclusion for anyone in Star Trek Into Darkness, which is more defined by inner demons and emotional gamesmanship than warp drives and photon torpedoes.
Sight
& Sound [Kim Newman] May 10,
2013
“Star
Trek Into Darkness”: Who made JJ Abrams the sci ... - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Cinefantastique
[Steve Biodrowski]
The
Daily Dot - "Star Trek Into Darkness": Too many d*cks on the ... Gavia Baker-Whitelaw
Klymkiw
Film Corner [Greg Klymkiw]
Mark
Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Critic's
Notebook [Sarah Manvel]
At Moria
- The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
'Star
Trek Into Darkness': Dick Cheney's Legacy | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
'Star
Trek Into Darkness' and the Wrath of Fanboys ... - PopMatters Bill Gibron
In
Defense of Star Trek | PopMatters
C.E. McAuley from Pop Matters
PopMatters
[J.C. Maçek III] From Thinking Steaks to TITANic Mistakes: The 'Star Trek'
Films They Almost Made, May 13, 2013
Star
Trek Into Darkness, directed by J.J. Abrams, reviewed. - Slate ... Dana Stevens
Resistance Is Futile: The Illogical Science of Star Trek Phil Plait from Slate, May 16, 2013
'Star
Trek Into Darkness': The Young and the Reckless | TIME.com Richard Corliss
Sound
On Sight [Josh Slater-Williams]
Ruthless Reviews [Devon
Pack] (Potentially Offensive)
Critic's
Notebook [Martyn Bamber]
Movie
Review - 'Star Trek: Into Darkness' - Exploring Familiar ... - NPR David Edelstein
Star
Trek Into Darkness (2013) - Reelviews Movie Reviews James Berardinelli
Star
Trek Into Darkness - HitFix Drew
McWeeny
[Review]
Star Trek Into Darkness - The Film Stage
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Abu-Assad, Hany
FORD TRANSIT B+ 92
Palestine Israel
Delightful romp through the Israeli checkpoints, as seen from the point of
view from one enterprising and very appealing young Palestinian Ford minibus
cab driver, easily the most popular form of transportation in the occupied
territories, who transports a provocative group of customers from Ramallah to
Jerusalem, usually having to take detours due to the everpresent Israeli
checkpoints, which he avoids, as he transports contraband goods. The film has a theatrical appeal, opening with
the music from Sergio Leone westerns, which re-appears from time to time,
suggesting this film is about a revenge western on a larger scale, with
literate customers who are well rehearsed, who are probably actors playing the
part, but no matter, what they have to say is intelligent, absorbing, and
sometimes hysterically appealing, including the likes of Palestinian journalist
and politician Hanan Ashrawi and Israeli filmmaker BZ Goldberg. Among the chosen points of view, an
overweight man with a heart problem who indicated any time Bush appears on
Palestinian TV, it should come with a health warning, to watch it at your own
risk, as he always feels as if he’s about to have a heart attack, or another
who thinks American presidents should have to pass an IQ test, as a stupid
American president like Bush can cause more international damage than what any
terrorist could ever possibly hope to accomplish, or another who speaks of the
Palestinians need to “hope” for a heaven, noting those that have such misery on
earth have a higher need for a salvation in heaven. Again, what works is grounding the film’s
very serious subject matter with the obvious charm and appeal of the young bus
driver. He’s not a terrorist, yet it’s
obvious from what the camera observes from his bus that each time he reaches an
Israeli checkpoint, each Palestinian is treated like a terrorist, and anyone
can only take so much humiliation before he responds with rage. This political film has enormous insight and
appeal. Ironically, one of the outcomes
of the Oslo Israel
PARADISE NOW
Netherlands Israel Germany France
BFI | Sight & Sound | Paradise Now (2005) Ali Jaafer from Sight and Sound, May 2006
Nablus,
Palestine, the present. Best friends Saïd and Khaled work in a garage. One of
the cars they fix belongs to Suha, the daughter of a man respected for being a
Palestinian ‘martyr'. Saïd tries to ignore his and Suha's mutual attraction.
Later that evening a Palestinian militant informs Saïd that he and Khaled have
been chosen to carry out a suicide bombing in Israel the following day; they
both have one last evening to spend with their families.
Late at night, Saïd goes to see
Suha and tells her his father was killed for collaborating with the Israelis,
but he doesn't say anything about the planned suicide operation. The following
day, Saïd and Khaled are readied for their mission, and bombs are strapped to
their waists. They are taken to a crossing on the border with Israel, but a
mix-up results in Saïd and Khaled getting separated. Khaled links up with the other
militants, but they cannot find Saïd. As Khaled tries to find Saïd he bumps
into Suha. She finds out about their plans and tries to persuade Khaled not to
go through with the attack. They find Saïd at his father's grave. The next
morning Saïd and Khaled set off once more on their mission. Khaled reveals he
doesn't want to go through with it. Saïd pretends to agree with him but at the
last moment escapes from Khaled and gets on a bus. The screen fades to white.
Review
At the end of Rana's
Wedding, his 2002 film about a young Palestinian woman frantically
evading Israeli checkpoints to get to her wedding on time, director Hany
Abu-Assad used an excerpt from the Palestinian activist-poet Mahmud Darwish:
"Under siege, life is the moment between remembrance of the first moment
and forgetfulness of the last." In Paradise Now Abu-Assad is
still under siege, and this time exploring the circumstances that lead to two
Palestinian friends becoming suicide bombers. Whereas his previous work
(notably Rana's Wedding and the same year's Ford Transit)
depicted the daily humiliations of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation
with a mischievously upturned eyebrow, Paradise Now provides a
discomfortingly intimate view of the conflict: it is an act of remembrance
suffused with bitterness.
The film had a troubled
production: it was shot largely on location in the West Bank town of Nablus at
the height of the recent intifada; one of Abu-Assad's location managers was
kidnapped by Palestinian militants; and his crew were repeatedly caught in the
crossfire of gun battles between the Israeli army and Palestinian militias. So
it is something of a triumph that it has made it to UK screens at all. Given
its highly contentious subject matter (some 250 Israeli civilians have died in
suicide attacks since January 2001), it is all the more remarkable for emerging
as a deeply humanistic and compassionate work that avoids moralising or dogma.
Best friends Saïd and Khaled are first shown passing their days working in a
local garage, smoking shisha and sipping lukewarm coffee while looking out over
their rambling town; the sound of distant gunfire punctuates their
conversations. There are no visceral explosions or battles to signify the
ongoing conflict, but rather mirage-like wisps of smoke in the background. The
approach is indicative of all Abu-Assad's work, which favours subtlety over
didactic bludgeoning.
Then, after this seemingly
innocuous beginning, Saïd and Khaled are recruited by an unnamed Palestinian
group to carry out a suicide mission in Tel Aviv. When Saïd takes his new and
last employer Jamal home for dinner, his mother is quick to don her headscarf:
the gesture is a silent yet unmistakable nod to the man's faith. But, bravely,
Abu-Assad does not invoke religious fervour as the reasons for Saïd's readiness
to die. Whereas Syriana showed vulnerable youths being recruited as suicide
bombers by an insidious brand of Muslim fanaticism, in Paradise Now
the trigger is more personal: Saïd's father was killed by his own people for
collaborating with the Israelis; fundamentally, however, Saïd holds the Israeli
occupation responsible for his father's death. The personal is made the
political in the most emphatic manner.
For all the undoubted gravity of
the dramatic situation, the director still allows himself moments of unexpected
humour. In one scene, Khaled records his last will and testament, AK-47 and
chequered kuffiyah held aloft in iconic revolutionary mode, only to have the
gravity of the moment repeatedly interrupted by a malfunctioning video camera,
his own desire to tell his mother where to buy cheap water filters and
assembled militants noisily eating sandwiches in the background. Messy reality
collides with the solemn business of myth-making.
Some critics have seen in the character
of Suha, the affluent, western-raised daughter of a respected Palestinian
martyr, the voice of reason: an objective plea for calm amid the maelstrom of
an irrational, unwinnable war. Certainly, her scene with Khaled when they
debate the rights and wrongs of suicide bombers is the closest the film comes
to a political lecture.
Abu-Assad neither glorifies nor
condones the tactic. But that didn't stop Israeli and US critics of Paradise
Now from campaigning against its nomination for this year's Oscar for
Best Foreign Film; they accused the film and film-maker of sympathising with
terrorism. At the same time, Abu-Assad has found himself criticised in certain
Palestinian circles for not portraying his doomed protagonists heroically
enough.
If we are to judge the director by the company of his enemies, therefore, Paradise Now is not an exercise in propaganda. And the film is most powerful in its moments of lyrical reflection. As the two young heroes depart to Tel Aviv (now shockingly shorn of their lived-in beards and long hair, and baptised into sleek, clean-shaven walking time bombs), Saïd looks mournfully out of the window of the vehicle taking them to the border with Israel, the peaceful hills speeding behind him. It is an unspoken declaration of regret and longing for a land equally cursed and blessed, where the sight of a sun-soaked valley sits in jarring proximity to a smouldering block of rubble.
Paradise
Now Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
[SPOILERS] It's easy enough to chalk this film's festival success and (relatively) substantial commercial push to its charged subject matter, and to do so wouldn't be wrong. But there's an incoherence bedeviling Paradise Now that is truly bizarre, since it ironically serves to make the film more ingratiating. It begins as a kind of observational master-shot affair, its first ten minutes containing the only striking composition you'll see during the entire ninety. (This is the crooked bumper / boiling coffee shot, which is kind of a silly sequence in any case and, it could be argued although I won't press too hard on this, may have cribbed its visual gag from Suleiman's Divine Intervention.) Then it becomes a flirtation story, and then a procedural, and then a chase film, and then a platform for dueling political position papers, and then a sins-of-the-fathers disquisition, and finally it ends with a twist of sorts, one that actually reverses any logical character development established in the first hour. Although this scattershot construction leaves the analytical viewer with the impression that Abu-Assad isn't a particularly skilled craftsman, in the moment it can almost feel refreshing, as though he's a balls-out showman willing to try anything. I'll admit that the first part of the film rebuffed my attempts at engagement, but then once we hit the martyr-video sequence, Abu-Assad's unlikely gallows humor pulled me in, and I was able to stick it out from there. In fact, this much-remarked-upon sequence almost announced itself as Paradise Now's thematic linchpin -- the unacknowledged distance between representation and reality, and how Islamist dogma, like any ideological metanarrative, imposes itself like a matrix over daily life, eventually effacing the distinction between action and interpretation. But if this were really Abu-Assad's grand assertion, why have his two potential suicide bombers switch places, with Khaled the Islamist rhetor suddenly discovering gray areas, and Said, the more introspective man, becoming the eventual conduit for violence? It's as though each man's encounter with pacifist Western thought (in the form of an attractive, urbane French-Moroccan woman) turns their belief systems inside-out, by magic. How are we to read this film? If Said and Khaled are two men so ground down by the daily violence and humiliations of the occupation that they'll turn their bodies into bombs, how can they be so fickle? In a way, it's almost as though Abu-Assad is depicting a colonization of the mind, giving us a picture of Palestinians so desperate that they can't even maintain coherent beliefs over ninety minutes. But then again, Paradise Now operates as though it's a symptom of that same psychological malady.
PARADISE NOW Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Paradise
Now and Route 181. By Richard Porton - Eyal Sivan Roads
to Somewhere: Paradise Now, by Richard Porton from Cinema Scope (pdf format)
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Bomb Culture B. Ruby Rich
from Sight and Sound, April 2006
Reel
Bad Arabs: How Hollywood
Vilifies a People, by Jack G. Shaheen,
book review by Christian Blauvelt from Jump Cut, Spring 2008
Abu-Assad, Hany
interview by Gerald
Peary
OMAR B 89
Palestine (96 mi)
2013 ‘Scope
Much of the fatalistic
implications from this movie have the riveting feel of real life drama, as it
depicts the improbable and near impossible mountain for Palestinians to climb
to obtain respect and nationhood around the world, as this harrowing story of
how deeply implanted the Israeli’s have infiltrated into every fabric of
Palestinian life is a bit overwhelming at times. Part of the film’s power is how accurately it
reflects life under occupation, and the futility of negotiating any peace
agreement with the Israeli’s, as there’s little likelihood of any progress, as
Israel has the Palestinians exactly where they want them, fractured, divided,
powerless, and permanently economically disadvantaged, where they literally
have to flee the country to find jobs and a new life elsewhere. If they stay, this film reflects, with
stunning accuracy, the grim future that awaits them. Told with a searing intensity that recalls the
near documentary portrait of Jacques Audiard’s brutal prison film 2010
Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet (Un Prophète), this film depicts
the horrible choices that will doom their futures, as young males can expect to
be continually rounded up and arrested by Israeli police raids into the
occupied territories where they are tortured into becoming informers for the
Israeli secret police, the Shin Bet, whose motto is “Defender that shall not be seen”
or “The unseen shield,” where they have little choice, as otherwise they’ll
simply rot in prison on the mere suspicion of a crime. And if they are released, their own people
suspect they are traitors, that they sold out someone in order to gain their
freedom, as that’s the way the system works, so they’re damned either way. Making matters worse, they’re also humiliated
and brutalized when picked up by the Palestinian police, as both sides
continually suspect informers in their midst, so the political reality is a
hyped up level of elevated paranoia and suspicion, where the legal system
simply doesn’t allow due process, so you’re viewed as guilty unless you can
prove otherwise, where in all likelihood freedom means you’ve informed on
someone.
Abu-Assad’s earlier
films beginning with RANA’S WEDDING (2002) depict the turmoil and daily
humiliations of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation, though FORD TRANSIT
(2003) is often hilarious and satirically charming, where young minibus cab
drivers, the most popular form of transportation in the occupied territories,
are viewed as local heroes in the reckless abandon on display in running a
black market business of contraband while avoiding Israeli checkpoints. The road from childhood friends to eventual
suicide bombers in PARADISE NOW (2005) reveals a discomfortingly yet altogether
human view of the conflict, something of a morality tale turning decidedly more
fatalistic, where one character suggests, “Under the occupation, we're already
dead.” OMAR, which won the Jury Prize (Special
Award) in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, is an outgrowth of that
philosophy, where young people growing up today are under no illusions, yet
they’re driven to be freedom fighters by a shattered and disintegrated culture
desperate to survive, refusing to live under the thumb of the Israeli’s even as
they’re forced to on a daily basis. This
Kafkaesque existence of life under siege is impossible to comprehend anywhere
else in the world except here, where there is little alternative except to
fight back. Adam Bakri as Omar couldn’t
be more enthusiastically energetic as he scales a rope attached to the top of
the 30-foot Wall of the Israeli West Bank barrier to visit his
girlfriend, constantly seen on the run where he dodges in and out of narrow
streets eluding police, even performing acrobatic roof jumps, navigating a
circuitous path to the home of best friend Tarek (Eyad Hourani), where he sips
tea while passing notes back and forth with his attractive sister Nadja (Leem
Lubany), the real object of his desire.
Secretly he pursues a romantic life together, while at the same time he
and Tarek, along with another childhood friend Amjad (Samer Bisharat), plot
radical acts of revenge against the continuing presence of Israeli occupiers,
culminating in the sniper killing of a border policeman. Not long afterwards, Omar is picked up in an
Israeli commando-style military raid in the
What starts out so
romantic and brightly optimistic turns suddenly dark and graphically ugly when
Omar is brutally tortured, along with nearly all of the other Palestinian
prisoners, where life on the inside of a prison is admittedly dour and
hopeless. While they’re looking for the
triggerman of the shooting, Omar’s hopes rest with a lack of evidence, but
those hopes are dashed when a planted fellow inmate records him claiming he
would never confess, something that in this depraved part of the world is as
good as a conviction, considered guilt by association, as it suggests he has
something to confess. This bizarre legal
reasoning leaves him sentenced to 90-years, where lawyers have no influence on
the outcome. In a stunning metaphor for
current Palestinian-Israeli relations, Omar’s options are slim to none, as he
can die in prison, a noble believer in the cause but an ineffectual and
forgotten entity in an endless struggle, or he can be recruited by the Shin Bet
to become an informer, ultimately betraying the only cause he’s ever believed
in. The Israeli handler, Agent Rami
(Waleed F. Zuaiter), is an equally complex figure, as he’s highly intelligent
and continually shows genuine empathy for Omar’s precarious position, where he
becomes the only person who knows the truth about Omar, perhaps his only
friend, but he’s like a mouse in a trap, as there is no escaping the clutches
of the secret police. Once released, on
an assignment to set up his friend Tarek, he immediately comes under suspicion
in his own community, as they suddenly have their doubts about one of their
own. Whatever his dreams and ambitions
may have been about being a force for Palestinian freedom have suddenly been
undermined by a deal with the devil.
While he hopes to sort this out on the other side, picking up where he
left off with Nadja, making plans to marry her, but things don’t go as planned,
where he winds up right back in prison with an even slimmer opportunity to get
out. What’s interesting is the degree of
personal intimacy in the conversations between Omar and Rami, which (much like
negotiations) rely upon a trust factor, even as they secretly hate and mistrust
one another’s real intentions, yet they are destined to play out this sick game
together, as Omar insists he can deliver the goods. But once back on the street he’s become a
walking pariah, where no one wants to be seen with him, where he does fit the
description of the quote from
TIFF
2013 | Omar (Hany Abu-Assad, Palestine ... - Cinema Scope Richard Porton
While the Israeli-Palestinian quagmire has some inspired
some distinguished non-fiction films since the dawn of the 21st
century—notably Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan’s Route 181; Fragments of a
Journey in Palestine-Israel, which remains one of the least seen important
documentaries of the last decade—most features tackling this intractable
conflict are disappointingly mediocre. Made by a Palestinian director who
resides in the Netherlands, Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar is a relatively
undidactic take on the lives of ordinary Palestinians with no choice but to
endure the indignities imposed by the constraints of Israel’s “separation
wall.” Less schematic and overdetermined than Abu-Assad’s overrated Paradise
Now, the film’s impact is nevertheless compromised by its failure to
resolve whether it wants to be a nail-biting thriller, a trenchant character
study, or an indictment of recent Israeli policy. Truth be told, it’s most
successful as a character study: the eponymous hero, devoted to his girlfriend
who resides on the other side of the separation wall, wanting to leave a normal
life but driven by a commitment to the armed resistance movement, is a prime
target for recruitment as a double agent by the Shin Bet. Only a party pooper
would reveal the climactic plot twist that makes Omar’s revenge on his
tormentors satisfyingly sweet—and, at least fleetingly, prevents this uneven
film from being just another well-intentioned but entirely predictable
political thriller.
Tragedy and betrayal swirl around Palestinian writer/director Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, a contemporary thriller/melodrama that sheds further light on the simmering tensions existing in the Middle East. While Assad has tackled this milieu before, most notably in Paradise Now (2005), Omar is yet another eye-opening look into the violence that desperation often spawns via the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If Paradise Now grimly tackled the morality of two would-be suicide bombers, Omar explores a similar stripping away of humanity in a much more relatable way, especially through a sprinkling of dark humor and the inclusion of a romantic angle.
Caught in the dual cross-hairs of allegiance and disloyalty is Omar (Adam Bakri), a young Palestinian baker who feels the pressures of love and loyalty weighing down on him: He wishes to marry a high school girl, Najda (Leem Lubany), but is hesitant on running the idea past her brother (and Omar’s friend) Tarek (Eyad Hourani). The two, alongside another childhood pal Amjad (Samer Bisharat) act as freedom fighters, plotting to kill an Israeli soldier. After the trio succeeds, and with Amjad pulling the trigger, Omar is eventually nabbed by Israeli forces, led by Agent Rami (Waleed F. Zuaiter). Omar is eventually tricked into an admission of guilt and made informant to bring in Tarek (the group leader) in exchange for his own freedom.
After being released, Omar has a month to complete his task, but things are further complicated when Tarek discovers Omar’s assistance on a planned ambush. We’re left to wonder where Omar’s true loyalties lie as he must maintain this increasingly hard balance act to bide time with the Israeli forces and maintain the trust of his friends. All the while, Omar continues to drop in on Najda to make their relationship known to Tarek. While the couple’s romance is easily the weakest and most undeveloped section of the film, the actors make amends and sustain plausibility with their subtle performances.
The heavily plotted last hour of the film manages to venture down a familiar narrative path, but with Abu-Assad’s assured direction and Bakri’s layered performance, Omar achieves an agreeable freshness that overcomes its potential schematic feel. The film’s numerous suspense set pieces, mostly on-foot chase scenes, sport a clearly defined sense of location and space that help them move in a rhythmic fashion. Bakri is a talent to watch not only for his ability to evoke both mystery and sympathy, but for his impressive physicality as well, whether he’s fiercely dodging law enforcement or scaling walls.
While Abu-Assad’s film never quite transcends its political trappings, Omar still works because of its commitment to a refreshingly humanist worldview. Omar is a film not about choosing sides, but instead a drama about the human cost of living under such a brutal occupation.
Omar / The Dissolve Jordan Hoffman
The first image in Omar is a wall. For viewers from another planet—or those who don’t read the world-news section of the paper—next to nothing in the movie explicitly indicates that this is the separation barrier between Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank. This lack of context is an effective creative choice. Given that this is a film about a very specific political situation, with lifetimes of scholarship and signifiers behind it, writer-director Hany Abu-Assad made a bold decision in pulling back and going broad. If not for one shot including an Israeli flag, the movie could work as a universal tone-poem about the fraying resolve of freedom fighters, and how they’re defeated by stronger forces.
But few people with such an uninterested worldview will ever see this movie, and Abu-Assad’s cinematic take isn’t so revolutionary that it can rewire thinking. This isn’t The Battle Of Algiers, it’s a small-scale drama about a hard-to-pin-down individual in an intractable battle far greater than he is.
Ambiguous protagonists are, by now, something of Abu-Assad’s stock in trade. 2005’s controversial Paradise Now, a portrait of two would-be suicide bombers made when terrorist attacks inside of Israel were more common, dared to try and humanize these evildoers, as many Westerners were calling them then. When Omar (Adam Bakri) is introduced, he seems more interested in stealing time away with his gal pal Nadia (Leem Lubany) than waging asymmetric war. He’s eventually pushed—allows himself to be pushed? chooses to get pushed?—along the path toward martyrdom.
Omar is part of a small cell, run by Nadia’s older brother Tarek (Iyad Hoorani), which includes his chum Amjad (Samer Bisharat), a jokester who’s a little shy and also has the hots for Nadia. The three pull off an operation wherein they shoot an Israeli soldier. Assad films this through the gun’s sight, with the three men chattering as they pick off a target at random. The wrong-place/wrong-time nature of the particular soldier’s death is surprising. Even the most rabid anti-Zionist partisan would agree that the affair seems to lack in glory.
The deed quickly comes back to haunt the group. Moles are everywhere; nothing gets past the Israeli secret police. Omar is soon picked up, tortured, and tricked into giving a quasi-confession. Amjad pulled the trigger, but the man the Israelis really want is Tarek. In short order, and much to his own amazement, Omar ends up working as an informer to save his own skin. His Shin Bet handler Rami (Waleed F. Zuaiter) starts spinning him in circles, and the pair share one of the film’s sole moments of levity, discussing Spider-Man. (Omar is given to moments of brooding solitude, and since he works at a bakery, there’s ample time to watch pita bread rise in a hot coal oven of symbolism.)
With torn allegiances, Omar tries to stay one step ahead of everyone—or at least that’s what he appears to be doing, as Abu-Assad’s reserved approach goes to great lengths to keep Omar’s true feelings distant. Still, anyone who has seen a cop movie knows this isn’t going to go well. A third-act twist, however, is unexpected enough that it ought to brush aside any plot complaints like “If the Shin Bet is just so all-seeing and all-knowing, why do they need Omar to track down Tarek in the first place?”
Apart from the acceptable length of time that can elapse before you give a wedding present, the Israel-Palestine debate is among the world’s thornier and most intractable issues. It’s clear Omar thinks he’s a freedom fighter, but does the film with his name in the title think he’s a freedom fighter? Abu-Assad’s stance on killing Israelis, if he is meant to stand for the voice of the film, is open to interpretation.
The writer-director chooses to show only what Omar sees. Omar is harassed by border police, but the film offers zero context as to why there needs to be border police in the first place. Abu-Assad has ample cover in simply telling a character’s story, but given the realpolitik of this conflict, the words of the great poet-philosopher Neil Peart come to mind: “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
A moralistic gray zone is good for business, though, at least with a foreign-language film trying to penetrate the American market. Regardless of whether the film and Abu-Assad advocate the characters’ actions will lead to post-screening discussion, perhaps more than the meat of the film itself. For what it’s worth, the self-identified Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad carries Israeli citizenship, and spent much of his life in the Netherlands. This is undeniably juicy packaging for what is, at its core, a good but not great crime drama. Of further note, two more upcoming films, Bethlehem and The Green Prince, both Israeli productions (the latter a documentary), are also about Palestinian informants with Shin Bet. Could make quite the triple feature.
Omar | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
“Omar”:
A devious Hitchcock thriller, in Palestine - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Slant
Magazine [Tomas Hachard]
Review:
2014 Best Foreign Film Oscar Nominee 'Omar'|The ... Gabe Toro from The Playlist
Critics
At Large : Art vs. Propaganda: Bethlehem and Omar Shlomo Schwartzberg
Little
White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]
Movie
Mezzanine [Amir Soltani]
Review:
OMAR, A Heart Pounding Thriller And ... - Twitch Dustin Chang
FilmSchoolRejects
[Daniel Walber]
Filmmaking
Review [Jordan Baker]
Spectrum
Culture [David Harris]
SBS
Movies [Rochelle Siemienowicz]
Film-Forward.com
[Nora Lee Mandel]
[NYFF Review] Omar -
The Film Stage Forrest Cardamenis
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Hot Property:
Omar | Film Comment Nicolas Rapold
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Interview:
Hany Abu-Assad Talks OMAR And The ... - Twitch Dustin Chang interview from Twitch, February
20, 2014
The
Luxury of Unhappiness: Director Hany Abu-Assad Talks Omar ... Livia Bloom interview from Filmmakers magazine, February 24, 2014
Interview:
Hany Abu-Assad | Film Comment
Nicolas Rapold interview, February 24, 2014
Omar: Cannes
Review - The Hollywood Reporter
Deborah Young
'Omar'
movie review - The Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Review:
'Omar' - Featured Articles From The Los Angeles ... Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
RogerEbert.com
[Sheila O'Malley]
In
'Omar,' the West Bank Is a Backdrop for Betrayal - NYTimes.com A.O. Scott
Achard, Laurent
DEMENTED D+ 66
A thoroughly detestable
film, one that is based on exploring extreme family instability, adapted from the
Timothy
Findley novel The Last of the Crazy
People, this setting is
confined to the strange rural inhabitants living in a run down farm that they
are having a difficult time trying to sell.
The look of the farmhouse is identical to Haneke’s dream flashback to
his childhood home in CACHÉ, where even the shot from the shadows of the barn
(of an ax) with a view of the house across an open expanse looks the same. Following that train of thought, it could be
a possible extension of that same story through the perspective of the young
Algerian child, who is seen throughout this film. Julien
Cochelin plays Martin, a silent, droopy eyed 10-year old Algerian kid who has
the run of the premises with little, if any, supervision, providing a near
voyeuristic perspective, as the camera follows his eyes throughout the
film. His mother may actually be the
Algerian housekeeper to this seriously dysfunctional white French family that
seem to be in a constant state of decay, which features a mother locked away in
a room due to her psychosis or dementia, gazing at nothing for long periods of
time, or screaming at the top of her lungs at others, where Martin, alleged to
be her son, is not allowed admittance to her room. Her weak-kneed husband works the farm, while
his mother is a busybody who criticizes anything and everything around her but
is apparently running the financial end into ruin, remaining in a constant
state of dissatisfaction, while their older son Didier is a closeted gay who
fancies himself as a writer but is in an emotional tailspin after his lover is
about to marry someone else, so he wastes his time flailing away drinking
beer. No one is happy with anyone else,
reflected by recurring offscreen episodes of extreme noise and violence,
usually with Martin sitting there in the kitchen absorbing it all. This happens so frequently that it becomes
unintentionally amusing, as the accentuated mood of hysteria is so wretchedly
contrived that the film, even without any musical score, loses any sense of
naturalness in this setting, as if there may be missing aliens in the
attic. Instead every scene leads to a
kind of gloomy melodramatic world of unreality.
Watching this film deteriorate is pure drudgery, as the inevitable signs
of a breakdown of all order only get worse, culminating in a finality of
apocalyptic proportions. Anyone care to
wait for this to happen? And even if
they do, does it prove anything? Are we
better off having experienced this?
The
Flickering Wall [Jorge Mourinha]
A 10-year-old watches as his highly strung, bankrupted rural family slowly unravels during the course of a summer. Bleak, overwrought drama that lavishes intense performances and highly stylized, formalist handling on a somewhat hysterical version of Cold Comfort Farm.
Festival
of New French Cinema Andrea Gronvall
from the Reader
Timothy Findley’s Canadian novel The Last of the Crazy People was the source
material for this moody 2006 psychodrama by Laurent Achard, who’s changed the
locale from
Festival of New French
Cinema Diane Eberhardt from Facets
The
disintegration of a country family is seen through the wide-open eyes of a
young boy. With a mentally unstable mother who never leaves her room, a
helpless and passive father, a controlling grandmother, a love-sick brother who
turns to alcohol and violence and a new friend who betrays him, eleven year-old
Martin (Julien Cochelin) finds little solace in life on this run-down farm, other
than in the bond he shares with the housekeeper and the company of his cat.
This spare film is replete with a quiet anxiety, where the mounting despair is
portrayed in carefully constructed, precise scenes, whose minimal action is
starkly contrasted within an austere Gothic drama. Directed by
"A lightning bolt in the sky of emerging French
cinema."
-Les Inrockuptibles
"Corrosively austere...Achard ratchets up the tension with chilling
control"
-Variety
WINNER Best Directing & Jury Prize
not coming to a theater near you (Ian Johnston)
The interest here is in how
director Laurent Achard resolutely (with only one exception) restricts the
narrative viewpoint to that of 10-year-old Martin, the film’s verbally
inexpressive loner protagonist. So, in What Maisie Knew mode, we bear
witness with Martin to the events taking place on the rundown family farm,
events that are in the main beyond his understanding: his alcoholic, disturbed
mother who locks herself away in her room; his vindictive grandmother; his weak
father, who appears to be sleeping with his mother-in-law (Achard lets out this
kind of narrative information in subtle, incremental stages); his gay would-be
writer brother on the path to psychological meltdown.
But the strength of this
restricted point-of-view also ends up being something of a weakness. We end up
being too much in advance of Martin’s knowledge of the world around him (it’s
different with literature – with Maisie James controls the feed of
language to us so that we experience the events with Maisie but simultaneously
understand more than she does). The result is that there is a certain plodding
predictability to the later part of the film and its violent climax.
User comments from imdb Author: moimoichan6
(moimoichan6@yahoo.fr) from Paris, France
It was apparently very hard for Laurent Achard to archive his strange
cinematographic new project : almost ten years have passed since his last movie
"Plus qu'hier, moins que demain", released in 1998. And when you see
"Le dernier des fous", it's not really hard to understand why it took
so much time to convinced a producer to put some money in the project : if its
story is quite classic for a french "film d'auteur", its style is so
arid (there is no music, but only sour, experimental, distorted and natural
noises ; most of the time, the frame stay still, and the sequences could be
very long, as if time stops for minutes, etc.), that it's certainly almost as
difficult to watch than it was to make.
The movie deals with a family crisis (with everything a french psycho drama is
able to offer : a crazy mother, a homosexual and depressive son, an absent
father, and so on...) setting in the french country. All the events are view
through the eyes of the younger soon, who passively watch his world collapsed.
First interesting point is that the movie never leave this point of view, and
make everything seems quite unreal, for we don't see an objective reality, but
we're always in the mind of this strange little kid. And the fact that this is
a mental movie allows the plot to take another direction, and then fallows stranger
and original paths. That's why the all the movie is between realism and
fantastic, and even naturalism and horror, and tries to stay in that border.
But if this experience is very interesting, it's not really satisfying.
The story, the situations, even the style, has everything to see with french
naturalism : the movie sometimes reminded me the psycho drama of Téchiné or
Piallat, or even "Mes Petites amoureuses" from Eustache (because of
some scenes between the child and his older neighbor). But the naturalist way
is disturbed by a fantastic tone, where the characters seem deformed (like the
mother or the maid of the neighbor), and sometimes look like monsters. You
constantly have the feeling (like the older brother said), that something
horrible is about to happened. Then, the movie is closer to realistic fantastic
like Bava than classical french sociological study. The family really looks
like a disturb bunch of freaks, almost as strange as the family of Miike's
"Visitor Q".
But the thing is that the mixture doesn't really work, for, as the movie always
tries to stay at the border of the two genres, it doesn't really fit anywhere,
and seems somehow unfinished, for it doesn't actualized its pretensions. The
naturalist way is like suppress by the fantastic elements, as if the movie
couldn't assume to the end the fact that it is a french "film
d'auteur". And the same thing goes with the fantastic and horror way : for
it is also a realistic movie, nothing fantastic never really happened. It's as
if the mix of the two elements, instead of increasing the impact of the two,
suppress the both.
But there is no doubt, that if the movie is hard to watch (it's sometimes
boring and annoying) it sticks to your mind for a long time, and some frames
(the distorted face of the mother, the sour and loud atmosphere, the loneliness
of the characters, etc.) comes to haunt you back, long after the screening.
A family's madness and despair are seen through the eyes of an
11-year-old boy in the bleak French-Belgian gothic drama "Demented."
Gallic helmer Laurent Achard ("More Than Yesterday"), who won a best
director gong at the recent Locarno fest for this, opts for a corrosively
austere, score-free aesthetic that spotlights the intense perfs at its heart,
especially from deadpan Julien Cochelin in the lead. However, despite its
bravura qualities, plot trajectory may prove too much of a major downer for
most auds. Pic will need fest exposure, critical support and further kudos to
break out of niche asylums.
Adapted from 1967 novel "The
Last of the Crazy People" by Canadian scribe Timothy Findley, script by
Achard and Nathalie Najem seamlessly transposes action from mid-'60s small-town
Canada to contempo rural France.
Book flows out of internal
monologues from its young protagonist, but in the screen version, young Martin
(Cochelin), rarely speaks. Still, his point-of-view almost entirely structures
the action as he watches from the sidelines or listens from another room as his
family falls apart.
In a large, dilapidated farmhouse
that the brood clearly can't afford to keep up, Martin's semi-catatonic mother
Nadege (Dominique Reymond, another memorably suffering mom in "Will
It Snow for Christmas?") has locked herself in her room and won't even
speak to her bewildered husband Jean (Jean-Yves Chatelais).
Unsympathetic to Nadege's plight,
Jean's mother Rose (veteran Annie Cordy) has taken on the role of the lady of
the house.
Meanwhile, Martin overhears the
sound of kissing in the barn where his older brother Didier (Pascal Cervo, from
"More Than Yesterday") has been having an affair with a neighbor boy,
who is now planning to marry a local girl. News of the nuptials sends Didier
into an alcoholic tailspin of despair.
Only Malika (Fettouma Bouamari),
the family's Arab housekeeper, and occasionally Didier pay attention to the
watchful, too-still Martin.
The discovery of a handgun in a
neighbor's house lays the way for a last-act tragedy, but the tone is more akin
to William
Faulkner or Racine than a sermon on the evils of firearms from Michael Moore.
Climax may prove either too harrowingly brutal or over-the-top for some auds'
taste, but last scene's use of sound is nevertheless impressively
expressionistic in itself. Before this, occasional stabs of welcome humor
lighten the atmosphere.
Using mostly medium and long
shots to create a detached sense of emotional distance, Achard ratchets up the
tension with chilling control as the traumas pile up on Martin's head.
Only once does pic diverge from
his viewpoint, for an unnecessary scene in which Didier burns his journals, but
Cervo's acting is so strong here that the digression is forgivable. Cochelin --
with his wide-spaced eyes, one lid always slightly droopy -- has a mesmeric,
otherworldly presence.
Achbar, Mark
MANUFACTURING CONSENT: NOAM CHOMSKY AND THE MEDIA
Canada
Manufacturing Consent - Noam Chomsky and the Media Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
(Two sections with intermission. Part 1 : Thought Control in Democratic Societies [95 mins]. Part 2 : Activating Dissent [72 mins])
In Copenhagen with a couple of hours to kill before dinner, suffering from a
cold, and a hangover, on a damp and dark day in December, I headed for the Film
Institute to catch what I thought was going to be an 85-minute documentary on
Noam Chomsky. 95 minutes later, the caption came up announcing the end of Part
1. Intermission, then the second half. Looking at my watch, I realised that, as
restaurants in
I’d seen enough of Manufacturing Consent to know that it wasn’t going to get a great deal better in the second half – not that the first half was especially poor. It was just that I was tired of the dichotomy between the strength of Chomsky’s ideas – which are fascinating and urgent in whatever medium they’re expressed (I have a split 7” single he did with Bad Religion to prove that point) – and the often asinine weakness of their presentation, courtesy of Canadian directors Wintonick and Achbar.
The idea of editing together many of Chomsky’s appearances on worldwide TV and radio over 25 years is an excellent one, and the film-makers must be applauded for the great range of clips they’ve accumulated. But it’s very frustrating that whenever Chomsky is questioned or taken on, the ‘opposition’ is shown in very brief clips – especially since these moments, featuring the likes of Tom Wolfe and William F Buckley, are among the most entertaining in the whole film.
And why on earth did they Wintonick and Achbar feel it necessary to ‘improve’ Chomsky’s delivery with their array of cack-handed tricks and gimmicks. Whenever anybody says anything especially important, KEY PHRASES are flashed up on screen in block capitals, and they stay there for a few seconds to ensure that they’ve SUNK IN. This isn’t the only instance of the directors doing the opposite of what is Chomsky’s main message here, namely the importance of everyone thinking for themselves.
Seldom does Chomsky get to speak more than a couple of sentences, for
instance before we cut to howlingly prosaic stock-footage or stills to show us
exactly what he’s talking about, just in case we couldn’t work it out for
ourselves. The style of the movie is a great shame, because its content is
often dynamite – the
While Wintonick isn’t quite a camera-hogging Nick Broomfield or Michael
Moore figure, by the end of the first part of Manufacturing Consent, the
audience may well be rather too familiar with his bulky frame and geeky
haircut. The Michael Moore comparison is especially useful with regards to Manufacturing
Consent, as the film shares much ground with
THE CORPORATION C+ 77
Canada
Based on writer Joel Bakan’s book, “The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power,” this film is loaded with information about the origins of corporations in America, originally limited to projects for the public good, with a limited time span, such as the building of a bridge, or a public works project. But by the end of the 19th century, a Supreme Court case changed all that. The 14th Amendment was passed after the Civil War so no one could steal the property or possessions of slaves, who were lawfully granted equal protection under the law. What changed, according to the film, was the granting of equal protection status to corporations in the same manner as individuals or persons. Under these legal guidelines, corporations have been protected by the equal protection laws despite doing some terrible environmental damage, most of which was never revealed until after the damage had already been done.
This film exposes some of the more dreadful human costs, like the current cancer epidemic we are experiencing where one of every two men gets cancer, for women, one of every three, or the privatization of water by Monsanto in the poorest regions of South America, prohibiting people from accumulating rainwater without paying to the company a surcharge, like rent, or IBM’s collaboration with Nazi’s in the Holocaust, actually providing weekly maintenance service for the machines used by the Gestapo to round up and exterminate the Jews, then collecting their profits after the war, or companies being allowed to establish patents on newly created molecular or biological life forms, so that eventually corporations own all forms of life except the human species, or the small punitive damages that have been collected from corporations that have been determined legally guilty of violating environmental protection laws, explaining that the cost of paying the fines and continuing to pollute is cheaper than changing their way of doing business. The film does mention a book, “The Ecology of Commerce,” which changed one carpet manufacturing CEO’s life, as he vowed to change his corporation from one of “plundering the earth’s resources” to a more equalizing relationship with the planet, giving back as much as it takes.
The information is terrific, comparing the behavior of capitalist corporations to the anti-social behavior of psychopaths, and it includes commentary by Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore, also Naomi Klein who writes for The Nation, but the editing is dreadful. At 145 minutes, it was nearly an hour too long, and it built to no dramatic conclusion, it just stuffed us full of information, which, after awhile, gets tiresome. Unfortunately, viewers may be dizzy with over saturation by that time, and whatever effectiveness the film has information-wise has been lost by the innate inability to digest everything this film has to offer. While there is power to this film, it is diluted by its own structure, which defeats its purpose.
The
Corporation Michael Sicinski from
the Academic Hack
Yes my friends, it is
the anti-Fahrenheit.
While I would have to be willfully blinkered to think we're getting the whole
picture here, one of this film's strengths (aside from clear argumentation and
meticulous research) is the fact that corporate insiders (former CEOs,
child-marketing experts, "undercover" advertising specialists,
commodities traders) line up to tell their side of the story. Some doozies are
contained therein; the "nagging study" was a jaw-dropper. But more
than what they say, their blithe indifference to the filmmakers' project tells
the story, and shows why a film that takes on the corporate-capitalist
structure is in some ways destined to succeed where
Adams, Joey Loren
COME EARLY MORNING B+ 90
A quiet, reflective film that beautifully captures the nuances of small town life in the rural South of Arkansas, shot by David Gordon Green's cinematographer Tim Orr, opening with the familiar song by Malcomb Holcombe, "Killing the Blues," from THE SLAUGHTER RULE. Ashley Judd as Lucy is in nearly every scene wearing no make up as a tightly wound, highly independent woman who enjoys her space, drinking beer, and sleeping with most every guy in town, then acting like nothing matters. The cast is superb, including Scott Wilson as her ultra reclusive father, who had a history of being a great guitar player, but needed to be drunk before he could play, who despite never leaving town has been all but absent in her life, Diane Ladd as the abused spouse in a pitiful relationship with her long term spouse where love dried up decades ago, the brilliant Tim Blake Nelson in a small but pitch perfect performance as Lucy's uncle who fills in the missing pieces of her past, and Stacy Keach as the aging contractor Lucy has been working with for the past 8 years.
Lucy obviously drinks too much, spends aimless time in roadhouse bars, goes home with whoever and slinks home early the next morning without a shred of dignity left to her name. In one of the best observed sequences, she and her father unpretentiously visit a Holy Roller southern Baptist church on Sundays, with a young but wise preacher, featuring plenty of rocking music and swaying souls, while another sequence where she volunteers at the local nursing home gets swallowed up in the final edit, losing a bit of the continuity of the story. Into Lucy's life walks Cal, Jeffrey Donovan, who is so straight he could easily be Bo from BUS STOP, something of a good 'ol boy car nut from out of town who unexpectedly treats her kindly, embarrassing Lucy into not just walking away for a change, though she's obviously uncomfortable with relationships. Her cool, mysterious and privately respectful room-mate, Laura Prepon, a tall, beautiful blond who could be the lead in another film, urges her to take this guy more seriously, opening up avenues that never existed before.
There's an interesting country soundtrack, a nicely paced rhythm with interweaving plotlines that never overreach, that becomes heartfelt and emotionally involving while maintaining a politeness and texture of the locale, even including the bored, haggard looking grocery clerk smoking a cigarette, continuing a neverending conversation with each customer that she knows by name, in a town where no one is a stranger, no one carries any secrets, and most people have been up and down every road many times before. This is an honest, intimate, low-key examination of a woman's journey through the quaint familiarity of her town, hoping to find some resemblance of self respect on her road to redemption.
Adamson, Andrew
SHREK B 87
USA
What felt like a summer special effects movie, a clever spoof on the fairy tale formula, actually did a masterful job changing gears and tenderly bringing Shrek and Princess Fiona together in love. I felt those sequences, blended together by the John Cale version of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah,” was heartfelt and masterfully done, which brought the film to a rousing and satisfying conclusion.
SHREK 2 C 76
USA Vernon
Not as unique, energized, or as well made as the original, the remake is
much cornier, features a new character, the gallant and noble Puss n Boots,
voice by Antonio Banderas, but this new character’s hilarious screen time is
diminished by the evil antics of the Fairy Godmother, who, unfortunately, is
something of a bore and dominates this film.
Too much time is spent away from the real characters, as they are cast
under a spell, and all look a little too goofy to be liked or believable. In the end, the film resembles CHICKEN RUN,
as there is a prisoner assembly line creating the Fairy Godmother’s potions,
and TOY STORY, as the old Disney characters of Pinocchio, the Three Bears, the
Three Little Pigs, and the Three Blind Mice, who, as it turns out, aren’t
really blind, come to the rescue, a scenario with results that are all too
predictable. Also, the music isn’t
nearly so inventive, or as woven into the fabric of the film, as in the
original, although there is a terrific rendition of “Living La Vida Loca.” However, the action can be fast and sweet,
some of the characters loveable, and there are some terrific sequences. It is astounding to me that this film was
chosen for entry into competition at the 2004 Cannes
THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA: THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE D+ 65
USA
A commercialized war movie, an interesting beginning that goes awry, that
turns into a needless epic battle scene, (which is only a few sentences in the
book), with children leading a herd of followers into slaughter, which, in a
children’s movie, is pretty atrocious and left me aghast. Opening in a Nazi bombing raid on England
Tilda Swinton is terrific as an evil ice witch who has presided over Narnia, turning it into a frozen kingdom for 100 years, running it as a police state controlled by her pack of wolves threatening harm to anyone that doesn’t do as they’re told, with her magical spear that freezes victims into stone, permanently revealing their last terrified expression, until the humans accidentally enter the kingdom and the lands slowly begin to thaw. Lucy is kidnapped by a fawn who has been ordered to bring any humans, known as the sons of Adam or Eve, to the evil White Witch, but he is won over by Lucy’s kindness, so he helps protect her. Enter Lucy’s second oldest brother, a dimwitted, insecure twit who falls into the witches trap and starts ratting out on his family and anyone else for a few pieces of sweets, a Judas figure if ever there was one. Add the eldest brother, supposedly handsome and courageous, but hesitant and a complete disappointment in his role, and eldest sister, a whining bore of a girl who was wretchedly awful in each and every scene in the film, and we have heroes of the most artificial kind, the kind you’re inclined to root against. They, along with the aid of a few talking beavers who help the family rally around their missing brother, attempt to reunite their family before they can all return home, helped along the way by a surprise visit by Santa Claus who bears gifts of magical protection. But rather than return home, events cause them to reach for a higher cause in this all too obvious battle for good and evil, as too many in the animal kingdom have stuck their necks out in their behalf, many ending up turned to stone by the witches spear, yet these siblings feebly keep thinking only of themselves, all except Lucy, of course. After a lion, the leader of the pack sacrifices his life for the Judas among them, a hellish war breaks out where one side is cretins, giants, dwarfs, one-eyed gnomes and cyclops, and grotesque disfigured horrors of all shapes against valiant, heroic, self-sacrificing warriors, all good against all evil, hardly a fair fight. After the resurrection, yes, I repeat, the resurrection of the lion, the tide turns and good prevails. Eventually, all who sacrificed their lives for good were resurrected, not just the lion, while the evil just remained dead. Overly simplistic? Absolutely, but the story was at least intriguing until the children became battle leaders, which they were in no way suited for, so it was all downhill at that point. I did love to see the cheetahs lead the charge into battle against the Ice Witch’s chariot driven by polar bears, highlighted by an aerial view of the battlefield, but other than Lucy’s appeal, that was it. Talking animals were highly decorated with moral colors in this thoroughly banal C.S. Lewis Bible story passing for a Christian fantasy fable.
The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe SANTA
CLAUS CONQUERS THE NAZIS, by Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
Ade, Maren
The
Personal View biography (Google
translation) from Christine Nord from North
(Translate
this page)
Maren Ade came
on 12 Dezember 1976 in Karlsruhe zur Welt. Even
with 14 years of experimenting with the video camera, and at 18 she made with
her then-boyfriend a first short film.
From 1998 to 2004 she studied at the Academy
of Television and Film in Munich, in 2003 she made her final film, "The forest for the
trees" , which premiered at the Hof Film Days. While still a
student, she founded with her fellow student Janine Jackowski the firm
"complicit Movie. In addition to her own films, she has hot movie
"Hotel Very Welcome" produced Sonja, in which backpackers in Asia is
about. 2003 Maren Ade moved to Berlin in Berlin with other filmmakers and filmmakers
such as Ulrich Köhler, Henner Winckler or Valeska Grisebach it is in close
connection. "All Others" is
her second feature film, it's about a couple on holiday, the meeting
with another couple from the balance brought by the. Birgit Minichmayr and Lars
Eidinger play the leading roles. "All
others" is this coming Monday in the Berlinale competition show
where the film 17 other productions for the Golden Bears compete with.
Maren
Ade - filmportal.de brief bio
Maren Ade Mubi
Interview with Maren Ade .:
the Lamp Catherine MacLennan interview
from The Lamp, November 2004
Berlinale 2009: Interview with Maren
Ade Kevin Lee interview February 25,
2009
“A
delicate psychological dramaturgy”
Ruediger Suchsland interview from Cineuropa, June 11, 2009
Village
Voice (Aaron Hillis) review Hillis
interviews the director, September 29, 2009
Couples
Chaos: German Director Maren Ade Talks About Everyone Else ... Scott Foundas feature and interview from LA Weekly, October 28, 2009
Maren
Ade: 'Toni Erdmann's humour comes out of a big desperation ... Jonathan Romney
interview from The Guardian, January
21, 2017
THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (Der Wald vor
lauter Bäumen) B 88
Germany
An unusual film, told in a distinctly measured manner as we are witness to a young woman’s walk through her own psychological purgatory, somewhat of her own making, but she hasn’t a clue how she got there, and even less of an idea how to get out, living in a perpetual state of limbo. Disturbing as it is, Ade forces us to examine the limits of our own human paralysis to things that make us uncomfortable. Ade herself comes from a family of teachers, and using a wrenchingly realistic, near documentary style, examines the life of a substitute teacher who is forced to take over a class with some of the more difficult kids in the middle of the school year, an assignment she initially welcomes, but becomes more and more withdrawn, unable to face her own inner shame at the way she is ridiculed and mistreated, and instead puts on a happy face, actually inventing friends she doesn’t have and fabricating things to say just to avoid having to be honest with others, which places her in an extremely uncomfortable and peculiarly isolated position, represented by her retreat from the teacher’s lounge into what looks like a broom closet where she mysteriously eats alone and her habit of staring out her apartment window with a pair of binoculars. The performance by the socially awkward Eva Lobau is entirely believable.
New in town, she initially welcomes her neighbors with a sunny disposition and home made Schnapps, which is hard to refuse, and greets her fellow teachers with a speech about bringing a “breath of fresh air” to the school, suggesting she is attuned with the latest teaching methods. But when her kids are out of control and continue to make fun of her, her condition deteriorates and she becomes more and more pathetic, which affects her life outside school as well, where she becomes even more psychologically unstable, as represented by her obsessive zeal to have at least one friend, where she literally stalks her next door neighbor in order to fabricate the appearance of coincidence, but once the neighbor catches on, and once her fellow teachers catch on, what recourse does she have? The end is a perfect culmination for her dilemma, as her fall from grace is poetically revealed in an eerie final shot which may initially draw gasps from the viewers, but when the director prolongs the shot, changing the entire context of the scene, it will likely provoke only more questions. Some critics who fully understand and appreciate the mechanics of making of that final shot are actually calling it hopeful.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Scott Pfeiffer
Writer/director Maren Ade is the talk of the town for TONI ERDMANN; she's an artist who's earned her comparisons to Renoir and Cassavetes. Here is an opportunity to see her first feature on the big screen. Her films are examinations of behavior—psychological case studies—and connoisseurs of character-focused films will note she was a fine director of actors right out of the gate. This cringeworthy psychodrama traces the breakdown of a naive, awkward, rather square young schoolteacher (Eva Löbau), who moves to a new town in the middle of the school year. Her professed hope of bringing "a breath of fresh air" immediately annoys the seasoned teachers, and the recalcitrant kids greet her nervous, overly solicitous manner with scorn and abuse. She hasn't the gift of authority. Her attempts to befriend the woman next door (Daniela Holtz), who initially humors her, are needy and puppy-like. Ade's camera style evokes the then-contemporary The Office, though sometimes she gets such low angles she seems to be down in the floor. Here, the embarrassing situations are not played for laughs. The miserable, lonely teacher can't find the humor and warmth that saves the characters in TONI ERDMANN. Still, the Ade hallmarks are here: the intense collaboration between director and actors yielding rich, precise realism in the performances; the behaviors and anxieties we recognize with a pang; an approach to character that allows us to infer a whole life from glances and gestures. Conflicts in Ade aren't melodramatic. Rather, they arise from people's natural tendency to dissemble, as in life. She refuses to take sides. While we empathize with the shy teacher's yearning for connection—she so wants people to like her—she's also a bitter, self-sabotaging buttinsky, and even a bit unstable, spying on her neighbor and cluelessly bestowing unwanted attention. (All three of Ade's features are marked by uncomfortable "what are you doing here?" situations.) Still, Ade's strategies are aimed at getting as close to this character as possible, and the film has a wonderful, magical ending which I choose to read as a ray of hope for her. It is audacious and open, a mystery, and it announces an important career.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil
Young] Northern Lights Film Festival
For roughly 75 minutes of its brisk 81-minute running time, The Forest for the Trees is nothing more or less than a sharply-written, well-observed, DV-shot, small-scale character study of a 27-year-old teacher struggling to adapt to a new school in sleepy Karlsruhe. When we first see Melanie Proschle (Eva Lobau), she's breaking up with Bernd (Achim Enchelmaier), her boyfriend of eight years, and departing for a different life in a different town. Like the corny joke about the cross-eyed teacher, Melanie has difficulty controlling her pupils – and her lack of social skills mean shehas problems making new friends. Seemingly oblivious to the eager advances of her work-colleague Thorsten (Jan Neumann), she instead fixes upon her (comparatively) glamorous neighbour Tina (Daniela Holtz), who works in a fashion boutique. Melanie's devious campaign to win Tina's friendship seems to pay dividends – for a time…
If the film ended abruptly at the 75-minute mark, it would still be a "should-see" – accomplished and engrossing, though nothing too far out of the ordinary. Let's say 7 out of 10. But the final three minutes (before the credits) are something else again – lifting The Forest for the Trees firmly into the "must-see" category. Completely out of the blue, and with the simplest of means, Ade delivers a genuine coup de cinema: thrillingly transcendent, disarmingly magical, transfiguring everything that's gone before (the closest recent parallel is with another German picture, Christian Petzold's The State I Am In). This review will not reveal the details of these closing minutes, but will instead support Canadian critic Mark Peranson who, in a review which astutely anaylses the progress of Ade's debut from student-project obscurity to globetrotting festival-fave, acclaims "the best ending of the year."
At a stroke, Ade dissolves whatever objections we may have harboured to her subject-matter and approach: the haplessly square, dowdy, jittery Melanie has been scrutinised and dissected rather like a dysfunctional lab-rat, a species lacking some crucial chromosome and dimly aware of the deficiency. Lobau's performance is, if anything, too convincing: there's a genuinely uncomfortable awkwardness about the way Melanie instinctively does the worst possible thing in any given situation, a portion of which derives from a suspicion that Ade is being patronising and condescending to those less fortunate than herself. But while we may never actually like Melanie, or might even squirm in her company, as the film goes on we do see she's deserving of sympathy – she's clearly struggling to cope with the ending of her relationship with Bernd (though she herself 'broke it off'), and is plopped down into a tricky set of pupils mid-way through a term. Melanie lacks support: both in her private and professional lives, and if nothing else she deserves some admiration for the way she so valiantly struggles to hold everything together. It's ironic, then, that the moment when we really identify with and understand her character is the glorious moment at the end when she finally realise that, sometimes, you have to just – let – go.
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [3/5] also seen
here: Old School
Reviews [John Nesbit]
eFilmCritic.com
(Chris Parry) review [3/5]
Film
Intuition Jen Johans
DVD Talk
(Don Houston) dvd review [3/5]
The
Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Reel Film Reviews (David
Nusair) capsule review
Variety
(Eddie Cockrell) review
BBCi
- Films Jamie Woolley
EVERYONE ELSE (Alle Anderen) A- 94
Germany (119 mi)
2009
The ultimate break-up
film, shown here in a deliciously slow burn of insecurities, everything that
the highly acclaimed, warm and nostalgia-tinged Olivier Assayas SUMMER HOURS
(2008) pretended to be but was “not,” a scathing exposé of social convention,
showing the hypocrisy and emptiness of a couple that, like the Wheeler’s in
REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (2008), want to be unconventional, that doesn’t want to be
like “everyone else.” An extremely
provocative film, well-written and intelligently directed by Ade, choosing
unusually ordinary or uninteresting lead characters as her subject, a mirror
image for the audience to identify with, a self-centered and bored German
middle class couple, yet they are onscreen the entire length of the film
together, rarely more than arms length away from one another. With six years between films, plenty of time
has passed, yet the distinctive finale of Ade’s last film is still fresh in the
viewer’s minds, as the disturbing ambiguity remains unsettling to this
day. In THE FOREST FOR THE TREES (2003),
all signs indicate a perfectly ordinary middle class setting, but as the
director gets inside the head of a well-meaning teacher who can’t control her
class, signs point to a psychological breakdown which the director meticulously
details, where one might call Ade an on-the–fringe miserablist, though not
full-fledged like Austrian Ulrich Seidl.
Both show a fondness for documentary realism, then embellishing the
prevailing social order with remarkably downbeat unpleasantries. As French director Claude Chabrol passed away
this week, I’d like to point out the similarities with his style early in his
career, especially the amazingly realistic LES BONNES FEMMES (1960), which for
all practical purposes was a breezy lightweight comedy until the final reel
which completely re-contextualized everything that came before. That film was half a century ago, targeting
the boredom of lower class working girls all at the same dead end job, an appliance
store with few if any customers, while this film sets its sights on the
economically successful, well-to-do German middle class, where they encounter
so few hardships in their lifetimes that they lose the ability to express
dissatisfaction, as they’re always expected to be happy doing whatever they
choose, yet freedom becomes a weight they carry on their shoulders. What’s compelling about the film is the
evaporation of the supposed happiness that exists between this couple that hops
in the sack at one moment and then has next to nothing to say afterwards or
even well into the next day, where their specialty becomes cutting each other
to shreds, where they fall under a blistering attack of acid-tinged criticisms
hurled with the precision and accuracy of heat-seeking missiles.
Lars Eidinger is Chris,
who is the picture of proper rearing, as he’s intelligent, well-mannered,
reserved, polite, soft-spoken, self-aware, yet distant, vacuous, aloof, and
unreachable, the kind of guy who always has a book in his hand but has a hard
time expressing his ideas. He fancies
himself as an architect, but he hasn’t really broken into the field just yet
and has few job offers, so he’s likely still supported by his parents, who are
unseen, but their presence is everywhere, as the couple is vacationing at his
parent’s villa on the island of Sardinia, and the house reflects his parent’s
bourgeois taste. Birgit Minichmayr is
Gitta, the much more unconventional and outgoing between the two, an impulsive
girl that has no problem whatsoever speaking what’s on her mind, and can be
seen in an early scene interacting with the young daughter of Chris’s sister, urging
her to communicate her real feelings, to come right out and say “I hate your
guts,” or “I despise you,” eventually pretending to be shot by this kid,
falling into the pool acting dead. It’s
a humorous scene the way it’s presented, especially with a charming little girl
who plays along, but the same theme continues to play out in various
permutations between the couple for the rest of the film. Their interplay, however, is so naturalistic
and their real feelings so disguised that at times you can barely tell there’s
tension in the air. And that’s exactly
how the characters see it as well, blind to what’s obvious, and not looking to
dig deep enough to uncover what’s under the surface. The focus of the camera is intimacy, zeroing
in on an accumulation of tiny details while capturing the couple in close
proximity, always within eye contact, but rarely actually looking at each
other. Gitta continuously confesses her
love and never leaves this guy’s side, annoying him with her suffocating
presence, yet she’s obviously well-intentioned and has a sexy charm about her
possessiveness. Chris, on the other
hand, is more indecisive and aimless and needs room, plenty of it, and the
island itself is a visual paradise with what appears to be tropical trees, a
jungle-like forest with high grass, and an ocean nearby. You’d think anyone could get lost in that
Edenesque atmosphere, but with these two, it’s like they’re either the first or
last two people remaining on earth just waiting for someone to hand them an
apple, as they couldn’t be less optimistic about their future together.
It’s interesting the
way Ade chooses to test this couple, as it’s with a stereotypical boorish
German male, Hans, actually named Hans-Jochen Wagner, an established architect
who’s loud, obnoxious, opinionated and totally condescending, yet he’s
continually seeking out Chris as if they’re old school friends. Chris, on the other hand, has a near phobic
desire not to be seen by Hans and is successful for half the film, but once
they meet, it’s clear Hans is handing them the apple, as Chris immediately
defers to Han’s smug masculinity and sucks the toxic fumes of his pig-headed
and overbearing nature, accepting without return a volley of insults directed
at himself and Gitta, all with a patronizing air of superiority, where Gitta
rises to his defense, but is then abandoned by Chris who thinks her
unconventional and outspoken honesty is out of line. Hans calls her a Brünnhilde defending her
man, a reference to the sword carrying, war-like maiden in Wagner’s Ring Cycle,
which is nothing more than insulting name-calling, one German stereotyping
another with an unflattering Nazi-tinged label.
But Chris seems to think it’s OK for Hans to joke around with demeaning
insults all told with a smile, but not for Gitta to call him on his noxious
contempt for others. In other words,
it’s socially acceptable to insult and disparage others so long as it’s only
words, where the manner in which it’s spoken trumps the meaning behind it. Chris then falls in line with the odious and
egotistic behavior of Hans and leaves Gitta dangling on her own. In perhaps the scene of the film, Chris
invites Hans and his more shallow pregnant girlfriend Sana (Nicole Marischka)
over for dinner, a social makeup for Gitta’s previous overly blunt
outspokenness, where after dinner they show the couple his parent’s villa,
carrying drinks up into his mother’s room where Hans immediately disparages his
mother’s taste as well, but she’s got a “cool” stereo, which plays the German
version of Barry Manilow or Neil Diamond, a live version of Grönemeyer singing
a typically popular mainstream love song, “Ich hab dich lieb.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VlmB3YWnc8) Sana reveals her middle-of-the-road
mainstream streak as she’s enchanted by the nostalgic simplicity of idealized
love, where she and Hans embrace all affectionately over the cheesy lyrics
while Chris and Gitta, shown on each side of the perfectly composed frame, may
as well be light years away. That shot
alone expresses with poetic clarity just how difficult it is to authentically
connect with someone else, because this couple wouldn’t be caught dead with
cheap sentiment, but without it, they’re lost in a no man’s land with nothing
to connect them together, each stuck inside their own heads instead of one
another’s. Revealing a bonanza of rarely
seen truths onscreen, there’s something reminiscent of Bruno Dumont’s
contrasting 29 PALMS (2003), featuring a superficial relationship held together
by nothing much more than sex, shown as not much of a defense on a desert-like
road to nowhere, but here in the luscious palms of a tropical paradise, these
much more sharp edged and carefully nuanced characters actually attempt to
communicate but fail just as miserably.
Time Out
New York review [3/5] Keith Uhlich
Maren Ade’s difficult relationship drama drops us into the middle of a sun-dappled, nondescript locale (it appears to be a summer vacation home) where several perplexing sequences unfold: Gitti (Minichmayr) has a hilarious “argument” with a child, ordering the girl to scream “I hate you!” with increasing venom, while her boyfriend, Chris (Eidinger), smiles from afar. Then Chris shapes a piece of gingerroot into a bulbous-nose effigy that he playfully uses with Gitti as a stand-in for his penis. It all feels vaguely ritualistic, the actions of a pair of lovers who have an instinctive, rawly intimate knowledge of each other.
The writer-director keeps us inside this thirtysomething German couple’s sequestered headspace for much of the film’s first half, attuning us to their private games and habits. Only as they venture into the outside world (the Edenic locale is eventually identified as Sardinia) do we get a sense of their lives beyond the relationship, mostly via a blustery acquaintance, Hans (Wagner), whom they’re trying to avoid.
Everyone Else’s power comes from the accrual of seemingly disparate incidents; a multifaceted portrait of the duo (and a larger examination of the ins and outs of any relationship) emerges amid all the sex, fighting, affection and insults. Moments that most movies would present with a forced dramatic flourish—as when Gitti threatens Hans’s wife, Sana (Marischka), with a kitchen knife—pass by with a strange sobriety that are as likely to intrigue as they are to put off. The film is an impressive effort, yet often a trying one.
The NYC Movie
Guru [Avi Offer]
In German and Italian with subtitles. Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr) and her boyfriend, Chris (Lars Eidinger), spend their holiday vacation at the villa of Chris’ parents in Sardinia, Italy. He works as an architect and she’s a publicist for a rock band. At least for a while, they seem like a normal, happy couple who love one another affectionately, but there’s much more to their relationship than meets the eye. Their vacation place looks so serene and picturesque that you’ll probably wonder whether some kind of event, perhaps a sinister one, might stir things up a bit and startle the tranquility. Writer/director Maren Ade doesn’t provide you with a wealth of information about the lives of Gitti and Chris because she trusts that you, the audience, is intelligent enough to gather the bits and pieces of details along the way and, most importantly, to pay close attention to their conversations. Ade achieves a quietly absorbing sense of realism by unfolding their relationship so gradually and organically. You may not find yourself liking neither of the two, but at least they come across as complex, sensitive human beings. When Gitti and Chris meet another couple, Sana (Nicole Marischka) and Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner), the dynamics of their relationship unravel even further and, in uncontrived ways, you notice them growing apart more rapidly from one another. Will they be able to patch up their relationship or is it completely hopeless for them? In reality, relationships take a lot of work and, fortunately, Maren Ade shows that she understands that because the answer to that question isn’t quite as simple and easy as you think it is. Even when Gitti behaves bizarrely or does something unexpected, her actions always uncover a new layer of her relationship with Chris while keeping you intrigued to continue discovering and peeling more layers. At a running time of 2 hours, Everyone Else manages to be quietly absorbing, mature and unpretentious with well-nuanced performances and lush cinematography.
Cannes
'09: Day Six Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May
19, 2009
And now for
something completely awesome. (Finally!) I haven’t attended the Berlin Film
Festival since 2001, but one of the nice things about Cannes is that virtually
all of the major Berlin titles screen in the Market, allowing one to play
catch-up on days when the main festival’s sidebar pickings look relatively
slim. I’d heard mixed things about François Ozon’s Ricky, about a flying
baby (no kidding), but couldn’t resist taking a look for myself; while I
appreciated Ozon’s matter-of-fact approach to such a fantastic premise, the movie
ultimately makes no damn emotional sense. I left shrugging. (C+, if you’re
wondering.) But Everyone Else, the second feature from Germany’s
Maren Ade, pretty much wiped the floor with me, to the point where I was
grateful that nobody else stuck around for the closing credits, so that I
didn’t need to hide my surprised tears. Ade’s little-seen debut, The Forest
for the Trees—a singleminded “horror film” (not literally) about a lonely
young woman with zero comprehension of social boundaries; look for it on DVD
from Film Movement—had knocked me for a loop a few years ago, but I was still
unprepared for this razor-sharp dissection of a relationship in crisis, which
somehow manages to be at once plotless and gorgeously structured, its theme
emerging slowly and taking on additional heft with each successive, apparently
rambling scene. Birgit Minichmayr (Downfall, Falling) and Lars Eidinger
(who I’d never seen before) play a couple so intent on avoiding bourgeois
cliché that they effectively choloroform any hint of genuine affection; without
pounding you over the head, Ade makes a case for the importance of kitsch in
romance, for the need to embrace with your lover the same gestures and
platitudes that so nauseate you when you see them indulged by others. And yet
the film is way thornier than that, contradicting itself in fascinating ways at
every turn. (Both actors are stupendous.) Ade is clearly a major new voice in
world cinema; I expect to see her at Cannes many times in future, and not in
the Market, either. Grade: A-
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List Ben Sachs
Chris and Gitti, a sensitive couple with little discernible
ambition, come apart during a lazy vacation in Sardinia, though their
dissolution isn't the result of violent flare-ups so much as personal
insecurities and deep-seated passive-aggression. In synopsis, Maren Ade's
second feature sounds like the sort of low-budget relationship drama we've come
so accustomed to forgetting in recent years; and, indeed, its opening stretches
look out over a great pitfall of solipsism. But EVERYONE ELSE displays rare
patience and its insights are well worth waiting for. It becomes apparent, for
instance, that this seemingly aimless film is actually moving at a pace unique
to its main characters--who, like many newly-serious couples, operate on their
own time, governed in part by libido but just as much by curiosity, a
willingness to drop everything for the revelation of a lover's secret, a shared
discovery, a new inside joke. (It should be noted that Ade is as deliberate in
her handling of time as Bela Tarr.) It's also revealed that what appeared to be
the filmmakers' solipsism is actually the characters' denial of certain hard
realities; and, in fact, this revelation becomes the driving force of the
entire film. Chris and Gitti are well aware of the middle-class lifestyle
they're trying to escape--It's the source of the film's title--as well as
darker philosophic issues most everyone spends adult life trying to avoid. The
film contains several monologues of self-examination reminiscent of Ingmar
Bergman's chamber dramas, probably the closest point-of-reference for Ade's
psychological examination, and the leads respond to the material with
performances of uncommon complexity. Needless to say, this sort of filmmaking
is an acquired taste (It requires that you see universal angst even in these
thirty-something fuck-ups), but Ade and her cast are so thorough in their
characterizations that even irritated viewers should be impressed with their
perceptiveness; those receptive to their mission should find this downright
unsettling. Once the couple's happiness is proven to be unsustainable,
EVERYONE ELSE proceeds with the anxious tension of a horror movie. Every revelation
of character carries a sense of unspoken threat, a nervousness that's in no way
diminished by the sexiness of the leads or the edenic palette of Bernhard
Keller's 35mm photography.
The Onion A.V. Club
review [A-] Scott Tobias
In her extraordinary 2003 debut, The Forest For The Trees, German director Maren Ade charted the emotional breakdown of an idealistic young teacher who leaves her provincial home for the city, but isn’t socially equipped for the transition. Ade sympathizes with her plight, but isn’t given to assigning blame in any direction—while the teacher endures cruelties large and small from her students and contemporaries, she’s culpable, too, in provoking those cruelties with her immaturity and passive-aggression. So what Ade is really examining is bad chemistry, and the emotional fallout that happens when people don’t fit in.
The idea of “fitting in” is embedded in the title of Ade’s equally sharp, uncompromising follow-up film Everyone Else, about a couple struggling for self-definition against bourgeois norms. Other than their looks, enhanced by the lovely backdrop of a working vacation in Sardinia, there’s nothing remotely ingratiating about the couple (or the movie), but plenty of truths to be gleaned from their relationship. Birgit Minichmayr and Lars Eidinger are an odd pair in the best of times—she an open, free-spirited, sometimes childish sprite, he a struggling architect who’s charming but distant, a little too cool for school. When they spend a little time with another, more settled couple (Hans-Jochen Wagner and Nicole Marischka), their fundamental differences are thrown into a harsh light.
Everyone Else is the quintessential breakup movie, which means the kindnesses, cute gestures, and happily-ever-afters of a typical screen romance are replaced by pettiness, ugly slights, backbiting, and the kind of hurt that only the most intimate are capable of inflicting on each other. Naturally, it can be unpleasant, and the toughness of Ade’s film is exacerbated by her refusal to apply some cookie-cutter structure to lead this couple more gracefully to the exit. Everyone Else isn’t formless, but Ade gives all this messy dysfunction plenty of room to play out, all while scoring subtle points about the lengths people will (or won’t) go to conform to the expectations of their lovers and their societies. There’s a slight imbalance in how Ade directs our sympathies—Minichmayr is more likeable than Eidinger, whose indecision is matched only by his remoteness and pretension—but Everyone Else unloads a fusillade of truth bombs about those painfully specific moments when communication breaks down and couples start talking past each other. It isn’t pretty to witness, but the pain of it smarts.
Maren Ade -
Cinema Scope Kent Jones
I have rarely been more surprised by a movie than I was by Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009). Most films that good come with some kind of buzz, and this one was undoubtedly no exception, but the buzz from Berlin had not reached me. I had never seen The Forest for the Trees (2003), her extremely sharp first film, and I had no idea what to expect. I saw the movie with my old friend Claire Denis in Buenos Aires, where it was in competition at BAFICI the year we were on the jury. Halfway through the screening, in the middle of the hiking scene, the projector broke down. When the lights came on, Claire turned to me and asked, “Is this as good as I think it is?” I could only nod.
Who was this filmmaker, who had the daring and the tenacity to track what was obviously her own experience down to the most minute level of intimacy and shared embarrassment? How could she bear the weight of going so uncomfortably deep into the terrible power imbalances that can exist between couples and remain happily unacknowledged until the “anderen” turn up? Where did she summon such a taut balance between tenderness and absolute ruthlessness, the kind of ruthlessness every filmmaker needs and few have the courage to exercise, the kind of tenderness few allow themselves the ability to summon on the set? And, to pose a dumbstruck question that Maren has undoubtedly been asked in countless Q&As by now, how did she work with her cameraman and her actors? When the film was over, Claire and I were both speechless.
A few nights later, I went to a festival dinner at a restaurant across town. Someone told me that Maren was there. What was I expecting? Let’s just say that I was not expecting this beautiful, self-possessed woman who resembled a young Lynn Redgrave. I remember that Maren and her producer Janine Jackowski had both been robbed at knifepoint just a few hours before, but if they hadn’t told me I would never have guessed it. Maren, in particular, was as cheerfully indomitable as an Austen heroine.
What will she do next? I have no idea. But if I had to point to one young filmmaker in the world whose future seems to me the brightest, it would be Maren. Everyone Else is a film of terrible power and absolute freedom, and it’s obvious that it’s only the beginning of the exploration.
One last thing: it’s also hilarious.
Film-Forward.com Yan Litovsky
The mark of originality may not be the ability to generate novel content, but the gift of interpreting an age-old scenario in a fresh and intelligent way. By this account, Everyone Else—a deceptively simple German film about a young relationship—is stunningly original. In a style at once hyper-realistic and polished, director Maren Ade explores the nooks and crannies of a couple’s interactions over the course of a lazy vacation in Sardinia. Chris (Lars Eidinger), an idealistic architect struggling with his ambition, and Gitti (Brigit Minichmayr), a laid-back, salt of the earth music publicist, appear to be an ostensibly happy match. They enjoy a seemingly recently found comfort with one another, but without an indication of the length of their affair, the audience is recruited as spying anthropologists, challenged to diagnose the nature of the bond. We look for clues in their fights, their sex, their silences, recognizing universal tensions and completely unique nuances.
Unlike a mumblecore film that revels in reality for reality’s sake, this documentation of a human interaction is loaded with analytic takeaways. At the core of their relationship is a struggle between private affection and the public projection of their image (as a couple and as individuals). In the confines of their house, Chris and Gitti share a silly, whimsical connection. Here, the significant differences in their background and personalities—her impulsive energy contrasts to his quiet self-reflection—are softened and ignored. Chris and Gitti flourish in each other’s company, putting the rest of the world, and their irreconcilable character traits, on hold. But in public, where real or imagined expectations are triggered by every passerby, the couple’s festering resentment and incongruous self-consciousness introduces tension and self-doubt. The aspect of their relationship that suffers most in the light of day is the couple’s assumption of gender roles. Gitti has a simpler, matter-a-fact personality that suggests masculinity, while Chris’ overly reflective self-doubt and passive nature place him in a more feminine role.
Everyone Else boldly addresses the unsavory desire to brashly present ourselves as a fully realized member of a social type—be it bohemian or posh, intellectual or homespun. In an age where authenticity and trueness-to-self (whatever that means) are revered, this inclination for self-invention is somewhat embarrassing and rarely explored with such care and honesty. The acting is equally sincere. Chris and Gitti reenact the natural ebb and flow of tension in a relationship, sometimes triggered by a microscopic change in mood. Despite the profound insights, the thrill of reality recreated somehow makes Everyone Else a light, and at times even joyful, experience.
Everyone
Else (Alle Anderen) Jonathan Romney at Screendaily (registration
required)
Writer-director
Maren Ade made a strong impression with her 2003 debut, the spare, video-shot The
Forest For The Trees. Everyone Else, her less focused, somewhat more
conventional follow-up is essentially an intense two-hander, with supporting
roles, about a mismatched couple whose introspective romance reaches an
understated crisis while on holiday. The film’s prime attraction is a prickly,
suggestive character sketch by female lead Birgit Minichmayr, but, while
festivals may take to Ade’s distinctive dramatic sensibility, the film’s
overall talkiness, sparse action and quintessentially art-house sleepiness will
make theatrical prospects tenuous.
Set in Sardinia,
the film traces the relationship between architect Chris (Eidinger) and his
apparently newish girlfriend Gitti (Minichmayr). Chris is failing to flourish
at his work - largely, it seems, as a result of his self-pitying hesitancy,
which sometimes passes as idealism, although Gitti sees through it. The couple
lead an insular life, acting out private micro-dramas, and generally being
disparaging about the other ‘normal’ people they prefer to avoid. The pair see
themselves as somehow different to the bourgeois order - although Gitti’s
status as a rebel looks somewhat tenuous when we discover she’s nothing more
radical than a music business PR.
Out shopping,
Chris runs into an old colleague, Hans (Wagner), a bullish type thriving in his
career and enjoying a showily perfect relationship with pregnant wife Sana
(Marischka). That couple’s shiny confidence causes both Chris and Gitti to
question the way they see themselves and each other, causing cracks in their
precarious closeness.
The film gets off
to a good start with a virtuoso bit of mischief from Gitti, teaching Chris’s
young niece how to express hate. Chris later indulges himself in a hugely
entertaining performance, doing a slinky dance to Julio Iglesias and Willie
Nelson’s cheesy ‘To All The Girls I’ve Loved Before’. After the first
half-hour, however, the drama is becalmed, as Chris and Gitti mull over their
relationship at length, and generally behave with the sort of tetchy perversity
and abruptness that may be true to life, but tends to mark a film as strictly
art-house material.
Throughout, Ade
makes a point of underplaying or defusing moments that seem to promise
conventional drama: neither a failed dinner party nor a hiking trip, on which
Chris and Gitti get lost, deliver the expected dramatic intensity. Somewhere
within the languid atmosphere - with warm-toned photography by Bernhard Keller
- is an insightful essay about the way lovers can feed on each other’s flaws.
Acting is generally persuasive and relaxed, with Eidinger impressing as an
essentially stolid character who seems to rely on his neuroses for a sense of
self. And while Gitti’s inner depths remains somewhat elusive, Minichmayr
achieves quite a feat in making her as vivid and often infuriating as she does.
Even so, you wish that Minichmayr’s energies had been allowed to infuse this
moody, rambling piece rather more.
Everyone Else | Reverse
Shot With or Without You, Eric Hynes
from Reverse Shot,
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick
Davis) review [A]
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
EVERYONE
ELSE, Maren Ade's sophomore splendor, arrives via Cinema Guild James van Maanen from Trust Movies, April 8,
2010
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Chris
Knipp • View topic - Maren Ade: Everyone Else (2009)--NYFF
Slant Magazine
review Kevin B. Lee
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Berlinale '09 quinellas
Jigsaw Lounge :
Cluj film-festival report [S.Seacroft[
Sheila Seacroft
The
House Next Door [Joseph Jon Lanthier]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Smoke
a Lot of Big Monkey Butt*: Everyone Else (2009, Maren Ade) Paul C
Boxoffice
Magazine (Amy Nicholson) review [4/5]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3.5/4]
Big
Picture Big Sound (David Kempler) review [1.5/4]
“A
delicate psychological dramaturgy”
Ruediger Suchsland interview from Cineuropa, June 11, 2009
Village
Voice (Aaron Hillis) review Hillis
interviews the director, September 29, 2009
Couples
Chaos: German Director Maren Ade Talks About Everyone Else ... Scott Foundas feature and interview from LA Weekly, October 28, 2009
Peter Brunette The Hollywood Reporter
Boston
Globe (Wesley Morris) review [3/4]
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Philadelphia
Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Austin
Chronicle review [3.5/5] Marc Savlov
San
Francisco Chronicle (Walter Addiego) review [3/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review April
9, 2010, also here: MOVIE REVIEW
| 'EVERYONE ELSE'; Perfectly Happy, Until They Venture Into the Outside World
FILM; Festival
Forecast: Lots of Sulfurous Clouds
Stephen Holden covering the NY Film Festival (Page 2) from The New York Times, September 1, 2009
Multinational
Forces at the Berlin Film Festival
Dennis Lim from The New York
Times, February 13, 2009
TONI ERDMANN A 96
Germany Austria
Romania (162 mi) 2016
You had asked what’s
the worth of living? The problem is that
it’s so often about getting things done.
You do this, you do that and in the meantime life just passes by. But how are we supposed to hang on to
moments? Now I sometimes sit and
remember how you learned to ride your bike or how I once found you at a bus
stop… But you only realize that afterwards.
In the moment itself, it’s not possible.
—Winfried Conradi (Peter Simonischek)
Despite being the most
popular and critically acclaimed film at Cannes 2016, Cannes critics ratings,
registering the highest score ever at the Cannes Screendaily Jury grid, Cannes:
'Toni Erdmann' sets Screen Jury Grid record - ScreenDaily, the film was
strangely shut out of winning any major awards in competition, where critics
such as Manohla Dargis (NY Times),
Justin Chang (LA Times), Kenneth
Turan (LA Times), Peter Bradshaw (Guardian) and Guy Lodge (Variety) wrote that the decisions of the
jury were quite simply “baffling,” especially considering the ongoing criticism
targeting the festival’s scarcity of woman directors, where the festival missed
a rare opportunity to recognize and reward a rising female talent. By all accounts, it was a major shock when
that didn’t happen, as the film is a major cinematic statement, one of the more
original works to hit the festival circuit.
While nearly every film has some detractors, even on what constitutes a
cinematic masterpiece, as films are often misunderstood at the outset and
develop a reputation over time, what distinguishes this film is the pure
enjoyment factor, as it’s hard not to dispute the sheer boldness of originality
on display, written and directed by Ade in just her third film, where this far
and away eclipses her earlier works in terms of complexity and scope. While both earlier films are distinctive, THE
FOREST FOR THE TREES (2003) is a minimalist walk through a self-induced
psychological purgatory, where a perfectly ordinary middle class setting takes
a turn for the worse, shot in a near documentary style, including a final shot
to reckon with, which actually draws gasps from viewers, while EVERYONE ELSE
(2009) which won the Jury Grand Prize (2nd place) at the Berlin Film
Festival, is a far more sophisticated portrait of a doomed, yet good looking
and seemingly progressive middle class couple whose sexual attraction hides
their more deep-seeded disinterest in one another, where the camera incessantly
hovers near them, perpetually exposing their attempts at maintaining a socially
acceptable cover façade while ignoring all evidence of a deeper divide. One might call Ade an on-the–fringe
miserablist, though not full-fledged like Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, but
both show a fondness for documentary realism, then embellishing the prevailing
social order with remarkably downbeat unpleasantries. This
film could be described as a
dazzling choreography of awkward and
uncomfortable moments, an unflinching portrait of embarrassment, while also
offering a searing commentary on displacement and dehumanization in the modern
workplace, where feeling anxious and exceedingly insecure is the new
normal. At the same time, the film is a
shameless father/daughter comedy battle of wills, a screwball portrait of family
dysfunction, where each is willing to go to outrageous lengths to outmaneuver
the other.
Delving into previously
unexplored territory, most of us are not at all familiar with the two leads,
Austrian actor Peter Simonischek as Winfried, the extremely unorthodox,
somewhat sleazy, shaggy dog father, and Sandra Hüller, his all-too normal
daughter Ines, very precise in her efforts, a stressed-out, workaholic
management consultant who is subjected to an unannounced, unexpected visit from
Dad, leaving his home in Germany to visit her in faraway Bucharest, a visit
that has enormous implications in her already existing turbulent world of
trying to establish successful corporate relations. In a film of this nature, the less you know
ahead of time will likely increase your appreciation for the film
exponentially, as, like any good comedy, being caught off-guard is the secret
to its success. The film’s near
three-hour epic scale is part of its unique spacial architecture, set in a
soulless Tatiesque landscape of towering glass skyscrapers, corporate
convention halls, deluxe hotel suites, expensive meals, champagne, disco
parties, and elegantly pampered hotel guests with endlessly flowing drinks in
ultra-chic cocktail lounges, all part of the glamorous and exquisitely clean
look of global capitalism, where the superficiality of the outer veneer
accounts for nearly everything, where backroom mergers and behind-the-scenes
deals are transitional phases necessary to bolster the financial bottom line,
where it’s all about executive privilege, protecting those at the top, making
sure they remain financially above the fray, even at the expense of that loyal
and dedicated army of employees that sacrifice their positions before the altar
of corporate greed. Somehow, without
expressly pointing any fingers or making any direct political commentary, this
just happens to be the scathing setting for the film, taking place within a
sprawling canvas of international commerce that initiates important meetings
and special reports, transnational phone calls with interpreters, symposiums
offering the presentation of bold ideas and suggestions, all with the hopes of
impressing the top executive brass, as they’re the ones controlling the purse
strings and are chiefly responsible for whether or not you have a job tomorrow
or not. Just how far is one willing to
go in order to make a good impression?
Or in this case, how much humiliation are you willing to endure? In this vastly expanding, seemingly limitless
world of competing expense accounts, like something out of the delirious
hallucinations of American
Psycho
(2000), Ines is trying to make her mark,
to get noticed, to earn a living in the rampantly sexist, testosterone-filled,
shark-infested waters of corporate downsizing, where her proposals, if they’re
to be accepted, must demonstrate the brazen wisdom of eliminating more
positions than the other guy, where she must be willing to strategize and justify
swift and ruthless sacrifices, like an extremely well-precisioned military
operation, where the carnage is needed to win the prize and claim that ultimate
victory. It’s all about the prestige of
the company, supposedly built to last, while the minions of temporary workers
will come and go.
Francine
Prose from The New York Review of Books,
December 22, 2016, Prankster and Daughter:
In a revealing scene, Conradi (Simonischek) is waiting to meet Ines in an extravagantly upscale Bucharest mall that, complete with an indoor ice-skating rink, is the capitalist equivalent of Ceaușescu’s palace. It’s the largest mall in Europe, Ines has informed him, in a country in which hardly anyone has any money. They have come there because Ines has been asked to escort on a shopping trip the wife of a CEO with whom her company (a consulting firm that advises corporations on how to “outsource” their labor forces, and in the process fire a significant number of their employees) hopes to do business.
When Ines at last appears with the CEO’s wife, who is flushed with the exhilaration of having spent so much money on luxury items, it again becomes clear—in her obvious willingness to put herself at the woman’s disposal—that Ines lives only for her work, that she is in thrall to her bosses and her “team,” and that her only desire is to succeed, at any cost, and perhaps win a hoped-for transfer to Shanghai. Her father gives her a searching look, then asks, “Are you really human?”
Without revealing any
of the hidden secrets that make this film such a novel surprise, this is a film
that accentuates financial insecurity, that goes out of its way to visualize
economic inequity, as outside the sleek windows of the modern 5-star hotels,
one sees dirt playgrounds where kids nearby play, living instead in tenement
row housing where people are literally on top of one another, packed together
like sardines, remnants of a forgotten era in Romania’s communist past. Add to this the language in the modern era
workplace, which consists of cliché’s and an invented vocabulary of workspeak
that is completely meaningless outside the workplace, as it’s a phony and fake
language, sucking up to one’s bosses, agreeing inherently, without ever being
able to say what you really mean, as you’re too busy degrading yourself
publicly, continually deferring to the so-called expertise of your boss, where
the film deftly highlights the routine
humiliations of modern life. The
consequences are so severe that her father asks her, “Are you really
human?” While this may seem excessive,
yet it all plays out in a kind of chaotic tug of war between father and
daughter, by turns hilarious, excruciatingly painful to watch, yet also deeply
moving, as Ade paints such an intimate portrait of two desperate souls, each
trying to have their own way, where there’s a playful give and take where each
plays along with the other, growing exceedingly irritated at having to do so,
where it’s one of the more cleverly written pieces of cinema in recent memory,
where the vastness of the ever-expanding canvas keeps imploding on itself, as
the best laid plans continue to break down, requiring new strategies, where the
father’s inner sense of humor is unleashed like a force of nature, or a genie
exploding out of a bottle, causing such a high degree of embarrassment to Ines,
who couldn’t be more straight-laced and uptight, a conscientious woman climbing
a very male-dominated corporate ladder, always overly sensitive about
protecting her image, where she constantly endures one pitfall after another,
usually at her father’s expense, as he’s stupefied to discover this stranger
inhabiting his daughter’s body. So it’s
an hour into the film before he resorts to his ultimate weapon, taking on the
role of his alter-ego, Toni Erdmann, a specialist in practical jokes, a guy in
a cheap suit, horribly unflattering wigs, who has a habit of carrying crooked
false teeth in his pocket, where his notion of being an obnoxious irritant,
turning up unexpectedly and embarrassing her in front of her friends and
colleagues, becomes an exercise of the surreal, as there’s nothing he wouldn’t
resort to. The film largely follows the
point of view of Ines, revealing her conflicting emotions throughout, where her
eroding confidence in herself wears down, ultimately exposed as a mask,
covering up her more vulnerable humanity, yet this is part of the workplace
armor that one is required to wear, men and women, a camouflage of protective
outerwear hiding the human within. The
final hour kicks into a new gear and simply surpasses all expectations, as our
sympathies with the two characters are constantly tested, displaying an ebb and
flow of constantly shifting moods, reaching unseen heights of comic farce and
outrageous spectacle, the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades, if ever,
where plenty of this film is cringeworthy, yet also incredibly funny, and like
Chaplin, the big surprise is how profoundly moving it becomes by the end,
becoming an almost tender look at the absurdities and despairs of modern
life.
On paper, TONI ERDMANN is the stuff of early-aughts awards fodder, the sort of vehicle that might've starred Dustin Hoffman opposite Julia Roberts in an Alexander Payne production. And were Hollywood to remake it today, as they have already threatened, one easily imagines an Adams-De Niro pairing helmed by David O. Russell. As it is, it goes something like this: after the death of his beloved dog, Winfried Conradi, an eccentric music teacher of the hippie generation, alone, divorced, and on the wrong side of the retirement age, sets out on a desperate attempt to woo back his estranged daughter Ines, an eighties child turned management consultant in Romania, and a good soldier in the neoliberal conquest of Eastern Europe. With the aid of a set of false teeth and an ill-fitting wig, Winfried, an outrageous prankster, crashes Ines in Bucharest, assumes the role of Toni Erdmann, “consultant and coach," and proceeds to upend her scrupulously cultivated professional life through a slew of haphazard, grotesquely humiliating sneak attacks. Sound familiar? In Maren Ade’s hands, this story of generational conflict is anything but. There is an extraordinary level of attentiveness and restraint to Ade’s regard here. On the one hand, this is a matter of camerawork and editing that always respect the evolving moment. On the other, it’s a matter of a screenplay that refuses to take even standard shortcuts to hit its beats. At no point, does any hand-of-god logic assert itself to steer things more quickly or more surely to their end. Instead, Ade preserves a deep, abiding trust in her leads Peter Simonischek and Sandra Huller, coupled with a refusal to allow them even momentary transcendence of the discomfort of their situation, and deepened by a wry, alert sense for the banal absurdities of self-presentation that dominate far too much of our contemporary lives. The result achieves a momentousness of both scale and intimacy the cinema simply hasn’t seen since the likes of Maurice Pialat and John Cassavetes. It’s also hilarious.
Film
Comment [Amy Taubin] May 16, 2016
We laughed till we cried, the “we” being the diverse, usually combative press corps, which almost unanimously embraced Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann as the first great film of the 2016 festival, in part because it accomplished what few films do in these polarized times: it made us aware of our common humanity.
An unlikely screwball comedy, Toni Erdmann focuses on a father/daughter relationship. Winfried (Peter Simonischek) is a sixtysomething, divorced, former piano teacher, living alone in a small German town. After his elderly dog dies, nothing keeps him from visiting Ines (Sandra Hüller), his only daughter, a thirtysomething rising executive who works in the Bucharest branch of a global corporation. Winfried is an indefatigable practical joker; Ines is a buttoned-up professional, even more rule-bound than her male colleagues, to whom she must constantly prove herself while also suggesting that she might be sexually available at some point down the line. Coping with her eccentric parent is the last thing she wants to do, especially since his anarchic behavior is intended to undermine her materialistic ambitions. To spare her from having to battle in public with her own father, Winfried reinvents himself as Toni Erdmann, a lifestyle coach, replete with Pythonesque wigs, oversized false teeth, and bad table manners. His implicit method: follow your impulses, the more laughable the better.
Trust in the creative impulse informs every aspect of the film, from Ade’s dazzling script which has just enough of a classical comedic structure to support two hours and 42 minutes of surprises big and small, to her direction, which is designed to liberate the actors as much as possible while the camera rolls, to the performances (Simonischek and Hüller seem to be as amazed as we are by the things their characters lead them to do). I seldom worry about spoilers, but the last 45 minutes contains four setpieces that take a film that is already great to a higher (say, The Rules of the Game) level, and the less you know about them in advance the better. Let’s just say they involve a karaoke performance, nudity, a very hairy embrace, and finally, a from-the-heart statement about how we could and should live our lives, which in almost any other film would seem like treacle, but here is thoroughly earned and provokes the tears that lay beneath the laughter all along.
Sony Pictures Classics won the bidding war for Toni Erdmann, which will certainly open in the U.S. in time for Oscar season.
Film
Comment [Eugene Hernandez] May 16,
2016
During multiple moments of Toni Erdmann, the latest feature by German filmmaker Maren Ade, the audience here at Cannes burst into applause. The loudest reaction came after an unexpected musical moment that united the film’s father (Peter Simonischek) and daughter (Sandra Hüller) in a fitting (and moving) duet.
“I thought about it when editing the film, or even before,” Ade said during a press conference. “Might there be applause? I was not sure if I would like that.” Yet, she conceded, “it’s a great thing when people applaud in your film!”
The musical sequence, a casual cover of a 30-year-old iconic American pop song, is so special because late in the movie it bonds two people who have struggled to navigate their strained relationship. Adults entering new phases of their lives, the father and daughter are at odds and unable to find a way to rebuild their familial bond.
In this extraordinary film, Hüller plays an uptight corporate woman named Ines, recently relocated to Romania for work, and Simonischek stars as her fumbling, playful father Winfried, who, desperate to connect with his daughter, dons a disguise and takes on an alternate persona named Toni Erdmann.
In early scenes, Ines is seen as sharply focused on her career, but later, when her dad enters the picture as Erdmann, he seems to disrupt the equilibrium she has created in her life. His gags and antics seem like the sort of dress-up games that parents instigate when their kids are young. But with his daughter all grown up and trying to play the role of a mature adult, his stunts set the stage for an intense conflict between the two.
Moments of pain and humor are interwoven throughout Ade’s dramatic and hilarious new movie as Ines and Winfried spar and share. Father and daughter struggle with how to relate to each other. Their outlooks have evolved to the point where the differences between them are striking, and there’s an increasingly poignant interplay at work exploring how each is navigating their personal and professional lives.
Clocking in at 162 minutes, Toni Erdmann takes its time unraveling its lead characters’ personas and building toward a powerfully cathartic conclusion.
“My film is less a plea for letting go than a plea for coming clean,” Ade said in press notes about her aims for this movie.
Following screenings this weekend here in Cannes, Toni Erdmann was widely considered by many to be among the very best in the early days of this year’s Competition.
“Father and daughter is such an emotional topic,” Ade explained during a press conference on Saturday, adding that she sought to strike a delicate balance between the humor and seriousness of these characters and their relationship. “The most important part was to be precise,” Ade said. “The viewer of a film, when you have this realism, can be pulled out of it very easily.”
Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson June 27, 2016
But, as we’ve already been through, there was not to be a happy ending. Of all the notable omissions in the awards, according to the critics (Adam Driver is pretty spot-on in Paterson, but I wasn’t as keen as many were on Jim Jarmusch going Ozu, with cutaways to a nefarious bulldog rather than pillow shots in a naked attempt to win the Palme Dog), Maren’s Ade’s third feature Toni Erdmann stands out as the most egregious in the 15 years I have been attending Cannes. To nobody’s surprise, it racked up a 3.7 in the Screen Daily chart, the highest in recorded Cannes history (albeit edging out Mr. Turner from two years back), and everyone’s new hero Ade won the FIPRESCI award from the international critics. Aside from a few French holdouts, Toni Erdmann was far and away the consensus pick as the film of the festival, a true success of script, acting, and directing that manages to be fully German and universal at the same time, a film that received as close to universal acclaim as it gets in Cannes. Despite the now-popular 162-minute running time, which I’m sure some will hold against it, it’s easy to explain why. For starters, Sean Penn’s The Last Face notwithstanding, there are generally few laugh-out-loud films in the Cannes Competition (let alone funny German films), and Toni Erdmann, even if it’s not a comedy per se, is at times laugh-out-loud funny; as opposed to almost everything (except for maybe The Neon Demon), it’s genuinely unpredictable, especially in its climactic act (an uproarious set-piece party that, however tempted I may be, I shall not spoil); it features two crackerjack lead performances from Peter Simonischek and Sandra Hüller; and finally, there’s the fact that pretty much every critic, wherever they are from, is a child, a parent, or both, and on this count the film tugs at the heartstrings pretty hard. You would think there would be a similar emotional impact on the jury members, being as they are clowns (especially the dude who made Happy Feet [2006]), but they certainly, to paraphrase Toni Erdmann, “lost the humour.”
The triumph of Toni Erdmann also comes as little surprise to anyone who saw Ade’s last film Everyone Else, which won the Silver Bear in Berlin way back in 2009. (Or her 2003 debut The Forest for the Trees, whose graffiti-strewn original poster, featuring blacked-out teeth on Eva Löbau’s protagonist, brings to mind one of Toni Erdmann’s prominent gags.) Toni Erdmann has a lot in common with Ade’s earlier film, initially posing as a game of shifting perspectives and encouraging the audience to identify and sympathize with the points of view of both of the film’s main characters as they reveal—and are made conscious of—the roles they are playing. In the first act, this is mainly Winfried (Simonischek), an aging schoolteacher with a crippled dog, whose identity is so associated with his predilection for pranks that even at the most uncalled-for times it’s hard for him to avoid provocation. (He’s characterized by the false teeth he inserts and removes from his mouth as if by habit, as if he is totally unaware; it becomes an unconscious act.) At a family gathering he meets his daughter, the seemingly unflappable Ines (Hüller, always good but never better than here), who we quickly understand harbours an estrangement, and a long-standing sense of embarrassment, for her father’s lowbrow antics. (Winfried sees Ines so rarely that he jokes to strangers that he has had to hire someone as a “substitute daughter.”) The second and third acts, which unfold in Bucharest, where Ines is temporarily employed as a consultant to an oil company looking to streamline, becomes more her story. After a bumpy reunion, what she calls “the worst weekend of my life” to her friends, “Winfried” is replaced by a bewigged lookalike who calls himself “Toni Erdmann.” A more overt game is played with the same characters under a different set of rules, initially one-sided until Ines, who herself has unconsciously assumed, or internalized, the role of the prototypical German businessperson, spontaneously decides to take things to the next level.
Most of the action in Bucharest is in some way related to the sexist business milieu and set in lifeless, neo-European locations (hotel rooms, office buildings, bland apartments, horribly tacky bars and restaurants; it’s almost unbelievable to think that in a communist-era apartment block a few kilometres away a wake is being staged by Cristi Puiu, with another aging clown named Toni); but this is the new Europe. (One of the exceptions comes in another stunning set piece set at an Easter family celebration involving one real-time warbling Whitney Schnuck; again, I won’t say more, only that this apartment contains the semblance of authentic life, as opposed to the transient business existence mostly presented elsewhere.) In other words, in a daring move by Ade, almost everything generally considered as beautiful is drained from the mise en scène so as not to distract us from what matters, which are the actors/characters and their complicated relationship. Winfried is completely out of place in this environment, so much so that when he first arrives (unexpectedly) to greet Ines, she struts past him in the lobby of her building as if he wasn’t even there. She later explains she was with colleagues, so she had to ignore him, which sets up the further adventures of Toni Erdmann: life coach, high-powered businessman, German ambassador, Kukeri.
Though her father’s arrival throws her off her game—she makes a few faux pas in conversation with her client, sleeps through an important phone call, and blames Winfried for her errors—more than him causing her embarrassment Ines does a pretty good job of embarrassing herself. (Though during an extremely uncomfortable sex scene, par for the course for Ade, she gets off on embarrassing her partner.) Winfried’s antics are partly a result of his concern, as he senses that Ines isn’t happy in her life (and Huller does a fine job of appearing consistently agitated and downright miserable); before leaving her apartment to head to the airport, Winfried asks her, half-jokingly yet razor-sharp, “Are you really a human?” (This line is echoed later, after a successful business presentation, when her boss beams at her, “You’re an animal, Ines.”) But Winfried/Toni’s presence also makes Ines realize that he has a point, readily apparent in scene in a nightclub where her kind-of boyfriend behaves like a moron, pouring champagne from a bottle at crotch-level. Ines comes to be embarrassed by her friends’ behaviour as well, until she has the confidence—which, as the sex scene proves, was inside her all along—to willingly sacrifice herself on the altar of humiliation. Ines’ party is a wonderfully mounted mix of embarrassment, humiliation, a power exercise, and a climactic resolution, and is such an inventive moment because of the way Ade first mixes the public and the private and then builds on it by adding an element of the surreal.
Ade’s triumph is to locate the obfuscated humanity in both of these characters: under Toni’s wig and Ines’ full-body force field are a father and daughter, and Ade reveals what they look like naked. In the film’s necessary coda, back in Germany for another family gathering (this time a funeral), Winfried and Ines have one of those conversations that seemingly summarize the dramatic action and point the way to a life-altering resolution. (“Life is so often about getting things done…how are we supposed to hold on to moments?”) Ines shows she hasn’t “lost her humour” by taking Winfried’s false teeth and placing them in her mouth, letting her guard down, but as Winfried runs to get a camera to capture this special moment, Ines shuffles around, removes the teeth, and, again, tightens up her face, assuming her familiar, dejected pose. There are no such easy resolutions in life, Ade is telling us, and despite all that they’ve gone through there’s just as likely a chance that the next time father and daughter meet, whether it’s in Germany or Ines’ new work home of Singapore, it might very well be like nothing ever happened in Bucharest. It will exist as a memory that elicits a smile, but will recede quickly into the grey matter. Because in the game of life, the banal and the consistent trump the extraordinary, and there are no easy resolutions.
A
Battle of Humour: Maren Ade on Toni Erdmann - Cinema Scope Mark Peranson interview at Cannes from Cinema Scope, May 2016
Cinema Scope: Everyone Else premiered in Berlin in 2009, and now seven years later your third film is finally receiving its debut in Cannes. What took so long?
Maren Ade: Directly after Everyone Else, I started working as a producer. I have a company called Komplitzen Film with Janine Jackowski and Jonas Dornbach, so this took up some time, but it also really took so long to write the script for Toni Erdmann. It took me one and a half or almost two years. Then we had to do the financing, and I was in Romania for five months preparing. It was almost one year dealing with the shooting, and after that I had more than 100 hours of footage and I had to edit it, and again that took one and a half years. And I became a mother twice during all of that. But for me time went by very fast.
Scope: Most filmmakers tend to work once every year or two years, and often one feels that there wasn’t a lot of work put into the final product. This film feels like there was a great deal of effort involved every step of the way, as you said, in the writing, the shooting, and the editing. First could you talk about writing the script—did it begin with the idea of a father and a daughter? Did you do research?
Ade: For sure, the father-daughter thing was there in the beginning, but I didn’t have the real conflict between the two of them. I had this idea that he was kind of a practical joker, and I wanted to have a female character who would have a completely different occupation than me, namely working in the business world. In the beginning I wasn’t sure what job she would have. I wanted her to work abroad, so I started to do a lot of research on women working in management positions. I had to find the right company, and the right job she was doing…I was a bit lucky that I came across this idea of a consultant. A consultant is interesting to me because a significant part of that job is that you have to perform—you really have to play a role. I found it much stronger than a normal management position. It meshed very well with the father character, as he starts a performance as well in the film. Then I did longer research on humour, or on comedy and comedians. I spent a lot of time with Andy Kaufman on the internet, because it took four weeks to Google everything about Andy Kaufman.
Scope: So Toni Erdmann somehow alludes to Tony Clifton?
Ade: Yeah, and I especially liked this very funny wrestling thing he did, and the great book [Dear Andy Kaufman, I Hate Your Guts] with all the angry letters that women wrote him about that…I also looked at some German comedians. So I had to write, then research, and then write again. For example, this business presentation that Ines gives in the film was the hardest work for me, because I had to understand everything about the business issues, about her options, in order to write it. I wanted her to do a project that is complicated but not too complicated, and also it took a while to find that oil business, because I visited several companies in Romania. But luckily I decided on Bucharest very fast. I think almost every scene is written for a location, so it’s not that I wrote a scene, and then found everything later. I first had to go to these nightclubs before writing the scene set there; I couldn’t imagine a scene like that.
Scope: You were scouting the locations while you were writing the script?
Ade: I was in Romania visiting places, going out to bars, going to dinner, visiting hotels, and locations, and then I went back to writing. I did that two or three times.
Scope: The spaces in the film are very striking. I know you probably didn’t see Cristi Puiu’s Sieranevada, which is also about family relations, and it’s set maybe a few kilometres away from where your film is shot, but the films are a universe apart, not just geographic space but also time. You have these sterile or cheesy spaces, in-between spaces that suit these characters who are dislocated. What kind of feeling were you after from these locations?
Ade: It’s a bit cruel there in Romania, as on one side there is what you and I think is Romania, and then you have these other places, which are not only for ex-pats, but they are places for the Romanian upper class. There is a small number of very rich people in Bucharest—we have rich people in Berlin but they don’t show it, you know. I’ve never been in a city where I saw so many really expensive cars and so on…you have this very cruel gap. On one side, I do like that they like this over-the-top thing, but on the other side you could be anywhere. The sad thing about Bucharest is that when you drive around, you see all these things that are borrowed from other countries, all these franchises, Austrian and German companies; you feel like they sold themselves to the richer part of Europe as well as America. And the hierarchy that you have between the Germans and the Romanians inside of the companies in terms of nationality still exists—even though the Germans may have the better know-how, this attitude should be changed. So there were several things that were interesting about Romania. Corneliu Porumboiu helped me with the research, as did Ada Solomon, so I had some contacts there. Corneliu had some friends who worked as consultants. Through him actually I found a German woman working as a consultant, who coincidentally lives around the corner from me in Berlin, but I found her in Bucharest. She was very open and helped me. Afterwards Sandra was able to learn from her; she did a job that’s very close to what is in the script.
Scope: Did you have Sandra Hüller and Peter Simonischek in mind when you were writing?
Ade: No, there was a long casting process with several actors, and several combinations, but they were the best. I really like to have a long casting process. There was not a single role where I didn’t audition at least ten actors. And I flew to Bucharest to cast the other roles—like Ines’ assistant Anca is the perfect Anca for Sandra, and we have the perfect Flavia for Peter and so on. I like casting because it’s a good chance to find out something about the characters and the relationships. I feel it’s almost a part of the rehearsal process.
Scope: Would you say the characters changed, or were they as they were written on the page?
Ade: During the casting I really work with the actors, so in the end I have something very close to what I want. But it’s sometimes very difficult in the shooting to get back to what we had in the casting, even if it was something very simple. You’re on the set and you think, “Huh, we had it before. It was very easy but all of a sudden it doesn’t work any more,” because you repeat something that simply doesn’t feel fresh and then you have to take another way to come back in the end to what you want.
Scope: Are there elements in Winfried that are based on your own father?
Ade: Yeah. My father is really a very humorous guy; he likes to joke a lot. I was doing my volunteer service in Munich when I was 20 and I had a ticket for the premiere of the first Austin Powers film, and as a giveaway they handed out these false teeth, and I gave them as a present to my father. And since then he makes jokes with these teeth. So the teeth thing is really something I borrowed from him, and the rest…well, it’s not him. But he has a good humour and that really accompanied me.
Scope: It’s a very strange habit, this thing with the teeth. I don’t think I’ve seen that in a film before, and it signifies that this idea of being a prankster is part of himself, and not something he can turn on or turn off. But when he changes in the second part of the film, he makes an intentional, conscious decision to play a different person, an entirely different character, fully…
Ade: We worked a lot on this idea, so that when he appears as “Toni” it’s a surprise, and it’s a big step that he’s doing this, but it happens in a way that it’s believable. I spent three shooting days on the scene working with Peter, which is a really, really long time, because I knew that if the audience wouldn’t believe that, if the scene didn’t work, then you could throw away the film. It wasn’t so easy for Peter because he had to play Winfried and not Toni—it’s not a double role, you know, it’s not like he’s playing two guys, he’s Winfried playing Toni. Sometimes while shooting he was a bit sad that he wasn’t allowed to play the role more over the top…Peter had to walk a very thin line.
Scope: You said you had more than 100 hours of footage, and I know you like to shoot many takes. When you do multiple takes are they different takes with actors trying out new things, different camera placement or movement?
Ade: It’s more like finding how everything comes perfectly together. Sometimes it’s more the acting, sometimes the flow of the camera. Maybe you don’t feel it too much because of the focus on two characters, but there are almost 2,000 extras in the film, as well as little side characters, so there’s that, too. I tried to arrange the action of every scene almost the whole way through, even if it was long. For example, in the party at the end, the last shot was ten minutes long. I would need one week of preparation to get it perfect, but I took longer parts and broke them down. What’s happening with the energy of the actors is interesting, and I wanted to give them the chance to lead a scene, or experience a reality. If you stop too often, the film reality doesn’t happen, because you always feel like you’re shooting a film.
I tried to get both very free acting and this thing that the actors should be in the moment as well at the same time be aware of the subtext—because for my films the subtext generates the main conflict. It has to be very precise or things fall apart. In other words, they need to be aware what their characters actually think, feel, or mean compared to what they say or what they pretend they are. Let’s say I don’t find the one perfect thing during the shooting, but I have a feeling of what could be right, and then I want to have at least two good other options because maybe I’ll need them in the editing. A lot of times when I’m sitting in the editing room, I’m thinking, “Oh shit, this was wrong,” so I can’t rely completely on myself during the shooting.
Scope: So it’s not a question of perfection, say in the Kubrickian sense, in that you know what you want and shoot it over and over until you get what you want, until you get it right…
Ade: No, no, I don’t work like that at all. For me it’s more like finding something out. If I would know what the perfect or right thing was, it would take me half of the time to shoot the film. I think it makes the film better when you try to be open to what happens, or try to see what happens, and integrate things but not lose the focus. Also in terms of rhythm and so on, it’s very risky that you lose the rhythm of the scene. Usually we would do a scene ten or 12 times from one perspective. Sandra said in an interview that she did each scene 30 or 40 times, so that’s basically true…but it’s not that much different from working in theatre. I could do even more takes!
Scope: To what degree in this film is your goal reaching a point where the audience can identify with your characters? This is where Everyone Else and Toni Erdmann are similar, though Toni Erdmann goes one step further. In Everyone Else, who the viewer identifies with goes and back and forth, but it’s different because there it’s a romantic relationship and here it’s a father and daughter, with a different set of baggage. Watching as a viewer and a critic, I’m reluctant to be caught up that way in a film, because sometimes that can be too easy, but I have no problem with that in your films, and it’s interesting to consider why that is. Maybe it’s because you don’t privilege either character’s perspective.
Ade: I always want that when there are two characters, there are two sides. I don’t like identification when you don’t feel free anymore. But you feel free because you can decide which one of the characters you identify with, and it’s even freer because these characters have not decided on things themselves—this is really important for me. On the other side, I come as close as possible to their conflict. It’s not like I say I want identification—some films do this, that’s not my main intention—it’s more that I want to try to create the situation where I can look behind the characters, or that there is always something more going on than the things they say. People ask me how I create this awkward feeling and so on, and I think that more than the film itself being awkward, this sense of awkwardness more comes out of the fact that you maybe find yourself in the characters. For me a film has to be something where you walk around a little bit, so identification without freedom doesn’t work for me.
Scope: Is the freedom something that you get not only because of the length of the film, but also the length of the scenes? You allow the interactions to play out longer than you would find in a typical film.
Ade: That’s what I found out when I tried to shorten the film; it gets very banal and less complex. The film needed a certain length…it just takes time. The more that you want to say, the more time you need. And when I tried to cut the film down, it was really astonishing to me, and very frightening, how fast you can ruin the whole film. The moment you take out 20 minutes, then you have the father coming, he’s an idiot, she’s a businesswoman…it gets very simple, very fast. It takes film time to be able to look at certain things.
Scope: Was there pressure to make it shorter?
Ade: Not really. You know, sometimes there is this rush in the editing to finish for a festival, but I don’t like when I have a feeling the film is not edited until the end. I wanted to be 100 percent sure because I had to defend the length. I have to say, “I’m sorry it has to be 150 minutes,” and I needed to find that out to be sure. I finished so close to Cannes because I took a lot of time deciding on the editing. If I were maybe a little faster on that, it wouldn’t have been so close. The thing I stretched was the editing and not the rest of the post-production.
Scope: You mentioned researching comedy and Andy Kaufman. If you think the film is a comedy, which maybe isn’t an easy answer, maybe you can address the idea of German comedies, why they aren’t so successful or exported. Do you watch a lot of German comedies?
Ade: This is the question I’ve been asked a lot of times…
Scope: I’m surprised people care.
Ade: I don’t know much about German comedies…we have great comedians in Germany; it’s not that we don’t have a tradition of being funny. I think most of the comedies that are made try to copy American comedies, maybe, and then you get a strange mixture that doesn’t work anymore. For me it’s my personal humour in the film, and I’m German, okay, but actually for a long time I haven’t watched a German comedy. And, you know, I don’t think the film is a comedy. It’s a drama where you laugh sometimes. It’s so funny that people are calling it a comedy.
Scope: I’m also interested in what you think is German about the film in terms of behaviour, especially regarding Ines. It’s not just the role that she’s in, but also the fact that she’s a German. If she were another nationality, maybe she would behave differently throughout the film.
Ade: Especially in the business world, a German woman has to deny a bit that she is a woman. It’s common that you have to behave a bit masculine, and not show any feelings. In Romania there’s a greater percentage of women working in high positions in business than in Germany, and they wear make-up, high heels…that was something very surprising to me, this image of a powerful woman who also wears pink. But the father for me is very German, as a member of the postwar generation who had this strong conflict with the generation that came before; it was very clear for them who the enemy was and what should never ever happen again. The father for me is not a “hippie guy,” as his code of values is very middle-class, he’s bürgerlich. This older guy joking is someone you can find in every country though—it’s almost a genre in itself, the funny 65-year-old.
Scope: There seem to be some other specific German elements, like life coaches; I’m not sure if it happens in other cultures. People getting professional advice as to how to behave in professional situations seems to be very German to me.
Ade: In other countries there are more women working in the business world; it doesn’t suit the picture of Germany. Though we have a female chancellor…but she has to be masculine to succeed.
Scope: Does this relate at all to the rather uncomfortable sex scene between Ines and her co-worker Tim in the hotel room?
Ade: For me this scene is a battle of humour, actually. He’s saying “Ha, ha, we spoke about that, that’s why I fuck you,” and she says, “No, I don’t want to lose my bite,” then he says, “Come on, don’t be so humourless.” It’s a misunderstanding between them, but it’s also a kind of duel. He asks, “Ha ha, do you find this funny,” and that’s what interests me about this scene. And she tries a bit to be a “Toni,” or something like that. She’s not in the mood any more, and it’s not her problem that he’s in the mood. So she’s just doing nothing. I don’t think she’s refusing. Okay, there is this thing with the petit four, but he could just say no when she asks him to do that…Some people think it’s her being dominant, but no, she’s trying to be funny.
Scope: So it’s not a question of power for you, more her just reacting in the moment?
Ade: It’s always a question of power, but for me it was more that she is refusing something. We worked for a very long time on the scene, and I think the best version was always when she was astonished that he does what he does in the end with the petit four. And people are laughing, which I think is the correct reaction. And the Tim character is not someone we need to sympathize with, so it’s okay. He’s not Anca, you know!
Scope: Do you see the film as feminist?
Ade: It’s okay for me when people say that, but it wasn’t my intention. Maybe the film can be read that way because I’m a woman, but it’s not that I said, “Well, I want to start a revolution…” But the thing is, what the father wants from her, and she denies, is also a woman-man thing. The father would never have gone to his son and asked, “Are you happy?” So the father is not on the right side with his values—he’s being conservative. Yeah, on the one side there is this issue about being human or not, which can apply to a man or a woman, but on the other side that’s why she gets so angry, because he’s asking her that thing. This is why it’s important for me that in the end she continues her job. It was never the idea that she gets through this event even higher than where she wanted to be before. Sometimes I was a bit afraid that I was trying to say that she should be more open, but in the end I think she chose the right job. It’s just that she should maybe try to integrate some other things in her life.
Scope: Some critics had doubts about the film’s coda, which I’m curious to hear you address. Did you ever consider ending the film with the two of them hugging in the park, which would have made the film, well, uplifting?
Ade: Yeah, we should just have put the titles there? That would ruin the whole film. All you critics would have been in shock! I hated that, but the question was asked, and we discussed it, but it was so simple and stupid, them hugging each other, you need to let it continue. Even him falling to the ground…it still would have been, “Oh, that’s the message: hug each other sometimes and things will be better.” It would have been very, very wrong. I think the two had to meet in real life. I know by that point people are thinking, “Maybe it could be a bit shorter,” but I felt that I had to stay with that rhythm for the final scenes.
Scope: I felt their encounter at the funeral is pretty essential, as it really brings home the fact—and I suppose you could read the scene in a number of ways—that it’s an ambiguous ending. And also you have moments in dealing with relationships, whether its with friends or specifically relatives, where you think you have a breakthrough, but the next time you revert to familiar, ingrained behaviour. The film needs drama to exist, but what I take away from the film, and this also relates to what we were discussing about the locations and the mise en scène, is that in the end things will essentially go back to being the same. I mean, maybe it’ll be a bit different, but not drastically different.
Ade: Yes, that’s what I wanted to have. That’s also what touches me, that they put so much effort, both of them, in order to change a very, very little thing…I think that’s funny in a way. But I wanted the ending to be open, and I don’t want to think about it any further. My thoughts end when the film ends, and the rest is up for the viewer to decide. I think everything could be possible, but it’s nice that they will share this little secret that happened in Bucharest.
Prankster and Daughter Francine Prose from The New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016
A portrait of Maren Ade:
The Art of the Cringe Factor - Goethe-Institut Birgit Roschy
Between existing and living! | Orissa
Post Piyush Roy
Daddy
Issues: Maren Ade's acclaimed 'Toni Erdmann' finds comedy in ... Daniel Eagan from
Film Journal
Artforum: Dennis
Lim June 03, 2016
Nick Pinkerton on Toni Erdmann Artforum,
December 23, 2016
Sight
& Sound [Jonathan Romney] May
15, 2016
“Toni
Erdmann”: Maren Ade's latest film is typically awkward, surreal ... L.R.S.
from The Economist
Toni
Erdmann is a 3-hour German film about modernizing Europe. It's ... Alissa Wilkinson
from Vox, December 29, 2016
Paste
[Tim Grierson] also seen here: Toni
Erdmann :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine
girish:
TIFF 2016: "Toni Erdmann" and "Aquarius"
Review:
Maren Ade's 'Toni Erdmann' Is a Comedy Experience Unlike ... David Sims from The Atlantic
Movie
Review: Toni Erdmann -- Vulture
David Edelstein
Slant
Magazine [Christopher Gray]
Cannes
Review: Maren Ade's 'Toni Erdmann' Details ... - The Playlist Jessica Kiang, also seen here: The
Playlist [Jessica Kiang]
Cannes
2016. Maren Ade's "Toni Erdmann" Daniel Kasman from Mubi Notebook, also seen
here: Toni
Erdmann
Cannes
2016: Maren Ade's Mediocre 'Toni Erdmann' Has Been ... Alex
Ramon from Pop Matters
Michael Sicinski at
Letterboxd
Maren
Ade's Toni Erdmann | White City Cinema
Michael Glover Smith
TONI ERDMANN Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
The
Film Stage [Giovanni Marchini Camia]
International
Cinephile Society [Marc van de Klashorst]
Cannes
2016: 'Toni Erdmann' Review | Indiewire
Eric Kohn, also seen here: 'Toni
Erdmann' Review: Here's the Funniest Nude Scene of All Time ...
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Toni Erdmann
– first look review - Little White Lies
David Jenkins, also
seen here: Toni
Erdmann – first look review
Time
[Stephanie Zacharek] also seen
here: Stephanie
Zacharek
Filmaluation
[Hemanth Kissoon]
The
House Next Door [Sam C. Mac]
'Toni
Erdmann': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen
Lee Marshall from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen
International [Lee Marshall]
A.V.
Club [Mike D'Angelo] also seen
here: Cannes
premieres its first great film, and Spielberg does Roald Dahl
Toni Erdmann | 2016
Cannes Film Festival Review - U.S. ... - Ioncinema Nicholas Bell
Village
Voice [Bilge Ebiri] also seen
here: Reasons
to Rejoice, From Cannes: 'Paterson,' 'The Handmaiden,' and ...
Toni
Erdmann : Like a bull in a china shop - Cineuropa Fabien Lemercier
Cannes
Dispatch #1: Sieranevada, Staying Vertical, Slack Bay, Toni Erdmann Blake Williams from Filmmaker magazine, May 16, 2016, also seen here: Filmmaker
Magazine [Blake Williams]
We
Got This Covered [Josh Cabrita]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
Reverse
Shot [Jordan Cronk] May 18,
2016, also seen here: Cannes Film
Festival 2016: Part One - Features - Reverse Shot
MUBI
[Daniel Kasman] Top pick of the
Cannes Fest
Reverse
Shot: Michael Koresky #2 Film of
the Year, January 02, 2017
Some Came Running: Glenn Kenny #4 from Fifty Noteworthy Films Released In
The United States in 2016, December 27, 2016
Are the Hills Going to March Off?: Carson Lund #17 on Top 20 Films
of the Year
Sight
& Sound [Nick James] May 18, 2016
BFI
[Geoff Andrew] May 24, 2016
Daily | Cannes 2016 |
Maren Ade’s TONI ERDMANN David Hudson from Fandor
Maren
Ade on 'Toni Erdmann,' the Most Embarrassing Film at Cannes ... Emily Buder interview from No Film School,
May 20, 2016
Discussing
"Toni Erdmann" with Maren Ade on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman interview, September 9, 2016
Brooklyn
Magazine: Emma Myers interview
January 11, 2017
Maren
Ade: 'Toni Erdmann's humour comes out of a big desperation ... Jonathan Romney
interview from The Guardian, January
21, 2017
Toni
Erdmann's Maren Ade interview: 'I don't ... - The Independent James Mottram
interview, January 31, 2017
Hollywood
Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Hollywood
Reporter [Leslie Felperin]
Toni Erdmann, directed
by Maren Ade | Film review - Time Out Dave Calhoun
Toni
Erdmann review: long German comedy is slight, biting little ... Peter Bradshaw from
The Guardian, also seen here: Guardian
[Peter Bradshaw]
Cannes
2016: Toni Erdmann, review - the most German comedy ever ... Robbie Collin from The Telegraph, also seen here: Telegraph
[Robbie Collin]
Film
reviews round-up: Toni Erdmann, Gold ... - The Independent Geofrey Macnab
Cannes
2016: Toni Erdmann, American Honey and the Palme d'Or ... Kaleem Aftab from The Independent
Cannes
review of Toni Erdmann | Screenwriter - The Irish Times Donald Clarke
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
'Toni
Erdmann' movie review by Justin Chang - LA Times also seen here: Cannes:
The gentle giants of Steven Spielberg's ... - Los Angeles Times
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr.
Toni Erdmann Movie
Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna
Cannes
2016: "Slack Bay," "The Student," "Toni Erdmann" Barbara Scharres from The Ebert site, May 13,
2016
Review:
In ‘Toni Erdmann,’ Dad’s a Prankster Trying to Jolt His Conformist Daughter A. O. Scott from The New York Times, December 22, 2016
How
‘Toni Erdmann’ Became an Unexpected Comedy
Rachel Donadio from The New York
Times, December 30, 2016
The
Director of 'Toni Erdmann' Savors Her Moment at Cannes - The .. . The New York Times, May 22, 2016, also
seen here: New
York Times [Manohla Dargis]
Toni Erdmann - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Adler, Carine
UNDER THE SKIN A- 94
Great Britain
A first time writer and director makes a film strikingly similar to Gary Oldham’s NIL BY MOUTH, as both explode with gut-wrenching performances portraying the raw, gritty realism of working class life on the edge, even down to the ending, as both use a song as a poetic means of explaining the character’s internal anguish and despair. This film could have been one of the best of the year, but it disintegrates near the end where it inexplicable resolves out of nowhere into a somewhat happy ending, seemingly so simplistic that one feels a bit cheated. It was truly stunning, as it just completely changed gears.
This film features a sizzling first time performance by Samantha Morton who takes us through a descent into her personal Hell, using dangerous and reckless sex to express her rather dysfunctional attempt to deal with her slowly disintegrating world, opening the film nude as Iris, drawing iris’s around her navel, narrating the story through her eyes like a personal diary. Her sister is Rose, Claire Rushbrook, named after her mother’s favorite flower, insisting Rose is her mother’s favorite. “They’re so close, they’re always doing everything together.” But her mother has a brain tumor, diagnosed with 3 weeks or 3 months to live. “She doesn’t even notice me.” There is a slow motion dance of Iris with her mom, then Rose is in tears as two men take the body of her mother away.
Iris is shown working in a lingerie shop attempting to help older women try on bras, but she feels the world closing in on her and quits in a momentary panic, leading her to a movie theater. “I don’t know why I wanted to talk to this guy, maybe it was his eyes or his mouth, I wanted to kiss him, so I did.” Images of making love are intercut with her mother’s casket entering the fire of the crematorium. After screwing Tom, she moves out on her regular guy, Gary, and to the rhythm of some terrific upbeat music, she brings bundles of flowers to her new apartment where the first thing she does is masturbate, and just before she gets aroused, the phone rings, the music stops, it’s Rose. They go through their mother’s things, Iris tries on her mother’s wig with some flashy glasses and a fur coat, “You look like a slut.” “Thank you,” Iris coos. Rose mentions “We’ve got to talk about mom’s ashes, I miss her, I used to talk to her every day.”
“Be still my heart,” Iris says to herself when she walks into a church, listening to the church choir, staring, haunted by the heartfelt beauty. Iris has a girl friend that works in the Lost Property department of the Liverpool transit system, and from unclaimed merchandise, she starts dressing more sexually provocative, wearing mini skirts with more lipstick and black eye shadow, and in a masturbation fantasy, there is an eerie scene walking through a cluttered flower shop where her mother is a janitor sweeping up the shop. When Tom’s telephone number is disconnected, she hits a singles bar where Massive Attack’s song “I Believe in One Love” blares as the camera moves over all the men, as if feeling each one out, close ups on shoulder, arms, cheeks, lips, until she finds Tom, ordering him to kiss her. Naked images are seen as the music changes to religious choral music, internally she says “I feel him, I feel him.” She has the recurring dream in the flower shop again, this time while having phone sex with Tom, who hangs up after he reaches orgasm before she can utter a word. She tries out for the church choir, not really able to carry a tune, which is followed by more sex with Tom, this time in red images, as if in a dream. “We never talk, I don’t know anything about you,” Tom pleads. “That’s what’s so nice,” Iris responds,” It’s not what you say, it’s what you do that counts.” “All we do is fuck” Tom realizes, and he’s out the door, leaving her alone to make puppet shadows on the reddish pink wall.
Rose is pregnant, and in a conversation with her husband asks if Iris is
prettier than she is. “No,” he responds,
“but she’s got a great body.” They enter
a huge apartment, which is followed by an image of Iris walking past cars at
night, on her night prowl into the clubs, shown in slow motion, slow dancing,
wearing only a slip, exuding sex, eventually picking up a new guy. The next morning, Rose and her husband drop by
asking about their mom’s ashes. Iris
indicates she lost them. “Iris, you
can’t just pretend nothing’s happened.”
Iris then throws them out, throwing flowers at both of them, “Get the
fuck out!” She’s back on the street
again, this time turning towards any man that looks at her, going with any man,
intentionally getting raped by a violent man, returning home to discover her
phone’s been disconnected, losing contact with the outside world. There is a tragic scene where she waits at a
public phone for Tom’s ten o’clock
call that never comes, but she refuses to give up the phone until one of the
women waiting threatens violence. Iris
returns back to the violent guy, apparently the only guy left, and he ties her
up, blindfolds her, then pees on her, followed by a beautifully tender
transition of piano music playing while she washes herself in the bathroom
sink.
The pace of the film accelerates into a more edgy, frantic chaos. When Iris’s purse gets stolen by street kids, she desperately begs Rose for money, then gets in a violent argument when she sees Rose wearing one of her mother’s rings. She tries using a phone, but gets in an argument with the operator, leaving her no choice but to walk out into another dark night alone to a pulsating, grinding rhythm on the soundtrack. She tries to get back Gary, her old boyfriend, but he’s now with her former best friend and he locks her out. Angered, horrified, and in tears, she returns to the bar with the familiar musical refrain, “I Believe in One Love,” and calls Rose’s husband, knowing Rose is out of town for the night, and drunkenly tries to seduce him. Rebuffed, she stumbles down the street, drunk, listening to the voices in her head of her mother.
Everything up to this point has been cohesive, Iris is completely backed up against it, nothing feels out of place, but then it feels like we missed something in the editing, like an entire piece of her life is missing. The whole tone of the film takes a major leap and don’t ask how it got there. Rose greets her the next morning confessing she took their mother’s ring, Iris reveals their mother’s ashes, and next thing you know, Rose is delivering her baby. Iris is filming the delivery, as her husband was out of town, and was the first to hold the baby. “Rose and I are a lot alike, except she still tries to boss me around,” then shifting to Iris taking the stage at an amateur night club, thinking of her mother, “Sometimes I walk down the street and someone reminds me of the way she walked or the way she smiled. It’s nice to remember those things,” before she breaks into song, singing Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Alone Again, Naturally...in my hour of need, I truly am indeed, alone again, naturally,” dropping her mother’s ashes into the ocean, swirling her body around on the beach one morning in a warm, soft image of the rite of spring.
Bright Lights Film
Journal :: Bereavement in British Cinema
Richard Armstrong, August 2004
Adler, Yuval
BETHLEHEM B+ 91
Israel Germany
Belgium (99 mi) 2013
You think we need Bedouins from who knows where to tell us what’s good for Palestine? Your father just learned to wear shoes last week!
—Abu Mussa (Karem Shakur), head of the Palestinian Authority.
Perhaps it’s no
coincidence that the same New York production company, Adopt Films, which
previously released standout independent arthouse films like 2013 Top Ten
List #4 Tabu (2012) and 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 Sister (L'enfant d'en haut) , had their hand
in distributing both Hany Abu-Assad’s Palestinian film Omar (2013)
and also this Israeli film, both dealing with the exact same subject from
slightly different perspectives, a stark look at the impact of how the Israeli
secret police coerces Palestinian prison inmates into becoming Israeli
informers in exchange for their release.
Abu-Assad is a Palestinian born in Israel, making him an Israeli
citizen, though he doesn’t consider himself one, as
There’s a meticulous
level of detail throughout, especially in the elaborate exposé of military
intelligence, both on the Israeli and the Palestinian side, producing a work of
intense scrutiny that offers real insight into how the intelligence world
operates in the Middle East. While the
film is a balance of Hebrew and Arabic, the end credits also list both, side by
side, with a little English thrown in as well.
While Bethlehem is a
Palestinian city located in the West Bank, it’s also one of the largest
Christian communities and includes important Jewish shrines, so the town is
interestingly patrolled by both Palestinian and Israeli police, though the
presence of Israeli police tends to incite instantaneous riots, creating
quickly growing mob scenes with groups throwing stones at the occupiers. This hostile environment is nothing less than
a war zone, as it’s a community ravaged by unending cycles of violence, where
the fanaticism on both sides only escalates.
This is one of the few films, along with Omar, to show
balance while creating an unmistakable picture of what life is like in such
war-torn areas, where we see it play out viewed from both sides. From the director, writers, and actors, almost
everyone involved in this production is working in a film for the first time,
including a terrific use of non-professionals, where according to the director,
a Columbia graduate who has a Ph.D in philosophy, the motivation for the film
was watching a video news excerpt from the Palestinian territories of an
informant dragged through the streets with a hundred people just standing by as
he was shot and executed in cold blood.
This kind of savage violence is at the root of the film, as it continues
to play such a prominent role in Arab-Israeli relations, much like the use of
drones, becoming the unspoken weapon used in the war on terror. It is not by accident that the title of the
film references the birthplace of Jesus, whose parents supposedly encountered
difficulty finding appropriate lodging several thousand years ago, as this is a
film that moves between Palestinian and Israeli society, between Bethlehem and
Jerusalem, which are geographically quite close, separated by a valley that to
this day remains a no man’s land and figures quite prominently in the film’s
finale. The film’s center is a
complicated relationship between Razi (Tsahi Halevy, an Israeli
singer-songwriter with a history of combat duty in the Israeli army), a veteran
Israeli Shin
Bet operative fluent in Arabic who is working in an antiterrorism unit, and
one of his informants, Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), a young 17-year-old Palestinian recruited
two years earlier with the sole purpose of helping track down his older
brother, Ibrahim (Hisham Suliman), considered a major threat to Israeli
security, as he’s the leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, a man Razi has
been targeting for over a year.
The film opens as
Palestinian suicide bombers have struck in the heart of
As all these forces are
swirling around in a state of pandemonium and chaos following the incident, the
first half of the film is mostly seen through the eyes of Razi, who has a
beautiful wife and family that he rarely sees, as the needs of his job are
round the clock, never taking a break, where much of his effort is in providing
reassurance to Sanfur, who grows less and less trustful, eventually cutting off
ties altogether, where the second half is largely seen through the anguished
eyes of Sanfur, who so much wants to prove himself, but the world he lives in
is always in a heightened state of paranoia and suspicion. There’s a brilliant action sequence when
Ibrahim is tracked down and chased through a market into someone’s home,
cornered into a firefight with an Israeli commando squad, turning into a brutal
and bloody siege in the home of an innocent family, where the intense street
level fighting is further accentuated by an angry mob that is turning on the
presence of Israeli police in their neighborhood, where rocks and bullets have
a surprisingly powerful effect, where the sense of havoc and turmoil is
everpresent, especially on a top secret assassination mission. The tempers flare afterwards when both Hamas
and the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claim the corpse of Ibrahim as one of their
own, where even in death the conflict continues, where the political insight
astutely shows a fractured West Bank that is continually reactive and on the
defensive, never developing any coordinated plan of action. After the death of his brother, Sanfur only
grows more angry and militant, reaching out to the leaders of Al Aqsa, the
local militia led by Badawi (Hitham Omari), but they’re curious about his
relationship to his brother, where certain details cause them concern,
especially when they hear Sanfur helped funnel money to Ibrahim from Hamas, a
group they’re fiercely at odds with, and the more they press the matter the
harder it is for Sanfur, who is just an adolescent kid, to maintain his own
sense of identity. Tugged and pulled,
manipulated and coerced on all sides, yet never able to distance himself from
his brother, there is no place where Sanjur is safe, nowhere for him to go,
ending up all alone in a no man’s zone, finding himself just as trapped as his
fanatically committed brother with no way out.
A film about conflicting loyalties, where Razi is equally divided at
placing his hard earned informant at risk, but it especially shows just how
elusive the enemy becomes when you also have to contend with an enemy from
within, where there is no peace and no safe haven, as you can’t trust anyone,
and you’re left with no place called home.
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
In Bethlehem,
retribution is more credible, unpredictable, and personal. Director Yuval
Adler, who had served in Israeli Military Intelligence, co-wrote with
Palestinian journalist Ali Waked. In this debut feature, the use of a
Palestinian informer is even more incendiary: the asset, who has a brother
aligned with Hamas, is 17. He’s more vulnerable, not only because of his age
but for having a years-long bond with his Secret Service handler, Israeli
family man Razi (Tsahi Halevy). Fluent in Arabic, Razi genuinely feels
protective towards Sanfu (Shadi Mar’i), even when the kid doesn’t realize all
of the behind-the-scene strings Razi pulls to insulate him, and throughout the
years, he has rewarded the teen with gifts (though a flashy iPhone may not be
the most inconspicuous).
There are many different types of turf wars
going on: the Palestinian Authority vs. Hamas, Razi taking on upper management,
Sanfur vs. his hardline family. The storyline never moves in a direction that
loses the plot’s inner-logic. Like in Omar,
this is a male-dominated battlefield, but Bethlehem
takes jabs at the machismo posturing and preening, questioning when personal
pride gets in the way of the political. The back-to-basics direction also
includes a lucidly choreographed shoot-out between a militants and the Israeli
army, where the suspense derives from what you can’t see around the dark corner.
Perhaps most impressively, Adler brings out volatile performances from his
non-professional cast (the film shares a father, actor Tarek Copti, with Omar).
TIFF
2013 | Bethlehem (Yuval Adler, Israel ... - Cinema Scope Jay Kuehner
Utterly circumscribed by its political geography, Yuval
Adler’s Bethlehem delineates the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
through the eyes of a Palestinian teen, Sanfur, who at film’s outset is boldly
protesting to his peers that he’s got the nerve to take a bullet to the chest
(aided by a protective vest presumably looted from Israeli officers). That he
spends the remainder of the film maimed from impact—which the director casually
elides—is evidence of Adler’s desire to maintain an uncompromising veracity to
a conflict that loops concentrically among familial, religious, and political
loyalties. At once a willful warrior in the Palestinian cause and an informant
to a doting Israeli officer who took the boy under his wing at an early age,
Sanfur shuttles between this surrogate father figure and his older brother
Ibrahim, who’s high on the Israeli secret service’s hit list. There’s an action
sequence in which Ibrahim is tracked and cornered into a nasty gunfight that
shows off Adler’s knack for kinetic warfare on a street level, while being
insightfully detailed in its exposition of political haranguing among Hamas and
the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, who ironically compete for corpses felled in the
cause. The salient publicity point for the film seems to be its escalated but
not inflamed sense of partisan politics, owing to a script co-written by Adler
and Palestinian journalist Ali Waked. The film will unfairly beg comparison to
Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now by virtue of context alone, but
a more instructive reference may be Abu-Assad’s documentary Ford
Transit, for the way it provides incidental insight into a conflict by
focusing on one of its chief movers—namely the white trucks that once belonged
to the Israeli army but have since been inherited by Palestinian taxi
drivers. Bethlehem is compelling for its regional exposure,
but a tendency for narrative velocity and plot machinations (otherwise known as
a thriller) gives away the film’s ultimate agenda as
genre-dependent, regardless of site-specificity. Credit to Adler though for the
necessarily unhappy ending.
Another addition to what’s become a long string of tight-knit films set within the Israel-Palestine conflict, the efficient if unremarkable crime drama Bethlehem uses the infamously ongoing struggle as the thematic backdrop for a story of loyalty, family and morality. Spending equal time with both sides, the film seeks a sort of objective middle ground, but rather than achieving a valuable neutrality, the whole thing just feels indifferently dramatized. The densely plotted script co-written by director Yuval Adler and journalist Ali Wakad—the latter is Palestinian, the former Israeli, and both supply the script with personal insights and experiences—is essentially structured like a truncated season of The Wire, paying close attention to the methods and idiosyncrasies that define both groups; unlike The Wire, however, a fresh sociopolitical worldview never materializes.
The story pivots on the complicated relations between Razi (Tsahi Halevy), an Israeli antiterrorism operative, his 17-year-old Palestinian informant Sanfur (Shadi Mar’i), and Sanfur’s older brother Ibrahim (Hisham Suliman), who’s either a hero, a militant, or a terrorist, depending on who you ask. That sort of idle shoulder-shrugging is found throughout the film, leaving us with the sort of clichéd bottom line that has accompanied this conflict for ages: Both sides have their favorable points, both sides are guilty of one thing or another, and an unwillingness to compromise only prolongs the violence. If you’ve watched even 10 minutes of CNN in the last decade, you’ve basically seen Bethlehem.
Still, the film skips along at brisk pace, even if the action isn’t always visually appealing. Adler, making his directorial debut, doesn’t so much direct as arrange and frame, following the rigors of the script perhaps too closely. His handheld camera and faux-documentary compositions belie a complete lack of imagination and spontaneity. Indeed, Bethlehem feels as if it’s bound to an invisible track: Tritely political dialogue exchanges follow sequences of tactical espionage follow manufactured emotional epiphanies—it doesn’t take long to deduce the pattern as the film barrels toward an abrupt denouement.
One unique wrinkle to these otherwise standard proceedings is Adler’s use of amateur actors. Halevy, for instance, served in the Israeli army and saw combat firsthand, while Mar’i grew up around the film’s primary shooting locations. Their performances are stilted, to be sure, but not exactly unnatural. Mar’i, for instance, has a noticeable “fish out of water” gaze throughout, but such wariness matches his character's bewildered disposition. His interactions with Halevy are particularly poignant, and together, their makeshift father-son relationship provides the script with a much-needed human dynamic. As the story progresses, and the cast of characters grows wider, their story takes a backseat before being reintroduced in the film’s waning moments. By then, Adler has spun his wheels with superfluous subplots and bootless politicizing, so what are meant to be bracing conclusions arrive with a thud rather than a bang. The same can be said for the film at large, which wades through the heated Israel-Palestine conflict the way one wades through a checkout line.
Slant
Magazine [Oscar Moralde] also seen
here: The
House Next Door [Oscar Moralde]
PopMatters Renée Scolaro Mora
Bethlehem / The Dissolve Noah Berlatsky
Critics
At Large : Art vs. Propaganda: Bethlehem and Omar Shlomo Schwartzberg
The
Daily Beast [Daniel Gavron]
Graffiti
With Punctuation [Andy Buckle]
Movie
Mezzanine [Christopher Runyon]
Reel
Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Yuval
Adler on 'Bethlehem' and Heidegger - NYTimes.com Larry Rohter interview from The New York Times, December 11, 2013
A
gripping thriller exposes unsettling Israeli-Palestinian truths Mitch Ginsburg from The Times of Israel
'Bethlehem,'
a film of spies and intrigue and Oscar ... - Jewish J Tom Tugend from The Jewish Journal
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Review:
'Bethlehem' a taut cat-and-mouse game - Los ... Sheri Linden from The LA Times
RogerEbert.com
[Sheila O'Malley]
Yuval
Adler and Ali Waked Breathe Life Into 'Bethlehem' - NYTim Manohla Dargis from The New York Times
Adlon, Percy
Percy Adlon official website
SUGARBABY
Time Out
A sweet romantic comedy, with chubby Sägebrecht playing a lonely
undertaker's assistant who falls for a young knight on a shiny yellow subway
train and stalks him in, one initially supposes, forlorn pursuit - the
punchline being that her U-Bahn inamorato (Gulp) is married to a black-clad
harpy and highly susceptible to a little old-fashioned seduction. Adlon paints
working class
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)
A glum, overweight woman (Marianne Sagebrecht) who works in a Munich mortuary finds her life illuminated one day when she catches a glimpse of a handsome young subway conductor (Eisi Gulp); she knows he's the Zuckerbaby of her dreams, and she sets out to catch him, studying the subway schedule, planning elaborate ruses, and finally luring him to her apartment, where he falls madly in love with her (1985). Director Percy Adlon (Celeste) deftly avoids the traps built into the material: the film is neither sticky and cultish nor grotesque and exploitative. The script ideas, which might seem familiar in outline, are pushed so far that they emerge in the pure, clear, mythic realm that lies on the other side of cliche, and the playfully abstract visual style that Adlon has adopted (lots of color filters, low camera angles, and wacky, unmotivated camera movements) gives it the allure of a real-life animated cartoon. A charming surprise, concocted with dignity and affection.
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
BAGDAD CAFÉ
A radiant, oddball comedy-drama
about the relationship that develops between a fat Bavarian tourist
(Sägebrecht), an irritable black truckstop owner (Pounder), and a weirdo artist
(Palance, smiling and delightful, in bandana and snakeskin boots), set in the
dusty Arizona desert land of lonesome motels beloved of Sam Shepard.
Sägebrecht, her husband ditched along the way, arrives sweatily out of the
yellow haze, absurdly decked out in buttoned-up suit, green felt hat and
feather, high heels and suitcase; gradually she transforms, and is transformed
by, the lives of a motley band of misfits who inhabit a dilapidated diner
exotically named 'The Bagdad Café'. A wish-fulfilling fable about culture-clash
and the melting-pot, it's also firmly grounded in telling and cinematically
original observations. Adlon's method is at once intimate, quirky and
affirmative: precise evocation of place, expressive colours, and a slow
build-up of characters, allow him to raise the film effortlessly into realms of
fantasy, shafted with magic and moments of epiphany.
eFilmCritic Thom
Shakespeare, who knew everything,
would begin his comedies by removing the main characters to a remote and
unfamiliar site. The break in the patterns would allow for everything to get
fucked up so it could come back together again in a new improved way. That is
why they are comedies and not tragedies. Imagine getting stuck in that remote
location and calling it your home instead of reassimilating back into the
social structure you came from.
Bagdad Cafe is that place.
Everyone is from someplace else. Some have been there long than others. They
all have a story but for some reason, this time around, the characters engage
each other and the chaotic systems of life repattern themselves into their
collective story.
The movie is a beautiful portrait in the middle of a desert where flowers
bloom. Flowers blooming in the desert is the overall theme of this film,
literally and metaphorically. The particular alchemy of coincidence causes a
chemical reaction that forges something new out of the seperate elements that
maintained their inertia. Everyone gets what's missing in their life and their
affect on each other challenges each other and makes them grow into more
well-rounded people. The Motel where this all takes place is like a hospital
where nobody knew they were sick until wellness begins to spread.
The characters are so off-beat, you'd expect this to be an Australian film.
You'll see some familar faces in this film in some unfamiliar roles. But a
regular gig on ER certainly pays more than an obscure independant film produced
in another country, yet filmed in English.
A wonderful film about making
friends, crossing boundaries and discovering how much of our life is other people.
Films Outside the Loop (Jeanne Chappé)
There are very few films that I consider perfect. This is one of them. The
film takes place in the middle of the
Into this scenario walks a German woman who has been dumped on the highway by her abusive husband. Her name is Jasmin (pronounced 'Yasmine' like the 'Bleeth'). Jasmin is played by Marianne Sagebrecht who is very much at ease in the shape of her container. Inadvertantly, Jasmin ended up with her husband's suitcase which contains (of course) men's clothes AND a magic kit. She then meets the odd (I am avoiding the word dysfunctional) characters who inhabit this small world.
Brenda is the owner (and totalitarian BOSS) of the motel and cafe. She is
played by CCH Pounder carrying quite a few less pounds. She has a slut for a
daughter and a son whose mind is totally consumed by classical music. Rudi
(played beautifully by Jack Palance) is an ex-set painter from
There is the difference in cultures...with both Brenda and Jasmin suspicious of one another. There is also a very clean, mysterious, bright yellow coffee thermos, a rifle with a hair-trigger, a boomerang, an incredible rainbow and some pink flamingos (for color). Above all, there is a whole lot of magic!
The same haunting song floats in and out through the entire film. Watching this film is like stepping into a place outside of time (right off the side of the highway).
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
Frau Muenchstettner was born to scrub. She is an artist with
a
Marianne Sagebrecht of
All these strange folks are in a funk, their spirits broken like the cafe''s coffee maker. And then along comes the first sign of magic: a Bavarian thermos that is perpetually full of coffee. Brenda's husband finds it abandoned on the highway along with the weeping Jasmin Muenchstettner, who nervously refuses a ride. Jasmin, who has just split with her husband, arrives at the cafe' hours later, and only slightly disheveled. Coincidentally, Brenda has just told her husband to get lost. They are two women sleeping single.
They also couldn't be more different in color, shape, culture and temperament. Brenda, meaner than cactus quills, takes an instant dislike to the Lane Bryant-sized, sweet-natured Jasmin. But after a lot of cleaning and cajoling, Jasmin wins the trust of the skinnier woman. The polar personalities propel the story, but there's something condescending about an Aryan Mary Poppins dropping by to save a black family from debt and despair. Nevertheless, it's a winning story of friendship, extended family and rediscovered femininity.
As in "Sugarbaby," which also starred Sagebrecht, Adlon's heroines are happiest when they find the yen within -- when they're nurturing and being nice. They enjoy being girls, as it were. Here, Jasmin strips away her dowdy Bavarian manner along with her thick wool suit and discovers she is not just a middle-aged hausfrau, eventually posing nude with a split cantaloupe for the artist Rudi Cox (Jack Palance).
Her Windex-blue eyes shining, she also wipes away the layers of grime at the cafe'. And voila`, Brenda's sunny side begins to emerge. She no longer sees Jasmin as a threat, but accepts her for what she is, a woman as generous of spirit as she is of body. The two women begin to work together, the cafe' flourishes, and Brenda begins to smile again and love her kids. There's beer and Coke and coffee and plenty of customers at the Bagdad Cafe, drawn by the ladies and the actual magic they've learned to perform.
The movie does seem to have been pulled from a hat, a series
of surprises tossed off by Adlon and his producer wife Eleonore. The script
grew out of the couple's 1984 trip across the
Sa gebrecht, who redefined sex appeal in
"Sugarbaby," is the most alluring full-figured girl since Jane
Russell. She is an understated actress in an overstated body, enjoyable
precisely because she is so peaceful and sweet. Like the rest of the cast, she
was chosen for her eccentric style. It's rather like the characters from "
Apollo Movie Guide
[Graham Barron]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
YOUNGER AND YOUNGER
The title refers to the
Aduaka, Newton I.
“Aduaka,
Newton (1966-)” BFI Screen Online
Born in Ogidi, Eastern Nigeria, in 1966, Newton Aduaka moved to Lagos in 1970 after the Biafran War, and then to England in 1985. Following a diploma course in video arts and post-production, he studied film history, art and technique at the London International Film School, graduating in 1990. He wrote and published short stories while working as a sound mixer on a wide range of productions.
In 1997 he set up Granite FilmWorks with Maria Elena L'Abbate to produce personal, cutting-edge and uncompromising films. As a director, his short films include Carnival of Silence (1994), Voices Behind the Wall (1990) and On The Edge (1997), which won him three prestigious awards and numerous special mentions.
His debut feature Rage (2000) was released to huge critical acclaim, becoming the first independent film by a black film-maker to gain a national release in Britain. It was also very successful in international film festivals, winning many prizes including Best Director at the Pan African Film Festival in Los Angeles.
Since then he has directed commercials and a further short film, Funeral (2002), commissioned for the Cannes Film Festival alongside similarly-themed work from internationally renowned directors such as Walter Salles, Arturo Ripstein and Amos Gitai.
Masterclass
with Newton Aduaka Cannes, May
2007, published in Africultures, July 24, 2007
ON THE EDGE
Great Britian (28 mi)
1997
On The Edge (1997) Ann Ogidi from BFI
Screen Online
The multi-award winning short On The Edge (d. Newton Aduaka, 1997) is a harrowing portrait of the effects of drugs which avoids the moralising of government health warnings. The director elicits an astonishing performance from actress Susan Warren as Lorna, who goes through a range of emotions as she copes with her drug withdrawal and self-hatred. Maynard Eziashi, is also very good as her boyfriend, Court, the still, reflective heart at the centre of the film.
The film is shot in black and white, with colour sequences depicting Court's childhood memories - an interesting reversal of expectation. The characters are trapped in their pain just as they are literally trapped in the flat when Court, in desperation, throws the keys out of the window. And the long night in which they fight through the argument is as gripping and intimate as theatre. We cannot leave until it becomes light. However when dawn arrives it is only a small respite in the storm.
Aduaka's debut feature film Rage (1999) an uncompromising story about the three teenage boys locked in a spiral of poverty and violence, also collected several awards. The director is clearly a talent to watch.
RAGE
Great Britain Nigeria
(120 mi) 1999
'Tell me about your
reality.' Rage (or Jamie to his mum) dreams of cutting a rap record with his
friends Thomas (a DJ), and Godwin, a talented pianist. They're each struggling
in their own way to grapple with questions of identity and race on the streets
of south London. Rage, the most rebellious, is also walking a moral knife-edge,
trying to help an elderly mentor out of his drug debts, but feeling the
pressure to cross the law himself. Aduaka's independent, improvised feature
isn't a smooth ride ('This ain't no Hollywood movie'), but it feels real, and
it has something important to say about where young people are at right now.
It's made with sincerity, but more than that, with integrity.
BFI screenonline [Onyekachi Wambu]
Rage (d. Newton Aduaka, 2000) was hyped as a violent hip hop style urban movie. It turned out instead to be a sensitive, downbeat and unglamorous portrayal of two working-class black boys and their middle-class white friend on the threshold of adulthood.
Jamie (Fraser Ayres) is a gifted rapper, convulsed by a burning, low-level anger which occasionally explodes - hence the 'Rage' nickname. He is in a line of alienated black male characters beginning with Horace Ové's Pressure (1975) and including Franco Rosso's Babylon (1980). However, Jamie's mixed-race background sets him apart from these antecedents, and this is given a further twist by neatly placing him alongside his two fellow crew members - his black childhood friend 'G' (Shaun Parkes), and 'T' (John Pickard), a white middle-class wannabe.
The Brixton based homeboys are in search of a record deal, which will make or break them. As manhood beckons all are at a critical turning point in their lives. Rage is the most driven; for him the music is all. In music he can find himself - outside of it, South London remains an alienating urban jungle. Rage also has identity problems - is he black or white? In a highly tribal youth culture, his white mother's childhood reassurances that he is neither - just a unique individual - are no longer enough. He badly misses his dead father. Marcus (Shango Baku), a thoughtful old Rasta, becomes a reluctant mentor. Rage indulges Marcus's ganja habit, storing up danger for himself by scoring Marcus' drugs on credit from ruthless local dealer Pin (Wale Ojo).
Troubled by money problems and determined to cut his own record, Rage leads his friends, particularly the reluctant G, on a drastic course of action. The inevitable disaster, humiliation and violence Rage, G and Marcus suffer from the police and Pin spins Rage out of control. His erratic ravings and violence finally drive G and T away. As the bonds of childhood break, each man is left to ponder his own true desire, his position in England at the end of the 20th century. And to choose a destiny.
The quiet lyrical resolution finds Rage coming to terms with himself. As his friends (the symbolic black and white aspects of his personality) drift off into their own orbit, Rage evolves beyond the clichéd 'tragic mulatto', of his earlier incarnation. He is becoming his own unique creation.
Shadows on the Wall by Rich Cline
BBCi - Films Michael Thomson
EZRA B+ 90
Nigeria France
USA Great Britain Austria
(110 mi) 2006 YouTube
trailer
Told much
like a fictionalized documentary, thus is a highly ambitious film about male
child kidnapping in Africa, initially used like pack mules to fill the ranks of
rebel soldiers in armed rebellion against corrupt and tyrannical governments
before being brainwashed to later lead the military assaults, a film that
suffers from poor editing and sound, which jumbles the material in an
incoherent order, detracting from some of the dramatic power, though that may
have been intentional, matching the altered state of mind of one of the
victims, while the sound is so poor that much of what is spoken in English (no
subtitling) was simply not understood.
Despite the flaws, this is an exhilarating film that gives you a ground
level African perspective without the Hollywood special effects and
melodrama—see the love story between Leonardo Decaprio and Jennifer Connelly
inserted into the backdrop of the Sierra Leone civil war that diminishes slave
child labor camps and the rampant theft of African diamonds to Europe into
secondary storylines in BLOOD DIAMOND (2006).
Shot by a Nigerian-born director, featuring mostly non-professional
actors and African locations (shot in Rwanda), this film gets its priorities
straight, following a young 7-year old as he and other boys are hauled out of
school by armed rebels carrying machine guns before being marched into the bush
to become part of a guerilla military operation they know nothing about. The first to object is shot on the spot. This view of stocking a rag tag army with
cheap child labor through forced intimidation feeds the exploitive capitalist
model at its bare bones worst, as these are child captives forced to work as
slaves. 9 years later, we see this same
young boy known as Ezra (Mamoudu Turay Kamara), a sullen, yet physically
imposing young man, now one of the elite soldiers of the group known as “The
Brotherhood” carrying an AK-47. While
they spout slogans about freedom and justice, their leader (Emile Abossolo Mbo)
would ruthlessly shoot anyone attempting to escape, implementing the same
tyrannical methods they are attempting to overthrow.
The scene
shifts from graphic footage into a courtroom where a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission is attempting to ascertain just what generated some of the worst
atrocities in their decade long civil war, calling witnesses to shed light,
many of whom can’t recall much. But one
witness who can’t speak comes forward, Onitcha (Mariame N’Diaye), Ezra’s
sister, pointing her finger at her brother sitting silently in the courtroom as
one of the leaders of a brutal raid against her family and village, killing her
parents and cutting out her tongue before burning the village to the
ground. From this accusation, the scene shifts
back and forth between flashback mode and the courtroom, where Ezra’s life as
part of the rebel faction is shot with
hand held cameras creating a visceral feel for movement and action, while the
courtroom scenes are single view shots, where each speaker and what they have
to say becomes the center of attention.
It’s interesting that in both versions, there is a lingering question
about the truth which continues to be an elusive element of this film. Shown only in brief segments, the audience
has to piece together Ezra’s life which is shot out of sequence, adding a great
deal of confusion, offering little in the way of explanation, which can be
rather appealing. We soon discover that
the rebels, far from being a revolutionary group, are actually a militia
guarding the diamond mines (always offscreen), where a European man in a white
suit who visits occasionally may actually be financing the operation, offering
guns and other special items in exchange for the diamonds. We see the same man in an equally cooperative
relationship with the government troops as well, apparently having a hand in
both side’s affairs, playing one against the other, arming both sides. When we see him deliver a shipment of
amphetamines, this is the prelude to the raids on the villages, intimidating
potential voters by chopping off their hands, where the soldiers were injected
with the drugs to increase their ruthlessness, keeping them up for 4 days
straight, causing hallucinations, and then wreaking havoc with their memories
afterwards, as Ezra can’t remember a thing.
As he’s still a child attempting to piece his life together, much of it
altered by drugs and traumatic stress, not only have the kidnappers taken his
childhood from him, but erased much of his memory as well. This adds a truly complex element to the film,
which may explain the incoherency of sequences told out of order, as it’s a
hideous part of the equation that may have no remedy.
The film
is to be commended for accentuating the internal trauma, not the bloody raids
and murderous assaults, where piecing back together again the broken parts of a
human being is not so easy. Some of the
sister’s testimony is equally appalling and traumatizing, as her suggestion
that Ezra may have led the assaults against his own family is simply
abominable. In a flashback sequence,
when he discovers what happened to them, he vows revenge against the
perpetrators, never once thinking he could have been involved. This strange out of body experience offers
perhaps the most lucid testimony about the concept of war, which is a highly
irrational act that makes no sense, as what reasonable person would willingly
murder and maim? There is plenty of
evidence both in
TimeOut
London Dave Calhoun
Aduaka's second
film after the London-set 'Rage' tells of the experience of a child soldier
(Kamara) who fights in a war in an unnamed African state, although the timing
and setting recall the civil war in Sierra Leone in the 1990s. The film jumps
back and forth from the bloody stage of this battle to a later truth and
reconciliation hearing, during which Ezra stands against his relatives in the
search for truth. It's an intelligent, cleverly measured film, but what's
particularly interesting is how it treads a similar path as the recent 'Blood
Diamond' yet steers clear of that film's failings. In 'Ezra', there's no
Leonardo DiCaprio to lead us by the hand through both an exotic foreign
landscape and a host of genre conventions. Instead, the film is raw and
truthful. When an exploitative white character does appear in 'Ezra' he stays
for a few minutes and is less poster-boy than grey, ugly and corrupt.
Center
for African Studies Calendar Cornelius Moore
Nigerian-born filmmaker Newton I. Aduaka, whose family suffered through the Biafran War of the late 1960s, brings a special sensitivity to this drama about the life of a child soldier. The film opens on the very young Ezra walking down a country road to school in an unnamed African country (most likely Sierra Leone). Just as class begins, gunfire disrupts the calm as rebel troops swoop down, later forcing the youngsters on a long march through the bush. Structured in nonlinear fashion, the story jumps forward a decade to Ezra testifying before a truth and reconciliation hearing. From there, Ezra’s flashbacks show children eventually forming substitute families in the militias, as they come to doubt they will ever see their real families again. Coerced, indoctrinated, and drugged into becoming marauding looters and killers, these youth unwittingly enrich rebel leaders, arms traders, and exploiters of local resources (most notably diamonds). Rather than focusing on battle scenes, Ezra provides a compassionate psychological portrait of war’s survivors as a vehicle for healing individuals and a nation. Aduaka expertly manages the tension throughout and draws solid naturalistic performances from his cast. Ezra won the coveted Grand Prize at Fespaco, Africa’s most important cinematic showcase.
Unlike many of its Western-made counterparts, Ezra neither condescends to its African characters (or culture) nor shies away from the grim, brutal violence that dominates so much of the continent. Unfortunately, Nigerian director Newton I. Aduaka's film has its own raft of problems, which eventually conspire to drain its relevant, pressing story—about children being kidnapped and turned into soldiers by murderous guerrilla battalions—of coherence and intensity. In this fictional tale, young Ezra is stolen in 1992 by a pack of rebels who seek to overthrow the corrupt Sierra Leone government that's reportedly in league with the West and its diamond consortiums. Seven years later, Ezra's sister (Mariame N'Diaye) comes before a truth and reconciliation tribunal with stories of her teenage brother's (Mamodou Turay Kamara) atrocities, none more abominable than his role in their parents' deaths. As Ezra denies any knowledge of these crimes, flashbacks elucidate his ordeal, which involves horrendous abuse and, before one nighttime raid, mandatory injections of hallucinogenic drugs. These sequences of Ezra's rebel duty express the drudgery, traumatizing intimidation, and unshackled cruelty that characterize such a life, and Aduaka's earthy color palette and grimy, intimate compositions elicit empathy for his psychologically and emotionally battered protagonist, as well as the chaos-engulfed nation in which he struggles to survive. However, despite its interest in pluming Ezra's psyche, the film fails to capture his tangled, tortured mental state, in part because its fractured-chronology narrative is a structural mess. The script's flip-flopping between the past and present (circa 1999) is so clunky and unfocused that confusion often reigns, thus undermining any clear portrait of its subject. Speaking of which, the decision to shoot Ezra in English proves an equally serious miscalculation, sabotaging not only some fine, natural performances from the all-African cast (save for Richard Gant's American general), but also too many key plot points conveyed via the dialogue of its game yet far-from-fluent stars.
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
The title character of “Ezra,” Newton I. Aduaka’s scorching portrait of an African child who is kidnapped and turned into a soldier for a rebel militia, is first seen as an innocent little boy crossing a bridge on his way to school. Inside, a teacher scrawls the date, July 13, 1992, on the blackboard and assigns the pupils an essay, “Why I Love My Country.”
Then, out of nowhere, armed soldiers appear in the courtyard, setting the building on fire and inciting panic. Rounding up the whimpering children, they separate out the boys and herd them at gunpoint into the jungle, where they are told they have to be ready to die for the cause of justice.
“You are children of the revolution,” barks the fearsome rebel leader (Emile Abossolo Mbo). “Forget everything you have learned till now. Today you are born again as children of this nation. You will fight and die for her.” Marching exercises and weapons instruction immediately commence.
Suddenly a movie that promised to be a straightforward exploration of the kind of forced child soldiering shown in “Blood Diamond” leaps ahead 10 years to observe the 16-year-old Ezra (Mamodou Turay Kamara) being questioned by the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the wake of a civil war. That country, unidentified in the movie, is almost certainly Sierra Leone.
As the rest of the film unfolds in flashbacks, “Ezra” loses its narrative continuity and becomes a choppy, increasingly confused jumble of Ezra’s memories while he is being interrogated. Although he is assured that the commission, modeled after one in South Africa, was not created to fix blame and assign punishment, it has a prosecutorial tone.
The crucial event on which it focuses is an attack on Ezra’s village on Jan. 6, 1999, when this ragtag militia had orders to amputate the villagers’ hands and feet to prevent them from voting. (Hardly any of the butchery is shown.) Ezra, who participated, might have killed his own parents. What does he remember?
One witness at the hearings is Onitcha (Mariame N’Diaye), his sister, who can communicate only in sign language and by writing because her tongue was cut out during the attack. As the story is pieced together, we also meet Ezra’s militant young wife, Mariam (Mamusu Kallon), the daughter of Maoists.
Mr. Aduaka, the film’s Nigerian-born director, deserves credit for attempting something that was probably impossible. Most of the movie takes place inside Ezra’s brainwashed, drug-scarred mind as he futilely tries to remember what happened. His amnesia may go beyond post-traumatic stress disorder. It isn’t until near the end of “Ezra” that we observe the preparations for that attack, during which the soldiers, now teenagers, are given powerful amphetamine injections before going into battle.
In a drugged frenzy, living without food or sleep for three days, they become mindless killing machines whose rampage ends only when they are literally unable to move. In such an altered state, remembrance may be less a matter of repressing atrocities than of having no coherent consciousness while committing them.
“Ezra” refrains from showing most of the gory details. It reveals only what Ezra is able to remember in the pieces of his story shown more or less chronologically. After he and his wife observe the rebel leader killing a soldier who talks back to him, they flee the militia. Both are now aware that their leader is secretly exchanging diamonds from the mine near the campsite for weapons and drugs provided by corrupt European traders; meanwhile, Ezra and his fellow soldiers have been living on the edge of starvation.
By this point the movie’s sense of time is as vague as Ezra’s perception of it. Chaos is all he knows. Making “Ezra” even harder to follow, and undermining its authenticity, is the fact that its mostly African cast speaks in a heavily accented English.
Mr. Kamara’s glowering lead performance, however, is riveting. He doesn’t try to elicit sympathy for his character, only to present him as a victim of war; there are probably tens of thousands like him.
Chris
Knipp :: View topic - Newton I. Aduaka: Ezra (2007)--SFIFF
Mamoudu Turay Kamara is brooding, charismatic and stylish as
Ezra, a sixteen-year-old trained killing machine who has escaped from "The
Brotherhood," the rebel army in what is obviously Sierra Leone, though not
named here. He is an innocent boy of nine in a prologue when the rebels overrun
his school and kidnap him. Ezra is a Sierra Leone civil war story told, unlike
Edward Zwick's effective but Euro-centric 'Blood Diamond,' entirely from the
African point of view and with Africans in all the main roles. Its strongest
point is probably its authentic look. The director is a Nigerian who lives in
the UK.
In the frame-story of the film, Ezra stands before a Truth and Reconciliation
Commission (on the South African pattern) headed by American Mac Mondale
(Richard Gant) and his sister Onitcha (Mariame N'Diaye), though she has had her
tongue cut out, bears witness that he was present in an attack on the family
village in which their own parents were killed and may even have been the one
who killed them. Before such attacks, including this one, the boy soldiers are
injected by their superiors with amphetamines, so they can fight for four days,
killing heedlessly, in a state of wild excitement and with no shred of a moral
sense. After two days if they don't eat, Ezra says, they hallucinate and see
demons all around them. After many such experiences the boys develop protective
amnesia. The Commission isn't a trial, but Mac Mondale wants Ezra to confess to
crimes. He won't. He denies any memory of them.
In its opening passage about the young kidnapped Ezra the film sketches in how
the new recruits are indoctrinated, motivated by fear, and brainwashed to
forget their families and live for the cause, worshiping their AK-47's.
"No hand, no vote" was the rule of the raids: villagers' hands were
cut off to frighten them from voting. Ezra has plenty of trauma, but this atrocity
is depicted more graphically in 'Blood Diamond.' A surprise and shock: to find
that there are girl soldiers too. One Ezra meets up with, Mariam (Mamusu
Kallon), becomes the mother of his child. While he can't remember how to read,
she comes from a Maoist intellectual journalist father and joined up out of
conviction.
Ezra eventually leaves "the Brotherhood" with others, including
Mariam, in protest because they are not being fed properly. We also get
glimpses of the subject of Blood Diamond, the whites who trade weapons and also
drugs for diamonds, the glittering but tainted fruits of this warfare.
It's important to have this material in a film with authentic settings and
actors and from the boy soldier's point of view. The film points out at the end
that there are about 300,000 child soldiers fighting on the globe, 120,000 of
them in Africa.
'Ezra' is consistent in its convincing look, but otherwise marred by some very
serious flaws. The framework of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is its
first undoing, because it leads the screenplay into a chaotic series of
flashbacks whose chronology is impossible to follow; some reviewers have
commented that their order is as blasted as Ezra's drug-addled and traumatized
mind. And in the switching back and forth between the flashbacks and the
Commission proceedings, the latter are increasingly overwhelmed by the war
drama and begin to seem anticlimactic.
The chronology of the various flashbacks becomes even more confusing as Ezra's
escape from the Brotherhood gets mixed in with his earlier service, and the
rhythm of the story is hobbled. This is one reason why things are confusing.
Equally damaging to the natural flow is the fact that all characters speak
English rather than whatever they might actually have spoken in individual
scenes (Sierra Leone's official language is English but there are 24 native
tongues). And to make things worse the voices are post-dubbed, so they're
noticeably out of sink. Even Mamoudu Turay Kamara often delivers his English
lines in a stilted manner, and you can see the mouths moving before the voices
come out. In a few scenes the dialogue is barely comprehensible.
Given how sketchy the story becomes in this treatment, it would be better to
read one of several books on the subject of boy soldiers in Africa, notably
Ismael Beah's 'A Long Way Gone: Memories of a Boy Soldier' (Feb. 2007), which
presents the experience eloquently and in more detail, though even Beah's
memories are not always completely reliable, for the same reason that Ezra's are
absent: protective amnesia and damaged recall due to drugs and stress.
'Ezra' was introduced at Sundance 15 months ago where it was nominated for the
Grand Jury prize; received several awards in Africa, and has been in limited US
release since February. Given these facts and the film's inherent weaknesses,
the decision to include it in SFIFF 2008 is open to question.
Seen as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival May 2008.
Offscreen.com :: “African” Cinema: A Comparative Look at Blood ... “African”
Cinema: A Comparative Look at Blood
Diamond and Ezra ~ Nigeria vs. Hollywood ~ by Becky Korman from Offscreen
Ezra Olivier Barlet from Africultures, March 27,
2007
'Ezra,' Tragic Tale of Child Soldiers in Africa Carolyn Weaver from News VOA
Award winner war film director Newton Aduaka says elitism and ... April 15, 2008
Blogs on African Films: Ezra--The best African film
I saw this year... Nikodimos
Fikru
Junior
Journal: Child soldiers:
first-hand witnesses 3 stories by Jane Peters, Brima Lakoh, and
Mohamed Kuteh from Sierra Leone
“Modern History of Sierra Leone”.
Cry Free Town. History: from 1990
to 1999
BBC NEWS | Africa | Ezra wins top African film prize James Copnall from the BBC News, March 3, 2007
Vertigo
Magazine, Article - EVENT HORIZON: Letter from Ouagadougou ... Graeme McElheran from Vertigo magazine from a Film festival (great photo) in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Spring, 2007
The movie
« EZRA », directed by Newton
ADUAKA, won the highest ... Consulate General of France in Lagos
Director interview
from Plan USA, March 7, 2007
Read S. James
Snyder's interview with director Newton I. Aduaka in the New York Sun February 8, 2008
The New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold)
indieWIRE Michael
Joshua Rowin
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
The New York Sun (S. James Snyder) feature and an interview with the director
The
House Next Door [Lauren Wissot]
Boy Soldiers | The New York
Observer Andrew Sarris
The Village
Voice [Ella Taylor]
Film Journal International (Eric Monder)
more... Facets Multi Media
Chicago
Reader | Movie Festivals | The African Diaspora Film ... Reese Pendleton
EZRA previously at Film Forum
in New York City film web page
Affleck, Ben
GONE BABY GONE B 88
I always thought it was the things you don’t choose that makes you who you are. —Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck)
A surprisingly complex
film that isn’t over when it’s over, that leaves you wondering how you got from
point A to point B when so much in between seemed ridiculously contrived,
almost defying belief, yet somehow in the end, there’s still plenty to like
about this film, much of it from going against the grain. First of all there’s Casey Affleck (Patrick
Kenzie), absolutely nobody’s version of a hero, especially fresh off his performance
where the title of the film outright calls his character a coward, THE
ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD (2007), recalled awhile
back as one of the crazy lunkheads in Gus van Sant’s GERRY (2002), who now
appears as one of the strangest leading characters, as he could just as easily
be anyone, the kind of guy who disappears unnoticed in a crowd. But here he’s Patrick Kenzie, a private eye
with a gun and a beautiful babe (Michelle Monaghan), a short-fused badass who
stands up to punks on the street as well as thugs in all walks of life, keeping
his brain on alert while the world is spinning out of control all around
him. This is as improbable as Elliot
Gould playing a mumbling Philip Marlowe in a sun tinged take on Raymond Chandler’s
film noir world in Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE (1973), which by the way
also caught us off guard, but worked.
Second of all there’s the man behind the camera, a former tabloid king
whose acting career and reputation have fizzled to record lows, as he’s become
an easy target, routine fodder for jokes condemning him as a lamebrain to the
second hand bin. What’s he trying to do
here, take on the persona of George Clooney as a clever mastermind behind the
camera? And third there’s Morgan
Freeman, a man whose reputation is rock solid in his role as chief of police, a
man’s man, a leader of men, the kind of guy you would want to have in your
corner in a time of trouble, as he’s wise enough to pass for several men. And finally there’s Amy Ryan (at the time of
the release, who?), as unsympathetic a character as the screen has seen in
ages, and yet it is this director who remains undaunted by her scandalous
behavior, who by the end of this film makes us all question ourselves, like who
are we to judge? Yet judgments are made
throughout this film, most with enormous consequences, which makes this a
highly provocative crime thriller about a stolen baby, where a private eye and
his good looking partner are called upon to look through the cracks and scour
the dregs of what the police usually overlook or can’t see.
Opening in first person
narration, this initially has the feel of a literary warhorse like SOPHIE’S
CHOICE (1982), where the poetic thoughts invoke something outside our
comprehension, beyond our grasp, yet then veers into the working class
neighborhoods of Boston in a completely unpretentious view of the world, where
a baby has gone missing and a distraught family is on the news begging for her
safe return. Suspicious of the police,
the family hires this improbable young couple, hoping they know people who
don’t talk to the police. Into the seedy
underworld they go, with the beautiful girl following his every move into the
gutter, through back room bars, into the homes of crack dealers, where we learn
that the foul-mouthed crackhead mother (Amy Ryan) with the missing girl moves
within these circles, a mother who may have put her own daughter at risk just
for a chance to get high. Eventually the
private eyes team up with a couple of veteran detectives (Ed Harris and Nick
Poole), an unsavory relationship from the outset, each openly suspicious of the
other, where Kenzie is told to “Go back to your Harry Potter books.” What’s most surprising perhaps to the viewer
is Affleck’s immediate ascension to lead man on the case, where he appears more
like a cop than a cop, yet he’s not supposed to be a cop, just a guy from the
neighborhood. This is the first of a
series of improbable occurrences that stretch one’s credulity, but Affleck
makes it work with his profanity laced chutzpah, standing up to thugs and hoods
like he’s been doing it all his life, showing the kind of balls that gains
immediate acceptance into a cop’s world.
As the danger mounts, so do the unsavory characters. The division between male and female is
tested, as they’re challenged in very different ways. The tense atmosphere makes it hard to
separate the good guys from the bad, as they’re continuously interwoven into
each other’s lives, mirror reflections of this kind of sick underworld where
intense flare ups are routine, where staring down the barrel of a gun becomes
the measure of a man, not the kind of world most of us would choose to enter,
which makes it all the more intriguing when we witness moral leaps of faith.
This brooding
contemplative thriller is a series of mood swings that moves like a chessboard
across this murky landscape, where every action causes an unexpected reaction,
with inexplicable consequences that only grow darker as the film
progresses. Monaghan is overly pretty
and never feels right when the going gets rough, but the rest of the cast has a
hard edge that’s been through tough times.
Written by MYSTIC RIVER (2003) novelist Dennis Lehane, we’re once again
asked to examine modern day morals under siege, where there’s a thick layer of
grime like quicksand just under the surface pulling us all too easily into this
morass of moral ambiguity where it’s much simpler to look the other way, and
righteous indignity has a youthful, idealist resemblance to Crusader Rabbit
with a witty arcane charm that feels instantly outdated and out of place. Despite some off-the-rails plot twists, this
is a film of ideas where the believability of the actors makes all the
difference in the world and the strong performances are supported by the weight
of the film, a surprisingly strong effort that never bows to the outsider money
interests of happy endings commercialism and maintains its integrity right
through to the end in a shot that visually recalls the final shot of Ryan
Gosling in HALF NELSON (2006), but offers a bleaker ray of hope.
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
It’s no rare thing that a film gets buzz for its
director. It’s a rare thing when that director has never made a film before.
It’s an even rarer thing when the film by that first-timer turns out to be as
astonishingly confident and shrewd as actor-turned-director Ben Affleck’s Gone
Baby Gone. (Apparently
Affleck also directed a hilariously titled 16-minute 1993 short “I Killed My
Lesbian Wife, Hung Her on a Meat Hook, and Now I Have a Three-Picture Deal at
Disney,” and wouldn’t I love to see that...) Based upon the novel by Dennis Lehane (who also wrote the book upon which Mystic
River was based), this is the story of a missing child, the young
private investigator who is trying to find her, and the sordid underbelly of
contemporary America that is exposed by the conflicting human urges a child in
jeopardy elicits from an array of good and decent people... not to mention the
much baser drives that parenthood cannot contain. Did Helene McCready (Amy
Ryan: Capote)
sell her four-year-old daughter for cash? Trade her for drugs? Let her become a
pawn in a feud among street thugs? This is the direction PI Patrick Kenzie’s
(Casey Affleck: Ocean’s
Thirteen) inquiry is taking, and where it shifts from there is even
more appalling, in a depressingly desperate way. The bleak victory here is in
Affleck’s wickedly unforgiving eye for the insularity of neighborhood, for
authentic working-class Boston, populated by the kinds of real faces, ravaged
by drink or drugs or plain old despair, that we seldom see in studio films, and
by small-minded attitudes about class pride that are the opposite of the
self-respect they pretend to. Affleck’s feature debut is so visually and
thematically astute, in fact, that it makes you look anew at
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Child-abduction
stories are a sticky proposition, because their inherent suspense invites the
most sickening sort of exploitation, as audiences are left to wonder what's
being done to an innocent, defenseless creature. But Gone Baby Gone,
based on the Dennis Lehane novel and directed with steady assurance by Ben
Affleck, works hard to defuse this tension in favor of a deeper, more
unexpected meditation on parenthood. Behind the camera, Affleck's presence is
as modest and workmanlike as his performances in front of it have often been
brash; as a Bostonian and a new father, he has a strong connection to the
material that makes itself felt in the well-tended performances and the
authentic portrait of working-class Dorchester. There's little pretense to it,
and none of the Method distractions that nearly sabotaged Clint Eastwood's
recent Lehane adaptation Mystic River. The film simply dives headlong
into a swamp of ambiguities and considers how to do right in an imperfect
situation.
Casey Affleck
probably wouldn't be the first casting choice of many filmmakers who aren't
related to him, but the qualities that make him such a curious leading man make
him the right choice, too. A more assertive actor might not have suggested what
a predicament his character's private detective gets himself into when he agrees
to look into an abduction case. Though the police, led by unit chief Morgan
Freeman and his ace detective Ed Harris, are using all their resources to track
down the missing daughter of junkie mother Amy Ryan, the girl's aunt (Amy
Madigan) hires Casey Affleck and his partner/girlfriend Michelle Monaghan to
pursue a supplemental investigation. The P.I.'s access to Dorchester's seamier
elements ("the guys who don't talk to police") gives him an
advantage, but he naturally bumps heads with the authorities as a result.
Though Ryan
dutifully plays the role of tearful parent for the camera, her negligence and
substance abuse are nearly as much an issue as her lost child, which provides a
fascinating subtext to the investigation. If the girl is found, her return
won't exactly be the feel-good story of the year. On this point, Gone Baby
Gone has a gratifyingly realistic take on what child-welfare issues are
really like, and it makes things more complicated for the people in charge of
tracking her down. Credit for the pungent dialogue, which is nearly as salty as
The Departed's and often as funny, should probably go more to Lehane
than to the screenplay co-written by Affleck and Aaron Stockard, but Affleck
gets near-perfect performances from his actors, with Harris a particular
standout as a detective whose emotions get the better of him. Though its
procedural goes a little soft in the middle, Gone Baby Gone quietly
accumulates in power, leading to one of the more subtly devastating final shots
in recent memory.
Amazing, really, how quickly fortunes and perceptions can
change in
As Lehane’s fans know, Gone Baby Gone is actually
the fourth book in a series centered on a private-dick couple, Patrick Kenzie
(Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan). The movie, co-written by
Affleck with his friend Aaron Stockard (who actually has been credited
as Matt Damon’s assistant!), wisely starts from scratch, offering only a few
vague hints regarding the pair’s troubled past. Longtime residents of
If it seems like I’m being deliberately cagey about plot details, that’s because Lehane’s story involves a truly wacko twist, one that strains credulity to an almost crippling degree. It’s up to the actors to make this revelation seem remotely plausible, and they collectively do a heroic job, aided by Affleck’s intimate knowledge of his hometown’s geographical and socioeconomic niceties. Casey Affleck, with his frail physique and slightly strangled voice, at first seems an odd choice for Kenzie, who’s meant to be something of a badass; only with hindsight does it become clear how crucial that amalgam of strength and weakness is to the character’s ultimate destination. But Gone Baby Gone’s true MVP is Amy Ryan (HBO’s The Wire), who plays the missing girl’s spectacularly unfit mother—a coked-up disaster in stiletto heels. It’s a truly bracing performance, equal parts blithe disregard and desperate need; Ryan somehow manages to make the woman at once Gorgon-level monstrous and indelibly human, which is precisely what’s required if the movie’s devastating final scene is going to make any emotional sense.
It’s that final scene, more than anything else, that makes Gone Baby Gone feel like a genuine tragedy, and Ben Affleck deserves enormous credit for remaining faithful to Lehane’s uncompromisingly bleak vision. I do find it unfortunate that arriving at this powerful moment necessitated such a preposterous series of events—in the end, it’s just hard to buy that certain people would do the things we discover they’ve done, however honorable their intentions. And yet few recent American movies have been so willing to question the value of rectitude, to suggest that right and wrong can sometimes be nearly impossible to determine. Gone Baby Gone ends not in a hailstorm of bullets or a volley of shouted recriminations, but with the almost offhand shrug of a man coming face to face with the consequences of a decision he’s made—a decision in which he chose to uphold every standard of justice this country was founded upon. To borrow a phrase from Spike Lee, he did the right thing. And he now beholds a private hell of his own making. Maybe Affleck can relate.
The sense of community has vanished. The neighborhood is no
more. We live in isolated exclusivity from each other, no longer keeping up
with the Joneses, but rather avoiding them outright. We’ve got politicians
saying it takes a village to raise our kids, and yet the notion today of such
togetherness is so oblique as to practically blot out the white flight suburban
sun. Privacy has been replaced by isolationism, imagined horrendous actions
playing out a mere few feet from your own sordid secrets. And we don’t care, as
long as we are safe. As he wanders through his
In the hands of first time director Ben Affleck, Gone Baby Gone arrives as one of 2007’s finest films. Taken from a novel by Mystic River author Dennis Lehane, this simple story of an abducted little girl, the surrounding investigation, and the suspicious mother at the center, has the kind of narrative power and acting prowess that elevates it above other like minded dramas. By capturing a sense of society lost, by using both the media focus and the behind closed doors denouements that seem to follow such situations, Affleck produces tragedy on an epic Greek scale and moviemaking of classic neo-noir artistry. In combination with some of the most riveting performances in recent memory, as well as a true sense of setting, what we wind up with is an incredibly dense and layered exploration of human ethics.
The saga of little Amanda McCready is already an overhyped
press sensation when her distraught aunt Beatrice contacts local investigator
Kenzie. Along with his live-in girlfriend/partner Angie Gennaro, the couple is
known for helping debt collectors locate deadbeats. Reluctant to take on the
case at first, a conversation with the child’s blasé, drug addled mother Helen
changes everything. Realizing a local dope dealer may be involved (the
kidnapping may have something to do with stolen drop money), Kenzie confronts
the hood. His responses raise even more questions. Worse, a local pedophile has
just been released from jail, and he’s holed up in a squalid shack with some
fellow addicts. All signs point to an imminent threat to Amanda’s well being.
With the help from a pair of
To give away more of the plot would absolutely ruin Gone Baby Gone. One of this film’s greatest strengths is the fact finding interactions between star Casey Affleck (Ben’s brilliant brother) and the individuals he interrogates. There’s a snarky, smug strategy and streetwise strength in how Kenzie handles these situations. He relies on alliances, long standing reputation, and an almost omniscient knowledge of underworld mechanics to dig behind the bullshit and discover the truth. These wonderfully evocative moments, scattered throughout the film like rewards at the end of a complicated maze, are the kind of payoffs we anticipate and expect. After all, hints and suggestions can only take us so far. Director Affleck understands this, and purposefully allows the verbal fireworks to close up a few loose ends before unraveling a couple more.
This is also a movie about attitude. Among the various victims
and suspects presented, we can see a well honed stance, a formed façade given
to the rest of the world to judge or junk. From the seemingly straight laced
detectives who combine caring with a well earned callousness, to the McCready
family and friends who offer conflicting messages of disgust and despair, the
universe of this
So does the acting. While his turn in The Assassination of
Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was amazing, Casey Affleck’s work here
is a revelation. He is so radiant, so unabashed in his studied swagger, that we
breathlessly anticipate his next move. During a crucial shoot-out between
Kenzie and the aforementioned house of drugs and depravity, the combination of
fear and fierceness illustrate Affleck’s approach perfectly. He can talk the
talk and walk the walk. Equally good are Ed Harris and John Ashton as the
There are many other brilliant turns here – Morgan Freeman’s cloistered captain, Amy Madigan’s proud Irish aunt, Amy Ryan’s hedonistic hellion of a mom, Edi Gathegi’s slang spouting Haitian don – all proving that, when it comes to directing, Affleck really understands actors. But he’s also in tune with the artform’s more ephemeral facets. From the opening shots, where the Boston neighborhood is painted in brutal, authentic strokes (the extras give the concept of local color a dark, disenfranchised quality), to the set piece sequences where the plot points play out in electric, kinetic splashes, this is a tour de force that truly lives up to the tag. Gone Baby Gone shows a mastery of all the cinematic basics. Affleck then goes a step further and suggests that he knows how to turn said strategies into masterpieces.
Yet it’s the theme of ethical dilemma that this film returns to time and time again. Everyone here is in a quandary – from the victim whose dope-fueled lifestyle choices may have resulted in the literal loss of her child, to the PI who is hoping a successful resolution of this case will lead to more legitimate work – and how they respond to and decide these issues stand as Gone Baby Gone’s biggest reveals. Even characters we don’t think have a backdoor agenda turn out to be trading on their principles. It makes for a moody, complex entertainment, the kind of narrative that drags you in different directions to the point where you can’t anticipate where you’re going next – and you don’t really mind. The journey is so stunning that its frequent bouts of unbelievable cruelty really don’t distract.
Indeed, the only negative thing one can say about this film is that director Affleck’s Jenny from the Block tabloid rep may ruin the chances for a wider audience embrace. This is the kind of movie that resurrects your faith in film - not just as a diversion, but as the creator of meaningful human mythology. From its initial crawl to its final dour beat, Gone Baby Gone delivers on its premise, its promise, and its propositions. We may not like where it goes, and the images it offers can be too harsh for mellowed mainstream eyes, but the resulting work is celluloid at its most classical and filmmaking at its finest. Ben Affleck deserves a lot of credit for reinventing himself as a talent to be reckoned with, not ridiculed. Like the neighborhoods sitting at the center of his amazing movie, such tabloid sentiments are now gone, baby…gone.
There
Will Be Choice: Why Gone Baby Gone Is the Best Film of 2007 Robert C. Cumbow from 24LiesASecond, May 11,
2008
DVD Talk Brian Orndorf, also seen here: OhmyNews
[Brian Orndorf]
Gone
Baby Gone (2007) Bryant Frazer from
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(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
THE TOWN B 85
USA (123 mi)
2010 ‘Scope
A film that seems to be
an anthem to Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood known for its generational proclivity
for armed robbery and car thieves, that is told with such a solemn tone that is
bears a resemblance to Spike Lee’s 25th HOUR (2002), which became an homage to
9/11 in New York City, as in both films, there’s an underlying acknowledgement
of the terrible price of lives lost, yet there’s also a lyrical upswing, as
both feature oddly poetic gestures of hope, of a world that could somehow be
just a little bit better. First and
foremost, the film is beautifully immersed in Affleck’s home town, his one true
love, the working class neighborhoods of
This is a white
knuckles bank heist thriller that moves with electrifying energy, that shows
with meticulous precision how heavy weapons can prevail in a bank robbery, how
people are compliant when a gun gets stuck in their faces, as the overriding
concern under the immediate circumstances is not the bank, but that no one
wants to die. This film shows how easily
one arrives at that heart pumping moment when you’d do anything to comply. In a well executed heist, this takes about ten
seconds, at which point it’s up to the robber’s sophistication to find out how
to get the maximum reward in the least amount of time. This particular crew is shrewd at covering
their tracks, confident they are leaving no evidence behind, as their skill set
in their profession is near brilliant. All
throughout though we’re expected to believe these are just a couple of boys
from the block. There are more changes
of professional uniforms shown here in the course of their dirty business that
by the end, one wonders where the telephone booth is that Clark Kent uses to
change into Superman. Any team this good
would probably have mob connections, but this appears to be a ragtag bunch of
guys from the old neighborhood who just happen to have grown up together. Chris Cooper excels in a scene as Affleck’s
father in prison, where the generational ties run deep, yet he exudes a
fatherly anger and despair at his helplessness to change his
circumstances. In one of the best
scenes, the police pull them all in for questioning, where Affleck recognizes a
local cop from the neighborhood, asking that cop what he would call someone who
grew up in a poor but close-knit neighborhood where everyone knew everyone
else’s secrets and then used that information to put away as many of them
behind bars as possible? This is
followed by macho maneuvering by the FBI where Affleck instantly realizes they
have nothing on him. But this is the
heart of the film, as neighborhoods are comprised of friends with well kept
secrets, which is why they remain friends.
In
While this is a
character study of a criminal group psychology, it also shows Affleck as a
conflicted and unwilling participant, as after awhile he wants out, where
there’s something of a hugely contrived love story at the center of all this
with Rebecca Hall, where he envisions a different life for himself through his
connection with her, where thoughts run through his mind similar to Brian Cox’s
dream sequence spoken to his son Monty (Ed Norton) at the end of 25th HOUR,
where a single decision could affect the rest of his lifetime, as it could
literally reconnect an entirely new set of possibilities. Much of this turns out to be Affleck fighting
as much with his own partners, who don’t want him to leave, as with his
condemned soul, where he’s trying to find a redemptive path. This doesn’t have nearly the punch or the
redemptive poetry of the Spike Lee film, one of his best, especially coming so
soon after 9/11, but Affleck does generate astonishing suspense, as these guys
are always on the alert for getting caught, always living on the edge where
something could go wrong at any moment, yet the audience is mesmerized by the
brilliantly well executed heist sequences and the frantic car chases which are
among the best on celluloid, though in typical Hollywood fashion one notices
for all the bullets flying, few people get shot. It’s a surprisingly well-paced film
throughout, entertaining as hell, leaving an ambiguity at the end which may be
challenging for the audience, as it can be a bit confusing telling the good
guys from the bad. Even with Johnny Depp
playing John Dillinger in PUBLIC ENEMIES (2009), we knew he was a bad guy, a
crook with a heartless soul, but Affleck’s character is still left struggling
for his, as if there’s the slightest possibility that he could turn into a
decent guy, even when all the evidence points otherwise. This sleight of hand trick may work for some,
as a good lead performance can charm the pants off of anyone, but the real
talent here is not in any real character development, as in the much superior
Australian film ANIMAL KINGDOM (2010), but in the kinetic energy displayed in
the chase sequences mixed in with the suspense of some daredevil heists.
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
On-screen titles note the high number of carjacking and
robbery cases in Boston's Charlestown neighborhood, but Ben Affleck's sophomore
directorial outing is less intrigued by how the city that pioneered the
Independence could have become the nation's capital of blue-collar crime than
it is determined to stitch a cops n' robbers yarn out of Michael Mann's least interesting
standbys. Casting himself as the center of a gridlock of heists and familial
vendettas that Jon Hamm's FBI agent describes as "fucking Townie
hopscotch," he plays the incongruously sensitive organizer of a motley
crew of outlaws, torn between loyalty toward his volatile partner in crime
(Jeremy Renner, bursting with Cagneyisms) and love for the bank manager he took
hostage (Rebecca Hall). The action is shot with heat and a feeling for taut,
battered, tattooed flesh, but the film lacks the specific sense of locale and
human-sized menace that Affleck's debut, Gone Baby
Gone, exuded. One can imagine the James Gray of Two Lovers
gravitating toward Hall's affectingly confused character; unfortunately, with
Affleck behind and in front of the camera, you're left with a fatuous star
vehicle that leaves little doubt about who gets the most soulful close-ups.
The Onion A.V. Club
review [B-] Sam Adams
As impressively controlled as Gone Baby Gone was, Ben Affleck’s directorial debut had a slightly airless quality, as if the film had been finished, then sealed behind a layer of plastic. His second feature, The Town, is a looser and more sprawling affair, more conventional, but also more assured. It’s also more of an Affleck movie. Though he stayed behind the camera for his first outing, this time, he reserves the central role for himself: that of a professional bank robber who finally gets a whiff of the straight life.
The son of convicted larcenist Chris Cooper, now serving a life bid in prison, Affleck is the brains behind his four-man crew, which includes lifelong friend and occasional sparring partner Jeremy Renner. They’re prolific enough to draw the attention of FBI agents Jon Hamm and Titus Welliver, but careful enough not to show their faces or leave any useful evidence behind—at least until wild card Renner decides to nab bank manager Rebecca Hall as collateral for their quick getaway. Physically, Hall gets away unharmed, but she’s emotionally wrecked, enough that she falls too quickly for Affleck, who comes sniffing around at Renner’s behest to make sure she doesn’t think about going to the cops. As Affleck and Hall’s relationship deepens and turns romantic, the increasingly volatile Renner presses for bigger and less well-prepared jobs, culminating in an attack on one of old Boston’s crown jewels.
Although the movie is set in
Time Out Online
(David Jenkins) review [3/5]
As a director, Ben Affleck
is more of a grafter than a dreamer. The same could be said of his writing.
Hell, why don’t we throw his acting in there as well? Brushing aside the light
alt-indie trappings of his well liked directorial debut, ‘Gone Baby Gone’, this
new soulful shoot-em-up, ‘The Town’, plays it straighter than a pool cue,
offering the sort of solid, proficiently written cops ‘n’ robbers yarn that is
the stuff of a thousand 'Bluffer's Guide to Moviemaking' tomes.
The title refers to
‘I watch a lot of TV – “CSI”, “CSI:
The film follows the genre rule book line by line, detail by detail. Doug hopes
that his One Last Job (pinching the concession stand haul from the Boston Red
Sox’s home ground) will be his ticket out of the ghetto and that he’ll be able
to live out his days in
It's hard to fault 'The Town' as a slice of robust craftmanship. But it's a
movie that has little to distinguish it from a very large collection of
similar tales.
User reviews from imdb Author: aschein81 from
You may now officially forget about Armaggedon,
Affleck's second effort in the director's chair, following his superb
"Gone Baby Gone" back in 2007, once again lands him back in the mean
streets of working class Boston. Based on the award-winning novel "Prince
of Thieves" by Chuck Hogan, the story outline in "The Town" is
mostly nothing new, as the majority of it is a routine police procedural
involving FBI agents on the hunt for a group of talented bank robbers led by
Affleck and Jeremy Renner. The plot itself doesn't have many surprises, for we
in the audience know that the robbers will always get away until the climactic
stand-off with the police towards the end. Affleck knows he isn't creating
anything original here with the plot, but he successfully takes the genre of
the inner-city crime thriller and executes it with great precision - with
superb acting performances, a sprinkling of tender romance, and a
heart-pounding level of suspense throughout. Oh yeah, and did I mention that
those nun costumes they wear when committing the robberies are really badass?
The performances themselves are the heart of the film, as Affleck has cast
actors in roles that make them completely believable and allow the audience to
care about them. Blake Lively is outstanding in her very small role as a
drugged out stripper, even though she has no more than 10 minutes of screen
time. She is completely unrecognizable from her well-known role on "Gossip
Girl." Jeremy Renner is terrifying as Affleck's co-leader of the gang. One
can sense through his character just how much this life of crime in part of his
blood, even if he tries to hide his true emotions by hiding behind violence and
intimidation. The talented veteran Chris Cooper is also spectacular as
Affleck's father in prison. His one, 3-minute long scene with Affleck behind
glass could be a training manual for young actors wondering how it's done.
Everyone else in the film, including Affleck, is strong and does the best they
can at making their characters appear authentic.
Affleck appears to also have a great understanding of suspense, pacing, and
editing, as I was completely immersed in every moment of the film - from the
gripping opening minute until the ending credits. The film rarely feels like a
typical slam-bam action movie (until the last 20 minutes when the film goes a
bit over the top with a larger than necessary climax), but rather as a
character-driven drama that exposes the culture of the people in this
neighborhood who live in this cycle of generational crime. It's just a part of
who these people are and what they know. Some of them desire to get out of it,
but then they feel like they are "too good" for their friends by
leaving them behind, as is true with the struggle of leaving any type of
criminal gang. Affleck does a solid job in the script department by allowing
the fast-paced dialogue amongst these characters to feel natural. He even
throws in an occasional witty and hysterical line to break the film's serious
tension. One that I especially liked was a satirical reference to crime shows
like CSI and Bones. Some of the dialogue is difficult to hear given the strong
The action / bank robberies are exceptionally directed and worth the price of
admission themselves, as one would expect in a film focused on umm, drum roll
please…..bank robbers. However, they are intelligently spaced apart throughout
the film's 2 hour run time to never make them too mundane. There are only 3
total robberies / heists in the film, with a great deal of character
development in between. There is actually an enormous amount of tension and
build-up between the 1st and 2nd heists in the film, which allows the 2nd heist
to have that much more of an effect on the audience when it does occur. The
only flaw in the direction of these scenes, is when the film goes for an overblown
climax in the last 20 minutes. I suppose he was trying to please the
action-friendly crowd, or the studio required him to add in more action. I'm
not sure. He just adds in too much gunfire and SWAT teams to make it appear
more Hollywood-esquire and unrealistic, and that takes away a bit of the
reality and honesty from the first 75% of the film. However, that flaw aside,
90% of what is in this film is superior to most of anything shown in theaters
so far this year, with the exception of Chris Nolan's masterful
"Inception." It is well worth your time, and it demonstrates
Affleck's true talent both as a scribe and director. Now I think it's time for
all of us to tell
DVD Talk (Jamie S.
Rich) review [4/5]
The Parallax
Review [Mark Dujsik]
Pajiba
(Daniel Carlson) review
TIME
Magazine (Mary Pols) review
Slant Magazine
(Bill Weber) review
The
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
FlickFilosopher.com
[MaryAnn Johanson]
DVD Talk (Brian Orndorf)
review [5/5] also seen here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
RopeofSilicon (Brad
Brevet) review [C+]
DVD Talk (Tyler
Foster) review [4/5]
DVD Talk (Jason Bailey)
review [4/5]
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Straight (Patty Jones) review
One Guy's Opinion
(Frank Swietek) review [B]
CHUD.com
(Nick Nunziata) review
The Land of Eric (Eric D.
Snider) review [B]
CineSnob.net (Kiko Martinez)
review [B-]
Black
Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Jeremy
Renner on Blake Lively and Boston Accents
Christopher John Farley interviews Jeremy Renner from The Wall Street Journal, September 10,
2010
The
Hollywood Reporter review Sheri
Linden
Entertainment Weekly
review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The
Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review [3/4]
The
Independent (Geoffrey Macnab) review [3/5]
The
Guardian (Xan Brooks) review [2/5]
The Boston Phoenix
(Peter Keough) review
Philadelphia
Inquirer (Steven Rea) review [3/4]
Austin
Chronicle review [3.5/5]
San
Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York
Times review A.O. Scott
Anatomy
of a Scene: ‘The Town’ Ben Affleck discusses a scene from the film on YouTube (2:16 )
ARGO B- 81
USA (120 mi)
2012 ‘Scope Official site
Every one of Affleck’s three
directed films have contained a contrived and heavy handed plot twist which
dramatically elevate the theatrical material, where the viewer must suspend
reality as the direction instead goes for Hollywood melodrama, oversaturating
the screen with a kind of hyper-tense reality that exists only in fiction,
where he simply takes poetic license to supercharge his movies. Some may find the amped up suspense
entertaining, where he often matches it with excellent musical choices, such as
Dire Straits and Led Zeppelin here, but there’s also an underlying deceit going
on in the relationship with viewers, where the director is not being
straightforward or honest, as instead he’s exaggerating for the Hollywood
cinematic effect he’s looking for. It’s
this manipulative dishonesty that some might find suspect, as it taints his
prodigal talents as a director.
Affleck’s exaggerated
lie here is the Americanization of history, as told through a
That said, with Argo: Too Good To Be True, Because It Isn’t, Affleck
largely draws from the accounts of Antonio Mendez’s 1999 memoir, The Master of Disguise: My Secret Life in
the CIA, events that were kept classified until President Clinton
declassified them in 1997, and Joshuah Bearman’s 2007 article from Wired magazine (Wired article). Affleck plays Mendez, who won the CIA's
Intelligence Star of Valor for his role in engineering the escape of six
Americans from Tehran in 1980, and the film is largely based from his
self-serving viewpoint. The irony, of
course, is that it was the CIA’s idea to invent a Hollywood style escape, using
a fictitious movie company scouting locations for a sci-fi movie in Tehran,
using an actual script and drawing storyboards, where the six Americans were
given fake Canadian passports, suggesting they are all part of a Canadian movie
production team scouting Iranian locations before all leaving the country
shortly afterwards. The U.S. government
was knee deep in a state of demoralization and utter paralysis during the
hostage crisis, as there was little they could do to counter the negative
publicity of Americans being held hostage and gas prices suddenly skyrocketing,
as if the perpetrators were actually being financially rewarded for this
outrageous act. But there is jubilation
in the streets of Iran and the seeds of revolution, as they get rid of the Shah, an iron-handed tyrannical despot who
was installed by the CIA in 1953 at the American Embassy against a
democratically elected, but Soviet backed Prime Minister, so their liberty is
gained, at least in their eyes, by standing up to the “Great Satan.” Traitors and collaborators are strung up on
the streets as a message to citizens that the last vestiges of the old ways
have been severed and a new day has begun.
The real untold story, which remains secretly classified to this day, is
how newly elected President Ronald Reagan orchestrated an Algiers
Accords, which many suspect was an arms for hostages deal with the
Iranians, where on the day of his inauguration all the hostages were
mysteriously released. But of course,
that history hasn’t been written yet. So
instead we get this smaller version of a feel good story, where
Perhaps the best part
of the movie is the daring escape sequence, which is another example of the
great fictionalization of history, turning it into an homage to DIE HARD
(1988), but despite the seemingly overwhelming odds, where every possible
obstacle must be overcome and everything that can go wrong does go wrong, all
ratcheting up the intense pressure of the moment, that tension was generated
with more believability and suspense than the fake film crew’s location
inspection. The team is quickly swallowed
up by the streets of Tehran which are literally teeming with hostile
demonstrators, where the portrayal of blood curdling anger and hatred all
seemingly projected at them is a perfect example of Hollywood hysteria, using
stereotypes and demonizing images to depict a near surreal world of fanaticized
hatred when they are surrounded by an angry mob, a dreamlike nightmare that is
in every respect an unmitigating disaster.
The Arab world (including Arab-Americans) has never recovered from this
kind of hostile depiction in the movies, remaining fodder for racial profiling,
as they will forever be portrayed as the fanatics, even as there are homegrown
American fanatics like Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad, or Charles
Whitman. It would be hard to imagine an
Arab-American love story coming out of the current Hollywood culture, which
makes no attempt to understand or appreciate Islamic culture either in
television or the movies, reflecting the prevailing hostile culture of the
times, much like the 50’s never portrayed gays or blacks or married couples
sleeping together on television.
Unfortunately it takes generations before these kinds of negative
depictions are overcome. While it should
be understood that the initial security breach in 1979 allowed a swarm of
Islamic students and militants to overrun the American Embassy, much like
recent events where the American Ambassador to Libya was murdered, where in
each situation the nation’s long-term tyrannical leader was deposed in
disgrace, where pent-up street turbulence fills the void of an absent leadership
or authority, where at least in Iran, that legitimate authority was replaced
not by a democratically elected leader, but by a Supreme Leader of Iran, a theocratic leader
who is the highest ranking political and religious authority in the land. Despite the passing of more than 30 years,
little is known about the nation of Iran in the United States, or their way of
life, even after a long-term military occupation of neighboring Iraq, as
nothing but a constant stream of stereotypes and negative depictions are ever
seen in the movies or in the newspaper reports.
This film, though thoroughly entertaining, will do nothing to alter that
depiction in the eyes of Americans.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam
Adams]
Forty years ago, Argo would have been an easy film to overrate; now, the reverse is true. Over the course of three films, Ben Affleck has emerged as an exceptionally solid, resolutely unspectacular director, the kind whose level of understated craft should be a requirement rather than an aspiration. Things being as they are, however, Argo is an unexpected treat, a cracking true(ish) story whose cast is replete with great character actors: Bryan Cranston, John Goodman, Alan Arkin, Victor Garber, Zeljko Ivanek, Titus Welliver, Chris Messina, Bob Gunton and Richard Kind, and that’s just for starters. Affleck takes the lead as a CIA ex-filtration expert whose job is to smuggle a half-dozen American embassy workers out of locked-down Tehran in 1979, a largely unknown offshoot of the contemporary hostage crisis. The plan — an absurdity arrived at after anything more plausible has fallen through — is for Affleck to enter the country as the second-rung producer of a Hollywood sci-fi movie looking to shoot in Iran, and the rest of the Americans to pose as the film’s crew, a ruse that involves generating ample publicity for the bogus production. There are soft in-jokes about the parallel prevalence of bullshit in the movie industry and covert intelligence, lots of scenes with men in pointy-collared shirts and scruffy beards involved in tense dialogue exchanges — nothing earth-shattering, but enough for a high-level diversion of a kind presently all too rare. Divorce it from awards-season hype, and Argo holds up fine: There’s no need to pretend it’s something it’s not, when what it is works just fine.
Argo: Too Good To Be True, Because It Isn’t David Edelstein from NPR, October 12, 2012
Ben Affleck's Argo is two-two-TWO movies in one, and while neither is especially original, by merging them Affleck pulls off a coup. First, he gives you espionage with the You Are There zing of a documentary. Then he serves up broad showbiz satire. For his final feat, he blends the two into a pulse-pounding nail-biter of a climax. And this all really happened. Most of it. Except for that climax.
The prologue is newsreel-style. A female narrator recounts the U.S. role in the 1953 Iranian coup that installed our ally, the Shah, the 26 years of human-rights abuses that followed, and the Shiite revolution that sent the despot fleeing to the U.S. and the Ayatollah Khomeini to power. Then it's 1979 and a mob is converging on the American Embassy in Tehran. Affleck deftly cuts between news footage and re-enactments, along with scenes of personnel inside the building shredding and burning classified documents. Six people — four men, two women — slip out a side door before they can be taken hostage along with their colleagues.
In the U.S., CIA agents, among them Bryan Cranston with '70s hair, express the fear that if the six — now hiding in the Canadian ambassador's basement — were discovered, they wouldn't be tossed in with the other hostages but publicly executed. How do you get them out?
Chris Terrio's script makes much of the CIA's blunders, from its prediction that the revolution wouldn't happen to proposed scenarios for the sextet's escape — among them a 300-mile bicycle trip to Turkey. Then unstable, maverick agent Tony Mendez, played by Affleck, hatches a scheme by which the six would leave Iran posing as a film crew on a location scout. It's a preposterous idea. But as Cranston explains to a higher-up, it's the best bad idea they have.
Argo is the name of a script Mendez finds in the mansion of has-been producer Lester Siegel, a fictional composite played by Alan Arkin. The scene's other character isn't fictional. Planet of the Apes makeup man John Chambers, played by John Goodman, was central to this operation.
Arkin and Goodman have the only colorful parts in Argo — the six fugitive Americans are like glorified extras, though Clea DuVall is always good to see, and Scoot McNairy has moments as the skeptic with the awful '70s mustache.
The film's climax, a series of movie-ish narrow escapes, had me leaning forward saying, "Go. Go. Go. Go. Go-go-go-go." I was annoyed, though, to learn that after all the movie's assurances of realism, from the prologue to photos over the credits showing the actors side by side with photos of their real-life counterparts, those terrifying close calls are all invented. If it seems too Hollywood to be true, that's because it is.
And then I thought, if they were going to invent, why not make the fugitives more interesting or Affleck's Mendez less of a lump? But my guess is the movie will be nominated for all kinds of awards and make Affleck an A-list director. Studios can do business with a filmmaker who comes on so serious but has a core of Hollywood shamelessness.
Slant Magazine
[Andrew Schenker]
Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers. In Ben Affleck's film, the past is present. Unfolding against the backdrop of the 1979 Iranian revolution and the resulting hostage crisis, the film quite clearly aims to draw parallels between that moment of history and the United States's current and increasingly belligerent attitude toward the Islamic Republic, goaded continually on by a bellicose Israeli state.
In telling the at times whimsical, at times heroic true-life story of C.I.A. "exfiltration" expert Tony Mendez (Affleck), who engineered a daring rescue of six Americans hiding out in the Canadian embassy in Tehran, Affleck and screenwriter Chris Terrio initially aim for a wider historical picture and a sense of balanced geopolitical understanding. In the largely animated opening sequence, a narrator gives us a quick history lesson which condemns the 1953 C.I.A./British overthrow of democratically elected Iranian president Mohammed Mosaddegh and describes the miserable conditions Iranians endured for decades under the U.S.-backed Shah. Similarly, after the revolution occurs and the militants set about killing any Americans left in the country, a C.I.A. operative admits that the U.S. essentially started the bloodbath by taking out Mosaddegh. Affleck further aims for a sense of moral equivalency by counterpointing Iranian revolutionaries burning the American flag with archival news broadcasts of angry middle-Americans torching the Iranian banner.
But this sense of balance is soon lost and the film becomes an increasingly blinkered tale of the heroic C.I.A. versus the Muslim menace, exactly the narrative that today's hawkish politicians love to propagate. It's astonishing how easily the film is content to give into what critic Jack Shaheen might call Reel Bad Arab syndrome, in which every Iranian face is either filled with hatred or suspicion. Granted, in post-revolutionary Iran, people were indeed filled with anger and hostility toward Americans, but Affleck's decision to portray this sense of fury—quite vividly evoked despite the director's distracting penchant for whip pans and arcing shots—not only seems increasingly misguided in a moment when mainstream outlets like Newsweek run headline stories unhelpfully declaring the phenomenon of "Muslim Rage," but seems to play exactly into the simplified us-versus-them narrative of the war on terror.
All of which makes the fact that Affleck has crafted what, at least by some standards, has to be considered a first-rate thriller, all the more depressing. Although the narrative builds slowly, the film, which details Mendez's plan to extricate the Americans by flying to Tehran and having the prisoners pose as a film crew scouting locations for a sci-fi B movie, works up to a second half of almost continual tension followed by a truly exhilarating release. As Mendez meets with a gruff director (Alan Arkin) and an expert makeup man (John Goodman) in preparation for the operation, his need for total verisimilitude necessitating the production of an actual script, storyboards, and publicity materials, Argo gets bogged down by indulging in a series of obvious potshots at the Hollywood system. But by the time Mendez gets to Tehran, the film has abandoned its comic pretensions and moved into full-on thriller terrain, a mode that Affleck handles with consummate ease, give or take an eye-bleeding use of shaky-cam.
It all leads up to the inevitable airport sequence whose nail-biting uncertainties as to whether or not the Americans will be able to make their escape before the authorities realize who they are, are aided by a sustained series of cross-cutting that would make D.W. Griffith proud. Perhaps too proud. In The Birth of the Nation, Griffith infamously built tension by juxtaposing shots of "evil" African Americans with glimpses of the "heroic" Ku Klux Klan riding to the rescue. The cutting in Affleck's film between menacing Muslims and peaceful white Americans is clearly not on the same level of preposterousness as Griffith's fantastical worldview. After all, Iranian revolutionaries really did call for the death of all Americans. And yet, by placing the image of murderous Middle Easterners front and center in his film, there's little doubt that the effect is to reawaken memories of the last time when anti-Iranian sentiment ran rampant in the United States and to stir up similar feelings at exactly the moment when doing so would be most dangerous. No one would deny the thrill of seeing the Americans affect their daring escape. It's only in retrospect, when we wonder what exactly it is we've been cheering, that the momentary excitement gives way to a bitter reminder of how little the American mindset has changed.
a memoir by Antonio Mendez
The Master of Disguise: My Secret
Life in the CIA, the film’s source material
Oscar
Prints the Legend: Argo's Upcoming Academy Award and the Failure of Truth Nima Shirazi from Wide Asleep in America,
February 23, 2013, also seen here: Argo's Oscar and
the failure of truth Nima Shirazi
from Mondoweiss, February 25, 2013
What you
won't see in Argo - World - Macleans.ca
Mark Lijek, a retired U.S. diplomat rescued from Iran, writes about the
real heroes of 1979, from Macleans, February 19, 2013
How the CIA Used a Fake
Sci-Fi Flick to Rescue Americans ... - Wire
Joshuah Bearman2007, also seen here: Wired article
How
Accurate Is Argo? - Slate Magazine
David Haglund from Slate, October 12, 2012
Pick
of the week: Ben Affleck's giddy Iran hostage thriller - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, October 11, 2012
Why
“Argo” doesn’t deserve the Oscar
Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, February 18, 2013
Twitchfilm/Filmfest.ca
[Jason Gorber] Argo and the
“Truthiness” Doctrine, October 15, 2012
Flavorwire
[Jason Bailey] October 12, 2012
'Argo'
and Other Forgivably False “True Story” Films – Flavorwire Jason Bailey, February 19, 2013
Pro-Carter
'Argo' Is Historic Revisionism ... - Investors.com Investor’s
Business Daily (IBD), February 22, 2013, also seen here: critique
Arguing Over Argo Roger Aronoff from Accuracy in Media,
February 25, 2013
Argo:
Truth or Fiction? | Democracy for Bell
Diana, March 24, 2013
Slate
[Dana Stevens] Director Ben
Affleck’s Iran hostage crisis thriller is his best movie yet
Why
Argo Is Unworthy of Best Picture: It's a Fraud Kevin B. Lee from Slate, February 25, 2012
Canada’s
Former Ambassador Feels Slighted by Argo
Daniel Politi from Slate, February 23, 2012
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here: The American Spectator :
Argo
'Argo'
review — Ben Affleck directs and stars in Iran ... - Movieline Alison Willmore, October 11, 2012
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Aghion, Anne
MY NEIGHBOR, MY KILLER
Peter Brunette Peter Brunette at
CANNES -- Award-winning documentarian Anne Aghion is here at
Cannes for the first time with another in her ongoing "Gacaca"
(pronounced Ga-cha-cha) series, which records the ongoing struggle to deal with
the aftermath of the genocidal violence that wracked Rwanda in 1994, when gangs
composed of the dominant Hutus, authorized by the government, slaughtered
nearly a million members, deemed "cockroaches," of the minority Tutsi
community. A theatrical release in any territory is unlikely, but worldwide
television distribution seems assured.
Similar in intent to the work of
In the process, complicated ethical and political questions are raised that
resist easy answers. As a recent authoritative article in The New Yorker by
Philip Gourevich attests, the emotional and moral needs of the victims have
basically been sacrificed, for want of a better option, to the overriding goal
of bringing the country back together.
Shot in gorgeous high-definition Digibeta, this installment of Aghion's series
focuses on several members, two of them victims and two of them murderers, of a
small village. Eschewing the easy intensities of atrocity footage, Aghion
relies for the most part on interviews with the central figures, a Gacaca
"trial," in which the accused and the accusers face each other, and
fascinating (if scarce) connective footage of the contours of life in a
beautiful country that recalls the picturesque landscape of Tuscany.
Perhaps the most striking thing about the film is the deep wisdom, sad
emotional maturity, and even poetry that seems to issue effortlessly from the
mouths of the victims who are, after all, only peasants. The direct
confrontations are infrequent, unfortunately, but when they come the stakes are
raised considerably.
There are two other problems. The first, probably unavoidable, is that reliance
on interviews and exchanges during the Gacaca sessions means that viewers end
up reading subtitles non-stop for the length of the film, and thus often miss
tell-tale facial expressions. The other difficulty, considerably more serious,
is that in her laudable decision to focus on the testimony of the villagers
themselves, Aghion has failed to provide the context for the Gacaca
confrontations, reported in other media sources, that would give us a better
sense of exactly what's at stake in the drama we're witnessing.
My
Neighbor, My Killer Lee Marshall at
Cannes from Screendaily
The Rwandan
genocide of 1994 has spawned a number of feature films, but Anne Aghion’s
remarkable documentary about the ‘Gacaca’ community tribunals is the most
calmly moving guide yet to the emotional landscape of those who were left
behind.
Unlike its
fictional counterparts, My Neighbor… does not lean on Western characters
to translate and mediate the raw horror. Apart from one or two court officials,
everyone we see on screen lives in the same small rural village, Gafumba, and
all played some part in the bloody events of that April – either as relatives
of the victims, or as their killers.
Filmed on
Digibeta in boxy 3:4 format, the film is a condensed, more cinema-oriented
version of a long-running project which has already generated three
award-winning TV documentaries, broadcast on HBO and other channels. Its
testing subject and heavy reliance on subtitles may confine My Neighbor
to niche theatrical audiences, but its educational potential should not be
underestimated. The TV films have been screened in NGOs and community centres
around the world, and have even become part of the process they document – with
viewings for self-confessed Hutu killers before their release from prison.
Gacacas are
hearings conducted by lay judges set up in open-air ‘courtrooms’ by the Rwandan
government in an attempt to facilitate the return to their homes of Hutus
suspected of participating in the 1994 genocide, and encourage rapprochement
between the two ethnic communities by meting out justice on the spot. The
director focuses in on this difficult process in one single farming community.
There are no images of the massacre itself, just an opening caption which tells
us that in less than a hundred days, three-quarters of Rwanda’s ethnic Tutsis
were slaughtered by their Hutu friends, neighbours – sometimes even family
members.
Women
survivors – generally Hutu wives of Tutsi husbands – describe, haltingly, what
it was like to have their menfolk and children butchered, to see a baby
snatched from their back and hacked to death.
Suspected
killers talk in their turn about their innocence, or involvement, but in a more
guarded way: they seem suspicious of the filmmakers, and of the whole
reconciliation act that they are being forced to perform. Gradually some
characters emerge: widows Felicite and Euphrasie, and Abraham Rwamfizi – a Hutu
who, unlike some of his Gacaca co-defendants, seems to be genuinely troubled by
his part in the massacre, even while he protests that he shed no blood.
What comes
across most strongly is the intelligence and humanity of interviewees such as
Felicite as they tussle with their conflicting emotions, and with questions of
truth, justice and forgiveness. The discreet, respectful camera gives them time
to express themselves but is also open to its role as voyeuristic intruder: as
Euphrasie comments to a neighbour: “What strange questions these white people
ask.”
Calmly paced
and sensitively shot, with a certain lyricism in its long shots of country life
and its spare soundtrack of Rwandan vocal music, Aghion’s powerful film sets
the beauty of a country against the unimaginable barbarity what took place
here.
My
Neighbor, My Killer David Hudson at
Scott Macaulay Interview with Aghion
from Filmmaker magazine, May 17, 2009
Dennis Harvey Variety
Agresti, Alejandro
VALENTIN B+ 90
Argentina
With carnival-like, lilting music playing throughout, and a non-stop voiceover from the leading man, who is an overly bright, nine year old kid with oversized black glasses (Rodrigo Noya) who yearns for happiness, as his parents are separated and he lives with his cantankerous old grandmother who never ceases to dislike and criticize everyone she meets, this is an earnest, yet narrow portrait of how adults are seen through the eyes of children. Actually, there’s very little child-like about this kid, as he seems to get along much better in the world of adults, but he misses his parents terribly, and actually counts to a hundred in the hallway, always hoping that his mother, who he never sees, will magically appear. Tired of his hot-tempered father’s philandering ways, with a new girl friend each time he, played by the director himself, shows up for rare visits, he finally meets one he can confide in, like a real mother, played wonderfully by Julieta Cardinali, who’s probably the best thing in this film, particularly the moments when she isn’t saying anything, yet remains warmly connected to his world. It’s wonderfully touching, with moments of brilliant observation and a few oblique suggestions of darker realities, yet its realism is spoiled somewhat by the portrayal of a child to be so beyond his years in adult understandings and observations. The story remains in a story mode, always a little too neat and perfect, which excludes so much of what’s going on in the world outside. Set in the 60’s, with a brief reference to the death of Argentine-born Ché Guevara and Armstrong’s walk on the moon, the turbulence of the times and its historical implications are never addressed.
Agüero, Pablo
SALAMANDER (Salamandra)
Argentina (84 mi)
2008
2008
Festival de Cannes: Part Six Milos Stehlik at Cannes
from Facets Multi Media
A wonderfully
exciting surprise here last night was the premiere of a first feature by a very
young Argentinian filmmaker, Pablo Aguero (he is all of 31), Salamandra.
Set in a “lost valley” in Patagonia, a hangout for renegades and hippies from
all over the world, the film is as ambitious as it is original.
Alba, a
thirty-year old mother, gets out of prison following the end of the
dictatorship, and comes to get her six-year old son, Inti. Together they make
the long (1200+ kilometer) journey, hitchhiking their way to El Bolson. Here is
a world of constant parties amid squalor, animals and bugs, children who attack
the houses of newcomers amid which the kind of crazy Alba and her precocious
son (among the most astonishing child-actor performances of all time) try to
build a new life. The film doesn’t miss a note, and the frequently hand-held
camera, never obvious or intrusive, gives the film an immediacy and
psychological currency.
I’d go see this
film again if it were playing somewhere right now.
Ahluwalia, Ashim
MISS LOVELY
India (115 mi)
2012
Miss
Lovely Dan Fainaru at Cannes from
Screendaily
This tragic confrontation between two brothers, set during the 1980s in
the lower depths of Bombay’s film industry, copies the look of the lurid
Z-grade films the two of them are churning out together with a remarkable
degree of success. So much so, that it may well put off both regular movie
audiences expecting a more conventional approach and the regular customers of
the genre, who demand a lot more titillation, sex, violence and gore, than
Ahluwalia’s film is ready to provide.
Introduced in Cannes as the harbinger of a new kind of Indian cinema, neither Bollywood nor art house fare, this approach, mixing the more doubtful qualities of Western and Indian cinema, has still a long way to go before finding its own voice.
The older of the two brothers, Vicky (Anil George), is a domineering, unscrupulous operator who even tries, unsuccessfully, to skim some of the profits off the mob financing him. His younger sibling, Sonu (Nawazuddin Siddiqui), unhappy but submissive, is his errand boy, going out to collect the money from customers, bringing in the girls who’ll drop their knickers (off Ahluwalia’s camera) at the slightest incentive and providing the drugs and the booze which keeps all this industry going.
One day, however, he sees Pinky (Niharika Singh), falls in love and decides to make a movie star out of her. Acting is not necessary he tells her, the look in her eyes is quite enough. He ignores, however, that behind Pinky’s apparent purity there is a long past, well known to his far more experienced brother.
The tortuous plot, whose details aren’t always very clear and spreads over a period of six years, drags in the murder of another sex starlet in which the two brothers risk being involved. Meanwhile, Sonu goes to jail for a crime he did not commit and when he comes out, no one is left to stand by his side.
Looking for all purposes like a badly-lit home movie shot with a restless hand-held camera, just the right approach to achieve the aspect of the films it talks about, My Lovely offers a bleak, sordid but apparently faithful portrait of the nervous self-destructing tension of the world in which it takes place, of the squalid sights, the disaffected alleys and the gutted houses in Bombay’s slums, of the corruption and the brutality of crime and law alike.
But, Ahluwalia has a hard time telling a story of any kind, even as unoriginal as this one is, establishing anything more than clichéd characters or following any kind of sequence continuity. His film gallops ahead regardless of any need for clarity, his shots tied up together in the kind of elliptic editing that may be just too much of an effort to keep up with. One-dimensional performances are not much help either.
Miss
Lovely: Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Dalton, May 25, 2012
Ashim Ahluwalia's stylized drama follows two brothers working in the grubby, low-rent, semi-criminal fringes of the Bombay film business.
CANNES -- A pair of Bombay movie-business slumdogs dream of becoming millionaires in this unusual Hindi-language arthouse thriller, which debuted in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes. Shot by former documentary maker Ashim Ahluwalia, Miss Lovely actually started life as a non-fiction project before evolving into a more artful kind of heavily stylized drama. Co-financed with international money, it has the potential to play beyond festivals, although its lethargic mood and elusive story will limit it to small niche audiences.
The action takes place in the late 1980s on the grubby, low-rent, semi-criminal fringes of the Bombay film business. Two brothers, Sonu (Nawazuddin Sidiqui,) and Vicky (Anil George), scrape a semi-legal living churning out trashy thrillers that combine pulpy horror with lurid soft porn. These artfully faked clips provide the film’s most immediate surface pleasures, mini-masterpieces of cheap special effects and cheesy music that echo the scratchy retro aesthetic of Tarantino’s flawed but colorful Grindhouse project.
But Ahluwalia clearly has more serious cinematic intentions here than knowing pastiche, instead luring us into a murky backstage story about a high-risk deal that the brothers strike with serious gangsters, garnished with a side order of sexual exploitation and police corruption. A fraternal feud also develops after Sonu falls for an enigmatic beauty, Pinky (Singh). The already sleazy plot darkens midway through with the sordid murder of a former soft-porn actress, underlining the toxic misogyny of the main characters. A hellish jail sequence, shock revelations and a grisly final showdown comprise the uneven final act.
On paper, the plot of Miss Lovely sounds like a vibrant behind-the-scenes retro-thriller in the Scorsese, De Palma or Paul Thomas Anderson tradition. But the finished article is a very different animal, chiefly because Ahluwalia chooses to tell a potentially lurid story in such a listless and elliptical manner. Dialogue is very spare, with long scenes drifting along wordlessly and aimlessly. The performance are competent, but ill-served by sketchy and cryptic characterisation. A queasy ambient score of industrial drones, clanks and rumbles seeps into every frame, amplifying the mood of creeping unease.
Partly driven by his concerns that Bollywood-dominated India is the “laughing stock” of global cinema, Ahluwalia has striven for a very self-consciously arty aesthetic here, more Gus Van Sant than Michael Mann. This is a commendably bold way to approach material that might otherwise have drifted into routine lowlife crime-thriller territory, but it also drains a rich story of narrative momentum and emotional punch. Miss Lovely sets out to prove that Indian cinema can be as rambling, pretentious and frustratingly opaque as a European art movie. It succeeds rather too well.
Cannes
2012: 'Miss Lovely' Director Ashim Ahluwalia on Indian Cinema (Q&A) Nyay Bhushan interview
at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter,
May 23, 2012
Ahmadi, Mohammad
POET OF THE WASTES B 87
Iran Japan
This film is a simple story with a kick, written by Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. After passing a series of hilariously irrelevant tests on science, religion, and politics, which he nearly failed, a young man who dreams of being a poet, Farzin Mohades, an Iranian Spike Lee look-alike, is offered a job as a garbage collector, a job he is told he should be thankful for, as so many others are still out of work. Wearing bright orange jump suits and knee high rubber boots, the men hit the streets every day, while living in squalid quarters at the town dump, occasionally singing songs at night around a bonfire. Farzin becomes enamored with collecting left over writings in the garbage from two houses, one where a mysterious woman in black resides, who writes letters about her failed attempts to get a travel visa, leaving her on the verge of despair, and another where a local poet writes volumes of poetry. Placing together the ripped discarded pieces of paper, he gains a sense of the eternal, a glimpse into their souls. He follows the woman in black, leaving anonymous letters at her door, initially offering unused poetry from the poet before crafting some of his own, feeling more than a bit in love with her, but he keeps his distance, while actually befriending the poet, who drops his garbage from his 2nd floor window, occasionally answering Farzin’s inquiries with riddles.
All this seems simple enough, but the kick is how poetry slowly filters into the storyline, where there’s such a contrast between the bleak lives of lowly street sanitation workers and the glorifying power of poetic suggestion, lofty sentiment that offers intelligent insight into the sublime. Interspersed between the satiric comedy, which even has a “Singin in the Rain” sketch by an infatuated Farzin, the film comments on how easily poetry is discarded, or disregarded. The film touches on the fragile human state, suggesting there is a parallel in how society so easily discards workers, poets, feelings, freedom, even love. A friend, Fred Tsao said this film reminded him of THE THIRD MAN, as the musical reprise resembled the zither music, the dark, mysterious woman dressed in black from head to toe, Leila Hatami, continually walking alone down the street resembled the luminous ice princess, Alida Valli, as well as the poetic perfection of the long, final shot.
Ahwesh, Peggy
MARTINA’S PLAYHOUSE
Lesbian
viewing and perversity Jennifer
Montgomery from Jump Cut, July 1992 (excerpt)
I appeared in Peggy Ahwesh's film MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE. The concerns I've addressed here about how lesbians see themselves in experimental film were literalized when I actually did see myself in the movies. While my own film is not about a lesbian relationship (it is an autobiographical account of a rape), Ahwesh's film is.
MARTINA'S PLAYHOUSE is introduced by the star Martina, a five year-old who stares at the camera and spells her name out loud. Thereafter, the film is divided into three parts that are intercut with each other. One part involves Martina at age three with her mother Diane, enacting a variety of role reversal games, each one taking turns at playing a baby and a mother. Another part is hand-processed imagery of flowers, with a voice over reciting theory from Bataille and Lacan about desire, lack, and the genital sexuality of flowers. Sometimes the voice is that of a woman, sometimes a man, and sometimes the child Martina, stumbling through the dense text with prompting from Ahwesh. There are "talking flowers" in one scene, snapdragons whose petal jaws are manipulated by a human hand.
The third pan is a scene between myself and Ahwesh, me in front of the camera, her behind it. Like Martina and Diane, I am playing a game: I am trying to seduce the filmmaker. I am also venting my frustration with the camera that she has positioned between us. At one point I scream, but since it is, after all, a movie, I tell Ahwesh I didn't feel comfortable with it (implying that I might try again later and get it better, more authentic). I tell her of my fantasy of getting down on my hands and knees and begging her to sleep with me. The camera and the audience there implied are both the reason for my being there at all and the prophylaxis Ahwesh uses to maintain her neutrality. At one point I contemplate using the microphone as a sex toy, an act that would adapt a no-win situation to my own sexual needs.
Ahwesh juxtaposes the mother-daughter games with a scene of lesbian
seduction in such a way that the two kinds of relationship slide over onto one
another. At one point Diane plays at being baby. Diane-the-baby is hungry and
tearful, and demands milk when Martina-the-mother tries to satisfy her by
reading her a story. Martina then offers her "child" her breasts, and
Diane suckles one nipple, then the other (according to Martina's fantasy of
lactation, one nipple offers milk, the other juice). Like Anna's coming out
scene with her mother in Akerman's film, this scene in
However, from day one there is also a third term: it is the fact of representation and, in cinema, the camera's gaze. Martina at age three is as aware of the camera's presence, albeit a benevolent one, as any adult, and her relation to it is more overflowing with meaning than any one theory can encompass. While Ahwesh employs theory, it, like the other pans of the film, has a discrete place, a world of its own (in this case, the world of flowers), and she leaves her viewers to figure out for themselves their relation to theory, and theory's relation to the rest of the film.
Super-8
films and the aesthetics of intimacy
Daryl Chin from Jump Cut, July 1992
Aïnouz, Karim
MADAME SATÃ B 87
Brazil France
Great
art direction, music, and acting, but having said that, it's still not enough
to make this
film work, while the fluid camera movement and the dark, mostly washed out
colors may give this film an edgy quality, I found it too affecting, as we
never get a true emotional sense of the characters who are always just this
side of over the edge, with few moments of restraint and some
inexplicable time jumps, perhaps it's editing, perhaps it's trying to
say too much in too little time, the end effect is it's uneven. Inexplicably, this was the winner of the
Madame Satã Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
All of the best ingredients are here. The pageantry and (muted) politics of late
Cinema Novo, the troubled masculinity and queer / patriarchal posturing of
Fassbinder, and surprisingly enough, Jack Smith’s chintzy, unironic exotica and
Kenneth Anger’s fascination with shimmering light. Narratively, the film never goes anywhere
entirely unexpected, but it never feels predictable, either. It’s more a case of everything hitting its
paces just so. Lázaro Ramos’s central
performance is the anchor here. He
toggles between João’s feminine and masculine sides with fluidity and grace,
which is no mean feat considering how both those sides exist at total extremes
(drag performance / kung-fu ass-kickings).
Some might complain that Ainouz withholds his story’s gratifying
conclusion, relegating it to some intertitles and images during the
credits. But this limited triumph,
coming on the heels of a nearly two-hour examination of João’s utter
disenfranchisement and explosive self-loathing, recalled the end of Beau
Travail. Nicely done.
LOVE FOR SALE
LOVE
FOR SALE Steve
Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
"Love for
Openly gay Brazilian director Karim Ainouz's film indulges a lyrical streak
only at its beginning and end -- the rest of the time, its images are rather
matter-of-fact. Even so, his vision of the sky is remarkably beautiful.
After opening with home movies, "Love for
After living in Sao Paulo village of Iguatu
After a while, she realizes that he has abandoned her. She gets back together
with an ex-boyfriend (Joao Miguel) but ends the relationship quickly. To make
ends meet, she sells tickets for a whiskey raffle.
However, in order to get out of Iguatu, she needs more money. After hanging out
with Georgina (Georgina Castro), a prostitute
friend, she creates Suely, an alter ego who raffles her own body off for the
chance to escape.
Ainouz's debut, "Madame Sata," brought the Bohemian world of 1930s Rio to life with vivid color and imagination. Telling the
true story of a thuggish drag queen's life, it's as true to the spirit of
novelist Jean Genet as any direct adaptation of his work. The world of
"Madame Sata" was both violent and inviting.
In "Love for Sale Sale
It's the kind of town that drives some people to sniff nail polish remover for
kicks. It has a frontier edge, where much of the business is semi-legal: at one
point, Hermila considers selling bootleg DVDs. It would be easy to re-imagine
the story as a Western or transplant Hermila to the world of the TV series
"Deadwood."
"Love for Sale
The film never integrates its taste for beautiful landscapes with its devotion
to the quotidian: the two rest side by side without gelling.
Hermila has big dreams, but she has trouble expressing them;
"Love for
Ainouz celebrates strong women, introducing a large cast of female characters
with smaller roles around Hermila. However, "Love for
"Love for
Hermila suffers the disapproval of her family and neighbors, but escapes the
most serious consequences by using the raffle earnings to escape Iguatu for a
town where no one knows what she did to get there. At best, "Love for
THE SILVER CLIFF (O Abismo Prateado) B 85
When you left me, my dear, Quando você me deixou,
meu bem,
You told me to be happy and well. Me
disse pra ser feliz e passar bem.
I wanted to die of envy, almost went crazy, Quis
morrer de ciúme, quase enlouqueci,
But afterward, as usual, I took heed. Mas
depois,
If you want to see me again, Quando
você me quiser rever
You're going to see me remade, it's true. Já
vai me encontrar refeita, pode crer.
Eye to eye, Olhos
nos olhos,
I want to see what you will do, Quero
ver o que você faz
When you realize that without you I am doing so well. Ao sentir que sem você eu passo bem
demais
I'm looking younger, E
que venho até remoçando,
and catch myself singing for no reason at all. Me
pego cantando, sem mais, nem por quê.
So much has happened, Tantas
águas rolaram,
So many men have loved me Quantos
homens me amaram
More fully and much better than you. Bem
mais e melhor que você.
If by chance you need me one day, Quando talvez
precisar de mim,
You're always welcome, come over. Cê
sabe que a casa é sempre sua, venha sim.
Eye to eye. Olhos
nos olhos,
I want to see what you will say, Quero
ver o que você diz.
How you will bear it to see me so happy. Quero
ver
—Chico Buarque “Olhos nos Olhos”
(Eye to Eye)
Aïnouz, who directed
the unconventional MADAME SATÃ (2002) about the anguishing life of a drag
queen, which won the Chicago Film Festival 1st Prize that year, has
made a much more quietly conventional film here, set in the busy Rio de Janeiro
district along the beach, where the viewer is immediately immersed in the noise
and sidewalk rhythms of a thriving city, a neighborhood where the well-to-do
live. It’s here that we see middle-aged
Djalma (Otto Jr.) make his way from an ocean swim to what appears to be a
passionate morning sexual encounter with his wife Violeta (Alessandra Negrini)
before heading out of town for a brief business trip. All appears well in the world as Violeta
sends her son to school and wanders through the same city streets on her way to
work as a dentist. Without notice and
seemingly without reason, Violeta is blindsided by a phone message from her
husband telling her that they’re marriage is over, which sends her reeling back
out into the streets again, this time to a dizzying effect, where the city that
appeared friendly and inviting in the opening suddenly feels harsh and
threatening. The mood shift is so
starkly unbalanced that Negrini appears to be overacting, as where there was
calm is now a storm, as she is simply unable to comprehend the impersonal
nature of making such a life-altering decision on a phone message.
Like
any woman of means, Violeta decides to hop on the next plane in search of her
husband, but she’s frustrated to the point of disoriented at missing the last
flight out, grabbing a cheap motel room nearby where she is immersed in the
uninviting noise of city confusion, stepping into a neighborhood disco where
they’re inexplicably playing the hyperkinetic Jennifer Beals music out of
FLASHDANCE (1983), Michael Sembello’s
“Maniac,” Maniac - michael
sembello - YouTube (4:05), where
Negrini’s surreal out of body experience on the dance floor is indicative of
her frantic, mind-bending state of anxiety, eventually thrust back out into the
city streets, finding solace in the nearby beach. Calmed somewhat afterwards, Aïnouz
beautifully shifts the entire mood of the film, shifting the focus from Violeta
who has commanded the screen for nearly the duration of the film to a young
unidentified girl, Bel (Gabi Pereira), who seems surprisingly mature for her
age, almost as if she’s living alone on the streets, where she seems to be
handling life’s difficulties with more self-assurance than Violeta, where this
meeting literally smacks her in the face like a jolt of reality. As it turns out, Bel is with her father,
Thiago Martins, and the two of them are living in his van, stopping at the
nearby beach for ice cream. The mood of
doubt and confusion has been replaced by a curious fascination with discovering this playful young girl.
As
this trio moves through the city together like newly discovered friends, the
audience is treated to multiple tracking shots of Rio de Janeiro at night, dark
but strangely luminescent, still pulsating with an undiscovered mystery that is
the heart of every magical city, making this a love letter to the city where
Violeta’s internal search for missing answers has been replaced by the soothing
rhythms of Rio, beautifully captured by Mauro Pinheiro, whose sensual images
light up the screen. There’s an
underlying melancholic tone that continues throughout, where often nothing much
happens, allowing extended wordless sequences to set the mood, with perhaps an
overreliance at the end on what inspired the film, a 1976 song “Olhos
Nos Olhos” (Eye to Eye) by Chico Buarque, Chico
Buarque - Olhos nos Olhos seen on
YouTube (4:32), a kind of revengeful defiance
following an abrupt end of a love affair.
The film does nothing surprising, but Negrini’s anguished performance is accompanied by a
lush visualization of her internalized realm, something the director
beautifully intermixes with the revelation of discovering the young girl, who
seems to be the secret surprise of the entire film.
CANNES:
FILMS I'M HOPING WILL WORK ME INTO A ... Howard Feinstein from Filmmaker magazine,
Ainouz, an ex-architect of Algerian descent who ended up at NYU to attend cinema studies, returned to his native Brazil to direct films, most notably Madame Sata (2002), which focused on a marginalized black drag queen, and the far better Love for Sale, aka Suely in the Sky (2006), a visual and narrative masterpiece about a single mother trying to cope in a hick town after leaving Sao Paulo.
Based on a novel by Chico Buarque, The Silver Abyss–or The Silver Cliff, depending on who is translating the Brazilian title, O abismo prateado—is, like Oslo, Augusts 31st, a nod to his hometown, but in this case a love letter to Rio. A 40-year-old woman, a dentist, spends an afternoon walking between her office and Copacabana until something surprising happens. This is little to go on, but Ainouz can work magic.
Toronto
2011. Days Three and Four on Notebook | MUBI Dan Sallitt
Two of my favorite films
from days three and four of the Toronto Film Festival were experiments in
duration. The less acclaimed of the two, Karim Aïnouz's The Silver Cliff, which
premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at
The Silver Cliff Gabe Klinger from Cinema Scope
Anyone who has ever passed through one of
Aïnouz relies largely on mundane details to try to convey Violeta’s range of
feelings that go from despair to eventual acceptance of the situation. The
delicate, unassertive style recalls Hou Hsiao-hsien in the near trance-like
power of certain scenes, while also evoking the lyrical music of Rio-born
composer Chico Buarque, whose song “Olho por olho” the film is said to be
inspired by. The
The
Silver Cliff: Cannes 2011 Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
Brazilian director Karim Ainouz weaves a sad, sensual film
inspired by the 1976 song "Olhos Nos Olhos" "Eye
to Eye" by
CANNES – The Silver Cliff was inspired by a 1976 song by Brazilian musician Chico Buarque, titled “Eye to Eye,” about the indelibility of love, the impossibility of forgiveness and the defiant display of emotional resilience that follow the abrupt end of a relationship. From that slender thread, director Karim Ainouz weaves a sad, sensual film in which very little happens, and for long periods, few words are spoken. But the story’s emotional texture is as rich as its intoxicating visual flow.
NYU-trained Brazilian filmmaker Ainouz has earned admirers at festivals and in specialty distribution with his films Madame Sata, Suely in the Sky and I Travel Because I Have To, I Come Back Because I Love You, the latter co-directed with Marcelo Gomes. That lengthy title declaration is almost the reverse of what happens in The Silver Cliff, which in many ways plays like an expanded music video, though is no less beguiling for it.
The film opens with shots of thundering surf on the beach at
During a break in her work at a dental clinic, Violeta retrieves a voicemail
in which her husband informs her he won’t be returning. Confusion, despair and
hurt propel her all over the city, as she tries and fails to reach Djalma or
gather information about his unexplained decision. Arriving at the airport too
late to catch the last flight to
Written by Beatriz Bracher and Ainouz, the film becomes a kind of out-of-body nocturnal odyssey for Violeta, with Mauro Pinheiro’s probing camera clinging to her through every sinuous shift in her restless journey. Densely populated, dark, alluring at times, alienating at others, the environments she moves through appear both to shake her up and somehow soothe her. In the film’s loveliest passage, she meets a young girl (Gabi Pereira) in a public restroom and then joins the open-hearted kid and her melancholy father (Thiago Martins) on the beach for ice cream.
More than most festivals,
Forgoing hysterical outbursts in favor of internalized turbulence, Negrini appears physically driven by the questions racing through her head. She makes the commonplace drama of one woman into something vigorous, bracing and perhaps even heroic.
The
Silver Cliff (O Abismo Prateado) review - Cambridge Film Festival Graham Hughes from Take One
The
Silver Cliff | Review | Screen - Screen International Howard Feinstein
Variety Reviews - The Silver
Cliff - Toronto Film Fest Reviews ...
Jay Weissberg
Chico Buarque - Olhos nos
Olhos on YouTube (
FUTURO BEACH (
Aïnouz directed the
Chicago Film Festival Gold Hugo 1st Place prize winner MADAME SATÃ in 2002, a
film with one of the best closing credit sequences of any
film seen that year, while this has one of the most brilliant opening
sequences, set to bright colors and the reckless punk sounds of Suicide - Ghost Rider (1977)
- YouTube (2:34), where a pair of German motorcycle riders traverse a
Brazilian beachfront landscape of giant sand dunes, racing across the crowded
beach, throwing off their clothes and rushing into the ocean. Only one survives, however, as the other gets
caught in the ferocious riptides, where the desperate attempts by lifeguard
Donato (Wagner Moura) fail to save the drowning man. Told in three chapters, opening with The Drowner's Embrace, the film has a
stark beauty in the gorgeous outdoor cinematography by Ali Olay Gözkaya
featuring the spectacular allure of one of the best Brazilian beaches in the
Northeastern region of Fortaleza, noted for their high winds, making it especially
dangerous, capturing the long expanse of pristine coastline filled with
swimmers, lounge chairs, kiosks, restaurants, showers, and casual beach
lounges, offering bits of insight into the beach culture through a series of
group calisthenics exercises performed in the sand and ocean by the lifeguards,
reminiscent of the body sculpture and poetic grace of Claire Denis in Beau
Travail (1999). Donato has a close
relationship with his mother and adoring little brother Ayrton who loves to
imagine himself as a super hero, going through the moves, playing imaginary
games on the beach with his big brother.
Heavy with guilt, still shaken from the experience of his first death
while on patrol, Donato meets with the survivor, Konrad (Clemens Schick), a
former soldier who owns a motorcycle repair shop in Berlin, where their grief
is shared through robust sexual interludes, spending their days together
searching for the missing body. The pace
of the film slows considerably as the days grow longer and more frustrating
when the body can’t be found. When the
search is eventually called off, they both find it difficult to let go of one
another when Konrad returns home.
In the second chapter, A Hero Cut in Half, Donato makes a
decision to visit Konrad in the middle of a dreary winter in
This final section is
perhaps the most disjointed, as it’s a case of lost connections, as Ayrton
reports their mother died and they hadn’t heard from him in all this time,
where Donato left one day and simply disappeared off the face of the
earth. All three have lost something
vital and significant in their lives, where romance ebbs and flows, leaving an
irreparable hole in their hearts, where Aïnouz resorts to sparse dialogue and
an elegant expression of stylish imagery.
While it can be sexually explicit, ultimately the film is more about
cultural dislocation and the remembrance of love, showing the elasticity of
boundaries, both personal and geographic, and the effect distance has on
relationships. The authenticity of the
ups and downs of the relationship couldn’t be more natural, elegantly scripted
and especially well acted, reminiscent of Andrew Haigh’s Weekend
(2011), as both are among the better portrayals of an adult gay
relationship. Aïnouz is a Brazilian who
has now settled in Germany, paying a debt to Wim Wenders and the existential
haze of The
American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund) (1977), turning this final
section into a melancholic road movie, where all three find themselves in
different states of mind when they hit the road on their motorbikes, seemingly
with no destination in mind, though they initially end up at the ocean in the
desolation of a grey wintry landscape, as if stuck inside a cloud bank,
desolate souls in search of their better selves, where the men struggle to find
some form of reconciliation and mutual understanding, layered in a tender piano
score by Volker Bertelmann. It’s curious
how different the three sections are both emotionally and cinematically, where
the surging energy and youthful vibrancy of the opening gives way to emotive
textures as an impressionistic and visually seductive mood supersedes
narrative, where the wandering aimlessness of the finale takes on a poetic
resonance as they ride into the foggy abyss of a German Autobahn to the
sound of David Bowie and Brian Eno singing “Heroes” in both German and English,
David Bowie, Heroes.1978 YouTube (6:24).
FUTURO BEACH
Ken Rudolph Movie Site
A couple of German tourists are motorcycling through
CultureCatch.com
[Brandon Judell]
Then there’s Karim Ainouz’s
Divided into three sections, Futuro Beach starts
off on a Brazilian beach shore where two German bikers rush into the ocean to
storm the waves. Only one survives, even though Donato (Wagner Moura), a
lifeguard, tries to save the day. The survivor, Konrad (Clemens Schick),
is distressed until he starts making love to Donato between searches for his
dead pal’s body. Act two takes place in a frigid
And that, boys, is what you need to know about love.
QUEERTIQUES.com
[Roger Walker-Dack]
Karim Ainouz’s mesmerising melancholic drama starts and ends in a very similar fashion. In the opening scenes we see two motorbikers racing across the sand dunes and when they reach the end of the beach discard their bikes and clothes and run off into the high rolling waves. They soon get caught in riptides and despite the efforts of the lifeguards, one of them drowns.
Donato one of the lifeguards is so shaken by his first ever death whilst on patrol, he takes it upon himself to break the sad news to Konrad the swimmer who they had managed to rescue. He is repaid for his kindness by Konrad working out his grief on him sexually. The two men spend the next few days together whilst the authorities search for the missing body. When it's time to give up on that, neither of them are prepared to let go of each other, so Donato makes the decision to leave his sun-kissed beach in Brazil to try life with Konrad in his native Germany.
In the second chapter of the story that Ainouz has
called 'A Hero Cut in Half' (the first was 'The Drowner's Embrace ') we see the
two lovers trying to make a go of urban living in the middle of a dreary winter
in a country that is alien to Donato. They almost seem to succeed but Donato
obviously misses not only Aryton his younger brother that he was extremely
close too and his mother, but he feels he cannot live without a beach. The fact
that he doesn't catch his return flight to
It's 8 years later and Donato has a new life, still
swimming, but now as a maintenance diver in a city aquarium. He and
Konrad are no longer an item but still important to each other as is
apparent when an angry Aryton turns up on his doorstep unannounced. It appears
that Donato had abandoned his family when he decided not to return back to
Together the three man try and establish some form of
forgiveness and reconciliation to be able to move forward. The final
scenes are of them in the middle of winter roaring down the fog-drenched
Autobahn to a stark desolate beach. It has another kind of beauty totally
different from their precious
Ainouz’s movie, that he co-wrote with Felipe Braganca, is light on plot as it focuses much more of the sensuality of each moment. There are certain pivotal scenes which are sparse of dialogue where he allows the camera to remain much longer than the norm with such riveting effect. Whether it be Donato letting off steam dancing rather manically in a club, or when he and Konrad are making rough and passionate sex together, or in the closing scene of the final motorbike ride. It's also clever that the script is guarded in revealing too much detail or any real insight into the three men and we are simply left to observe and imagine what emotional state they are in at any time.
It is unquestionably a real visual treat from the wild
untamed uninviting ocean in
P.S. Interestingly enough Mr. Ainouz is a Brazilian who has now settled
in
Grolsch
Film Works [Ashley Clark]
The
Cue Dot Confessions [Michael Scott]
Praia
do Futuro: Berlin Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
'Praia
do Futuro' Review: A Gay Self-Discovery ... - Variety Guy Lodge
Praia do Futuro
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Akerman, Chantal
“I don’t feel I belong
anywhere. On the contrary, I have the feeling that I am only attached to the
land under my feet. And even there the ground is often a bit shaky.”
—Chantal Akerman (1977)
Akerman,
Chantal from World Cinema
Independent filmmaker noted for her minimalist
narratives and static visual style. Inspired by Godard's Pierrot le Fou,
she took on a variety of odd jobs to finance her first film, Saute ma Ville
/ Blow Up My City (1968), a black-and-white short that drew belated
attention at the 1971 Oberhausen Festival. She spent much of 1972 in
"Comparable in force and originality to Godard or Fassbinder, Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important European director of her generation." - J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
"The films of Chantal
Akerman are the single most important and coherent body of work by a woman
director in the history of the cinema." -
In 1976 the French newspaper Le Monde heralded Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles as "the first masterpiece in the feminine in the history of the cinema." The unconventional style and subject made the film a powerful sign of a decade when feminism erupted into the arena of politics and film.
Akerman the filmmaker came of age at the same time as the new age of feminism, and her films became key texts in the nascent field of feminist film theory. Feminism posed the apparently simple question of who speaks when a woman in film speaks (as character, as director ...); Akerman insisted convincingly that her films' modes of address rather than their stories alone are the locus of their feminist perspective. The many arguments about what form a "new women's cinema" should take revolved around a presumed dichotomy between so-called realist (meaning accessible) and avant-garde (meaning elitist) work; Akerman's films rendered such distinctions irrelevant and illustrated the reductiveness of the categories. - Professor Janet Bergstrom, UCLA, in Sight and Sound
Born in
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies
Considered one of the most significant independent filmmakers of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Chantal Akerman possesses a pronounced visual and narrative style, influenced by structuralism and minimalism, which offers astute insights into women's role in modern culture.
Akerman's interest in film was sparked at the age of 15 by a viewing of Jean-Luc Godard's "Pierrot le Fou", prompting her to enroll in the Belgian film school, INSAS. After about two years' study she quit school, eager to begin making films rather than sitting in a classroom. Akerman saved money from clerical and waitressing jobs to make several short films which received minimal recognition.
It was not until she moved to New York in 1972 that Akerman began to develop her distinctive visual style and to deal with those themes which have dominated her work thus far. In America she became acquainted with the films of the avant-garde, specifically those of Michael Snow, which influenced her perception of the relationship between film, space and time. Her first two features, "Hotel Monterey" (1972) and "Je Tu Il Elle" (1974), with their studiously static camerawork and minimal dialogue, were early indications of the visual style which came to full flowering in "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles" (1975). This 200 minute, minimally plotted film scrutinized three days in the life of a woman (Delphine Seyrig) who adheres to a regimented schedule of cleaning, cooking and caring for her teenage son. Every day she also takes in one male caller to make ends meet. On the third day her schedule is interrupted, and she later experiences an orgasm with her male caller. Her response to these unfathomable alterations in her routine is to thrust a pair of scissors into the man's throat.
Reception for "Jeanne Dielman" was mixed. It was criticized by many as a boring and meaningless minimalist exercise; Akerman's defenders, however, were awed by her visual aesthetic and use of real time to emphasize the routine of her protagonist's world. Thanks to the film's exposure, Akerman was able to secure financial backing from the Gaumont company and from German TV for the striking "Les Rendezvous d'Anna" (1978). Her first semi-commercial effort, it featured popular French actors Aurore Clement and Jean-Pierre Cassel in a story of a female director trekking across Europe to promote her latest film. Again, static camerawork and minimal dialogue created a sense of alienation which mirrored the emptiness and insincerity of the protagonist's encounters.
After failing to raise $25 million for an adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's 1969 novel "The Manor", Akerman returned to independent production with "All Night Long" (1982), an insightful drama contrasting romantic illusions with harsh realities. Akerman's most accessible film to date is "Golden Eighties" (1986), a satire of musicals set completely within the confines of a Brussels shopping mall. Here too her concern is with idealized notions of romance; unlike her earlier works, however, the central story is complemented by several subplots and the film's pacing is a little more sprightly. Akerman's signature camera does remain static, providing a unique perspective on the structured world of the shopping mall.
In 1988 Akerman returned to New York to film "American Stories/Food, Family and Philosophy", an exploration of her Jewish heritage through a series of stories told by immigrants. To support herself, Akerman has held a number of teaching posts; she has stated a desire to make more commercially viable films because of the financial constraints now on independent production.
Film
Reference Lillian Schiff
At the age of fifteen Chantal Akerman saw Godard's Pierrot le fou and realized that filmmaking could be experimental and personal. She dropped in and out of film school and has since created short and feature films for viewers who appreciate the opportunity her works provide to think about sounds and images. Her films are often shot in real time, and in space that is part of the characters' identity.
During a self-administered apprenticeship in New York (1972–73) shooting short films on very low budgets, Akerman notes that she learned much from the work of innovators Michael Snow and Stan Brakhage. She was encouraged to explore organic techniques for her personal subject matter. In her deliberately paced films there are long takes, scenes shot with stationary camera, and a play of light in relation to subjects and their space. (In Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, as Jeanne rides up or down in the elevator, diagonals of light from each floor cut across her face in a regular rhythm.) Her films feature vistas down long corridors, acting with characters' backs to the camera, and scenes concluded with several seconds of darkness. In Akerman films there are hotels and journeys, little conversation. Windows are opened and sounds let in, doors opened and closed; we hear a doorbell, a radio, voices on the telephone answering machine, footsteps, city noises. Each frame is carefully composed, each gesture the precise result of Akerman's directions. A frequent collaborator is her sensitive cameraperson, Babette Mangolte, who has worked with Akerman on such works as Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, News from Home, and Toute une nuit. Mangolte has also worked with avant guardists Yvonne Rainer, Marcel Hanoun, and Michael Snow.
Plotting is minimal or non-existent in Akerman films. Old
welfare clients come and go amid the impressive architecture of a once splendid
hotel on
The films (some of which are semi-autobiographical) are not dramatic in the conventional sense, nor are they glamorized or eroticized; the excitement is inside the characters. In a film which Akerman has called a love letter to her mother, Jeanne Dielman is seen facing the steady camera as members of a cooking class might see her, and she prepares a meatloaf—in real time. Later she gives herself a thorough scrubbing in the bathtub; only her head and the motion of her arms are visible. Her straightening and arranging and smoothing are seen as a child would see and remember them.
In Toute une nuit Akerman displays her precision and
control as she stages the separate, audience-involving adventures of a huge
cast of all ages that wanders out into
Akerman's Moving In, meanwhile, centers on a monologue delivered by a man who has just moved into a modern apartment. A film of "memory and loss," according to Film Comment, he has left behind "a melancholy space of relations, relations dominated by his former neighbors, a trio of female 'social science students."'
Deaths of Cinema | La
Ressasseuse: Chantal Akerman, 1950–2015 ... Kate Rennebohm from Cinema Scope,
Winter/Spring 2016
“I was overcome by an
emotion I can’t quite define…but it was very, very strong, and had something to
do with happiness. [And after seeing more of her work,] there really have been
moments during which I felt I had to defend myself against what was being
expressed, moments in the performance when I had to close my eyes. And at the
same time, I can’t understand why.”
Toward the end of Un jour Pina m’a demandé (1983), her made-for-television film about Pina Bausch, Chantal Akerman sits on the floor underneath a window and recounts her reactions upon first encountering Bausch’s choreography. That her description above could apply just as well to her own films indicates an affinity between these two women that goes beyond shared themes or sensibilities. Granted of course that sharing is there, and far from secret: a rigorous presentism that nonetheless speaks to a traumatic history, one inscribed in faces, bodies, and landscapes; gender as a line to be probed rather than a division to be drawn; repetition—of movements, gestures, words—as a phenomenological tool for showing the very impossibility of repetition, the ineffaceable singularity of every action or moment.
But in Un jour Pina m’a demandé we see more than just likeness. Just as Bausch’s choreographies rivet the spectator to an ever-expanding collection of mundane movements on stage, movements that blur the traditional division between “dance” and “not-dance,” so Akerman extends that idea via her camera, cutting from the performance onstage to tightly framed shots of the action backstage, where dancers and crew carry on a separate but intrinsically related choreography: arms and hands removing clothing, patting faces, caressing skin. If they ever were, dance and the not-dance of ordinary life are no longer discrete realms, and “ordinary life” is indeed not ordinary at all; and in the action of her camera, Akerman does not record or mimic, she extends the implications of Bausch’s practice, and her own at the same time.
This brings us to the cardinal point, and one in which the past tense can sadly no longer be avoided. Rather than the “or” or the “is,” Akerman was (tragically, was) a filmmaker of the “and.” Un jour Pina m’a demandé is not Akerman on Bausch, it is Akerman and Bausch, cinema and dance (or dance-theatre, in Bausch’s naming). And these “ands” are everywhere in Akerman’s work. As with her use of the serial and the additional in her formal structures, her avowed linkages with other artists—whether choreographers (Bausch, Yvonne Rainer), filmmakers (Godard, Snow), or the canonical authors whose works she adapted (Proust, Conrad)—were a way out of essentializing categories. The difficulty in explaining what “kind” of filmmaker Akerman was, of finding a single descriptor for her, is crucial to her work: she made a career-long habit of rejecting labels, whether they be “documentary” or “fiction,” “feminist” or “queer” filmmaker. Rather than the label, Akerman was an artist of the list—the very home of the “and,” capable not only of containing contradictory terms without issue, but containing them absent any necessary hierarchies. So Akerman was, simultaneously, a documentarian and a narrative filmmaker; a maker of comedies and films of existential horror; a dry, minimalist filmmaker and one who made films full of song, laughter, and joy.
The “and” is, implicitly and unavoidably, a term of continuation. It is the linguistic equivalent of Akerman’s long takes, which remind us that the cut is something essentially arbitrary: a momentary disruption in time’s fragile but ceaseless flow, its palimpsestic accumulation and inevitable losing of words, actions, faces, bodies, lives. And so, even beyond the standard compressions, distortions, and fictionalizations involved in describing a life and a body of work in a few thousand words, the idea of now needing to end Akerman’s list—and of potentially subsuming that life and work within whichever term happens to be last—is anathema. So if we must try and define Akerman, let’s use a definition that she applied to herself. In Autoportrait en cineaste, a 2004 text she wrote to accompany the Centre Pompidou’s retrospective of her work, Akerman writes
Je suis une ressasseuse….
Ma vie est long, un long ressassement.
In naming herself a ressasseuse, Akerman defines herself as one who repeats without ceasing; she is always returning, but also always turning over, finding something new. It is a single term, yet one which refuses containment, refuses stasis, refuses to let go of the “and.” There is already so much death, too much death, for us to allow Akerman’s death to end that long ressassement that was her work.
And so, we focus on the “and.”
***
While Akerman rejected labels, however, that doesn’t mean she didn’t think that they were sometimes right—it’s just that, as she said in an interview with Dennis Lim, they are never right enough. The question of feminism has always been particularly fraught when it comes to Akerman, as her masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) became a central text for that historical moment’s newly minted meeting of feminist thought and film theory. While Akerman conceded that what Jeanne Dielman showed (the domestic space, a housewife’s tasks, the isolation, the repetition, the desperate ordering of time) and how it showed it (static camera, medium and long shots only, no reverse shots, overtly composed and frontal framing) did indeed make it a feminist film, it was arguably just as important for its demonstration of the rich potential of Akerman’s conjunctive approach. This is most evident in the film’s consummate mixing of the concerns of two seemingly divergent avant-gardes: the North American fascination with stripping film down to the material essence of the medium, and the continental interest in cinema’s role in social and representational codes and norms.
Several commentators have linked the obsessive, regimented movements of Delphine Seyrig’s Dielman to the work of dancer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer (which Akerman first encountered upon moving to New York in the early ’70s) and her concept of choreographing via “task-oriented” movements. This concern with the body and its disposition in space was intrinsic to Akerman’s work from the outset. Her first feature, Je tu il elle (1974), traverses the poles of Jeanne Dielman’s regimentation and Un jour Pina m’a demandé’s ecstatic release as it follows a young woman (performed by Akerman herself) who departs from a space of repetitive actions and opaque investigations—how many different positions can a body and a mattress occupy in a room?—for a space of uncontainable dynamism (a percussive pas de deux between two women’s bodies) before moving on to yet more spaces. (This latter sequence, with its series of passionate interconnections, already gives evidence of what Akerman would respond to in Bausch’s choreography. Toute une nuit [1982], made shortly after her introduction to Bausch, offers fragmented scenes of lovers coming together and apart, with the characters hurling themselves at each other as Pina’s dancers do, as if they could break through the skin separating them could they but gather enough velocity.)
The long-take/fixed-camera strategy Akerman employed so memorably in Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman is almost certainly her most influential contribution to the stylistic vocabulary of art cinema, though her use of it has a philosophical weight rarely found in those of its latter-day practitioners. (Moreso than the oft-cited Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant, Julia Loktev is one of the most provocative present-day heirs of not only the style but the structures and concerns of Akerman’s ’70s work.) In Nothing Happens, her seminal book on Akerman’s work, Ivone Margulies dubs Akerman’s cinema “hyperrealist,” a term that houses a complex set of meanings. One iteration aligns Akerman with Andy Warhol and the mid-century purveyors of the nouveau roman: an attitude that approaches the image and the word not as representations or mirrors of reality, but as equivalent to that reality. To echo the title of an essay in which Stanley Cavell discusses her work, for Akerman the world is a collection of things, within which the image (moving and not) is also a thing in itself.
Margulies also discusses how the images in Akerman’s films, by virtue of their length and flirtation with stasis, waver between the registers of abstraction and figuration. As the shots stretch on, often with little change or variation, we shift between immersion in the image’s illusion—a self-contained fictional world composed of bodies, movements, and voices—and awareness of the image’s presence: a block of light and shadow on a wall, hovering in front of us, a potent reminder of (our) time, passing. In this, Margulies connects Akerman to the move towards minimalism in the art world, aligning her work with those artists’ efforts to activate the spectator’s experience of the piece as part of the piece itself.
Margulies’ astute analysis of the artist’s intensely engaged materialism cuts to the ethical heart of Akerman’s cinema. While many have been apprehensive about, if not downright hostile towards, the presumed denuding of truth and responsibility in the poststructuralist/postmodern contention that reality is “just” words and images, in Akerman’s films the image shares all of the same ethical problems and existential possibilities of the world outside the theatre. In Sud (1999), Akerman’s camera travels through nondescript landscapes in the American South to eventually arrive at the town of Jasper, Texas, where an African-American man named James Byrd, Jr. was recently murdered by white supremacists. As is characteristic of Akerman’s “documentary” films, Sud gives very little information about any of its subjects, apart from the brutal details of how Byrd died. Landscapes and towns go unnamed and unspecified; interviews with locals contribute only a sense of the partiality of the views involved, never an authoritative explanation; a lengthy sequence of Byrd’s funeral gives images and sounds of his community, but few details of his life. And then, the final shot of the film: a seven-minute take, the camera secured to the back of a moving vehicle as it rumbles along the three-mile stretch of road where Byrd was dragged to death.
The horror of this and other “empty” images resonates across Akerman’s films. She had a longstanding concern with the imagining (and the imaging) of suffering—those traumas whose magnitude challenges the very notion of representation. Akerman’s status as an Ashkenazi Jew—and as the daughter of a woman who lost her entire family in Auschwitz—were vitally important to her work, and she spoke regularly of the bilderverbot, the Jewish ban on making graven images. Denying herself the act of representation, Akerman instead sought to create what she called “distilled images,” evoking the presence of a traumatic history through its seeming absence. In D’Est (1993), Akerman traverses the former East Germany, Poland, and Russia shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, her images of unnamed people standing around or engaging in mundane, everyday activities reverberating with echoes of the supposedly vanished past, postwar and wartime (and Soviet and Nazi) both. Akerman’s “emptied-out” formalism speaks to greater, sometimes monstrous emptyings: in these idling, obscurely waiting crowds, we see not only the endless lines that waited outside the perpetually understocked government shops, but the lines for the trains bound for deportation and death.
From the ’80s through to her final film, Akerman began to engage more overtly with questions of Jewish identity and experience. Histoires d’Amérique: Food, Family and Philosophy (1988) consists of a series of monologues, delivered straight to the camera by actors dressed in period clothing but obviously standing in contemporary Brooklyn, that relate stories of Jewish persecution and migration to America in the early 20th century. While the stories are fictional (Akerman wrote them, drawing from actual testimonials and diary entries) and their recounting patently artificial, Akerman’s foregrounding of theatricality ultimately serves to heighten the film’s haunting evocation of a traumatic history. Là-bas (2006) documents a trip to Tel Aviv by Akerman, a visit in which her literal immobilization (resulting from depression and fear of recent bombings) mirrors her figurative paralysis; largely comprised of static shots of covered windows, the film unfolds through her verbose (and acousmatic) recounting of the impossibility of saying anything at all about the “Israel question.” In her final film, No Home Movie (which Andréa Picard discussed in Cinema Scope 64), Akerman chronicles the last year of her mother Nelly’s life, the elderly woman’s imminent passing threatening another loss as well: a loss of history, of an entire generation’s cataclysmic experience with the Shoah.
Many of Akerman’s films revolve around the filmmaker’s efforts, and perceived failure, to connect with her mother: in News From Home (1976), Akerman reads her mother’s letters over images of New York City, highlighting Nelly’s presence in her thoughts but also the radical separation between mother and daughter due to the distance between them and the profound differences in their daily lives. (In a far lighter vein, Akerman further reflected on her relationship with Nelly—and on the horrors of history that drive a wedge between those generations that experienced them and those that did not—in her underrated 2004 comedy Demain on déménage.)
That sense of failure is not just personal for Akerman, but is intrinsic to both her ethics and her aesthetics. “I’d rather touch on the faces I wish to film,” Akerman said at the time of D’Est, and her films are shot through with the painful sense of only being able to touch on—of not being able to be on the other side of these images, within these images. The distance between viewer and image mirrors the distance that exists all too often between people; no less than our proximity to images, our proximity to others carries with it no guarantee of real understanding or connection. In a striking early sequence from Akerman’s Proust adaptation La captive (2000), Simon (Stanislas Merhar), deeply and jealously in love with Ariane (Sylvie Testud), projects her image onto a wall. Unable to stay away, Simon moves into the projector’s light, altering Ariane’s image even as he seeks to merge with it; he traces Ariane’s light-skin with his hand, but, as in his actual physical encounters with her, contact only makes him more aware of the barrier between them. Akerman always reminds us that we are sharing our time and space with her images; whether they be of an empty road where a man died, a crowd of obscurely waiting East Germans, or a woman sitting at a dining-room table after committing a murder, she compels us to think both about the distance between us and them, and about whether we can or should connect to them. Time spent in the company of an image, or a person, may be no guarantee that we will understand them, but sometimes it is all we can do.
It would be an injustice, however, to interpret Akerman’s cinema as only a cinema of loneliness, of the impossibility of connection. In No Home Movie, Akerman reworks the image from La captive in a sequence depicting a Skype conversation between Akerman and Nelly, who are at that moment separated by an ocean. As the women exchange words of endearment and chit-chat, Akerman’s camera slowly zooms in on the computer screen. As Nelly’s face starts to blur, the image begins to slip between layers: Nelly’s face transforms from skin to a vacillating moiré pattern of beiges, blacks, and reds and back again, while Akerman’s own face, reflected on the computer screen and merging with her mother’s, floats in and out of view, each appearance somehow more shocking and wonderful than the last. A solution through dissolution, this image is rapturous—a shimmering giggle of a stolen moment.
So here, then, is a last “and.” Never one to prescribe or dictate, Akerman instead leaves us with a feeling: sometimes, this world of concrete things, bodies, and images is enough, and there is joy to be found there. And sometimes, heartbreakingly, there is not.
Chantal Akerman -
Alchetron, The Free Social Encyclopedia
All-Movie Guide Hal Erickson
Chantal Akerman brief bio info from Lycos
V2_:
Chantal Akerman brief bio from V2
Archive
Media Art Net |
Akerman, Chantal: Biography brief
bio and a few film reviews from Media Art Net
GLBTQ Biography a more extensive bio
Chantal
Akerman artist and art...the-artists.org
a resource guide on the artist
Filmmaker
Chantal Akerman will discuss her work
a brief film introduction from Cornell University
filmjourney.org : Chantal
Akerman a brief Akerman
retrospective by Doug Cummings
Chantal Akerman -
Strictly Film School Acquarello,
various reviews
Chantal
Akerman filmography - Film - Time Out London brief film reviews
Chantal
Akerman's Films: A Dossier - teksty trzecie Chantal
Akerman's Films: A Dossier, by Angela Martin and Chantal Akerman, Feminist Review, 1979
Romance
of the Ordinary [on Chantal Akerman] | Jonathan Rosenbaum retrospective thoughts by Jonathan Rosenbaum
from the Chicago Reader, January 26,
1990
Haber's Art Reviews: Chantal
Akerman and Post-Cold War Europe Chantal Akerman: Bordering on Fiction,
by John Haber, May 27, 1997
Exalting
the Everyday [CHANTAL AKERMAN BY CHANTAL ... Chantal
Akerman by Chantal Akerman, by Jonathan Rosenbaum, October 24, 1997
Unspoken Cinema Blog article: Chantal Akerman - Walking Woman Adrian Martin, notes from un unfinished
essay, 1998, posted by Harry Tuttle January 12, 2008
FILM;
Chantal Akerman And the Point Of Point of View - The New York ... Dinitia Smith from The New York Times, April 26, 1998
Chantal Akerman: SELFPORTRAIT/AUTOBIOGRAPHY Selfportrait/Autobiography:
A Work in Progress, by Frances Richard, Artforum,
November 1998
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Innovators 1970-1980: Keeping a distance Janet Bergstrom from Sight and Sound, November 1999
Chantal
Akerman + Catherine Breillat. Film and Theory. 2001 (By European Graduate
School Seven Video Lectures) Seven
video lectures, each less than ten minutes, 2001
Chantal
Akerman - On Absence and Imagination in Documentary Film Open discussion with the filmmaker June 2001
at the European Graduate School
A
couch in New York : Chantal Akerman and sex in the city Rose Capp from Screening the Past, December 1, 2001
Alisa Lebow, ‘Memory once removed: indirect memory and
transitive autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est‘, Camera
Obscura May 2003 also seen
here: Memory
Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive ... (pdf files)
The
Great Divide | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 15, 2003
Mothers'
day: Amy Taubin on Chantal Akerman ArtForum - Find Articles Mothers'
day: Amy Taubin on Chantal Akerman, from Artforum, October 2005
La Chambre Akerman: The Captive
as Creator - Rouge Ivonne Margulies
from Rouge, 2006
Ghosted
Documentary: Chantal Akerman’s Là-bas by Greg Youmans 2006
(pdf)
ART
REVIEW - Through a Glass Darkly, Very Darkly - Review ... Benjamin Genocchio from The New York Times, January 15, 2006
Morra, J. (2007). Daughter's Tongue: The Intimate Distance of
Translation. Journal of Visual Culture. 6; 91. Sage Publications. Joanne Morra from The Journal of Visual Culture, 2007 (pdf)
Kinsman, P. (2007). She’s Come Undone:Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and Countercinema.
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 24: 217–224. Routledge. R. Patrick Kinsman from Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2007 (pdf)
Chantal
Akerman: Walking Woman Notes from an
unfinished 1998 essay by Adrian Martin, posted by Harry Tuttle at Unspoken Cinema, January 12, 2008
Chantal
Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space
Bordering On Fiction, by David
Schwartz from Moving Image Source,
July 2, 2008, also seen here: Bordering
on Fiction by David Schwartz - Moving Image Source
Griselda Pollock on Jewish quarterly Griselda Pollock accompanies Chantal
Akerman’s image journey through memory, Autumn 2008
Chantal
Akerman, ‘Almayer’s Folly: Synopsis and Statement of Intent’, LOLA, 2, 2012 December 13, 2008
Maria Fosheim Lund, ‘Deja-Vu Melodrama: An Iconographical and Iconological Analysis
of “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles‘, Out 1 Film Journal (January 27, 2009)
Article on Jeanne Dielman at SFMOMA Open Space by Brecht Andersch,
February 2009 Chantal Akerman & “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles,” February 26, 2009
Men
Carouse; Women Clean - The New York Times
Dave Kehr juxtaposes Jeanne
Dielman and John Cassavetes’ Husbands, by Dave Kehr, August 20, 2009
Maternal
Matters: Jeanne Dielman and Emma Bovary Strange(ly) Maternal
Matters: Jeanne Dielman and Emma Bovary Strange(ly) Familiar Reflections on
Everyday Domestic Scenes, by Adriana Cerne, January 1, 2010 (pdf)
Columns
| Film Art | Orphans and Maniacs: Chantal Akerman's Maniac ... Andréa Picard from Cinema Scope, Winter/Spring 2010
Now
on DVD: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies on Notebook | MUBI Aquarello, February 7, 2010
Chantal Akerman | Frieze Vivian Rehberg, March 1, 2010
Chantal Akerman: The
Integrity of Exile and the Everyday - Lola Journal Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2011
Jungle
Fever by Andréa Picard - Moving Image Source Madness
and malaise in Chantal Akerman’s Almayer's Folly, January 6, 2012
Criterion Cast - A Journey through the Eclipse Series: Chantal
Akerman's Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna
David Blakeslee, March 12, 2012
Chantal
Akerman: Too far too close - Art - Domus
May 1, 2012
Chantal
Akerman says 'a film is a film is a film,' but hers really are ... Miranda Popkey from Politico, May 4, 2012
Chantal
Akerman | Foolish Human James
Harmon, July 23, 2012
Invested
in Expression or in Its Destruction? - Senses of Cinema Zain Jamshaid, September 19, 2012
Between
Literature and the Moving Image: The Cinematography of ... Between
Literature and the Moving Image: The Cinematography of Chantal Akerman by Marion
Schmid, 2013
A
Nos Amours Chantal Akerman Retrospective - A NOS AMOURS links of articles, essays, and interviews,
September 2013
Bordering
on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est | POSTMODERN ... Kristine Butler, September 22, 2013
Chantal
Akerman's New York | Village Voice
Melissa Anderson, October 23, 2013
The Other
Akerman : The Essay Film in News From Home (1976) Devdutt Trivedi from Projectorhead, December 2013
Adam
Roberts on the ICA blog discussing Jeanne Dielman Preparing to see Jeanne Dielman... from
ICA, December 10, 2013
Adam
Roberts on the ICA blog discussing screening News from Home Planning
a Screening: News From Home, from ICA, January 21, 2014
Huffington Post: Dis-moi, a Break through Work by Chantal Akerman by
Adam Roberts The Huffington Post, May, 2014
Travelling
Shots in Chantal Akerman's D'est (aka From the East, 1993 ... Adam Roberts from The Huffington Post, March 23, 2015
Chantal
Akerman for beginners | BFI Alex
Davidson from BFI Sight and Sound,
June 4, 2015
Film/Art
| We Can't Go Home Again: Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie Andréa Picard from Cinema Scope, September 8, 2015, also seen here: Cinema Scope: Andréa Picard
Chantal
Akerman, Whose Films Examined Women's Inner Lives, Dies ... Obituary from The New York Times, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman (1950-2015): J. Hoberman Remembers the Great ... J. Hoberman from Tablet, October 6, 2015
Read
J. Hoberman's 1983 Cover Story on Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne ... Danny King from The Village Voice, October 6, 2015
Postscript:
Chantal Akerman - The New Yorker
Richard Brody, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman: a primer | Sight & Sound | BFI Cristina Álvarez López and Adriane Martin,
October 6, 2015
Rendezvous
with Chantal Akerman | Sight & Sound | BFI Nick James, October 7, 2015
Chantal
Akerman, guiding light | Sight & Sound | BFI Robert Greene, October 8, 2015
Chantal
Akerman dead: Influential, experimental feminist filmmaker ... Christopher Hooton from The Independent, October 6, 2015
The Sheila
Variations: Sheila O'Malley R.I.P. Chantal Akerman, October 06,
2015, also seen here: R.I.P. Chantal Akerman | The
Sheila Variations
Chantal
Akerman Dead: Feminist Movie Pioneer Was 65 | Variety Pat Saperstein, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman Dead: Belgian Director Was 65 | Hollywood Reporter Etan Vlessing, October 6, 2015
Director
Chantal Akerman: The most personal of filmmakers - Chicago ... Michael Phillips from The Chicago Tribune, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman, filmmaker of existential despair, dies at 65 - The ... The
Washington Post, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman is dead | Screenwriter - The Irish Times Donald Clarke, October 6, 2015
R.I.P.
feminist filmmaker Chantal Akerman. - Slate
Jesse Dorris from Slate,
October 6, 2015
NO
HOME MOVIE: In Warm Memory of Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) Catherine Grant from Film Studies for Free, October 6, 2015
Some
Came Running: Chantal Akerman, le patron
Glenn Kenny, October 6, 2015
Director
Chantal Akerman Dead at 65 - artnet News
Cait Munro, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman, 1950-2015 | Filmmaker Magazine
Sarah Salovaara, October 6, 2015
R.I.P.
Chantal Akerman, leading Belgian filmmaker · Newswire · The ... Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman has died aged 65 | BFI
Samuel Wigley, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman Dead at 65 -- Vulture E.
Alex Jung, October 6, 2015
Curtsies
and Hand Grenades: Chantal Akerman
Willow Maclay, October 6, 2015
Daily |
Chantal Akerman, 1950 - 2015 - Fandor
David Hudson with all the links, October 6, 2015
The
New York Film Festival Grapples With the Death of an Icon « Mark Harris from Grantland, October 7, 2015
What
Chantal Akerman Left Behind for the Women of Cinema | Milk Jake Boyer, October 7, 2015
On Chantal Akerman -
Film Society of Lincoln Center Kent
Jones, October 7, 2015
Lindsay
Zoladz on Chantal Akerman -- Vulture
October 7, 2015
Chantal
Akerman obituary | Film | The Guardian
Jonathan Romney, October 8, 2015
Lesbian
Filmmaker Commits Suicide - Curve Magazine
Victoria A. Brownworth, October 8, 2015
Chantal
Akerman (1950-2015): a reflection by Concordia expert Krista ... Krista Geneviève Lynes, October 8, 2015
Remembering Chantal
Akerman - Vogue Lesli Camhi from Vogue, October 8, 2015
Renowned
Feminist Filmmaker Chantal Akerman Dies at 65 ... Elizabeth Daley from the Advocate, October 8, 2015
Keeping
a distance: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman | Sight ... - BFI Janet Bergstrom from BFI Sight and Sound, October 15, 2015
On Chantal Akerman |
Institute of Contemporary Arts Adam
Roberts, October 19, 2015
On
Chantal Akerman « LRB blog - London Review of Books Daniella Shreir, October 22, 2015
Chantal
Akerman, film director - obituary - Telegraph November 17, 2015
3quarksdaily:
Chantal Akerman: Now Sue Hubbard,
November 23, 2015
Farewell | Frieze An
Homage to Chantal Akerman, December 2015
Carol's
ghost: Chantal Akerman, Todd Haynes, and the problem of ... Emily from Femina Ridens, December 3, 2015
Chantal
Akerman 1950-2015 on Film Studies for Free | Jane Topping links of articles, essays, and interviews,
December 7, 2015
Chantal
Akerman: An Intimate Passion • Senses of Cinema Bérénice Reynaud, December 9, 2015
Her Cinema,
Even • Chantal Akerman • Senses of Cinema
Elisabeth Lebovici, December 9, 2015
Chantal
Akerman's Screens • Senses of Cinema
Giuliana Bruno, December 9, 2015
Chantal and
Some Comrades • Chantal Akerman • Senses of Cinema Nicole Brenez, December 9, 2015
With
Chantal • Senses of Cinema Marilyn
Watelet, December 9, 2015
I
Didn't See Time Go By • Chatal Akerman • Senses of Cinema Vivian Ostrovsky, December 9, 2015
Dear
Chantal • Tribute to Chantal Akerman • Senses of Cinema Yvonne Raner, December 9, 2015
A
Last Conversation with Chantal Akerman • Senses of Cinema Esther Orner, December 9, 2015
Tribute
to Chantal Akerman • Claire Atherton • Senses of Cinema December 9, 2015
Funeral
speech for Chantal Akerman • Senses of Cinema Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur eulogy delivered at
the funeral service of Chantal Akerman on October 13, 2015, at Père Lachaise
cemetery, December 9, 2015
chantal
akerman: notes. - mixed feelings
Trisha, January 2016
Presence
(appearance and disappearance) of two Belgian filmmakers Imma Merino from Comparative Cinema, 2016
Chantal
Akerman, 1950–2015: Quarterly Review of Film and Video ... David Sterritt, January 14, 2016
Homage
to Chantal Akerman | Film Quarterly
Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur eulogy delivered at the funeral service of
Chantal Akerman on October 13, 2015, at Père Lachaise cemetery, published
January 20, 2016
Remembering
Filmmaker Chantal Akerman | The Jewish Museum Blog February 10, 2016
“It
Gets Dislocated”: The Evocative Cinema of Chantal Akerman ... Paula Rabinowitz from Walker Art Center,
March 28, 2016
I
Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman | Film ... Clayton Dillard from Slant, March 28, 2016
Place
and Displacement: Akerman and Documentary | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, March 29, 2016
Brooklyn
Magazine: Forrest Cardamenis March
30, 2016
A
new Chantal Akerman retro shows her cinema of loneliness – Metro Matt Prigge, March 30, 2016
I
Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman Eric Monder from Film Journal, March 30, 2016
Death Invites an Audience
- Gay City News Steve Erickson,
March 31, 2016
Indie
Focus: A fresh look at Chantal Akerman all across L.A. - LA Times Mark Olsen, April 3, 2016
The New Yorker: Richard Brody April 4, 2016
Virginia Quarterly Review: Michelle Orange April 11, 2016
Chantal
Akerman: 10 essential films | BFI
Michael Ewins from BFI Sight and Sound,
June 21, 2016
C
Magazine / Every Home a Heartache: Chantal Akerman Jon Davies, Summer 2016
Chantal
Akerman, A Reluctantly Feminist Filmmaker: 52 Weeks Of ... Lauren C. Byrd from Bust magazine, August 12, 2016
Walking,
Talking, Singing, Exploding . . . and Silence: Chantal ... Barbara McBane from Film Quarterly, September 16, 2016
Chantal
Akerman and the Possibility of Intimacy in Film | 4:3 Alena Lodkina, October 3, 2016
EXHIBITION
| City of Women | Chantal Akerman: La Chambre / The ... Moderna galerija / Museum of Modern Art,
October 16, 2016
The
Cinema Of Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics Block Cinema, April 6, 2017
Tales
of Ordinary Sadness: Melancholy in The Cinema of Chantal ... Joseph Earp from Bright Wall Dark Room, April
10, 2017
Looking,
Really Looking! The Films of Chantal Akerman Northwest Film Center, June 17, 2016 — May
31, 2017
Akerman, Chantal They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Chantal Akerman
interview with Chris Dercon (1995)
Chantal Akerman discussion on absence and imagination An open Q & A with Chantal Akerman, June
2001
Interview
with Chantal Akerman Miriam Rosen
article and interview with Akerman from Artforum,
April 2004
Chantal Akerman interview about Down There Four Decades from the Forum (2006)
The
New York Times: Dennis Lim interviews Chantal Akerman for Jeanne Dielman
January 16, 2009
AV Club
interview with Akerman Sam Adams
interview from The Onion A.V. Club,
January 28, 2010
Chantal Akerman: The Pajama
Interview - Lola Journal Nicole
Brenez interview, Summer 2011
Tropical
Melancholia: Director Chantal Akerman on Her Best Work in a Decade, Fandor,
November 2011 Michael Guillén interview
from Fandor, November 2011
No
Idolatry and Losing Everything that Made You a Slave: Chantal ... Élisabeth Lebovici interview from Mousse magazine, December 2011—January
2012, also seen here: Maniac Shadows -
Kunstenfestivaldesarts | Kunstenfestivaldesarts
Afterall interview with Akerman, Nov 2013 Alaina Claire Feldman interview from Afterall, April 11, 2013
Interview with Chantal
Akerman, recorded November 2013. By Ricky D’Ambrose video interview (12:17)
Necsus
| Temps mort: Speaking about Chantal Akerman (1950-2015 ... conversation on the death of Chantal Akerman
by film scholar Eric de Kuyper and Annie van den Oever, November 27, 2015
Chantal
Akerman interview • Senses of Cinema
Janet Bergstrom interview, December 9, 2015, also seen here: “Chantal
Akerman: Heartfelt”
Film Comment Book Review Identity
and Memory, The Films of Chantal Akerman, edited by Gwendolyn Audrey Foster,
reviewed by Michael Rowin
The Films of Chantal Akerman another brief book review
Artist's
page in Artfacts.Net Akerman art
exhibitions
Chantal Akerman
on artnet artworks for sale on
Artnet
Chantal
Akerman (1950 - 2015) - Find A Grave Memorial
Chantal Akerman -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SAUTE MA VILLE B 84
aka:
Blow Up My Town
Belgium (13 mi)
1968
My name is Chantal Akerman and I was born in
Brussels. And that’s the truth.
—from Chantal
Akerman par Chantal Akerman, 1997
A whimsical short
starring the director herself at age 18, feeling very much in the moment of the
French New Wave, made in one night with no retakes, heavily influenced by
having seen Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965), feeling more like a mad rush of
combustible energy, yet Godard allowed her to view cinema as an art form, where
she had the freedom to express herself, though in a 2010 interview with Sam
Adams at The Onion, AV Club
interview with Akerman, “I have told that story one million
times. And I am so angry at Godard that
I don’t even want to think about it.
Because he is getting to be such an asshole now, and he’s
anti-Semitic. He gave me the push, but
that’s it.” Dropping out of high school,
she enrolled in film school at the INSAS - Institut Supérieur des Arts in her native Brussels, but also dropped out after a few months, making
her directing and acting debut with this short film, an apocalyptic romp with a Godardian sneer of contempt, expressing her
views of a woman being cooped up in the kitchen all day, refusing to allow her
gender to be shackled, like previous generations, and literally blowing up the
stereotype, where themes of feminism, suicide, and mental health are all
jumbled together. With tongue in cheek, this absurd black
comedy makes a statement of liberation through annihilation, perhaps more in
debt to the mad antics of Věra Chytilová’s film DAISIES (1966), a key
feminist film in the Czech New
Wave movement that was banned for potentially inciting a riot, where art stands
for obliterating the banal routine.
Described by Akerman as
“the opposite of Jeanne Dielman, that was resignation. Here it is rage
and death.” Something of a shock to the
system, resorting to a kind of punk nihilism in the climax, Akerman’s film is
all about destroying old models in order to make way for something new, no
longer accepting the domestic acquiescence that their mothers and grandmothers
were forced to endure, where the kitchen is viewed as a feminist battleground,
a place where you could go mad, as her character literally comes unhinged. With a free-spirited tone of casual
indifference and nonchalance, a young woman played by Akerman herself breezes
into her apartment building, humming loudly, seemingly youthful and carefree as
she picks up her mail, goes into her kitchen, locks the door, seals the edges
with tape, ignores the phone ringing, and cooks a pot of pasta. Feeling like performance art, a kind of
provocation, she strangely puts on a raincoat and makes a concerted effort to
do the dishes, but fails miserably, growing increasingly agitated, still
humming, occasionally breaking into recognizable notes, singing “la la la la la
la,” where all the pots and pans end up on the floor, yet she makes a concerted
effort to scrub the floors clean, which includes polishing her shoes, which
extends to her legs, before squirting lotion on her face, making faces in a
mirror before writing the message “It’s all over” on the mirror with lotion,
more of a pointed reference to the past than any cryptic message about what
she’s about to do, which is light a paper on fire and turn on the burners on
the stove, laying her head down, curled around the flames as she waits for her
death. The film ends with a gigantic
explosion, though we still hear her singing her little tune before reciting the
credits.
A clue to the film’s
absurdly comical mood is a cartoon Smurf on the kitchen door that reads, “Go
Home!” Expressing sheer irreverence and
a sense of anarchy, the film blends comedy with an unmistakable anxiety, making
an apocalyptic comment on the juxtaposition of seemingly ordinary spaces with
extraordinary inner conflict, reinforced by Akerman’s signature style of
claustrophobic framing and oblique camera angles. The film expresses not only dissatisfaction
with the norm, but alienation, conveying a particularly feminine sense of
isolation and ambivalence, where it’s important to understand Akerman never saw
herself as a “feminist” or “gay” artist, refusing to allow her films to be
screened at gay film festivals, contending “You wouldn’t say of a Fellini film
that it’s a male film … When people say there is a feminist film language, it’s
like they’re saying there is only one way for women to express
themselves.” Akerman’s films, however,
are highly personal statements, more like intimate essays than fictional works
or documentaries. In keeping with the
times, the late 60’s and early 70’s was an emancipating era, where it was
important for individuals to rediscover their own identity, not the one handed
down from past generations, but something new and liberating. Easily missed in the title sequence is a
dedication, as the film is dedicated to Claire, most likely Claire Wauthion, a French actress with whom she was
involved in real life, shown
having sex with her at the end of JE, TU, IL, ELLE (1974), suggesting that at
least in Akerman’s eyes, this “Chaplinesque” farce that mocks obsessive
housekeeping with its own hilariously energetic yet disastrous attempts at it,
is probably a love poem to her girlfriend at the time, describing it in an
interview with French art critic Élisabeth
Lebovic in Maniac
Shadows - Kunstenfestivaldesarts | Kunstenfestivaldesarts as her
“queerest movie.”
Janet Bergstrom from Sight and
Sound, November 1999, BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Innovators 1970-1980: Keeping a distance
Akerman saw Pierrot le fou by chance when she was 15; she had never heard of Godard and she didn't think much of movies. The experience led her to realise that she wanted to make films that, like Godard's, would carry an erotic charge of immediacy, would be "like talking to one person". She made her audacious gem of a first film - Saute ma ville (1968, 13 minutes) - when she was only 18, in 35 mm, with no money and no institutional support. "One day I wanted to make a film about myself. That was Saute ma ville. I needed a camera, some film, some lights and someone to operate the camera. I asked somebody I knew if he would help me make the film and somebody else loaned me a camera, we bought a little film stock and we made the film in one night. And then I edited it." Akerman had spent several months in a Brussels film school (INSAS) before she dropped out because she wasn't allowed to plunge immediately into film-making. But even after she had completed Saute ma ville no one around her believed she was a film-maker. Her sense of isolation and uncertainty was so great that she left home for Paris, where she stayed for two years. She wanted to work in films but she didn't know how.
Akerman describes Saute ma ville as follows: "You see an adolescent girl, 18 years old, go into a kitchen, do ordinary things but in a way that is off-kilter, and finally commit suicide. The opposite of Jeanne Dielman: Jeanne, that was resignation. Here, it is rage and death." The adolescent is played by Akerman. The film is structured around ordinary domestic routines; the humour, or horror, emerges from the way simple tasks veer out of control. The girl 'sings' (la-la-la-la) with the intrusiveness of a troubled child vying for attention; every gesture looks like the externalisation of psychic implosion, for instance, her disturbing dance with her mirror image. The girl's dislocated activity is the despairing prelude to suicide. The explosion that blows up not only "her city" but first of all herself is set off when she sets fire to a letter (which we cannot read) as she leans over the stove with the unlit gas turned on full blast. A sound-image carried over from this scene opens Jeanne Dielman: before the names appear in the credits the loud sound of a jet of gas can be heard, a noise repeated every time Jeanne turns on the stove.
Saute ma ville sat in a lab for two years because Akerman didn't have the money to claim it and because she was so uncertain about its worth. Finally, when the head of the lab told her to take it away, she asked him to watch it and give her his opinion. Not only did he like it, he also gave her contacts in Belgian television, which led her to Eric de Kuyper, who broadcast Saute ma ville in his Alternative Cinema series. The next day Akerman heard André Delvaux, Belgium's best-known film-maker, give her film a glowing radio review. Overnight she became "a film-maker", not least in her own eyes.
On
Chantal Akerman « LRB blog - London Review of Books Daniella Shreir, October 22, 2015
Chantal Akerman’s films don’t have conventional plots with a beginning, middle and end. Yet nearly all the obituaries, following her death at the age of 65 this month, described how Akerman was inspired to make her first film at the age of 18 after watching Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, and said that Gus Van Sant cited Akerman as one of his major inspirations. Over and over, we were given her genesis as a filmmaker and the promise of her reincarnation, bookended by two credible male auteurs.
Her death, too, was cast as part of the narrative. Akerman committed suicide; the obituary writers implied it had something to do with her final public appearance in mid-August, when the preview of No Home Movie was booed at the Locarno film festival. But Akerman was never dismayed by criticism; she thrived on it. During the Cannes preview of the three-and-a-half-hour Jeanne Dielman (1975), now considered a classic of feminist counter-cinema, Akerman recalled the rebounding of fold-up seats as audience members walked out, and Marguerite Duras shouting on her way to the exit that Akerman was crazy. Akerman gave as good as she got until the film’s star, Delphine Seyrig, urged her to sit down. She never lost her taste for tragicomic confrontation; at Locarno this August, her response to the booing was to say: ‘It was a great film, no?’
This self-aware sense of humour was an abiding characteristic of Akerman’s public persona. In a recent interview, she laughed as she described how some of the films she made in New York in the 1970s had been financed with money stolen from the 55th Street Playhouse, the gay porn cinema in Manhattan where she worked as a cashier. (The padding from the dollar bills kept her warm walking home, she said.) Her first film, Saute ma ville (1968), was self-financed. To secure funding from the Belgian government for Jeanne Dielman, she submitted a much shorter script with a more conventional feminist message.
Akerman always insisted that she made ‘Chantal Akerman films’ and was no porte-drapeau (standard-bearer) for a particular brand of feminism. This may sound like an abnegation of responsibility, but Akerman’s early films are as distant from the feminism of the time as they are from traditional linear cinema. She refused to give her characters a cohesive, easily recognisable identity.
In Je, tu, il, elle (1976), the main character, played by Akerman, gives a hand-job to a male truck driver and engages in a stark seven-minute lesbian sex scene that ends the film. The title character of Jeanne Dielman is both a housewife and a sex worker and, by the end, a murderer. Many of Akerman’s displays of exposed bodies could be isolated pieces of feminist performance art; in some ways, she was less like Agnès Varda than Marina Abramović. As she put it, the idea of a single language of feminist film ‘is like saying there is only one way for women to express themselves. But there should be as many different ways as there are different kinds of women making films.’
There was a pragmatic side to Akerman’s feminism. She aimed for an 80 per cent female crew, employing women in roles normally fulfilled by men (cinematographers, lighting technicians, sound recordists) so that a literal or metaphorical male gaze didn’t dictate the shots. She shot at her own eye level so that ‘the camera was not voyeuristic’: ‘You always knew where I was. You know that it wasn’t shot through a keyhole.’ And when she’s playing one of her characters, Akerman often stares directly back into the camera for an uncomfortable length of time: as relentless, confrontational and provocative on-screen as off.
Senses of Cinema: Nicole Fernandez Ferrer December 16, 2015
“Look at a painting, read a book, have fun and here we go!”
– Chantal Akerman in the documentary Chantal Akerman, écrivain de cinéma
by Nicole Witart (1993)
A pungent and tragicomic critique of domestic life and the literal explosion of the so-called ‘feminine universe’, Saute ma ville (1968), the first short film by Chantal Akerman, then 18, allows each of us to identify with the position of women assigned to the home (here, the kitchen, emblematic space of this universe) and, as a retort, glorifies the revolt against this confinement, doomed to its own destruction.
From the opening titles, Akerman installs us in her récit (narrative) (the word is written in capitals, black on a white background). Subsequently, we enter a story told by Akerman, one she will keep on telling in later films, most notably Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080, Bruxelles.
Saute ma ville is supported by images constructed like a burlesque and the performance of an actress that seems to come straight out of a slapstick comedy. This exuberant character is played by the filmmaker herself, who literally bursts in front of a large building (the sounds of the city being omnipresent there), flowers in hand, to get back to her apartment. Akerman’s humming adds an enthusiastic and light touch to this jaunty entrance.
Driven by an inner voice which repeats the word “Scotch”, Akerman seems to be preparing a banal diner of pasta, when all of a sudden she begins peeling off a thick roll of brown scotch tape, systematically sealing up the kitchen door. The noise of the tape ripping is counterpoint to and in rhythm with her determined crunching on an apple. In between, she eats the pasta in a compulsive manner. After negligently getting rid of her cat by throwing her outside, Akerman then systematically trashes the kitchen, where the entire film plays out, in a parody a contrario of domestic order, creating an exhilarating ritual.
Putting on a raincoat and a small headscarf (does Akerman represent here the typical woman of the 60s?), she embarks upon a simulation of cleaning which turns into a grand farce of housework. The conscientious polishing and the repetitive and vigorous brushing of her shoes, quasi-choreographed, leave her legs covered in black stains.
The camera, which films the character at her level and in comically, allows us to see, in a discordant manner and in high angle, a pensive Akerman humming while leafing rapidly through the daily paper Le Soir. She then looks at herself in the mirror. By not gazing at herself, but reflecting instead, she cunningly “subverts” this symbol of the woman who ‘makes herself up’, does her hair, and dresses for braving the outside world with the weapons of femininity.
Gradually, in the narrow space of the kitchen, Akerman seals up a window. This action is shown as one of the rituals of daily life: collecting one’s mail, buying flowers, tidying cupboards, clean, polishing one’s shoes…
The soundtrack, the interior voice, the manner of humming, the noises of the kitchen and the jerky acting style all lead us towards farce and absurdity, yet they quickly bring us back to tragicomedy. Everything here points the spectator toward a fatal end.
The motif of the mirror again re-appears in the scene in which she smears beauty lotion on her face with frenzy and disgust while bursting out laughing. Striking a match while pronouncing “Bang, Bang!”, then setting fire to some paper after turning on the gas, Akerman allows us to hear the hiss of gas while she curls up on the stove, an arm folded under her head and the bouquet of flowers in her hand. This entire scene is presented to us through the mirror. As a final thumb of the nose to the conventions of drama, the sound of the repeated explosions over a black screen are brutally cut short to make room for Akerman’s light-hearted and cheerful humming.
This final image infuses the whole film with euphoria. Saute ma ville is tolling the boycott of the housewife and the destruction of the dutiful and “gendered” feminine, but also leads to the heroine’s death. Today, after Chantal Akerman’s suicide, this ending has taken s on a new dimension, creating a feeling of immense sadness at the tragic loss of a free, mordant and audacious voice in international cinema.
Over the final, black screen, the adolescent voice of Akerman reads the credits: “This was Saute ma ville. Camera: René Fruchter. Assistant: Richard Bréchet. Editing: Geneviève Luciani. Sound: Patrice. Direction: Chantal Akerman.”
Lindsay
Zoladz on Chantal Akerman -- Vulture
October 7, 2015
Chantal Akerman’s first short film was called Saute Ma Ville, which means, roughly, “blow up my town.” She made it when she was 18. She began that year of her life in a Belgian film school, but dropped out after a few months, figuring she could make better films on her own. She was not wrong. The precocious teenage Akerman financed that debut short herself, according to the film scholar Ivone Margulies, partially by “selling three-dollar shares on the diamond exchange in Antwerp.” And she starred in it, too: The 13-minute Saute Ma Ville follows a clownishly charismatic Akerman as she performs a number of domestic tasks with a sloppy, chaotic glee — Chaplin as madwoman in the attic. She’s electrifying to watch, but the film has a disturbing undertone that builds as it progresses. By the end, she has taped up the doors to her apartment, a task she completes with an eerie smile. In the final scene — a kind of DIY homage to her then-favorite film, Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou — she lights a piece of paper on fire, cranks up the gas on the stove, and puts her face to rest uncomfortably close to the burner. Only after the screen has gone black do we hear the explosion we’ve been dreading.
I saw Saute Ma Ville when I was 20. It is not hyperbolic to say that it changed my life. It was one of the only films I’d been shown in film school made by a woman — let alone a teenage girl, made at a time when there were considerably more barriers to getting your artistic voice heard as a young person. I was bowled over by the simple fact that we were sitting there, in a film class, still discussing a film that an 18-year-old girl had made 40 years before. I loved Saute Ma Ville — its rhythm, its irreverence, its sense of anarchy. I loved the way it blended comedy with unease. I had spent my first two years of film school feeling increasingly alienated from my professors and my classmates and the more traditional movies they wanted to make; everything I wrote seemed too strange, too personal. Saute Ma Ville and the rest of Akerman’s early films jolted me awake, gave me permission. They felt like handwritten notes from another alienated young woman, sent across generations, saying, “Yes, you can do this, too.”
Akerman’s films are largely about space, time, and, I’d venture to say, a particularly feminine sense of isolation, displacement, and ambivalence. In one of the best ones, 1977’s News From Home, she films strangers on the unfamiliar streets of New York (she moved here for a couple years in her early 20s, from 1971 to 1972) while reading aloud letters from her mother back in Belgium (an Auschwitz survivor who passed away last year and was the subject of her latest film, No Home Movie.) News From Home is a visual poem about loneliness and homesickness, but also about the ecstatic curiosity of an anonymous person in an unfamiliar city. A more recent work, 2006’s La Bas, is formally similar, combining footage she shot while staying alone in Tel Aviv with audio of her own thoughts and the diary entries of a deceased aunt. In the oddly hypnotic Hotel Monterey, Akerman’s camera wanders the hallways of a shoddy, desolate Manhattan hotel, finding compositional beauty in empty hallways and abandoned corridors. Akerman once said she liked to film the “images between the images” in more traditional narrative films. You are, of course, welcome to find her way of seeing boring — plenty of people have. But acquiring a taste for her films is like committing to a practice of meditation: a “boredom” that can quite literally rewire the brain.
Akerman’s best-known films (like the early film essay Je Tu Il Elle or the more traditionally structured Les Rendez-vous d’Anna) are often about women alone, a topic that still — nearly five decades after her debut as a filmmaker — makes plenty of people uncomfortable. There is a double standard still in place: A man sitting alone in a restaurant or a bar is perceived as mysterious, brooding, lost in thought; a woman sitting alone in the same place is perceived as jilted, lonely, yearning for a companion. We teach women to be more self-conscious about their solitude than men, but an artist needs to feel comfortable in solitude in order to think, create, and innovate. This is a subtle but huge reason why we still have too few female artists.
I spent the rest of my time as an undergrad watching every Chantal Akerman film I could get my hands on — and shamelessly ripping them off. I started renting one of my university’s last surviving Bolex H16 cameras; it had a busted door that I had to duct-tape shut so as not to expose the film. It would have been easier to shoot digitally, but I wanted my weird personal-essay films to look as much like Akerman’s as possible. (In one particularly on-the-nose short, I spelled out a Charlotte Brontë quote in Campbell’s alphabet-soup letters; unexpectedly, fishing through ten cans of acidic tomato broth stung my and my actress’s hands so badly that we spent the rest of the afternoon soaking them in ice water.) I started pouring my own part-time earnings into my projects, just like her. There was only one place left in the D.C. area that would transfer old black-and-white 16mm film onto digital video, so every couple weeks I’d ride the subway to the end of the line, take a creepy shortcut through a small cemetery in suburban Maryland, and drop off my reels. These journeys felt ritualistic and important; I made them alone. I felt, rather presumptuously, like a steward of a dying breed.
I eventually abandoned filmmaking for an even more solitary profession. But the truth is that Akerman’s films, with their monastic but often strangely bemused heroines, taught me how to get comfortable spending time alone. They taught me not just how to endure solitude, but to find an odd joy in it. I see so clearly now that they taught me the first step in making a life as a writer.
***
A lot of the obituaries of Chantal Akerman have called her a “feminist filmmaker,” or lauded her for telling the untold stories of women’s lives. And I suppose I haven’t said much to complicate that narrative, so here I should let Chantal have some say in the matter: “I think it is poor and limiting to think of my films as feminist,” she once said in an interview. “You wouldn’t say of a Fellini film that it’s a male film … When people say there is a feminist film language, it’s like they’re saying there is only one way for women to express themselves.” (She’s had arguably harsher words when people have tried to label her films “lesbian” or “LGBTQ”; she was once quoted saying, “I will never permit a film of mine to be shown in a gay film festival.”)
The Akerman film most often stuck with the “feminist” prefix is, indisputably, her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. She made it when she was 25, the same age Orson Welles was when he made Citizen Kane. In it, we watch the titular, emotionally enigmatic widow/secret prostitute (an immaculately coiffed Delphine Seyrig) perform a number of household tasks in what seems like real time: She makes coffee, peels potatoes, and — what’s this? — receives payment from her john, all with the same detached affect. It’s a study in the way filmic time passes, a meditation on what we define as “drama,” an homage to the invisible labor of the housewife. It is bizarre and beautiful and absolutely riveting. It has also aged better than the sort of stereotypically one-dimensional second-wave feminist art that taught us to perceive the domestic sphere as nothing but a prison and to see women like Jeanne as helpless victims of the patriarchy. Akerman sees something infinitely more complex in her heroine. Jeanne Dielman is as much a celebration of household ritual as it is a condemnation. She sees daily routine not as a prison so much as a kind of gorgeous and elaborate dance.
I have struggled with this, in my admiration of Akerman: How can I honor her wish to be perceived as something more universal than “a female filmmaker” while still acknowledging the fact that something in her films spoke to me specifically as a woman and as a feminist? I don’t have an easy answer to that question, but I am grateful for its messiness. The older I get, the more I realize that the women who have helped me arrive at a personal definition of feminism are more often than not the ones who have poked and prodded at the term, refused its simplest slogans, challenged its cleanest borders. I find enough peace in the way Ivone Margulies puts it, writing about Jeanne, a figure onto which Akerman has piled “layers of signification that include but are not restricted to the feminist reading.”
The truth is that Akerman was prickly, and parts of her legacy will always remain so. It’s widely believed that her early work was her best (I haven’t seen all of her late films, but I’d suspect this is true), and I’m sure it wasn’t easy on her to know that most people thought she could never top the movie she made when she was 25. (That wasn’t easy on Welles, either.) And the facts that have trickled out about her death and the last year of her life have been bleak, dismaying, almost unspeakably tragic. No Home Movie, which interrogates her dying mother’s experiences Auschwitz, seems to have taken a heavy emotional toll on her; friends told the Times that she had been “in a dark emotional state” since her mother’s passing. The French paper Le Monde has reported her death as a suicide, though the official cause has not yet been released. Regardless, the ending to Saute Ma Ville has taken on a haunting new meaning. A film that had once been such a source of joy for me was, yesterday, too difficult to bear.
***
I can’t end an homage to an artist I admire on such a bleak note, so here is a postscript, written in the spirit of Chantal Akerman, who taught me so much about the power of the personal, the enormity of minor things, the destabilizing force of intimate detail.
About a year ago, I finally made a friend who is as much of an Akerman nut as I am. Her name is Anna, and when we met she was working on an M.A. thesis that was partially about some of Akerman’s documentaries. I remember the car ride when we both started geeking out about her for the first time, and we were so annoying about it that I’m surprised the other passengers did not throw us from the moving vehicle. Our Akerman fandom soon became the crux of our friendship, something we would joke about. We now accompany each other to the movies that are too long or slow for other people to want to see with us. Earlier this year, we organized a screening of Jeanne Dielman on a projector in our friends’ living room; one of the hosts took a long nap and marveled when she came back in the room that she had not missed anything at all. We laughed.
Last week, Anna emailed me when she realized we forgot to get tickets to the New York Film Festival’s Wednesday night screening of No Home Movie (subject line: “OMG WE FUCKED UP”). There were still tickets for Thursday night, but she was headed out of town that morning. “I am seriously tempted to change my flight but I know that is ridiculous,” she said. I told her that it was, but that I was honored to be friends with a person who would even consider changing a flight for a Chantal Akerman–related reason. The exchange made me think, as I did yesterday, of my favorite Akerman quote, which she told an interviewer in 1982. I’ve written it down in so many notebooks that I know it by heart. “I haven’t tried to find a compromise between myself and others,” it goes. “I have thought that the more particular I am, the more I address the general.”
I
NEARLY DIED OF BOREDOM!!!: SAUTE MA VILLE (1968) m.d’d!, January 8, 2011
Chantal
Akerman, 1950–2015: Quarterly Review of Film and Video ... David Sterritt, January 14, 2016
The Cine File:
Saute Ma Ville Andrew Schenker
Presence
(appearance and disappearance) of two Belgian filmmakers Imma Merino from Comparative Cinema, 2016
Lesbian
Filmmaker Commits Suicide - Curve Magazine
Victoria A. Brownworth, October 8, 2015
Griselda Pollock on Jewish quarterly Griselda Pollock accompanies Chantal
Akerman’s image journey through memory, Autumn 2008
The
Evening Class: ROSENBAUM ON AKERMAN
Michael Guillen, January 2, 2009
Revoir
« Saute ma ville », premier film de Chantal Akerman. Hélène Delye
Salute
Your Shorts: Chantal Akerman's "Saute ma ville" :: Movies ... Sean Gandert from Paste magazine, August 28, 2009
From
Amber Frost at Dangerous Minds:
Blow Up My Town (1968)
directed by Chantal Akerman • Reviews ...
Willow Catelyn from Letterboxd
Saute
Ma Ville - Curtsies and Hand Grenades - blogger Willow Maclay
Curtsies
and Hand Grenades: Chantal Akerman
Willow Maclay, October 6, 2015
Chantal
Akerman's 1968 short, 'Saute ma Ville' ('Blow up My Town ... Amber Frost from Dangerous Minds, July 7,
2014
Saute ma ville |
Facets Features Garret Kriston
User
Reviews from imdb Author: MisterWhiplash from United
States, October 6, 2015
User
Reviews from imdb Author: kambiz kaheh from Tehran, Iran,
October 14, 2004
Criterion
Confessions [Jamie S. Rich] included
on JEANNE DIELMAN Criterion DVD
Saute
Ma Ville and Je, Tu, Il, Elle plus Sally Potter's Thriller | BAMPFA
Short
Film: Saute ma ville, by Chantal Akerman | Filmmaker Magazine Scott Macaulay, July 7, 2014
FILM;
Chantal Akerman And the Point Of Point of View - The New York ... Dinitia Smith from The New York Times, April 26, 1998
Chantal
Akerman, Saute ma ville (Blow Up My Town), 1968 ... entire short film,
YouTube (12:30)
HÔTEL MONTEREY
Chicago Reader - Hotel Monterey summery Jonathan Rosenbaum
This early experimental feature, slightly longer than an hour, by Chantal Akerman (1972), shot silently and brilliantly by Babette Mangolte, explores the corridors, lobby, elevators, and rooms of a cheap New York hotel. Occasionally the rooms' solitary occupants are glimpsed, but this only increases the overall atmosphere of eerie isolation and quiet, and reveals perhaps more than any other Akerman film how central an influence Edward Hopper has been in her work.
In a silent series of long, slow and defiantly
“uninteresting” shots, Akerman films the drab corners and empty corridors of a
low-rent
User reviews from imdb Author: runamokprods from US
Chantal Akerman is arguably the most important and interesting female
director of her era, yet she is sadly under-known here in the
Hotel Monterey is an experimental silent 60 minute 'documentary' set in a cheap
NY hotel. No story, just images that cross the sadness of Edward Hopper's
paintings with the weirdness of David Lynch (who seems to have been influenced
by this). It's like a great photo book come to life. It has a fascinating look
(very grainy 16mm, with super rich colors). No question that by nature this
feels dull in spots and some images are less powerful or repetitive, but its
full of wonderful, disquieting moments, and it has a fascinating, hypnotic
almost imperceptible build to a 'climax'. If nothing else, the film is worth it
for the simple power of the moment when the camera starts to move after 30
minutes of still images.
Article on Hotel Monterey on Turner Classic Movies Michael Atkinson
Arguably the least accommodating film you'll ever see on
broadcast television, Chantal Akerman's Hotel
Monterey (1972) is the work of a testy experimentalist in her unmellowed
youth, and if you're not accustomed to what has been termed
"avant-garde" or "experimental" film, watching it requires
a paradigm shift in how you approach the medium. All of which sounds
forbidding, like taking a test in quantum mechanics, but actually Akerman's
film - her second feature, from an acclaimed career in its fifth decade - could
hardly be simpler. There's no story, no characters - it's a kind of
documentary, but one without an agenda. It's cinema as experience, not as an
alternate narrative reality you can "escape" into.
Filmmakers looking to subvert the hegemony of industrialized moviemaking tend
to aim toward elliptical excess (to whatever degree their limited budgets can
let them, of course), or to instead drain away the distractions and clutter
that most movies accumulate in their effort to "entertain." After
all, it's not difficult to take a step sideways and see the cataract of
spectacle, story, busy-ness, craft, acting and visual design in a
"normal" film for what it is by definition: baloney, albeit baloney
we all crave and happily consume. Akerman would quickly become, with the
more-than-three-hour existentialist epic Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), an
"arthouse" darling, and that film, which unblinkingly chronicles the
daily routine of a precise, emotionally vacant Belgian housewife (Delphine
Seyrig) until her tiny world begins, almost imperceptibly, to crumble, is an
ordeal by cinema in which the time spent watching very little happen is integral
to the experience. Movies aren't supposed to work like this - Nero-like
mega-consumers that we are, we expect a movie to hold our distracted attention
in a death grip for every second, especially now, when we can fast-forward or
change channels at the first whiff of impatient non-entertainment. But art is
in the control of the artist, not the viewer, and if you imposed your will on Jeanne
Dielman or Hotel Monterey
from the comfort of your couch, making them fit your ideas and whims, not
Akerman's, then the films would fizzle into nothingness, and you will have
wasted what time you did expend upon them. The time spent watching Seyrig's
lost widow attempt to control her four-walled universe is like gunpowder slowly
packed into a cannon, and eventually the fuse is lit. The climax is only a
meaningful shock if you've been paying attention, and put in the hours.
Hotel Monterey is far shorter -
65 minutes - and much less structured, her first lengthy film after two shorts,
filmed during a New York sojourn when she was merely 21 and just getting
acquainted with the experimental filmmaking scene and the work of Jonas Mekas,
Michael Snow, Stan Brakhage, etc. The film is silent, first of all - no
soundtrack of any kind, a radical choice only a few avant-garde filmmakers over
the decades have ever chosen. But it is also essentially a still-life, a
portrait of the eponymous hotel, a rundown, claustrophobic single-occupancy
dwelling for transients and fringe dwellers. Shooting over the course of a
single, long night, Akerman moves from the lobby, where patrons and employees
are glimpsed but apparently oblivious to being filmed, to the elevator to the
rooms, filmed in symmetrical Kubrick-like compositions, sometimes empty,
sometimes occupied by what are obvious loners looking to be forgotten by
society. (One shot, of a pregnant woman from down the hall, has a positively
Vermeerian pallor.)
Then Akerman goes to the halls, endless, narrow, underlit, slowly patrolled by
the camera, which is intent on forcing our movie-watching engines to slip into
neutral and coast, authentically observing the grim scenery. Hotel Monterey becomes genuinely
spooky - the darknesses begin to suggest secrets and unspoken menace. At one
point, the film settles on a single hall and aperture/doorway, absolutely
lightless except when it is illuminated in a flash by a flickering light of
some kind, and it's here that you begin to think the hotel might be haunted,
that shadows and figures might be hiding in the underexposed grain. Another
slow dolly down another murky hall further evokes the sense of a horror film -
but without the plot-stuff. (If Kubrick didn't see this film before he made The
Shining (1980), it seems certain that a few directors of recent Japanese
horror films had.)
Then, Akerman finds the rooftop, and daylight, not quite an exultant climax
(midtown always looks gray and grimy in '70s films), but a relief nonetheless.
And that's all there is to it, with Akerman's impulse being to simply record
the space, and the feeling the space gave her. But implicit in the action
between you and the film is the matter of the hotel itself, how privacy is
impossible in a large city, how the hotel is always occupied by hidden people
and yet, when you stalk the corridors alone, it seems as empty as a ghost town.
The movie is also, like Jeanne Dielman, a deliberate expression of the
time it takes to watch it - far from having your temporal span "whizz
by" during a movie (and why is that a great thing, anyway? Who's in such a
hurry that you'd want hours to vanish from your life?), Hotel Monterey makes you live every minute of that hour, an hour
you might not remember otherwise, and won't if you change the channel.
Eclipse
Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Criterion essay from Michael Koresky,
Looking
with Babette Mangolte
Akerman in
SoHo January 21, 2010
Press
Notes: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Hotel
Monterey (1972) - The Criterion Collection
A
Journey Into The Eclipse Series – Chantal Akerman’s New York Films David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast,
DVDTalk.com
[Jamie S. Rich] Criterion
Collection, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
DVDTown
[Christopher Long] Criterion
Collection
DVD Verdict [Daryl
Loomis] Criterion Collection
The
House Next Door [Dan Callahan] Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
The Auteurs [Acquarello] Mubi, Chantal
Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
seanax.com
[Sean Axmaker] Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
LA CHAMBRE
A
Journey Into The Eclipse Series – Chantal Akerman’s New York Films David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast,
The first film in this set is an 11 minute short subject
that is almost laughable in its simplicity, the kind of High Art Conceptual
Piece that generates scornful disdain or mocking dismissal from your average
popcorn-munching movie fan. Basically, a camera is mounted on a tripod and pans
around a small, cramped apartment a few times. All the objects in the room
(ordinary “stuff of life” like second-hand furniture, a tea kettle, fruit on a
table, an umbrella, a dish rack, a calendar, discarded garments and so on)
remain stationary except for a person, Ms. Akerman herself, 21 years old at the
time, who lays on a bed in her nightgown (nothing revealing, don’t get excited
guys, no precursors to YouTube-era exhibitionism on display here) and shifts
her position each time the lens passes her way. First she’s just glancing
sideways into the camera, then she’s rolling around under the sheets, then
she’s fondling an apple, then she starts chewing on it – kind of seductively,
perhaps, but mostly just eating an apple. The camera pauses briefly a couple of
times and changes direction. That’s the dramatic suspenseful part! There’s a
human hand guiding the camera, and you can get a quick glimpse of the operator
in the bottom of a circular mirror between the two windows. That’s just one of
the details that stood out to me after watching La
Chambre a couple of times without noticing it the first time around. The
film is a formal exercise; there’s no “a ha!” moment of surprise discovery
hidden in the film that I’ve been able to discern either in my viewing or by
reading about it. Akerman just built on her contemporary influences, came up
with the idea and executed it. One’s initial reaction to La Chambre
(and to a certain extent, the other films on this disc) could be along the
lines of “What the hell? I could film that! Anybody could film that!”
But the point is, Chantal Akerman already did film it, and she built
from that experiment, applying her technique in creative and original ways as
she perfected her cinematic vision.
User reviews from imdb Author: lor_ from
I have enjoyed and benefited from viewing several of Akerman's features over
the years, back when they played frequently at NYC art houses: JEANNE DIELMAN,
TOUTE UNE NUIT especially. But this early short film betrays her feet of clay.
The 360-degree counter-clockwise panning around the room shot seems like a riff
out of Michael Snow's experimental bag of tricks, but is not as interesting as
his breakthrough films, notably WAVELENGTH.
Instead we have the gimmick performed a half dozen times, then suddenly
changing to a back & forth pan right to left, left to right, over &
over until arbitrarily stopping.
Like Warhol's more famous and interminable earlier experiments in this form,
the duration becomes the issue in watching this. The purpose of Chantal's
approach is to force one to examine details, in this case the unchanging
topography of the chamber, and of course the expected (or shaggy-dog not to
expect) movements of Chantal herself as the human element submerged in the
room. It's just like watching the sleeper in Warhol's SLEEP occasionally budge,
with minimal pleasure or anything else to be derived from the effort.
My interest in cinema over the years has focused more on maximalism -I would
rather see Abel Gance, Sacha Guitry or Ken Russell toy with the medium than
observe the minimalists and structuralists like Chantal and more recently the
idiotic dogme crew spinning their wheels. As a parting shot, my all-time favorite,
using elements really from both camps is Bert Haanstra, whose feature DR.
PULDER SOWS POPPIES reminds us that subtlety is not dead, even in a modern era
where gimmicks have trumped conventional dramatic narrative.
Eclipse
Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Criterion essay from Michael Koresky,
Akerman
Takes on Conrad December 15, 2010
Akerman in
SoHo January 21, 2010
Press
Notes: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
La chambre
(1972) - The Criterion Collection
DVDTalk.com
[Jamie S. Rich] Criterion
Collection, also seen here: CriterionConfessions.com
DVDTown
[Christopher Long] Criterion
Collection
DVD Verdict [Daryl
Loomis] Criterion Collection
The
House Next Door [Dan Callahan] Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
The Auteurs [Acquarello] Mubi, Chantal
Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
seanax.com
[Sean Axmaker] Chantal Akerman In The Seventies, 3-disc
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
JE, TU, IL, ELLE
France Belgium
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Chantal Akerman directed and plays the lead in this early
(1974) black-and-white feature that charts three successive stages of its
heroine's love life. In the first part she lives like a hermit, eating only
sugar, compulsively rearranging the furniture in her one-room flat, and
apparently writing and rewriting a love letter; in part two she hitches a ride
with a truck driver and eventually gives him a hand job; in part three she
arrives at the home of her female lover, and they proceed to make frantic love.
This is every bit as obsessive and as eerie as Akerman's later Jeanne
Dielman and Toute une nuit, though not as striking on a visual
level; as in all her best work, however, the minimalist structure is both
potent and haunting.
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
CHANTAL AKERMAN is a triple threat in her 1974 film ''Je Tu Il Elle,'' serving as screenwriter, director and star. In the film's first section, she is seen posing alone in a near-empty room, and heard on the sound track making isolated comments about rearranging the furniture. She takes off her clothes. She eats sugar from a brown paper bag. She writes a long letter, then spreads the pages on the floor, scatters sugar over them and curls up in a ball. A man walks by outside the window. After a while, she puts her clothes back on and goes outside.
In the film's middle segment, she hitches a ride with a truck driver, played by Niels Arestrup. At first they barely talk. They stop for a meal together and eat in silence beside a tank of tropical fish. Gradually, the truck driver begins to unburden himself, talking to his passenger about eroticism. She listens attentively, then performs a sexual act according to his instructions. After this, he is significantly friendlier. He lets her watch him shave and gives her an affectionate pat. Thus ends the second episode.
In the last section, Miss Akerman's character is seen visiting another woman. She says she is hungry, and the woman (played by Claire Wauthion) makes her a sandwich. She then demands another sandwich and eats it greedily, after which she reaches for her friend. They remove their clothes and tussle athletically for a while. Then they fall asleep, and the film ends.
Made a year before Miss Akerman's much more successful ''Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,'' this film is most notable for Miss Akerman's evident sang-froid, even under the most soporific of circumstances; otherwise, it is one of her lesser efforts.
Eclipse
Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Criterion essay from Michael Koresky,
Looking
with Babette Mangolte
Press
Notes: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Je tu il elle (1975)
- The Criterion Collection
Invested
in Expression or in Its Destruction? - Senses of Cinema Zain Jamshaid, September 19, 2012
A
Journey Through the Eclipse Series: Chantal Akerman’s Je tu il elle David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast,
March 14, 2011
Hunger
and Thirst: Chantal Akerman's 'Je tu il elle' - Hyperallergic Douglas Messerli, August 13, 2016
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Strictly Film School Acquarello
JEANNE
DIELMAN, 26 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES A 98
Sylvain: Well, if I were a woman, I could never make
love with someone I wasn’t deeply in love with.
Jeanne: How could you know? You’re not a woman.
Akerman was born in
Brussels, the daughter of Jewish parents from Poland, where her mother Natalia
(Nelly) survived Auschwitz, a place where her father and mother were lost. It was a subject her mother refused to ever
discuss, supposedly to keep her sanity intact, though from a young age, Chantal
was extremely close to her mother, reading her letters in one of her films,
NEWS FROM HOME (1977), while in 1998 she exhibited a video installation
entitled Self-Portrait: Autobiography in
Progress, comprised of six screens of images from her films, and a running
text entitled A Family in Brussels
(also the name of an Akerman novel), where Chantal narrates the story, interchanging
her own voice with her mother’s, becoming a single indistinguishable
identity. While her father owned a small
factory in Brussels, she describes her family as “very poor,” though she could
never please her father, who wanted her to marry a nice Jewish man, “But my
mother thought I was marvelous. My
mother was implicitly encouraging me.”
As a child, the films she had seen were largely Disney films or war
movies, where it never occurred to her that it was an art form until age 15
when she viewed Godard’s PIERROT LE FOU (1965), suddenly realizing cinema had
an elevating capacity to become art. She
dropped out of high school and enrolled in film school in Brussels, but quit
after three months, “I thought we were going to make films, but we were
studying chemistry, physics.” She sold
$3 dollar shares on the Antwerp diamond exchange, raising $300 for her first
film, a 13-minute short entitled SAUTE MA VILLE (1968), made in one night with
no retakes, where she plays the central figure.
Afterwards she moved to New York, working as a nude model in a sculpture
class and a cashier at a pornographic theater, but regularly attended
screenings at the Anthology Film Archives, home of independent
and avant-garde film screenings, discovering the works of Stan Brakhage,
Michael Snow, Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, and Yvonne Rainer, which she claimed
provided the inspiration and freedom to do what she wanted to do.
Made when she was just 25,
shot in five weeks, Akerman made JEANNE DIELMAN on a $120,000 grant from the
Belgian Government, described by the author as “a Greek tragedy based on
nothing, almost nothing,” a very detailed portrait of domesticity, a movie that
defies the notion that experimental filmmaking is a spontaneous, self-indulgent
art form, as it has a carefully choreographed, almost mathematically precise
shooting scheme, manifested in long takes and medium shots, with Jeanne nearly
always in the frame, but wanders in and out, where the camera often begins and
ends a shot in darkness as Jeanne habitually turns lights on and off, lighting
only the room she is in. Nearly all of
the film, with the exception of evening strolls after dinner and brief outdoor
excursions running morning errands, occur in Jeanne’s one bedroom home, with a
living room couch opening into a bed for her son, where the vast majority of
the film is given to housework, much of it unfolding in real time, though it is
compressed time, with the director looking at her watch while shooting and
instructing her lead actress, “Now you sit for 25 seconds.” A portrait of feminine subjectivity expressed
through extreme minimalism, showing the suffocating alienation implicit with
the dull routines of housework, the film takes place over the course of three
days, where every sequence and every gesture is meticulously written into a
90-page script that Akerman said read “like a novel.” The slow pace and extensive length are
necessary for viewers to become intimately familiar with the daily rhythm and
routine of the protagonist, Jeanne Dielman, played by Delphine Seyrig, from all
the glamorous costumes in Last
Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), and
Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972) to an unpretentious Belgian housewife in Brussels whose exact
movements are carefully dissected over the course of the film, revealing a
repetitious and banal routine, where a woman’s life consists of shopping,
running errands, cooking, cleaning, washing, scrubbing (with Ajax!), knitting,
even humming to music being played on the radio, all routines that she repeats
over the course of three days, where the overwhelming familiarity with the
tasks at hand begin to consume her life, and that of the audience, where repression
has never been revealed with such exquisite precision, where a “huge” moment in
this film takes place when Ms. Dielman drops a spoon or forgets to
button a button. Perhaps in a nod to
Buñuel’s BELLE DU JOUR (1967), Jeanne also consorts with men in the late
afternoons for paid sex, scheduled weekly though seeing only a discreet one
client per day during the week while her older son Sylvain (Jan Decorte) is at
school, with each visit planned with the same painstaking detail as the evening
menu.
Akerman’s controlled,
formal style perfectly mirrors the inner feelings of her character, never
showing an ounce of emotion as she dutifully and perhaps even robotically
performs each mindnumbing daily task at hand with no wasted time or motion,
where the efficient rhythm of the film unfolds like clockwork, where for large
stretches of time she’s by herself alone and speaks to no one, seemingly on
autopilot, where it’s difficult to perceive under her skin, something Akerman
herself has not been forthcoming about, leaving her an opaque figure of study,
never breaking from the surface, always filmed with the same fixed camera
position. The film is not simply
concerned with the monotonous drudgery of housework, or making a radical
political statement, but seems more interested in the amount of time in our
lives spent performing mindless activities, especially when you consider how
this repetition accumulates over a lifetime, where what’s particularly
noteworthy or artistically unique is how she chooses to involve the audience,
as they’re in it for the duration and can actually “feel” the accumulative
effects of disaffected hours doing little to nothing that is intellectually
curious or challenging. What is
presented onscreen has complete documentary integrity, as we witness the entire
process of Jeanne making a meatloaf, peeling potatoes, scrubbing the bathtub,
making the bed, washing dishes, etc.
This is a difficult experience and quickly wears on the audience,
producing many walk-outs, though not nearly as many as D’EST (1993), though
both are among Akerman’s best films, perhaps because they are so challenging to
viewers. Over the extended time, there
is ample opportunity to analyze and fall deeper into thought, searching for the
more potent hidden meaning underneath the emotionless veneer of ordinary
everyday existence. Because the film is
so acutely exact, visual comparisons are inevitable as Jeanne moves from day
one to day two, and so on, where there are clues left behind when things are
not exactly the same, when Jeanne does things in a different manner, where
initially it’s a stretch to think there’s anything to it, but as we enter day
three, the film seems to accentuate these differences, where they literally
“become” the story, adding anxiety and suspense, until eventually everything’s
out of whack, becoming something of an intense psychological thriller with
extreme consequences, where by the end, we’re not nearly in the same place as
when we began the journey. In this way,
Akerman adds little jolts to the senses, like alarms going off in her head,
where something is mysteriously out of balance.
What’s intriguing is that there’s no definitive cause, no single
culprit, as it could be a variety of circumstances that lead to the same end,
but unlike police procedurals or crime capers, the film remains ambiguous about
the cause, leaving it in the hands of the viewers.
The film is nothing
like the extreme depths of emotional repression found in Robert Redford’s Ordinary
People
(1980), in particular the Mary Tyler
Moore character, who refuses to even discuss the death of her oldest son, but
carries on as if nothing has happened, putting it all in the past, despite the
emotional anguish and family dysfunction this causes, but both films are
similar in that there are no easy answers at the end, no happy ending, no easy
road to recovery. JEANNE DIELMAN doesn’t
even concern itself with the future, but is instead a microscopic examination
of one woman’s life, modestly dressed, wordlessly going about her business, as
it all feels so contextually anonymous and bare-bones, yet just as contemporary
today as it was when it was released.
JEANNE DIELMAN premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May of 1975 as
part of the Directors’ Fortnight, where there were plenty of walk-outs, yet
overnight it became her breakthrough work, but wasn’t released in the United
States until eight years later in March of 1983, greeted favorably by feminist
critics at the time, calling it a feminist manifesto, while Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman
described the film as “truly legendary… a movie of tremendous force and
originality,” becoming one of the seminal films of the 1970’s. From Akerman’s point of view, the visual
content of the film is significant, “I do think it’s a feminist film because I
give space to things which were never, almost never, shown in that way, like
the daily gestures of a woman. They are
the lowest in the hierarchy of film images. A kiss or a car crash comes higher, and I
don’t think that’s accidental. It’s
because these are women’s gestures that they count for so little.”
So the very things that contribute to a devaluation of women,
relegating them to the home, out of the workplace or positions of power,
restricting their access so they have diminished social influence, is then
reconfigured by this director, where a housewife takes ownership of her duties
and responsibilities, reflecting instead a position of empowerment and free
will, obliterating all pre-conceived negative stereotypes, where the style and
formal precision of the film itself at least leads to an end result, a new
appraisal of women in the home, where the naturalism of their daily activities
takes on new meanings, where worth accompanies those seemingly banal
activities, which at least in the eyes of the viewers, have been significantly
elevated. There’s a fascinating
comparison of the film with John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970) by Dave Kehr, Men
Carouse; Women Clean - The New York Times,
which sounds downright hilarious, as the men in Cassavetes’ film barely set
foot in their own homes, instead they are freewheeling guys out of Kerouac’s On
the Road, where every day they’re off on a new liberating adventure, moving from one to the next, before finally, at the end of
a lengthy weekend spree, returning home to their wives in suburbia, while
Jeanne is forever caught, like a rat in a maze, with no escape from the
repetitious and banal routine, where a woman’s life is consumed by the ordinary
details of mundane life, where the overfamiliarity with the tasks at hand begin
to consume her life, literally suffocating the life right out of her, leaving
her spiritually drained and emptied, with few reserves to call upon, so by the
end she is truly emptied of whatever’s left of her spirit. One is a spontaneous free-for-all where guys
do whatever they please, all but ignoring their wives and children, while the
other is a meticulous clinical analysis of female alienation and social
detachment.
What’s curiously ironic
about this film? Without the revealing
title identifying the lead character, even after spending more than three-hours
immersed into the meticulously compartmentalized world of this woman, we
wouldn’t even know her name, as it’s never mentioned and there’s no reference
to it in the film (although it may be mentioned in the letter from her sister
in Canada), instead she remains completely anonymous and off the radar. Reminiscent of an earlier Rainer Werner
Fassbinder film, WHY DOES HERR R. RUN AMOK? (1969), this is much more extended
than the Fassbinder film, which runs less than 90 minutes, but both resort to
long takes, with subjects named in the title that apparently go unnoticed and
are largely ignored, examining the accumulating psychological effects of
unbearable tedium and banality, where each leads lives of quiet desperation
that leads to explosive results.
According to American writer and director Jayne Loader, “Akerman’s
cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal
character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost
slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial
expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a
thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and
ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the
portrait is pieced together.” Akerman
has suggested much of the visualized imagery came from lovingly watching her
own mother in the kitchen, where she became intimately familiar with the
meticulous nature of each movement and activity. In a 2009 video interview for the Criterion
Collection, Chantal Akerman on JEANNE
DIELMAN - YouTube (6:33), Akerman describes Jeanne’s daily
activities as formal rituals that replaced abandoned Jewish rituals in
households throughout Eastern Europe, “where practically every activity of the
day is ritualized,” which eerily suggests there is a hidden Holocaust
connection. It’s interesting that 80% of
the film crew was comprised of women, assuming positions that had only been
staffed by men, behind the camera and in lighting, for instance, where Akerman
was one of the first to break down these barriers that presumed women were not
capable, which was the standard mindset in the era of the 70’s. Remember, this is a full decade or more before
the arrival of Jane
Campion
in the 80’s and 90’s, who did the same
thing, and still remains the only female director to win a Palme d’Or prize at Cannes,
where every year we hear the same cry of a lack of diversity.
Akerman herself
provides the voice of the neighbor dropping off her baby for Jeanne to look
after, sequences that actually provide the biggest laughs in the film, first
where Jeanne politely listens to the neighbor ramble at length on in the
hallway about her own dull life, where it’s clear Jeanne has her hands full
dealing with her own monotony, and again when Jeanne, displaying absolutely no
maternal skills, cannot stop the inconsolable child from crying, where Jeanne
may as well be the anti-Christ, as the baby bawls even louder anytime she comes
near. Some of the best shots are the
scenes of Jeanne riding the elevator, like she’s stuck inside a space capsule,
only this elevator moves so slowly, it’s almost in another time dimension. Like Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, Ms. Dielman is certainly stuck inside her own time
capsule. While some were heard
exclaiming “I’ve never seen a film like this,” one does think of Virginie
Ledoyen in A SINGLE GIRL (1995), as so much of both films play out in real
time. Without getting too technical, one theory advanced by Ivone
Margulies in her August 18, 2009 Criterion essay, more than thirty years after
the release of the film, A
Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles, deals with Jeanne’s sexual repression,
namely her frigidity, where her detachment is a defense mechanism used against
having any distinct interest in men, allowing her full control. Supposedly, what changed, out of the viewer’s
eyes, was an orgasm on the gentleman’s visit on Day 2, which caused all her
interior wiring to go haywire. Things
immediately start to go wrong, she forgets to put the lid on the porcelain
container holding the money, she overcooks the potatoes, walking in circles
afterwards wondering where to put the pot, carrying it from room to room,
having to go out and buy more, causing dinner to be delayed, where Sylvain
points out her hair is disheveled, getting up an hour earlier the next morning,
where all the stores are still closed when she makes her morning rounds, while
later the coffee goes bad, absurdly trying all manner of corrective measures,
none of which work, and bit by bit, things steadily unravel, leading to the
precipitous event, namely the next visit by a gentleman, where the same thing
ocurrs, which is apparently more than she could bear. An orgasm simply opens the floodgates, where
she has to restore order and balance. Turning
on a dime, this is among the better endings, a truly provocative film, perhaps
only Virginia Woolf writes about such things where the mundane is turned on its
head and becomes so dramatic and powerful.
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - Time Out Tony Rayns
Chantal Akerman's feature is one of the few 'feminist' movies that's as interesting aesthetically as politically. It covers three days in the life of a bourgeois widow who supports herself and her somewhat moronic son by taking in a 'gentleman caller' each afternoon. Much of the film simply chronicles her ritualised routine, but does it in an ultra-minimal, precise style that emphasises the artifice of the whole thing...and gradually the artifice (coupled with the fact that Delphine Seyrig plays the woman) shifts the plot into melodrama, so that the film becomes a bourgeois tragedy.
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum February 21, 2002 (capsule review)
Chantal Akerman's greatest film--made in 1975 and running 198 minutes--is one of those lucid puzzlers that may drive you up the wall but will keep you thinking for days or weeks. Delphine Seyrig, in one of her greatest performances, plays Jeanne Dielman, a Belgian woman obsessed with performing daily rounds of housework and other routines (including occasional prostitution) in the flat she occupies with her teenage son. The film follows three days in Dielman's regulated life, and Akerman's intense concentration on her daily activities--monumentalized by Babette Mangolte's superb cinematography and mainly frontal camera setups--eventually sensitizes us to the small ways in which her system is breaking down. By placing so much emphasis on aspects of life and work that other films routinely omit, mystify, or skirt around, Akerman forges a major statement, not only in a feminist context but also in a way that tells us something about the lives we all live. In French with subtitles. Admission is free; a new 16-millimeter print will be shown.
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles | NW Film ... Northwest Film
Center
Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman and Saute ma ville are both depictions of a woman’s work in the home, but portray two women who approach domestic tasks very differently. The mother, Jeanne Dielman, performs sex work for male clients daily for her and her son’s subsistence. Like her other activities (bathing, knitting, and shining her shoes), Jeanne’s sex work is part of the routine she performs every day by rote and is uneventful. Jeanne performs every task according to a strict routine, from peeling potatoes to lighting the oven and replacing the matchbox, while the younger woman in Saute ma ville works her way up her entire shin with shoe polish while shining her shoes. The interior space is a stage for the women’s domestic rituals—the difference between their approaches is underscored by the rhythm of the tasks and gestures. While Saute ma ville’s singularity stems from the frenetic and absurd tendencies of the main character, her final act of destruction seems oddly deliberate. On the other hand, it is the movement away from order in Jeanne Dielman that, suddenly and surprisingly, leads to death. The kitchen becomes a place of both order and chaos. Deviations from perfection or even logic culminate in destruction. Akerman’s use of real time in tandem with the portrayal of dull and predictable routines give the viewer an almost frustratingly real sense of the unarticulated tragedy of estrangement, loneliness and disconnection. “Jeanne Dielman is as influential and as important for generations of young filmmakers as Welles’s and Godard’s first films have been. . . It is no overstatement to say that she made one of the most original and audacious films in the history of cinema.”—Richard Brody, The New Yorker. In French with English subtitles.
Cine-File
Chicago: Kalvin Henely April 17,
2009
After over 25 years of being shown in 16mm, JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES returns in 35mm looking fresh and clean as it once must have when it opened at Film Forum in NYC back some 30 years ago. Also enlarged in size this time around is its canonical reputation it has since earned, thanks in large part to its fanatical devotee, critic J. Hoberman. When he first reviewed it in the Village Voice it was still a virgin, not yet having been exhausted by critical thought and writing. Since that time it's become a cornerstone of not only structuralist film but also feminist film, and the crystallization of a lot of ideas and trends going on in experimental film around that time. But the film and it's reputation is, except for some lucky few that might have caught it in a film class on 16mm, only something that we've heard about until it was recently released in a Chantal Akerman DVD box set (alas, only available as Region 2 discs). Seeing it now is a new experience, to be sure, and very much like actually finally meeting someone you've been hearing and wondering a lot about. Part of the draw of meeting Ms. Dielman is that you never really quite satisfy that curiosity you have about her, as you patiently watch her silently and dutifully performing her daily house chores—like Mona Lisa giving a facial expression. The film's use of extended duration, as in some of Warhol's films, seems to have also acted as a kind of preservative, keeping Jeanne Dielman alive and her actions intriguing and suspenseful. That is, as suspenseful as cooking potatoes and dusting tchotchkes can be, which under Akerman's control forms into a kind of beneath-the-surface psychic tension. A mesmerizing, voyeuristic three-day journey into the unsettlingly mundane and mundanely private moments of existence, JEANNE DIELMAN turns what most movies leave out into a masterpiece of cinema.
Hoberman Hosting Akerman Ricky D’Ambrose from the Tisch Film Review
“When she bangs the glass
on the table and you think the milk might spill, that’s as dramatic as the
murder”
—Chantal Akerman, discussing “Jeanne Dielman” in 1977
Akerman’s is a film about creating tasks. It also a film about the effects of interrupting them. “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1976) will be screened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on March 31, forming the seventh installment of a month-long program in commemoration of J. Hoberman. No other contribution to European cinema (or to any cinema) succeeds in creating a kind of experience as ascetic as Akerman’s, as asphyxiating as this.
Observing three days of a Belgian housewife (Delphine Seyrig), Akerman’s framing is frontal, rigid. Uninterrupted takes – often prolonged to fifteen minutes – make modest events (peeling potatoes, preparing coffee, sewing, etc.) equivalent to all others (the housewife’s bedroom provides the site of several sexual encounters with gentleman who supplement her income). As such, Jeanne’s activities are disciplined, indistinct performances. Her activities help form the highly methodical, highly controlled gestures of Akerman’s mise-en-scene.
To deny on-screen events narrative hierarchy, to refrain from indexing or classifying Jeanne’s activities in this way, Akerman also resists a cinema that aspires to understand what occurs within the frame psychologically. Instead, we merely watch the figures on screen, themselves transformed into objects; the effect is a kind of phenomenological theatre, a spectacle for the eyes and body (with a length of three hours, the experience of watching the film is also an experience of one’s own body struggling through all kinds of sensations, particularly strain).
“Jeanne Dielman”is over thirty years old. With a contemporary cinema that has grown too facile, too distrusting of genuinely provocative sensibility, it remains entirely radical.
The
Cinema Of Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics Block Cinema, April 6, 2017
Chantal Akerman died in October 2015 at the age of sixty-five, leaving behind a body of work that spans five decades and stands as one of the most significant contributions to modern cinema. Positioned in between fiction and documentary, Akerman’s films give visibility to those people and places that our culture overlooks or relegates to the margins because of gender, race, or age; or simply because they have found themselves on the wrong side of history. From Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—widely regarded as the most important feminist film of the seventies—to No Home Movie, Akerman’s films offer us scenes of unique beauty and formal discipline, indeed a new, sensuous way of thinking about the complexity of ordinary experience. Labor, love, travel, migration—no aspect of life is immune to the workings of power and yet resistance can arise unexpected from the smallest details, whether we find ourselves in a lower middle class kitchen (Jeanne Dielman), on the streets of the former Eastern Bloc (From the East), or at the US-Mexico border (From the Other Side). This series will culminate in a one-day symposium, The Cinema of Chantal Akerman: Time, Borders, Politics, organized by the Northwestern Image Lab and the Department of French and Italian. The symposium will bring together renowned scholars from the fields of film and media studies, art history, and political theory, and is scheduled to take place on Friday, April 28, 2017.
One of the monumental works of world cinema, Jeanne Dielman has become an influential film and a feminist touchstone for a broad and diverse group of filmmakers, theorists, writers, and artists. Its structure is simple, but its impact is profound. Over the course of three days (and the film’s three-plus hour running time), we follow the life of Jeanne Dielman, a single mother who is turning tricks on the side. In deliberate real time, she scrubs a bathtub, prepares meals, and performs other mundane domestic duties. These scenes reveal both the crushing monotony of her life and her obsessive fastidiousness; they also valorize and give due attention to the kind of “woman’s work” that is usually invisible in cinema. Dielman is a woman trapped by routine, which is only broken by a shocking act at the end of the film. Writer and critic Gary Indiana has rightly stated that "Akerman's brilliance is her ability to keep the viewer fascinated by everything normally left out of movies.” It’s a devastating modern masterpiece.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Kathleen Sachs
I used to think that Chantal Akerman’s films had more in common with Yasujirō Ozu’s than those of Ozu’s most devout disciples. Her use of still, waist-level medium shots (similar to Ozu’s signature “tatami shots,” said to mimic the perspective of someone kneeling on a tatami mat), stylized settings hyper-respective to her cultural background, and a seemingly detached tone that cloaks rich subtext all recall Ozu’s oeuvre. After rewatching her seminal 1975 film JEANNE DIELMAN, 23, QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, which she made when she was just 25 years old, I still believe that her work exhibits these aspects, but to antithetical effect. Where Ozu reveals the calm within chaos, Akerman inveigles chaos out of the calm, and there’s perhaps no better example of this than this 201-minute tour de force that depicts three days in the life of its title character, a middle-aged mother played to perfection by the solemn, red-haired Delphine Seyrig. Most of the film is comprised of superlative long takes in which Jeanne does her daily chores, intercut by brief expositional conversations with her 16-year-old son and oblique references to her “job” as a rather apathetic prostitute. Though it evokes experimental cinema in how it ingeniously uses a simple concept to confront the illusion of that simplicity, it’s also a brilliant depiction of real life as narrative; in a 2009 interview with the New York Times, Akerman observed that “[i]n most movies you have crashes or accidents or things out of the ordinary, so the viewer is distracted from his own life…[T]his film is about his own life.” A friend once remarked to me that their standard response when asked by a filmmaker to provide feedback about a film they didn’t like was to say that it gave them space to think about that very subject. Ironically, the same is true about the masterwork that is JEANNE DIELMAN. The long takes are simultaneously hypnotic and freeing, producing a sensation that’s almost as mindless as the tasks themselves. Akerman’s depiction of these chores, which are certainly banal even if rendered extraordinary by Babette Mangolte’s lens, is often regarded as a feminist interpretation, a label that Akerman rejects. Indeed, she’s said in several interviews that the seemingly monotonous routines were lovingly inspired by both childhood memories of her mother and Jewish ritual; in the aforementioned interview, she also said that “Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious…[s]he didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour,” which speaks less to the mundanity of the tasks at hand and more to Jeanne’s general discontent. At the risk of spoiling the film for anyone still unfamiliar with its abrupt ending, the duration doesn’t so much emphasize the monotony as it provides context around the downturn of both character and tone. It doesn’t show three days in a life, but rather the day before the day that cracks start to appear in the foundation, and then the day that it finally crumbles to the ground, out of which something altogether new and different is formed. (On a tangential note, the ending reminds me of these lines from Sylvia Plath’s Holocaust-adjacent poem “Lady Lazarus”: “Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air.” In 1986, Akerman directed an adaptation of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s off-Broadway play Letters Home, based on Plath’s letters to her mother. So much to unpack.) Only the late filmmaker’s second feature, JEANNE DIELMAN is almost daunting in its command of the medium—perhaps the only label that can rightfully be attached to it is “masterpiece.”
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) March 23, 1983, also seen here: Movie
Review - - 'JEANNE DIELMAN,' BELGIAN - NYTimes.com
LIKE its blunt title, Chantal Akerman's ''Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,'' deals in unadorned facts. It's about the looks and sounds of ordinary things and people, which it records with such precise, unsettling clarity that it has the effect of finding threats in mundane objects and doom in commonplace characters.
It's not difficult to understand the extraordinary underground reputation of this lengthy (three hours and 18 minutes), very beautiful Belgian film, made in 1975 and starring Delphine Seyrig, a screen presense comparable, perhaps, only to Garbo. Miss Seyrig has participated in a number of supposedly experimental films over the years, but in none as original and ambitious as this.
''Jeanne Dielman'' is not quite like any other film you've ever seen, though it does recall the early films of Jean-Luc Godard as well as some of the work of our structuralist film makers of the late 1960's and 70's. It's as fastidious and deadpanned as its title character, a genteel, middle-class widow-and-mother who supports herself and her teen-age son by prostitution each afternoon, in her depressingly tidy apartment, with a series of fastidious gentlemen callers, middle-aged and older.
''Jeanne Dielman,'' which opens today at the Film Forum, has been described as minimalist, though I don't see how any film this long and so packed with information could be equated with minimalism as defined in painting. The manner of the film is spare, but the terrible, obsessive monotony of the life it observes is ultimately as melodramatic as, say, Roman Polanski's ''Repulsion.''
Miss Akerman records three crucial days in the life of Jeanne Dielman (Miss Seyrig) as if she were observing the habits of some previously unknown insect.
Jeanne Dielman is first discovered in the tiny, immaculate kitchen of her Brussels flat, her back to the camera, washing dishes in the sink. For some time, she doesn't turn around, and the camera simply waits until she does. She wears a smock to protect her sensible skirt, blouse and cardigan sweater from unsightly soap or grease stains. The door bell rings.
Jeanne walks out of the frame and, after a bit, the camera follows her into the hall where, just outside the frame, she greets that afternoon's client. When the pair disappear into Jeanne's bedroom, the unmoving camera stares down the hall at the closed door for what seem to be several minutes, like a well behaved dog.
In the course of these three days, the perfectly ordered, utterly empty world of Jeanne Dielman comes apart, but Miss Akerman's method of dramatizing this breakdown has little to do with ordinary theatrical gestures.
Instead, we are forced to watch this woman so closely that when her routine is interrupted in any way it has the emotional force of a tragic event. Jeanne's life is held together by habits, by the mechanics of housekeeping. She never leaves a room without switching off the light. She washes herself in exactly the same way every morning, shines her son's shoes in the very same order. When she talks, it's only to correct her son or to supply some requested information. Any other communication is to be avoided.
Miss Seyrig, though she has never looked more beautiful, is a fascinating, self-mockingly frumpy Jeanne Dielman, who is less a character than some nightmarish representation of a woman. Curiously, Miss Seyrig's elegant features do not look out of place in this bourgeois world, which, as recorded in the photography of Babette Mangolte, is as stylized as Miss Seyrig's presence.
''Jeanne Dielman'' is not a movie to see if you're in a hurry to go somewhere else. It demands total attention. If one gives it anything less its revenge will be a boredom so complete it might be fatal.
It's also not a movie to see on an empty stomach. At various points in the film the camera watches Jeanne as she cooks. Without cutting away or using any other ellipses, the movie attends to Jeanne's cooking as if it were a documentary, showing us how she prepares, among other things, what seems to be a succulent meat loaf and paperthin, breaded, veal cutlets. At the film's end, I was both moved and starved.
A
Matter of Time: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles Criterion essay by Ivone Margulies,
Chantal
Akerman, 1950–2015 October 06, 2015
(video)
Sight & Sound Poll 2012: Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles August 22, 2012
(video)
We Have a
Winner October 29, 2009 (video)
Jeanne Dielman Cooking Video Contest August
31, 2009 (video)
The
Dynamic Women of Delphine Seyrig photo gallery, July 20, 2016
A
Criterion Feast photo gallery,
November 21, 2012
The
Oldest Profession photo gallery, January 31, 2012
Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) - The
... The Criterion Collection
Chantal Akerman: The
Integrity of Exile and the Everyday - Lola Journal Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2011
Walking,
Talking, Singing, Exploding . . . and Silence: Chantal ... Barbara McBane from Film Quarterly, September 16, 2016
"Jeanne
Dielman" by Jayne Loader - Jump Cut
Death in installments, by
Jayne Loader from Jump Cut, 1977
Chantal
Akerman, 1950–2015: Quarterly Review of Film and Video ... David Sterritt, January 14, 2016
Keeping
a distance: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman | Sight ... - BFI Janet Bergstrom from BFI Sight and Sound, October 15, 2015
Unspoken Cinema Blog article: Chantal Akerman - Walking Woman Adrian Martin, notes from un unfinished
essay, 1998, posted by Harry Tuttle January 12, 2008
Brooklyn
Magazine: Forrest Cardamenis March
30, 2016
3quarksdaily:
The Humanists: Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 ... Colin Marshall
'Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 ... - london city nights
Repression,
Oppression, Suppression: A Life of Domestic Routine Morgan Meis from Patheos, December 23, 2015
Senses of Cinema: Jenny Chamarette May, 2013
Jeanne
Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles | Film ... Eric Henderson from Slant magzine
notcoming.com | Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 ...
Adam Balz
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Film Comment: Manny Farber + Patricia Patterson November-December 1976 (pdf)
The Village Voice: J. Hoberman March 29, 1983 (pdf) also seen at The Village Voice here: Read
J. Hoberman's 1983 Cover Story on Chantal Akerman's 'Jeanne ...
The Village Voice: Andrew Sarris April 05, 1983 (pdf)
Article on Jeanne Dielman at SFMOMA Open Space by Brecht Andersch,
February 2009 Chantal Akerman & “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080
Bruxelles,” February 26, 2009
Adam
Roberts on the ICA blog discussing Jeanne Dielman Preparing to see Jeanne Dielman... from
ICA, December 10, 2013
Chantal
Akerman says 'a film is a film is a film,' but hers really are ... Miranda Popkey from Politico, May 4, 2012
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975 ... Steve Lysaker from The Passion of Joan Jett of Arc
JEANNE
DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 ... - Hammer to Nail Nelson Kim
n+1: Emily Wang Whose
Boredom? Jeanne Dielman is “boredom” in real time, but the question remains
whose boredom it is. Is she bored, or are we? February 13, 2014
The Sheila
Variations: Sheila O'Malley R.I.P. Chantal Akerman, October 06, 2015
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - TCM.com Felicia Feaster
Extreme
Long Shot [Hamed Karkan]
Invested
in Expression or in Its Destruction? - Senses of Cinema Zain Jamshaid, September 19, 2012
The
Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
How
does "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce" benefit from its ... Jeff Saporito from Screen Prism
Regarding
the Pain of Jeanne Dielman – Filmscalpel
Sound Unseen: The Acousmatic Jeanne
Dielman – Filmscalpel
Feminism,
Cinema and TV: Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce ...
Medium.com: Zach Lewis Kicking
the Canon, April 06, 2015
The New Yorker: Richard Brody A
Chantal Akerman Retrospective, April 4, 2016
FilmFanatic.org
[Sylvia Stralberg Bagley]
Chantal Akerman -
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The
QNetwork [James Kendrick] Criterion
DVDBlu
Review [Christopher S. Long]
Criterion
DVD
Talk [Jamie S. Rich] Criterion, also
seen here: Criterion
Confessions
Jeanne
Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles · Dvd Review ... Scott Tobias from The Onion A.V. Club, Criterion, also seen here: The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Jeanne
Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles | DVD ... Eric Henderson on Criterion DVD
Review
of Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ... Moira Jean Sullivan from Agnes Films, also
seen here: Jeanne
Dielman
Remembering
Filmmaker Chantal Akerman | The Jewish Museum Blog February 10, 2016
Presence
(appearance and disappearance) of two Belgian filmmakers Imma Merino from Comparative Cinema, 2016
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
MUBI's Notebook: Ryland Walker Knight November 09, 2009
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 ... - The New Yorker capsule review
Nick's
Flick Picks: The Blog: 3 Hours and 21 Minutes of Good News Nick Davis
Southern
Vision [Tyler Atkinson]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Other Voices, Other
Films - Cinescene Paul B. Clark
I
Didn't See Time Go By • Chatal Akerman • Senses of Cinema Vivian Ostrovsky, December 9, 2015
Letterboxd: Ashley Clark April 05, 2016
Letterboxd: Fernando F. Croce December 09, 2012
Chantal
Akerman interview • Senses of Cinema
Janet Bergstrom interview, December 9, 2015
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles ... - Time Out Stephen Garrett
Chantal
Akerman: 1950-2015 | Balder and Dash | Roger Ebert Scout Tafoya, October 6, 2015
Film - Chantal Akerman's
'Jeanne Dielman' - Then as Now, the Terrors ... The New
York Times, January 16, 2009
Men
Carouse; Women Clean - The New York Times Dave Kehr juxtaposes Jeanne Dielman and
John Cassavetes’ Husbands, by Dave Kehr, August 20, 2009
FILM;
Chantal Akerman And the Point Of Point of View - The New York ... Dinitia Smith from The New York Times, April 26, 1998
DVDBeaver
Criterion review [Gary Tooze]
Jeanne
Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles - Wikipedia
Akerman sums up Jeanne
Dielman YouTube (1:46)
YouTube
- Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1976)
Filming
Jeanne Dielman (1975) YouTube (4:32)
A fun mash up of
Jeanne Dielman YouTube (4:28)
And finally, a nice
Akerman (non-serious) clip where she just won't put her fag out! YouTube (1:16)
Drew
Morton, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles: Day x Day x
Day visual essay (1:46:08)
NEWS FROM HOME
France Belgium
Germany (85 mi) 1977
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
An early experimental feature by Chantal Akerman (1976, 85 min.) that juxtaposes images of New York City with the texts of letters written to Akerman by her mother in Belgium and read aloud offscreen by Akerman. This is one of the best depictions of the alienation of exile that I know.
Time Out
Akerman explores the disjunction between European myths about
filmjourney.org : Chantal Akerman Doug Cummings
Reynaud told us there is only one print available of this film in
Akerman's film is a collection of footage (shot by cinematographer
Babette Mangolte, a filmmaker in her own right) of
But what transforms the film into something more than just a carefully-observed time capsule is its juxtaposition of voice over: Akerman herself reads letters from home written by her mother that tell of family concerns and practical details. They express parental love and support with constant reminders to write more often. Akerman layers this narration over the images of the city at regular intervals, allowing pauses for reflection. At times, the city's sounds become dominant; at other times, the narration is foregrounded. Sometimes the narration and ambient noise fluidly merge into an ambiguous juxtaposition, passing cars muffle the ongoing news from home. What emerges is a profoundly personal meditation on the complexities of place--it's not just New York City, but Akerman's New York City, a home away from home, personal and remote, familiar yet foreign. And to see the film is to share her world and recognize our own within it.
Eclipse
Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Criterion essay from Michael Koresky, January 20, 2010
Press
Notes: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
January 27, 2010
News from Home
(1976) - The Criterion Collection
The Other
Akerman : The Essay Film in News From Home (1976) Devdutt Trivedi from Projectorhead, December 2013
A
Journey Into The Eclipse Series – Chantal Akerman’s New York Films David Blakeslee from The Criterion Cast, September 13, 2010
Adam
Roberts on the ICA blog discussing screening News from Home Planning
a Screening: News From Home, from ICA, January 21, 2014
Strictly Film School Acquarello
LES RENDEZVOUS D’ANNA (THE MEETINGS OF
ANNA)
France Belgium Germany
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)
The succes de scandale of Jeanne Dielman brought
Chantal Akerman the opportunity to make a film for the French major Gaumont;
the result was this moody, terse, haunting feature about a woman filmmaker
(Aurore Clement) on a promotional tour of
Time Out
A quietly moving odyssey: an itinerary of train journeys, hotel rooms, and chance meetings that relates the past to a present lack of confidence among Europeans. A series of train rides, a series of tales. Only once do film and central character overcome their emotional reticence: when Anna (hitherto a passive listener), in a scene both surprising and logical, lies in bed with her mother and 'confesses' her love for another woman. A chaste refusal to supply easy answers means that the film is primarily descriptive; what emerges most strongly is a moving eroticism stemming from the everyday.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
At the end of News From Home, the unseen Chantal Akerman
rode a ferry out of
Lesbian
viewing and perversity Jennifer
Montgomery from Jump Cut, July 1992
(excerpt)
One of the most interesting films was also the only feature-length piece
included in the festival: Chantal Akerman's LES RENDEZ-VOUS D'ANNA. This film
may be a semi-autobiographical portrait: "Anna" is a filmmaker who
travels from one European city to another presenting her work. She spends a
great deal of time alone in hotel rooms placing unsuccessful calls to a
mysterious woman in
Anna next arrives in
The film is a painful, leisurely portrait of the loneliness experienced both in solitude and in the presence of people you love. Lesbian relationship here is about distance: the geographical distance between countries, the distance experienced over the telephone wires, the distance between the non-intersecting paths of two women's lives, and the generational distance between mother and daughter, for whom confronting the daughter's lesbianism is only one small step to bridge the gap of the years that separate them.
Chantal Akerman is famous for the elegant minimalism of her films: the uncluttered camera work and the stripped-down plot. The minimalism of Akerman's films is what enables us to see clearly the sexual economies at work, and thus is a good strategy for making a powerful lesbian film. None of Akerman's films are purely devoted to lesbian relationship; her characters have many modes of being: being with women, being with men, being alone, being on the road, etc. But it is the cleanness of Akerman's films that enables us to confront this multiplicity, and lesbianism as well, head-on, and that has made her, despite her own protestations, an intensely sought-after filmmaker in the lesbian film circuit.
Eclipse
Series 19: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Criterion essay from Michael Koresky,
Press
Notes: Chantal Akerman in the Seventies
Les
rendez-vous d'Anna (1978) - The Criterion Collection
Criterion Cast - A Journey through the Eclipse Series: Chantal
Akerman's Les Rendez-Vous D'Anna
David Blakeslee, March 12, 2012
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nick Davis
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Strictly Film School Acquarello from Strictly Film School
Review
of Les Rendez vous d’Anna, Directed by Chantal Akerman | agnesfilms Moira Jean Sullivan
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
ALL NIGHT LONG (TOUTE UNE NUIT)
aka:
A Whole Night
France Belgium
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)
Chantal Akerman said good-bye to minimalism with this 1982
feature, which finds its model less in Michael Snow than MGM musicals. A hot
summer night in
Time Out
Akerman, the mistress of minimalism, has made her own midsummer night's sex comedy, with a superabundance of stories and a cast of (almost) thousands. The film shows an endless series of brief encounters that take place in Brussels in the course of one delirious, torrid June night, with the twist that each relationship is condensed into a single moment of high melodrama - the coup de foudre, the climax of passion, the end of an affair - with the spectator left to fill in the fictional spaces between scenes. Each couple compulsively plays through the same gestures, each mating rite is a variation on the same theme: repetitions which Akerman uses both as a rich source of comedy and as a device to show erotic desire as a pattern of codes and conventions. Marrying the pleasure of narrative to the purism of the avant-garde, this is her most accessible film to date.
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Another beautiful insomniac's journey from Chantal Akerman.
Her narrative is a fractured La Ronde, built from fragments of dozens of
personal dramas not quite intertwining during a humid, languorous night in an
oppressively impersonal
Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
YouTube - Toute une nuit
(1982) Akerman - ending
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
THE EIGHTIES
Belgium France
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Eighties: a make-or-break time for artists, especially severe ones like Chantal Akerman, who decided she had it with idiosyncratic films nobody saw. A shift into the mainstream, then? The structure, rehearsal footage culminating in resplendent finished work, might shape a method-to-her-madness memo to studio heads handing out the funds, except this is Akerman, experimental down to her fingertips, the airy making of a musical just the natural extension of the august exploration of Jeanne Dielman. A directorial sketch book, glimpses of screenplay readings, dress rehearsals and choreography, young performer following young performer under the filmmaker's scrutiny. The lenses are on the poised women and men being interviewed and molded, though the star of the film is Akerman herself, the auteur-conductor-puppeteer-ventriloquist just out of camera range, extracting an emotion or modulating a line ("More subdued... Your mind is a blank, as motionless as you can be") -- at one key point, she jumps in front of the camera to record one of the songs, her vocal clunkiness at the mike a no less naked moment than her bodily unveiling in Je Tu Il Elle. The trajectory is the progression of art, by which the fragmented (disembodied voices on a black screen, feet in heels clicking across the floor) becomes the whole, the grain of video segueing into Minnelli luster. The elating last twenty minutes display the results, warbling in long takes at the ice-cream shop, teeny hair-salon giddiness, the shopping mall as rueful ballroom, Magali Noël at the swirling center. The MGM-dreaminess, already mined for deconstruction by Godard and movie-movie romanticism by Demy, is here a comment on society's ritualized role-playing, a continuation of the yearning musicality of Toute une Nuit, and, acknowledged over a double 360° circular pan atop a building at dusk, only the beginning: "Until next year...," to producers, audiences, fellow artists.
Strictly Film School Acquarello
NIGHT AND DAY
France Belgium Switzerland
Time Out
Akerman's lyrical chronicle of a heterosexual ménage-à-trois
looks banality straight in the face. New to
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) (capsule review)
One of the constants of Chantal Akerman's remarkable work is
a powerful if "heavy" painterly style that practically precludes
narrative flow even when she's telling stories. Even at her best, as in Jeanne
Dielman and The Man With a Suitcase, the only kind of character
development she seems able to articulate with conviction is a gradual descent
into madness. But the relatively unneurotic Night and Day (1991) strikes
me as her most successful work in years. Julie (Guilaine Londez), the heroine,
makes love to Jack (Thomas Langmann) in their small flat by day and wanders
through Paris at night while he drives a cab--until she meets Joseph (Francois
Negret) and guiltlessly launches a secret nighttime affair with him. Akerman
brings a lyricism to the material that makes it "sing" like a
musical. Whether the camera is gracefully traversing Jack and Julie's flat or
slowly retreating from Julie and Joseph across bustling traffic while he
recounts the things he loves about
MOVIES Jonathan Rosenbaum (long review) from the Reader
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
D’EST A 98
aka: From the East
Belgium
With Chantal,
everything seemed so easy. For D’Est
(1993), we went from Brussels to Odessa by car.
Sometimes we drove the whole day without shooting anything. Then, all of a sudden, she would say, “We’re
getting out” and she would direct one shot.
It is only now that I realise this. She used to say she was lazy. She had a joyous energy and a phenomenal
capacity for hard work.
—Marilyn Watelet, December 9, 2015, With Chantal • Senses of Cinema
Chantal Akerman is
Jewish, lesbian, a French-speaking Belgian, and a major artist, who among all
things is totally anti-commercial, and defiantly so, where there are major
walk-outs in some of her films, especially this one, as she refuses to conform
to other people’s expectations. Arguably
her best film, though never receiving anything like the critical praise for
Jeanne Dielman, which is decidedly more impactful and influential, but this
film is completely original, where there’s nothing else like it, defiantly
unconventional, made by a free-spirited artist, where it feels lightyears ahead
of its time. In a hundred years, maybe
500, perhaps people will begin to understand.
If an alien came down from another planet, nothing would explain what it
is to be human any better than this film, which literally immerses the viewer
in a sea of humanity. No filmmaker, from
the Lumière brothers to today, could duplicate this film if they tried, as they
could not capture the textures that Akerman creates, including a vividly
expressive sound design that is a mix of what was captured live on the scene,
but additionally music is superimposed over the track, interspersed throughout
the film, some coming from outdoor speakers at beerhalls or an outdoor concert,
but also a radio offscreen, a record player, or a television, adding invisible
layers underneath. Notes Andréa Picard
from Cinema Scope, Winter/Spring
2010, Columns
| Film Art | Orphans and Maniacs: Chantal Akerman's Maniac ..., “A recent
viewing of a gorgeous 16mm print of D’Est
(1993) not only convinced me that it’s her greatest film, but that her love
of the world and her ability to be moved (by faces, landscapes, movement,
music, etc…) is itself heartrending, like a reflection of meaning that inheres
in, but also gives generously to the viewer.”
Shot after the fall of Communism, the Berlin Wall, and the breakup of
the Soviet Union, when the Eastern bloc started falling apart, Akerman traveled
through East Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia,
eventually making her way to Moscow in three trips during 1992 and 1993,
capturing life as it is lived, articulating reality and truth through a wordless photographic essay in the manner of Vertov’s cinema
of truth, which later became cinéma vérité, comprised of a continuous montage
of images and sounds from unspecified locations, like a symphonic construction,
contrasting long and short sequences, street scenes and lone individuals,
indoor and outdoor, day and night, from the end of summer to deepest winter,
using fixed camera positions and what seems like endless tracking shots, along
with silence, musical excerpts, and natural sound, becoming a personal as well
as collective history, all without dialogue or commentary.
While my own favorite
endorsement comes from Stuart Klawans,
long-time film critic for The Nation: “If this isn’t a masterpiece, tear the word from your dictionary.” Listed as #3 on J. Hoberman’s Best Films of
the 90’s, J.
Hoberman's Top Ten Lists 1977-2006 - alumnus.alumni.caltech.edu,
making Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 90’s list as well, Jonathan
Rosenbaum's Top Ten Lists 1974-2006, the film opens optimistically from solitary images to the hustle and
bustle of city streets in the afternoon sunshine, or patrons listening to
blaring music while drinking beer at a seaside setting before the camera also
curiously moves indoors to private moments of individuals alone, capturing
small portraits, still life’s, resembling moving paintings, before day turns to
night, returning back to vividly alive street scenes, with pedestrians, trains,
and trolley cars, where offscreen sounds turn into an outdoor rock concert,
with young kids dancing outdoors in coats, chantal akerman - d'est
(1993) - lviv part - YouTube (6:22). While the film mainly
consists of elongated tracking shots of waiting crowds, where hundreds of
people are standing around, presumably waiting for a bus, but it would takes
dozens of buses to collect this many people, and the few glimpses of buses that
we do see are packed tightly together like sardines, or Tokyo commuter
trains. Presumably shot from a car,
though always steady, slowly moving, where every single person in the shot has
a relationship with the camera, some very agitated and disturbed, talking
angrily, others offer only brief glances, like looking up from a newspaper,
with some quickly moving out of the frame, though a few curiously follow the
camera, even as it moves, while others boldly stare, for long periods of time,
always viewed as a curiosity, like something out of place, as if an alien had
just dropped down from the heavens. Most
people walking normally move faster than the tracking speed, which allows the
viewer a studious glimpse of each and everyone that appears before the camera,
becoming a cavalcade of faces, voices, creating
a kind of living art, like a painting that comes alive with people moving
within their own environment, with the natural sounds creating circular layers
on top of layers, continually filling up the empty space on a constantly
evolving canvas. Easily Akerman’s most
humane work, as it is literally inhabited by tens of thousands of anonymous people
standing around waiting for something, like the ultimate Waiting for Godot film, with endless tracking shots of people
huddled in the cold, wearing heavy coats and hats, whether inside or out, with
so many scenes of people resigned to standing around in the dark waiting for a
bus, or a train, who knows? It seems to
represent a kind of human paralysis, a
Russian population in stagnation, as if the world is standing still for
a moment in time, where every shot becomes a living memory, D'est - YouTube
(7:56).
Conjuring up a new way
to see the world, we find babushka-wearing women in the fields picking
potatoes, shot in real time, all in a row, working their way towards the
camera, placing them in buckets they carry alongside with them, again startled
that anyone would want to film them, yet their work is all part of a
repetitious yet endlessly banal routine of human existence. Winter arrives, and the scene shifts to an
empty rural expanse covered in ice and snow, where a line of four men carrying
bags and suitcases are seen coming up over a hill on a solitary road, like a
scene out of Béla Tarr’s
SATANTANGO (1994), though that wouldn’t be made until the following year. More are seen walking across empty,
snow-covered fields, where you can hear the crispness of the snow under their
feet as we follow them across the landscape, perhaps on their way to work. These scenes lead into urban streets, where
there is heavy pedestrian traffic mixed with cars and buses, where so many
shots are framed with grey, colorless, concrete structures in the background,
maybe 8 to 10 stories high, capturing the look of Kieslowski’s The
Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), where residents must walk or travel
great distances to get anywhere, while in the foreground there are bare trees,
silhouettes in grey, reflecting little or no growth, as if they were simply
planted that way and have remained looking like that long afterwards, another
image of being stuck or frozen in time.
The entire film is shot in natural light, where at night, only the
street lights, the front and rear lights of passing cars, or lit windows in the
nearby buildings provide any source of light, where one gets the feeling
everyone is consumed in darkness, D'EST [Extracto] - YouTube
(9:01). One wonders, who goes to
Russia in the wintertime? Chantal
Akerman, apparently, where there are as many as 12 lanes of one-way traffic on
a city street at night, with lane markers obliterated by the falling snow, so
it’s a free for all, with cars moving in all directions. Because the camera car is traveling so
slowly, people honk, or express irritation as they quickly pass by. In the daylight, there’s even a toboggan
slide for kids, basically an ice path down a small snowy hill, with that
enormous concrete structure looming in the background, where no one has a sled
or a toboggan, a few have a piece of cardboard, as everyone else just slides
down by the seat of their pants. The
enormous train stations are equally packed, many carrying packages in their
arms, observing row after row of every seat taken, overflowing with people asleep
on the floor, using any available space, with some families sitting with large bundles, like huge bags of
grain, farmer size, as many as 10 or 12, as they sit silently and wait with the
multitudes of others, all stuck for long periods of time trying to get
somewhere.
There are glimpses of
people in their tiny, claustrophobic rooms, one where a kid is listening to an
authority figure on State TV while someone else is about 10 feet away playing
the piano, both crammed together but sharing a common space. Another shows a woman in her kitchen cutting
a loaf of bread with a giant-sized knife, where each individual slice must be
carefully cut to size, while also cutting slices of salami, nibbling as she
goes along, where putting them together is a meal, Chantal Akerman - D'Est -
YouTube (3:58). One of the few sequences expressing any sign of joy
takes place on the dance floor of a cavernous hotel, a sad relic from the
Stalinist era, Chantal
Akerman D'Est - YouTube (3:20), a stark contrast to a similar scene from
Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2014
Top Ten List #2 Ida where they play the transcendently eloquent music of
John Coltrane, IDA clip -
Jazz - YouTube (58 seconds), both films where history and the Holocaust are
only a backdrop to the story, and where Poland’s complicity is a key
component. And let’s not forget, Poland
became part of the Eastern bloc controlled by the Soviet Union after the
war. This contemplative aspect of the
film is elusive, yet it’s important to understand Akerman’s personal connection
to the territory she traverses, as it replicates, in reverse, the direction
Jews were transported by trains to the extermination camps. Akerman’s mother survived Auschwitz as a
young girl, but most of her Polish family perished there. The endless lines of subdued citizens waiting
patiently mirror the lines for the trains bound for deportation and death. The haunting silence heard throughout the
film may be the collective voices silenced during the Holocaust, where the film
is striking in the way it returns to the past, where memories are like buried
ghosts, as there is otherwise no sign anywhere in the film of a Jewish
presence. For instance, there are no
synagogues, no cemeteries, and she does not return to the town where her family
is from, believing little could be gained from that. It is through memories and lived experience
that one accumulates knowledge of Jewish customs and faith, handed down
generation by generation. Akerman
identified her Jewishness through her mother and early childhood memories. Returning to the scene of the crime, so to
speak, evokes haunting recollections, while the land beneath her feet is the
same turf she felt exiled from her entire life, where rootlessness is a common
theme throughout her work. Herself coming
“from the East,” a reference to the English film title, is a displaced kind of
homecoming, as she no longer feels welcomed there, yet the film intensely
studies the grim faces of the people who do live here, capturing random looks
of people in transit, or in crowds, in their homes, or public places. We learn no one’s name or identity, and no
one is asked about their religious or political beliefs. From the subjects of this film the filmmaker
asks for nothing except the captured images, using her own artistic
inclinations to turn it into a particular film aesthetic, where the conspicuous
absence of any signs of Jewish culture is a daunting realization that silently
haunts the film with a powerful emotional resonance. Quoting from Alisa Lebow, Alisa Lebow, ‘Memory once removed: indirect memory and
transitive autobiography in Chantal Akerman’s D’Est‘, Camera
Obscura May 2003 (pdf), “The victims of Stalin are piled on the
corpses of the Holocaust… If not for the past, in which her family’s history is
directly implicated, there would be no D’Est,”
where the film serves as a kind of elegy. There is a brief musical
recital late in the film by Russian
cellist Natalia Chakhovskaya, who studied under Mstislav Rostropovich, a
compatriot of Shostakovich, assuming his place as the director of the cello
department, teaching at the Moscow Conservatory after Rostropovich emigrated to
America, assuming his post from 1974 to 1995.
With a dozen or so men offering flowers after her performance, you might
think this would offer a beautiful and harmonious finality, but instead Akerman
returns to the streets, capturing the hordes of people on their way to work in
the morning, with this intriguing sequence shot in a luminous blue tone,
feeling like first light just after dawn, Chantal
Akerman - D'Est (1993) on Vimeo (5:15).
From
the East (D'est) | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chantal Akerman's haunting 1993 masterpiece documents without commentary or dialogue her several-months-long trip from east Germany to Moscow--a tough and formally rigorous inventory of what the former Soviet bloc looks and feels like today. Akerman's painterly penchant for finding Edward Hopper wherever she goes has never been more obvious; this travelogue seemingly offers vistas any alert tourist could find yet delivers a series of images and sounds that are impossible to shake later: the countless tracking shots, the sense of people forever waiting, the rare occurrence of a plaintive offscreen violin over an otherwise densely ambient sound track, static glimpses of roadside sites and domestic interiors, the periphery of an outdoor rock concert, a heavy Moscow snowfall, a crowded terminal where weary people and baggage are huddled together like so many dropped handkerchiefs. The only other film I know that imparts such a vivid sense of being somewhere is the Egyptian section of Straub-Huillet's Too Early, Too Late. Everyone goes to movies in search of events, but the extraordinary events in Akerman's sorrowful, intractable film are the shots themselves--the everyday recorded by a powerful artist with an acute eye and ear.
D'Est (From the East) | NW
Film Center
D’Est is Chantal Akerman’s first documentary film shot on trips taken as the Soviet system was about to collapse, and echoes her legendary Jeanne Dielmann in its minimalist approach and long, uninterrupted sequence shots. Akerman has said she went ‘while there was still time’—what kind of time, nor whose time, nor if there is any elsewhere, is not known. The film avoids dialogue of any kind—though people often enough exchange words, they are not audible, and never subtitled. It is a wordless winter travelogue through the countries of Eastern Europe, from East Germany, through Poland and the Baltic states, across Russia towards Moscow. The Soviet era has gone, a collapse leaving behind a seemingly stunned, endlessly waiting populace. Akerman alternates between existence in public spaces and in private spaces. She alternates day and night. And she alternates static shots with moving shots—but not just any old travelling shots. Bleak, for sure, but beautiful image-making and laying out of materials, the deft and caring work of a great artist. “In my films I follow an opposite trajectory to that of the makers of political films. They have a skeleton, an idea and then they put on flesh: I have in the first place the flesh, the skeleton appears later.”—Chantal Akerman.
Cine-File
Chicago: Beth Capper
Chantal Akerman said she wanted to travel around Eastern Europe and shoot everything that moved her, so she did. The result, D'EST (From the East) is part ethnographic documentary and part neo-realism--a travelogue from East Germany to Moscow in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall. People watching is one of Akerman's many talents. In some scenes she is a flaneuse--a woman, hidden from view, who follows the paths of unknowing subjects through city streets; in others she is seen, and acknowledged by her subjects, although often its more of an unsurprised glance than an acting out for the camera. Despite all this watching, Akerman's eye is not oppressive; her gaze comes from below, elevating and empathizing with the people she shoots. D'EST is in many ways much like an exhibition of stunning photographs or perhaps a meditative and somber Jacques Tati film; the scenes Akerman captures are at times so perfectly choreographed that its hard to believe they are not planned and orchestrated. Maybe this is just another of Akerman's talents--the ability to compartmentalize the world into images both haunting and touching in equal measure. Unlike JEANNE DIELMAN, Akerman's three-hour masterpiece where audiences are forced to inhabit the oppressive tedium of one woman's daily routines, the everyday is anything but mundane in D'EST. Every image is more compelling than the previous one, proving that the more we look at one another, the more we want to look. Akerman's hope is that perhaps in looking we'll reach an understanding.
Columns
| Film Art | Orphans and Maniacs: Chantal Akerman's Maniac ... Andréa Picard from Cinema Scope, Winter/Spring 2010
Akerman has always been more than kooky; as her short Saute ma ville (1968) illustrated early on, she can be downright explosive. That uncontainable maniac energy has no doubt fuelled her art, made it as great and singular as it is. She’s steadfast, stubborn, and sometimes scarily stuck, her manic-depressive aches and pains fodder for films, and never far from the public eye. We’ve seen it, heard it, and watched it, even when we felt we had no right to do so. Her exhibitionist-voyeuristic-narcissism comes as a unique emballage and its unwrapping gives her works their unique cadence and their inevitable tendency toward extinction. Even during her lows, her curiosity prevails enabling creation to succeed the self and transcend that heavy, earth-bound inertia. Her gaze upon the world is a serious one, and that’s worth remembering when confronted with something seemingly slight like Tombée de nuit sur Shanghai. If one waits long enough, the world reveals itself in ways that are familiar but also uncanny; especially if the view purports to have no author (its orphan status), the vulnerability of the maker is never entirely concealed. Akerman’s politique d’auteur is a politics of the self, which confronts history at every turn. She’s said it on many occasions: she’s always in exile. A daughter from a mother orphaned by the Holocaust, we can assume that “orphan” is not a word Akerman uses lightly but it’s a word she’s chosen for the images in Maniac Summer.
A recent viewing of a gorgeous 16mm print of D’Est (1993) not only convinced me that it’s her greatest film, but that her love of the world and her ability to be moved (by faces, landscapes, movement, music, etc…) is itself heartrending, like a reflection of meaning that inheres in, but also gives generously to the viewer. When asked about the aesthetic, philosophical and logical choices he made during the shooting of In Vanda’s Room, Pedro Costa replied: “the cinema is not about the artist; it’s about being in the world, our world.” D’Est wonderfully encapsulates this sentiment, as Akerman (in her days of venturing forth from home, and in a sort of exhilarated riposte to News from Home (1976), one of the most beautiful and rigorous NYC films ever made) shares her journey from Eastern Germany, through Poland to Moscow. Told through a montage of static images without voiceover or interviews, and through a series of stunning mostly medium tracking shots which take great pleasure in watching people line-up and wait for the bus, the film could be read as a treatise on Babushkas and their glamorous fur hats, or on the infinity of Eastern dusk, agricultural populations, migration, transportation, post-Communist political and economic change, the longueurs of winter, aging, daily routines (and routine pleasures), the colour blue, and so on. The film is so rich, so formally daring and precise that it seems miraculous considering Akerman’s latest, shut-in works. (The daring includes not only looking, but looking back and holding an uncomfortable gaze.) D’Est bursts forth with humanity, inquisitiveness, humour, and love, but also with foreboding, mystery, unease, torpor, and, especially, rootlessness. A cello performance acts as an interlude, binding all of the images together, escaping its own realism. (A different incarnation of D’Est was initiated for an exhibition at the Jeu de Paume, and later remounted at the Beaubourg, with many monitors arranged out of sequence providing both a temporal and spatial editing different from that of the film. But the film is a masterpiece; as perfect a work of art as Akerman has ever created.)
East
European Film Bulletin [Konstanty Kuzma]
Shortly after the iron curtain fell and the Eastern Bloc started falling apart, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman traveled to Moscow by train to capture a crumbling world “before it is too late.” How soon it would have been too late to witness the remains of this world is hard to say, but from Akerman’s journey resulted From the East, a static 110-minute documentary released in 1993, mainly consisting of tracking shots of waiting crowds boldly reciprocating the camera’s gaze. The concept of From the East is similar to that of Tokyo Ga, where German director Wim Wenders travels to a similarly alien world: Tokyo. The Japanese capital is frantic: Wenders observes Pachinko parlors, funky Japanese TV shows, over-crowded trains, and in contrast to all this, Yasujiro Ozu – a fixed point amidst the ever flashing city lights. The purpose of Wenders’ journey to Japan is his fascination with Ozu’s work, which brings the film a loose narrative mediated through the ingenious voice-over. But where Wenders is lyrical and essayistic, Akerman sends us post-cards from a bleak world. “Drama is life with the dull bits cut out,” Hitchcock once told Robert Robinson in an interview for the BBC (05th of June 1960), and to Hitchcock’s credit, From the East is excessively boring…
The film sets out in Poland, with a few sprayed cement blocks and a wall that is barely tall enough to serve as an analogy to “the Wall”. There is a Warsteiner beer sign, a man who’s waiting for the bus, smoking and drinking beer, and trees that blow in the wind. We wouldn’t be able to tell the place or time of the setting hadn’t it been for the title screen: Akerman wanders around an anonymous world, one that lacks identity as much as any village does. Only as we travel further eastwards, the East seems to reveal its ‘real’ face with the eternally sad landscapes and grey skies, a place where people seem to live troubled and monotonous lives. Often, the camera will track alongside large groups of people waiting at a train station or bus stop: some glance at the camera, some stare at it, others ignore it; some are silent, some smile, some seem displeased. Meanwhile, the noses and eye-brows ascend and descend in height and position, warts and pimples appear from time to time, and make-up partly conceals the pale skin tone of women. Grim faces, grey walls, muddy landscapes: indeed, Akerman is not particularly worried about picturing the East in a favorable fashion. The fact that these masses of people do not seem to mind the eternal and purposeless waiting is troubling, if not disturbing. But then again, waiting was not an activity foreign to the citizens of the Eastern Bloc. The lines you had to endure in the Soviet Union (as well as many Socialist countries) only to obtain basic products such as =toilet paper were notorious. There is a joke from Glasnost times in which a man, standing in such a line, suddenly snaps, leaving the line with the intention of assassinating Gorbatschow, thus hoping to avenge the unchanged economic misery. Soon enough, he is spotted rejoining the line, as it turns out that the line for killing Gorbatschow is even longer than the one he had been standing in…
Looking at Akerman’s oeuvre, though, it is doubtful that the East alone is to be blamed for the aggressive monotony in From the East (indeed, one may conjecture that a film of Akerman about Japan would not have been shot in Pachinko parlors either). Rather, throughout her work, Akerman is constantly challenging a certain conception of art: her work is not simply Anti-Hollywoodian, but opposing the superficial connection of cinema with drama. The tension here is not between real and false emotions; the problem lies precisely in the ominously transparent organization of emotions on screen. Everything is too obvious, too simple to be true, ready for consumption. And of course, there is another enemy: time, or, rather, its non-existence in a cinema that paces and shouts and shoots, but becomes perpetual in Akerman’s films. From the East, be it intentionally or not, convincingly embeds these struggles into non-fiction, in this case a world where stillness reigns over words, and nobody seems to worry about the purpose or meaning of it all. It all just sits and stands there, unconcerned about what we, the observers, may think – the boldness of existence, a power one is glad to be reminded of. Certainly, Akerman’s films thus challenge the boundaries of the cinematic medium, though the risk with such a radical approach is that it may fall wayside. If in one way or another, art is always a juvenile compromise between wanting and wanting to want, the real extent of this struggle is seldom uncovered as thoroughly as it is in a film like From the East. For those who hoped for an earlier ‘climax’ in Jeane Dielman, this film will be a tough bone to chew on. But perhaps, it is a torture worth going through. Wait and see.
D'EST
(Chantal Äkerman, 1993) | Dennis Grunes
The most brilliant film from anywhere in the 1990s, D’Est (From the East) is the work of Chantal Äkerman, the world’s greatest Belgian-born filmmaker, the world’s greatest woman filmmaker, and the world’s greatest living Jewish filmmaker. Along with Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami, Äkerman is cinema’s reigning humanist, and for more than thirty years she has been going back and forth between documentary and fiction, although her documentaries are highly dramatic and her fictions sometimes seem documentary, and she often lands in some magical space in-between. Like Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934), D’Est is a photographic essay, a visual survey, of humanity.
Although Äkerman’s masterpiece defies categorization, it is a kind of “road picture.” For it, Äkerman herself took to the road, traveling from Germany to Poland to Moscow, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. She explains that she had always wanted to make a film about “the diaspora of the Eastern European Jews,” and that, in a transfigured form, D’Est became for her that film, for, in each human face she encountered along the way, she felt the history with which she was investing it—a history including the Jewish ordeal of Hitler and the death camps and of Josef Stalin, the former candidate for priesthood whose anti-Semitism was actually more authentic (by which I mean less politically motivated) than Hitler’s. Road pictures are drifty things reflecting the impermanence and uprootedness of human lives, and in the sustained ironical technique by which Äkerman’s film proceeds it’s the “impermanence” and “uprootedness” of her own traveling and tracking camera that, destabilizing figures in often stationary positions, transforms them into a metaphor for lost and scattered Jewry—the most moving use of a moving camera I have ever encountered. Äkerman also films people walking, and this motion of theirs contributes to the same thematic result. It doesn’t matter how few, if any, of these people are actually Jewish, for Äkerman’s own Jewishness, and her reflections on the historic plight of European Jews, invest what she sees as a visionary with the thematic import she pursues as an artist.
Another aspect to this is the darkness of night in which Äkerman films much of what she sees, for instance, in Moscow streets. Headed for home carrying packages that imply rootedness and deliberation, people seem by the determination of their stride to be doing their best to push their way out of the darkness that nevertheless dogs them and is enveloping them. If one is of a literal mind, one can watch this and see little or nothing; but, once drawn into the film’s metaphorical, which is to say, spiritual life, one is overwhelmed by a circumstance so enormous it’s as if one were “feeling history” for the first time. The black of night in this film resonates with a sense of the eternal tragedy of Jewry: the home or even the life always being taken away—the nothingness to which the rest of the world is ever poised to consign Jews by scattering either them or their ashes to the winds. Äkerman’s irony embraces the idea that those whom she films here, who are seemingly hewing to a sure, steady course, are contesting their fate as wanderers or are in denial that this is their fate and their history. Closer to the surface, the Soviet Union has ended but its former citizens, apparently unfazed, go on with their mundane lives. They also are scattered to the winds, and therefore the continuation of ordinary existence cocoons them from this sea-change while Äkerman’s camera penetrates and deconstructs the event of their survival.
For the most part, Äkerman employs two kinds of shots in D’Est, tracking shots and static shots. Her long tracking shots, among the most beautiful I have seen, are correlative both to her own (topographic, emotional, spiritual) journey and to the uprootedness of her camera subjects, which, by ironic dint of her travels, she shares. Äkerman tracks through railway depots and through streets, alternating between humans in a kind of limbo, between their lives, as it were, and people, as Carl Sandburg would have it in his great American poem “Limited,” who are certain they are headed, by train, for Omaha, which in fact is only their most immediate destination. Perhaps the most piercing element in these trackings arrives very late in the film, on a Moscow street, when the camera passes a young boy (at one point the boy stretches back from the extreme right of the frame as if unsure about continuing on his way screen-left), finds him again, alongside a woman we also have seen before, and then loses him forever as we strain in anticipation to see him again, as if his future and ours depended on our reunion. Nothing so crystallizes the sense of impermanence that permeates this film than this little drama which is embedded in the flux of urban pedestrians all making their way to Sandburg’s Omaha. D’Est is a film populated by ghosts whose substantial reality provides an index of the depth of humanity that, metaphorically, has been lost.
Most of the static shots are interior shots, in people’s homes, and some of these find people, including children, in fixed poses, while others are engaged in repetitive activities. One such scene recalls similarly obsessive kitchen scenes from both Äkerman’s Je tu il elle (1974) and her tremendous Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975): a woman, seated at a kitchen table, slices a salami and some bread, slicing and slicing, and intermittently eating only a little bit (but with relish!). Do people do this? Perhaps rarely, if at all; but much of what we do amounts to doing this and things like this, and in all these interior shots Äkerman captures a sense of the routines and compulsive behaviors that people employ to curb frustrations and uncertainties and assuage loneliness. In line with this, a television set, usually playing, appears in these interior scenes.
One of the earliest static shots in D’Est—it comes close to opening the film—shows a boy in his late teens or twenties seated on a roadside bench, presumably waiting for a bus. He is wearing a red tank top, and behind him, on the vertical slats of a wooden fence framing his head, are painted red markings. Throughout the film, dabs of red punctuate nearly every shot, appearing quite often as an item of apparel, for instance. (In the film’s rural scenes, fluttering trees, in long shot, evoke the ephemeral and evanescent nature of existence.) Late in the film, the seemingly purposeless boy has been replaced by a concert cellist, who, after her seated performance, is gifted from the audience with bouquet after bouquet of red roses. Numerous nighttime shots in the film are bathed in a reddish glow, while others favor dusky blues that stress the film’s twilit sense of the eternal. (The film’s two principal color cinematographers are Bernard Deville and Raymond Fromont, and their work is wondrous.) On one level, Äkerman’s repeated use of red suggests the lifeblood of the people she essays, their determination to persist and survive, if not quite their ability to prevail. This is another way of saying, perhaps, that red is armament against the drabness and crushing oppressiveness of life. On the other hand, in ironic counterpoint to this, red evokes a sense of spilt blood, suggesting as much the forces arrayed against humanity as humanity’s quickened response to these. And, of course, red throughout, by its association with Communism, continually reminds us of time and place, and the end of the Soviet Union.
Time is a strange thing in this film. Some visual points of punctuation disclose the time in which the film was shot, the early 1990s, but for the most part there is washing over everything a sense that the human lives we see haven’t budged from the 1930s. D’Est is saturated with a sense of the past, implying that a connection with the past has in some sense held people back from their future. On the level of Soviet reference, this may suggest an ideological nostalgia contesting a nation’s ability to adapt and grow. On the level of Jewish reference, a more dire suggestion arises: the extent to which, by isolating and targeting Jews, the world has helped create a community whose insularity became a defense against eradication. On the other hand, some moments vividly juxtapose time references. In one scene, for instance, a pop singer, wearing a mini-skirt, performs on stage with a band while couples below dance in tentative rock fashion, among them a woman whose very long skirt seems to belong to a time of long-since abandoned modesty. In D’Est time yields to unspecified time yields to intimations of timelessness.
There is almost no dialogue in the film (at least in the VHS version I own), and what dialogue there is isn’t translated, allowing us to share Äkerman’s foreign journey. It’s a solemn world we enter, one certainly not without joy, but a world caught somewhere in between earth and eternity, hope and hopelessness, despair and fortitude. It’s a world of sounds and background noise, but the camera records the silence of faces—the gap between what they show and what they hide. On Yasujiro Ozu’s tombstone, American maverick filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has informed us, Chinese characters appear whose “rough translation” is “the space between all things.” Äkerman’s camera captures the space between all people, even when they are jostling one another in a crowd, as well as the space between all things that make up a person, an identity, or the elusive, perhaps illusionary appearance of identity. There is no rhetoric of humanity in Äkerman’s films; somehow, like Ozu, in fact, Äkerman is peculiarly capable of showing us in each person whom her camera passes over the individual’s silent participation in the aggregate of humanity. There is a universe in each grain of humanity.
Äkerman’s extraordinary use of camera would appear to stylize the humanity that her camera discovers, but, to an unprecedented degree, her human subjects react to the camera in their midst in all kinds of self-dramatizing ways. The net result is a film that is, at once, pure cinema and pure humanity. Post-D’Est, no one can be so foolish as to think that one precludes the other. Perhaps the fullest measure of the humane film that Äkerman has wrought is this: we keenly feel the loss of each face, each soul, the camera passes by, and, because there are so many of these souls in the film, we are never passive in watching the film, for we are always catching up with it.
Äkerman has given us such wonderful films: Hotel Monterey (1972), Jeanne Dielman, News from Home (1977), Toute une nuit (1982), La captive (2000). But D’Est towers over these and almost everything else by everyone else.
It is from Belgium, France and Portugal.
Place
and Displacement: Akerman and Documentary | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 29, 2016
Bordering
on Fiction: Chantal Akerman's D'Est | POSTMODERN ... Kristine Butler, September 22, 2013, also
seen here: review-3.995
- Postmodern Culture Bordering on Fiction: Chatal Akerman's
D'Est, by Kristine Butler, September 1995 (pdf)
Walking,
Talking, Singing, Exploding . . . and Silence: Chantal ... Barbara McBane from Film Quarterly, September 16, 2016
From the
East, Chantal Akerman • Film Analysis • Senses of Cinema Steven Ball, May 2013
Chantal
Akerman says 'a film is a film is a film,' but hers really are ... Miranda Popkey from Politico, May 4, 2012
Review
Article: First Person Jewish/ Neo-Noir | Marat Grinberg ... Marat Grinberg review of First Person Jewish, by Alisa S. Lebow,
June 2011 (pdf)
Tribute
to Chantal Akerman • Claire Atherton • Senses of Cinema December 9, 2015
D'est (1993, Chantal
Akerman) – Brandon's movie memory
While
There's Still Time: Jonathan Crary on Chantal Akerman's D'Est Virgil Taylor from Verso Books, October 9, 2015
From the East (1993) directed
by Chantal Akerman • Reviews, film + ...
Taj LV from Letterboxd
D'Est (Akerman,
1993) - The Other Journal M. Leary,
December 10, 2009
D'Est
– Chantal Akerman (1993) – The Art(s) of Slow Cinema October 29, 2015
Strictly Film School: Acquarello
Night
in the Lens [chai walla]
filmjourney.org : Chantal
Akerman Doug Cummings
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Chantal
Akerman, 1950–2015: Quarterly Review of Film and Video ... David Sterritt, January 14, 2016
DVDBlu
Review [Christopher S. Long]
Review: 'D'Est' -
Variety Emanuel Levy
Chantal
Akerman: NOW review – flickering between life and death ... Laura Cumming from The Guardian, November 8, 2015
Travelling
Shots in Chantal Akerman's D'est (aka From the East, 1993 ... Adam Roberts from The Huffington Post, March 23, 2015
ART IN
REVIEW - The New York Times Roberta
Smith from The New York Times, May
15, 1998
ART
REVIEW - Through a Glass Darkly, Very Darkly - Review ... The New
York Times, January 15, 2006
FILM;
Chantal Akerman And the Point Of Point of View - The New York ... Dinitia Smith from The New York Times, April 26, 1998
chantal akerman - d'est
(1993) - lviv part - YouTube (6:22)
early street scene, bustling with activity, sun shining, interior
scenes, isolated moments of individuals alone, small portraits, still life’s,
resembling moving paintings, then trains, trolley cars, night time street
movement to the sounds of an outdoor rock concert, young kids dancing outdoors in
coats
Chantal Akerman - D'Est -
YouTube (3:58) cutting bread and sausage
Chantal Akerman D'Est -
YouTube (3:20) dance hall scene
D'EST [Extracto] - YouTube
(9:01) long tracking shot in the
snow, a cavalcade of faces, voices, and a Russian population in stagnation as
cello music plays
D'est - YouTube (7:56) same as
above – no cello music
Chantal Akerman - D'Est (1993) on Vimeo (5:15) Blue light,
near end
Chantal Akerman, D'est: au
bord de la fiction (1995) - YouTube
(4:58) viewed as a video
installation, twenty-four sequences are shown simultaneously on video monitors
in a darkened museum room, but perhaps a lone audio track, so it doesn’t sound
haphazardly chaotic
CHANTAL AKERMAN BY CHANTAL AKERMAN –
made for TV
aka:
Cinéma, de notre temps
France Belgium
(64 mi) 1997
My name is Chantal
Akerman and I was born in Brussels. And
that’s the truth.
—from Chantal Akerman par Chantal Akerman, 1997
Chantal
Akerman by Chantal Akerman | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Made for the prestigious and long-running French TV series Cinema de notre temps (originally known as Cineastes de notre temps), this 1996 self-portrait by the highly talented Belgian-born filmmaker consists mainly of clips from her previous films, but the selection and arrangement of these are canny and subtle, and Akerman's on-camera introduction is touching and revealing. It's an excellent introduction to her work, though the many glimpses offered here of her best films—notably Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, From the East, and Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels—can't really take the place of seeing these works whole.
Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman Icarus Films
When asked to participate in the Cinema, of Our Time series, Chantal Akerman jokingly suggested herself as subject matter. She envisioned a film consisting solely of excerpts from her films, but when pressed by the producers to include footage of herself, Akerman grudgingly agreed, and divided the film into two parts.
The first part opens with Akerman in her apartment, reading from a text directly to the camera, describing the problems she encountered making this film. What emerges from this mise-en-scene is a funny, often personal, and always thoughtful confession from this extremely perceptive filmmaker.
Part two lets Akerman's films speak for her, taking clips from her extensive filmography and linking them anonymously until they form a new film. There are scenes from Jeanne Dielman, her best-known film, but also glimpses of several other works - forays into experimental film, comedic shorts, musicals, narrative features - including an early short that stars a very young Chantal.
Exalting
the Everyday [CHANTAL AKERMAN BY CHANTAL ... Jonathan Rosenbaum from the Chicago
Reader, October 23, 1997, also seen
here: Exalting
the Everyday | Movie Review | Chicago Reader
This weekend the Museum of Contemporary Art, as part of its exhibit "Hall of Mirrors: Art and Film Since 1945," is presenting not only Chantal Akerman, one of the finest filmmakers working anywhere, but also the two features I would describe as her greatest achievements--the 200-minute narrative Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and the 107-minute documentary From the East (D'est, 1993). To make the program even more fully rounded, the museum is also showing a 64-minute self-portrait, Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman (1996), which provides an excellent introduction to her work as a whole. (This film and Akerman herself will appear on Sunday; From the East shows on Friday, and Jeanne Dielman on Saturday.)
Despite her significant and still growing international reputation, Akerman isn't yet considered an "established" mainstream or avant-garde artist, because many critics in both spheres still treat her as something of an interloper, even an irritation or a threat. A friend who's a highly respected novelist and film critic recently told me that he regards all her work as worthless, even though he hasn't bothered to look at all of it. Among the better-known gatekeepers of avant-garde film in New York, one woman dismissed Jeanne Dielman outright when it belatedly straggled into the city in the late 70s, while one man half-seriously avowed in private that he couldn't possibly accept an epic about women's housework that shows someone making Wiener schnitzel incorrectly.
What all three were reacting against, I suspect, is what Akerman chooses to film and finds interesting--the kind of choices that define what most innovative representational art consists of. Generally speaking, her turf is the sort of everyday life that's excluded from most other pictures, and in my experience, gatekeeper critics tend to have more trouble with this turf than most audiences. When From the East was screened for the press at the Toronto film festival four years ago only five people stayed to the end, but at the public screenings I attended in Toronto and Locarno few people walked out.
I suspect mainstream critics walk out because they invest so many hours persuading themselves that most commercial movies are worth sitting through that they tend to resent movies whose very premises make most commercial movies--and the hype they routinely provoke--seem foolish. And I suspect some avant-garde film critics resent Akerman's steadfast refusal to confine her work to the avant-garde and experimental realm--instead moving freely between narrative and nonnarrative, relatively independent and relatively industrial forms of filmmaking.
Chantal Akerman by Chantal Akerman--made for the venerable French TV series "Cinema of Our Time" (originally called "Filmmakers of Our Time," it stretches back to the 60s)--opens with a long shot of a simply furnished officelike room. A dog enters the frame from the foreground, eventually sitting down on the floor at the left while Akerman emerges from around a corner and seats herself on the right, facing the camera and proceeding to explain how she came to make this film. Some of what she says is extemporaneous, some is read from a text. She explains that she will treat her previous films as rushes and that the producers, Janine Bazin and Andre Labarthe, insisted that she appear in the film, occasioning this introduction.
After going into some detail concerning her blocked feelings about this project and recounting a Jewish joke about a man trying to sell an undernourished cow by way of a metaphor, she talks briefly about being born in Brussels in 1950, the daughter of Polish Jews who settled there in the 30s. She explains that when she started to make films at the age of 18 no one in her family encouraged her or thought that the facts of their own lives were worth making films about.
Then Akerman speaks about her grandmother, who did huge paintings, none of which seems to have survived (and which she knows about only through her mother), and reflects a little on the implications of this for her own work--citing the Second Commandment and Jewish taboos against visual representation, especially art produced by and about women. (The size of her grandmother's paintings and the fact that they showed women who appeared to be looking out at the viewer are suggestive of the monumentality of Akerman's work as well as its aggressive modes of address.) After this comes the title "Self Portrait," followed by fleeting titles that catalog the 15 films she'll be showing excerpts of and the 13 other films that won't be represented.
By my count, the remainder of the film, apart from a few closing words by Akerman, consists of 34 clips, and the three films excerpted most often are From the East (five clips), Jeanne Dielman (four), and the 1993 Portrait of a Young Girl in Brussels (four). This is an accurate representation of her work at its best, though I regret the absence of two favorites, the 1983 The Man With a Suitcase and the 1991 Night and Day, both of which I seem to like more than most Akerman fans. These clips aren't shown chronologically, and extracts from some of the films recur, but the logic of the juxtapositions is almost always easy to follow.
Sometimes the links are thematic, as in a cut from Jeanne Dielman (Delphine Seyrig) polishing her son's black shoes in the kitchen to Akerman, starring at 18 in her first film (Saute ma ville, 1968), polishing her own black shoes in her own kitchen. But the formal and temperamental differences between these segments are just as important as the thematic linkages: Saute ma ville, shot in nonsynchronous sound and black and white, is in many ways a primitive sketch for Jeanne Dielman, shot in sync sound and color; and the giddy abandon with which Akerman polishes her own shoes while she's wearing them--and records the sounds of polishing so that they fail to match her own contorted, jerky movements--provides a stark contrast with the highly controlled and coordinated moves of Seyrig (and Akerman the filmmaker). The difference isn't necessarily between crude technique and polished technique, for in documentary films such as News From Home and From the East Akerman uses nonsynchronous sound in ways that are both subtle and complex.
Later cutting boldly from a Pina Bausch dance performance in One Day Pina Asked Me (1983) to a tracking shot past pedestrians standing in the snow at a Moscow bus stop in From the East, Akerman is able to show a formal relationship between the filming of figures in a landscape in two radically different TV documentaries. Prior to that she demonstrates numerous relationships, moving from the music rehearsals of Les annees 80 (1983), her feature-length "trailer" for a full-scale musical, to a fully realized scene from the musical itself (Golden Eighties, aka Window Shopping, 1985), to a series of dance rehearsals in Les annees 80s, then to another Bausch performance in One Day Pina Asked Me. Here we see Akerman joyfully conducting a singer in a recording studio, visibly even more taken by the music than the singer, and her grandiloquent gestures are much closer to dance than the swaying of the background figures in the finally realized number; similarly, the dissolving pirouettes of various dancers in a rehearsal for the same film have more life than the "finished" performance by Bausch's troupe that we glimpse just afterward. (The most exuberant dancing of all comes just before, in an extended sequence from Portrait of a Young Girl in Brussels.)
Akerman appears in almost a third of the films excerpted here--more if one adds a couple in which we hear her offscreen voice--and one of the fascinations of this critical and selective tour is watching her own gestures being reproduced in other films by some of her actresses. (Aurore Clement nibbling food off a stray hotel tray on a hallway floor in the autobiographical Les rendez-vous d'Anna from 1978 comes just after we see Akerman compulsively devouring sugar from a spoon in the 1974 Je tu il elle.) But Akerman's disarming tactic of using herself as a star--which she criticizes in her introduction as a dubious form of bravado--and some of her stars as versions of herself has to be weighed against her determination to film anonymous, everyday people as if they were just as important and her determination to integrate stars and nobodies in films such as American Stories (1988). The sorrow and beauty throughout her work, with its shining nocturnal moods and glowering compulsive activities, has a lot to do with exalting the unexceptional, the neglected corners of the world around us.
Bright Lights Film
Journal | Robert Bresson and Chantal
Akerman Gary Morris, August
1, 2002
SOUTH (SUD)
South Icarus Films
Inspired by her love of William Faulkner and James Baldwin,
renowned director Chantal Akerman had planned to produce a meditation on the
American South. However, just days before she was to begin filming, James Byrd,
Jr. was murdered in Jasper,
This racially motivated killing shook the country, and revealed the intense hate that still lies just beneath the surface of our society. Instead of following the story in a typical American media fashion, Akerman allows the story to slowly unfold on its own. Long, panning shots set the stage, creating the world of Jasper. Patient interviews reveal the thoughts and emotions of the local townspeople. Akerman's access to their lives, including being allowed to film Byrd's funeral, allows her to tell the tale in a pensive and beautiful fashion.
Alternating static shots and dolly shots, Akerman reconstitutes the horrible incident. "We found pieces of his body all along the road," says one witness. But this is not an anatomy of his murder, nor the autopsy of a black man lynched by three white males. Rather, it is an evocation of how this event fits in to a landscape and climate that is as much mental as physical.
Akerman writes, "How does the southern silence become
so heavy and so menacing so suddenly? How do the trees and the whole natural
environment evoke so intensely death, blood, and the weight of history? How
does the present call up the past? And how hoes this past, with a mere gesture
or a simple regard, haunt and torment you as you wander along an empty cotton
field, or a dusty country road?"
filmjourney.org : Chantal Akerman Doug Cummings
Akerman wanted to create a film about the beauty of the
American South, but after arriving on location in Jasper,
Unlike the preceding films, Akerman incorporates interviews in South, partly because it addresses an event and requires necessary exposition. Several people comment on the murder and race relations in general in and around Jasper, including several elderly black residents, the town sheriff, and a journalist; all agree that although things are better than they used to be previous to the Civil Rights movement, tensions remain vividly entrenched.
In many ways, the film is a meditation on violent crime as much as it is racial violence in specific, and as such, Akerman includes two of the films most emotional sequences, one is a significant portion of a black church memorial service that is rich in culturally-specific mourning rituals, and the other is the final shot of the film: a continuous view driving along the entire three-mile long stretch of the road Byrd was executed on. The camera is mounted on the back of a slow-moving vehicle and it points backward, a stylistic device that recurs throughout Akerman's films, ensuring that the visual journey is one of continual discovery rather than simple clarification of what lies ahead. Each foot of the pavement reveals new terrain previously nonexistent to the viewer and serves as a potent reminder that the past must never be forgotten.
Senses of Cinema Rose Capp
THE CAPTIVE B+ 92
France Belgium
Time Out
review Geoff Andrew
Akerman returns to top form with this strange but compelling
version of Proust's La Prisonnière. Set in (just about) modern-day
Paris, it charts the effects of the festering jealousy felt by wealthy young
Simon towards his seemingly innocent and defenceless lover Ariane, whom he
keeps cooped up in their apartment lest her occasional forays outside for
singing lessons tempt her into (improbable) sexual escapades with her
girlfriends. Pared in the Bressonian manner, but inflected with an almost
operatic intensity, the film transcends/eschews naturalism to create an almost
timeless parable about the deadeningly obsessive/possessive perversities of
many male-female relationships. The use of Rachmaninov's Isle of the Dead
is particularly effective.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
The standout in this year's
"Rendez-Vous With French Cinema" series is Chantal Akerman's La Captive. Inspired by the fifth volume of Remembrance of
Things Past, but more directly influenced by Vertigo and Buñuel's
oeuvre, the film is a contemporary surrealist masterpiece and Akerman's most
fully realized feature since Jeanne Dielman. Somber in tone but
punctuated with hilariously absurd details, it has, from beginning to end, the
quality and logic of a dream—or of a fantasy spun by the protagonist as he lies
in bed, writing in his notebook à la Proust.
Simon (Stanislas Merhar), the
writer, is a spoiled rich kid living in a luxuriously appointed Paris apartment
with his elderly aunt and his girlfriend, Ariane (Sylvie Testud), whom he seems
to have spirited away from her hip lesbian circle and whom he despairs of ever
entirely knowing or possessing. Their nightly bedtime ritual involves Ariane
feigning sleep while Simon rubs his pajama-clad body against her carefully
covered ass until he comes. Akerman displaces passion from the somnambulist
actors—onto landscapes almost submerged in blackness as seen from a speeding
car, or onto the surging score (Schubert and Shostakovich).
La Captive is one of the rare films where meaning is conveyed as
much through sound as image. It's also Akerman's most despairing depiction of
her recurrent theme: the impossible desire to merge the self with the other—always
in her films a stand-in for the long-lost mother.
Symbiotic attachment is equally
central to Jean-Pierre Denis's Murderous Maids, which also stars Testud.
Based on the real-life story of the Papin sisters, whose brutal murder of their
employer and her daughter inspired Genet, de Beauvoir, and Chabrol among
others, Denis's film is a serviceable frame for Testud's performance as the
eldest sister, a depiction of madness that evokes pity and terror on a scale to
satisfy Aristotle's definition of tragedy. Actors refer metaphorically to
finding the spine of a character. Testud literalizes the metaphor, exchanging
the flexible, catlike posture she brought to La Captive for a backbone
rigid with repressed rage and desire.
Strictly Film School Acquarello
An outwardly fragile and introspective man
named Simon (Stanislas Merhar) stands in a darkened room poring over an
audioless film footage of a group of holiday revelers at a seaside resort in
Perhaps the most Bressonian of
Chantal Akerman's minimalist and dedramatized cinema (most notably, in the
bookend structure and psychological deconstruction of A Gentle Woman),
La Captive is an
elegantly sinuous and provocative exploration of obsession, madness, and
intimacy. Although inspired by Marcel Proust's La
Prisonnière, the fifth volume of his epic
masterwork In Search of Lost Time,
Akerman distills the lush texturality and baroque elements of Proust to create
a spare and essential portrait that nevertheless retains the thematic density
and emotional ambiguity of the psychological novel. From the estranged opening
sequence as Simon studies a celluloid image and speaks for a silent and
physically absent Ariane, Akerman establishes the film's subjective point of
view and implicit objectification of - and control over - a voiceless (or more
appropriately, silenced) Ariane. Visually, Akerman further reflects Simon's
literal projection of Ariane through disorienting images of converging and
diverging shadows cast on anonymous streets and an unfinished alabaster
sculpture at an empty museum that represents both idealized perfection and
dimensional incompletion. Moreover, Simon's perception of Ariane's untenable
opacity is subsequently illustrated through an oddly distanced, non-coital
sexual encounter between Simon and an unconscious Ariane - her impenetrable
thoughts occluded by sleep. By presenting psychological interiority through an
overarching narrative circularity and incorporating visually austere and
oppressively isolating landscapes, Akerman creates a haunting and irresolvable
odyssey of possession, passion, disconnection, and myopia.
Senses of Cinema (Berenice Reynaud) review
Ivonne Margulies:
‘La Chambre Akerman: The Captive as Creator’, Rouge 10, 2006
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Turner Classic
Movies dvd review Nathaniel Thompson
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick
Davis) review [B+]
Kamera.co.uk Ben
McCann
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards)
Movie Martyr (Jeremy
Heilman) review [3/4]
DVD Talk (Matt Langdon)
dvd review [3/5]
TV
Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/4]
BBC
Films: Interview - Chantal Akerman BBC interview with the director by David
Wood
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Gary W. Tooze]
FROM THE OTHER
SIDE (De l’autre côté) A- 93
When you try to show
reality in cinema, most of the time it’s totally false. But when you show what’s going on in people’s
minds, that’s very cinematic.
—Chantal Akerman
This
is an exquisitely filmed and well-directed investigative look at the
devastating consequences of the seemingly unstoppable, illegal entries
into some sparsely populated Mexican/Arizona border
crossings. Alternating between interviews and landscapes, Chantal
Akerman uses a minimalist technique, documenting small, cinematic
portraits in time that speak for themselves, opening with stories of stark
faces of family members who have lost loved ones attempting to “cross over” to
the other side, returning frequently to examine the jarringly raw
desolation of the dusty landscapes on the dirt-poor Mexican side of the border
wall. Later, we hear the opinions of people on the American side,
landowners, restaurant entrepreneurs, who are worried about how the
“invasion” of illegal immigrants might bring diseases, how they are considered
trespassers and are viewed as a constant threat to their freedom, sequences
which are ever-so-slightly underscored with the lush piano music of Chopin,
a contrast to the utter emptiness “from the other side.” As
always, Akerman’s camera silently gazes at the landscape, relying heavily on sound that only
occasionally matches the visual image, where she is as interested in the
setting as in the diverging views of people populating both sides, revealing
evocative images of brutally unforgiving landscapes and stunning tracking
shots. Only
the second Akerman film to be shot on digital, following an earlier American
documentary SUD (1999) that examines a brutal hate crime in Jasper, Texas, a
racially motivated murder that occurred when James
Byrd, Jr. was dragged to death chained by his ankles to a pickup truck
driven by avowed white supremacists in 1998, which along with D’EST (1993) and
this film comprise Akerman’s documentary trilogy dealing with specific
localities. Made only a year after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it
anticipates the paranoia and fear of borders that marks our contemporary times
and the worldwide rise of nationalism, including rare infrared surveillance
footage from a U.S. helicopter hovering over a group of people while they are
herded fatefully toward the border, where their movements are scrutinized and
tracked, with gunsights fixed on their target.
No names accompany the faces of Mexicans captured in the film, as if to
underscore their anonymity and invisibility in terms of the long history of
Mexico-U.S. border-crossing, where individuals may change but the phenomena of
poverty and desperation that drives migrants from their homes does not, while
America simply refuses to acknowledge its economic dependence on undocumented
laborers, which includes a long-term, symbiotic relationship with cheap and
easily exploited, undocumented labor, the same relationship it once had with
slaves centuries ago, as both are byproducts of capitalism, where migrants are
not stealing American jobs, as alleged, but almost inevitably work
off-the-books in non-existing positions well below the allowable wage scale for
American citizens, where no one else is clamoring for these underpaid
jobs.
Akerman’s meditative
documentary captures life on the Mexican-U.S. border, speaking to residents of
Agua Prieta, a Mexican border town in the state of Sonora, where undocumented
immigrants risk everything to cross into America, while also speaking to
residents in Douglas, Arizona on the American side, interviewing a Mexican
consulate, the sheriff, a restaurant owner, and a few locals, where hostile
residents fiercely advocate keeping the migrants out, displaying signs on their
property that read, “Stop the Crime
Wave! Our Property and Environment is
Being Trashed by Invaders!” Like
the former Berlin Wall, or the border of Israel and the West Bank, an
immediately recognizable wall along the border symbolizes the diametrically
opposing interests, with a barren ghost town on one side, built upon dirt
roads, with a few open businesses, and plenty of ramshackle houses, many of
which are empty, reflecting few opportunities and an unending poverty that has
plagued this town for generations, while the other side reflects the ominous
presence of heavily equipped police vehicles continuously scouring the border,
using the latest in militaristic technological equipment to help discourage and
dissuade the migratory flow. Between
1994 and 2007, there were around 5,000 migrant deaths along the Mexico–United
States border, creating heightened concerns, where this film examines the
culture emanating from both sides. Using
durational filmmaking dotted with minimal or even casual action, where the film
explores a stream-of-conscious relationship between inside and outside, mental
and physical, including a fluid geography of wandering states of mind, though
captured by a fixed camera. Akerman’s
approach is to inhabit a region, where her lingering shooting style dwells on
instances of pause and transition, reflection and anxiety, perhaps suspended
between a before and after, in the unsettling time of a transitionary moment,
though what we inevitably see is a
historical aftermath of hundreds of years of conflict reduced to a
sequence of images where the director breathes her own life onto an existing
landscape, making a contemporary urban panorama, an impressionistic mosaic of
what has been described as a “distant intimacy” fused with an analytic
detachment that is necessary to create empathy.
Regardless of the distance traveled to get there, in Akerman’s films the
journey of discovery inevitably turns out to be an interior journey.
The first half of the
film is set in Mexico, where Akerman’s rendering of this itinerant life uses a
unique cinematic language, whose syntax moves between static and tracking shots
of desert landscapes, a dilapidated town, and the border wall, where Akerman
interviews a 21-year old Mexican whose older brother recently died in the
desert when his group lost their way, an older couple in their 70’s that
recently lost their son and grandson, while also interviewing people who plan
to or have already attempted to cross the desert into the United States,
including a group that reads a prepared statement about their unique hardships
and the inevitable prejudices they’re about to face, while thanking the
filmmaker for food and for giving visibility to their situation, all coming
from humble origins, with extremely modest goals, “We come from nothingness and to nothingness we will return.” Akerman encounters men, women, and adolescents who are
constantly being persecuted by the American immigration services when they try
to escape misery. If they manage to
cross the border alive, they end up being pariahs, exiles, and exploited. A common aspect of
every Akerman film is that she absolutely refuses to provide background
information, and instead her film aesthetic is a visual contextualization,
offering viewers an opportunity to see the world differently through her
European eyes, where in her avant-garde documentary film NEWS FROM HOME (1977),
for instance, in shot after shot of different city streets in New York City,
each meticulously balanced and composed, they start resembling similar
architecture in Brussels, her native country, where building size, age,
deteriorating color, placement in neighborhoods, and their relationship to pedestrian
foot traffic is surprisingly the same, always showing life within confined
spaces, and allowing viewers to figure out what it means. The human commonality is that we each carry
our own interior world around with us wherever we go, representative of the
mindset of JEANNE DIELMAN (1975) and her confined space, where the domesticated
interior is neither liberating or comfortable, but represents a kind of unease,
where anxiety is a byproduct of everyday life and accompanies the human form
wherever it goes, even crossing oceans and continents, as this interior shadow
self is inescapable, defining who we are and what we stand for. In examining the two sides, each reflective
of their own unique cultural attributes, which couldn’t be more different, yet
the landscape, the emptiness, the mountains, and the desert is nearly
identical. Geographically it’s
indistinguishable from one another, all part of the same earth, but nations
have constructed a border, and with it comes a visualized image of what that border
represents to them.
In this arid land of
dirt, between mountains and desert, what director Chantal Akerman finds is the
tragedy of this space, a tragedy that becomes readable by the distance between
us and them. For Mexico, it’s an obstacle
one must get across, to get to the other side, where life will presumably be
better, offering more opportunities, yet for America, it resembles the American
frontier of 100 years ago, where they still have the covered wagon mentality
about homestead life on the frontier, where outsiders become the “other,” in
other words, not one of us, where they are perceived as dangerous and inhuman,
sometimes depicted as lawless, savage, and life threatening, where Mexicans are
described with inflammatory words like “filthy,” “dirty,” “horde,” and
“invasion,” frightened by a perceived disorder that will corrupt order and an
impurity that will contaminate purity, which to the filmmaker, a European Jew,
must recall how Jews were similarly perceived in the 30’s by the Third Reich. With Americans enacting their own laws with
total impunity in a war against Mexican immigrants, devising more stringent
border patrols, cutting off the safer routes, leaving only the largely rural
sections of vast, uninhabitable deserts, survival instincts kick in where
residents must do whatever it takes to survive any confrontation, which
includes eradicating the “other,” where it’s not out of the ordinary for
ranchers to hunt down illegals with rifles and magnums. According to Akerman, “At times, the ranchers
have held more than four hundred people on their land, treating them like
prisoners of war.” Both are captives of
their own cultural upbringing, where they are subject to a certain set of
beliefs reflective of the neighboring community that has been handed down to
them through the years, which includes fears, anxieties, and long-existing
prejudices. While Akerman’s pacing is
slow, it is always highly sensitive, feeling eerie and mysterious, chosen as
the 4th best picture of 2002 by French magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, Cahiers du
Cinema: 1951-2011. This is a film
that continuously gets better and continues to provoke, lingering in the mind
even days afterwards, largely due to such a formidable, avant-garde style
that gets under your skin, where viewers may experience an emotional surge
as the film progresses, as the sum of all information from both sides
sinks in, reflecting a deeply entrenched humanity on each side of the
border. Particularly stunning is one
seemingly endless tracking shot of cars stacked up at the American border
that follows one car after another, while with a single turn, the shot
continues onto a barely-lit street of nearly empty Mexican
establishments, continuing on into the darkness. Both sides view the
wall from such differing perspectives, as the Americans are staunch
defenders of their own freedom, while the Mexicans see it as a path to
freedom. Akerman maintains her objective distance throughout,
interviewing Mexicans in Spanish, Americans in English, returning to her native
French language only when the film builds to its highly poetic conclusion,
where the filmmaker herself in a haunting dreamlike sequence describes
the fate of one Mexican woman who disappears after a seemingly successful
border crossing, who briefly leads an indistinct quiet life but then hasn’t
been heard from since, who may be alive, who may be dead, yet she is someone
who may no longer claim either “side” as her own, but who has become,
instead, a non-being, a persona non grata, an invisible ghost of those who have
been described as the disappeared, “los desaparecidos,” "De
l'autre côté" (Del otro lado) (fragmento) (2012) - Chantal Akerman YouTube
(4:49).
Chantal
Akerman, 1950–2015: Quarterly Review of Film and Video ... David Sterritt, January 14, 2016
Many of the same qualities distinguish Akerman's strongest
nonfiction films, including From the East (D'Est, 1993), an
enthralling journey through Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, and other lands
after the fall of the Soviet Union, and From the Other Side (De
L'Autre côté, 2002), an unfailingly humane portrait of Mexicans seeking
better lives across the United States border and Americans who seem dazed,
confused, or hostile about the situation.
From
the Other Side | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
What gives Chantal Akerman's video documentary about illegal Mexican aliens in the U.S. so much bite as well as poignancy is her personal investment in the material. It's felt in her haunted and highly evocative lingering over landscapes (an Akerman specialty), as well as in her subtitled interviews with Mexicans in Spanish and a few Americans in English. These are capped by her own highly moving monologue in French. A major work that creeps up on you gradually (2002). 99 min.
Bad
brains Amy Taubin from Film
Comment (pdf)
Chantal Akerman’s From the Other Side (De l’autre côté) is a series of portraits of desperately poor Mexicans who risk their lives to cross illegally into the U.S. in hopes of finding work. Filmed in digital video, a medium whose visual potential Akerman understands far better now than she did when she made her previous documentary South, From the Other Side alternates stunningly composed talking-heads with long shots of the dangerous desert terrain the Mexican must cross en route to what will be, at best, a land of exile. (She uses the border patrol’s aerial radarscopes to chilling effect.) The film’s raison d’être is to render the subjectivity of the “illegals,” but Akerman, in a few deft interviews, shows the hypocrisy and paranoia involved in the U.S. immigration policy and its failure to acknowledge the economic dependence of the U.S. on undocumented laborers.
CINEFILE.info Kyle Cubr
Of the late Chantal Akerman’s greatest strengths as a filmmaker are her eye for outdoor shot composition and the ability to create a compelling story from the lives of ordinary people, and in so providing a platform for those whose voices would otherwise not be heard. In FROM THE OTHER SIDE, Akerman explores the U.S.-Mexico border, including those that live nearby as well as those who work there. In these discordant times where xenophobia and nationalism have reemerged in the collective American consciousness, Akerman’s film, perhaps now more than ever, elegantly humanizes all sides involved in the U.S. border debate. This humanization seeks to highlight the struggles faced in the name of wanting to create a better life for oneself on a personal, communal, and national level. OTHER SIDE is an exercise in minimalism, especially with its recurrent landscape shots along the boundary (both static and sweeping) that invoke the very nature of what barriers are and how they can be torn down to unite. Part journalism, part video essay, and part investigation, this revisit to a time during the most previous Republican president’s administration’s intercontinental, foreign policy and its effects on those directly involved displays both the resentment and benevolence of the human spirit.
Over
There: Chantal Akerman presents From the Other Side at FIAF ... Nicolas Rapold from Film Comment, October 6, 2015
“They have stories to tell… unfortunately,” said Chantal Akerman after a screening of her 2002 documentary From the Other Side (De l’autre côté) last Thursday at the French Institute Alliance Française in New York. “Unfortunately,” because the stories Akerman hears in the film are about death in the desert—the final resting place of Mexicans desperate for work who perished crossing into the United States.
Perched cross-legged on her chair onstage at FIAF (next to CUNY professor Jerry W. Carlson), Akerman sketched out the hybrid techniques and historical thinking that went into the movie. From the Other Side forms part of her cycle of nonfiction films about the experience of displacement and borders, sharing titles denoting only direction—Sud, D’Est, Là-bas.
In From the Other Side, Akerman listens to Mexicans talking about relatives who disappeared, and Arizonans talking about the influx of illegal immigrants. The film is built out of interviews (in a doorway, a yard, an office, a restaurant), and long takes of dusty, flat border towns, frequently covered through car-borne tracking shots that recall the 10th Avenue trek in News from Home (77). U.S. helicopter night-vision footage is used briefly to show a line of people attempting to cross illegally, caught only as mute ghostly silhouettes.
“Sometimes the absence is stronger than the presence. It means more,” Akerman said to the audience, later invoking the representation of Jews in Resnais’s Night and Fog. The post-screening session, in fact, began with the filmmaker mentioning that anti-immigration cant pricked up her ears with its echoes of rhetoric used historically against Jews. “Everyone who is ‘dirty’ does interest me,” she said, later talking about the resonance of the border’s barbed-wired walls.
The filmmaker demonstrates her skill as a compassionate interviewer, planting us across from both sad and stoic relatives, Americans voicing outsized September 11th paranoia, even an overwhelmed Mexican consular official. “I have always had good contact with people. They always want to talk to me,” Akerman said. “I just let them exist, and probably they feel it.” In one extraordinary sequence, an illegal immigrant reads out a proud, pained statement at a cafeteria table of his companions—a moment that came about at the man’s request. “You have to be really like a sponge when you make a documentary.”
By contrast, the film’s concluding monologue, delivered in voiceover over nighttime highway footage, was the director’s own creation. Akerman voices recollections about a middle-aged Mexican maid who made it to San Diego, secured work, but one day disappeared.
“It’s totally fictional but it could have been true,” she said. “There is not such a wall between documentary and fiction. It can be porous.”
Taken together, Akerman’s comments reveal a mind working at multiple levels of reference and abstraction, rather than a fiction filmmaker sojourning in issue-oriented documentary. The border wall, for example, is in her estimation “more powerful and less anecdotical than some people walking.” A lengthy drive-by tracking shot of the wall’s expanse “becomes concrete, and abstract, and again concrete.”
“Long shots make you feel the journey,” Akerman said. “With those shots, you cannot forget them—because I insist. . . You have them in your body.”
FROM
THE OTHER SIDE (Chantal Äkerman, 2002) | Dennis Grunes
Likely an unintended companion-piece to María Navaro’s fictional El Jardín del Edén (The Garden of Eden, 1994), Belgian-born filmmaker Chantal Äkerman’s documentary De l’autre côté (From the Other Side), from Belgium and France, is about the fate of Mexicans who steal their way across la frontera, the shared border heavily guarded on the U.S. side. Navaro’s wonderful film, from Mexico, coaxed my sympathy for these undocumented aliens. Äkerman’s more disturbing film provides a tragic view of the situation. Whereas Navaro relied on atmosphere and a fluid narrative (for all the Altmanian zigzagging amongst disparate characters), Äkerman approaches us with an artillery of distancing devices aimed at provoking instead a critical response. The greater artist of the two, Äkerman has, accordingly, made a far less amiable film, and a far more challenging and important one.
In Agua Prieta, the film opens with interviews of Mexican souls who recollect and still mourn, as they will for the rest of their lives, the loss of loved ones who managed to get across la frontera, only to perish in the States. A woman and her spouse, in separate interviews, open their hearts about a son of theirs. Their rambling, barely coherent speech provides an index of the enormous depth of their pain and of their interviewer and our surrogate, Äkerman herself. A boy recalls his older brother—in a sense, defying chronology of birth, his tragic twin, because a coin toss decided which one of the two of them would attempt to cross the Mexican-U.S. border. The burden of his life is now his brother’s death. He recounts the fate of a group of undocumented aliens, all freezing and starving in the Arizona desert into which the design of impenetrable fences and lethal patrols had forced them, each of whom, including the boy’s brother, died one by one—a circumstance that echoes state-managed famines in the Third World, and, of course, the massive number of state-engineered agrarian deaths in Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Indeed, later in the film, a sheriff whom Äkerman interviews concedes that the deadly result of U.S. immigration policies and actions, if perhaps not something that U.S. authorities are aiming at, is nevertheless something they cannot help but “anticipate.” By default, then, these are voluminous cases of managed state murder—if you will, a scattered and cumulative holocaust.
Äkerman’s Mexican border towns, in color, are parched, hazily sunlit and largely inert—the visual opposite of the border town in Orson Welles’s great film noir, Touch of Evil (1958). Äkerman portrays the towns in long shots with a fixed, level camera, creating placid scenes of dusty road and still sky. By contrast, Welles relied on angled shots, traveling shots, and closeups to get his ominous black-and-white night world right into our face. Äkerman’s different vision suggests a distillation of grief, anguish and hopelessness among Mexican mourners. The little activity that we see becomes correlative to the socioeconomic doldrums, the listless poverty, that provoke illegal immigration across the border. Ironically, the hush on the Mexican side is prelude to the terrible risk on the other side and the dogging possibility of death. The tales come back of death. Theirs is a plight of desperate people who know the risk.
The vistas in Mexico are extraordinarily calm and lovely (the superb cinematographers are Raymond Fromont, Robert Fenz and Äkerman)—this, a sterling example of Äkerman’s withering irony. Repeated shots of the seemingly endless tall, striated metal fence prohibiting Mexican flight at that point, shot at different times of day, similarly find deceptive beauty there. It’s a gorgeous fence—a prettier thing, say, than the plain and practical American flag that becomes a recurrent part of Äkerman’s rigorous mise-en-scène. Behind this appearance, though, lurks an attitude of hostility, hatred, racism, and a casual American disregard for human life.
Äkerman’s immediately previous documentary—her beauteous fictional La captive (2000), from Proust, arrived in between—was Sud (South, 1999), which found Äkerman in the American south (Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas) attempting to fathom white American racial hatred and to record American self-denials on the score. A summary shot is already celebrated: Äkerman’s camera travels the 2½-mile length of road in Jasper, Texas, over which James Byrd, Jr., a black man, was dragged one night in 1998 by three whites who had cut his throat and tied his ankles to the back of a pickup truck. From the Other Side is an extension of that investigation of hers. The hostility on the American side is palpable as well as visible. An ungrammatical and insufficiently capitalized sign presents this exhortation: “Stop the Crime Wave. Our Property and Environment is Being Trashed by Invaders.” (Instead of Invaders from Mars, Invaders from Mexico.) The source of the sign is Arizona ranchers who, consumed by hatred, respond with paranoia as though they were under seige—as though they were victims. With rifles and magnums, these ranchers, vigilantes, have taken it upon themselves to hunt down Mexican immigrants and transport them to the Mexican side of the border. “At times,” Äkerman has explained, “the ranchers have held more than four hundred people on their land, treating them like prisoners of war.” She has also said that what most disturbed her about the ranchers is their identification of the immigrants with “filth” and “hordes”—words, Äkerman discovered in her research, that the ranchers and their apologists use over and over. Ironically, as Äkerman’s film points out, once they have settled, the immigrants, by the inexpensive labor they contribute, immeasurably bolster the American economy, especially given the pressures and demands of globalization. But Äkerman also appreciates the basis for the ranchers’ irrational perspective and the implications of their hateful, self-pitying dehumanization of the immigrants, and it chills her to the bone.
Indeed, in one bravura passage we hear her chill. Throughout the film, Äkerman’s offscreen voice can be heard asking questions of those whom she interviews. Thus it becomes a powerful statement when, dumbfounded into silence, she listens to an American couple spouting the most sincere, awful and frightening nonsense. They speak of the gravest danger that the Mexican immigrants pose: the infliction upon the U.S. of a smallpox epidemic. With a stupendous sense of martyrdom, the couple explain how insufficient quantities of American vaccine will require their own sacrifice so that their grandchildren may survive. Taking our cue from Äkerman’s silence, we find the passage hilarious. (Äkerman remains unseen throughout the film.) We laugh in horror. Like everything else in the film, however, in context the scene is tragic—for both the Mexicans, who are dehumanized and therefore made ripe for abuse, and the white Americans, who, by failing to embrace the humanity of others, lose a grip on their own humanity.
Äkerman has described the fear of Americans vis-à-vis the Mexican immigrants as “[f]ear of the other, fear of his or her poverty . . . and [of] the possibility of contagion.” It is to this that the viral epidemic that the white couple anticipate refers. The emphasis that Arizona ranchers give to the identification of Mexicans with “filth” suggests the fear of impurity that Äkerman, a European Jew, cannot help but identify with Nazism. In Arizona newspapers, she found “talk of mountains of filth, as if the filth was going to replace nature . . . [m]ountains of old clothes, soiled diapers, plastic bottles and bags, dirty papers, etc. There was also talk of poisoned dogs, theft, rape, and violation of private property.” Äkerman has noted that, while the ranchers feel they are in danger of losing their “lifestyle,” the immigrants are actually losing their lives.
From the Other Side is, as I have said, a difficult film. At one point, when she is interviewing a sheriff, Äkerman says something to which the sheriff responds, “I couldn’t have said it better”—and we can’t make out just what Äkerman did say! This isn’t technical shoddiness; this is the way Äkerman presents her film. If we could hear what she said, we still wouldn’t have “the answer” to the problems she discloses. By the same token, at other times we do hear what people say and it’s as if we hadn’t, given how hard it is to follow. This isn’t a smooth film; it’s drawn tight, but it’s also discontinuous and seemingly haphazard in the order of its presentation. There is no mistaking Äkerman’s sympathies, her point of view, but she gives us little else to go on. Her film is so fascinating because there is no easy sentimentality to encourage an automatic response. Rather, we end up investigating silences and ambiguous landscapes, stretching our capacities to glean truth from visionary shards and pieces; and, in the process, we become responsible, active audiences. Äkerman’s film hasn’t a chance to wash over one. Because it never manipulates us, its constant accompaniment is our beating human heart.
From the Other Side is from the other side of many borders, including the one that divides honest, meritorious cinema from manipulative cinema, that is to say, commercial entertainment. Its humanity stands as a rebuke to the kind of inhuman cinema that would play our hearts like a violin, soliciting tears for the hunted, dying Mexicans and thus dehumanizing them in yet another way. As ever, Äkerman (along with Iran’s Abbas Kiarostami) is cinema’s reigning humanist—an exemplar of the Jewish humanism that Adolf Hitler once tried so hard to eradicate. Her film won the 2003 Award of Merit in Film from the Latin American Studies Association.
Memory
Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive ... Memory
Once Removed: Indirect Memory and Transitive Autobiography in Chantal Akerman's
D'est, by Alisa Lebow, originally published in Camera Obscura, 2003 (pdf)
Cinematheque
Ontario lecture series: Philip Rosen on De l'autre cote - Andréa Picard; Philip Rosen - Cinematheque
Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group – 2006 (pdf)
The
Great Divide | Movie Review | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 15, 2003, also seen
here: The Great
Divide [FROM THE OTHER SIDE] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chantal Akerman: The
Integrity of Exile and the Everyday - Lola Journal Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2011
Place
and Displacement: Akerman and Documentary | Jonathan ... Jonathan Rosenbaum, May 29, 2016, also seen
here: Akerman
and Documentary - Jonathan Rosenbaum
Walking,
Talking, Singing, Exploding . . . and Silence: Chantal ... Barbara McBane from Film Quarterly, September 16, 2016
From the
Other Side | Taipei Mansions Ryan
Swen, also seen at Letterboxd here: From the Other Side
(2002) directed by Chantal Akerman • Reviews ...
Chantal
Akerman says 'a film is a film is a film,' but hers really are ... Miranda Popkey from Politico, May 4, 2012
Critique
: « De l'autre côté », de Chantal Akerman (2002) | Bad Timing
Atmosphères 53 - Film - De
l'autre côté Willy Durand
There
Is No More Distance: The Films of Chantal Akerman - WFHB
DIVISION/Review Issue 9
Winter 2014 by David Lichtenstein - issuu
Giuliana Bruno, Jan 19, 2014
Between
Literature and the Moving Image: The Cinematography of ... Between
Literature and the Moving Image: The Cinematography of Chantal Akerman by
Marion Schmid, 2013
Tales
of Ordinary Sadness: Melancholy in The Cinema of Chantal ... Joseph Earp from Bright Wall Dark Room, April 10, 2017
filmjourney.org : Chantal
Akerman Doug Cummings, also
reviewing Sud, D’Est, and News from Home
Homeland
Insecurity | Village Voice Jessica
Winter, February 18, 2003
Reels
for Radicals Presents: From the Other Side by Chantal ... Deepdish from Deepdish TV
Strictly
Film School - Belgian Cinema Notes
Acquarello
DVDBlu
Review: From the Other Side/South
Christopher S. Long
From the Other
Side (2002): Akerman on the US-Mexico Border ... Emanuel Levy
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
From the
Other Side - Educational Media Reviews Online (EMRO)
From The Other Side -
Icarus Films
Chantal Akerman Four
Films - Icarus Films Home Video
Chantal
Akerman's 'From the Other Side': Invisible Migrants ... Andrea Avidad from Migration Mapping
Presence
(appearance and disappearance) of two Belgian filmmakers Imma Merino from Comparative Cinema, 2016
Afterall
• Online • The Aesthetics of Migration
Marcelline Block, May 30, 2012
Review:
'From the Other Side' - Variety
David Rooney
De l'Autre Côté,
directed by Chantal Akerman | Film review - Time Out
"Meissner
Ends Embattled Tenure as Head of INS; Immigration Wave Tested Her Reshaping of
Agency" Dan Eggen from The Washington Post, November 20, 2000
Chicago
Filmmakers celebrates Akerman's amazing eye for the ... Nina Metz from The Chicago Tribune, July 7, 2016
FILM
REVIEW; Inching Toward America, So Near but So Far - The ... Dave Kehr fom The New York Times, also seen here:
New
York Times
TOMORROW WE MOVE B 88
Belgium France
It’s certainly possible
Akerman had a blast making this film, which she describes as a “Marx Brothers
film made by Éric Rohmer,” yet it’s a fairly conventional (for her), upbeat
French film comedy, with a love for the musical number and a piano that just
keeps cranking out the hits, teaming up the incomparable Aurore Clément and
Sylvie Testud, a mother and daughter act that, when onscreen together, work
wonders. The film unfolds as a playful domestic
farce about a young woman’s desire to move to a larger apartment and make a
mark in the literary establishment. After
the death of her husband, the charmingly affectionate, over-dramatic Clement
moves in with her quirky, more introspective, yet always engaging,
chain-smoking daughter (probably based on Akerman herself), immediately putting
a cramp in one another’s style, in particular the daughter, as the move
amplifies her anxieties through the mother’s encroachment both on her personal
and physical space, common themes throughout Akerman’s career. Clement has rhapsodic episodes playing the
piano while Testud is busy eavesdropping on the public’s prurient interests
listening for sizzling tidbits she can use in her porn novel. When they decide to sell their apartment, a
flurry of wacky people enter and exit their lives so quickly and so often that
it resembles a musical chairs farce, particularly when it’s mixed with the mad
gypsy violin music of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies. The dizzying pace is charming, for awhile,
but I much preferred the quieter moments of reflection which are interspersed
throughout the screwball moments.
Clement and Testud are a treat, particularly their genuine affection,
and certainly no one left the theater unhappy, but despite its stab at
synchronizing some madcap comedy, this feels like a minor effort, though it’s
shift in tone to screwball comedy feels significant.
Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
In Tomorrow We Move, Charlotte
(Sylvie Testud) lets her widowed mother Catherine (Aurore Clément) move into
her two-level abode and, aside from her mother's luxurious grand piano (lowered
via crane in the film's dreamlike first shot), every other last possession adds
to an already cluttered living space. Meanwhile, in between impulsively moving
random pieces of furniture out of her place and onto the sidewalk below, she
continues to mope in front of her laptop computer, plodding through a piece she
has been commissioned to write. Chantal Akerman's carefree but almost
suffocatingly schematic imitation of comedy mixes the whiplash pacing of
screwball, a near-surrealist approach to narrative, and, most incongruously,
the centralization of the non sequitur (maybe not quite to the précis
represented in Airplane when a scene of airborne panic is interrupted by
an extreme close-up of pert, jiggly naked breasts, but close). Told to whip up
a batch of erotic prose, despite the fact that her life experience dabbling in
eroticism has apparently been amassed through eavesdropping,
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
The only
thing that kept Chantal Akerman's giddy, overwhelming farce off my list of
2004's best movies was the gamble that it would play Philadelphia in 2005. No
such luck, although for once we're hardly alone. Apart from festival
screenings, the latest movie from the director of Jeanne Dielman and Je
tu il elle — and, incidentally, her most accessible in nearly a decade —
went without a theatrical opening anywhere in the U.S., a sad commentary on the
state of art-house distribution. Thankfully, KimStim stepped in where theater
owners feared to tread, releasing the film in an anamorphic transfer (albeit
with nonremovable subtitles and no extras) that preserves Akerman's precise
compositions. A quasi-remake of Akerman's Man with the Suitcase, a near-wordless
burlesque in which Akerman plays a writer bedeviled by the unannounced comings
and goings of an unwanted houseguest, Tomorrow stars Sylvie Testud as a
frazzled writer forced to share a cramped duplex with her oversexed mother,
whose constant activities inevitably worm their way into Testud's prose.
Opening with a piano dangling precariously in midair, Akerman's manic farce
runs, at nearly two hours, longer than a high-pitched comedy should, but the
film seems to work your nerves on purpose, testing the audience's endurance as
surely as, if more enjoyably than, the slow-moving Jeanne Dielman and D'Est.
(Fittingly, an untranslated joke at the end of the movie turns comedy into a
dirty word, finishing a litany of mots cochons with the word
"comique.") Akerman's comedies, which rarely figure in assessments of
her oeuvre, are generally funnier in theory than practice, but due in no small
part to Testud's razor-sharp performance (as well as a supporting cast that
includes Aurore Clément, Lucas Belvaux, Natacha Régnier and Elsa Zylberstein), Tomorrow
is often uproarious, although the humor is fraught with something more
sinister. Desperate to find her own place, Testud consults with a real estate
agent who comments that the smell of disinfectant reminds him of the gas
chambers, and idly recalls, "I knew a Weinstein — once." As Testud's
writing takes a sudden turn towards the pornographic, Tomorrow We Move
builds to a frantic climax relieved by a delightful twist it would be a shame
to spoil here. A gas from start to finish but not without its barbs, Tomorrow
is a minor masterpiece from a director scandalously underrepresented on DVD.
More, please.
Griselda Pollock on Jewish quarterly Griselda Pollock accompanies
Chantal Akerman’s image journey through memory, Autumn 2008
Tomorrow We
Move Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
NO
HOME MOVIE B 86
Belgium France
(115 mi) 2015
It’s been years now
that I have started to film all over the place, as soon as I sensed a
shot. Without purpose really, but with
the feeling that one day these images would make a film or an
installation. I was letting myself go,
by desire and by instinct. Without a
script, without a conscious project.
From these images were born three installations which were shown all
over the place. This spring, with Claire
Atherton and Clémence Carré, I put together some twenty hours of images and
sounds still without knowing where I was going.
And we started to sculpt the material.
These twenty hours became eight, then six, and then after a certain
amount of time, two. And there, we saw,
we saw a film and I told myself: of course it is this film that I wanted to
make. Without admitting it to myself. And, as one says, the red thread of this film
is a character, a woman born in Poland, who arrives in Belgium in 1938 to flee
the pogroms and the horror. This woman
is my mother. Within and solely within
her apartment in Brussels.
—Chantal Akerman, Fall 2014
A different kind of
film, shot over the course of several years, where Akerman was never clear what
might develop. There is no single
narrative, as there are many narratives, where everything is open to the
subjective perception and interpretation of the viewer. With an inside as well as outside story that
are equally heartbreaking, it’s hard not to think of Akerman’s own death as she
prepares a story about the final days in her own mother’s life, using abstract
and experimental film styles, though what’s likely to stand out for most is the
extreme personal nature of the film, offering unique insight into the filmmaker
herself. Mostly taking place inside the
claustrophobic confines of her mother’s apartment in Brussels, it’s impossible
not to compare the mood and pace of the film with Akerman’s earlier
masterpiece, JEANNE DIELMAN (1975), which was modeled after a young girl
infatuated with the movements of her mother around the house, at times moving
like an animal pacing back and forth, as if stuck inside a cage, making precise
movements from room to room, where the swiftness and speed of foot can be
traced to a single-minded purpose for each and every action. Through the passing of time, there is nearly
no movement now, as her mother sits at a table or in a chair, and can only be
seen walking very short distances, where the sense of individual purpose and
conviction are gone, as now there is a health attendant (Clara) at her side to
help her eat and clean up after herself, where she is seen in a fragile and
often forgetful state. Akerman pesters
her with questions from behind the camera, an energetic force to be reckoned
with, as now she’s the one that moves around a lot, a globetrotter traveling
from city to city, leading a busy life, while her mother in a self-imposed
exile rarely leaves the home at all other than to take short walks. Anyone who’s sat at the bedside of an ailing
parent on the verge of death understands this process, as it can take days or
weeks, but the end is near, where there’s a sense of anguish and despair about
the inevitability of a certain finality that haunts us to the core, a feeling
that’s hard to shake, even long afterwards.
While you may try to offer comfort and pay attention to them, it’s also
clear that they sense your lurking presence, where in most instances you
haven’t been there, sitting at their side, as you’ve been off somewhere living
your own life, so this closeness and constant attention may not be familiar
territory, making them uncomfortable suddenly being the center of attention, as
it may bring attention to just how feeble and helpless they are.
The worst part of being
old and sick is losing one’s sense of independence, as in one’s mind, they can
still be as capable as ever, it’s just the body that wears down, something no
one wishes to dwell upon, but it’s a reality.
While the focus of the film is Akerman’s mother Natalia, the overly
detached style is all Akerman, using a minimalist approach with no music,
background information, or accompanying narration, with oblique shots of
doorways, halls, and empty rooms, along with long shots that meticulously
document the mundane aspects of everyday life, chronicling the final months
inside her home, including the barren emptiness of her existence, while also
concerned with providing a sense of time as it is lived by her mother,
separated in distance from the rest of her family. Reflecting a sense of dislocation and a
yearning for closer contact, Akerman includes Skype conversations, where her
daughter in Oklahoma or New York can communicate with her mother in Brussels,
and though they don’t amount to much in terms of a developing storyline, it
does reveal the degree of affection and personal endearment Akerman has for her
mother, always sent with plenty of love and kisses. Perhaps the most extended sequence is a
conversation in her mother’s kitchen with Akerman resurrecting her mother’s
history as a Holocaust survivor, a Polish Jew losing her own parents in
Auschwitz, where the pogroms and targeting of Jews led to her and her husband
eventually taking refuge in Belgium in the late 30’s. It’s a subject Natalie has difficulty with,
preferring not to talk about it, never mentioning her experience in the death
camps, but her daughter has a charming way of probing the subject, reminding
her that her father was a communist who refused to wear the Jewish star, who
understood early on exactly what was happening, where it all feels so natural
when discussed through a mother and daughter relationship. To this end, the film opens with an extended
shot of a tree in the desert somehow surviving harsh winds in a desolate
climate, a metaphor for those surviving Jewish families who have somehow
endured. Tracking shots of an endless
Israeli desert also provide much of the film content, including one of
telephone wires stretching out into the distant horizon, a mammoth project in
labor that was meant to allow people to better communicate with each other,
while now they are nearly obsolete, replaced by satellite communications and
cell phones.
“All you have is time,” Akerman once told an interviewer. “In my films you are aware of every second passing by. Through your body. You are facing yourself…You’re face to face with the Other. It’s from this crucial face-to-face that your sense of responsibility begins … That’s my idea of ethics. It’s why I want equality, always, between the image and the spectator. Or the passage from one unconscious toward the other.”
Not everyone will like
this film, which will have a significantly personalized effect, depending on
the viewer, as it may be too spare and ambiguous for some, while overly chatty
for others, yet movingly transcendent for a few, expressing a blend of
melancholy and humor, the film is an intimate portrayal of everyday life in the
Akerman family, filled with an enormous affection between mother and daughters.
As Natalie’s health declines, she is
surrounded by more people, as Chantal’s sister Sylviane arrives to help, with
both making their best efforts to keep her awake, knowing that any one of her
brief slumbers may be her last.
Curiously, we see signs of her mother’s presence even when she’s not
there, such as an empty backyard lawn chair that is shown repeatedly,
disheveled beds that show signs someone is living there, or the sounds of a
vacuum cleaner can be heard in empty rooms with no one present. A pervasive sense of death is everywhere,
looming in the emptiness of the quiet spaces, where at times we’re unable to
tell if there’s even a person in the room, as all we hear is the dull drone of
a television. Natalie tends to doze off
frequently, asleep in her recliner chair, where it comes as no surprise when
she’s finally gone. But the pace of the
film changes, becoming quicker, darker, confused even, caught in enclosed
spaces, trapped with no way out. There’s
an exquisite shot in bleached out color, completely overexposed, saturated by
nothing but light, as it moves from the darkened room past the curtains to a
door opening to the outside and flurrying away, like a spirit released. After that shot, there’s little peace to be
found, only an overriding sadness permeating throughout an empty room, with a
lengthy, unbroken shot of the world left behind, with everything all in place,
where behind the camera one can hear Akerman sobbing, a place where art and the
personal converge into the same language, allowing it to linger, as if forever,
but we knew it would soon be extinguished forever. Natalie died in April 2014, where this film
was released nearly a year and a half later, yet resonating even more fully is
the knowledge that in October 2015 Chantal Akerman took her own life. Apparently unable to come to grips with the
idea that she no longer had a home to return to, no refuge from the storm, this
last piece of film is the artist’s final message, where one can read all sorts
of things into it, inviting reflections on themes of loss, absence,
and the eternal exile of the scattered Jewish homeland, but mostly there’s
an overwhelming sadness at the thought that our existence on earth is held
together by such fragile threads, a tenuous grasp where at any time one can
simply let go. It’s impossible to
understand the weight of that kind of grief, especially when most of the film
is spent expressing such an enduring love, as it’s clear Natalie had a special
place reserved for both of her daughters.
In her absence, Akerman could no longer live in the bleak emptiness of a
world without her, allowing the darkness to force out all light, becoming
exiled from the only living existence she knew, yet her films will live in
perpetuity, like an eternal flame, providing faith for the abandoned and a
voice for the voiceless.
From March 19, 2016, Senses of Cinema: Bérénice Reynaud :
Completed a year and a half after the latter’s passing, the film is a companion piece to Ma Mère Rit (My Mother is Laughing) (still untranslated in English) that was published in 2013. The book is a chronicle of Natalia’s last months, after a series of health mishaps (broken shoulder, pulmonary embolism) that kept her confined to her apartment in Brussels under the care of a Latin American woman, Clara, after a major scare while she was visiting her younger daughter, Sylviane, in Mexico. Chantal, who teaches in New York and rents a flat in Harlem, comes and goes, spends a bit of time in Brussels where she tries to write. The film is a sort of anamorphosis of the book: we find these moments in No Home Movie, but spatialized, choreographed (as an echo, as so many have noted, of Jeanne Dielman), reaching out to us, thanks to the ever-structuring absence of reverse angle shot.
The bridge between “no home” (the shots taken là-bas, the absence), and “home movie” (conversations with Natalia at the kitchen table or in the living room, views of or from the Brussels apartment), are the Skype sequences, and they are also the most emotional, as well as the ones that reflect the most Akerman’s personality. As always, Natalia complains that her daughter “tells her nothing.” “I have nothing to say, I teach, I see my students, I eat, I walk the dog…” Then comes the moment to hang up: “I have work to do.” Suddenly the banal becomes precious. “A big kiss, Maman, now I am hanging up.” A few more words are exchanged. “Now I really have to hang up. I kiss you a lot.” More small talk. “Maman, I want to give you a big kiss.” Etc… She can’t hang up. Time is missing from time. Time is folding upon itself, and, subjected to the difficult task of compensating for the spatial distance, stutters, stumbles, bites its own tail, gasps for air, bursts out laughing, mocking its own nothingness. But tenderly. Because time is all they had, this moment flattened onto a small screen, knowing that the time would come when the screen would only reflect an empty space. And then two empty spaces. They both knew it. Maybe. Chantal knew it.
One day I even wanted to kill myself but smiling, and, above all,
without forgetting to smile as if this was an inconsequential gesture. And it was, since I survived. I survived everything till now, and I have
often wanted to commit suicide. But I
would tell myself I cannot do this to my mother. After, when she is no longer
here.5
Of all the tributes and
obituaries written on Akerman’s death, this one felt more profoundly meaningful
than any of the others, by Willow
Maclay, October 6, 2015, Curtsies
and Hand Grenades: Chantal Akerman
As a 16 year old not-out-yet trans
girl I had little reason to leave the confines of my bedroom. I wrote in
journals about the pain I was experiencing in day to day life just by existing
as a false version of myself, the gender dysphoria that seemed the permanently
stagnate my every move, and the frustration of knowing that I had no real home
to relax in either by body or through family. This intensely introspective
period of my life saw my writing flourish at the expense of my mental health,
but I figured out the type of person that I was supposed to be, and how I could
go about accomplishing these goals of womanhood. I also saw my growth as a
cinephile become a fixture of my everyday life. I wasn't going to school, but
every day I found something new in cinema to give me reason to wake up in the
morning. During all of that time though I could never find something that so
resolutely affected me in the way that Chantal Akerman's movies did. The first
movie of hers that I ever saw was Je, Tu,
Il, Elle and I was struck by the first section where Chantal moves about
her apartment writing about herself, and her ideas. This felt like what I was
going through at the time. The interior space, the singular experience, the personal
writing, the repetition. Chantal Akerman was filming something that felt like
my life. I remember jotting down "I wish I could make movies like
this" in my diary afterward. This experience kickstarted a love affair I
had with her work that I've never had with any other filmmaker.
In the late 2000s there really wasn't filmmaking or television about
transgender characters beyond ridiculing those people or having them play
corpses. Finding relatable cinema has always been a game of looking for subtext
or tonality that replicates personal feelings. My queerness is insular and
deeply ingrained in my body. I like to shed my skin when I engage with art and
feel reborn into someone that feels prouder of who I am. The lyrics of Donna
Dresch and Kathleen Hanna were scribbled all over my walls in places my parents
dare not look. My little secret of who I really was, and books by Alison
Bechdel brought to me tears, because she was wrangling with anxiety over
herself that was a constant feeling for me as well. Chantal Akerman did the
same things for me, but in cinema. Her interior worlds felt like they lacked
freedom. They were jails. Being closeted was nothing short of demoralizing so
to see something so deeply personal reflected in her hallways, small rooms and
spaces inhabited by women not made for this world felt like my space. Akerman's
cinema was more of a home for me than anything I ever lived through up until
last year, and her characters were versions of myself I could see existing.
It has always been baffling to me that Akerman's cinema has been described as
detached, because I have the opposite experience with her work. I think back to
that quote in Jeanne Dielman about
her son not understanding, because he wasn't a woman, and I think this
experience could hold true for why her cinema has never been accepted into a
generalized canon as much as it should, because film criticism is a field
inhabited mostly by men. Akerman has always laid herself out there for the
world to see. She is a deeply personal filmmaker whose cinema has always
represented her life in some way. The holocaust is a running theme in her work,
as much as her relationship with her mother, queerness, art, and movement. She
could never be pinned down to one specific type of movie so she's often worked
in both narrative and documentary, experimental cinema, musicals, romance- and
so much of it vital to her experiences.
Even recently I have found my relationship with Akerman's work expanding into
new areas. I haven't seen my mother in 18 months, and our relationship is
fractured to say the least, but she sends me letters. She talks about the
experience of losing me, and wanting to see me again. She is sad that she
hasn't seen me in as long as she has, but she knows I'm working towards living
my life in a way that is representative of who I am. She always ends each
letter hoping to hear back from me as soon as possible. She worries. I put on News From Home the other day in
preparation for a piece on her now final film No Home Movie, and I was moved by the similarities between the way
my mother and Chantal's mother reacted to each of us moving away. They're so
very similar and it became apparent to me for the first time that maybe this is
what a mother/daughter relationship feels like. It's complicated and messy, but
there's a lot of love to be shared between us. I cried at that revelation.
Akerman's movies have always felt symbiotic- like they come out of some place
within her that I feel personally connected to even though I never had the
chance of meeting her. The type of effect she had on my life is nothing short
of profound, and it has to ring true for other women.
I woke up this morning to the news that she had passed, and from reports it was
a suicide. I sobbed into the shoulder of the man who gave me a physical home
over the woman whose cinema sheltered me in a cinematic one. I am gutted. I
feel like part of my soul was removed when I heard this news. She felt like
family. I miss her so much.
The Chicago Reader: Andrea Gronvall
Chantal Akerman's final film shares some formal concerns with her earlier works; what sets it apart is a stream of love and yearning, regret and loss, from which painful memories resurface. Akerman (who died in 2015) said that she prepared for her 1975 masterpiece Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by closely observing her homemaker mother, Natalia, for decades, and indeed this 2015 documentary about her mother's last years reveals an extraordinarily warm, intimate bond between parent and globe-trotting daughter. Long takes of the Israeli desert, paralleled with long takes of empty rooms in Natalia's apartment, suggest her sense of dislocation as a Holocaust survivor, a condition she struggles to verbalize in her kitchen with a daughter who probes for more. The combination of memoir and abstraction is both cerebral and heartrending. In French with subtitles.
Cine-File
Chicago: Kathleen Sachs March 18,
2016
Chantal Akerman's NO HOME MOVIE—her last film before her untimely death this past October—is a synthesis of the Belgian artist's most personal work, more specifically the seminal JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAY DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES (1975) and the less ambitious but decidedly more intimate NEWS FROM HOME (1977). It's a quasi-documentary about Akerman's mother in the months leading up to her death—they talk, they laugh, they suppress. It's formally reminiscent of JEANNE DIELMAN, which Akerman said was "a love film for [her] mother,” as it “gives recognition to that kind of woman.” The likeness is perhaps most obvious in the scenes that take place in the green-tiled kitchen, bringing to mind Delphine Seyrig as she cooked, cleaned, and silently contemplated. At one point Akerman's mother says to her other daughter, “She's never really talked to me,” referring to the filmmaker and recalling her gently pleading letters in NEWS FROM HOME. Near the end, Akerman explains to a housekeeper how her mother fled Poland during the war only to be captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp. Examining topics from the mundane to the meaningful, Akerman uses her avant-garde sensibility to meditate on both a relationship and a lifetime in a little under two hours. Much of her work imitates life in all its glorious banality, but NO HOME MOVIE considers life at its most honest and sublime.
Film Comment: Eric Hynes October 09, 2015
There’s no shortage of philosophical musings in Laurie Anderson’s Heart of a Dog, a valentine to and rumination about the artist’s dear pet Lolabelle. (The film premiered at Venice, is currently screening at NYFF, and will have a theatrical release on October 21.) But where Mekas’s voiceover is purposefully rough and spontaneous-sounding, Anderson’s is deliberately performed, affectedly enunciated, and exactingly produced. Her imagery follows suit. There’s an impressionistic, elliptical, even coy quality to their content and arrangement, but Anderson’s design is far from random. Between a progression of observations about Lolabelle’s life, illness, and absence, and potent diaristic asides about loss, Anderson’s isn’t building toward ratifying her own voice—though she’s ever present on the soundtrack, she’s rarely on screen—but toward understanding and coping with the absence of others. Yes, she’s employing elements of her life to express something about her life, but she’s also using it as a metaphor for things universal and philosophical. While Mekas’s film insists on presence, Anderson’s is preoccupied with absence.
Not dissimilarly, Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie is haunted by loss, even as the camera fixates on all that can be seen. The filmmaker’s eye is often as fixed as a CCTV camera—on a tripod in her frail mother’s hallway, or on the kitchen table, or steady on her shoulder as it records her laptop screen during a Skype chat. But rather than the perspective of a coldly invasive observer, the camera comes across as a tool of futility, trying to glimpse a ghost before it vanishes forever, before it rejoins all that’s inherently ineffable. When her mother asks why she’s filming their Skype chat, Akerman answers: “Because I want to show how small the world is.” But instead of Mekas’s positivist claims for his art, Akerman’s statement seems to be included ruefully, an idealistic claim otherwise contradicted by every subtly plaintive shot in the film, as well as by the continuation of that very scene, in which a poor Internet connection and her mother’s hearing disability frustrate their communication.
Akerman shares remarkably candid moments with the audience, such as a conversation about her mother’s experiences in a concentration camp, and later, her mother’s evident physical decline as Akerman and her sister try to lift her spirits and make the best use of their remaining time together. Yet she does so via various distancing tactics, such as placing of the camera outside of the room of action. We’re constantly looking through doorways, around nearly closed doors, out windows, over shoulders. We’re always there, but also never quite there. Yet what it yields isn’t quite intimacy thwarted—it’s closer to a painfully accurate representation of the inherent limitations of intimacy. Bringing us physically closer runs the risk of overestimating the possibility of emotional or spiritual closeness. Akerman’s rarely on screen, and she’s never the focus when she is. Her revelations aren’t about what’s seen, but rather about the complications, frustrations, and integrity of seeing.
Criticwire: Justine Smith August 17, 2015
"Where is Chantal?" The soft words are spoken by Chantal Akerman’s mother and echo through the final act of her newest film, "No Home Movie," which had its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival. In a weakened state, half in a dream and unable to turn around to see her daughter pacing on the balcony behind her, Chantal’s mother wonders where her daughter is. Akerman, who shot most of the film herself by arranging cameras around her mother’s home, likely did not even hear her mother’s voice while it was recorded. She died in April 2014 at 86 years old.
As a companion to "No Home Movie," Locarno also screened a documentary about Akerman’s life called "I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman," directed by Marianne Lambert. The films have a naturally symbiotic relationship and build on common themes. Lambert’s film offers an overview of Akerman’s career, while showcasing the behind-the-scenes process of her work on "No Home Movie." This adds context on how Akerman made the film but also shows her struggle with the loss of her mother. She is at a turning point and she no longer knows where home is. "No Home Movie’s" title can be read two ways: This is no ordinary home movie, and a story about not having a home.
Beginning with her early experimental films, much of the action of Akerman’s body of work has taken place in interiors. These spaces are often restrictive, gilded cages for her disaffected female leads, where they are caught in an endless cycle of routine and loneliness. To call these spaces "homes" seems disingenuous, as they don’t offer the sense of family and comfort we have come to understand from the word — and yet, the idea of home remains fundamental to Akerman’s work.
For Akerman, home seems indistinguishable from her mother. Early films like "Jeanne Dielman" and "Je Tu Il Elle," very much centered on the home and the destruction of that rigid routine, were in many ways a rebellion against her mother and that life. "No Home Movie" is a response to her earlier work, as she attempts to show reverence for her mother and their love. But Akerman can’t escape who she is, and tries to unearth memories from her mother’s past. She pokes and prods, trying to get her mother to discuss her time in Auschwitz and Poland before the war. Her mother resists. This is not their normal relationship, because they usually discuss the mundane; how beautiful Chantal’s eyes are, their eating habits, or the magic of Skype. In spite of Akerman’s resistance, love in her life has always leaned towards the ordinary, but that does not undermine its value. Their affection-laced conversations makes the film almost accessible — almost.
In spite of the film’s affection, "No Home Movie" remains an exercise in rigidly constructed formalism. Part of this experiment is one built on foreknowledge of Akerman and her work, and, as a result, bleeds occasionally into self-indulgence. Lambert’s documentary, then, offers important context to those who are unfamiliar with Akerman while offering insight into her methodology. In the case of "No Home Movie," part of the difficulty is the nature of her chosen tools. Using handheld cameras and their built-in microphones means that not all the sound or images will be clear — something we naturally accept from home movies. but not from the cinema. The decision is thoughtful and clear, but it does not make it any more palatable.
Her preference for long shots has long been a staple of her career, but it is telling that this stylistic choice is still a challenge. In this film, the long conversations between her and her mother are full of love and humor, those scenes are hardly a challenge, though Akerman frames these shots to distort rather than showcase her mother. Chantal’s mother remains a mystery to her; she shows that to us through her framing or her use of focus. Still, these scenes are pleasurable. The long shots are more testing when she focuses on the lack of persons. Empty apartments, and drifting shots of the Israeli desert — another evocation of the troubled nature of home that Akerman seems to struggle with in regards to her Jewish background.
In "I Don’t Belong Anywhere," Aurore Clément, who starred in Akerman’s 1978 film "Les Rendez-vous d’Anna" describes the film’s premiere and how Delphine Seyrig, the star of "Jeanne Dielman," warned her not to attend. Clément, believing herself courageous and mature went anyway, ready for the reactions no matter how much people disliked the film. Unexpectedly, she was physically attacked and had to be escorted out of the theater. How could a film, in particular one where fundamentally little happens, inspire such rage?
After the press screening of "No Home Movie" in Locarno, there were audible boos. This speaks to Akerman’s continued ability to confront audiences rather than placate to them. Her work, even when it is laden by love, challenges people on a primal level. Akerman lives up to Locarno’s reputation for showcasing difficult films that face audiences with their biases and preconceptions. Above all else Akerman brings us into her world, and through her challenging form allows us to understand her fragmented understanding of home. For her, home is not a physical space, but a subjective experience wrought with insecurities, fears, and a vagabond spirit. For Akerman, home was her mother.
FilmLinc Daily: Kent Jones October 07, 2015
I’m not going to write anything official about Chantal Akerman, whose films and whose being were in fierce opposition to grand pronouncements and self-advertisements and protective barriers of all kinds, whether they were concocted from images or words or a pretty combination of both. She had a horror of clichés and neat formulations, and it seems to me that she was always trying to wriggle out of the straitjacket of such size-ups and classifications as feminist, structuralist, leftist, or “essentially” Jewish, even when they were made in her favor.
I can only write about Chantal from ground level, which is as I remember her. I certainly won’t pretend that we were close. We saw one another infrequently over the years, corresponded now and then. But the first time we met, we connected. I’m sure that many others made similarly quick and intense connections with her.
Chantal was direct, tough, and emotionally extravagant. She was small in stature but she commanded a room with her fatigued stance, her grand and sometimes wicked smile, her wild rough-grained voice, and her eyes. The eyes had it. I’ve rarely looked into a pair of eyes so bewitching.
As a filmmaker, she didn’t have a commercial bone in her body. She gave it a try with Golden Eighties and A Couch in New York and, to a certain extent, Tomorrow We Move, all of which are fascinating films, the latter in particular, a dizzying, angular, breathless movie with an undercurrent of anxious sadness. There are some funny, lyrical passages in A Couch in New York (and in the resolutely deadpan black and white short J’ai faim, j’ai froid), but she didn’t really have the temperament for comedy or high spirits. She made films of extraordinary tonal control—for instance, Toute une nuit, the ferocious La Captive and, of course, Jeanne Dielman—but I would hesitate to call any of them elegant. Elegance wasn’t her thing. She was involved, deeply so, with the sounding of mysteries and enigmas drifting or hovering just beyond the everyday world, the shattering strangeness of people living through a hot summer night or trying out for a movie musical or walking the halls of the Hotel Monterey.
In a sense, all of her movies are ghost stories populated by future phantoms. For instance, her extraordinary 1993 film D’est. All of those variously shaped people, dutifully lining up for cars and buses and trams in the former Eastern bloc countries just after the fall of the wall, filmed so slowly and so closely, with neither compassion nor cold objectivity but with absolutely rapt attention—why are they so moving? Because they are seen from an imagined future vantage point, where all the fragile and unnamable currents of energy and motion that comprise the sense of life behind this minute of this hour of this day of this moment in what we call history are long gone. Or, to quote Chantal, “You sense that this is time that leads toward death.” One could say the same of all her films.
This hard and constant eye on time, this insistence on the reality of decay and obliteration, puts me in mind of Melville’s Bartleby. It’s not at all difficult to imagine Chantal making a movie called I would prefer not to—actually, No Home Movie is close enough. She had some beloved collaborators—Claire Atherton, Babette Mangolte, and Aurore Clément come to mind—but I think of her as an essentially private artist, perhaps more so than most filmmakers. No Home Movie is very much a film made alone, and as elemental as it gets. It is composed entirely out of images, shot by Chantal with a little camera, of her beloved mother in the last phase of her life and from the inside of a moving car looking out, passages of raw unfolding time exactingly positioned against one another, slowly acquiring centrifugal force and moving toward an inevitable conclusion. No home movie is right. All the tenderness, all the attention, all the care, all the phone calls and Skype conversations and prescriptions filled and meals made and linen washed will not ward off death.
I read in The New York Times obituary that this formidable film was booed in Locarno, and that the booing might have thrown Chantal into despair. Apart from the fact that No Home Movie was reportedly well-received on the whole at that festival, it all sounds pretty unlikely to me. But speculation about the circumstances of someone’s death amounts to so much wasted time. The woman I knew would have waved off such nonsense, cigarette in hand.
Chantal planned to come to New York to present No Home Movie. As of a couple of weeks ago, we were expecting her. Her messages are still in my inbox. Her film is playing as scheduled. The tributes have begun, as they should. And time will pass, and the shock will come to an end, and we’ll look at her movies again, and… then what?
We’ll be shocked again. Chantal’s films do not comfort. They jolt and they re-orient, they put you and me face to face with accumulating time, in whose shadow we live whether we know it or not. That’s the source of their terror and their great beauty—one in the same.
Film
Comment: Violet Lucca March 30,
2016
Chantal Akerman is one of those filmmakers cursed with having legions of imitators and very few peers. I say “cursed” because the aesthetic tools she developed—extreme long takes, a particular style of frontal or “planimetric” compositions (which she argued obeyed the Second Commandment’s prohibition of idolatry)—can seem dulled by overuse in less skilled hands. (I recall my college film production TA warning me about associating a female subject with her home in a short documentary I was making because it was so “overdone”—and she was right to say so.) Still, there’s nothing like watching one of Akerman’s films; even works like Portrait of a Young Girl at the End of the 1960s in Brussels (94) or Golden Eighties (86), which adapt more conventional formal strategies befitting their genre, also bear her unique authorial touch and contain a degree of the personal. It’s talking about her films that often becomes difficult, for she had the great gift of turning the banal, the overplayed, and the obvious into something wholly unique, usually by asking us to do something as simple as gaze and experience time.
Akerman’s final film, No Home Movie, which in part documents her elderly mother Natalia’s decline in health, is oftentimes painfully intimate. Rather than show the unsavory aspects of the end of life—hospitals, hospices, or the myriad accessories that assist failing bodies—the director focuses on conversations with her mother, and allows her physical decline to speak for itself. Yet because of Akerman’s family’s history—her parents fled Poland to Belgium while teenagers, and her mother was deported to Auschwitz while her father spent the war in hiding—there’s no such thing as a lighthearted trip down memory lane. Sitting together in a teal kitchen, daughter prods her mother to remember the man besotted with her aunt who got her papers to enter Belgium; a brief round of “you were the most beautiful mother” and “you were an adorable child” compliments; then a disagreement about whether or not the King of Belgium was a Nazi.
No single work by Akerman attempted to address Natalia’s experiences in a comprehensive manner, but the Holocaust and its legacy—both as the daughter of a survivor and racism in contemporary Europe—preoccupied her and manifest themselves throughout her work. Aside from her visit to Israel, prompted by what she felt was an increase in anti-Semitism and documented in 2006’s Là-bas (which also contained discussions of family history), there’s 1980 Dis-moi (80), an hour-long documentary for a French TV series about grandmothers in which the director interviews old female survivors of the Shoah in their homes. Like Akerman’s mother, these women speak directly about the horrors they’ve experienced, and then, after a time, get bored and return to domestic chores or watching TV while the cameras are rolling. The Holocaust also figures in her most famous work: in an interview shortly before her suicide, Akerman explained that “[my mother] went out of the camps she made her house into a jail. That’s Jeanne Dielman. Now I can tell that, but I was not aware of that when I did it, you know?”
The candid mother-daughter chats in No Home Movie, which frequently run without cuts, are uneasy not simply because they touch on topics that Akerman has waited a lifetime to talk about, but because her mother says she feels uncomfortable being filmed. “I don’t want everyone to hear what I have to say to you,” she tells her daughter over Skype, without irritation. “ I want to show how small the world is,” Akerman responds, smiling. But this joviality (faked or real, we can never know) isn’t lasting. In one of the film’s most heartbreaking moments, her mother’s caretaker—a Spanish-speaking woman who, either because of a language barrier or ignorance, doesn’t seem to understand the Holocaust—whispers to Natalia after lunch, “She knows you are anxious, but she doesn’t know it’s because of her.” “It would make her sick,” Natalia replies. Unlike the earlier conversations in the kitchen or over Skype, the camera is set up in another room, diagonally angled toward her mother’s formal dining room. Her mother and her caretaker are distant figures at the table, their heads cut off whenever they move in closer, sloughing away any sense of familiarity and intimacy with each frame. We’re eavesdropping on family tension, made even more unpleasant by virtue of the fact that the person who’s being talked about has not only heard it too, but still chose to show it to the world and violate her mother’s wishes for privacy. The ethical implications of this decision call into question her entire project, as well as past films like News From Home (77), which incorporates letters from mother to daughter that were never intended to be presented publicly. Yet Akerman’s insistence on filming can equally be understood as a daughter who has taken a radically different approach to life than her mother, and we witness—in the film as a text and in how she navigates her mother’s objections in the moment—how such openness about personal matters is a fundamental component of her identity and independence. In the portrait Akerman creates of her mother, we come to understand that her stubborn commitment to filming is more than simply being stubborn.
Nevertheless, such dynamics between family members remain fraught, and they aren’t easy to witness (especially as outsiders). Akerman also courts a sense of anxiety with extremely long shots of the Israeli desert, the majority of which are taken from the window of a moving car. These views of the big, wide world—one that the mildly agoraphobic Natalia refuses to see—break up the everyday goings-on in the house and green parks of Brussels. (Akerman’s mother is repeatedly shown turning down offers to go on walks, and lives in one of those immaculate homes that speaks to a deep-seated desire to remain indoors; the director also includes brief shots of peering out of a window onto the streets, like a small child that wishes to go outside but is forbidden to by their parent.) Taken together, these views of sun-parched vistas, smattered with scrub and battered by violent winds, come to form an apt metaphor for experiencing grief and mourning a loved one. Like that initial wave of grief, their implicit hopelessness is made even more agonizing by their length.
And yet, as any person who has grieved knows, you keep moving forward through space and time; the world continues despite your loss. In these bleak landscapes, expansiveness doesn’t necessarily come to elicit hope until you let it (assuming you’re buying into the seven stages of the Kübler-Ross model). Still, this isn’t a self-help manual or therapy via art: No Home Movie immerses you in a feeling and holds you there. What you ascertain from the experience, or how it connects to your own losses, is just as personal as the film is to Akerman.
Film/Art
| We Can't Go Home Again: Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie Andréa Picard from Cinema Scope, September 8, 2015, also seen here: Cinema Scope: Andréa Picard
“It is in a house that one is alone. Not outside of it, but inside. In the park there are birds, cats. Maybe even a squirrel, a ferret. We are not alone in a park. But in the house, we are so alone that we are sometimes lost.”—Marguerite Duras, Écrire
Writing about writing also meant writing about solitude for Marguerite Duras. Sequestered in her house in Neauphle-le-Château in north-central France, the French writer-filmmaker wrote many of her many books there while grappling with loneliness to extricate the torrent of emotion and memories she carried within her. Hunger, emotional exhaustion, pain—these emotions were real as the authorial routine (i.e., the structural, pathological discipline) took over so many years of her life. “To write,” she said, “is also not to speak. To keep quiet. To scream without making noise…This self-destruction in the house is not at all voluntary. I did not say, ‘I’m locked up here every day of the year.’” Instead, Duras describes her solitary confinement as a need as basic and vital as writing itself. A condition and a consequence of one another, simply. That house, which was more of an old farmhouse than a tony country home, was occupied by German soldiers during the Second World War. Their garbage was found buried and strewn next to the house—oyster shells and cans of fois gras, jagged splinters of pottery handcrafted by the locals, remnants of a pilfering séjour de luxe from terrorizers in a foreign land. A place thus haunted by memories lived, imagined, and dreaded inevitably added to the solipsistic loop of anxious ideas swirling in her mind and often put down on paper.
Duras’ meditation on and melding of writing and solitude is certainly not original, but the raw intimacy with which she conveys a sort of necessary entrapment alongside a simultaneous inability to participate in so-called normal, daily, social life expulses waves of distress and deep desolation. Ones which find striking resonance with Chantal Akerman’s disarmingly direct words in her confessional, diary-like book Ma mère rit. It was published in 2013 to rave reviews in France (though barely known elsewhere), and Akerman delivered a spellbinding and eccentrically dramatic reading of a segment of the book’s English manuscript at New York’s The Kitchen—a collateral event to her “Maniac Shadows” exhibition in October of that year. Only a portion of the book was read because the audience was fidgety and annoyingly impatient, and Akerman, ever sensitive and attuned to the tone and movement in the room, exasperatingly gave up before the end and tossed the remainder of the pages in the air with a characteristic, melodramatic flair of abandon. Sure, those words were voiced in a thick, smoky French accent (incomprehensible to some?), and there was a fat stack of pages remaining 40 minutes into the reading (daunting to some?), but most significant was the raw, honest, unadorned, and disarmingly frontal nature of those words (too uncomfortable for some?). More private thoughts than confidences or divulgences, Akerman’s personal admissions were self-avowals of weakness, paralysis, regression, childish stubborness, petulance, and unremitting emotional and psychological struggle. In other words, pure pain. A rare intimacy emanated from each sentence, unabashedly honest and equal parts ugly and enthralling. Like truth commingling with fictive flight, rehearsals of life adopted cinematic form in the engaged spectator’s mind, compensating for the lack of visuals accompanying Akerman’s brusque, albeit soothing, voice.
The scene was set for simplicity: a dark stage, a small table with a desk lamp, a barefoot Akerman, casual in jeans, dwarfed by her large printouts. She looked like an overgrown child, echoing the one she was describing in the text, the one constantly seeking solace not so much from the world but from her own neuroses. The publisher calls the book a “hypersensitive self-portrait, marked by a burning, intense and raw daily life.” Hyper. That prefix again. Despite needing a 20-year updating and a bit more risk-taking in its prose to be worthy of its radical subject, Ivone Margulies’ seminal 1993 book on Akerman, Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday, still stands as the defining scholarly text on Akerman’s filmmography. The adjectives “hypersensitive” and “hyperreal” certainly apply to Akerman’s latest film, No Home Movie, a devastating documentary portrait of the filmmaker’s mother Natalia (Nelly) Akerman in the final months of her life, leading up to her death, when she was mostly confined to her Brussels apartment. Very much a pendant to Ma mère rit, the film introduces the book’s readers to familiar characters like Clara, the Mexican caretaker who lives with Akerman’s mother, and visualizes in the most intimate of terms the deeply complex relationship between mother and daughter, the push and pull between tenderness and frustration, between the will to forget and the desperate desire and need to know—which is ultimately at the core of the book’s polyphonic form.
Inherently cinematic, the book consistently flouts linearity and reads like a Durasian script where “elle/she” is used by Akerman to intermittently shuttle between her mother, her lover(s), and herself. The Je, tu, il, elle demarcations are less cogent than in the film, and disorientation ebbs like manic thoughts made manifest, the ones that prevent Akerman from sleeping soundly at night, if at all, and elicit bouts of depression and general debilitation. No Home Movie adheres more strictly to the mother-daughter dynamic, at times with Chantal living and caring for her mother in the latter’s tidy, bourgeois Belgian apartment, with its cramped, tiled, Jeanne Dielman-esque kitchen as the centre of the “action” (i.e., peeling of potatoes, eating), and at other times Skyping with her from hotel rooms abroad. The film is deceptively radical, on the surface appearing like a first-person diary-doc shot in fairly swimmy, low-grade video recording seemingly benign quotidian exchanges with her mother in declining health, but below simmers a wealth of emotion, which is unleashed via violent passages of an undetermined wind-whipped landscape in an arid land, which we suspect to be Israel (shot on a phone mostly from a moving vehicle). The film is full of tenderness (oui, sa mère rit, et beaucoup), but violence and rupture lurk in every scene as Akerman seeks to extract her mother’s harrowing story before that knowledge is forever irretrievable. A Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz and fled to Belgium, Natalia Akerman suffered from chronic anxiety all her life, an affliction that fuelled much of her daughter’s creative output and helped shape Akerman’s thematic preoccupations with gender, sex, cultural identity, existential ennui, solitude, and mania.
In No Home Movie, it is as if Chantal Akerman, perhaps for the first time in her career, has revealed the core of her work and her wounds in the most naked of ways: her frequent focus on confinement, repetition, and confrontation; her longing to be elsewhere; her dizzying instability. And yes, of course, exemplifying the hyperrealism for which she has been associated since Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), the film is very much a treatise on space and time, on domestic and physical entrapment and subliminal choreography as Akerman’s mother lives out her final days isolated from the outside world, and perhaps far from a promised land never attained. Constructed of frames-within-frames with doors open and partially ajar, windows real and laptop-bound, with furniture and objects as middle-class indexes, the film proceeds by meticulously mapping space and doing so for extended durations. A sense of acute claustrophobia emerges in the apartment. In the book, Chantal speaks at length about trying to shelter herself from her mother’s illness and her constant yearning for physical affection, finding temporary respite in a messy room to which she retreats to write. This daily act is not simply salvation from the cramped, compartmentalized space and death’s inevitable encroachment, but also from Chantal’s restless (and relentless) mission to hear about her mother’s past, to recuperate memories no matter how traumatic or details seemingly insignificant—to hear her mother speak and tell her story, their story. From the film’s abundance of static shots and its odd transitional zones, but also from its plunge into filial shame, wonderment, and guilt, Ozu naturally comes to mind.
Still, No Home Movie is in dialogue with much of Akerman’s filmography, especially the obsessive everyday routines and structural rigour of her masterpiece, Jeanne Dielman; the complex, intimate relationship with her mother which forms the basis of News from Home (1977); and Akerman’s devastating essay on exile, Là-bas (2006), when she herself was confined to a rental apartment in Tel Aviv unable to bridge the threshold to the outside world, overwhelmed by the flooding of traumatic thoughts, fears and vulnerabilities awakened by her family’s history with the death camps. Stylistically, though, the film is very different from the older celluloid work, the closest in look and tone to Là-bas, which was also shot in video and similarly takes the shape of a personal, cloistered chamber piece. And yet a different sort of radical experiment altogether reminiscent of Nicholas Ray’s 1973 film We Can’t Go Home Again—a work that could only have been made differently considering the filmmaker’s monumental oeuvre and time’s merciless passing—No Home Movie punctuates its febrile, intimate, goading images with interpolated desert landscape shots that dramatically sever the film’s rigid time-space continuum, cracking open the surface to expose a different form of experience. Not unlike in Michael Snow’s three-and-a-half-hour opus La région centrale (1971), the rugged terrain elicits a visceral bodily experience, which lends a cosmic dimension to the film. Intermittently ripped from the everyday exchanges between mother and daughter/filmmaker, the viewer is immediately introduced to this anonymous desert landscape shot with a wind-bent foregrounded tree as prelude. While inherently mysterious, much can be deduced from these contrapuntal images, which, not unlike the process of mourning itself, will affect each viewer differently.
In May, Akerman premiered her awesome, nervous-breakdown-inducing installation NOW as part of the curated Arsenale section of the Venice Biennale. Some of those landscape shots appear, alongside other deserts and seascapes on the five hanging plexiglass screens, while black-and-white digital noise is projected onto the floor and a bench meant to overwhelm the viewer at every turn. A major sound component comprising an impressively charged arsenal of speakers, subwoofers, and amplifiers heightens the general state of emergency that is NOW. Supplemented with pebbles and medium-sized rocks and cheap, compact plastic faux aquariums, the installation incorporates elements from Akerman’s previous installations but is by all accounts her most ambitious, impressive, and fully formed gallery work yet. And while much of the imagery remains indistinct, the landscapes look to be from Israel or the Middle East, the sounds are a cacophony of traffic, sirens, music, song, wind (that ubiquitous crackly, jarring wind in the footage from No Home Movie), and the overall effect is one of total emotional collapse. Four screens hang in two rows, which encourage viewers to walk through a middle, parting toward the fifth screen as a bench on the left cheekily offers impossible repose, wedged as it is between two screens of rapidly moving images; sitting there puts viewers in the line of fire, as an overhead projector beams digital static downwards. The installation offers no respite, and while it is loud and consists of a barrage of moving imagery, it does not bombard to the point of effacement; instead, the somewhat ordered multi-sensory chaos wholly resonates with the sense of disorder and disarray that reigns in the world today, on large levels and intimate ones.
Together, Ma mère rit, NOW, and No Home Movie form an interconnected body of work from one of today’s most fearless voices. In an age of seductive slickness, of Instagram-curated happiness, Akerman continues to confront what Joan Didion termed “the unspeakable peril of the everyday,” doing so in a disarmingly honest, unembellished way which gives weight and credence to nervous collapses, emotional impairment, and fears about the precariousness of life. Both elliptical and tryingly quotidian, No Home Movie is a shattering contemplation of loss and grief as much as it is a search for identity and calm, for rootedness from a perpetually nomadic, breathless soul. It is not a home movie: it is a movie about having no home.
Senses of Cinema: Bérénice Reynaud March 19, 2016
Virginia Quarterly Review: Michelle Orange April 11, 2016
Walking,
Talking, Singing, Exploding . . . and Silence: Chantal ... Barbara McBane from Film Quarterly, September 16, 2016
Fandor: Shari Kizirian Full-Frontal Farewell, April 01, 2016
Review:
Chantal Akerman's No Home Movie (2015) | Sight & Sound | BFI Nick Pinkerton, November 29, 2016
Reverse
Shot: Michael Koresky She’s Not There, October 06, 2015
Fandor: Kevin B. Lee April 01, 2016
Tribute
to Chantal Akerman • Claire Atherton • Senses of Cinema December 9, 2015
Slant
Magazine [Clayton Dillard]
NO HOME MOVIE & I
DON'T BELONG ANYWHERE Steve
Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Chantal
Akerman's 'No Home Movie' is a Profound Final Statement ... Eric Kohn
Brooklyn Magazine: Adam Cook October 08, 2015
MUBI's Notebook: Michael Sicinski September 16, 2015
No
Home Movie · Film Review No Home Movie and I ... - The AV Club Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Artforum: Melissa
Anderson September 28, 2015
The House Next Door: Michael Pattison August 10, 2015
MUBI's
Notebook: Daniel Kasman August 11,
2015
Senses of Cinema: Darren Hughes December 16, 2015
Filmmaker: Giovanni Marchini Camia August 19, 2015
Fandor: Shelly Kraicer January 14, 2016
Senses of Cinema: Jaimey Fisher September 15, 2015
Film-Forward.com
[Caroline Ely]
Frowning
[Douglas J. Greenwood]
Presence
(appearance and disappearance) of two Belgian filmmakers Imma Merino from Comparative Cinema, 2016
Senses of Cinema: Jaimey Fisher September 15, 2015
The New Yorker: Richard Brody September 21, 2015
Artforum: Rachael
Rakes August 26, 2015
AnOther: Carmen Gray November 11, 2015
Reverse
Shot: Genevieve Yue Listed as #1 of
Best Movies of the Year, January 02, 2017
The Sheila
Variations: Sheila O'Malley Top
Movies of 2016, December 19, 2016
No Home Movie | The
Seventh Art Srikanth Srinivasan,
listed at #2 for Favorite Films of 2015
Sight & Sound: Robert Greene Listed as 5 of Best Documentaries of the
Year, January 13, 2017
Fandor: Chuck Bowen Best Films of 2016, so far, June 20, 2016
Brooklyn Magazine: Justin Stewart Top 5 Movies of April 2016, April 29, 2016
Critics
Round Up - A Collection of Arthouse Criticism
Fandor: Jordan Cronk September 21, 2015
'No
Home Movie': Locarno Review | Hollywood Reporter Boyd van Hoeij
'No
Home Movie' Review: Chantal Akerman Pays Tribute to ... Peter Debruge from Variety, also seen here: 'No
Home Movie' review: For Chantal Akerman, the personal is political
The
last picture show: how Chantal Akerman's suicide alters her final ... Adrian Searle from The Guardian, November 4, 2015
No
Home Movie review – infinitely careful, painfully poignant ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
No
Home Movie review: a profound final statement from Chantal ... Tara Brady from The Irish Times
'No
Home Movie': Chantal Akerman's final film - Baltimore City Paper Adam Katzman
Documentaries
'No Home Movie' and 'I Don't Belong Anywhere ... Sheri Linden from The LA Times
Review:
'No Home Movie,' of Love and Melancholy - The New York ... Manohla Dargis from The New York Times, also seen here:
The New York Times: Manohla Dargis
Chantal
Akerman Takes Emotional Path in Film About 'Maman' - The ... Nicolas Rapold
from The New York Times, August 5,
2015
No Home Movie - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Akin, Fatih
SHORT SHARP SHOCK (Kurz und schmerzlos)
User comments from imdb Author: Christian Heynk from
Germany
I watched this flick on TV. It was a
User comments from imdb Author: (f_baersson@hotmail.com)
the movie is about a turkish guy who gets out of prison and
sees himself tangled up in the same situations that he lived before, with his
best friends stealing and dealing, only this time he himself has changed and
has a very differentiated view of the daily crime and violence.
the story unfolds with an interesting plot always centering the 3 friends in
their daily life and how suddenly their live changes quickly when things go
more wrong than they ever did before.
a great job by the director. the pictures are beautiful at the same time very
authentic. the story always feels real even though it has a lot of extreme
situations in it. the characters move as they are depicted closely and without
unnecessary sentiments.
overall an extremly entertaining movie that brings us close foreign cultures
from right around the corner.
User comments from imdb Author: Mikew3001
(mikew4001@yahoo.de) from Hamburg, Germany
"Kurz und schmerzlos" means as much as
"quickly and smoothly" and is a German underground drama by young
Turkish film maker Fatih Akin. Shot in the suburbs and industrial area of
The film shows the life and fate of three young foreigners - Turk Gabriel,
Greek Costa and Serb Bobby, all of them dreaming of love and money in the bleak
surroundings of social welfare, crimes, industry, unemployment and cultural
minorities. Of course it won't take long until the friendship of the three
outsiders is about to break apart when Gabriel becomes a henchman for a local
gangster boss, and a journey through violence and despair begins for all three
of them...
There are no special effects, no visual games, there is just pure
"adrenaline acting" - except for Ralf Herforth ("Knocking on
Heaven's Door") as gangster boss Muhamer, all actors are unknown
newcomers, but with a great impact and brilliant performances. There is much
realistic violence in it than can be felt in every second, and you really need
to watch out for some contemporary American or Japanese underground stuff to
find something similar. And the sound track is very good, too.
But the movie shows also the social milieu and the problems of national
minorities in a Western country like in the works of British film maker Hanif
Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette"). Watch out for this example for
great contemporary German cinema, and although "Kurz und schmerzlos"
avoids all the visual styling of "Lola rennt", it has the same impact
and power like that international box office hit!
IN JULY (Im Juli)
Basically an
understated, shaggy-dog romantic comedy, and an inconsequential one at that,
the film is played with near effortless assurance. Daniel (Bleibtreu) is a
bespectacled Hamburg student teacher. A market vendor (Paul) sells him a lucky
sun ring, which he soon matches with the image on the dress of a lovely Turkish
tourist (Üner) he meets for the night. It's the holidays, so he decides to
return the visit. En route to Turkey he picks up the same, now hitch-hiking
street vendor; is picked up by a nutty Serbian woman trucker (Katic) and a
Turkish driver (Kurtulus) with a body in his trunk; loses two cars, his wallet
and passport, and gets the wrong side of several nations' border guards. The
cast are extremely confident, and there's a winning soundtrack, fine
photography and never a longueur.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
There's
a wonderful moment in Howard Hawks' classic screwball comedy Bringing Up
Baby in which Cary Grant, a straitlaced and nerdy paleontologist, tries to
excuse himself from the moon-eyed Katharine Hepburn, telling her that he's due
to marry another woman. Undaunted, Hepburn lets out a confident burst of
laughter, as if to say, "No, silly, you're coming with me." From
The Lady Eve to Something Wild, it has long been a staple of
romantic comedies that free-spirited women know more than hapless men about the
ways of love, even if it takes the whole movie to penetrate their thick skulls.
An unabashedly goofy road odyssey across the wilds of Eastern Europe,
writer-director Fatih Akin's In July follows this reliable formula to
the letter, yet every time the pace starts to flag, it coughs up one hilarious
left-field interlude after another. As tradition dictates, the film's loose,
irrepressible spirit radiates entirely from the female lead, here a delightfully
flaky young street vendor played by Christiane Paul. In the Cary Grant role,
Run Lola Run's Moritz Bleibtreu stars as a lovelorn Hamburg physics teacher
who's oblivious to Paul's affections, falling instead for the mysterious Idil
Üner, a beautiful Turkish traveler stopping through the city for the night.
When Üner takes off the next morning for Istanbul, Bleibtreu takes a great
romantic leap and spontaneously decides to follow her there, embarking on a
roundabout journey through Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria (eliding war-torn
Yugoslavia) to meet her under the Bosporus Bridge. In the meantime, Paul
departs on her annual hitchhiking vacation, going wherever the passing cars
take her, but in a cinematic universe ruled by serendipity, she and Bleibtreu
wind up spending most of the journey together. At times too eager to please,
In July gets away with its broad, stridently wacky tone, partly because
Akin's affection for even the smallest character runs surprisingly deep. In his
world, stereotypical baddies like a gun-toting border guard, a silver-toothed
hoodlum with a corpse in his trunk, and a ruthlessly seductive pickpocket are
capable of unexpected decency, especially in the face of romantic destiny. As
he treads over well-worn screwball territory, Akin understands that he can get
away with a predictable finish so long as he provides a few compelling detours
along the way. And with interludes that evoke Rousseau one moment and The
Dukes Of Hazzard the next, In July rarely gets boxed in by its own
studied conventions.
Spirituality & Practice [Frederic and
Mary Ann Brussat]
C. G. Jung coined the term "synchronicity" referring to a special confluence of events set in motion by chance. All of us have experienced these marvels that challenge us to move beyond our cause-and-effect thinking. As novelist Milan Kundera wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, "It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences . . . but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he therefore deprives his life of a dimension of beauty."
The beauty of coincidence is at the heart of In July,
a high-flying and very entertaining German road movie written and directed by
German-born Turk Fatih Akin. Daniel (Moritz Bleibtreu) is a student teacher of
physics in
After she leaves for
As they travel through five countries, various eccentrics
throw roadblocks in their blooming relationship: a truck driver (Jochen Nickel)
with a robust libido, a devious lady (Branka Katic) in a van, a greedy Romanian
border guard (Fatih Akin), and a Turk (Mehmet Kurtulus) who is on a mission of
mercy. Daniel remains open to love on the long journey across
Epinions DVD review [Stephen O. Murray]
The Hamburg-born child of Turkish parents Fatih Akin won many
European awards for his 2004 film "Gegen die Wand" (Head-On), for his
2005 music documentary "Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul,"
and has been winning more for his 2007 "Auf der anderen Seite" (The
Edge of Heaven). I was disappointed by "Gegen die Wand" and have not
seen the other two ("Crossing the Bridge" is available on DVD here;
"Auf der anderen Seite" has not crossed the
In "Im Juli" repressed student teacher Daniel Bannier (puffy-lipped
Moritz Bleibtreu, Lola's amour in "Run, Lola, Run", the
journalist/prisoner in "The Experiment"
[in which Akin played a taxi-driver BTW] and Andreas in "Spielberg's
Back in
That very night, Daniel sees another Turkish woman, Melek who is wearing a
t-shirt with the same sun symbol. Juli is discomfited to have set Daniel up to
fall in love with someone else.
When Daniel decides to go the
Daniel and Juli have a number of adventures en route, including some very funny
border-crossing (especially the inflexible Romanian border guard) and an
applied physics experiment (a variant on the problem Daniel is trying to set a
high-school class that he is paying no attention to him at the start of the
movie's extended flashback). The many coincidences that drive the plot require
willful suspension of disbelief: the movie is a fairy tale quest (with some
hard knocks), not an exercise in realism.
There's nothing new here in the couple who don't know they're a couple while
they are on the road genre here, except for the route's geography and the woman
being of Turkish descent (rather than Claudette Colbert and her successors
since 1934's "It Happened One Night"). Nonetheless, the actors have
more than sufficient charm to make the journey enjoyable for viewers. They and
director Akin are also genial in bonus clips. The DVD has trailers for "Im
Juli" (giving away far too much of the plot, so that it should not be
watched before the movie itself) and for half a dozen other movies.
It's difficult to credit that Daniel could be so naive and have survived to
adulthood, but it's entertaining. (And his character is written to be
irritable, to increase the frisson of the seemingly carefree Juli). Given that
Juli is portrayed as very impulsive, her deciding to hitch-hike to
As with the earlier German New Wave movies, the colors in "Im Juli"
are very vivid (supersaturated).
The onset interviews with Moritz Bleibtreu and Christiane Paul (DVD bonus
features) are brief and not particularly informative. Fatih Akin expresses
admiration for the plays of William Shakespeare and the films of Jim Jarmusch,
and muses on the stability of the conventions for romantic comedies.
DVD Verdict Joel Pearce
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)
EyeForFilm.co.uk Keith Hennessey Brown
Boston Globe Ty Burr
The Boston Phoenix Peg Aloi
San Francisco Chronicle (Carla Meyer)
Washington Post
[Ann Hornaday]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
WE FORGOT TO GO BACK (DENK ICH AN
DEUTSCHLAND – WIR HABER VERGESSEN ZURÜCKUKEHREN)
Germany (60 mi)
2001
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
International
House's "Young Turks of the German Cinema" series doesn't kick off in
earnest until next week, but don't miss the first night's programming, devoted
to director Fatih Akin, whose Golden Bear win at this year's Berlin Film
Festival cemented the Turkish diaspora as world cinema's next big thing.
Neither We Forgot, an hourlong documentary produced for German TV, nor
the brief, goofily energetic stoner comedy Weeds reveals a master at
work, but they certainly point up Akin's interest in exploring his own ethnic
and cultural identity. Part home movie, part sociological film (and eminently
conscious of the way the two modes intersect), the documentary consists mainly
of interviews with members of Akin's extended family, most of whom have
emigrated from Turkey to Germany, and a good number of whom have returned.
Akin's own parents, they tell him, never abandoned their own plans to return to
Istanbul; the desire just slipped away. Akin's father says it's been 10 years
since he thought of the house he's always kept there.
Though the
unfortunate decision to dub non-German speakers with Akin's voice clouds the
issue, much of the tension between cultures is expressed in language. Akin's
brother laments his own poor command of the Turkish language, but hopes his
children will speak it better some day, the way some hope their kids will go to
college. Akin's friend Adam, of Greek heritage (and a star of Akin's Short
Sharp Shock) tells him that he thinks in Greek. Really? Akin asks.
"Maybe not in the Greek language," Adam admits, "but
emotionally." That emotional language is the stuff of cinema, and it's
what, when Akin's In July and Head On hit these shores, will make
you glad you're already up to speed.
SOLINO
Germany (124 mi)
2002 German TV version
(114 mi)
This bitter-sweet
family saga is pitched between the nostalgia of Cinema Paradiso and the
melancholia of Once Upon a Time in America. The opening section, with
the Amato family relocating to Germany in the mid-'60s to set up a pizzeria, is
the most sickly, with a cutie-pie young protagonist and too many polkas
squeezed out as glue for the piecemeal scene setting. But momentum builds, and
come the '70s, with budding film-maker Gigi and and his jealous brother Giancarlo
now free-living students, their accumulation of petty slights and betrayals
becomes genuinely compelling. The opposition of bustling Germany and laidback
Italy is used as a framework for the differences of character and ethics that
run down the middle of the family.
With the easily digestible, Italianate charmer "Solino," helmer
Fatih Akin completes his move into the mainstream and away from the tougher,
grungier style of "Short
Sharp Shock" that first brought him to notice. Straight up-and-down
yarn, about a southern Italian family that moves to a gray mining region of
Germany in the '60s, is the first the German-born Turkish director has made
from someone else's script; but despite (or maybe because of) that, result is a
slick, entertaining, if never very original, study of family and roots. Helped
by the presence of local names Moritz Bleibtreu and up-and-coming Barnaby
Metschurat, business has been pleasant on home turf, and some overseas action
in smaller markets and on cable looks likely.
Akin already signaled his
mainstream ambitions with his last feature, "In
July" (2000), an engaging road movie with juicy parts for Bleibtreu
and Christiane
Paul as two characters winding their way from Hamburg to Istanbul. Though
"Solino" lacks the previous pic's more inspired (and magical)
moments, it's a much tighter and better-paced movie, despite its longer running
time. Narrative-driven film shows a deft hand at rapid, but not hurried, brush
strokes that move things along without any diversions.
It's 1964 in the lazy town of
Solino, somewhere in the heel of Italy, and the Amato family, comprised of
father Romano (Gigi Savoia),
mom Rosa (Antonella Attili) and young sons Giancarlo (Michele Ranieri) and Gigi
(Nicola Cutrignelli), up roots and take the train to Duisburg, in Germany's dull
Ruhr region, in search of work. However, Romano soon tires of the coal mines,
so Rosa has the wheeze of opening an Italian restaurant, which they name after
their home town.
While the eatery thrives, the
kids are left to their own resources. Younger brother Gigi quickly learns to
speak German, becomes fascinated by photography, and then - thanks to a
visiting Italian film director (lugubrious Vincent Schiavelli, in theatrical
mode) - by the movies.
At the 40-minute mark, film
flashes forward to 1974, and Romano wants his grown sons to follow him into the
restaurant biz. They, however, are more into partying and girls - especially
blonde Johanna (Patrycia Ziolkowska), with whom they end up sharing a grungy
apartment but not, for the time being, her bed. Meanwhile, Gigi starts a
nascent career as a filmmaker by making a short that gets selected for a local
film festival.
However, when various problems
force Gigi's return to Solino along with his mother, the family starts to
fracture from underlying tensions. A final section, set in 1984, wraps the
parcel up neatly.
Film develops a slightly darker
edge soon after the midpoint, but it's only a temporary hiccup in the generally
benign proceedings. Though Giancarlo is shown as the more feckless,
overshadowed brother, despite his macho posturing, even the fraternal strife
that drives the pic's third act is lightly resolved. As Gigi rediscovers his
Italian roots back in Solino with a childhood girlfriend (Tiziana Lodato), the
film even skirts dangerously close to "Cinema
Paradiso" territory.
Both Metschurat and Bleibtreu, in
their different ways, are convincing as German-raised Italians, though it's a
bit of a stretch that they actually speak to each other in Deutsch. After
starting off as florid, pantomime Italians, Savoia and Attili settle into their
roles later on. Both Ziolkowska and Lodato are good as the two girlfriends, the
former with a pragmatic, north German edge and the latter with an Italian
small-town sensibility. Cutrignelli is first-rate as the young, wonder-struck
Gigi, through whose eyes the first act unfolds.
Jannos Eolou's sunny,
Mediterranean score keeps things bubbling along, and other technical credits
are pro, including production and costume design for the three time periods.
HEAD ON (Gegen Die Wand) A- 94
Germany Turkey
I
felt this was the kind of film KONTROLL (2003) tried to be, but wasn’t,
creating a very stylized universe where people’s lives are so out of control,
yet where the film is so completely under control, in complete synchronization
visually and emotionally with the pulsating soundtrack, a film that’s not
afraid to show the emotional aftereffects of driving head on into an immovable
wall, where images literally burst off the screen, using very inventive
storytelling. “Punk rock is not
dead!” This is a bizarre love story that
was never really about love at all, bringing together two oddly eccentric
characters who only belatedly learn to give a damn. This is absurdist comedy mixed with in your
face realism, throw in some tableaux musical storytelling from Istanbul, and
two powerful performances by the quirky pair, especially Birol Ünel as the beer
guzzling, coke addicted don’t give a fuck guy with violent tendencies,
(“Fucking Turks!”) and Sibel Kekilli as the smiling, young, innocent looking
but deeply troubled, rebellious girl who thinks he can save her simply by being
Turkish (“You’re one of them”). From
this improbable beginning, we weave in and out of the seedy underworld of
various bars and clubs, establishing an edgy camera style that balances their
explosive inner and outer worlds, where they seem to be reeling from the raw
power of just getting through everyday life.
I never really knew where this film was heading, but it’s a rollicking
ride, blending into one film the deceptively complicated mix of German and
Turkish cultures, which when combined, create a completely new glimpse of the
kind of intercultural world we live in.
Head-On Michael
Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Stylistically, never less than compelling, but somehow the
picture addressed me as though I was supposed to be moved by it, or find its
rather shallow cross-cultural collisions deeply philosophical or at least
cleverly depicted. Truth is, it's a solid enough timewaster, already fading
from memory. Some portions of its montage resemble slightly less caffeinated
Guy Ritchie moments, and its music cues are trying way too hard. Stuart
Klawans compared Head-On to a
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
If everything you know about the Turkish in Germany you
learned from Fassbinder, Head-On will come as a shock - even that unsentimental
director looks like a creampuff next to the goings-on in this doomed romance.
Our hero is the 40-year-old Cahit, a Turkish/German self-destructive enough to
drive his car into a wall; his life turns around - sort of - when he meets the
young and sexy Sibel on the inside of the hospital. Sibel, unfortunately, has
an insanely traditional Turkish family (and the broken nose from her brother to
prove it), prompting her to ask Cahit for a marriage of convenience, which he
provides, with some confusion.
As he presides over her wantonness while secretly falling in love with her, the
film moves towards a tragic event with the bluntness of a baseball bat and the
precision of a surgeon. Every single blow hits its target for a maximum of
pain. Without explanatory monologues or a “release of tension,” it charts the
progress of two people caught between two cultures that pay the ultimate price
when the people surrounding that particular marriage of convenience fail to
cooperate in the worst ways imaginable.
I can't remember the last movie that put me through so much baroque anguish
without being completely exploitative (or completely phoney). This movie feels
felt from the inside out, loves its battered couple and refuses to explain like
a social worker what is all too painfully obvious.
Not since the death of Alan Clarke has such an affirmatively scabrous vision
hit the screen, one that takes a stand for its hapless victims instead of
quietly noting their suffering, and if it doesn't make my ten-best list this
year, I'll be just as surprised as you.
Political Film Review
Michael Haas
Head-On (Gegen die Wand), directed and
written by Fatih Akin, is primarily a story about the transformation of Cahit
Tomruk (played by Birol Ünel), a Turk whose family went to Hamburg in search of
a better life. He is a German citizen without a family who, at about the age of
forty, has been living in squalor since his wife died. When the film begins,
his job consists of picking up bottles on the floor of a nightclub, after which
he gets drunk and totals his car by running into a wall head on. Although he
survives the crash, he is accommodated at a mental facility along with Sibel
Güner (played by Sibel Kekilli), a twenty-year-old Turkish woman who also has
recently committed suicide. She asks him to marry so that she can break free
from traditional parents. What is in common between them is that both are
victims of anti-Turkish discrimination by Germans, and she believes that they
can at least become roommates. After trying to avoid her proposal, Cahit finally
agrees, her parents agree, and they indeed get married. But they are not in
love, and they prefer other sex partners. Although Cahit has doubtless evoked
no sympathy from filmviewers, he changes as Sibel cleans up his apartment and
serves him delicious meals. One night he goes to a nightclub to see her, is
roughed up by some of the patrons, presumably her former tricks; she then takes
him home and nurses him back to health. Cahit is now in love with Sibel, and
they finally have sex together. One night, however, one of her former tricks is
in the same bar with Cahit, though Sibel is absent; when the trick needles
Cahit with an insult of Sibel, Cahit fatally though unintentionally beans
him with a beer bottle. Cahit goes to prison, while Sibel's parents disown her.
Sibel tells Cahit that she will wait for him, but she goes to Istanbul, where
her older sister Selma (played by Meltem Kumbul) takes her in at first. When
Cahit gets out of prison, he is no longer the wild man that he was before. He
flies to Istanbul to rejoin her, only to discover from Selma that she has a
daughter and might not want to see him again. In a few days, they nevertheless
meet, have sex, and he begs her to join him, as he plans to return to his
hometown in a country that he never before experienced despite his meager
knowledge of the Turkish language. When the film ends, filmviewers must guess
whether Sibel and her daughter join Cahit on the bus, which departs the station
in Istanbul. Turkish gypsy music punctuates the story, notably a singer and a
band of six instruments who perform in the foreground; in the background is the
beautiful city of Istanbul and its Grand Mosque.
Film Comment
Amy Taubin
Winner of the 2004 European Film Award and the Golden Bear
at the Berlin Film Festival, Fatih Akin's Head-On also swept the
Akin, a German of Turkish descent, attracted attention in
Sibel and Cahit's dilemma is that they are desperate to break free of their
repressive culture but have nowhere else to go. They live in a virtual ghetto,
which they despise, and they despise themselves for being part of it. What's
interesting and fairly unique about Head-On is that the onscreen
conflict is not between the Turkish subculture and the dominant German culture,
but takes place entirely within the subculture and, psychologically, within the
characters themselves. That is not to let the Germans off the hook for their
treatment of their "guest workers." Sibel and Cahit might welcome the
opportunity to assimilate, but it's not an option available to them. Just about
the only German we see in the film is the psychiatrist in the hospital where
the lovers first meet, who offers a bromide in the form of a lyric from a song
by The The: "If you can't change the world, then change your world."
Sibel and Cahit eventually change, not their world, but their surroundings by
returning separately to
Head-On is exceptional for its vivid, multi-layered, and fairly
unsparing depiction of Turkish culture in
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Dark Passion Asuman Suner, March 2005
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Head On (2004) Nick
James from Sight and Sound, November
2004
The Village
Voice [J. Hoberman]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Outsider Slarek
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Matthew Wilder
Film Journal International (Ethan Alter)
Head On Henry Sheehan
Kamera.co.uk Elke de
Wit
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Jonny Lieberman
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Arthur Lazere
hybridmagazine.com Brian Villalobos
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
Twitch Todd Brown
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Crushed
by Inertia Lons
Milk
Plus: A Discussion of Film Daniel
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
d+kaz . intelligent movie
reviews [Daniel Kasman]
Film Freak
Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Movies into Film.com (N.P. Thompson)
The QNetwork Film Desk
[James Kendrick]
Thoughts on
Stuff Patrick
MyFilmReview Reinier Verhoef
filmcritic.com Matt Langdon
16mm
Shrine perhaps the most uninformed
review out there by Ash Karreau
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
VISIONS OF EUROPE
25 European Union countries,
25 directors (140 mi) in this omnibus
film from 2004
Fatih Akin (segment
"Die alten bösen Lieder")
Inevitably
uneven, this compendium has 25 filmmakers – one from each of the 25
member-states of the EU – reflecting, any way they please, on how the Union
might affect life in their own respective countries. Best by far are those by
fairly established directors: Bélà Tarr’s endless Hungarian food-queue,
Malgosia Szumowska’s droll tale of a remote crucifix at a Polish crossroads, Barbara
Albert’s wry evocation of a divided Austria, Aki
Kaurismäki’s tribute to traditional Portuguese (!) customs; Peter
Greenaway’s three-colour shower; and Sasa Gedeon’s
diplomatic stab at the Czech national anthem. The Benelux countries are
generally the most disappointing, and a Maltese entry the most pleasingly
cheeky surprise.
Bright Lights Film Journal [Robert Keser]
CROSSING THE BRIDGE: THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL
Germany Turkey
Time Out London (Nick Funnell)
German-Turkish
director Akin follows Alexander Hacke, musical director on Akin’s sensational
‘Head-On’ and bassist with punk outfit Einstürzende Neubauten, around Istanbul
recording the city’s eclectic music scene. Hacke meets hairy rockers, fervent
buskers, wrecked Romanies, persecuted Kurds and crinkly popsters, as well as
some of the nicest – yet still credible – rappers you’re ever likely to
encounter. The film touches on the politics of the Turkish music biz
(apparently Kurdish music videos were only broadcast on TV for the first time a
few months before Hacke’s trip, allegedly to curry favour with the EU), but
Hacke’s explicit refusal to make sense of the remarkable mishmash arguably
hamstrings the otherwise enjoyable proceedings.
Crossing the
Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
Michael Sicinski, still not convinced from the Academic Hack:
First things first -- don't go see this movie. I
mean, it's fine and all, but for the price of a movie ticket in most major
markets, you can buy the soundtrack off iTunes, and this is a much better use
of your money and time. Now then, as far as Akin's documentary goes, it's
perfectly serviceable. It follows Wenders'
Having fallen in love with Turkish music while working on
Fatih Akin's 2004 Head-On, German avant-garde musician
Alexander Hacke returned shortly thereafter—with Akin and his camera in tow—to
explore and record the country's diverse sounds. Crossing the Bridge: The
Sound of Istanbul documents Hacke's journey throughout Turkey's sonic
landscape, from the grunge-influenced rock of Duman and the multicultural
hip-hop of Ceza to the '50s and '60s tunes embraced by Canadian folk singer
Brenna MacCrimmon and the classic pop of regional icons Orhan Gencebay and
Sezen Akzu. What he discovers is a country defined by its geographic situation
between East and West, a place whose fundamental fabric is comprised of threads
from America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East but which nonetheless exhibits
its own distinctive identity.
Structured as a series of walkabout vignettes in which Hacke travels from one
recording space to another (or, in the case of street players, an outdoor
plaza), Akin's documentary functions as a compact introduction to a little
known music scene, its aesthetic gracefully reflecting the disposition of its
many artists and its narration and interview clips providing just enough
historical and social context for its performances. The resulting portrait is
one of constant, unconscious cross-cultural dialogue, where the combination of,
say, Asian instruments and Twista-like rhymes—or a band's Western drum kit
featuring a traditional darbuka instead of a snare—allows for uniquely personal
means of comprehension and expression.
In light of the country's legacy of suppressing and/or disparaging locally
cultivated music (such as that of Zappa-ish Erkin Koray and Kurdish crooner
Aynur), contemporary Turkish music often functions as an inherently political
act aimed at simultaneously maintaining one's heritage and forging a new path,
even as some artists' proclamations about their desire to lyrically deal with
relevant issues are contradicted by refrains filled with familiar egocentric
boasts and wistful laments. Yet ironically, it's the iconic Gencebay—an
enormous movie and recording star who, in film clips, comes across like a
Turkish Richard Roundtree—and the regal Akzu that are the true heart of Crossing
the Bridge, their homegrown, heartfelt songs about loss and misfortune
ultimately drowning out the more hybridized sounds of their rocking and rapping
successors.
FilmJerk.com (Neylan Bagcioglu)
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
The Village
Voice [R. Emmet Sweeney]
Film Journal International (Daniel Eagan)
Choking on
Popcorn Mariken
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
Exclaim!
[Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Scott Macdonald
Culture Wars
[Nathalie Rothschild]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner] (great photo)
Movieeveryday.com
[Scooter Thompson]
The Nation (Stuart Klawans)
Page 3
signandsight an interview with Fatih Akin from Daniel Bax
The Hollywood Reporter at Cannes Duane Byrge
Santa Fe Reporter Mark Jenkins
Austin Chronicle [Marrit Ingman]
Los Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
THE EDGE OF HEAVEN (Auf Der Anderen Seite) A 95
aka:
On the Other Side
This film opens and
closes on a brilliant shot, each offering its own thematic observation,
beginning with a car arriving at a desolate, run down gas station, where the
traveler is called by the name of “brother” several times, a sign of cultural respect,
but one that is multi-sided, as the film soon reveals. Fatih Akin has written another one of those
Kieslowski-like intersecting plot scenarios told in three chapter headings
involving three families with mixed German-Turkish heritage, a Turkish father
and son living in Germany, a Turkish mother living in Germany but separated
from her long lost daughter, and a German mother and daughter, not necessarily
seen in any correct order. At some point
in the film, all are connected, but what matters most is not the interweaving
mathematical construction, which is interesting enough, but the deep-seeded
connections that are established, some of which are profoundly moving. The film highlights the differences between
the two cultures in the first two shots, which couldn’t be more opposite,
providing the viewer some idea as to the vast divide that exists between
characters. Historically, as the
postwar French invited the Algerians, Turks were invited into Germany to work
as “guest workers,” the exact same term President Bush has used for his
proposed temporary resident immigration program with Mexicans, a proposal that
went nowhere except to fan the flames of racist intolerance along the border
states where they are building giant iron fences to keep the immigrants
out. While these host nations offer
unskilled, low wage labor, it has been accompanied by deep seeded resentment in
the mother country against the “foreigners” as well as complications arising
when first generation offspring are actually born citizens, yet treated with
racist scorn and disregard. Evidence
Fassbinder’s earlier German classic ALI:
FEAR EATS THE SOUL (1974) and the recent riots outside
Tuncel Kurtiz as Ali
Aksu is an Anthony Quinn, Zorba the Greek type character, an old Turkish man
who retains his vigorous energy and charm, and his delight with the pleasures
of women and drink. When he finds a
Fassbinderesque Turkish hooker in
This
film is, according to Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, also Twitch: the second entry in an intended trilogy
"Liebe, Tod und Teufel"
("Love, Death and the Devil")—of which Akin's acclaimed Head-On
was the first installment. While not as explosive as his previous film HEAD ON (2004),
a radically offbeat punk love story, this is still a daring work of probing
intelligence on the power of redemption, simultaneously tearing us apart while
also bringing us closer together, set in an expanding internationalized stage
with a constantly-on-the-move camera style by Rainer Klausmann that beautifully
captures with precision the finer details in each culture, which is an
extraordinary expression simply by composition alone, adding authentic
locations and music to a superb ensemble of actors, lead by Schygulla who may
surprise many with the depth of her performance, but she is given some of the
best scenes in the film which occur near the end. Her character beautifully transcends the
cultural divide with her effortless style of understatement and also offers a
refreshing look at what those self-absorbed kids from Fassbinder’s KATZELMACHER
(1969) might have turned into forty years later. The final shot has its own transcendent
quality, which could easily be a shot from similar films such as Ozon’s TIME TO
LEAVE (2005) or Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s CLIMATES (2006), yet shown here, coming on
the heels of Schygulla’s personal transformation, offers profound insight. It’s so easy to get caught up in our
differences, which is at the root of KATZELMACHER, shown through simple,
ordinary acts of societal prejudice and xenophobia, but what we have in common
is all too often overlooked and forgotten, but not by Akin, called Fatih
Fassbinder in some reviews, who skillfully navigates outside the jurisdiction
of national boundaries and identities by knowing each so well and instead,
despite the meandering journey, cuts a path straight to the heart of the
matter, creating believable people who suffer unfathomable losses yet retain a
surprising emotional resilience.
Cannes
Dispatch 4 George the Cyclist from Kipuka – Vox, May 23,
2007
“The
Edge of Heaven
"
by the German/Turkish director Fatih Akin splits its time between and
following six characters (two
sets of mothers and daughters and a father and son--four Turks and two
Germans). The spellbinding, continually
evolving plot includes the unfortunate, accidental deaths of two of them.
The linear plot,
which doesn’t try to interweave multiple stories simultaneously, but just
proceeds relentlessly ahead, follows a Turkish/German professor of German to Turkey,
where he tries to track down the daughter of his father's live-in prostitute.
Ironically, the daughter has come to to track down her mother. The daughter is
involved with a militant group in Turkey and seeks asylum in Germany. She is
befriended by a good-hearted young woman who has recently returned from several
months in India. This was another exceptional film in the Competition category.
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
Fateh Akin is not the kind of guy who wins the hearts of
millions. His Turkish/German cross-cultural nightmares deal in complexities and
emotions that most films — even good ones — soft-pedal so as to make them
palatable, and this does nothing for the size of his fan base. That’s a
tragedy, for The Edge of Heaven proves his worth in ways quite separate from
the fact that it’s one of the best films of the year.
Divided into three sections, the film deals first with stories about two
women’s deaths: a middle-aged Turkish prostitute who shacks up for a price with
an aging countryman and a lesbian student who falls for a dissident Turk on the
run from the police. It wouldn’t be cricket to tell you the how and why but the
deaths are mostly catalysts for the characters that live on, some of whom
barely miss knowing each other even as they need each other to put together the
pieces of their lives.
On the face of it that sounds like the Magnolia/Babel school of “we are all
connected, let’s hold hands” filmmaking but Akin turns the model on its head.
Instead of disparate people made tenuously and spuriously coherent, this film
misleads people intimately linked into losing relationships they need to be
whole. And told with bluntness, brutality and courage, it lays bare their
painful shortcomings with a power all but vanished from current cinema.
This is the “cultural exchange” movie
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun)
Turkish-German
director Fatih
Akin broadens his canvas and quietens his tone for his follow-up to the
fiery and intimate ‘Head-On’ (2004). His concern is again with movement between
Turkey and Germany – and its consequences for the individual – although this
time his enquiry takes on a cross-generational edge, as well as a more
thoughtful and maudlin one: we’re never very far from death.
Coincidence is
Akin’s scheme as he separately presents, via two chapters, the lives of an
estranged mother and daughter. Yeter (Nursel Köse) is a prostitute in Bremen
who makes an arrangement to live with elderly Ali (Tuncel
Kurtiz), another lost Turk, although he accidentally kills her when she threatens
to leave.
Meanwhile, her
daughter, Ayten (Nurgül Yesilçay) is a dissident on the run in Hamburg who
makes friends with a German woman, Lotte (Patrycia Ziolkowska), who’s willing
to go to any length to help her. Events move to Istanbul when Ayten is
repatriated and Ali’s son, Nejat (Baki Davrak),
a professor of German, arrives in the city looking to find the daughter of his
father’s late partner-cum-escort.
As in ‘Head-On’,
fate dominates proceedings, but there’s no escaping the contrivances of Akin’s
script. Maybe that’s the point – the loose grip his players have on where
they’re going – but it detracts a little from a film that is otherwise
thoughtful and engaging, even if you miss the up-close study of ‘Head-On’ amid
the film’s abundant characters and detail.
review: Auf der andere
Seite (The Edge of Heaven) (Cannes 2007) Boyd van Hoeij from European-Films
Fatih Akin leaves behind
the raw power and direct impact tactics of his Golden Bear winner Gegen die Wand (Head-on) for something more
evocative and complex with his Cannes Competition film Auf der andere Seite (The Edge of Heaven; the
Turkish title is Yasamin kiyisinda)
-- just note difference between the titles of the two films. The story is still
set between
The film follows two stories that both end in foretold deaths
(the first two parts are called Yeter’s Death and Lotte’s Death) before moving
on to the third part that carries the film’s title and has an even stronger
sense of continuity after death in the original German, which literally
translates as “On the Other Side”. The German title also points more
strongly to the theme of incomprehension that the Germans and Turks have of
each other and the preconceived ideas they have of the other party; the whole
idea of having sides seems to conveniently overlook the fact they are all
humans.
Yeter (Nursel Koese) is a
Turkish prostitute who decides to say yes to an exclusive, live-in contract for
her services with the older Ali (Tuncel Kurtiz), a Turkish immigrant in Germany
whose son Nejat (Baki Davrak) is a
professor of German literature. When his father is sent to jail after hitting
Yeter (which results in her death), Nejat leaves the country for
Yeter’s daughter Ayten (Nurgul Yesilcay) is a Turkish militant who thinks that
her mother works in a German shoe shop but who has no further information on
here whereabouts. When things get too hot for her in her home country she
travels to
The director’s Gegen die Wand was a
straightforward single narrative, while his Solino
was a two-part story that allowed a view of the protagonists’ life at two
different ages. Auf der andere Seite is
not as easily classified, as the two separate stories are not so
straightforwardly connected (the shared history of Ayten and Yeter has taken
place offscreen before the film begins). Akin’s work is so serene,
contemplative and yet so complex that it bypasses any simple comparisons to
recent convoluted choral works such as Crash
and Babel and offers pleasing
touches of Kieslowskian non-coincidences, though Akin is certainly not on the
same level as the legendary Polish director of the Ten Commandments
and the Three Colours Trilogy -- at
least, not yet. Some of the coincidences and metaphors (a Turkish immigrant's
son as a German literature professor?) seem a bit too far-fetched and could
have used some fine-tuning. A debate about
As an acting showcase, Auf der andere Seite is outstanding. Hanna Schygulla gives one of her most riveting performances in years, while the Turkish ensemble is excellent all-round, with Baki Davrak (on whom the film opens and closes) arguably the lead, though he carries it off with a light grace that belies his character's inner trouble.
The Turkish-German director Fatih Akin's new film has been given a poetic English title for its UK release, but the German original, Auf der Anderen Seite, "On the Other Side", is better. This is an intriguing, complex, beautifully acted and directed piece of work, partly a realist drama of elaborate coincidences, near-misses and near-hits, further tangled with shifts in the timeline - and partly an almost dreamlike meditation with visual symmetries and narrative rhymes.
It is about the tension between
At the movie's centre is Nejat
(Baki Davrak), a second-generation Turk who has attained what might be the
greatest distinction
It is a glitteringly confident
narrative pattern, gesturing at the globalised, historical forces that govern
individual lives; in some ways it is like a very, very much better version of
Alejandro González Iñárritu's mediocre film
To the political institutions
involved, Akin directs a fierce satiric pessimism. A Turkish revolutionary is
refused asylum by a German court not on the grounds of terrorist activities -
of which it is in fact unaware - but on the Catch-22 basis that a country about
to be admitted to the EU club couldn't possibly be tyrannical. Later, after
repatriation, we see the Turkish government cut a cynical deal to release this
same suspect from prison to placate the German authorities. Amid the
bureaucracy and the institutional bad faith, however, individual Turks and
Germans find common ground: friendship and love.
This is perhaps not a film for
everyone; it does need a leap of faith, though not a very big leap. What I
think is beyond doubt is that Akin - already the winner of the Golden Bear at
the Berlin film festival for his 2004 film Head-On - is a director who has
found a real voice. He tackles big ideas, big themes, in the service of which
he creates believable human beings and elicits tremendous performances from his
actors. It is bold and exhilarating film-making.
REVIEW |
Scattered People: Fatih Akin's "The Edge of Heaven" Elbert Ventura from Reverse Shot on indieWIRE
A German filmmaker of Turkish descent, Fatih Akin has
made hybrid cultures and hyphenated identities his great subject. "Head-On,"
his acclaimed breakthrough film from 2004, told a love story between two German
Turks that wended its way back to the homeland. In "The Edge of Heaven,"
his latest, the fixation on blurred borders and social dislocation continues on
a larger canvas. Several characters shuttle back and forth between
Divided into three chapters, the movie is
populated by the homesick and the homeless. There's Nejat (Baki Davrak),
a professor of German literature in
That bustling synopsis is as problematic onscreen as it reads on the page. In an interview with the "Montreal Mirror," Akin talked of a fecund period after the success of "Head-On": "I put together all my notes and ideas, and pulled together various stories I'd heard. I asked, how can I put all those elements together?" It's a comment that belies a writer unable or unwilling to edit himself. Instead of refining his material, Akin deems each theme and idea indispensable, with contrivance and cliche serving as the connective tissue that (barely) holds it all together. Characters cross paths without knowing it; the pull of fate -- or, in this case, an overactive plot -- is palpable. Akin's resort to melodrama has drawn comparisons to Fassbinder, but "The Edge of Heaven" really comes off more like a poor man's Kieslowski -- a daft daisy chain of missed connections and strained affinities.
The winner of the Best Screenplay prize at last year's Cannes
Film Festival, the movie is certainly au courant in its preoccupations.
Evoking the globetrotting alienation of Inarritu, Akin lays out his themes with
great purpose and little subtlety. A description of the protagonist just about
sums it up: a German professor of Turkish descent who goes back to
But if the movie's reach exceeds its grasp, it doesn't necessarily render it without merit. For all of his weaknesses as a writer, Akin can be a vivid director. "Head-On" may have romanticized gutter life, but its soulful, sensual depiction of l'amour fou was never less than magnetic. "The Edge of Heaven" broods more and crackles less, but it keeps you hooked with its conviction. Part of its pull lies in Akin's touching faith in the kindness of strangers. At every turn in the movie, a helping hand is offered to someone in need, a humane undercurrent that cuts through the narrative's obstinate convolutions. "The Edge of Heaven" also establishes a few poignant tropes that are distinctly Akin's: the solemn passenger staring out the window of a bus, the solitary tourist in a crepuscular hotel room, the voyage that leads to nowhere.
Perhaps "nowhere" is too strong. By movie's end, Akin gives Nejat a place to rest, though the pall of ambiguity still pervades. An inversion of "The 400 Blows"' freeze-frame by the sea, the movie's last shot also happens to be its most poetic, an open-ended seaside image promising a family reunion in which Akin allows his overheated movie -- and his peripatetic protagonist -- to cool down and breathe.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| The Edge of Heaven (2007) Catherine Wheatley, March 2008, also seen here:
Sight &
Sound [Catherine Wheatley]
Westminster
Wisdom Gracchi
EDGE OF HEAVEN, THE Michael Tully from Hammer to Nail
The
Evening Class: BERLIN & BEYOND 2008—<em>The Edge of Heaven</em ... Michael Guillen, a critical round up, also
seen here: Twitch
Cinemattraction.com [Sarah Manvel]
The
House Next Door [Vadim Rizov]
Cinematical
[Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Onion A.V. Club
[Noel Murray]
The Lumière Reader Gautaman Bhaskaran
Creative
Loafing [Curt Holman]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
Film-Forward.com Yana Litovsky
The
Village Voice [Nick Pinkerton]
ScreenGrab:
The Nerve Movie Blog - Indie Film News, Reviews and Gossip Mike D’Angelo from Screengrab, May 23, 2007
The
Edge Of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite)
Peter Brunette negatively from Screendaily
DVD Times Noel Megahey in a negative mode
THE
EDGE
OF HEAVEN Steve Erickson from
Chronicle of a Passion says it couldn’t be more generic
2007 September 09 « Rightwing
Film Geek Victor Morton
Future Movies Coc Forsythe
EyeForFilm.co.uk Val Kermode
Daily
Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Mediterranean Film Festival (Split) report
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Avuncular
American [Gerald Loftus]
Scott Roxborough
interview with Akin from the Hollywood
Reporter, May 23, 2007
Young,
Qualified and Unwanted article on
the exodus of young Turkish-German professionals by Michael Sontheimer from Der Spiegel, May 21, 2008
BBCi
- Films Anna Smith
The
Edge of Heaven Sukhdev Sandhu from
the Daily Telegraph
The Japan Times Giovanni Fazio
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Philadelphia
Weekly [Matt Prigge]
Austin
Chronicle [Josh Rosenblatt]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
SOUL KITCHEN B+ 91
It’s incredible, so Romanesque. —Shayn Weiss (Birol Ünel), describing the cavernous confines of the restaurant Soul Kitchen
This whimsical Fatih
Akin film is a blast, a comic romp through the streets of Hamburg, Germany,
Fatih's home town, featuring the crazy restaurant antics of German-Greeks
all set to a 1960's black funk musical soundtrack. It is like a
valentine to his home town, but done only with the manic energy that he
provides. It brought back recollections of the Beatles playing there
before they became famous, as in Hamburg they were just another bar band, and
the town was filled with bar bands, each with their own dedicated group of fans. More a love poem than anything else to Akin’s
hometown of Hamburg, Germany, which is really a spirited romp through the back
streets, mostly centered in an empty industrial warehouse district where
German-Greek émigré Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos, co-writer with Akin, a German-Turk)
runs his mostly empty restaurant named Soul Kitchen, serving fish sticks and
greasy French fries with ketchup and other monstrosities for meals, but his
regulars love the stuff. Zinos wears a
Jim Morrison haircut and runs around in T-shirts and a black leather
jacket. Soul Kitchen (which is not in the film) is actually the name of one
of the songs on the initial album by The Doors, which has the beer barrel polka
feel of something created by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt
Weill, and can be heard here: Soul Kitchen - The Doors.
No longer occupied with
the ramifications of cultural differences, this plays out more like a zany
improvised road movie that never actually gets on the road, but instead
affectionately relishes the quirky peculiarities of the city, including
diverse, even eccentric personalities.
Top on the list is Zinos’s semi-incarcerated brother Illias, Moritz
Bleibtreu, a professional burglar out by day on partial parole, who carries the
distinctive habits of a career criminal, having never worked a day in his life,
but instead spends his time at the restaurant gambling with his deadbeat
friends named Goat or Ali Davidson and advancing his various criminal
enterprises. Zinos’s girl friend Nadine,
Pheline Roggan, is moving to Shanghai on a work assignment, which is causing a
bitter conflict between the two of them that is not exactly remedied by their
Skype hook up. Her aristocratic family’s
last supper together is like something out of a Buñuel movie, but it is the
only scene that features Monica Bleibtreu (the mother of Moritz) as Nadine’s
grandmother, as in real life she died during the shoot. She gloriously yells at everyone to shut
up. Birol Ünel, perhaps the best thing
in every Fatih Akin movie, plays Shayn Weiss, an insane chef who not only gets
fired for refusing to heat up a Spanish gazpacho soup that is traditionally
served cold, but then gets hired by Zinos at Soul Kitchen, only to drive out
every single customer in the joint by refusing to serve them the junk they’re
used to eating, calling them culinary fascists! Ünel is drop dead hilarious in every scene
with that Buster Keaton-like hang dog frown, his efficiency with knives, and
his propensity to lose his explosive temper at any moment. Add to this group the Uma Thurman look-alike
from PULP FICTION (1994), Anna Bederke as Lucia, the tough as nails, hard
drinking waitress who lives for free on the rooftop somewhere above the
warehouse and falls in love on the dance floor with Illias. There’s also a crusty old sailor on the
premises continually working on his boat named Sokrates (Demir Gökgöl), a
bearded old coot always complaining about Zinos while refusing to pay rent, yet
the man, usually seen wearing headphones, never misses a free drink or
meal.
This only begins to
describe the madcap characters that comprise this screwball comedy. The story, if there is a story, involves
greedy tax collectors and an old friend of Zinos who seems to be carrying a
grudge from grade school, Thomas Neumann (Wotan Wilke Möhring), a ruthless real
estate broker who is hell bent on obtaining the deed for Soul Kitchen, a man
working secretly for another shady businessman Udo Kier, which should tell you
something about Neumann’s shabby character.
Neumann sticks the Health Department on the dilapidated restaurant,
which without customers, has been turned into an immense practice studio for a
budding rock “n” roll band comprised of former employees of the
restaurant. Their music, which evolves
along with restaurant renovations from grungy punk rock to sophisticated soul
music, along with a clever advertising scheme, brings in a whole new upscale crowd
that finds the culinary delights of Chef Shayn out of this world and Zinos is
finally rolling in the money. The
Honduran tree bark sequence where Shayn laces the desert with a so-called
aphrodisiac turns the entire premises into an after hours orgy. But, of course, it’s not all about happiness
and light, as Zinos must plunge into a world of turmoil, where he resembles a
Job-like character, a man trying to make a decent living when the entire
universe conspires against him. That
black cloud mostly comes in the form of his brother, Illias, becoming the
manager of the restaurant while Zinos follows a hare-brained idea to join
Nadine in Shanghai, having had enough of uneventful Skype contact. These plans immediately go awry, as Zinos’s
life is soon spinning out of control, exacerbated by a plaguing back injury
that occurs early in the film, leaving him in physical as well as emotional
agony, taking a turn for the worse when he discovers his brother has lost the
deed to the restaurant in a card game, leaving them temporarily sharing a hotel
room with the ever complaining Sokrates.
As he’s self-employed,
he’s not part of the nation’s health care system, as he opted out to try to
save money. So the man has an aversion
to doctors and their skyrocketing costs, but instead explores every alternative
medicine avenue, from initial therapy sessions with Anna, Dorka Gryllus, a
gorgeous Hungarian actress last seen in IRINA PALM (2007), to having to take
drastic measures, where Anna carries his hobbling frame to a natural healer, a
Turk known as Kemal the Bone Crusher.
What happens here is what one might expect, as the Bone Crusher uses
Neanderthal methods of excrutiating pain outlawed since the Medieval era, a
crude practice involving ropes, a homemade stockade and a torture rack. What’s truly inspiring, at least in my view,
is that Akin uses the persistent back pain routine, growing worse throughout
the entire film, for the sole purposes of setting up this visual gag, which
takes all of ten seconds, and of course pokes fun at his own cultural stereotypes. Throughout this entire saga, there is a wall
to wall musical soundtrack, from an opening Quincy Jones jazz number of “Hicky
Burr” from the 60’s that features Bill Cosby doing the mumbles, to Sam Cooke,
Ruth Brown’s “I Don’t Know,” Curtis Mayfield’s “Get Down,” Dyke and the
Blazers’ “We Got More Soul,” and the Isley Brothers’ “It’s Your Thing,” but
also including jazz and German hip hop as well as some traditional German
songs. The eclectic variance reaches a musical
peak in the final sequence which features the gorgeously peaceful and
transcendent sounds of Pharoah Sanders “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” one of
the most perfect pieces of music ever written and the only time I’ve ever seen
it used in a film. This can only lead to
an exquisite finale, where the exuberance continues over the end credits. There are musical soundtrack samples
currently available on a 2-CD listing from Amazon Germany heard here: http://www.amazon.de/Soul-Kitchen-Ost/dp/B002UIWSJ6/. While this is not
among Akin’s best, as it doesn’t contain the complex seriousness of his earlier
efforts, this film certainly contains his effervescence for life, as it’s
literally bubbling over with exuberant energy and what can only be called
fun.
T
Magazine: Hamburger Helper Stephen
Heyman from The New York Times,
August 20, 2010 (excerpt)
Recently, he recounted a night out with two American friends who had previously urged him to move to New York. Akin took them to a electro dance party in a run-down pedestrian mall, to a bar that used to be a brothel and to the Kiez St-Pauli, Hamburg’s red-light district, where the Beatles stayed when they lived in Hamburg. At 6 a.m., the party moved to the street but showed no sign of letting up. “O.K.,” his guests relented. “We get it now why you don’t want to leave.”
Time Out
New York review [4/5] Joshua
Rothkopf
So much of moviemaking comes out of deliberateness: the rigorously plotted screenplay, the expensive highway explosion, etc. Thus, when a film takes on the improvisatory spirit of whatever as its game plan, it’s impossible not to admire it. Soul Kitchen isn’t the best effort by Germany’s Fatih Akin; that would be his postpunk romance Head-On (2004), which felt Fassbinder-worthy. But his new movie, an occasionally shouty comedy, is easily his most fun: It’s about the relaunching of a restaurant—more of a bohemian hangout—along with all the madness that goes into such endeavors. The lofty dining-cum-performance space (which lends us the title) welcomes a knife-flinging diva of a head chef, a wanna-be rocker, a rapacious property developer and even a tax collector, all of whom yield to its high-volume vibe. Bumping well after midnight, the joint becomes an emblem for the liberated film itself.
Akin, who uses throbbing dance music as effectively as Danny Boyle, has a softness for Hamburg’s cultural outsiders; he was born to Turkish immigrants and his movies flaunt a post-reunification embrace. The humorously mystified owner of the establishment, thick-maned Zinos (Bousdoukos, also a cowriter), is a Greek-born entrepreneur. (He plays a lot like John Cusack’s vinyl-store proprietor in High Fidelity.) After his Skype relationship with a Shanghai-based girlfriend gets difficult, he throws himself into the rehabilitation of his criminal brother, Illias (Bleibtreu), who needs a job to justify his prison day-leaves. Their bond is the heart of the film—even as Zinos is reduced to a bent-over wreck (he throws out his back early on), you feel the character is somehow growing in stature. Give this a shot.
The
Village Voice [Nicolas Rapold]
Moving in just six years from critic-approved discovery (Head-On)
to state-of-the-union meller (Edge of Heaven), with a fruitful detour
into the music doc (Crossing the Bridge), Turkish-German director Fatih
Akin now takes a break with a peppy Eurocomedy. Wild-haired young
Greek-German Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos) runs a lumpen-loved schnitzel
joint in a former Hamburg warehouse. Events with socioeconomically loaded
undertones send this Akin protagonist spinning: Rich, pasty-faced girlfriend
(Pheline Roggan) chases a job in China, light-fingered brother Ilias
(watch-twirling Moritz Bleibtreu) gets parole, crass childhood
friend Thomas (Wotan Wilke Möhring) schemes to flip the property, a militant
new chef triggers clientele flight ("Culinary racists!"). But since
the filmmaker's main agenda here is to keep things bumping along, the fraught
situations are happily played and funk-scored as crowd-pleasing rather than
issue-stroking. As the hapless, devoted, herniated restaurateur, Bousdoukos
mugs, frets, and Frankenstein-walks with a winning excitability. Pseudo-retro
fish-eye lensing, party-camera pivots, and obvious gags are among the movie's
goofier features. Akin tends toward snappy plotlines, but the amiable sell of
his latest movie turns that bug into a feature.
Salon
(Andrew O'Hehir) review [Best of Tribeca 2010]
Better known for serious-minded explorations of the new, multicultural Europe, like his 2007 international award-winner "The Edge of Heaven," Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin tunes his instrument to a higher, more farcical pitch here. "Soul Kitchen" is the title of the movie (in German as well as English) and the name of the ragtag restaurant in a scruffy neighborhood of Hamburg whose anguished proprietor, Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), can't decide whether to stay and fight for his business or chase his wayward girlfriend to Shanghai. His ne'er-do-well brother, Illias (the terrific German actor Moritz Bleibtreu) -- a mess of tics, gangster mannerisms and failed schemes -- is just out of prison, and Zinos' temperamental, haute-cuisine chef seems poorly matched to the customer base.
This sort of slam-bang Marx Brothers comedy, where the coincidences pile atop each other and almost every scene ends in chaos, isn't necessarily Akin's strong suit. His portrait of Hamburg as a multicultural hothouse where real estate tycoons, rock musicians, hipster entrepreneurs and grizzled German seamen collide in the same restaurant is undeniably appealing. Indeed, the clear subtext of "Soul Kitchen" is the fact that in Hamburg a Turkish-German like Akin and a Greek-German like Bousdoukos (who co-wrote the screenplay) can make a silly comedy together, while their cousins back home have a considerably more fraught relationship.
Short
Takes: Soul Kitchen - Film Comment Laura Kern, July/August 2010
If the apartment of the female lead in Head-On (04) looks (according to her boyfriend) like it’s been hit by a chick bomb, then the title restaurant of Fatih Akin’s latest film has been hit by the male equivalent. The dingy, sparsely frequented Hamburg eatery in question is owned and run by Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos), an endearing Greek-German, who each night deep-fries frozen food for undiscriminating locals. It’s hardly the type of joint that even his awkwardly tall girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) would stoop to enter.
Akin, a German with Turkish roots, is known for exploring themes of cultural identity and homeland. And while Soul Kitchen is his self-professed attempt at a Heimatfilm, it more closely resembles a screwball comedy. It’s fast and airy, and follows a protagonist whose escalating misfortunes are played mostly for laughs. Nadine is relocating to Shanghai—a move Zinos also hopes to make—just as his lazy, thieving brother, Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu), is granted part-time leave from prison as long as he’s “employed” at Soul Kitchen. Plus, the irascible new chef, Shayn (the priceless Birol Ünel), is estranging customers with his lofty culinary aspirations. Oh, and then there are the back problems that render Zinos practically immobile.
Like the aphrodisiac-spiked dessert that Shayn prepares one night, the movie’s effects may not linger long, but they are feverishly fun and guilt-free while they last.
The Onion A.V. Club
review [B+] Scott Tobias, also seen
here: Soul Kitchen ·
Film Review Soul Kitchen · Movie Review · The A.V. Club
Exciting young German-Turkish director Fatih Akin makes movies about the harmonious—and sometimes not-so-harmonious—ways that cultures merge or collide. But he’s a populist at heart, not given to reinventing genre films so much as invigorating them with rakish humor, boundless intensity, and a great feeling for character. In July and the masterful Head-On were smart cross-cultural twists on the road movie and the romantic comedy, respectively, and Akin’s last feature, The Edge Of Heaven, was an everything-is-connected drama done right. Now Akin returns with Soul Kitchen, perhaps his most broadly entertaining effort to date, the filmic equivalent of a big, shaggy bearded collie, eager for people to scruff its floppy ears. And a little slobbering aside, it’s just as irresistible.
As the Greek-born proprietor of an American-themed grease pit in Hamburg, Germany, Adam Bousdoukos plays a slightly more put-together variation on the ne’er-do-well hero of Head-On. Both are tagged as losers, and not unfairly, but both also reveal a capacity for change. Bousdoukos’ restaurant attracts a few regulars who happily feast on powder-packet soups and deep-fried fish fillets, but the business is also attracting the wrong kind of interest from health inspectors and tax collectors. With his girlfriend (Pheline Roggan) heading to Shanghai, Bousdoukos hastily works to reinvent his business and leave it to other hands so he can join her, but his new hires are volatile, to say the least. His ex-con brother (Moritz Bleibtreu) wants to manage the place, but isn’t accustomed to working, and his new chef (Birol Ünel) has a temperament in the kitchen that would make Gordon Ramsay blush.
To this already bustling ensemble, Akin adds a plucky waitress who has eyes for Bousdoukos’ brother and a cantankerous barfly who lives on the property, as well as a raucous soundtrack that includes everything from Kool & The Gang and The Isley Brothers to contemporary blues, reggae, rock, and electronica. Soul Kitchen plays everything big and loud—and sometimes too doggedly conventional—but it’s the rare example of a crowd-pleaser made without cynicism or calculation. It’s about a protagonist who strains to make everyone happy, and it does the same without breaking a sweat.
not coming to a theater
near you review Mike D’Angelo
Nobody who saw Head-On, Turkish-German director Fatih Akin’s breakthrough feature (at least in the U.S.), has likely forgotten the ecstatic moment in which its two lost protagonists leap wildly about a dingy apartment while shouting “PUNK IS NOT DEAD!” at the top of their lungs. With his latest film, Soul Kitchen, Akin makes a valiant attempt to sustain that level of manic energy from start to finish, and comes remarkably close to succeeding. So over-the-top boisterous that I initially misinterpreted its gleeful disdain for conventional niceties as mere ineptitude, this is a two-chord Ramones album of a movie with infectious high spirits and no use for subtlety; once I finally surrendered to its goofy charm (which took nearly half an hour, so conditioned was I by Akin’s fairly somber previous film, The Edge of Heaven), it became one of those rare cinema experiences that’s more akin to a party than a movie.
The story itself is hilariously overstuffed. Soul Kitchen is the name of a nondescript Hamburg diner run by Zinos Kazantsakis, a Greek-German (Akin is really stretching here!) whose girlfriend has just taken a job in China and wants him to join her there. At her going-away party, Zinos witnesses a tantrum thrown by a temperamental chef and shortly thereafter hires the guy, even though he refuses to cook the comfort food Soul Kitchen’s patrons prefer. Meanwhile, a starchy tax collector threatens to repossess the appliances; an old school chum angles to buy Zinos out (making anonymous complaints to the health inspector when Zinos refuses); and Zinos’ brother, a professional burglar doing six months in jail, asks for a phony job at the restaurant in order to take part in a work-release program. Throw in a herniated disc, an aspiring rock band, no-limit hold’em poker, ill-advised power-of-attorney arrangements and a cell phone with Zapp & Roger’s “I Want to Be Your Man” as its never-not-funny ringtone, and you still haven’t even scratched the surface of all the heady nonsense at play.
For those unprepared for intentional stupidity, as I was, Soul Kitchen will at first seem plenty jarring. Akin works entirely in shorthand here, encouraging his ensemble cast to play to the rafters and getting instantly to the point of every scene—so much so that it sometimes seems as if he shot the outline for the script rather than an actual fleshed-out screenplay. Every line of dialogue is purely functional, every plot twist deliberately telegraphed. Cartoon behavior reigns: When Zinos’ brother, smitten with Soul Kitchen’s hot waitress, sees her grooving to the work of a club DJ, he immediately phones a couple of fellow thugs who appear a moment later, masked, to steal the turntables and mixing board. At one point, a character’s sudden fall inspires a camera move rarely seen in films not starring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. No gag is too silly, no incident too contrived, no anything “too much.”
So what separates Soul Kitchen from any random Hollywood comedy starring the middle-aged, defanged Eddie Murphy or Steve Martin? In a word, soul. Akin may be taking a quick breather from weighty subject matter, but that doesn’t mean he’s on autopilot. On the contrary, every frame of the movie throbs with conviction and the sheer joy of filmmaking, to the point where you may swear you can hear the director cackling in the background of certain particularly ludicrous shots and scenes. It’s exhilarating to see someone as gifted as Akin working in this broadly populist mode and treating it not as hackwork but as an opportunity to just cut loose for a little while. He brings the fun.
Tonight at the Movies
[Laurie Curtis]
Faith Akin, since his film debut in 1998 of Short Sharp Shock at the Locarno Film Festival, has been known for making films that make you think. They often explore the lives of German Turks and their struggles with living in two different cultures. They are riveting dramas that capture your attention like a thriller. Akin is not afraid to speak his mind and share his opinion; in 2006 he was investigated by German police after wearing a t-shirt bearing the image of a Nazi swastika. The t-shirt was Akin’s way of voicing his opinion on the Bush administration. With his latest film, Soul Kitchen, Akin surprises his audience with a smartly written comedy.
Zino (Adam Bousdoukos) is a young restaurant owner who caters to the working class serving up pizza, fish, burgers, and your typical diner fare. Business is just okay; he barley gets by each month and owes back taxes to the government. Zino’s love life does not seem to be going any better. His girlfriend Nadine (Pheline Roggan) is getting ready to depart for Shanghai, where she has taken a job as a foreign correspondent for a newspaper. On the night of her farewell party, Zino arrives late and smelling of his greasy kitchen. However, his luck seems to possibly take a turn when the chef, Shayn (Birol Ünel), at the high class restaurant of the farewell party is fired for refusing to make warm gazpacho for a diner. That is, until Zino’s brother Illias (Moritz Bleibtreu) turns up. Illias is out on partial parole and wants his brother to sign a work permit, allowing him more freedom.
Just when every situation in Zino’s life seems to be hopeless--his girlfriend has left for Shanghai, he has lost his regular customers who do not understand Shayn’s gourmet cooking, he has thrown out his back, and he is being cornered by former classmate, Neumann, who has practically demanded to buy the building that is the Soul Kitchen--a dance school opens up next door. The students fill the Soul Kitchen one night, lured by the sound of music coming from the restaurant. Suddenly the crowd is ordering up Shayn’s high priced meals faster than they can be made. Soul Kitchen becomes an evening hot spot filled with music and good food. With the restaurant back on its feet Zino decides to leave Soul Kitchen in his brother’s hands and join Nadine in Shanghai, but what Zino finds only breaks his heart.
Akin’s transition into comedy could not be more seamless. The script is full of sharp and witty writing. When Zino and Nadine are attempting a long distance relationship via Skype, his neighbor is peering in at Zino’s attempt at phone/video sex with his girlfriend. He closes the shade in an effort for privacy only to have the webcam get caught in the shade. It is scenes such as this that are edited with such precise comedic timing that they have the audience laughing out loud. Zino heads out for a night on the town with Lucia, the bartender/waitress at Soul Kitchen. As the evening becomes the wee hours of the morning, the color of their drinks change with each shot they consume. This small detail makes the scene funny. My favorite scene involves a button. It is absolutely hysterical, but do not want to spoil the scene by divulging the details; just know that Akin’s sense of comedic timing and detail is spot on.
Akin shot the film with movement, to keep the film flowing. The camera never remains still and keeps up with the flow of the story of Zino’s life. We are either moving with the characters, or moving away or towards them. The style of filming coupled with sharp editing gives the film its fast pace. The pace is consistent with the craziness that is Zino’s ever changing life and works with the story rather than against it.
As the Soul Kitchen gets its revival with a new clientele and gourmet menu, Zino’s character is also undergoing a transformation and it is illustrated on screen through his cooking lessons from Shayn. I particularly enjoyed these scenes, perhaps because of my love of food, and for me, they lent the film an earthiness.
I cannot write about this film without talking about the music, which is just as fast paced as the story and the style of cinematography. The film features an eclectic mix of music. Everything from Kool & The Gang and Quincy Jones to Sam Cook and Ruth Brown; There is even a bit of Greek Rembetika thrown in for good measure. It is a film that I could not stop tapping my feet too. As the film ends, It’s Your Thing by the Isley Brothers starts playing and my toes keep tapping to the beat all the way through the credits.
Soul Kitchen is a smartly written, laugh out loud comedy that will not disappoint.
The
House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
ReelTalk
(Misha Zubarev) review
The
House Next Door [Aaron Cutler]
Eternal
Sunshine of the Logical Mind [Bob Turnbull]
Slant
Magazine (Fernando F. Croce) review
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
CultureCatch.com [Brandon
Judell]
Soul
Kitchen | Review | Screen Lee
Marshall at Screendaily
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Movie Martyr (Jeremy
Heilman) review [2.5/4]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]
Daily
Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Cinema
Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
Soul
Kitchen | Chicago Reader JR Jones (capsule review)
ArtsBeat
Interview: Fatih Akin A Kitchen, and Filmmaker, With Soul, interview by
Mekado Murphy from The New York Times, April 23, 2010,
also seen here: A
Kitchen, and Filmmaker, With Soul - The New York Times
Hamburg
plans Beatles tribute Ed Meza from Variety, August 30, 2010
The
Globe and Mail (Jennie Punter) review [3/4]
Soul Kitchen Movie
Review & Film Summary (2010) | Roger Ebert
Chicago
Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review
The New York
Times (Stephen Holden) review
A
Hand That Links Germans and Turks
Nicholas Kulish from The New York
Times, January 6, 2008, also seen
here: 2007 profile of the director
T
Magazine: Hamburger Helper Stephen
Heyman from The New York Times,
August 20, 2010
Aldrich, Robert
Film
Reference Ed Lowry
Despite a commercially
respectable career both within the studio system and as an independent
producer-director, Robert Aldrich remains an ill-appreciated, if not entirely
bothersome presence for most American critics. Andrew Sarris did praise Aldrich
in 1968 as "one of the most strikingly personal directors of the past two
decades"; yet, for the most part, it has remained to the French and the
English to attempt to unravel the defiant quirkiness of Aldrich's career. Only
the otherworldly Kiss Me Deadly, which Paul Schrader unequivocably
dubbed "the masterpiece of film noir," has received anything like the
attention it deserves on this side of the Atlantic ;
yet the film is quite indicative of the bitter ironies, bizarre stylistics, and
scathing nihilism characteristic of most of Aldrich's work.
In bringing Mickey Spillane's
neo-fascist hero Mike Hammer to the screen, Kiss Me Deadly plays havoc
with the conventions of the hardboiled detective, turning the existential
avenger into a narcissistic materialist who exploits those around him for the
benefit of his plush lifestyle. In an outrageous alteration of the novel's
plot, Hammer becomes a modern neanderthal whose individualism is revealed as insanity
when it causes him to botch a case involving a box of pure nuclear energy and
thus the fate of the world. The result is a final shot of a mushroom cloud
rising from a California Hollywood genres and American
ideology.
The extremity of Aldrich's
reinterpretations of the Western in Ulzana's Raid, of the war movie in Attack!,
of the cop film in The Choirboys, and of the women's melodrama in Autumn
Leaves betrays a cynicism so bitter that it could only arise from a liberal
sensibility utterly disillusioned by an age in which morality has become a
cruel joke. In fact, the shattering of illusions is central to Aldrich's work,
and it is a powerfully self-destructive process, given the sweetness of the
illusions and the anger of his iconoclasm. In Whatever Happened to Baby
Jane?, a gothic horror film whose terms are explicitly the hideous
realities hidden beneath the sugar-coating of the entertainment industry,
Aldrich virtually defines the genre of camp, offering derisive laughter as the
only alternative to an unbearably absurd cosmos. This sense of black comedy
(which Aldrich shares with, and developed at the same time as, Hollywood
contemporary Stanley Kubrick) has frequently been responsible for the volatile
relationship his films have had with popular audiences. Given the context of a
life-and-death prison football game in The Longest Yard, Aldrich was
able to enlist the audience in the hero's bitter laughter in the face of a
triumphant totalitarian authority. But when he adopted the same black humor
toward the scandalous chicanery of the marginally psychotic cops in The
Choirboys, he angered almost everybody, not the least of whom was the
novel's author, Joseph Wambaugh.
Turned in an introspective
direction, Aldrich's acid sensibility resulted in an intensely discomforting,
stylistically alienated version of Clifford Odets's Hollywood-hating The Big
Knife and the madly ambitious The Legend of Lylah Clare, an 8–1/2
cum Vertigo far too complex by any Hollywood
standard. When turned outward toward the world at large, that same sensibility
was responsible for a downbeat, disheartening masterpiece like the
much-maligned Hustle, a film that succeeds better than almost any other
in summing up the moral displacement and emotional anguish of the whole decade
of the 1970s.
At his most skillful, Aldrich
could juggle ideologically volatile issues so well that his most popular film, The
Dirty Dozen, made during the politically turbulent period of the Vietnam
War, played equally well to hawks and doves. Its story of death row prisoners
exploited by the military bureaucracy into participation in a suicide raid,
where they are to attack a chateau, slaughtering both German officers and
civilians, seemed explicitly antiwar in its equation of heroism and criminality
and its critique of the body-count mentality of a morally corrupt system. Yet, The
Dirty Dozen still managed to emerge as a gung-ho war movie in the best Hollywood tradition. The multiple contradictions of the
film's stance are nowhere clearer than in its climactic scene, where Aldrich
has black athlete Jim Brown recreate one of his famous touchdown runs in order
to set off an underground holocaust explicitly parallelled to Auschwitz .
In a far less popular film, the
revisionist western Ulzana's Raid, Aldrich does confront the horrors of
Vietnam with a nearly intolerable accuracy via the properly bloody metaphor of
a cavalry company using West Point tactics to fight a band of Apache guerilla
warriors. The film relentlessly refuses to diminish the brutality of the red
man; even as it demonstrates the poverty of the white man's Christian idealism.
The result is perhaps the first western ever to cast America
More than any other mainstream
director, Aldrich insisted on presenting the radical contradictions of American
ideology. If we adopt a stance not nearly as cynical as his own in most of his
films, we might observe that his capacity to do so has frequently resulted in
sizable profits. Yet it is also important to remember that, while Stanley
Kubrick (whose 1950s films bear striking stylistic and thematic similarities to
those of Aldrich) found it necessary to retreat to England, reducing his output
to two or three films a decade, Aldrich chose to fight it out in Hollywood,
where his capacity for moneymaking allowed him the space to vent his own
personal anger at the compromises we all must make.
All-Movie Guide Lucia Bozzola
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies bio info
Robert
Aldrich Alain Silver from Senses of
Cinema
Screening
the Past Article #1 Robert Aldrich: an independent career,
by RJ Thompson
Screening
the Past Article #2 The hunter gets captured by the game: Robert
Aldrich's
Guardian
Article (2006)
Mainstream Maverick, by John Patterson
from the Guardian,
The Films of Robert Aldrich - by
Michael E. Grost Classic Film and
Television
Robert
Aldrich blog-a-thon Dennis Cozzalio from
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film
Festival report
Aldrich, Robert They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
WORLD FOR RANSOM
USA
Time Out
Monogram cheapie derived from the
NBC TV series China Smith, this is a seminal Aldrich movie with Duryea,
as private eye Mike Callahan, the first in a long line of compromised idealists
who recur throughout the director's work. The plot concerns a kidnapped nuclear
scientist - we're in Cold War country here - and the story's set in a Poverty
Row
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)
Though he had directed a few
earlier films, Robert Aldrich's career really begins with this grungy,
low-budget thriller (1954, 82 min.) about a thick-skulled detective (Dan
Duryea) hammering his way through a back-lot Singapore
World
for Ransom (1954) / Robert Aldrich's Actresses Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
World for Ransom Michael Grost from Classic Film and Television
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
APACHE
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film
Festival report
The day's other two Aldrich pictures were minor
disappointments: genre pieces that haven't dated especially well. Burt
Lancaster produced Apache, which is presumably why, he was able
to 'brown up' in the title role of Massai, last of his people's legendarily
fierce warriors.
Lancaster's blue eyes have never looked quite so lapis
lazuli as they do here, and though his acrobatic skills are displayed to their
fullest as Massai leaps from rock to rock fleeing perfidious whitey, the
picture (which traces the proud chap's painful transition from
government-plagung 'terrorist' to domesticated corn-farmer) never manages to
overcome his egregious miscasting.
The script doesn't help, a fits-and-starts affair full of
stilted dialogue (all of the 'Indians' have American accents, but still say
things like "they are" for "they're" and "we
will" instead of "we'll," etc.) - though the striking
technicolour cinematography (this was Altman's first non-monochrome production)
is a major plus.
Turner
Classic Movies review Rob Nixon
Along with
Wellman's story told of Massai, derived from a historical figure who waged a
last stand against the encroaching U.S. Army and white civilization in the late
1880s. Upon the surrender of Geronimo, Massai is captured after attempting to
disrupt the peace negotiations between the Apaches and the
To bring the story to the screen, Lancaster and Hecht chose writer James R.
Webb and director Robert Aldrich, a Hollywood maverick and outspoken liberal
himself, considered by Hecht to be unusually gifted at creating intense
psychological drama and one who could make a project look more expensive than
it actually cost. Thanks to
Whether it can be credited to the "happy" ending or not, Apache
proved to be a major hit, the top-grossing Western of the year and a
confirmation not only of Lancaster's commercial appeal but his ability as a
producer who could match himself to the right vehicle at the right time. The
film opened a month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against segregation in Brown
v. Board of Education, and its success vindicated
Senses of
Cinema Mark Freeman
DVD Times Mike Sutton
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
Apache
Brian Darr from Hell on Frisco Bay
The New York Times H.H.T.
VERA CRUZ
A rousing tale filled with action, gunfire and betrayal,
starring two of
Turner
Classic Movies review Eleonor Quin
With a tag line blaring, "The Giants Battle in the
Biggest Spectacle of Them All!," Vera Cruz stormed into theaters in
1954. This groundbreaking Western was indeed a spectacle in every way - from
the sweeping Mexican landscapes (filmed in Superscope no less), to the
multitudinous gun battles, to the bona fide movie stars taking top billing.
Starring Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster, and directed by Robert Aldrich, Vera
Cruz was such a pioneering film that it inspired a genre within a genre:
the Spaghetti Western. Set in the 1860s, the story follows two mercenaries on
the make in
Produced by Lancaster and his partner, Harold Hecht, Vera Cruz was a
massive commercial hit, grossing over $11 million. This was due in part to the
savvy top billing of Gary Cooper, already an established Western icon from such
films as The Virginian (1929) and High Noon (1952). Coop was
devoted to the genre, and threw himself into it, at times a little too
vigorously. During the filming of Vera Cruz, he was seriously injured by
flying fragments from a dynamite explosion that went awry. Despite playing a
flawed hero, the actor was always concerned with the righteousness of his
characters. Director Aldrich remembers Cooper's objections and insistence on
rewrites when he felt a moral line had been crossed. But rewrites were common
on the set of Vera Cruz; in fact, the script was still being written
during filming. Aldrich called the film "a total improvisation,"
adding that a scene would be finished and shot five minutes later and
concluding, "I'm not sure that that's the right way to work." As it
turned out, there would be bigger issues to worry about.
Vera Cruz was not actually filmed in Vera Cruz, due to the unpredictable
weather conditions. Production was set up instead in
Legendary cinematographer and frequent Aldrich collaborator, Ernest Laszlo
filmed the spectacular scenery in Superscope, a new widescreen format making
its debut. Aldrich was also making a debut of a kind, as Vera Cruz was
his first big-budget film at $3 million - but he carried it off with grand and
almost excessive style. As the profits rolled in one can only picture the
beaming Burt Lancaster, spying the gold for the first time in the film and
pronouncing gleefully, "Well, hell--o."
Apollo Movie Guide
[Scott Renshaw]
Images Movie
Journal Gary Johnson
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
KISS ME DEADLY A- 93
USA
Remember me when I am
gone away,
Gone far away into the
silent land;
When you can no more
hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go,
yet turning stay.
Remember me when no
more day by day
You tell me of our
future that you plann'd:
Only remember me; you
understand
It will be late to
counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should
forget me for a while
And afterwards
remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness
and corruption leave
A vestige of the
thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you
should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
—Remember, by Christina Rossetti, 1862
A low down and dirty
apocalyptic film noir, filmed during the end of the noir era, set in the atomic
age of the 50’s, where screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides, whose novel Long Haul was used for Raoul Walsh’s THEY
DRIVE BY NIGHT (1940), while also co-writing Nicholas Ray’s On
Dangerous Ground (1952) and William Wellman’s TRACK OF THE CAT (1954),
alters the focus of the original Mickey Spillane novel, a book he despised,
where instead of a mafia drug conspiracy, he adds a new twist of international
weapons smugglers who are actually trafficking nuclear weapons. Conceived out of trashy pulp material, it’s a
low-budget B-movie with few emotional attachments that cynically exploits
America’s Cold War fear and a 1950’s rising paranoia about the atom bomb, a
time when people were urged to build bomb shelters in their back yards. This film opens with a barefoot woman running
down the road at night in a state of panic, flagging down a car wearing only a
trenchcoat, which nearly causes a crash, but the driver is none other than Los
Angeles private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), whose concern isn’t about the
lady in distress, Cloris Leachman in her first feature role as Christina, but
the potential damage to his always spotless and buffed convertible Jaguar
sports car. Driving her back into Los
Angeles, she cryptically mentions that people are after her, having her
institutionalized, and should they not make it back into LA, somehow sensing
her death is imminent, she mysteriously urges him to “Remember me.” Hammer’s car is immediately run off the side
of the road where he and the girl are left barely conscious. They kidnap the girl while Hammer and his car
are dropped off a cliff, but he somehow manages to survive. The girl is not so fortunate, as we hear the
distressing sounds of her terrifying screams (and see only her dangling feet)
while she is being tortured with a pair of pliers in a place that shall not be
named, a prolonged sequence taking place offscreen until she is finally
silenced. This scream typifies the
atmospheric mood of horror, but also the degree of sadistic exhibitionism on
display.
The film was not
reviewed by the New York Times when
it came out, calling it too revolting and utter trash, and it was banned in
Great Britain, where the prevalent use of violence is way over the top, made
worse by the lead character’s sadistic enjoyment of inflicting pain, where he’s
forever slapping people in the face to get information out of them. Only one guy avoids the inevitable by quickly
taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, tipped off by the sounds that Hammer was
quickly approaching, so when he got punched and slapped around, it made no
difference, as he couldn’t talk because he was completely passed out
already. Transplanted from New York to
LA, Hammer’s apartment is spacious and modern, with a tape recording answering
device built right into the wall, where strange literary and/or artistic
references run throughout the film. His
Girl Friday secretary (Maxine Cooper) has modern ideas about sharing work with
pleasure, where Hammer actually pimps out her services, specializing in
adulterous divorce cases, his sleazy methods repeated to his face by a police
investigator, where he often sleeps with the wife while his secretary Velda
seduces the husband, then they extort each one to keep this information from
coming out in the court proceedings, where Hammer is forced to admit
sarcastically, “All right, you've got
me convinced. I'm a real stinker.” But after a warning from both thugs and cops,
Hammer doesn’t scare off this case so easily, thinking the panicked girl must
have had something valuable that both the police and the criminal underworld
want. His destroyed car is quickly
replaced with another one just as snazzy, but he’s smart enough to find the bomb
attached to the ignition, while another explosive device is later found by his
over-revved mechanic Nick, Nick Dennis from John Cassavetes’ Too
Late Blues (1961), a guy who speaks free form the way he envisions sports
cars running, “Va-va-voom!” When Nick
gets snuffed out, Hammer has reason to feel the blues, where a lingering theme
throughout is Nat King Cole’s version of
“I’d Rather Have the Blues” KISS ME DEADLY - "I'd
Rather Have the Blues" - YouTube (2:54), heard first over a car radio
as the opening credits roll backwards, and a second time by a black nightclub
singer, Mady Comfort.
Aldrich wreaks havoc with
Hammer’s avenging angel character, already one of the darkest anti-heroes in
the film noir genre, turning him into an existential narcissist whose
livelihood is exploiting (or blackmailing) others to benefit his own plush
lifestyle, where his exaggerated sense of masculinity and individualism, so
fascinated with women and fast cars, also having the perfect Hollywood bachelor
pad, is in stark contrast to the conservative conformity of the times. Much of the film is set in the Bunker Hill
area of Los Angeles, beautifully shot by Ernst Laszlo in contrasting Black and
White, accentuating darkness and shadow throughout, shading the moral
line. While the movie is laced with
brutality and corruption, filled with bizarre characters, no one is a more
intriguing character than Christina’s frightened roommate, Gaby Rogers as Lily
Carver, a television actress appearing in only one other feature film, Joseph
Strick’s THE BIG BREAK (1953), eventually marrying the very successful American
pop songwriter Jerry Leiber of Leiber and Stoller, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Compared to other femme fatales, Carver is
initially the most vulnerable character onscreen, appearing sweet and soft and
in need of protection from Hammer, fearful and perhaps a bit touched in the
head, as if her facilities may not all be there. But by the end, she’s a changed or
transformed woman where her body has literally been inhabited (or killed) by
somebody else, becoming someone who is perhaps the most devious character in
the entire film, where the personality fissure and apocalyptic finale may
remind some viewers of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997). Aldrich delights in confusing compositions,
odd or oblique camera angles, views down staircases, creating a bleakly
disorienting atmosphere of hopelessness and despair, where some nearly always
faceless criminal underworld characters involved in international espionage
have got their hands on what amounts to THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), where “the
bundle,” or “the box” in this case, may be a miniature H-bomb in a suitcase at
an oceanfront beach house. In what is
one of the bleakest endings ever, Aldrich may be going to every expressionistic
extreme to remind viewers of what’s at stake, where much like Hitchcock in The Birds
(1963), he may be targeting the complacency of the populace, as the director
uses a somewhat surreal and apocalyptic wake up call to strike back at foolish
humans who continue to believe they are exempt from life’s tragedies.
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Kiss Me Deadly is a thick-ear masterpiece, wrenched by director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides from Mickey Spillane’s trash novel, shot through with poetry (“Remember Me” by Christina Rosetti), unspeakable violence (the kicking naked legs of a woman tortured vaginally with a pair of pliers), hopped-up street talk (“3D-Pow!-Va-va-voom!”), strange characters, and fringe-fantastical elements.
After credits that roll the wrong way and a nighttime drive, the desperate Cloris Leachman, naked under a trenchcoat, flags down thuggish private eye Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) and drags him into a plot involving spies, hoodlums, cops, a mastermind so erudite that he can only speak in metaphors when warning a dim-bulb blonde not to tamper with something deadly enough to kill everyone in range, codeword-dropping secret agents (“Los Alamos…Trinity…Manhattan Project”) and a suitcase containing “the big whatsit” (a box of fissionable treasure that might be either pure plutonium or the head of Medusa). Meeker’s nasty hero (note his smile as he tortures innocent witnesses by breaking irreplaceable opera records or slamming hands in drawers) sucker punches his way through a cast of perverts and sluts, then (at least in some prints) goes up with a mushroom cloud that rises from a beach house at the 1950’s apocalypse of a finish.
Time Out Jessica
Winter
Condemned on its release as harmful to minors, Robert Aldrich’s late
contribution to the B-noir tradition, by way of Mickey Spillane, couldn’t quite
find its audience in 1955. But it now stands as a crucial influence on what
would become the French new wave, an irresistibly seedy trip through the
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Though it didn't reach its
audience at the time, this top-notch piece of film noir has seen its reputation
do nothing but improve over the years since its release in 1955. A major
inspiration for the French New Wave movement, its influence is still prevalent,
as anyone who's seen films with glowing suitcases can attest. Maybe it was just
too tough for its time. A Robert Aldrich-directed adaptation of a Mickey
Spillane novel, Kiss Me Deadly stars Ralph Meeker as a barely likable
Mike Hammer. After picking up a trenchcoat-clad woman running barefoot down the
highway, he finds himself plunged into a dark and dangerous world in which
nearly everything is worse than it seems. That's the case in most noir films,
of course, but this one plays as more noir than most: All the elements, from
the tougher-than-nails characters to the stark photography to the harsh
environment, combine in this classic, reissued in a new collector's edition
complete with the original theatrical trailer and two subtly but substantially
different endings. Kiss Me Deadly is a terrific film, but after seeing
it, you may want to bathe, and may never trust anyone again.
Slant Magazine [Nick Schager]
Never was Mike Hammer's name more fitting than in Kiss Me Deadly, Robert Aldrich's blisteringly nihilistic noir in which star Ralph Meeker embodies Mickey Spillane's legendary P.I. with brute force savagery. Sneering, scowling, and dishing out ruthless justice almost as often as he takes cruel thrashings, Meeker's Hammer is a heartless, narcissistic, amoral beast with nothing but contempt for society, a worldview that Aldrich also assumes in every one of his bluntly beautiful staircase-punctuated compositions and stinging close-ups. A "bedroom dick" who willingly admits to his own sordidness ("All right, you've got me convinced. I'm a real stinker," he tells some pesky cops), Hammer embroils himself in radioactive mystery after he almost runs down a hitchhiking psychiatric ward escapee (Cloris Leachman), gives her a lift, and then, after the woman is killed by her pursuers, is nearly exterminated for his trouble. The gumshoe's subsequent investigation into the woman's death doubles as a lacerating indictment of modern society's dissolution into physical/moral/spiritual degeneracy—a reversion that ultimately leads to nuclear apocalypse and man's return to the primordial sea—with the director's knuckle-sandwich cynicism pummeling the genre's romantic fatalism into a bloody pulp. "Remember me"? Aldrich's sadistic, fatalistic masterpiece is impossible to forget.
indieWIRE Peter
Bogdanovich
Talk about the tension between a director and his material—which was one of the critical cornerstones of the French New Wave’s reassessment of American movies—-and they were the first to point out this frisson in the work of iconoclastic director-producer Robert Aldrich; perhaps most noticeably in his aggressive independent film, the dark and dangerous 1955 thriller, KISS ME DEADLY (available on DVD). Aldrich hated detective-fiction writer Mickey Spillane’s novels so much that he took one of the author’s most popular and typical Mike Hammer private-eye stories and transformed it into not only the best picture ever made from Spillane (which isn’t saying much) but a savagely angry film noir classic of annihilating dimension—-literally: At the end, everybody, including Hammer, gets blown away in a dusk-lit Malibu beach house by no less than a nuclear blast. What then happened to L.A. is left to the imagination.
The whole thing starts out quietly one night with a terrified young woman—-Cloris Leachman’s first role—-running barefoot along a deserted blacktop wearing only a raincoat. Hammer—-played exceedingly tough, with virtually no charm, by Ralph Meeker—-picks her up, tries to help her. When she gets murdered anyway, it really pisses him off and this is how he gets involved in the labyrinthine mystery that unfolds and remains fairly difficult to figure out all the way through. But, though often impenetrable, it’s also completely riveting—-like a down and dirty The Big Sleep—-Howard Hawks’ equally mystifying 1946 detective picture with Humphrey Bogart as Raymond Chandler’s detective, Philip Marlowe (also available on DVD).
However, while the Hawks-Bogart movie is somewhat satirical, reluctantly romantic, Aldrich’s remains vicious and paranoid, strangely anticipating the bleak present more than representing the ambiguous 1950s; in this way, Kiss Me Deadly today seems remarkably modern. If only current pictures could be as well made, and as personal. The hardboiled script is by veteran shady-world scenarist A.I. Bezzerides, who wrote one of Jules Dassin’s most underrated movies, Thieves’ Highway (1949), and the excellent photography is by Ernest Laszlo, who conspires with Aldrich in the kind of angles that would have been unthinkable before Orson Welles’ The Lady From Shanghai (1948). Clearly Aldrich had seen all the good movies. The ensemble cast includes edgy, unsentimental performances from numerous pros in this line of work, like Paul Stewart (a Welles alumni), Albert Dekker, Maxine Cooper, and Wesley Addy.
Aldrich had greater box office success with some of his later pictures, like the sardonic horror story, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962); the troubling war film, The Dirty Dozen (1967); or the hard-hitting football yarn, The Longest Yard (1974). He did several others in the same angry mood, such as The Big Knife (1955) and Attack! (1956), but none of his other movies has quite the unbridled hostility and reckless panache of Kiss Me Deadly, a uniquely perverse turn in picture history—-even the title rolls up backward: Deadly Kiss Me. (The director’s production-company name also refuses to conform: The Associates and Aldrich.)
Having started out as assistant to such legendary filmmakers as Jean Renoir, Charles Chaplin, Abraham Polonsky, Joseph Losey and William Wellman, Aldrich inherited their pull toward freedom, and he was in the forefront of the independent movement, though he had the ability as well to work successfully within the system (was for a while president of the Directors Guild). His most explosive film, Kiss Me Deadly may also be his best: When the world turns as ugly as this, Aldrich seems to be saying, it is all bound to end in unredeemable catastrophe. What could be a more appropriate cautionary fable these days?
Cineaste Christopher Sharrett
Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is often seen as a capstone to the great period of film noir that began in the early Forties. But if so, it is also a preamble for a new breed of neurotic male heroes who dominated the color noirs of the following decades, like Lee Marvin’s disoriented ex-con trying to find his elusive payoff in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), or Gene Hackman’s hysterical detective, who ends up literally traveling in circles in Arthur Penn’s superb Night Moves (1975). As if he foresees his unstable heirs, Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), the nominal hero of Aldrich’s film, is an especially obnoxious incarnation of the tough guy, a ruthless, unsavory version of masculinity that sees itself threatened and on the verge of extinction. He is a shambling, sadistic thug, a degraded version of the men who went down mean streets but were not themselves mean. Hammer is the creation of Mickey Spillane, whose vile pulp novels captured an especially vicious tone of the Cold War and postwar male culture. In rubbish like One Lonely Night, Hammer laughs out loud as he machine-guns a gaggle of Commies. Mike Hammer perfectly represented his creator, a racist and misogynist, an unreflective, smug man who appealed to a sizeable portion of the Greatest Generation’s depleted sense of self, as the Organization Man defined a new way of life for the postwar wage slave.
Aldrich isn’t in love with Spillane’s creation. He simply puts Hammer on display, without flourishes to make us love him. Unlike all other incarnations of Mike Hammer, Kiss Me Deadly offers little possibility for audience identification. Hammer tortures a squeaky, aging coroner who won’t cough up information, and slaps around another old man who won’t take a bribe. He pointlessly breaks a priceless Caruso 78rpm record of an uncooperative opera buff, and seems ready to drown him in boiling spaghetti. He beats a hoodlum senseless by bashing his head on a wall, then, when the dazed man won’t quit, Hammer punches him down an endless flight of concrete steps. Aldrich is insistent that Spillane’s creation is a miserable joke, and while one could argue that Aldrich’s Hammer has the characteristics of Spillane’s protagonist, it’s hard to see Aldrich’s version as anything virtuous, and nothing less than a deflation of the triumphalism that informed so many postwar movies heroes. In case we miss the point, after Hammer is interrogated by the Interstate Crime Commission, and he leaves the room, its chairman says, “Open a window!” And yet, as Alain Silver and James Ursini remark on the disc’s commentary track, the Commission is Aldrich’s version of HUAC, a bunch of smarmy, intrusive men who like to humiliate people—no one gets a break (nor should they) in the director’s scathing vision of often-romanticized Fifties America.
Mike Hammer isn’t a Philip Marlowe-style private eye driven by existential impulse to penetrate the mysteries of the night-shrouded big city. He is a “bedroom dick” who works divorce cases (in other words, he is close to what private eyes actually do), using his mistress/secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper) as a prostitute to lure errant husbands, while Hammer seduces frustrated wives. He savors his work, telling Velda he thought the “honey talk” she extracted from a tape-recorded philanderer was “nice.” When the sucker doesn’t quite take the bait, Hammer instructs her to “give ’em that sincerity,” the point being that honest emotions are something Hammer holds in contempt.
A crimp is thrown into Hammer’s degenerate routine at the film’s opening, when his sports car is driven off a dark country road by a semiclad woman named Christina (Cloris Leachman, in her film debut), an escapee from what Hammer calls “the local laughing house.” Hammer’s first concern isn’t the woman’s plight—he complains, “You almost wrecked my car!” Christina is a pawn of a Communist spy ring trying to get atomic secrets out of the country, led by arch-villain Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), clad in a pinstriped suit, impossible toupee, and the shiniest wing-tipped shoes ever registered on celluloid.
Hammer and Christina are captured by the Commies; she is stripped naked and tortured to death by a man photographed from the waist down, one hand holding pliers (Aldrich lets us figure how the pliers are used), Christina's flailing legs dominating the image as her amped-up screams overwhelm the soundtrack–it is a miracle how the sequence survived the Code. The scene establishes the hysterical tone of the film; the filmmaker's artifice is highly expressionistic to underscore the panic and dread that informs every frame of the film. In Hammer's world, reason has vanished, making space itself off-kilter, emphasized by the Dutch angles and the reverse crawl of the opening titles.
As Hammer recovers in the hospital after a near-fatal plunge off a cliff with the already-dead Christina, he ignores questions from policeman Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), his friendly enemy, and resolves to find the meaning of Christina’s admonition to “remember me.” What follows might be seen as a typical noir investigation, as Hammer fades into an especially black and brutal Los Angeles night, but there are crucial innovations. Hammer doesn’t withhold information from the cops because he wants to go it alone, but because he figures on some sort of big payoff that might not come his way if he helps the law. Murphy tells Hammer that he has outright contempt for the law, making him a vigilante or a jungle beast. Hammer doesn’t flinch; has only a vestige of the traditional detective’s compunctions and driven intellectual curiosity. His compulsion to work the case, to find out who his enemies really are, is compelled by bullheadedness rather than the pursuit of truth. The hero’s archetypal search for the Holy Grail is caricatured by Velda, who, fed up, excoriates the amoral Hammer for his pursuit of “the great whatsit.”
Kiss Me Deadly is known for its impossible plot holes; in fact, the film is less a sequential narrative than a series of set pieces that establish the film’s environment of sex, violence, paranoia, and nuclear anxieties. The sexual politics of the crime genre are scrutinized by Aldrich, and by screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides (who took apart the male psyche many times in noir, most spectacularly in On Dangerous Ground [1952]); women are used and discarded by the hero, but he ends up brought low by fatal woman Gabrielle (Gaby Rogers), and is ultimately rescued by Velda (the woman he was supposed to rescue) as nuclear hell breaks loose, closing the film with one of the cinema’s all-time bleakest endings.
One can easily argue that the film is resolutely sexist—it even ends with a Pandora/Eve motif, as a villainess’s curiosity launches Armageddon. It doesn’t help that the villainess has already been coded as a lesbian. But the film is equally resolute in debunking the myth of the playboy; while women seem to want to have sex with Hammer at first sight, the consequence is usually death or brutalization, as the world of Kiss Me Deadly relentlessly merges Eros with Thanatos, insisting that healthy human relations of any sort simply cannot thrive in the present world. The only time Mike Hammer comes close to showing a real emotion is when his only buddy, the eccentric Nick (Nick Dennis), the auto mechanic, is murdered by Soberin’s hoods.
Kiss Me Deadly is known for its impossible plot holes; in fact, the film is less a sequential narrative than a series of set pieces that establish the film’s environment of sex, violence, paranoia, and nuclear anxieties. The sexual politics of the crime genre are scrutinized by Aldrich, and by screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides (who took apart the male psyche many times in noir, most spectacularly in On Dangerous Ground [1952]); women are used and discarded by the hero, but he ends up brought low by fatal woman Gabrielle (Gaby Rogers), and is ultimately rescued by Velda (the woman he was supposed to rescue) as nuclear hell breaks loose, closing the film with one of the cinema’s all-time bleakest endings.
One can easily argue that the film is resolutely sexist—it even ends with a Pandora/Eve motif, as a villainess’s curiosity launches Armageddon. It doesn’t help that the villainess has already been coded as a lesbian. But the film is equally resolute in debunking the myth of the playboy; while women seem to want to have sex with Hammer at first sight, the consequence is usually death or brutalization, as the world of Kiss Me Deadly relentlessly merges Eros with Thanatos, insisting that healthy human relations of any sort simply cannot thrive in the present world. The only time Mike Hammer comes close to showing a real emotion is when his only buddy, the eccentric Nick (Nick Dennis), the auto mechanic, is murdered by Soberin’s hoods.
Enough has been written about the film’s many allusions to high culture, from Greek myth to modern painting. The point is that the cultural past is indeed past, with its remains stomped on by Hammer, the American as bull in a china shop. He breaks phonograph records and knocks over a table after breaking into Mist’s Gallery of Modern Art. The modernist paintings in his apartment are up-to-date decorations, alongside his reel-to-reel answering machine. He is the American as postliterate consumer. He can memorize a poem (it is a clue in the case) but he understands it not at all. When Christina asks him in the opening scene if he reads poetry, Hammer simply glares at her. In one of the film’s final scenes, after burning himself on the Great Whatsit (a box of glowing, howling nuclear material that has been used in every postmodern film from Repo Man to Pulp Fiction), a rumpled Hammer is treated like the overgrown child that he is by a hostile Pat Murphy, who decides to recite decontextualized words (“Manhattan Project!, Los Alamos! Trinity!”), as if he were instructing a first-grader, establishing, once and for all, that Mike Hammer is a dumb brute. He at least realizes, at the end, that he has run his course and is clearly overmatched. Murphy’s answer to another cop about what to do with Hammer is Aldrich’s final statement about the wretched creation Spillane so loved: “Let him go to hell,” which is more or less where he goes. The ending of Kiss Me Deadly matches that of Vertigo in its unrelieved pessimism. It is extraordinary to think that such an uncompromised visions of gender relations and the American landscape were offered in the conservative Fifties.
Suffice it to say that the Criterion restoration of Kiss Me
Deadly is exemplary; the Blu- ray image is especially dazzling, but even
the standard DVD does a fine job in rendering cinematographer Ernest Laszlo’s
beautiful, eerie, high-contrast black and white. The supplements include the
useful Ursini/Silver commentary, a short film about screenwriter A. I.
Bezzerides, a slide show of the Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles where some
of the film’s key action occurs, and a documentary about Mickey Spillane that
mostly reminds us how tiresome he was. My only concern is that Kiss Me
Deadly, although a significant film, probably should not have been a
Criterion priority, since a passable DVD of the film already exists. The same
is true of another recent Criterion project, Sweet Smell of Success, which,
although gorgeously presented in its new version, takes the place of other
films that have never been released on home video and desperately need
Criterion’s attention—I think, for example, of all of Max Ophuls’s American
films. Be assured that I’m not really complaining about anything Criterion
does—the company is one of our supreme cultural assets.
Kiss
Me Deadly: The Thriller of Tomorrow
Criterion essay from J. Hoberman, June 20, 2011
Kiss Me Deadly
(1955) - The Criterion Collection
Kiss
Me Deadly - Turner Classic Movies
Glenn Erickson on the DVD release
Film
Noir of the Week: Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Glenn Erickson, July 13, 2007
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson, July 20, 2001
Kiss Me Deadly Glenn Erickson writes about the
newly-discovered complete ending, from Images,
1997
Kiss Me
Deadly - Film (Movie) Plot and Review ... - Film Reference Fred Camper
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Whose Noir Is It,
Anyway? Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly Alan Vanneman from Bright
Lights Film Journal, November 2007
State
of nature: The Moralistic Nihilism of Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me ... Matt Zoller Seitz from the House Next Door,
October 17, 2006
"Nightmare
on Aldrich Street." Jim Emerson
at Scanners responds to the Seitz piece, October 18, 2006
Kiss
Me Deadly - Turner Classic Movies
Jeff Stafford
Ruthless
Reviews Hondo
Hollywood Gothique Steve Biodrowski
The Films of Robert Aldrich [Michael E.
Grost]
Images Gary Johnson
Bright Lights
Film Journal Alain Silver from Images
Kiss
Me Deadly Caffè Noir, October 11,
2011
Big
House Film Roger Westcombe
Greatest Films - comprehensive
analysis of classic US films Tim
Dirks
Motion
Picture It's Called Alex, October
18, 2006
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] - for 'Tribune' magazine
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
The Onion A.V. Club
[Mike D'Angelo]
Film-Forward.com [Jack Gattanella]
Film
Monthly Robert Weston
Paste Magazine Sean
Gandert
Movie
Martyr Jeremy Heilman
Digitallyobsessed
review Dan Lopez
AVForums
(Blu-ray) [Mark Botwright]
The QNetwork
[James Kendrick] Criterion Blu-Ray
DVDTown -
Blu-ray [Christopher Long] also seen
here: DVD
Town
Ultimate
Guide to Disney DVD Luke Bonanno,
Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD
Talk Stuart Galbraith IV, Criterion
Blu-Ray
DVD Verdict -
Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]
DVDizzy.com - Criterion Collection
Blu-ray with Pictures
DVD
MovieGuide Colin Jacobson, Criterion
Blu-Ray
Film
Intuition Jen Johans
The Spinning Image
Graeme Clark
Combustible
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Film Jennie Kermode
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Musings and Ramblings Dave Sindelar
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide
Baltimore
City Paper Eric Allen Hatch
San Francisco Chronicle
Mick LaSalle
DVDBeaver.com
[Gregory Meshman]
THE BIG KNIFE
A dynamite portrait of a man on the verge of total
psychological and moral collapse, Robert Aldrich's 1955 indictment of
Apollo Movie Guide [David Nusair]
Upon its initial theatrical release in 1955, The Big Knife
must have seemed a searing and shocking piece of filmmaking. Audiences of that
era undoubtedly were stunned at the extreme cynicism of the screenplay, which
takes a weary view of
Jack Palance
stars as Charlie Castle, a successful actor best known for making cheesy B-movies.
Though he once had lofty ambitions of becoming a serious performer, he’s now
stuck doing films that have little artistic value. His wife, Marion (Ida
Lupino), is threatening to leave him unless he severs all ties with the studio
that’s got him under contract (one that specializes in just the sort of
pictures that Charlie despises). Heading that company is the vicious Stanley
Hoff (Rod Steiger),
a bulldog of a man who knows that Charlie is a huge asset to his studio and
under no circumstances wants to see him leave – even if that means blackmailing
the actor.
The Big Knife is based on the play by Clifford Odets, and given that the
action rarely leaves Charlie’s living room, that’s not a terribly surprising
revelation. But unlike a good proportion of films that make the transition from
the stage to celluloid, The Big Knife fails to ever make that cinematic
leap – the movie feels like a filmed play. The dialogue has a forced,
stilted quality to it – nothing that’s said sounds entirely organic. These
aren’t things that normal people say; everything plays like it was written for
the single purpose of furthering a movie plot.
It certainly doesn’t help that the actors infuse their respective roles with a
theatrical flourish that’s more distracting than anything else. Palance appears
to be doing a bad James
Dean impression, while Steiger (an actor who’s never been known for his
subtlety) goes completely over-the-top as the tough-as-nails studio head. Shelley Winters
fares slightly better as a failed starlet who’s got something on Charlie, but
since her character receives so little screen time, it’s hard to really care
about her. Lupino, as Charlie’s troubled wife, is the sole standout here and
manages to give an impressively compelling performance despite being surrounded
by a cast full of hams.
And for a film that takes place almost entirely in one setting, the runtime
(which is just shy of two hours) is ridiculously inflated. The story occurs
over a 24-hour time span (give or take a few minutes), and there just isn’t
enough plot to keep things interesting. This is essentially a tale that
could’ve been told in half an hour without losing a thing, but the film chugs
along for nearly two hours regardless – pacing be damned.
Having said that, the film does contain a surprising number of twists –
especially considering how limited the storyline is. These twists, some of
which are completely unforeseeable, certainly perk things up (if only
temporarily) – preventing the movie from becoming an all-out bore.
The Big Knife undoubtedly was meant to be a scathing indictment of the
Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford
Turner Classic Movies Scott McGee
DVD Savant review Glenn Erickson
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film
Festival report
Ozus' World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
AUTUMN LEAVES
USA
Time Out
A seemingly eccentric, but in fact characteristic, Aldrich film: cutting a radical cinematic swathe through weepie material. It rattles both psychological skeletons and the skeleton of psychology as Crawford's middle-aged spinster and Robertson's seductive young liar rush first into marriage and then at each other's throats. An 'extraordinary combination of domestic Guignol and elephantised soap opera', as Richard Combs has described it.
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)
Robert Aldrich's 1956
melodrama is a dry run for his later and much more extreme Whatever Happened to
Baby Jane? Joan Crawford stars as a lonely middle-aged woman who gives in to
the advances of a handsome young man (Cliff Robertson), only to discover after
their marriage that he isn't all he seems to be. Even in this antipathetic
context, Aldrich manages to find room for his characteristic intimations of
breakdown and approaching chaos. With Vera Miles and Lorne Greene.
In the '50s, Robert Aldrich was a favorite
of the French Cahiers du Cinema critics. In the '60s, though, Aldrich got
sloppier as his budgets got bigger. Most of his later movies are at least a
half hour too long, and formulaic action films like The Dirty Dozen and Too
Late the Hero tarnished his once bright reputation. But movies like World
for Ransom, Kiss Me Deadly, and Attack still hold up as harsh
portraits of violence, paranoia, and a new kind of universal dread that began
with the A-bomb and ended with the JFK assassination. All of Aldrich's early
work is intriguing, but Autumn Leaves is his secret gem. It's been
passed over as camp because of its star, Joan Crawford, but Aldrich brings all
his hard edges to this woman's picture. The collision of his tough style with
the soapy material makes for a film that never loses its queasy tension.
It
begins with a decrescendo of violins. Nat King Cole sings the title song under
the credits, which play over dark, blotchy leaves that look like clusters of
Rorschach tests. The camera slowly zooms into a seedy group of bungalows, and
the tentative pacing of the zoom strikes a note of pure desolation. After two
exhausted dissolves, we see Millicent Wetherby (Crawford) at work, a
middle-aged typist pounding on her typewriter with grim determination. We learn
a lot about Millie in just a few moments of screen time. Her landlady, Liz
(Ruth Donnelly), pops in through Millie's squeaking screen door. While the
women chat, Aldrich frames Millie's empty bed behind them. As Millie tries to
make jaunty small talk with Liz, Aldrich takes Crawford's rigid fakeness,
apparent in all her later films, and makes it look like a cover for Millie's
quiet desperation, her huge fears, and antic last hopes. Liz talks about her
brother ("Tall and skinny and all muscle," she muses) as if talking
to herself, her forbidden sexual attraction to a sibling foreshadowing Millie's
future.
Perhaps
it was a budgetary consideration, but the
This
is the point when a rough-edged, somewhat uncomfortable May-December love story
becomes a harrowing examination of primal, even infantile urges and conflicts—a
kind of Oedipal nightmare. We learn, but Millie doesn't, that Burt's father
(Lorne Greene) cuckolded his son with Burt's ex-wife Virginia (Vera Miles).
Burt, whose mental problems start to become obvious, has blocked his father's
betrayal out of his mind. Still unaware of what happened between all of them,
Millie insists that Burt go to see his father. When he agrees, reluctantly,
Aldrich pulls his camera far back from the couple as Burt walks slowly away
from her; Millie is framed by an arch in the ceiling and lit from behind with
electric light. It's a potent image of a mother pushing her child out of the
nest.
Millie
discovers the truth too late. In the film's most virtuoso sequence, she tries
to stop Burt from going to his father's hotel room, running frantically up
flights of stairs. At a high, way-beyond-the-top peak of emotion (aided by Hans
Salter's expressive score), she discovers Burt slumped over by his father's
bedroom door. As she leads him away, we can see that the bed in the middle of
the frame is a mess (it's obviously been used for fucking, unlike Mother
Millie's well-made bed in the first scene). The real theme of Autumn Leaves
is not loneliness, but incest. Liz wants her brother, Millie wanted her father,
and Burt wants a mother to protect him from his father.
Burt's
delicate derangement turns to full-blown madness. Certain Millie has betrayed
him, he slaps her around and even throws her typewriter at her (Aldrich shows
the machine making a gash on Millie's hand, in close-up). Millie and Burt seem
perversely turned on by this violence, and you get the feeling that hurting
Mommy is a vital part of their torrid sex life. But Mommy punishes her Son
eventually, packing him off to an insane asylum after one too many of his
crying jags. Locked away, Burt is subjected to shock treatment repeatedly (in
close-up, of course). The conclusion is "happy" on the surface, but,
after what we've just witnessed, walking into the sunset with these two might
someday involve matricide.
Aldrich
is always doing unexpected things with the camera. He often zooms in almost
imperceptibly to create a feeling of imbalance, and he juts his camera up close
to Burt and Millie when they kiss for the first time, not caring that the lens
is getting wet. Burt is pounding on the camera lens itself by the end, as if he
wanted to bust out of the movie. Though Aldrich is having a field day with his
camera, he is very attentive to his two outstanding lead actors. There are
fleeting moments of camp in Crawford's performance. However, perhaps because
she is reacting to someone else's pain for a change, her narcissism doesn't
hold her back. Joan Crawford sometimes comes through, but mostly we're watching
Millicent Wetherby. Crawford is sensitive, operatic, and quite touching,
especially when Millie first lets her guard down. This is arguably her best
performance. As far as Robertson goes, there can be no argument that this is
his best work. If photographer Diane Arbus felt that all families are creepy, Autumn
Leaves proves that such creepiness persists in the most unlikely places.
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
ATTACK
USA
Time Out
Often described as hysterical, this is in fact a brilliant predecessor to Kubrick's Paths of Glory using a fictional slant on World War II's Battle of the Bulge - the cowardice of a CO (Albert), resulting in heavy casualties, is studiously ignored by superiors with an eye to his father's political pull - to express a virulent disgust not so much with war itself as with the systems of privilege and self-interest which perpetuate its disasters. Where Kubrick analyses, Aldrich attacks; and his images have precisely the same hallucinatingly twisted quality as the war-torn landscapes in which they take shape.
Attack (1956) Mark Harris from The Blackboard
I just finished watching Robert Aldrich's Attack,
which came out in 1956, one year after Kiss Me Deadly, and which is
often listed as an off-genre noir. The film is a knock-out. It is
compositionally dazzling, recognizably the work of the same director as Kiss
Me Deadly. The screenplay by James Poe, based on a stage play by Norman
Brooks (of which more anon), is terrific, bursting with exceptional dialogue
that the gifted cast -- Jack Palance, Eddie Albert, William Smithers (who
should have had more of a big-screen career), Buddy Ebsen, Lee Marvin, Robert
Strauss, Richard Jaeckel -- attacks with theatrical gusto. The portrait of the
U.S. Army brass during World War II is daringly nuanced (and so the Army
refused Aldrich all cooperation in the making of the film). The result is, with
John Ford's They Were Expendable, Lewis Milestone's A Walk in the Sun,
and Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory, one of the greatest of all
American war movies.
Norman Brooks is a bit of a mystery to me. His play Fragile Fox that is
the basis of Attack premiered on Broadway in October 1954 with an
excellent cast including Dane Clark, James Gregory, Andrew Duggan, Don Taylor,
Crahan Denton, and Jason Wingreen, received mixed reviews, and closed after 55
performances. The script was never published, so it would be difficult to
determine how much of the excellence of the Attack screenplay is
attributable to Brooks, and how much to James Poe (who had a distinguished
career that included four Oscar nominations and one win). But the strong
conceptions of the story are probably Brooks's. He never had another play on
Broadway, and Doollee.com, The Playwrights Database, tracks no subsequent work
by him; the IMDB only lists one other co-writing credit, on a "Golden Age
of Television" script for the CBS Television Workshop in 1952.
Brooks appears to have been a gifted writer, but I'm not sure what became of
him.
This instance, as well as the ongoing research on the Arthur Penn/William
Hanley television production of Flesh and Blood, reminds me that the
intersections between film, television, radio, theater, music, and publishing
from the 1920s through the 1970s are fascinating and insufficiently explored.
Anyone who thinks that we know all we need to know about this recent history is
quite mistaken. There are many areas that scream for further exploration. I
mentioned the adventures of American actors in post-war European films as one
such subject, a while back; Brit noir and television noir are clearly others,
the investigation of which is well underway here at The Blackboard. These
developing topics are an exciting prospect.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] - Torino Film
Festival report
Yesterday got off to a strong start with the first of the
day's four consecutive Robert Aldrich films (he's the subject of the main
full-retrospective here this year): hard-hitting 1956 war drama Attack,
starring Jack Palance and Eddie Albert as feuding members of the same unit
(Albert the cowardly, mentally-unstable, father-dominated Captain - looking
from certain angles like George W Bush; Palance his ferociously principled,
scarily charismatic lieutenant - something of a forefather of Michael Shannon's
uber-marine Karnes from Oliver Stone's World Trade Center.)
Picture is a taut psychological drama set in 1944 France, a
bit Paths of Glory in its lions-led-by-donkeys theme, but playing out
entirely on or near the hazardous front-line. Lee Marvin pops up at various key
moments as a breathtakingly cynical and Machiavellian colonel with his eye on a
career in peacetime politics (1956 was a presidential election year in the
States), but in many ways the star and pivot of the show is William Smithers as
an ordinary-joe lieutenant caught in the middle of Palance, Albert and Marvin's
internecine strife.
It's Smithers in the picture's who's the most reliably sane
voice of reason and rectitude, his personal code coming under the severest of
tests in the blood-spattered final act. The long, talky climactic scene in a
cellar is pretty much the only part that betrays the picture's theatrical
origins - otherwise this is a fast-moving, well-constructed affair (marred by
Frank Devol's over-emphatic, paid-by-the-note score) in which many of Aldrich's
most recognisable techniques and themes are pretty much all present and
correct. It also features another of his most recognisable and enjoyable
trademarks: late, striking opening titles - in this case
"introducing" the hapless Smithers, who on this evidence didn't
deserve the way he's fallen into relative obscurity.
Palance, of course, remained a star well into the eighties:
news of his death circulated through the
Attack proved the best of the five-and-a-half
pictures I saw on Saturday. The other, Aldriches ('Aldrichs') were of interest,
but not quite up to the same level of accomplishment: perhaps not a surprise,
as they were all made earlier.
Long Pauses Darren
Hughes
DVD Times Review [Mike Sutton]
here
Tom Sutpen from If Charlie Parker Was a
Gunslinger
Senses of
Cinema review Richard Armstrong
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE?
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Rob
Christopher
One of Aldrich's secret weapons was composer Frank De Vol, with
whom he worked multiple times. Better known as simply DeVol, he churned out the
theme songs as well as the incidental music for TV shows like Gilligan's
Island and The Brady Bunch: catchy, yet generic-sounding stuff was
his forte. He worked the other end of spectrum too—check out his score for KISS
ME DEADLY. Aldrich knew that DeVol could be counted on to supply meat and
potatoes cues like "Joan Uncovers the Rat" and "Bette Kicks the
Shit Out of Joan." A sort of grotesque musical wallpaper, his music
effectively magnifies shock and revulsion but without sufficient individuality
to call attention to itself; DeVol was the anti-Bernard Herrmann. It's exactly
what WHAT EVER requires. Aldrich keeps the focus squarely on Joan and Bette,
the yin and yang of "has-been showbiz legends," playing Jane and
Blanche, two made-up "has-been showbiz legends." Celebrity and
"reality" and fiction blur together more deliciously than ever before
or ever since.
Superbly dark
As has been very widely chronicled, the off-screen enmity between Davis and Crawford was scarcely less vicious than Jane and Blanche's (see Shaun Considine's 500-page book on the subject, Bette & Joan - The Divine Feud) and this adds a prickly edge to picture which the intervening decades have done absolutely nothing to blunt. Indeed, so tight is the focus on the acrimonious twosome that in some ways the picture packs more of a punch than Billy Wilder's superficially similar Sunset Blvd. (1950) - it certainly works better in terms of basic thriller nuts-and-bolts, with the alcoholic, hammer-wielding Jane a genuinely menacing (though ultimately pathetic) figure as she spirals into dementia.
But while the film is essentially Davis's show (confined to a wheelchair, Crawford doesn't have the scope to physically interpret her role the same way) Aldrich shows a masterful touch with what could easily have been campy, pulpy fare - just see how long he spins out the prologue before finally bringing up the opening credits. It's a deceptively tricky task, but he manages to strike just the right balance between laughs (Jane's hilariously abrupt "conversations" with her "normal" neighbours) and chills: What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? has lost none of its power to entertain and disturb, and as such emphatically deserves the big-screen limelight for which its heroines so destructively competed.
Forward to
Yesterday - Bob Westal Classic Film, Movie ...
The
Evening Class: ROBERT ALDRICH BLOGATHON—Saint Joan and Baby Jane Michael Guillen
The Greatest Films - comprehensive
analysis of classic US film Tim
Dirks
4 FOR TEXAS
There's little to complain about this Frank-and-Dean Rat-Pack-Goes-Western romp, but plenty of time in which to do it. While Aldrich keeps this tale of two scalawags' attempt to swindle each other out of cash and, later, a riverboat, running at a leisurely but laugh-getting pace, at some point in its two-hour-plus course, you have to start wondering why this comic oater needed to be so near epic length. In the meantime, though, Martin is at his drunk/sober finest, tossing off lines so good he must have actually rehearsed them. Their two love interests are fireballs as well, and who can complain about a supporting cast that includes Charles Bronson, Victor Buono, and the Three Stooges! That's right, the aging Stooges (featuring Moe, Larry, and Curly Joe DeRita) show up for a scene late in the film which has nothing much to do with the plot, but for true Stoogeophiles, it offers a rare chance to see the knuckleheads in action in color, as spry -- and violent -- as they had been 30 years before.
Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan Cracknell]
It might be 4 For Texas
Set in the frontier Texas town of Galveston, 4 For Texas revolves around
Zack Thomas (Sinatra) and Joe Jarrett (Dean Martin), who are competing for
control over the potentially lucrative local gambling scene. Each is trying to
get his foot in the door with his charm and the pull of his significant wealth.
The opening scene is one of the movie’s few highlights. Jarrett’s just hijacked
a stagecoach for $100,000. Thomas is there and they try to out-dupe each other
for control of the money. Power shifts back and forth within seconds. It’s
funny and logical, an establishment of their shifty minds. But that’s really
where the movie’s highlights end. The rest of the film is a sea of bad jokes
and an awful display of machismo on the parts of Sinatra and Martin.
Even a brief appearance by the Three Stooges
doesn’t generate many laughs. In colour they come across as a trio of fading
legends up to the same old slap, poke and whack routine that they’d been doing
for the past 30 years. Although their appearance is limited to just a few
seconds of the movie’s running time, it’s a high-profile example of a major
problem that mars 4 For Texas Texas
Throughout the film, Sinatra and Martin duke it out to see who’s the most
manly. Forget the riverboats and the millions to be made, the pair strut their
peacock feathers in a show of pomp and righteousness. To them, it’s all about
ladies and who can have the greater control. It doesn’t help any when the two
major female roles, played by Anita Ekberg (La dolce vita) and Ursula
Andress (Dr. No), are essentially slaves to the boys’ whims. The girls
both start out with power, but the second the men walk in, they throw
themselves to their knees, loyal to the guys’ every request. Couple the women’s
submissive attitudes and actions with the film’s overt sexual innuendo stemming
from its frat house humour, and 4 For Texas is likely to insult many,
including even those who consider themselves to be less sensitive viewers.
4 For Texas
4
For Texas John McElwee from
Greenbriar Picture Show
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
HUSH...HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE
USA
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film
Festival report
I'd been plagued all day by a jaded,
seen-too-many-movies feeling, which for a better term might as well call Film
festival Fatigue, so wasn't sure how tolerant I'd be of
southern-fried Gothic stretched out to 130 minutes. As it turned out, the
picture kept me engaged and entertained right through past
Picture is a fundamentally daft melodrama about dark
family secrets and feuds in an out-of-the-way corner of
Plot recalls Aldrich and
After: late drinks at the "English"-themed pub
next to the main festival hotel, bizarrely named 'The 1870 Huntsman.' Among the
drinkers: fellow
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson
At some point immediately before
production began on Hush…Hush, Sweet
Because
Charlotte is kissing cousin to Suddenly, Last Summer in that it's
a rutty little bayou potboiler in tradition-of-quality drag, where backwoods
glamour translates as both the size of the family property and the ghastly
dimensions of said family's "eccentricity." Davis plays Charlotte,
who long ago in 1929 was accused of quartering her lover with a meat cleaver
after the married suitor miraculously found his conscience at the end of
Charlotte's father's pistol barrel. Though nearly everyone in the area is
convinced of
Did
I say they leave her alone? Flash forward to 1964, when the county developers
serve Charlotte (and her estate's butch housemaid Velma, played by Agnes
Moorhead, who matches
Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco
Bright Lights Film Journal Mark A. Vieira
promises
David Lowrey from Drifting
DVD
Panache: HORROR MONTH: 15 'Sweet' minutes
Adam Ross from DVD Panache
THE FLIGHT OF THE PHOENIX
USA
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]
As in Aldrich's What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the opening credits for The Flight of the Phoenix are withheld for an audaciously long time - and when they arrive, they prove well worth the wait. The action freezes as we're introduced to the whole cast of characters, one by one, as the aeroplane in which they're flying commences a very rough 'emergency landing': veteran pilot (James Stewart), nervy navigator (Richard Attenborough), plus passengers played by a variety of (male) actors of varying ages and nationalities - including Christian Marquand, Hardy Kruger, Ronald Fraser, Ian Bannen, and George Kennedy. The presence of Kennedy on board a movie aircraft is, of course, a guaranteed harbinger of serious trouble - one wonders how Kennedy's fellow-passengers coped when they saw him taking his seat on real-life jets - and disaster duly ensues when the plane comes down in a desolate expanse of the Libyan desert.
The crash immediately takes out two of the minor players - an
bouzouki-strumming annoyance and Aldrich's own bland, blond son William
(producer of the 2004
With all their remaining options fading fast, bespectacled twentysomething (FRG-)German aircraft designer Dorfmann (Kruger) proposes a startling solution: he reckons he can cannibalise the crashed aeroplane into a smaller model which might even be able to get airborne. After much reluctance and skepticism, the men set to work. Complications ensue, and it later transpires that Dorfmann isn't quite the aviation expert he initially appears - indeed, he turns out to be something of a distant cousin to the overconfident juvenile bell-founder whose labours provide the tense climax for Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev.
Though overlong, slow in parts, and saddled with an unfortunate, sixties-emphatic score (by 'DeVol'), this Phoenix proves a sound enough conveyance, Lukas Heller's screenplay (adapted from Elleston Trevor's novel) ambitiously cobbling together elements of (a) Poseidon Adventure-ish disaster movie, (b) tense, Wages of Fear-style tense all-male psychological drama and (c) philosophical parable into a rough-edged but workable whole.
The 'parable' aspect is the part that works best today - especially since the title does somewhat give the ending away. In this situation of dire extremis, Aldrich and Heller show two types of man emerging as the crucial forces: Stewart's old-school, emotional, flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants pilot and Kruger's cool, analytical technocrat. It's a very mid-sixties collision of temperaments, and while it's clear that Dorfmann represents what The Aviator's Howard Hughes calls "the way of the future", it's also evident that the past is much too valuable to be jettisoned entirely. What The Flight of the Phoenix optimistically presents is an uneasy but ultimately amiable state of cooperation between the two - it's no coincidence the last words we hear are a jocular chat about imperial measures vs metric.
On closer inspection, however, the role of alcoholic navigator Attenborough is perhaps most crucial of all - he's the go between not only between Kruger and Stewart, but between those two and the 'labourers' without whom no progress would be possible. And Attenborough turns in easily the most compelling and convincing performance of the bunch - it seems remarkable in retrospect that out of the whole cast the only one to obtain an Oscar nomination for this movie was ... ah well, see if you can guess for yourself.
Apollo Movie Guide
[Jamie Gillies]
The
Flight of the Phoenix C. Jerry
Kutner from Bright Lights After Dark
Movie
Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)
eFilmCritic.com (David Cornelius)
Needcoffee.com - DVD
Review by HTQ4
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
THE DIRTY DOZEN
Reel.com DVD review [Bill Schwartz]
Hard-case actor Lee Marvin leads a rag-tag group of terminal criminals on a suicide mission behind German lines in Robert Aldrich's caustic World War II caper film The Dirty Dozen, recently re-released on DVD. Aldrich directed what must be the coldest of films noir, Kiss Me Deadly, and he applies that touch here. Having Ralph Meeker (Deadly's pitiless Mike Hammer) acting as the voice of discretion in his role as Captain Kinder only underscores how far the level of brutality sinks. Of course, it's 1967, so the violence isn't necessarily graphic, just proliferate.
The Dirty Dozen belongs to that '60s, early '70s subgenre of World War II caper films that include The Guns of Navarone, Kelly's Heroes, and The Train, to name a few key examples. Focussing on one initial goal usually involving sabotage, burglary or some other vice, these kind of caper films often turn the moral tables on our regular viewing position and question the motivations of its heroes, addressing the nature of heroism and its costs. The viewer roots for "the bad guys." In The Dirty Dozen, they're the vice-ridden jailbird soldiers, thereby making the point that morality suspended for a larger, common good is a virtue. Through motivated by self-interest, these cons all learn to respect the commitment to something bigger than himself.
The film is in letterbox widescreen, preserving the Cinemascope aspect ratio of its original release. Generally sharp, it has a few emulsion blemishes, but they're hardly noticeable. The Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround Sound comes through fine.
Included on the disc is a mod featurette "Operation Dirty Dozen," made in 1967 and providing an entertaining, if mock backdrop to the making of the film. It's a real timepiece. Besides the featurette, there's not much else. More's the pity. Some of the cast provided the voices of the evil action figures in Joe Dante's satirical Small Soldiers. Surely one of them could have been recruited to provide some real information on the making of the film. And because the action takes place nearly 60 years ago, some historical background would have fleshed out and contributed to the mood of the film for viewers unfamiliar with D-Day.
DissssMISSED!
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Turner Classic Movies Lang Thompson
Turner Classic Movies Paul Sherman reviews the DVD release
Special
Edition, DVD Town [John J. Puccio]
The
Dirty Dozen John McElwee from
Greenbriar Picture Shows
The
Dirty Dozen Andrew Horbal from No
More Marriages
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
HUSTLE
USA (120 mi)
1975
Hustle |
Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
A brilliant 1975 film noir by Robert Aldrich, with all the power of his Attack!, Kiss Me Deadly, and Legend of Lylah Clare. Burt Reynolds is an emotionally damaged police detective searching for his lost motivation in the rubble of an LA shadow world populated by pimps, whores, and killers. Aldrich's vision of a spreading, inescapable moral corrosion is insidiously depressing when it is not immediately horrifying. The sinister mise-en-scene is compromised only by a few overripe lines from screenwriter Steve Shagan, and Reynolds reveals himself as an actor of depth and complexity.
girish:
Stormy Week/Aldrich
Another twisted romantic
relationship is at the heart of Hustle (1975). Burt Reynolds and
Catherine Deneuve are lovers. He’s a hardened cop and she’s an upscale
prostitute. At first, their relationship is business-like and ‘broad-minded.’
She casually conducts phone sex business around the house while he hangs about;
unsurprisingly, this begins to send him over the edge. When things come to a
head, Aldrich stages an unsettling rape scene and dares us to consider
interpreting it as (perhaps) a love scene. Aldrich’s view of love may be
sardonic but it is intelligently countered in both films through the
sympathetic, even tender presence of the two female leads (Deneuve and Darby)
who never allow the audience to pass easy judgments on the characters' motives,
actions, self-interest, etc. In both movies, Aldrich achieves a balance between
the psychological (how individuals behave alone and in relation to each other)
and the sociological (how he sees American social institutions and the people
who are part of them).
A few words about the music. The Grissom Gang is a post-Bonnie &
Clyde movie. It lays down sprightly thirties jazz to accompany often
horrific moments in the film. There’s a good reason why this works. Jazz of the
swing era (the 30s) differed from jazz of the bebop era (beginning in the 40s)
in many ways. For example, swing tended to be rhythmically more emphatic,
stressing all four beats in a bar, which often gave it an insistent jauntiness.
This contrast of a cheery soundtrack with dark subject matter has the
interesting effect of distancing the filmmaker (and the audience) from the material,
adding a reflective layer to the viewing experience. The music undercuts the
images, and we’re forced to dialectically construct a personal response to the
combination of image and sound.
An interesting touch. Hustle is a film with strong political critique;
in it, wealthy and powerful lives are worth much more than 'ordinary' ones. As
they are cruising down a Los Angeles boulevard in a convertible, Reynolds tells
Deneuve that the Americans are trying to open the first McDonald's in Paris.
Deneuve replies incredulously that they will never succeed. "Paris is a
fortress against the hamburger!" she asserts. Considering all of Aldrich's
knowingness, irony and political skepticism, Deneuve's conviction seems one
that Aldrich perhaps cautiously shared at the time. (At least that's the
feeling I got from the scene.) The sad thing is: All his pessimism seems
completely justified today, while his one throwaway note of optimism has been
proven false.
more Peter Nellhaus from Coffee Coffee and More
Coffee
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film Festival report
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING
Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)
Robert Aldrich, who blew up the
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] 2006 Torino Film
Festival report
Yesterday (Wednesday) I caught only one film - due to
various factors which I don't have time to explain right now - but it was a
corker, and by some way the best of the 20-odd titles I've seen so far. Pic in
question in Robert Aldrich's 1977 paranoid thriller-cum-action-movie-cum-satire
Twilight's
Last Gleaming, a
kind of cross between Dr Strangelove and Air Force One showcasing
a barnstorming turn from Charles Durning as an American president in dire
extremis. As usual with Aldrich, the running-time is excessive at 143 minutes,
but the tension is maintained at a high level throughout - and the running
current of very black humour makes for an entertaining watch. It's also
chillingly topical in the light of recent American foreign-policy, and numerous
lines drew gasps and laughter from the rapt audience at the
Nuclear missiles
raise their warheads, but this time the paranoia is inward, and it's American
vs American as Lancaster's renegade Air Force General captures a Montana
missile base in order to 'blackmail' the President into revealing the shameful
secrets of former administrations. The plea for 'open' government makes this in
many ways the first film of the Carter administration. On reflection, the
script is often contrived and the acting less than dynamic. But praise to
Aldrich for his no-nonsense direction, which fashions the material into a
fairly riveting computer hardware thriller. His handling of the countdown - 'It
stopped at 8. Next time they go!' - is sufficiently convincing for one to think
that the film and everything else might end prematurely. Aldrich turns in a
neat, professional job, and even his use of split-screen is unusually
uncluttered.
Goatdog's Movies [Michael W. Phillips Jr.]
"We have invaded Silo 3. We are prepared to launch nine nuclear
missiles. We demand ten million dollars, Air Force One... and you, Mr
President." In Robert Aldrich's
fervid attack on the evils of the
Dell is accompanied by Willis Powell (Paul Winfield), in many ways a voice of reason, and Augie Garvas (Burt Young), two convicts who are along for the ride because of the $10 million and free passage out of the country that Dell demands from the government. The sequence where Dell's men break into the military base is tense and exciting, and it features some of the split-screen camerawork that Aldrich uses to good effect throughout the film. It might not be very realistic—this film isn't very high on realism—but it's exciting. Throughout the film, too, are small, quiet touches of humor, such as when Dell indignantly informs Powell that "there are no midgets in the United States Air Force." Aldrich, who directed such nail-biters as Kiss Me Deadly and The Dirty Dozen, is an expert at pacing that ratchets up the suspense. The film's dramatic, but not really surprising, ending is a masterpiece of deliberate pacing.
Attempting to thwart Dell's plans is General MacKenzie (Richard
Widmark), a longtime nemesis of the rogue general. His job is to be the bad
guy: as we grow to like, or at least respect Dell, MacKenzie attempts to take
him out. He's in charge of carrying out the government's "Solid Gold"
attack, a small-scale nuclear device that will destroy the silo and half of
You might notice that Dell's demands are a bit outdated, since the Pentagon Papers, released by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971, already told the world exactly what Dell wants the president to reveal. In addition, Henry Kissinger's 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy says pretty much what the top-secret document says. It wasn't much of a surprise, and it certainly didn't prompt the kind of widespread, government-destroying outrage that the film predicts. American people are pretty willing to ignore or forgive any number of dastardly deeds committed by their government. I think Aldrich had too much faith in the body politic.
The film shares Dell's naivité about the president. Dell sincerely believes
that the president is a good man who has either been led astray or never knew
what was going on in the first place. It's devastating for him to think that
the leader of the free world, elected by the people of the
The film was a huge flop, and it basically destroyed Aldrich's career. It
was one of the first films to attack
Twilight's Last Gleaming Aldrich’s paranoid vision, by Joe Heumann
from Jump Cut
Strictly Film School Acquarello
SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Alexandrowicz, Ra’anan
JAMES’ JOURNEY TO JERUSALEM
Israel
Bright-eyed and bushy-haired,
young James is a devout Christian sent by his African village to make a
pilgrimage to "
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
PopMatters Lesley Smith
Slant Magazine - Film Review: James' Journey to Jerusalem Eric Henderson
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Guardian/Observer
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Alfredson, Daniel
THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE B- 82
Following on the
footsteps of the earlier THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), featuring the
same two lead actors but with a different director, much of this plays out like
the earlier version, including plenty of connecting background information, but
without the novelty of discovering these characters for the first time. Here they are resuming familiar roles and
simply carrying on afterwards. There are
no flashbacks, changes in time sequence, or other narrative alterations, as this
is a simple straight forward presentation, made with substantially less money
as the second and third installments were originally made for Swedish TV,
expecting immediately to follow with a DVD release. But the huge success of the initial film
brought notoriety not only to the books and its author Stieg Larsson, but also
to this Millennium trilogy. The first film spent more time with Mikael
Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a top notch investigative journalist working for
an issues oriented magazine called Millennium,
joining forces temporarily and even having a strange but fascinating affair
with a punkish, anti-social computer specialist Lisbeth Salander (Noomi
Rapace), who has a horrible history of family and foster care abuse. She ends up being his guardian angel,
actually saving his life in the end from a reclusive family of demented
Nazi’s. This film treats each one
separately as they barely have any screen time together, and what there is
could have been shot in a single day.
Instead the film spends more time with Ms. Salander who has retreated
into secrecy, yet with fingerprints on a murder weapon is charged in the
strange murders of her corrupt and sexually perverted guardian, along with a
young couple recently hired by the magazine to write an exposé on sex
trafficking. The entire film is spent
observing Lisbeth’s attempts to vindicate herself from the charges, aided by
Blomqvist doing the leg work while Salander remains out of sight. She does, however, tap into his computer to
see what information he’s obtained.
Unfortunately, this
film treats Lisbeth as a superhero, where with her black leather jacket she’d
fit right in with the TERMINATOR series saving the planet from invading cyborgs
from the future. As one character, Palmgren
(Per Oscarsson), an irascible old guardian wiling away his time in a senior
citizen home (something of a Deep Throat mole in this film) calls her, she’s
“invincible.” And since she’s featured
so prominently in this installment, that’s pretty much what the audience thinks,
as they’re certainly not going to kill her off this early when her character is
one of the most original discoveries in recent years. Rapace’s identification with this character
is astonishing, which continues to surprise here, especially how deep-seeded
her hatred is for abusive men, including a startlingly frank lesbian sex scene,
even if the plot is more plodding and heavy handed, reaching into the Cold War
bag of villains and stereotypes. Professional
martial arts boxer Paolo Roberto takes a turn here in the gym and also in a
superbly choreographed fight sequence with a robotic monster (Mikael Spreitz) that
resembles Lurch from The Addams Family. But it turns out he’s just the heavy doing
the dirty work for the real criminal behind the scenes, a Russian secret agent
defector named Zala (Georgi Staykov), something of a novelty in Sweden, who has
discovered his niche in the criminal underworld. As Lisbeth tracks him down, knowing he’s the
real killer, so too does Zala make a beeline towards Lisbeth, so when they meet
it’s like two colliding trains heading for each other on the same track. Zala is remarkably detestable, but by the
end, which is left hanging, we get the feeling there remains unfinished business. Without the extraordinary talents of Noomi
Rapace, this would be a fairly conventional made-for-TV thriller, but the
intensity of her performance is a rare gift, something all viewers should
appreciate.
Time
Out New York review [3/5] Joshua
Rothkopf
You’ve seen the noses buried in Stieg Larsson’s thrillers
everywhere; even Zodiac’s mood maven David Fincher is preparing a
The Girl Who Played with Fire pushes her—and an investigative journo, Mikael (Nyqvist)—into a gruesome underworld of sexual abduction, with Lisbeth suffering a private history of abuse herself. Though play with fire she might, couldn’t screenwriter Jonas Frykberg have played with a little button called DELETE? There’s no reason why a two-hour movie should feel like three, nor require quite so much fidelity to Larsson’s plot curlicues; paradoxically, this only draws attention to an ugly pair of endgame villains straight out of a Bond movie. Downbeat and turgid, the brainy movie turns a literary sensation into summer homework.
The
Village Voice [John Patterson]
This grim and bloody adaptation of the second volume of the late Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy—featuring journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace)—moves the story into a very different register from the stand-alone murder mystery of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire is a cliffhanger whose resolution comes only in the third volume, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, which makes for certain structural infelicities in the adaptation (suggesting that the best way to enjoy the trilogy would be as weekly episodic television). This time, we navigate the innermost recesses of post–Cold War Sweden's secret state. Lisbeth, a semi-criminal adult ward of the Swedish state, gets her biography painstakingly backfilled, revealing disturbing connections with the main narrative, in which Mikael hires two investigative journalists with a bombshell story on child sex abuse in high places. Predictably, this pair is soon murdered, and their killer, equally predictably, is linked with baroque psychopaths from Lisbeth's past. Stripped of Larsson's social/political minutiae and slimmed down to its thriller chassis, certain clichés become more glaring: Lisbeth's superhuman hacking skills, overfamiliar from a zillion TV procedurals; an exploitative lesbian sex scene that mightn't have pleased the feminist Larsson; the secondary villain, a blond giant incapable of feeling pain—gah!; and the too-comfy manner in which the twin narratives finally interlace. As with the Twilight franchise, fans of the novels will eat it up, while newbies may wonder what all the fuss is about.
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)
review [4/4]
Welcome to the world of low-budget crime thrillers. No hairy chases across rooftops and highways, no high-tech graphics to punch up the clues, no 8-frame cuts to keep you alert. It's doubtful that the budget for costumes for this film went over $300 (or the equivalent in Kroner). From the plain, drably realistic approach you see on screen, one might even wonder if the cast had to brown bag their lunches. But, boy, does it work as a character-driven drama!
It does so for several reasons, not the least of which is the superb book on which it's based--one that has caused a sensation in the book publishing business--an adaptation that implies keen dedication to Steig Larsson's written words, and an astute eye in casting. With elements like these, a Jerry Bruckheimer approach is entirely superfluous.
This second book in the trilogy upon which the movie is based is aimed on revealing the identity of the men creating havoc in the Swedish community with three murders. Most vitally concerned is the slender, bi-sexual, underestimated terror, Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace). With an iron will and intellectual genius, she represents a nightmare for the authority figures who turned her into a martial arts expert filled with hatred and a demand for retribution. Now, wronged again by the authorities, she's accused of the killings because her fingerprints were found on the gun belonging to the third victim, lawyer Nils Bjurman, a sick rapist who had been appointed as her guardian. But, as a preceding scene shows, she used his gun one night to remind him of his obligations to her and of the consequences if he doesn't live up to his promises.
Finding the real killer, though, is only an immediate first step in unmasking the women=hating monsters who subjected her to mental and physical torture as a teenager and then putting her into the hands of a degenerate. Obtaining justice for her mental scars is a single-minded quest to find those responsible and end their hidden power structure within the Swedish government.
But, first, she must destroy her vilest enemy before he destroys her. She's already set him on fire for the way he savaged her mother, but he survived. His existence now is covered in a mist of secrecy and official protection. Only now, as the investigation over the murders proceeds, his name finally appears for the police and the press to ponder. Zala. A man with a pathology to compete against every international icon of evil in the last forty years. Tracking the animal down couldn't be more life-threatening. Lisbeth Salander is as much prey as she is hunter.
The second person to whom this tangle of secrecy and coverup is of such profound concern is the star investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (cool Michael Nyqvist) who writes for his and his partner-lover's monthly publication devoted to the exposure of corruption, Millenium. Two of the three murder victims were writers on his staff whose research had uncovered officials involved in a pattern of crimes that made the Swedish government look like a rat's nest of psychopaths. Blomkvist's prior knowledge of Salander (in "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo"), both intellectual and carnal, makes him certain she's no more the killer of his reporters than he is. His is a relentless probe that's as vital to him, his publication and to society as Salander's. What they don't yet realize is that they're after the same pit of snakes.
What makes the mystery so compelling is a depth and complexity that doesn't allow one line of this hunt for moral monsters to lead to any more than a part of the puzzle. For the full truth to be revealed, several seemingly independent discoveries must be put together and Larsson's story construction saps each step of that process for intensity of drama and its ironies. The books' effect of smashing sales records around the world also owes much to a singular relationship between a perceptive man and a woman whose intuitive distrust separates them but who, together, form a team of avengers--correcters of a seethingly evil cabal.
The film culminates in one of the most arch and wrenching moments of the entire series--one whose immediate aftermath will continue in the third part of the trilogy--when the full depth and nature of the consipiracy will, at last, be known.
Thankfully for film lovers, the author's brilliance seeps into every corner of the film, which is all the more appreciated by the fact that director Daniel Alfredson picks up the story following Niels Arden Oplev's work on the first film, "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." Similarly, screenwriter Jonas Frykberg picked up his reins from the work of Nikolaj Arce and Rasmus Heisterberg.
Not that a difference in styles (and budget and quality)
isn't noticeable. What accounts for this is the production plan. According to
one Swedish source, the final two films were originally intended for a Swedish
TV-series and thence directly to DVD. Talk about lack of vision or confidence.
When the first film turned in the biggest numbers ever known in
Credit for that grip on our involvement goes mightily to Rapace's skill in interpreting Larsson's creation--the slender victim of abuse who combines startling intellectual genius with physical ferocity; and to Nyqvist's rendering of a man who, like Larsson himself, is wholly devoted to correcting injustice generally, and that which Salander suffered, in particular. With absolute faith in her innocence regarding the murders, he puts his own life on the line to track her down, ultimately finding her close to death. His actions test Salander's almost total distrust of men.
Side notes: Rapace has been approached about reprising her role in this series for an American prodution. So far she's declined, having plenty of other work scheduled. She's had it with Lisbeth Salander. The concern, then, is, what American actress will get the role. Is there a cross between Ellen Page and Glenn Close?
Readers of "The Girl Who Played With Fire" will
find it interesting that the entire first part of the book, detailing
Salander's vacation tour, her solution to Fermat's Last Theorem and
mental exercises with other mathematical brain-blasters. Larsson, no doubt, was
having fun with the extent of the woman's intellectual capacity, combining such
preoccupations of her mind with the fact that she was living the good life on
the Wennerstrom money that made her rich enough to cover all needs for the rest
of her life. The film version of the saga picks up with her return to
If only she wasn't such a smoke factory. Clearly, Swedish TV has no problem with chain smoking, which is such a prevalent prop for Salnder that you have to fear for the condition of Rapace's lungs. The girl's a poster child for the nicotine rush.
My reading of "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" ended in a state of sadness. Larsson, who died almost immediately after delivering his manuscripts for the three books to his Swedish publisher, had intended to carry on the series for a total of ten. The fourth exists, the major part of which was found in his laptop--and the literary world awaits a legal decision regarding its disposition.
An estimated 40 million copies of the Millenium books have been sold worldwide. "To say it is unusual for a posthumous work in translation to reach number one on the New York Times bestseller list is an understatement. To see a posthumous work in translation reach number one around the world is unprecedented." (From the press notes--for once facts, not hype).
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
DVD
Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [2/5]
Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti
eFilmCritic.com
(Rob Gonsalves) review [4/5]
DVD
Talk (Brian Orndorf) review [3/5]
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
The
Onion A.V. Club review [C] Tasha
Robinson
One Guy's Opinion
(Frank Swietek) review [C]
Movie
Babblings Päivi
The
Hollywood Reporter review Kirk
Honeycutt
Entertainment Weekly
review [B+] Owen Gleiberman
Variety
(Boyd van Hoeij) review
The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director lashes out at US remake Andrew Pulver from The Guardian,
Swedish
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo director attacks Hollywood remake Ben Child from The Guardian, November 9, 2010
Los
Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York
Times review A.I. Scott
THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET’S NEST B+ 90
The finale of Swedish
author Stieg Larsson’s made-for-TV Millennium Trilogy is not a letdown, as
there’s excellent suspense from start to finish, creating a wonderfully murky
atmosphere where each shot of the city of Stockholm by cinematographer Peter
Mokrosinski looks dark and gloomy, a place where the sun never shines, always
enveloped by low lying clouds. The first
part of the series was directed by Niels Arden Oplev, featuring a mix of
digital video, 16 mm, Super 16 mm, 35 mm, all blown up on Super 35 mm, giving
the film a variety of looks which helps set the series in motion, as the
opening introduction is easily the most intriguing, as it draws the audience
into this smart crime drama where part of the interest is the unusual
individuality and intelligence in the characters, introducing the punkish
computer hacker Lisbeth with a near photographic memory, played by Noomi
Rapace, and Mikael, an award winning journalist played by Michael Nyqkvist,
where a brutal streak of sadism lies underneath the cool veneer of Swedish
sophistication, where only on the outside surface does life feel safe, secure,
and orderly. Daniel Alfredson takes over
the reins of the last two episodes, shot entirely on 35 mm, where the second
installment disintegrates into blasé Cold War stereotypes, showing little of
the imagination of the initial episode, turning Lisbeth into something of a
superhero, a valiant, closely guarded loner who has had to fight back from
horrific childhood experiences of horrendous male sexual abuse from the adults
in charge of her care, who have covered up their criminal actions by
mis-diagnosing her as delusional and schizophrenic, labeling her a mental
patient requiring their ongoing supervision even as an adult. When she meets Mikael, he may as well be from
Mars, as it’s the first intelligent sign of life in a male human being that
she’s ever witnessed, so they remain distant, but close, contacting one another
through computers.
Lisbeth is brutalized,
shot three times, buried alive and left for dead at the end of Part Two, waking
up here in a Gothenburg hospital where a bullet has been removed from her
brain, while down the hospital corridor is her hellish father, Zala (Georgi
Staykov), a Russian secret agent defector whose criminal underground status has
been protected by a secret group within the police and is recovering from an ax
injury to the head that she caused, so even in her incapacitated state she is
under police custody for attempted murder charges until she recovers. Within minutes, an elderly gentleman (who
turns out to be the director’s father) assassinates Zala in his hospital bed,
moving to Lisbeth’s room, but she heard the shots and with the help of her
visiting attorney (Annika Hallin), Mikael’s sister, locked the door. This sets into motion an interweaving
storyline of multiple narratives that includes a behind-the-scenes group of
secret service players known as the Section who ordered the hit, intending to
take out Lisbeth as well, also Mikael’s assembled journalistic team at Millennium magazine that are set to
release an extensive exposé on the shocking brutality inflicted by the State on
a young pre-teen girl, Lisbeth’s biographical revelations, while her monstrous
half-brother (Mikael Spreitz) who nearly killed her is still on the loose just
waiting to finish the job, not to mention Lisbeth is ordered to stand trial
once she recovers fully, where the Section’s lawyer and psychiatrist are
attempting to return her to a mental hospital, and finally Mikael is contacted
by a secret police task force interested in tracking down the Section’s
criminal perpetrators behind Zala’s thirty year cover up, which starts out with
just two overzealous cops but eventually turns into a room full of special
agents.
The downbeat and
disturbing mood accentuated by the music of Jacob Groth shows Lisbeth to be
highly suspicious, fearful to speak to anyone, where all around her she is held
back by deeply disturbed and detestable men who have turned her life into a
living hell, leaving her vulnerable, isolated and alone, but an aggressive
force within that remains committed to fighting back, especially when she
learns of a demented psychiatrist’s attempts to move her back into a mental
hospital, which ignites in her mind the abuse scenario from her past. Her suspicion leads her to remain
tight-lipped even to her own lawyer, though behind the scenes Mikael is
supplying the lawyer with evidence to dispute the prosecution’s case against
Lisbeth. Even so, the audience is aware
in every scene just how fragile and fraught with danger each life appears when
a rogue group of secret police are free to target and wreak havoc with all of
their lives. The director does a good
job juggling the suspense from each of the various storylines, highlighting the
unleashed dark forces and the secret interior worlds, building a tense,
psychological drama that reaches a remarkable crescendo when each of the
narratives peaks at precisely the same moment, resembling the operatic editing
of THE GODFATHER (1972). The secret to
the success of this trilogy is the fierce interior character of Lisbeth
herself, especially as played by Noomi Rapace, an outlandish woman dressed
provocatively in full black leather fetish attire, wearing motorcycle boots,
facial painting with heavy black eye liner, looking boyish with spikes, multiple
tattoos, a Mohawk haircut and piercings, a girl who never smiles or enjoys
herself, who uses her silence brilliantly in this final episode, remaining one
of the more compelling characters seen in years. Her appeal lies in her approach to herself,
her reaction to the dark forces surrounding her, operating with utmost
conviction, highly disciplined, fiercely independent, protecting herself with
the feral quality of an animal surrounded by savage beasts, yet she remains
balanced and in complete control of her life, even as she has no connection to
anyone else on earth except for a similarly isolated, hermetically sealed
fellow computer hacker (Tomas Kohler) known appropriately enough as Plague.
The
Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
Joshua Rothkopf from Time Out New
York
Talk to hard-core Stiegheads after the lights come up, and
they’ll tell you that whole reams of subplot have been cut from this third and
final installment of the Swedish-made “Millennium Trilogy.” (
The straw churning the frigid shake is Noomi Rapace, the actor well cast as androgynous cyberpunk Lisbeth Salander. Rapace has been whispered about as a contender for Ridley Scott’s forthcoming prequel to Alien (she could play human or monster). Here, it must be said, she’s largely offscreen, spending the movie in an intensive-care ward until her last-act court trial, into which she strides like a miniature Gary Numan. The spectacle is oddly moving, as is the long-telegraphed demolishing of a fatuous psychologist (Ahlbom Rosendahl). But such pleasures are meager and too late, given the demands on our patience. These Girl movies have turned the intimate vengeance of a unique heroine into something close to a TV procedural. At home might be the best place to watch them, or maybe streaming on your MacBook, divorced from the snorts of the unconvinced.
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
From "King Lear" to "Psycho," some of
the greatest popular art in existence has confronted human evil and depravity
with an eye as unblinking as Marion Crane's after a visit from Mrs. Bates. By
transcending the boundaries of disreputable genres built on bloodlust, our
shrewdest artists have made something of such stories beyond mere cruelty.
Then there's everything else, a little (or a lot) further down the durability
scale. I doubt anyone who has read one, two or all three of the late Stieg
Larsson's best-sellers, referred to as the Millennium trilogy (or, informally,
the "Dragon Tattoo" trilogy), believes they're reading something for
the ages. Who cares? It's enough that the borderline-superhuman heroine at the
center, bisexual computer wizard and sexual abuse survivor Lisbeth Salander,
exacts bittersweet revenge on the men who very nearly destroy her.
We like that sort of thing. We are a hypocritical species, shaking our heads at
the sadism while awaiting, with pumping heart and bated breath, the righteous
and usually fatal comeuppance.
"The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest" brings to a close the hugely
popular trilogy of thrillers written by Swedish journalist and editor Larsson.
Those who are all in, as they say, will surely feel compelled to pay the money
and see this publishing and cinematic phenomenon through to the end.
Pity the unsuspecting moviegoer wandering into Larsson's trilogy at the
two-thirds point. That moviegoer will be confused. "Hornet's Nest"
begins with Salander in the hospital, critically injured, accused of a triple
murder. Down at the spacious, industrial-Swedish-funk loft offices of
Millennium magazine, meanwhile, her champion and one-time lover, the journalist
Blomkvist, is digging down into a massive government conspiracy. Those
protected by the shadow government inside the government include a Soviet
defector who is Salander's father, whom she torched (literally) long ago.
(Hence the title of book and Film 2: "The Girl Who Played With
Fire.")
Larsson's leading characters have less to do in this wrap-up chapter. As
Larsson wrote it and screenwriter and exposition-condenser Ulf Rydberg adapted
it, it's a rather wobbly blend of courtroom drama and loose ends tied, albeit
rather leisurely. In its depiction of
I did like the notes struck at the end between Noomi Rapace, the series' fine,
fierce Lisbeth, and Michael Nyqvist as Blomkvist. The book ended differently;
the movie has the guts to let things dangle. Both actors have gotten a lot of
high-profile international work off this lucrative series. Rapace is in the
next "Sherlock Holmes" film opposite Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law;
Nyqvist has signed on for "
Filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti
When we last left Lisbeth Salander, she had faced down her
father and half-brother - the former an empty-souled gangster and the latter a
gigantic, remorseless, and compassionless enforcer - for a little family
discussion that left everybody bloodied and scarred but somehow still alive. As
shown in Daniel Alfredson's concluding film of the Stieg Larsson mystery trilogy,
the whole clan are not only tough to kill but sticklers for grudges and the
enactment of revenge. It takes a bit for the plot's motor to sputter into life,
but once it does, the spirit of relentless justice (for better or for worse)
makes for a far more satisfying piece of work than Alfredson's dire,
uninvolving film of the previous book, The
Girl Who Played With Fire.
Airlifted to a hospital for emergency surgery to get that bullet out of her
head, Salander (Noomi Rapace) has just one question at first for her doctor
when she comes to, "Brain damage?" Once it seems clear that
Salander's ferocious intelligence hasn't been at all affected, she enacts a tough
exercise regimen in order to get out of the hospital as soon as possible.
Arrayed against her, however, is apparently the entire machinery of the Swedish
state, particularly the rogue unit of government spooks who handled the
defection of Salander's Soviet spy father, Alexander Zalachenko (Georgi
Staykov) and have been covering up all of his crimes in the intervening years
under the excuse of national security. It's one of those aged agents, in fact,
who strolls into the hospital and puts a bullet in Zalachenko's brain before
firing another into his own after being unable to bust into Salander's room.
This just leaves the steadily-strengthening Salander out there as a loose end
to be dealt with.
Themes of rebirth play out through screenwriter Ulf Rydberg's skillful thinning
out of Larsson's expansive novel, with nearly all the major characters being
knocked down in some manner only to rejuvenate themselves not long after. This
kind of steely toughness isn't just a nod to the film's highly Nordic
anti-sentimentality; it's also necessary for a story that revolves so much
around putting things right.
More so than in the previous films, Salander's protector-from-afar,
investigative journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), seems determined
here to ensure that Salander finally achieves some kind of justice for the
barbarities inflicted on her by a series of officials who have ranged from the
merely ignorant to outright sadists. The forces of officialdom, all those gray
old spies long come in from the Cold War and eager to see their secrets kept
buried (along with the inhumane lengths to which they went previously to do
so), step up their harassment campaign.
Blomkvist's reactions to the dangers posed to his magazine co-workers are so
dismissive, his mind narrowed in pursuit of the prey, that he doesn't seem much
different than the avowedly anti-social and nearly autistic Salander. At least
the stone-faced Salander, a gothic Garbo for the new millennium, cracks a
quarter-grin every now and again, which is more than the espresso-fueled
crusader Blomkvist (still missing that rascal's charm which Larsson gave him in
the novels) can manage.
Pared down or not, the story still sprawls in the manner of Fire, with
too many secondary characters introduced and essentially forgotten about in the
blink of an eye. But fortunately there's a dramatic trial hulking at the
conclusion that not only ties nearly everything up but also provides a perfect
venue for Blomkvist's expose of the conspiratorial forces arrayed against
himself and Salander. The potential for melodramatic theatricality at this
point is high, but with the exception of Salander's slug-like therapist, the
film plays it all out as cleanly and mostly dispassionately as lovers of
Swedish crime stories demand. It's a world of questions and answers,
information, facts, and blood-red violence; criers and the soft of heart need
not apply.
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review
The single arresting image in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third and draggiest film in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, is Noomi Rapace as the damaged, bisexual, heavily pierced cybergirl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander—but only in the last half-hour (of two and a half), when she hauls herself out of her hospital bed and dresses for her attempted-murder trial. Rapace has a striking face to begin with, all sharp angles and flat planes, and for court she wears a towering mohawk and nose ring, her eyes and lips rimmed in black, looking like a cross between Grace Jones and Edward Scissorhands. Among these pale old Swedes, this statue-still icon of racial and sexual transgression leaps out of the screen. But talk about all dressed up with nowhere to go—it’s like Halloween night on C-Span.
I’m not a fan of the late Larsson’s prose (or that of his quasi-English translator), but I can understand his books’ peculiar pull. He was that rare commercial novelist whose paranoia wasn’t driven by opportunism: His investigative-journalism career convinced him that conspiracies weren’t the stuff of theories but the bedrock of a malevolent social order. And he saw women—when they weren’t jumping into bed with his alter ego, the indefatigable Larsson-like aging journalist Blomkvist—as especially vulnerable. In three books, every kind of predator except vampires turns up to menace Salander: buggering pedophile perverts; neo-Nazi serial sex killers; ex-KGB, burn-scarred, insanely vindictive patriarchs; and my personal favorite, a mute, Teutonic albino giant genetically impervious to pain. Buffy had it easy.
In Hornet’s Nest, the conspiracy to silence Salander reaches into the most sclerotic echelons of the Swedish government. After only one feeble assassination attempt, the bad guys totter back to their wheelchairs and respirators and try to work through bureaucratic channels. The process is a tad slow. Larsson is renowned for his attention to marginal details, which gives his prose a rambling, one-thing-after-another pace that many readers find soothing. Onscreen, the lack of acceleration makes for one of those long Scandinavian winter nights.
The first film, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, had a different director, Niels Arden Oplev, and at least hit its marks: The cyberhacking of Salander complemented the shoe-leather reporting of Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) and vice versa, and the two outcasts’ growing bond—and their revenge on multiple foes—was reasonably fun to watch. But the next two, directed by Daniel Alfredson, are like extended footnotes. Here, as in The Girl Who Played With Fire, Salander and Blomkvist have practically no contact. Imagine your favorite duos—Nick and Nora, Steed and Mrs. Peel, Beavis and Butthead—limited to one phone call and a quick wave.
Having been beaten and shot, Salander spends most of Hornet’s Nest in that hospital bed glaring in mute outrage. I don’t blame her. At the end of the last film, she took an ax to the father who tried to kill her, and now she’s being put on trial for attempted murder: The hapless secret Swedish cabal of old white men wants to put her in an asylum under the supervision of a sadistic Fascist pedophile shrink. Salander’s sympathetic surgeon tells prosecutors she’s not well enough to talk to them, so weeks go by while they sit on their hands outside her hospital room and she begins to write a memoir of her abuse. Oprah could get to her faster than these bad guys.
It almost doesn’t matter that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest has so little sting. Most fans have moved on to speculation over a possible book four allegedly being held for ransom by Larsson’s girlfriend. (Watch out for albinos, babe.) There’s also that remake in production by new auteurist darling David Fincher, who in Zodiac proved that he could imbue the most insignificant bit of minutia with his patented malignancy. But does Fincher have the stuff to stiffen up Larsson’s flaccid plotting? (I consider that a macho dare.)
The
Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest really stepped in something ... Michael Sicinski from The Nashville Scene
The
Village Voice [Melissa Anderson]
DVD
Talk (Jamie S. Rich) review [3/5]
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Movieline
(Stephanie Zacharek) review [4/10]
Slant
Magazine (Nick Schager) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Jay Seaver) review [3/5]
The
Onion A.V. Club review [C+] Tasha
Robinson
eFilmCritic.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [2/5] also
seen here: DVD
Talk (Brian Orndorf) review [2/5]
and here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf]
RopeofSilicon
(Brad Brevet) review [C+]
CHUD.com
(Joshua Miller) review
Boxoffice
Magazine (Vadim Rizov) review [1.5/5]
The
Hollywood Reporter (Kirk Honeycutt) review
Entertainment Weekly
review Owen Gleiberman
Variety
(Boyd van Hoeij) review
The
Girl with the Dragon Tattoo director lashes out at US remake Andrew Pulver from The Guardian,
Swedish
Girl With the Dragon Tattoo director attacks Hollywood remake Ben Child from The Guardian, November 9, 2010
Boston
Globe (Wesley Morris) review [2/4]
The
Boston Phoenix (Brett Michel) review
San
Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli, Hearst Movie Writer) review [3/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Alfredson, Tomas
LET THE RIGHT ONE IN B+ 91
A pre-teen vampire love
story that acts as a wish fulfillment revenge fantasy, something along the
lines of KING OF PING PONG (2008), another Swedish film (without the vampire)
released within a week of one another shot entirely in the snow which features
a troubled adolescent teen that veers into serial killing. The disturbing similarities are interesting,
as each features over-the-edge behavior in response to hopelessly dark realism
and a brooding lead child character whose response to bullying leads to
escalating violence and serial murders, where they are all but ignored by their
dysfunctional families as well, placing them in dubious outsider status. In each there is a household overrun by cats
which adds a slightly humorous but thoroughly eccentric charm. This film examines the world of Oskar (Kåre
Hedebrant), a mildly effeminate yet studious 12-year old boy who is incessantly
picked on by a group of 3 boys who single him out to brutalize for their own
amusement, so he spends his time in near isolation in a dreary apartment complex
with his divorced mother who not only remains aloof but completely irrelevant
to his world, as are all of the adults in this film. Instead he keeps a knife under his bed and
collects gruesome stories about horrible crimes for his scrapbook. Almost as if he wills her to appear out of
his imagination, another young girl his age named Eli (Lina Leandersson)
appears with strange habits, as she smells funny and doesn’t wear shoes in the
snow, or even a coat for that matter, while everyone else is bundled up in
scarves, hats, and gloves. It's obvious
these kids have spent a great deal of time being alone, so when they meet,
they're initially suspicious but both are longing for a friend.
One of the more
interesting aspects of the film is the way their friendship develops slowly, as
each is involved in leading separately unhappy lives, where Oskar is learning
not to count on adults for help or understanding, as his family is completely
dysfunctional and his teacher couldn’t be more impotent, so there is no one to
turn to for help for the abuse he endures, while Eli, who we learn early on is
a vampire, has a helper Hakan (Per Ragnar) who obtains fresh human blood in a
distinguished manner, yet in an amusing but utterly horrific development,
couldn’t be more incompetent. In a touch
of irony, our leads turn out to be the
boy and girl next door. As the story
unfolds, we learn some new twists about vampires, like their stomach rumbles
when hungry, they easily scale the sides of buildings, they need to be invited
indoors, their mere presence causes cats to hiss and attack viciously, and when
subjected to blinding light in the daytime, they erupt into flames. All of this is naturally interwoven into the
story, adapted by John Ajvide Lindqvist from his own novel, featuring uncanny
cinematography by Hoyte Van Hoytema as he uses close ups in dimly lit rooms,
shows a knack for perfectly framed interior shots and gorgeously composed
outdoor sequences, all told with a surprising degree of gentle intimacy,
expressing a natural inclination to be curious, where what is accentuated is
what’s so human about them, not the world around them that is screaming for
order and understanding.
While this is a
beautifully dark and powerfully absorbing film, it mixes the grotesque with the
intimate, where it’s actually a Beauty
and the Beast story, where the vampire could be both at the same time,
prominently displaying her lust for victims with plenty of splattered blood all
mixed together with perfectly quiet and tender scenes. Unlike most films in this genre, special
effects are not used to overemphasize terror, as reality is far more
terrifying than anything else these kids are involved with. Instead, much like Roman Polanski’s REPULSION
(1965), terror is expressed through brilliant use of offscreen sound. There is a uniquely powerful sound design,
most of it accentuating the unsettling interior mood of the vampire, where
eerie offscreen noise is continually balanced against a probing musical score
by Johan Söderqvist, adding a distinctive growl in a flurry of brief activity
when the vampire strikes. Actually there
are many voices to this vampire, and even a few different faces, but it’s truly
eye opening when Oskar discovers her real nature, as he’s frightened, perhaps
even repulsed, while at the same time also protected for the first time from
his own worst fears. She has a curiously
seductive effect that singularly raises his confidence level, and at 12 if he
feels like he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, then it sounds like
the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review (Page 2)
It is perversely gratifying in this climate to watch a child prey on grown-ups, even if that involves ripping open jugulars and chug-a-lugging blood. Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is a delightful mix of high and low: It’s a genuine genre vampire picture; and it’s Swedish, winter-lit, Bergmanesque. A lonely, beleaguered-by-bullies blond boy has a new neighbor in his apartment complex, a darkish girl of rather ambiguous sexuality and even more ambiguous humanity. She is also subject to deep tummy rumbles that trigger feral outbursts. In their like estrangement from the world, they bond. A gay-outsider metaphor? Maybe. Doesn’t matter. The emotional climate is authentic, while the killings are nice and splattery. Swedish vampires are such a natural I’m surprised there haven’t been more. True, everyone looks anemic, but the winter nights are long, and you gotta love the way they all say bluude.
Electric
Sheep Magazine Pamela Jahn
Separated from the major annual Edinburgh Festival pandemonium for the first time ever, this year’s 62nd film festival wished to establish a fresher, stronger, edgier identity, exploring the nooks and crannies of new movie-making and bringing unusual treasures to its enthusiastic local and international audience. Unfortunately though, this was not a year of major cinematic breakthroughs and in spite of the promising programme notes, too many of the films turned out to be mediocre.
Without doubt, the pick of the festival was Swedish director Tomas Alfredsson’s excellent Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in), an intelligent, well-paced vampire movie, which deservedly won the top award for best narrative feature at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival. Impressively handling familiar material and giving it a fresh spin, it has the gruesome feel and bizarre beauty of an eccentric horror fantasy, but also delivers plenty of emotionally charged drama and wry humour. Andersson slowly charts the blossoming friendship between troubled 12-year-old Oskar and vampire girl Eli through a series of poignant and near-surreal attempts at bonding that are in turn gentle and disturbing. Superb cinematography and mesmerising performances by the two adolescent lead actors (Kåre Hedebrant and Lina Leandersson) make it a film to treasure.
The Wall Street
Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
By happy
happenstance, a remarkably fine and genuinely frightening movie about a teenage
vampire is playing in a dozen or more cities around the country. "Let the
Right One In," in Swedish, with English subtitles, was directed by Tomas
Alfredson from John Ajvide Lindqvist's adaptation of his own novel. This time
the genders are reversed -- the vampire takes the form of a dark-eyed girl. Her
name is Eli, and she moves into a suburban apartment with a stone-faced man who
only looks to be her father. At first Eli has evil eyes for Oskar, the boy next
door; he looks like an angel, and lives in a hell created by school bullies.
But she falls in love, in her fashion, and becomes the boy's protector.
Mr. Alfredson's
style is as elegant and laconic as "Twilight" is amateurish and
campy. The cinematographer, Hoyte Van Hoytema, has created formal compositions,
muted in tone, that I will savor as still frames when the DVD is released. The
film has its share of sly humor. At one point Eli, her face smeared with a
victim's blood, snuggles with Oskar in bed and tells him she's not really a
girl, but he still wants to go steady. Yet the main dramatic tone is quiet
horror grounded in a matter-of-factness that will have your blood running cold.
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In transports vampire legend to the realm of tween romance, melding genres with a haunting poignancy that’s mildly undercut by a script that, during its last act, bounces around like a jeep on a dirt road. Alfredson doesn’t shy away from supernatural lore (sunlight and stakes to the heart are fatal, blood-suckers must be invited across thresholds) but his prime concern is the way that vampires’ undead condition leads to the same type of isolation and loneliness also felt by unpopular adolescents. Thus, when picked-on Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) meets gaunt 12-year-old vampire Eli (unnerving, doe-eyed Lina Leandersson) outside his dreary, snow-coated apartment complex, their bond is immediate, born out of frustration, longing and hunger – hers for blood (which the mystery man with whom she lives attempts to acquire via the murder of innocents), and his for the power to combat a vicious school bully. Anderson’s chilly, pensive aesthetic exudes fairy tale melancholy, comprised equally of ethereal serenity and mundane realism, the latter of which extends to a group of grim adults whose fates are eventually intertwined with Eli’s. These peripheral characters serve basic narrative purposes (specifically, to create opportunities for carnage), yet while their presence expands the film’s portrait of frosty Nordic misery and alienation, it doesn’t do so in any appreciably affecting way. Ultimately, they’re just dull distractions from the central, disturbed romance whose main contribution is a bit of ridiculousness involving a horde of cats. Still, despite these needless narrative detours and a few indie-style affectations (most notably the assertively emotive score, which mucks up the otherwise eerie sound design), Let the Right One In has a gloomy poeticism wrought from arresting supernatural imagery – none more potent than an underwater shot during the public pool finale – as well as striking close-ups that give empathetic consideration to forlorn Oskar and Eli, two kids desperate for a warm, compassionate embrace in an environment frozen to the bone.
The Onion A.V.
Club (Keith Phipps) review
In the
Hedebrant has another new neighbor in Ragnar's apartment, 12-year-old Lina Leandersson, who introduces herself to Hedebrant with the words, "I can't be your friend," then proceeds to spend every evening with him in the halfhearted park outside their apartment complex. Sometimes she smells bad and looks haggard. At other moments, she looks like a girl in the flush of youth. Meanwhile, residents keep disappearing, and Hedebrant starts to put two and two together about why he never sees his new friend in daylight.
The "v" word only gets mentioned briefly in Let The Right One In, which is fitting, since vampirism is used more to support the film's themes than to provide traditional scary-movie thrills. When director Tomas Alfredson, working from a novel and screenplay by John Ajvide Lindqvist, does go for bloodsucking jolts, they're effective, but the quieter moments are what make the movie heartwarming and unsettling. As Hedebrant and Leandersson's friendship deepens, the film makes it impossible to judge whether we're watching tender scenes of puppy love or unholy union. And when an emboldened Hedebrant fights back against his bullies, we see the grave consequences of his newfound assertiveness.
Let The Right One In is more concerned with the everyday horrors of childhood than things that go bump—or that growl and tear—in the night. Directing with a controlled chilliness in sync with his snowy setting, Alfredson keeps his protagonist vulnerable while slowly letting him regain his self-respect and capacity for friendship, developments the film uncomfortably link to his potential for violence. It's a sweetly queasy film that suggests the spirit that sustains us, the demons we hide from the world, and the monsters that prey upon us in the dark might all be variations on the same beast.
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
I’m so sick of Swedish vampire movies, aren’t you? Honestly, I’ve had it with those bloodsucking Svenskar. If you can stomach just one more, however, “Let the Right One In” is the Swedish vampire movie to see.
The film is terrific. The upcoming screen version of “Twilight” (opening Nov. 21) may be the set of fangs everyone’s waiting for, at least among certain demographics, but I can’t imagine anyone older than 15, who cherishes vampire lore or not, failing to fall for this spectacularly assured, mournfully beautiful entertainment, one that mines an old myth for all sorts of insinuating new themes and variations. Director Tomas Alfredson treats John Ajvide Lindqvist’s script, adapted from his novel, the way any fine director visiting a familiar horror narrative treats it: as if it’s the first time for all of us.
Twelve-year-old Oskar, a sweet, pale blond boy, lives with his divorced mother in a drab apartment complex in suburban Stockholm. Oskar endures routine, painful encounters with bullies at school. (None of these scenes are easy to watch, yet none of them feels melodramatically exploitative.) When first we see the boy he is toying with a knife, dreaming of revenge.
His champion, savior and supernatural mentor all arrive in one ghostly package one evening on the forlorn jungle gym in the snowy apartment courtyard. The girl in question, Eli, says she is also 12, “more or less.” She is oddly impervious to the cold, even for a Scandinavian. The initial small talk between them is rocky, remote, but something’s there—they need each other in ways Oskar cannot yet understand.
Eli has relocated from parts unknown with her own personal Renfield, a father figure who aids Eli in getting her what she needs to continue her existence. The color red is crucial to any vampire story, but it’s amazing how director Alfredson and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema deploy splashes of blood, or close-ups of Oskar’s pensive mouth, or crimson tree buds struggling to survive the winter, to sustain a visual leitmotif gracefully. For a genre associated with schlock and awe, “Let the Right One In” is unusually well-made. The scenes of violence are all the more unsettling for the camera’s middle-distance observation point. Some individual shots—Eli’s attack on a local hard-drinking apartment dweller under a bridge, or her rapid ascent up the outside of a hospital building—are stunners. And not since “Jaws” have severed body parts underwater been depicted quite so vividly.
At heart the film is about an unlikely friendship and a precarious bridge built between two isolated individuals. Kare Hedebrant (Oskar) and Lina Leandersson (Eli) are excellent together, and because Oskar doesn’t know what he’s getting into, the audience experiences his awakening with a mixture of tingling suspense and genuine pathos. Already “Let the Right One In” has been slated for an American remake, by the “Cloverfield” director, and I suspect director Alfredson will entertain some lucrative Hollywood offers of his own. Good luck to everybody on all fronts. Meantime, this is one of the real finds of 2008.
Let
the Right One In Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
indieWIRE
review Michael Koresky from Reverse
Shot
Slant Magazine
review Andrew Schenker
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Gothenburg Film Festival report
The Auteurs' Notebook Daniel Kasman
Chicago
Reader (J.R. Jones) review
seanax.com
[Sean Axmaker] condensed version
from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer here
Village
Voice (Elena Oumano) review
The
Globe and Mail (Rick Groen) review [3/4]
Boston
Globe review [3.5/4] Wesley Morris
Austin
Chronicle (Marc Savlov) review [4/5]
San
Francisco Chronicle (Reyhan Harmanci) review
Los
Angeles Times (Carina Chocano) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY B+ 90
Unlike anything else
you’ll see this year, an intelligently restrained and thoroughly detached study
of the dark and shadowy world that exists behind the face of the Cold War,
circa the early 1970’s, as the British Intelligence has to clean up one of
their messy operations gone wrong in Budapest, Hungary when an agent gets
gunned down on the streets in broad daylight.
An updated adaptation of John Le Carré’s 1974 novel, not to be confused
with the 7-part made for TV British mini-series in 1979 starring Alec Guinness,
this one stars Gary Oldham as Smiley, the agent brought out of forced
retirement to investigate the presence of a double agent mole hidden within the
upper ranks of their intelligence service.
In an early sequence, all the suspected agents are gathered together
into a room with the head of Intelligence (John Heard) laying out the problem
while coolly indicating the mole was likely someone sitting with them at the
moment in the room. Through a series of
brief flashbacks mixed with current operations, it’s rare to find even the
briefest glimpse of a clue, where these guys are professionals at leaving no
tracks behind. Instead, bits and pieces
of conversations from interpersonal relations are seen which reflect a hidden
side of the characters introduced, where they all remain detached, indifferent
and isolated, closed off from the rest of the world, unable to express
openness, inconspicuously blending into the landscape without generating
emotional sparks, making it hard for anyone to detect. What’s interesting is a continuing holiday
office party sequence that appears throughout to plenty of drinks and cheesy
music, each time offering a littler bit more information, which is one of the
only times these guys are ever seen in a slightly informal setting, as each one
is always on their guard, offering quick glances at one another, aware that
they’re continually being watched.
Shot in Budapest,
Istanbul, and London, this is a contemplative and deeply probing thinking man’s
movie, one of the darker looking films of the year, where cinematographer Hoyte
Van Hoytema continually shoots agents as moving shadows engulfed in a black
emptiness of oversized rooms, where looming underneath it all is a chilly
atmosphere of mounting dread and paranoia.
It’s twenty minutes into the movie before Smiley utters a word, pursuing
his leads in an extremely low key and deliberate manner, rarely speaking,
revealing nothing, simply observing the men in their work, spending most of the
time listening, occasionally asking questions about events that previously
transpired, double checking their answers with the record, searching for blind
spots and holes, always attempting to unearth a clearer picture of each and
every step of the operations, continually unraveling and then putting back
together again the various pieces of the puzzle. The world is so muddled and hazy that’s it
hard to judge the progress, as traps are continually being set, so how does
Smiley or the audience distinguish the truth from falsely planted clues? In this world, which is really the altered
scenes behind the scenes, it all looks the same, where lies are perfectly
incorporated into regular routines.
While tempers grow short and fingers are pointed, the director offers
occasional close ups where the camera at times feels too close and too
intrusive, especially the blank look on Oldham’s face which betrays nothing in
this overly polite world of manners and etiquette, where catching someone off
guard or in an uncontrolled moment seems far fetched, where the audience can
grow frustrated by the continuing compilation of minutiae and the subsequent
lack of comprehension or progress on the case.
While there are quick
bursts of violence when bad things happen to the wrong people, there’s nothing
seemingly pointing to how the mission was compromised in the first place, only
the horrifying consequences thrown into the faces of the viewer, where the
price each agent pays to remain invisible can feel hollow and empty, where the
inhuman unravels into the inhumane, where agents are asked to do the
unspeakable. It’s hard to fathom what
motivates men at this level, what drives them to put themselves into harm’s
way, where if caught they can’t reveal anything, even under torture. In one of the more revealing scenes of the
film, a reprise of that party sequence, the brightest undercover British agents
are captured in a spontaneous moment of drunken revelry with a man in a Santa
Claus suit wearing a Lenin mask leading the group in a rousing chorus of the Internationale, where Smiley
uncomfortably backs out of the room to an outside balcony where he sees another
man’s hands all over his wife, as they are kissing in the shadows. We never see any of the wives, and only have
a limited window into the personal lives of the agents, where duty and
sacrifice is the blood running through their veins and is at the core of their
being. In something of a clever twist,
there is the briefest insinuation of a homosexual affair, which sheds light
into the closeted and secretive world of both a gay man in the 70’s and an
intelligence agent, both having to invent a false or neutered personality to
live by, a lie that never goes away, where either way tenderness or intimacy is
the real danger that could blow their cover, literally destroying their
lives. The film is a grey and murky
world of secrets and betrayals where the undercurrent of life trembling in
those veins is off limits, where the idea of romance or having a lifelong
partner remains inaccessible and continually out of reach, where instead it is
the dedication to consistency in their work and the accumulation of minute
details that determines the man, where in this intensely distrustful business,
each other is really all they have, brothers in an elite fraternity of
subterfuge.
Based on the novel by John Le Carre, Tinker Tailor
Soldier Spy is a brilliantly nuanced spy thriller that takes place during
the Cold War era - a time filled with high anxiety, volatility, and
disillusionment. Much like today. In the film, Gary Oldman plays George Smiley,
a British intelligence operative who is brought out of retirement to track down
a double agent, feeding top secret information to the Russians. Like the age
old nursery rhyme, Smiley must investigate suspects identified as a tinker,
tailor, soldier, poor man, and beggar man, in an effort to find the mole.
Directed by Tomas Alfredson, who was responsible for the underrated vampire
thriller, Let the Right One In, Tinker Tailor is hauntingly
immersive with ominous sounds, atmospherics, and camera work. With a top notch
British cast that also includes Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, John Hurt, and many
more, Tinker Tailor is a perfectly condensed, carefully calculated game
of chess.
Review:
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Film - Time Out New York Keith Uhlich
The Cold War is over, but director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) and his collaborators have brought those suspicion-fueled days to vivid life in this masterful adaptation of John le Carré’s beloved 1974 spy novel. Unless you’re familiar with the source material, which previously inspired a seven-episode TV version starring Alec Guinness, it’s likely you’ll feel a bit lost on first view: Characters spout insider-espionage jargon (Karla, Witchcraft, Scalphunters) with world-weary casualness, and flashbacks to seemingly inscrutable events are prevalent. Here’s all you need to know: There’s a Soviet operative in the British secret service, and forcibly retired MI6 man George Smiley (Oldman, perfection) has to find out who it is.
Now immerse yourself in the world Alfredson creates, a paranoiac’s nightmare of cautiously opened doors, enigmatic glances and soundproofed rooms inhabited by men in suits with shady motives. (The film is extraordinarily photographed by Hoyte Van Hoytema.) At the center of it all is Smiley, practically a caricature with his oversize glasses and somnolently polite demeanor, but possessed of a scarily patient intelligence—a bespectacled predator waiting for just the right moment to pounce. Alfredson shares the character’s confident composure, allowing the narrative to unfold with trancelike precision and finding piercing moments of pitch-black humor—the best involves an under-the-eye gunshot wound that oozes like a bloody tear duct—which augment and deepen a movie that’s already several cuts above the secret-agent cinema standard.
Associated Press
Christy LeMire
Gary Oldman is in a tough spot in "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy."
As the ironically named George Smiley, he's an inherently reticent, veteran operative, given to revealing nothing personally or professionally. And yet, as the central figure in this adaptation of John le Carre's best-selling 1974 novel, he must serve as our conduit, our guide through a shadowy and increasingly dangerous world where no one is to be trusted and nothing is as it initially seems. It's his job to make it accessible for us.
Because he's Gary Oldman and he's such a chameleon, he finds a slyness beneath the stoic veneer, a frightening intelligence that makes him a surprisingly formidable force. Oldman leads an excellent cast, a veritable who's-who of top British actors working today, all of whom keep us guessing as to who the traitor might be among them.
Tomas Alfredson, perhaps best known for directing the superb Swedish vampire thriller "Let the Right One In," has crafted a precisely detailed, retro-faded, well-acted mystery. But he's created a mood in this tale of Cold War espionage that may be a bit too chilly, a tension that may almost be too restrained.
You might feel the need to go back and rewatch "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" a second time - especially if you haven't read the book - because, truthfully, it is a bit confusing upon initial viewing. Like the spies he follows, Alfredson gives little away - that includes cheap scares and easy red herrings, which is admirable - but his film is dreadfully devoid of any sort of propulsive energy. (Thankfully, the ever-charismatic Tom Hardy shows up about halfway through as a maverick field agent to liven things up.)
Smiley, who's been forced into retirement from
And so he must surreptitiously sniff each one out, with the help of his much-younger assistant (Benedict Cumberbatch, which has to be the greatest name ever). This also prompts him to reflect on his own history with the Soviets.
This is a grim, methodical world ruled by drab, mistrustful geeks who have come to relish their power, but Alfredson navigates it fluidly and keeps the many complicated pieces moving with quiet ease. If everything's shot as if it's hanging in a constant haze, that's only appropriate; we are, too.
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy: The Ghost in the Machin... Bilge Ebiri from They Live by Night
I’ve watched Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy twice now and I’m still not sure I understand all of it. The story, at least in its broad strokes, is fairly simple, but structurally it burrows into little pockets that are sometimes hard to untangle. The film moves not like a river but an octopus at the bottom of the sea; you sense the overall form sliding along, but you can’t always follow the individual tentacles. And yet, I can’t tear myself away from it.
As I’ve said elsewhere, a film you have to see more than once should also be a film you want to see more than once. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy draws you into its atmosphere of dread and anxiety, and it’s hard not to feel uneasy while watching it, even if you don’t quite understand what’s happening. But the thing that’s making me come back to it over and over again is something other than this hard, nervous, thriller element. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Much like last year’s The American (and not unlike Alfredson’s earlier Let the Right One In), the film seems to be saying something about how tenderness insinuates itself into a tense, unfeeling world -- how the soft edges of desire collide with the cold angles of the machine.
Ostensibly, this adaptation of John le Carre’s classic spy novel
is about the hunt for a mole in a British Intelligence unit (called “The
Circus”). Of course, these aren’t glamorous, James Bond-style spies, or even Third
Man-style spies. Yes, we get interludes in
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy uses mood the way other movies might use plot points. Into this impeccably crafted recreation of a dry, drab, smoky bureaucracy, Alfredson carefully allows sharp little pangs of emotion: A jealous glance, a furtive embrace, a barely-glimpsed and hasty goodbye between two lovers. Maybe that’s why the film always feels like it’s ending. It’s shot in this persistent, autumnal glaze that makes everything seem like the last act of something, which is perhaps the ideal way to make a movie about people hiding very important things.
I haven't read le Carre's novel, but the filmmakers have spoken elsewhere, briefly, about their own addition of homosexuality into the film. But they've added it in such a glancing manner that you could easily miss it -- in fact, even as I write these words I'm not 100% sure to what extent the element is there, particularly at the end. But that very uncertainty seems to be part of the film's design. It’s amazing how often we’ll catch a glimpse of a body in the film, without ever seeing the face. Like there’s a story not quite being told hovering on the edges of the frame, constantly fleeing from our judgmental glance. We’re never getting the whole story.
In a way, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy seems to be saying that humans, even when placed into a well-oiled machine, will find ways to populate the place with their desires, to cut through the oppressive air of the mundane and find tenderness and human warmth – however fleeting, however wrong, however corrosive. In the end it's a film about intimacy -- perhaps even love, perhaps even of the forbidden kind – and how it burgeoned in this steely, unfeeling space.
Amy Taubin ArtForum
IF THE CURRENT INTEREST in the 1950s with its rigid gender
codes and well-advertised postwar optimistic veneer seems largely a diversion,
suitable for mockery and/or nostalgia, not so the ’70s, whose failures
(Vietnam), corruption (Watergate), and crumbling economy on both sides of the
Atlantic opened the door to Reagan’s and Thatcher’s reactionary governments and
thence to the way we live now—too close for comfort to the way we were then. Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974), John le Carré’s cold war
espionage procedural, is set in the early ’70s, inside Britain’s Secret
Intelligence Service, better known as MI6 or “the Circus”—the latter having to
do with the proximity of its headquarters to Oxford Circus rather than with the
madly straitlaced performative style of its employees. Le Carré’s hero, George
Smiley, is brought out of forced retirement to find the mole who is delivering
British and American secrets to
And now we have Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011), a
most brilliant feature movie directed by Tomas Alfredson and
starring Gary Oldman in a performance of
subzero cool that nevertheless ignites the screen with suppressed rage and
longing. Far more lively, cruel, sexy, subtle, and poignant than the television
version, TTSS opened a few months ago in
The movie’s only conventionally choreographed action scene—and
the mechanism by which the plot is set in motion—occurs before the opening
titles. Control (John Hurt), the beleaguered head of MI6, dispatches
experienced agent Jim Prideaux (Mark Strong) to
But no more so than the rest of the movie. Espionage is depicted as a thinking man’s game (although there is no doubt that Smiley could use his gun if pushed to it). Alfredson maps observations, suspicions, and deductions through frequent slow, seemingly weightless tracking moves that close in on objects and persons with charged intent: It’s camera movement as thought. Similarly, Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan’s deftly condensed script (dozens of le Carré’s pages stripped down to a single sentence) and the extremely elliptical editing within and between scenes—including a few subjective flashbacks—suggest mental processes (mostly Smiley’s) without the usual expressionist markings of subjectivity. (Alberto Iglesias’s elegiac orchestral score, with its touches of fado, does a great deal to establish tone.) The production design in myriad shades of gray and brown with the occasional hit of mustard or burnt sienna organizes almost every shot around frames within the frame (doorframes, window frames, picture frames, frames that move up and down or in and out) and streaked and dusty glass surfaces (mirrors, windows, windshields) that diffuse light and make it difficult to see anything clearly or directly. The look is rarefied, almost too ethereal, as if Smiley’s favorite painter would be Agnes Martin.
The movie’s best joke is that chaos exists only within Control’s flat, glimpsed just twice—before his fall and right after his death. Control is also the only character who gives full vent to his anger and frustrations. Hurt is memorable in the role, as is Kathy Burke (the star of Nil by Mouth [1997], the only film Oldman has directed) as a former MI6 researcher, fired by the team that brings down Control because she’s come to the same conclusion that he did: “There is a mole right at the top of the Circus. He’s been there for years.” (When the plot is as complicated as this one, repetition is helpful.) The supporting cast is exceptional all around, although those playing the good guys—Hurt, Burke, Strong, and two of British cinema’s most eccentrically attractive rising stars, Tom Hardy and Benedict Cumberbatch—are more vivid and nuanced than the suspected bad guys, who are merely nasty and curdled to the core.
But the movie belongs to Oldman, and anyone who wants to understand what movie acting is at its greatest should take more than one look at it. His Smiley is in a liminal zone between middle and old age. Certainly he has more past than future, and the particulars of that past infuse every gesture and word and especially his silences, which are frequent and long. His voice, which echoes Control’s way of speaking, is like steel sheathed in silk. His gait is feline, despite arthritic knees. His three-piece suits are perfectly tailored. The Cheshire Cat grin that once must have lit up his face is now just a memory etched in the muscles at the corners of his mouth.
His practice is to betray nothing himself, especially not his feelings about being betrayed, which he often has been. Smiley’s vulnerable spot is his unrequited love for his wildly adulterous wife, Ann. In both the novel and TV series, it’s mostly a gimmick—an easy way to show that Smiley has feelings. In the movie, Smiley yearns for Ann, whose face is glimpsed only for a second in profile, in a way that is truly heartbreaking and says everything about what happens in a relationship when one partner wrests all the sexual power from the other. There are three major scenes in which Smiley cannot, as it were, contain himself. The first is when he drunkenly describes his first encounter with his nemesis, Karla, a top man at the KGB. Another is his final confrontation with the Mole, whose betrayals are as much personal as political.
But the most wrenching and brutal is when, at a Circus Christmas party—one of the best scenes in the movie and one that’s not in the book—Smiley glimpses through a glass door the hands of a man he loathes all over his wife’s beautiful ass. A man in a Santa Claus costume wearing a Lenin mask has just taken the stage and all the assembled British spooks have risen to their feet to sing the Internationale. Smiley leans against the door gasping as if he’s been punched in stomach. His world is turning upside down and he has lost everything he values. It would have been a mercy—and a necessity if almost any actor other than Oldman were playing the role—for the director to pull the camera back, but instead he shoots Smiley’s crumbling face from three angles, all of them too close to hide anything. Acting, as they say, is reacting, and as reaction shots go, this one is at the top of the list.
Sight & Sound
[Philip Kemp] October 2011
Cinema@The
Digital Fix [Mike Sutton]
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy Review: I, Spy - Pajiba
Daniel Carlson
The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
'Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy' Review | Screen Rant
Kofi Outlaw
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Film
Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Back
to the Cold War with Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ... - Village Voice J Hoberman
The Wall Street Journal]
Joe Morgenstern
The
Playlist [Oliver Lyttelton]
Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen
here: DVD Talk
[Jason Bailey]
Click
here for the review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy James Bernardinelli
David
Edelstein on 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ... - New York Magazi David Edelstein from
Review:
Gary Oldman stars in smart and subtle Tinker Tailor ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith Phipps
the
m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Amber
Wilkinson]
Confessions
of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
goatdog's movies - Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy, 2011 Michael W.
Phillips Jr.
Review: 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' the quintessential spy tale Mark Rabinowitz from CNN,
also seen here: CNN
[Mark Rabinowitz]
FilmFracture:
What's Your Time Worth? [James Jay Edwards]
eFilmCritic
[Daniel Kelly] also seen here: EatSleepLiveFilm.com
[Daniel Kelly]
Twitch
[Ross Miller] also seen here: TINKER
TAILOR SOLDIER SPY Review
FILM
REVIEW: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Things That Go ... - CBC.ca Eli Glassner
The
Film Stage [Jack Cunliffe]
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[Craig Grobler] with more showbiz
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Battleship Pretension [Tyler
Smith]
FlickFilosopher.com
[MaryAnn Johanson]
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy — Inside Movies ... - Box Office Magazine James Rocchi
Electric
Sheep Magazine [John Bleasdale]
The
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Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Monsters
and Critics [Anne Brodie]
'Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy': Review Revue - WSJ Blogs - Wall Street ... Barbara Chai
Mark Reviews
Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Subtitledonline.com
[Amy Labbadia]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Three Movie
Buffs [Scott Nash]
Little
White Lies Magazine [Adam Woodward]
ClimbingHigherPictures
[Ryan Hamelin]
Tonight at the Movies
[Laurie Curtis]
Twitch
Film [Jason Gorber] also seen
here: : TINKER,
TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY Review
Screen
Comment [A.J. Goldmann]
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy - DAILY FILM DOSE
Blair Stewart
ColeSmithey.com
[Cole Smithey]
Next
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Movie
Review: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | Jeffrey M. Anderson
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The
Film Pilgrim [Helen Murdoch]
The
Critical Movie Critics [Amy Bigmore]
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Ozus' World
Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
EricDSnider.com
[Eric D. Snider]
Screenjabber.com
[Jenny Priestley]
tonymacklin.net [Tony
Macklin]
Alone
in the Dark [Paul Greenwood]
Gary Oldman’s Good, but Alec Guinness Was Great June Thomas from Slate, December 8, 2011
Spy Glasses: The Terrific Eyewear of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Forrest Wickman from Slate,
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy (1979) : DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video Paul Mavis review of the 1979 mini-series
DVD Verdict
Review - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979)
Clark Douglas review of the 1979 mini-series
Interview: Gary
Oldman on "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" Interview by Peer from eFilmCritic,
Gary Oldman not spooked by Guinness's Smiley Patrick
McGavin interview from The Boston
Phoenix, December 13, 2011
Gary
Oldman talks about 'Tinker, Tailor,' - The Washington Post Ann Hornaday interview,
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy: the reinvention of George Smiley Will
EW
Movie Review: "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" - NY1.com Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly
The
Hollywood Reporter [Deborah Young]
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out ... Dave Calhoun
The
Guardian [Xan Brooks]
Colin
Firth says film industry underestimates audiences' intelligence Xan Brooks and Mark Brown from The Guardian, September 5, 2011
The
Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy – review Philip
French from The Observer,
First
Night: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Venice ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab from The Indpendent,
The
Independent [Anthony Quinn]
The
Independent [Jonathan Romney]
Why
John Le Carré beats Ian Fleming
Robert Hanks from The Daily
Telegraph,
The
Telegraph [Sukhdev Sandhu] and Jenny McCartney from Seven Magazine Review,
John
le Carré: from novel to the screen
1979 version, Catherine Humble from The
Daily Telegraph, July 28, 2011
Le
Carré thriller to compete for Golden Lion
The Daily Telegraph,
On
the set of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Mick Brown from The Daily
Telegraph,
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy - review David
Gritten from The Daily Telegraph,
Gary
Oldman's Smiley 'as good as Alec Guinness'
Anita Singh from The Daily
Telegraph,
Love
letter to John Le Carré Toby
Clements from The Daily Telegraph,
Double-O
Who? Meet history's unsung spies
Nigel Farndale from The Daily
Telegraph,
Le
Carré: Oldman brings 'more sex' to Tinker, Tailor role than Guinness Josie Ensor from The Daily Telegraph,
Tinker,
Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Cracking the code for a ... - Globe and Mail Rick Groen
'Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy' movie review -- 'Tinker Tailor ... - Boston.co Ty Burr from The Boston Globe
Review:
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - Reviews - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Critic
Review for Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
'Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy' review: Gotcha!
Amy Biancolli from The SF Chronicle
Movie
review: 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'
Kenneth Turan from The LA Times,
Tomas Alfredson moves into spy territory with 'Tinker, Tailor' Steven Zeitchik from The LA Times,
The Scores: Iglesias searches for the sound of loyalty in
'Tinker' Todd Martens from The LA Times,
'Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy': engaging espionage, critics say Oliver Gettell from The LA Times,
A Second Look: 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy' miniseries Dennis Lim from The LA Times,
Tinker
Tailor Soldier Spy - Roger Ebert - Chicago Sun-Times
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis, December 8, 2011, also seen here: The New York Times [MANOHLA DARGIS]
The
Storyteller Who Returned From the Cold
Terrence Rafferty from The New
York Times, September
18, 2011 )
Alk, Howard and Mike Gray
Emile
DeAntonio and the New Documentary of the 70s Beyond verité, by Thomas Waugh from
Jump Cut
AMERICAN REVOLUTION 2
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
After a preview of "American
Revolution Two" this week, a member of The Film Group recalled how it
got started: "We finished making a Colonel Sanders commercial and went
down to
The heads got beat last August during the Democratic National Convention. The
events of that week seemed, at the time, to be a watershed. Nothing could ever
be the same afterwards. The Daley machine had been mortally wounded. The police
themselves, as the Walker Report put it, had been the rioters. And people had
seen it all on TV.
Now summer is upon us again, and the question is; has anything really changed?
The events of convention week, which will figure so sharply in history, already
recede in our minds. Mayor Daley smiles again from the front pages. One battle
does not make a revolution. Or does it?
"American
Revolution Two" isn't really about the convention disturbances. It's
about what happened afterwards, surprisingly, in the Uptown neighborhood of
poor Southern whites. While
The film isn't much concerned with the alliance itself, however; it's taken for
granted that poor blacks and poor whites should work together. The film is
about how a neighborhood had its idea of
The film itself began as a collection of footage from those two memorable
nights, Wednesday and Thursday, of convention week. It was then expanded to
cover several months. The Film Group (a smoothly professional
The result is a film every Chicagoan should see. But that's a cliché. What I
want to say is: If you were disturbed by what happened last August and if you
wondered, however vaguely, how such a cataclysmic week should apparently have
no aftermath, then you should see this film and see what has happened.
The film is an "unnarrated documentary," something both The Film
Group and Chicago filmmakers Gerald Temaner and Gordon Quinn have men
experimenting with. There's no deep, authoritative voice telling us what is
happening. Instead, we see and hear only the people the film is about; they
speak for themselves.
One of the film's subtitles is "A Few Honkies Get Their Heads Beat,"
and that describes as well as anything the first third of the film. We see
again the scenes we remember so well: The demonstrators, the police, the
guardsmen, the tear gas, and the march to Dick Gregory's home.
After convention week, a reprise. We get clips of an ABC-TV newscast about the
redwood fences Mayor Daley threw up to spare the delegates the sight of empty
lots. We hear the boosterism of a
And then we go into the ghetto: Into pool halls, bars, restaurants, to hear
black people talking, sometimes angry, sometimes wry, about the honkies who
needed to get their heads beat to find out what the ghetto knew all along. In
one stunning shot, we begin with a close-up of a black girl who speaks of her
experiences and beliefs. Then the camera pulls back to a medium shot revealing
her as an armed militant: "I'll have my rifle on one arm and my baby on
the other, and I'll fight for what's mine."
By now a smooth editing rhythm has been established, and we're inside the
film's logic. (Indeed, this film is as well edited and as high in technical
quality as any cinema verite documentary I've ever seen. The quality of the
sound recording outdoors on
The editing builds up a rhythm of angry and amused black faces, and the rhythm
of the film is the rhythm of the words they're saying. This momentum begins to
be broken by another kind of face: a white face with a southern accent, saying
earnest things. But saying the same things. This is a community leader from
Uptown -- no, not officially a leader, because the Uptown Council is run by
bankers and businessmen and he is "only" a poor white from
We go to a party at which this man and many of his neighbors drink Pepsi and
argue passionately about their neighborhood, about being poor, about what needs
to be done, about the "pigs" who, they say, harass them for the
crimes of being poor and living in Uptown. The party includes members of the
Young Patriots, a white
Now a revealing scene occurs. A spokesman for the Young Patriots attends a
meeting of a group of concerned citizens from
"Oh God," says the chairman, bored, "we've all heard this so
many times before." He is resentful: The meeting was called, it appears,
by a clique that wished to congratulate itself on its progressive views. How
embarrassing to listen to a hillbilly who doesn't even know he's using clichés.
But, no. The group decides to let the hillbilly talk. This is the ultimate in
liberalism, isn't it? To be bored by someone rather than admit you feel
superior to him? And this leads us to the film's most poignant moment of
revelation.
For when the liberals from
"But what's your program?" a concerned citizen asks him. "If you
had a concrete proposal . . ." says another. A third suggests he take his
ideas to "his grown-ups." A fourth says that if the Young Patriots
could get a program organized, the
The film now shifts permanently to events in Uptown. A Black Panther organizer,
Bobby Lee, comes into the neighborhood to offer assistance to the Young
Patriots. And Lee, who is quite a remarkable person, dominates the last part of
the film.
In an astonishing scene, Lee confronts and wins over a room filled with
suspicious, even hostile, Uptown whites. God knows what these people thought of
Black Panthers before they met one! Bobby Lee cajoles, reasons, argues, asks
questions: "What's bugging you, brother? This black beret? Here, I'll take
it off. We been through a lot together. You poor? You ever been in jail?"
The man nods, holds up two fingers. "Tell us what you been through,"
Bobby Lee says.
First one person, then another gets up to speak. Bobby Lee coaches a shy young
mother to her feet; she holds her baby. When she finds courage to talk, the
words come in a rush: "The cops had my brother up against the squad car.
He was out in front of the house. The cops had a knife, they were pricking him
with it. I said, what's he done? They wouldn't answer."
And Others: "The cops said, what's your height?" a boy says.
"Then they took me over to the wall where there was a measuring stick, and
then banged my head up against the wall. If you're poor, they don't care.
That's it, man. If you got the bread, the pigs are scared of you."
"Right on!" Bobby Lee intones, "Right
on!"
The meeting ends in camaraderie and a sense of purpose. These people will
constitute a committee to attend the Uptown Council meeting, where a Model
Cities program is being decided on -- without them.
At this meeting, and at a later meeting with the district police commander, the
group finds an identity. The meeting with the policeman is particularly
revealing. He begins by congratulating the gang on its name: the Young
Patriots. He admits his men may harbor some resentment against people whose
appearance doesn't fit their idea of "correct" appearance. "What
we're trying to do," he says, "is to teach policemen that everyone
isn't like them." But then he says: "The poor neighborhoods have been
exploited by a person, or persons, who are less than American. They may be pink
or even red."
An outburst of anger from the audience. They've come to share their grievances,
to have a dialog, and now they're being told they're Communist dupes.
Obviously, these poor people couldn't have grievances unless a red -- a pink,
at least -- told them they did.
People have been saying for a long time, why don't they make a movie about
"American
Revolution Two" shows this much clearly: that in the aftermath of the
Democratic convention, a group of formerly voiceless, even opinionless Uptown
whites became galvanized into a community that was fed up. That these people
were able to understand that their enemy was not the black man (or another
stand-in target) but an establishment that dismissed them as poor hillbillies
and, therefore, less than equal. That these people formed an alliance with the
Black Panthers, borrowing their methods of organization and protest. And that
this alliance has created, in the midst of a city largely without a voice,
(unless you're white, unless you're educated, unless you're affluent, unless
you have clout), a community which found its voice and used it.
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun)
THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON
I am…a revolutionary
Working as one of the original
founders of Chicago’s Second City improvisational comedy troupe, in fact it was
Alk leaving which led to his replacement by the more comically acclaimed Alan
Arkin (SCTV Guide: Feature: Days and Nights at the
Second City), and also as one of the cinematographers in the Dylan
film DON’T LOOK BACK (1967), director Howard Alk turns out to be the one
largely responsible for shaping this film.
According to remarks at the film’s screening from the producer Mark
Gray, none of the participants were particularly political minded until one
event changed their lives, the City of Chicago’s police assault on peaceful
demonstrators across from the Conrad Hilton hotel at the 1968 Democratic
Convention, footage of which was used in Alk’s earlier 1969 film AMERICAN
REVOLUTION 2. Alk was apparently a child
genius, someone who graduated from the prestigious University of Chicago at age
16 and became an active Trotskyite, and whose response after viewing the
Democratic Convention footage was supposedly, “Where are the black
people?” This led to his interest in
establishing ties with the newly formed Chicago Chicago
The film was made during a time of few renowned
documentaries, perhaps WOODSTOCK Hampton
On December 4, 1969 , under the authorization of State’s
Attorney Ed Hanrahan, supposedly to serve a warrant for a weapons violation, a Chicago 4:30 am of 14 officers, 5 of whom
were black, stormed Hampton Chicago
In the question and answer discussion
afterwards, one of the Panther attorneys was present, who indicated initially
all the officers were vindicated, but only after a period of ten years were
they finally held responsible for violating Hampton’s civil rights. Over the course of time, this also led to the
FBI revelations that they actually directed the State’s Attorney’s raid, based
on diagrams provided by FBI informant William O’Neal, who was Hampton’s
bodyguard, the man who actually provided the exact location of Fred Hampton’s
bed, which was the target of the majority of the police bullets. An autopsy also revealed that there were
barbiturates found in Hampton’s stomach, who was known to be ardently drug and
alcohol free, suggesting he was drugged the night before by O’Neal, who served
him kool-aid and hot dogs the night before, corroborating the testimony of
Hampton’s girl friend in the apartment who claimed he did not respond and
remained groggy throughout the raid, only lifting his head an inch or so off
the bed before he was shot and killed.
The title of the film was penned by Albert Grossman, an early agent to
folk stars like Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary, and an early contributor
to the making of this film, who after seeing the advance version proclaimed
this film to be about THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON, picking up on a verbal theme
that is repeated several times by others in the film. The film is a time capsule for an era that
exists no more, as the Black Panthers were eliminated, all killed or jailed or
run underground in one of the more inflammatory and least documented periods of
American history.
Of local Chicago
interest, one of the first white officers through the door, perhaps the first
to actually visually target Hampton, was later also one of the partners of
Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge, who along with officers under him ran a
torture unit out of the Area 2 police station, using a variety of torture
techniques - - Russian roulette, electroshock, suffocation and beatings - - to
extract “confessions” during the interrogations of 200 black men from the late
60’s through the 90’s, allegedly using intimidating remarks like, “We killed
Fred Hampton. You’re next.” Burge most
likely learned about electroshock while torturing Vietnamese prisoners before
he was honorably discharged from the military in 1969, bringing this same
method back to
As Peary points out, this film is
“crudely made but powerful and important”. Amazingly enough, the filmmakers set
out simply to show the hardships of being a black, openly political activist in
1960s Chicago Hampton Hampton
THE
MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON Chicago
Documentary Festival
This riveting documentary
chronicles the short life of Fred Hampton, the founder of the Illinois Hampton Hampton Hampton December 4, 1969 ;
the day that police stormed BP headquarters and Hampton Hampton
Willamette Week review David Walker
By 1969, Fred Hampton, leader of
the Illinois Black Panther Party, was one of the most important and influential
civil-rights leaders in America U.S.
Under Hampton
Hampton Hampton Hampton
In 1968, producer Mike Gray and
director Howard Alk began filming a documentary about Hampton and the Illinois
Black Panther Party. The film began as a straightforward portrait of the dynamic
leader, and the first half of it consists primarily of rare footage of Hampton Hampton
But it's what happened next, when
Hampton
On the morning of Dec. 4, 1969 , 14 Chicago Hampton
Hampton
News of the raid spread rapidly
through the media, with detailed accounts provided by the police and state
Attorney General Edward Hanrahan. Just hours later, Gray and Alk began filming
at the scene of the crime, and what they saw and captured on film directly
contradicted news reports.
Shock Cinema (Steven Puchalski)
What's the most efficient way to deal with a 'freedom
fighting revolutionary' who has a growing following? That's easy. Kill him!
Unfortunately, we're not discussing some old Rambo knock-off, but instead a
riveting b&w documentary that focuses on the short life of Fred Hampton,
the founder of the
Fall Books Special: The Night Fred Hampton Died | Lit &
Lectures ... Jeffrey Haas on his
book The Night Fred Hampton Died from
The Reader, November 4, 2009
Life
with the Black Panthers Sean O’Hagan
from The Observer,
Life
with the Black Panthers Howard
Bingham photos from The Observer,
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)
Allagnon, Stéphane
ILL
The director was
present for the screening and grew up in Normandy, claiming he knew these
little seaside towns intimately, known for their storms, but not for their
blustery clouds, but for a gray/white pall that dominates the entire landscape,
where the coastline is then pummeled with torrential wind and rain. Shooting for two months between April and
June, he claimed it was sunny and beautiful the entire time, that whenever
clouds rolled in blocking the sun, they frantically shot what they could with
wind and rain machines to manufacture this look in the film. More importantly, he does an exquisite job
maintaining the dead end mood of the town, where being at the bottom of the
economic ladder is infuriating, so they have to resort to other means to get
ahead. This is particularly true during
tourist season when outsiders with money roll into town which only exacerbates
their sense of economic futility. Also,
during the opening credit sequence, the translated title reads “Before the
Wind,” a mistake that took this director completely by surprise, believing “Ill
Wind” captures the noir mood he was searching for.
A top notch cast,
terrific locations in the small seaside resorts or on the rugged cliffs
overlooking spectacular Normandy coastlines, beautifully captured by world
class cinematographer Yves Cape, who works with Bruno Dumont, as well as a
scintillating story written in the Raymond Chandler mode by this first time
director, all of which when combined together help create a charming little
noir thriller starring Jonathan
Zaccaï in the lead role of Frank, a savvy computer repairman who is awoken from
a 3-year work absence one morning and called upon to help a supermarket gets
its computers back online after a storm knocks their power equipment
haywire. Once there, he realizes the
power outage had nothing to do with it, that the computer payroll has been
sabotaged internally, which is the real cause of the shutdowns. When he informs the head manager in charge
(Bernard Le Coq), he is abruptly told to just fix the computer and mind his own
business. As the only customer at the
nearby hotel, he becomes immediately infatuated by the sexy attractiveness of
Frédérique (Aure Atina) the desk
manager,
but she’s on to him right away and ridicules his style, asking if that works
with other girls? At night, the place
fills up with locals who drink hard and party, but by day the place is
completely empty, where a sense of unending boredom prevails. There’s an
amusing sequence where he decides to take a walk on the beach, as there’s
nothing else to do, where he walks out into this raging storm, immediately
battered by the wind and rain which is at near hurricane proportions, stops,
takes a look, and turns around and walks inside again. So much for a walk. Inside, he meets some locals who work at the
supermarket, guys who resemble heavies who claim everybody has to get their
cut, that it’s ridiculous for the owners to get all the profits, that there has
to be a system in place where they can get a share, suggesting that in this
town, he’s either on the side of the workers or with the owners.
Frank is curious what
he can do to fix this system, which seems to rely on an old dilapidated computer
that is nothing less than an antique, which is an essential component in hiding
whatever is being covered up. When he
asks to speak to the usual computer guy who installed it, the guy is allegedly
on vacation in the islands nearby with his mistress and is probably waiting out
the storm. Le Coq then offers him a
sizeable sum of money, asking him to take it, calling it a bonus for a job well
done, that he’d feel much more secure if he just took the money. When Frank
attempts to meet the computer guy’s wife, she’s an attractive but somewhat
crazed woman (
Festival
of New French Cinema Reece Pendleton
from the Reader
A computer repairman, assigned to fix a rural supermarket’s
damaged system, begins to suspect the malfunction has been caused not by a
recent storm, as the manager claims, but by an elaborate embezzlement scheme.
Complicating matters are rumors from the locals—among them the town’s
attractive innkeeper—regarding the whereabouts of the previous repairman.
There’s nothing especially original here, but writer-director Stephane Allagnon
sets a refreshingly amiable tone, while the charming ensemble performances
minimize some of the more glaring plot contrivances.
Festival of New French
Cinema Diane Eberhardt from Facets
An effective
caper set in a small seaside town battered by strong winds, in which an
appealingly aloof and laidback computer technician from the city (Jonathan
Zaccaï) is hired for temp work at the local supermarket. Staying at a hotel
where he is the only client, he befriends some of the locals and flirts with
the bartender, all the while beginning to understand that the antiquated
computer system of the supermarket is a front for money embezzlement by the
general manager (Bernard Le Coq) and his former technician, rumored to have
mysteriously disappeared. As the small group of off-beat characters sets out to
embezzle the embezzler, this quietly affecting film keeps marching to his own
little beat, in rhythm with the howling wind and the mood of a film noir.
Directed by
"Distinguished by a sure narrative hand and a subversively
droll demeanor... fresh spin on a popular genre"
-Variety
A quietly confident
Gallic caper comedy in which a laid-back data processor embezzles the
embezzlers of a rural French supermarket in the wake of a squall, "Before the Storm" is distinguished
by a sure narrative hand and a subversively droll demeanor. Fresh spin on a
popular genre should produce traffic in fest aisles, with modest arthouse
rainmaking possible.
A howling gale has
knocked out power in a village on the rugged French coast. Unemployed techie
Franck Meyer (Jonathan Zaccai), whose "whatever" attitude barely
masks an innate alertness, is summoned by a temp agency to repair the local
market's aging computer system.
Once on-site, he
discovers a mysterious, crudely written software program, code-named Betty
Boop, disrupting the method in which the substantial daily cash totals are
reported to the head office. Store manager Hopquin (Bernard Le Coq) seems
unusually nervous, and points the finger at missing accountant Michael Castel
(Alain Grollier).
When Castel is found
dead in the surf, Franck begins to uncover Hopquin's plan to divert some of the
money. His unlikely accomplices in the scheme include mysterious yet lusty
hotel manager Frederique (Aure Atina), local layabout Charlus (Guillaume Viry)
and Castel's bitter widow Laura (Florence Thomassini)Debuting helmer Stephane
Allagnon understands the caper terrain and the leavening balance of humor and
eccentricity that are hallmarks of genre standouts from "Local
Hero" to "Blood
Simple." Violence is downplayed in favor of well-thesped character quirks:
When Frederique needs to understand the caper's nuances, she dumps out the
sugar bowl and uses the cubes to recap the pic's plot.
Tech package is pro,
from Yves
Cape's unfussy camera to Philippe
Chiffre's production design and the expansive sound mix, all of which
vividly evoke the chaotic effects of that mighty wind.
Allégret, Marc
ZOUZOU
Basically a
vehicle for Josephine
Baker, who bubbles effervescently through some Busby Berkeley-ish
production numbers, and also gets to sing her classic 'Pour moi, y'a qu'un
homme à Paris', with a tearful eye on her adored but roving-eyed foster
brother. It is Gabin who really catches the eye in this part, with his persona
already almost fully developed. Impassive as ever, he is first glimpsed as a
soldier in an oriental dive, reigning benignly over the pretty girls but still
a stranger in a strange land. Then the fatal encounter with his dream during a bal
musette waltz which he hoarsely croons in her ear; and finally the
misunderstanding, the accusations of murder. Happy ending apart, you can
already see the romantically doomed gangster of Pépé le Moko, stubbornly
proletariat, eternally yearning for the purity denied by the world in which he
is mired.
DVD Talk [David
Cornelius] from the Josephine Baker Collection (excerpt)
In June 2005, Kino released Josephine Baker's first three
feature films - "Siren of the Tropics," "Zouzou," and
"Princess Tam Tam" - on DVD. Those individual releases have now been
collected into one box set, simply titled "The Josephine Baker
Collection." No changes have been made to the discs, still in their
original single-wide keepcases; a cardboard box housing the discs is the only
addition. Those looking for just one or two of these titles would do fine to
buy them separately.
John Sinnott reviewed all three discs for DVD Talk during their original
release, and I'll be linking to those reviews throughout this article, to avoid
repetition of information and to allow for a second opinion. (Read John's
review of "Zouzou" here.)
Baker's return to the screen would not come for another
seven years. For "Zouzou," Baker would retain more control over the
production, and while the finished product would become more of a successful
showcase for Baker's talents (now we can hear her sing!), it would also contain
another clichéd, unimaginative love triangle, and while the film is often
entertaining, the drama never lives up to its potential.
Zouzou (Baker) is an orphan who, along with Jean (Jean Gabin), was raised in a
traveling circus. As adults, the duo wind up working backstage at a
It's the same sort of thing that you'd find in every backstage drama being
churned out in
But then the film goes and adds too much. Jean is accused of a murder he didn't
commit. Zouzou dances to raise money for his defense. As a subplot, this angle
feels too contrived and desperate. There are some exciting moments that come
from this storyline, but even then they feel out of place.
Of course, we're really just here for the music and for Baker's electric
charms, and on those levels, "Zouzou" succeeds. Her charisma carries
the film, even if the script bungles too many opportunities along the way.
filethirteen.com Review
DVD Talk Review: Zou Zou
John Sinnott
PLUCKING THE DAISY (En effeuillant la marguerite)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
Turning out six feature performances including her landmark
role in her husband Roger Vadim's directorial debut, ...And
God Created Woman in 1956, Brigitte Bardot established herself as
the foremost French sex symbol, catching foreign audiences and (especially)
censors off guard with her raw sexuality. These films, while not fully exposing
their star, certainly contained enough peripheral nudity and suggestiveness to
raise eyebrows in conservative
Agnes Dumont proves that less is more as her solution to the mess she has
gotten into is to shed her threads for the prize money in a striptease contest.
Leaving her hometown of
Plucking The Daisy makes the most of misunderstandings as it weaves its
plot amidst the many cast members, always upping the ante just when things
didn't look like they could get any worse. It is playful fun and misadventure,
with Bardot's role both in and out of disguise creating the opportunity for her
womanizing boyfriend to show his true colors, or so it seems. The first half of
the film sets the circumstances up, and gives us a good overview of each
character, with the flood gates opening on the comedy going into the last half
now that we know who is who and what is what. While this certainly wouldn't
compare to ...And God Created Woman as a classic, it does a good job of
entertaining, and Bardot commands the screen in an innocent, yet equally
sensual fashion. Her co-stars conspire to keep everything moving until the end,
the timing is tight, and the staging effective. Marc AllÈgret manages to keep
the mayhem under control, pulling everything together in the nick of time. If
this didn't have Bardot as its centerpiece, I'm sure it would be lost to
obscurity, despite being fairly whimsical and harmless entertainment. As a
Bardot vehicle however, it serves to reinforce the legendary sex appeal of a
20-year-old girl, and offers yet another opportunity for audiences to ogle a
goddess while she shakes and shimmys for the camera.
DVD Verdict
Brigitte Bardot first appeared on the French film scene in
the early 1950s after she was noticed on the cover of "Elle" magazine
by director Marc Allégret. For four years beginning in 1952, she had a number
of mainly small supporting roles. Then in 1956, she had her first real role of
substance playing the focal point of a love triangle in La lumière d'en face
("The Light Across the Street"). A succession of hits followed and by
year-end, she had become
Home Vision Entertainment has now released Plucking the Daisy on DVD as part of its Brigitte Bardot Collection.
Agnes Dumont, the daughter of a stuffy French official,
quickly leaves her provincial hometown for
Plucking the Daisy is a film that's easy to take and
not just because we get to look at Brigitte Bardot a lot. Cinematically,
there's nothing particularly innovative about it and there are no stand-out
acting performances in it. It's just a competent, enjoyable piece of
entertainment that will appeal to anyone who appreciates the craft of the
Brigitte Bardot's part as Agnes gives her an opportunity to engage in a comedic role and she demonstrates a reasonable flair for such work. She looks comfortable and spontaneous, and there appears to be good rapport with the rest of the cast. The famous Bardot pout is thankfully at a minimum in this film (although maybe it's just that she hadn't fully developed it yet or at least realized that it wasn't appropriate here). She's the star of the film and carries it well. Surrounding Bardot is a fine cast of well-seasoned French character actors. Daniel Gélin and Robert Hirsch play Daniel and Roger, the two newspapermen, in somewhat the style of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis when they were a twosome. Gélin at times actually seemed to have Martin's mannerisms, but Hirsch is never quite as crazy as Jerry Lewis. One of the great pleasures of the film is Darry Cowl as Agnes's brother Hubert. He assumes a very funny, rushed manner of speaking that steals every scene he's in. His role in Plucking the Daisy is one of his earliest in a still-active career that numbers over 100 films. Also of note is an amusing cameo by that veteran of the American screwball genre, Mischa Auer. He plays a long-suffering cab driver who drives Agnes around as she tries to raise money, finally being rewarded for his patience in the end.
Direction is by Marc Allégret, a well-known French director active since the late 1920s. Most of Allegret's best work appears to have been in the 1930s. He does a good, workmanlike job with Plucking the Daisy, keeping the plot moving along briskly. The film was but one of several collaborations between Allégret, Bardot and her husband Roger Vadim (who co-wrote the screenplay).
Home Vision Entertainment (which is a major distributor of
foreign feature films in
The DVD contains a French monaural sound track that is clear and distortion-free, with English subtitles available. The latter are well done, conveying the gist of the French dialogue accurately and with just the right level of detail to make the film fully understandable to a non-French-speaking viewer without being obtrusive.
The supplements include trailers for three Bardot features: Plucking the Daisy and The Night Heaven Fell (both from Home Vision), and And God Created Woman (from Criterion). There is also a comprehensive Bardot filmography, and four postcards for Bardot films included in the keep case.
Plucking the Daisy is one of Brigitte Bardot's earlier films that aspires to be nothing more than a light, romantic farce in the style of the American screwball comedy. In this it succeeds very well. There's nothing new here, but if you're looking for an hour and a half of solid entertainment and always wondered about those sexy comedies that Brigitte Bardot was reputed to star in, here's your chance. Home Vision Entertainment makes it easy with a fine transfer.
Bright Lights Film
Journal [Alan Vanneman]
DVD Authority.com ("Fusion3600")
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
Flipside Movie Emporium
(Michael B. Scrutchin)
A Guide to Current DVD (Aaron Beierle)
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) also reviewing THE NIGHT HEAVEN FELL
Allen, Keith
UNLAWFUL KILLING
Unlawful
Killing: Cannes Review Duane Byrge
at Cannes Hollywood
Reporter, May 13,2011
Funded by Dodi Fayed's father Mohamed, doc presents several far-fetched conspiracy theories about the ex-royal's death.
A defense lawyer’s last-gasp tactic in defending a guilty client is to cloud up the prevailing evidence with an onslaught of other possibilities, no matter how remote: That is the tactic and style that director Keith Allen reverts to.
In this high twaddle, Allen shells out in rapid-cut succession a barrage of other possible scenarios: Arms dealers wanted Diana dead because of her opposition to land mines; Prince Philip knew Nazis as a young man, so obviously he wanted Dodi offed; the press always is pro-establishment (that’s a new one on me) and facilitated the high-power cover-up; Christians did not want their princess impregnated by a Muslim; the driver was a member of the French secret police and willingly drove to his own death at their orders; the coroner’s report was flawed and medical officials never make human errors, on and on.
Aesthetically, the balderdash is buttressed by solid filmmaking techniques and slippery aesthetic snippet-ry: Quick cuts to not allow for any serious rumination; percussive music to infuse profundity; and Robin Quivers' semi-serious remark that since Mohamed Al Fayed owns Harrods, he must be an all-right kind of guy.
And, enhancing the visual high piffle, what could better trumpet veracity and clarity than interviews with a bunch of smartly dressed Brits in ascots intoning with all the high-truth that their tony accents impart.
In the interests of full disclosure, I received a thank-you letter from Dodi Fayed for a review I did of F-X at Sundance way back when, indicating to me that he had potential as a rising producer in that he knew enough to butter up the trade press.
With similar fair-mindedness and solicitation of justice, I offer up said letter to bidders and will gladly entertain 5-6 figure, cash offers. Then again, perhaps the filmmakers will somehow link me to the byzantine conspiracy of having the long-range foresight to capitalize on the death of Lady Diana and Dodi Fayed, and was somehow involved. You may choff and chortle, but that’s the level of absurdity offered up as evidence of a conspiracy in this dodo-headed documentary.
Unlawful
Killing Fionnuala Halligan at
Whatever the truth behind the deaths of Princess Diana, Dodi Fayed and
Henri Paul in
Unlawful Killing is a poorly-made hodge-podge of cracker-jack theories fronted by expert witnesses of debatable calibre; it’s a wail of grievance from a parent still pointing the finger in every direction.Mohammed Al-Fayed lost his son in terrible, questionable circumstances that will never be resolved; a £10 million inquiry didn’t come up with the answers, and neither will this bizarre documentary.
His pain is there for all to witness as he burns the Harrods
Royal Warrants in front of Dodi’s tomb in
UK personality/jobbing actor/Lily Allen’s dad Keith Allen doesn’t hesitate to trot the Diana rent-a-quote gang out; Kitty Kelley; Diana’s astronomer; Tony Curtis; Lauren Booth; Piers Morgan; a doctor who has no qualms in diagnosing Prince Philip as a psychopath along the lines of Fred West based on a grainy photo of him standing beside some Nazi officers. Conspiracy theorists, former M16 agents; someone who claims Phillip slept with Princess Margaret, Princess Alexandra, and once wore a leather jacket while thrusting his hand up somebody’s skirt.
Allen is an affable sort, but it’s never clearly explained why he
spent six months at the Royal Courts of Justice following the inquest into the
deaths. One smells the lure of an Egyptian chequebook coupled with an
opportunity to bang on about the Establishment, the “racist” Royal Family
(“gangsters in tiaras”) and their lives of “unfettered privilege” at the
expense of the
He divides Unlawful Killing into segments (“The White Fiat
Uno” etc), but can’t keep within his paramaters, jetting off with every theory
ever presented, credible or otherwise. There is a brief shot of Diana taken
inside the car as she lay dying which has never been published in the
Technically, Unlawful Killing is a mish-mash, with court-room reconstructions which would struggle to pass muster on a History Channel documentary.
There is no doubt that something was wrong with the short life and death of Diana; Allen is right in that people feel they haven’t been told the whole truth. He raises some interesting points, but this simply isn’t rigorous enough. The only case Unlawful Killing convincingly makes is that it’s time to let Diana go before films like this hijack her entire legacy.
Not
for British eyes: Keith Allen's Diana film seeks headlines in Cannes Charlotte Higgins at Cannes May
13, 2011
Allen, Woody
Allen, Woody from Art and Culture
The uber-nebbish
persona of Woody Allen’s early-1960s stand-up shtick proved to be the
springboard that took this most unlikely
Eventually Allen's work matured, and
he came home, setting his films in the milieu of
In 1992, after a long-term love
affair with actress Mia Farrow, whom he featured in 11 films, he was slapped
with accusations of incest with Farrow’s adopted daughter Soon-Yi Previn.
Though cleared of any sexual misconduct, Allen was permanently tainted by the
scandal. His latest work seems to rip the headlines out of his own press
releases. In 1994’s "Bullets Over Broadway," Allen rallied back with
a cheerful message: all's well that ends well. His next effort, "Mighty
Aphrodite," dealt jokingly with adoption and betrayal, while 1996's
"Everyone Says I Love You," Allen’s first musical, charted new
thematic ground as a gala of good-natured neurotic hijinks.
"Deconstructing Harry,"
however, returned to Allen’s now-familiar dark heart of self-loathing. In 1998,
he stayed on this familiar course with "Celebrity," which follows the
lives of two divorced New Yorkers. Here, Allen is hot on the heels of every
failed communication, doggedly probing the causes of urban angst. Who else
could give us such a cynical tour of our tabloid culture or psychoanalyze us
with such deft wit?
The
Woody Allen Project Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
Lately I am
compulsively organizing most of my reading / viewing / listening into projects,
reviewing what I've done up to now and where I want to go next. I have a
complete log of my book-reading going all the way back to high school; my
similar logs for film watching and music listening are, alas, either buried in
a storage locker a thousand miles away (I really must take care of that stuff
one of these days) or lost to history (I've had a number of catastrophes over
the years which I won't dwell on, including the loss of painstakingly assembled
personal libraries to economic circumstance). But much of what I've done before
I want to do again anyway, from a matured perspective.
The projects spin off into sub-projects, and unless a project is very tight
(but I can always expand its definition), none is ever really "done."
An example of one of these projects, just getting started: Woody Allen. It is
axiomatic that Woody has been in decline for 20 years, with the occasional
uptick. But is it true? I mean to find out.
There are many Allen pictures I've liked or loved over the years; you could
call me a fan. Among the Allen high points for me are Love and Death,
But then he got really good notices for Match Point in 2005, and when
I finally saw it on DVD, I too was impressed: it is a superior modern noir (in
the plot sense, not the lighting sense). I especially liked the fact that
Jonathan Rhys Meyers's character gets away with everything: that seemed
realistic as well as cynical.
Now I've watched Deconstructing Harry from 1997, and you know what? --
it's really good too! I have a lot more late Allen to look at, but I'm starting
to get a suspicious feeling that it's not that the quality of his work
flat-lined so much as that the critics just got tired of him. He is
repetitive, no question; Deconstructing Harry, for example,
reprises themes that are quite familiar from Stardust Memories. But
artists get to be repetitive and work a vein if they want to; Ivy
Compton-Burnett is strictly repetitive, but also one of the greatest English
language novelists of the 20th century. Allen's obsessions are his working
material, and he likes to revisit them as often as possible. There is
nothing wrong with that.
New York:
Woody Allen: Playing It Again from
the James Kaplan interview of Allen featured in the New York Magazine (April 6, 1998)
I always regretted that I was
born too late for New York City
When I was a nightclub comic, I
played the Blue Angel. There were a number of those -- the Bon Soir in the
Village, and Upstairs at the Downstairs, Basin Street East 12:30 , and so you’d find yourself on
the street at 1:30 in the
morning, and there were always places to go. I went out much more when I was
young. First off, because the kind of music that I liked best, there were still
guys alive playing it. I could go see the Wilbur De Paris Band on 52nd Street New Orleans
I like to show people the city
through my eyes, which are not realistic -- they’re highly romanticized. New York Brooklyn , and we were a half-hour away by train. In the
early forties, my father would bring me from Brooklyn
into Manhattan
You’d ride the subway for a
half-hour from Brooklyn , then walk up into Times Square and look in every direction, and there would
be lit marquees from movie houses. I mean, where I grew up -- and it was an
abundant-movie neighborhood in Brooklyn , you
know -- there were a certain number of cinemas, but when you came up at 42nd Street 42nd
Street New York New York City
Paris New York Paris Fifth
Avenue Bank Street Manhattan
Woody
Allen.Com official website
A Woody Allen
Page website info
Woody Allen Movies another website
Film Reference Allen profile by Mark W. Estrin, updated by Robyn Karney
Woody Allen Victoria Loy from Senses of Cinema
All-Movie Guide Jason Ankeny
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies extensive bio info
Another Woody Page complete filmography
Woody Allen Anders Herman Torp’s Woody Allen site
offering information on films, books, and music
Woody Allen FAQ An archive of facts and links to Web
resources
Best Films: Woody Allen Ratings and stills from the films
Fidelio Film: Woody
Allen - The Original Neurotic
Fidelio Film central rates them in order and briefly comments on the
films
Stumped at the
Video Store: The Appeal of Woody Allen
by Chris Neumer from Stumped magazine (undated)
Review of
Reconstructing Woody Douglas W.
Reitinger book review in the Rocky
Mountain Modern Language Association journal
A Kind of Slither Marion Meade’s book The Unruly Life of Woody Allen is reviewed by Michael Wood from The London Review of Books,
Yale Review of Books: The
Unruly Life of Woody Allen Book by
Marion Meade is reviewed by Adrian Bonenberger
Book
Ideas: Side Effects by Woody Allen a
book review by John Halcyon Styn
Ray Tennenbaum's Text: On Woody Allen a book review on "Woody Allen," Eric
Lax's all-but-authorized biography
Harvard
Gazette: Woody Wows Film Students by
Doug Gavel,
New York Sun Article (2006)
He’ll take
Deconstructing
Woody - Which Actor Does It Best?
Nick Nadel at Filmcritic,
Woody
Allen's top five books The Guardian, May 6, 2011
Woody
Allen: 'None of my films will be remembered' Dalya Alberge from The Observer,
Allen, Woody They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
DGA Interview David Geffner interviews Allen for DGA magazine. May 2002
Seven Interviews with Woody
Allen from Philm Freax
Woody Allen Interview by Tony Jenkins
Robert E Lauder Interview with Allen from Commonweal,
Hour Bonus
#6: Woody Allen Trivia questions
that challenge the moviegoer to find odd connections in Allen's work. Answers
are provided.
Lifeisajoke.com: Woody
Allen Humorous Quotes A collection
of sayings attributed to Woody Allen
Topix.net: Woody Allen Woody Allen on-line forum
WHAT’S UP, TIGER LILY?
USA Japan
Time Out
Sweet revenge for anyone who has
sat through a foreign film suffering from a torrent of bad dubbing. For his
first auteur-credit (!), Woody Allen got hold of a 1964 Japanese
exploitation thriller and exploited it for his own ends, dubbing it
delightfully with gags and
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Phil Moscowitz is parked outside a prison one night when an
escaping young lady drops in on him. They go back to his place only to be
attacked by two hoodlums - Phil has found himself embroiled in a plot involving
two factions who are out to secure the recipe for the world's best egg salad.
Taking a Japanese spy film from 1964, Woody
Allen dubbed over the original action with his own dialogue. When an
interviewer in the introduction asks him why, he explains that death is his
bread and danger is his butter - no, danger is his bread and, er, well, anyway,
he has created a wacky comedy with a mixture of hip and corny jokes, and a couple
of musical interludes from the Lovin' Spoonful for good measure.
The original film looks to be very influenced by James Bond - this was a few
years before You
Only Live Twice, although Mie
Hama and Akiko
Wakabayashi are in both. There are fistfights, exotic locations, gadgets,
beautiful women and presumably the hero would offer a handful of throwaway
quips, too. In Allen's version, the quips are the whole point, and enough of
them hit the mark for the enterprise to be judged a success.
Mostly, the dubbing makes the characters look silly. The prison break has the
warden broadcasting an announcement over the tannoy which is interrupted by a
weather forecast. One of the villains, Wing Fat, walks down a line of girls
making appreciative comments until - "Mom!" When he is outsmarted,
the other villain, Shepherd Wong, yells at his henchman, "That was Wing
Fool you fat! ...that was Wing Fat you fool!" And, of course, there is a
creepy wretch with a Peter
Lorre voice, which is killing the voiceover actor's throat.
Allen includes a few non dubbed gags, like reversing the film, stopping the
action to have the complicated plot explained (or not), and having a hair on
the screen be chased around by the silhouette of a hand. There's enough
invention to sustain the short running time, but it's not too consistent, and
some of the gags will just make you groan. It would be interesting to compare
Tiger Lily with the original - it looks just as crazy (see the "choosing a
moustache" bit, for example).
What's Up Tiger
Lily? Michael Brooke from DVD Times
filmcritic.com Chris Barsanti
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Cinepassion.org Fernando
F. Croce
New York Times (registration req'd)
TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN
USA
Time Out
Discounting the abortive What's
Up, Tiger Lily?, this was Woody Allen's debut as his own director, and it
marked the beginnings of his idiosyncratic 'one shot - one gag' technique. Its
tale of the eagerly criminal career of Virgil Starkwell is as unpredictably
structured as Annie Hall, if not yet anything like as sustained in tone
and mood. But it has plenty of hilarious jokes and concepts, like the
ventriloquists' dummies at prison visiting time, and the return home from a
chaingang break with five shackled cons in tow.
Edinburgh U Film Society [Matthew Bull]
Woody Allen's first film as director-writer-actor is a mock documentary following the criminal career of Virgil Starkweather (Woody Allen) from childhood to incarceration for bank robbery.
Although today Woody Allen is today known more as a director of movies, when Take the Money and Run was made he was primarily a script-writer and stand-up comic. This is very much reflected in the nature of the film, which basically follows the format of many of the Marx Brothers movies, in that it uses the 'plot' as a carrier for a series of sketches and gags. These revolve mainly around Allen's favourite themes of death and women. Some miss the mark, but most work in that brilliant mix of neurotic angst, slapstick and plain funny one-liners that characterise Woody's films and writings. Importantly, it lacks the often-tiring pretentiousness and mental masturbation of some of his later failed attempts at being a humorous Bergman, if such a thing is possible.
Take the Money and Run is not one of Woody's best known movies, and
as a film it is no better made than, say, Monty Python's Holy Grail.
Many of you reading this may not even have seen it before. But take the effort
because this comic treat will at the very least make a winter's evening in
eFilmCritic.com [Charles Tatum]
Woody Allen's 1969
crime comedy is a mockumentary telling the story of Virgil Starkwell, possibly
the world's worst criminal.
Narrated by Jackson Beck, we find
Virgil started out life with petty crime, and never really became successful
after that. He meets a pretty girl, Janet Margolin, and falls in love, but the
call of easy money keeps drawing him into failed schemes to rob banks. As we
see his plans go awry time after time, we also hear from psychiatrists and authority
figures, all of whom think they know what is really wrong with Virgil. His
parents, ashamed of their son, don disguises to hide their identities- Groucho
Marx noses and glasses.
Most of the film revolves around Virgil's misadventures in prison after his
bank jobs fail. I cannot decide which is funnier, the first prison scene where
he gets out on his own after his gang forgets to tell him the breakout is off,
or the second chain gang scene where six men escape into a field and try to
split up while still chained together.
The first ten minutes of this film are among the funniest in cinematic history.
Watching Allen try to play the cello in the marching band is so good, I rewound
it to watch again. The film is rich with great lines and dialogue, and boldly
steps into the surreal and ridiculous on more than one occasion: the best
example is Virgil's attempt to run over a woman who is blackmailing him, in her
living room. Allen is not yet in those
Of course, the film cannot sustain the laughs through the whole thing. Some
scenes fall flat, but are immediately forgotten by whatever Allen pulls out of
his bag of tricks next. Watch for a very young Louise Lasser near the end of
the film, who bears a striking resemblance to Mia Farrow.
This film served as inspiration for comedies like "Airplane!," and
borrows its maniacal pace from the old Marx Brothers pictures. Allen is not
quite a great director here yet, his editing is sloppy and the sound quality is
awful, but the characters and writing are great, especially in this day and age
when the next Adam Sandler film is looked upon as the Second Coming.
Very cheap, a little fitful here and there, but still one of the great comedies of all time and one that will have you laughing more often than not. I highly recommend "Take the Money and Run."
Turner
Classic Movies review Rob Nixon
Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]
DVDTown [John J. Puccio]
Cinepassion.org Fernando
F. Croce
ThreeMovieBuffs [Patrick Nash]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
BANANAS
USA
Ted Prigge
Before Woody Allen was making thoughtful neurotic character studies like "Hannah and Her Sisters" and intense dramas like "Crimes and Misdemeanors," Woody Allen was a comedian. He wrote for several shows and even did stand-up. He created the prototype for what would inspire MST3K (called "What's Up, Tiger Lily?") and directed bizarre, surrealistic comedies with several kinds of jokes being shot at the audience at high speeds. "Bananas" is one of his better ones, albeit a very convoluted one.
The story, which is a backdrop for expressing some of the
Woodster's views on politics, rebellion and love, moves harshly from area to
area. At one point, he'll be in
The film starts off with a parody of political assasinations and the Wide World of Sports (eh?). Howard Cosell (giving a riveting performance as himself) is down in San Marcos covering the assasination of its president and interviews the dying man (getting his last words) and then the new dictator, General Vargas (Carlos Montalban, brother of Ricardo). The film goes to its silly titles (with a great Latino/Latina score by Marvin Hamlisch) and then introduces Fielding Mellish (Woody), a neurotic, insecure little loser who works as a products tester where they test out horribly inane machines, like the "Execucisor," a desk with weights and a basketball net that starts to physically harass Fielding.
We follow him around a bit as he gets into all kinds of trouble. Perhaps the funniest scene in the entire hilarious film takes place when Fielding enters a magazine store with the intention of buying pornography but is embarrassed because it is a very public place. He grabs a bunch of nice magazines (Time, The National Review...) and puts the magazine "Orgasm" at the bottom. When he goes up to the register, he casually stands there as the cashier sorts through them for prices. But he stumbles on "Orgasm" and shouts out to his co-worker, "How much is a copy of 'Orgasm?' This man wants to buy a copy." It's a hilarious scene done perfectly.
We also see a lovely silent performance from Sly Stone as a young man (looking faintly like Matt LeBlanc...bad omen for him) terrorizing people on a subway car...including the Woodster. He's not hard to find, trust me. To see him is alone a good reason to see this film.
Fielding meets the rebellious
The rest of the film has him in
The film also works on a satirical level with the
government/rebel thing, but not as well as in his later "Sleeper."
His plot seems to move around just for the sake of jokes. But how can anyone
not laugh at the hilarious lines, like the one where the
"Bananas" is a contender for Woody's funniest film and it is definitely one that gets laughs the whole way through. It may be incredibly uneven and the plot might be weak, but at least all the jokes work.
Three Movie Buffs (Patrick Nash)
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
PLAY IT AGAIN SAM
Edinburgh U Film
Society [Matthew Bull]
That's right, a film starring
Woody Allen which he didn't direct. But then he did write the original play on
which the film was based. A mild-mannered film critic is dumped by his wife.
His two closest friends help him to start dating again, in which he is also
aided by apparitions both of his hero, Humphrey Bogart, and his ex-wife. But
the dates go disastrously wrong, and the helpful advice of Bogart is completely
useless. Eventually, Allen is attracted to his best friend's wife, played by
Diane Keaton, and the two have an affair. But it is Allen who resolves the situation
by facing up to his problem and relaxing. The true hero, he finishes his affair
realising it is for the best for all concerned.
Play It Again, Sam is an obvious homage to Casablanca Casablanca
Turner Classic Movies Rob Nixon
Apollo Movie Guide
[Jamie Gillies]
Movie
Reviews UK Damian Cannon
The Greatest Films - comprehensive
analysis of classic US film Tim
Dirks
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX * BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK
USA
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)
This is an anthology of answers to questions about sex which
many people wonder about. The first question is whether aphrodisiacs work and
to illustrate this we travel back to medieval times and see the court of an
English King (Anthony
Quayle) who has just returned from a successful campaign. He is enjoying a
feast to celebrate and before he retires to his bedchamber with his Queen (Lynn
Redgrave) he calls for his Fool (Woody
Allen) to entertain him. Alas, the Fool's humour does not please him and
the court is quickly cleared by his
One of the early, funny ones in the Allen career, Everything You Always Wanted
To Know About Sex took its title from David Reuben's book answering sexual
problems and queries, but anyone looking for problem solving here will be
sorely disappointed. Mostly it's a series of ridiculous situations taking their
inspiration from real enquiries and scripted by Allen into a comedy that, in
the main, is consistently funny and inventive. The initial instalment sees the
cast talking in daft, pseudo-medieval manner as the Fool tries out a love
potion on the Queen, but is foiled by her chastity belt, setting the tone for
the humour.
The questions posed at the start of each segment only have a tenuous connection
with the stories which follow, which can be illustrated by the second,
"What is sodomy?" Here, a well cast Gene
Wilder stars as a doctor who is approached with a very unusual condition:
an Armenian shepherd (Titos
Vandis) asking him about an affair with a sheep named Daisy. When the
shepherd brings the object of his affection into the office the doctor
unexpectedly sees exactly what the attraction is, and begins an affair of his
own. With some clever touches, such as the wife finding wool on her husband's
suit rather than a hair, this is an early highlight.
Next is a spoof of Italian movies, spoken entirely in Italian, with Allen and
new wife Lousie
Lasser finding that the only way she can achieve orgasm is by having sex
with him in public. That's it, that's the joke, making this only mildly
amusing, especially compared with what's next, "Are transvestites
homosexuals?", cringeworthy comedy of embarrasment featuring the lumpenly
heterosexual Lou
Jacobi as a middle aged man visiting his son-in-law to be's parents and
excusing himself to try on the mother's clothes. Watching Jacobi forced to
pretend to be woman in public is very funny.
A gameshow called "What's My Perversion?" also suffers for being a
one joke sketch, but the following one where John
Carradine stars as a mad scientist whose expertise is in sexual research is
an improvement. All the horror movie clichés are twisted into a ludicrous tale
where Allen and Heather
MacRae try to combat the scientist's escaped giant breast. Lastly, the most
celebrated episode which delves into the inner workings of the human body when
it has sex, so every part of the anatomy from the brain, with Tony
Randall as the Operator, to the sperm, with Allen as one, is orchestrated
with military precision (the pleasure centre is particularly entertaining). As
sketch movies go, this is one of the more successful ones with few dull spots
and a colourful, winning irreverence throughout, if very much of its time in
its attitudes. Music by Mundell Lowe.
Turner
Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Ted Prigge
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
SLEEPER
USA
Reel.com DVD review [Pam Grady] (link
lost)
Back before Woody Allen (whose first taste of schtick came as a teenage writer on Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows) thought that a comedian ought to somehow get serious, he was a dependable purveyor of amiably silly hilarity. For proof, one need look no further than 1973's Sleeper, a playful goof on the sci-fi genre set 200 years in the future.
Allen plays Miles Monroe, a
It's hard to resist a film that contains the ultimate banana-peel joke, when
Miles attempts to hijack humongous fruits and vegetables only to slip, along
with the farmer who's chasing him, on a skin the size of
Though Sleeper is set in 2173, the humor is unabashedly 1973, as when
Miles declaims morosely about the repressive regime, "What kind of
government do you have? This is worse than
Sleeper is one of the latest additions to the Woody Allen oeuvre on DVD. The flawless MGM disc contains both full-frame and anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1) versions of the film with a Dolby Digital mono soundtrack. The DVD offers scant features, only an insert with production notes and the film's very funny theatrical trailer.
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)
It is the year 2173 and scientists have discovered a capsule
containing the body of a man cryogenically frozen two hundred years ago. They
must revive him in secret, because the
One of what will forever be known as "the early, funny ones", Sleeper
was star, co-writer (with Marshall
Brickman) and director Woody
Allen's apparent tribute to the silent film comedies of Buster
Keaton. This means quite a measure of slapstick to go along with the verbal
humour that Allen is best known for, and a fairly long sequence where he says
nothing at all onscreen. Nevertheless, Allen still seems to be sustaining his Bob
Hope style wisecracking coward act that had seen him so well through his
films of the sixties and early seventies, with a notable dose of sexual
frustration to go along with it.
The laughs are pretty evenly shared between the verbal and the physical,
evidence of which can be seen when Miles wanders around the lab in a stupefied
manner, disappearing for a few seconds only to re-emerge slumped in a motorised
wheelchair, bumping into the doctors and the policemen. When Miles is truly
aware at last, Allen fires off the one liners: when told the authorities want
him dead and will destroy his brain, he complains that's his second favourite
organ. The Allen persona has been honed to a fine point, and setting it loose
on a fully realised world that sums up the worst of the modern era makes him
the smartest character.
Science fiction is always about the time it's written in, and Allen and
Brickman have fun sending up the seventies, with its preoccupations of sex,
food and corrupt government. The safe house where Miles is being kept is
eventually invaded by the lawmen, and he has to make good his escape, leading
him to pose as a robot butler and be delivered to the home of Luna (Diane
Keaton at her daffiest), where he grows accustomed to the 22nd century way
of life, complete with instant pudding (that turns dangerous), drugs replaced
with an orb that has the same effect, and of course the Orgasmatron, the film's
most famous innovation, which has replaced sex.
Naturally, there is a scene where Miles goes into the Orgasmatron by himself,
with frazzling results. But before we get there, he has to kidnap Luna and
persuade her that he is not a dangerous alien, and that they must reach the
Underground to spark the revolution. However, she is reluctant to go along with
this, and it's only when she is threatened with brainwashing by the police that
she sees Miles' view. There are many incidental gags that raise laughs, such as
Rags ("Woof woof woof woof! Hello, I'm Rags!") the useless robot dog,
and Allen's silent comedy is excellent (like the way he excuses himself from
having his head removed), but many of the conversations go on a bit too long.
However, there are terrific, resigned final lines and Sleeper does entertain.
The jolly, oddly appropriate music is by Allen too.
Turner
Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film
Review Richard Scheib
Flipside Movie Emporium Gauti Fridriksson
Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley)
The Greatest Films - comprehensive
analysis of classic US film Tim
Dirks detailed analysis
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
LOVE AND DEATH
USA
Time Out
On the
same inspired wavelength as the Mel Brooks 2000 Year Old Man routines,
Stephen Leacock's parodies of the Russian novel, and any number of insane SJ
Perelman dialogues. It's another episode in Allen's Jewish-neurotic romance
with Diane Keaton, this time with Napoleon's invasion of
Turner Classic Movies Jeff
Stafford
Leave it to Woody Allen to make an irreverent burlesque
about all things Russian, particularly its history, literature and film
culture. While it might not have seemed a likely commercial prospect for a film
in 1975, it's even harder now to imagine a major studio bankrolling a project
like Love and Death despite the financial clout of the director or star.
Yet, Love and Death touched on all the familiar Allen themes his fans
had grown to love - relationships, sex, marriage, and self-deprecation - in the
context of a nineteenth-century story about Boris Dimitrovich Grushenko, a
cowardly peasant who is talked into assassinating Napoleon by his cousin, Sonya
(Diane Keaton). Not only was Woody able to question religious and philosophical
concerns within the comic framework of Love and Death, but he was able
to pay homage to some of his favorite films: a battlefield hawker who sells
blinis to the troops recalls Harpo Marx in Duck Soup (1933), a dueling
scene appears modeled on a Bob Hope routine in Monsieur Beaucaire
(1946), the climax is a direct nod to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal
(1957) and 'The Scythian Suite' by Stravinsky is used as background music in
one scene, just as it was in Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky
(1938). Famous dialogue from the novels of Tolstoy like War and Peace
and Anna Karenina is also parodied along with in-jokes about the poetry
of T.S. Eliot.
More than anything, Love and Death was a happy accident. Originally,
Allen was trying to write a romantic comedy about two clever New Yorkers who
solve a murder but wasn't able to work out the details to his satisfaction.
With time running out on his script deadline, he happened to notice a book on
Russian history in his library and the ideas began to flow. (He would later
return to flesh out the characters of his two New Yorkers in Annie Hall
(1977) and work out the crime-solving plot in Manhattan Murder Mystery,
1993)
Filmed on location in
Movie Reviews
UK Damian Cannon
The SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Appreciating Great Trash Chris Coleman
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
ANNIE HALL
USA
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]
25 years on, it seems ever more remarkable that Annie Hall managed to beat cash-cow Star Wars at the 1977 Oscars. Woody Allen, with his legendary indifference to Academy Awards, still boasts that, of all Best Picture winners, his made the least money. It’s also the shortest - and, arguably, the best. None, certainly, comes close in terms of experimentation – this is his fifth film as director, and Allen risks a freewheeling, try-anything structure, relentlessly bending the rules of cinema just to see what happens.
And so very much of it comes off, even if repeated viewings
do reveal how little actually happens in the brief but intense comic romance
between comedian Alvy Singer (Allen) and aspiring singer Annie Hall (Keaton),
and how much the film concentrates on Alvy, no matter what the title might
suggest – this remains Allen’s only ‘Best Actor’ nomination, and he should have
won. But familiarity doesn’t sap the freshness: individual scenes and
lines are no less impressive (and funny) for having passed so securely into the
popular consciousness. Among films, perhaps only Psycho and
Too many people only know Annie Hall from its heavy TV
rotation – on the big screen, Gordon Willis’s cinematography comes to the fore,
rivalling even Ralph Rosenblum’s crucial work in the editing suite (Allen’s
editors are often described as the ‘real’ directors of his work, chopping down
the huge spools of footage into these economic bite-sizes). This is the most
geographically energetic of all Allen’s films, and Willis does remarkable
things with the drizzly greys of
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)
In his much-acclaimed romantic comedy Annie Hall,
Allen sheds the clownpaint of his previous screen persona and bares himself as
Manhattanite Alvy Singer who wears his psyche like a wound oozing through his
sleeve. Alvy has loved and lost Annie Hall, a reticent midwestern girl
who evolves through the long course of their relationship into a mature,
self-confident woman. Does Alvy change? Has he ever changed? He attempts in
retrospect to dissect the experience to understand it, understand Annie, and
ultimately (and continuously) himself.
Woody Allen takes us inside his head as he explores, for himself, his own
neuroses. But we are only bystanders—if any one of us could actually answer his
question "Where did I go wrong?", he'd find a way to prove our
theories wrong. It's how he is. It's how Alvy Singer is.
As any good neurotic knows, the only way to sort out our internal labyrinthine
dialogue is to hear them, see them outside ourselves. What is romantically
considered "the muse" is in actuality a survival mechanism that
drives us to create a personal symbology in an attempt to understand ourselves:
van Gogh painted his madness, Kafka drew rich and hideous metaphors to release
his nightmares, and Woody steps outside of himself to hear himself think.
Allen takes us through Alvy's psycho-journey using hilarious and divergent
devices. Scattered throughout his non-linear storyline are cinematic
gems—surreallistic sequences in which he sets his characters in their own
pasts, to revisit and review what occurred—as well as outrageous narratives and
subtle cues. He constantly breaks the 4th wall, either directly (as in the
opening monologue) or as a sotto voce, mid-scene. Annie and Alvy's first
endearingly real conversation, out on her balcony, is ingenious: the ever
precocious Allen provides us with subtitles for their thoughts while their
mouths awkwardly ramble on—sheer movie magic. And I feel compelled to tease
those who have not yet seen this by mentioning that this film includes the most
famous sneeze ever captured on the silver screen.
I don't believe there had ever been anything quite like it when Annie Hall
first hit the screen. The natural, conversational dialogue flows so flawlessly
we don't recognize it as "enhanced"—in some instances as they talk
over and around each other, it is difficult to imagine these lines were
actually scripted. And although we walk away with a hundred new punchlines in
our heads, we realize they are NOT one-liners but masterfully crafted
crescendos, dependent upon the previous three minutes or so of dialogue.
Brilliant.
Both Keaton and Allen developed unique screen personalities in this film that
have been copied and re-rendered by countless actors in soon-forgotten movies
since. There was even the craze of the "Annie Hall" style that
followed for several years, which I remember as a refreshing counterbalance to
the disco polyester of Saturday Night Fever (premiering the same year).
But these two were so fresh and original and un-selfconscious that it is a
phenomenon that we can only revisit by viewing Annie Hall again and
again. Now that I own it, I will and will.
Annie Hall won 4 out of the 5 Academy Awards® for which it was
nominated, and was recently voted #4 in the American Film Institute's top 100
comedies. Diane Keaton is delightfully natural and peculiar; Allen has never
been more charming or sincere. And the real star, their fragile relationship,
is so intricate, honest and familiar we might almost wince at the levity by
which it is portrayed. Who else but Woody could pull this off without
tear-jerking sentimentality? It is only through Keaton's songs that we
recognize his bittersweet regret, and through the flashbacks at the end we
understand that we, like Alvy, like Woody, just needed to see it all one more
time before letting go.
This is an American tour-de-force that earns all of the accolades it has
received over time in every line, every humorous tickle to sidesplitting
laugh.... Woody knew he was on to something and has continued to explore this
venue ever since. There are those who miss his old gags, and astonishingly
there are those who do understand him and dismiss him—the all-too-common sign
of a great auteur.
Did I mention that Paul Simon and Jeff Goldblum cut their teeth on this set? Or
that small parts and cameos are graced by Carol Kane, Colleen Dewhurst, Shelley
Duvall, and the zero-to-60mph joke delivered impeccably by Christopher Walken?
I just can't say enough about this film.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2002 (excerpt)
“Annie
Hall"contains more intellectual wit and cultural references than any other
movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture, and in winning the award in 1977
it edged out "Star Wars," an outcome unthinkable today. The victory
marked the beginning of Woody Allen's career as an important
filmmaker (his earlier work was funny but slight) and it signaled the end of
the 1970s golden age of American movies. With "Star Wars," the age of
the blockbuster was upon us, and movies this quirky and idiosyncratic would
find themselves shouldered aside by
Watching it again, 25 years after its April 1977 premiere, I am astonished by how scene after scene has an instant familiarity. Some of its lines have seeped into the general consciousness; they're known by countless people who never saw the movie, like Jack Nicholson's chicken salad speech from "Five Easy Pieces." For years I've invariably described spiders as being "as big as a Buick," and this movie may be where most people first heard Groucho Marx's comment that he would not want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.
Alvy Singer, the gag writer and stand-up comic played by Allen in the movie, is the template for many of his other roles--neurotic, wisecracking, kvetching, a romantic who is not insecure about sex so much as dubious about all the trouble it takes. Annie Hall, played by Diane Keaton, sets the form for many of Allen's onscreen girlfriends: Pretty, smart, scatterbrained, younger, with affection gradually fading into exasperation. Women put up with a lot in Allen's movies, but at a certain point they draw the line.
Alvy Singer, like so many other Allen characters and Allen himself, accompanies every experience in life with a running commentary. He lives in order to talk about living. And his interior monologues provide not merely the analysis but the alternative. After making love with Annie for the first time, Alvy rolls over, exhausted and depleted, and observes, "As Balzac said, 'There goes another novel'."
Alvy is smarter than the ground rules of
"Annie Hall" is built on such dialogue, and centers on conversation and monologue. Because it is just about everyone's favorite Woody Allen movie, because it won the Oscar, because it is a romantic comedy, few viewers probably notice how much of it consists of people talking, simply talking. They walk and talk, sit and talk, go to shrinks, go to lunch, make love and talk, talk to the camera, or launch into inspired monologues like Annie's free-association as she describes her family to Alvy. This speech by Diane Keaton is as close to perfect as such a speech can likely be, climaxing with the memory of her narcoleptic Uncle George falling asleep and dying while waiting in line for a free turkey. It is all done in one take of brilliant brinksmanship, with Keaton (or Annie) right on the edge of losing it.
Annie Hall Syd Field
CultureDose.net [John Nesbit]
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan
Jardine]
Movie Reviews
UK Damian Cannon
Combustible Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
The Greatest Films - comprehensive analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1977
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
INTERIORS
USA
Time Out
Interiors must rank as one of the most spectacular changes of
direction for an American artist since Clint Eastwood made Breezy.
Working as director and writer only, Allen put together a beautifully acted,
lyrically written exploration of an intelligent middle class American family
whose three grown-up daughters are thunderstruck when their father trades in
his elegant depressive wife for a lively, but jarringly vulgar, divorcee. The
film has moments of humour, but they are integrated into a totally serious structure
which isolates the family's countervailing tensions with a scalpel-like
penetration. Only in a single character, the failed husband of one of the
daughters, does the tone falter towards soap. Otherwise the approach is rock
steady and, if the film's surface invites superficial comparisons with Bergman,
its real roots lie in the very finest American art.
Turner
Classic Movies review Jessica
Handler
Interiors (1978) is comedic writer/director Woody
Allen's first serious dramatic film, and is a stylistic homage to the films of
Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Starring E.G. Marshall (12 Angry Men,
1957), Geraldine Page (1986 Best Actress Academy Award® Winner for A Trip to
Bountiful), Maureen Stapleton (Bye Bye Birdie, 1963), Diane Keaton (Annie
Hall, 1977), and Mary Beth Hurt (The World According to Garp, 1982),
the plot concerns MarshallÕs decision to divorce his wife (Page) and marry
Pearl (Stapleton), and the chilling effect his choice has on his adult
daughtersÕ detached relationships with their parents, each other and their own
inner lives. The film was originally titled Anhedonia, meaning the
incapacity to experience pleasure.
A visually stunning film, Interiors lays bare the emotional struggles of
a deliberately isolated family. Within Gordon Willis' cinematographic color
palette of grays, greens and whites, the appearance of
In the biography Woody Allen by Eric Lax, Allen's longtime editor Ralph
Rosenblum comments on Allen's desire to make a serious film: "Even before
he made a movie, he had that Bergmanesque streak. He was going to make funny
movies and pull the rug at the very end. I wasn't shocked by the original end
of Take the Money and Run (where Virgil is machine-gunned), but I
thought it was stupid. But that's something he has carried through all his
movies and he will finish his life making serious movies. He says that comedy
writers sit at the children's table and he's absolutely right about that. He
wants to be remembered as a serious writer, a serious filmmaker. He managed to
rescue Interiors, much to his credit. He was against the wall. I think
he was afraid. He was testy, he was slightly short-tempered. He was fearful. He
thought he had a real bomb. But he managed to pull it out with his own work.
The day the reviews came out, he said to me, 'Well, we pulled this one out by
the short hairs, didn't we?'
Allen was indeed apprehensive about how audiences would respond to Interiors
and while watching the film with an acquaintance reportedly said, "It's
always been my fear. I think I'm writing Long Day's Journey into Night
and it turns into Edge of Night.' It's true the reviews were mixed on Interiors
and even Allen wasn't sure he was satisfied with the dialogue. In Lax's
biography, the director said, "Take the last speech in the Russian Uncle
Vanya. It's extremely poetical, and nobody talks like that, really. Yet
that's how I was trying to write in those dramas. After I saw it, with Diane
Keaton, it became a very important film in my life. But even among all the
people I know in the film business - the directors and actors and New Yorkers -
nobody saw it."
Obviously, Allen is mistaken because his peers saw Interiors and
nominated it for five Academy Awards¨, including Best Actress (Page), Best
Supporting Actress (Stapleton), Best Art Direction, Best Screenplay and Best
Director.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)
Reel.com
DVD review [Rod Armstrong]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
MANHATTAN A 97
USA
Edinburgh U Film Society [Nicola Osborne]
Isaac (Woody Allen), a comedy writer is dating Tracy (Mariel Hemingway) a
high school student. He makes light of the age difference - "I'm 42, she's
17. I'm going out with a girl wherein I can beat up her father!" - but
it's something that neither he nor his closest friends Yale and Emily are
entirely comfortable with. Mind you Yale is in no position to judge - he's busy
having an affair with Mary (Diane Keaton) a bright and quirky writer - think grown
up Annie Hall. Meanwhile Isaac's ex-wife Jill (Meryl Streep) is creating hell
for Isaac by bringing up his son with her girlfriend and publishing an
"honest account" of their break-up. Then things get tricky as Isaac
panics about
A complete love song to
Out of this everyday material Allen has crafted a genuinely romantic,
optimistic and totally enjoyable piece of iconic cinema that also happens to be
pretty much grounded in reality. Most impressively he actually manages to both
restrain his darker side and immerse the film in humour without resorting to
stand-up. To complete the film he's chosen the most perfect Gershwin score
chosen beautifully with Rhapsody in Blue, An American in Paris and Strike Up
the Band ensuring only the stoniest hearted soul could be left unmoved.
Apparently Woody Allen hated his work in this film and tried to block it's
release. Maybe it's because he actually plays a complex and often unlikeably
bitter quasi-paedophile, maybe he's just a lousy judge of his own films, either
way thank goodness he failed. There may be one or two dodgy moments
(particularly his sparring with Yale) but
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel
Paragraph One: Manhattanis not a sequel to Annie
Hall; rather, it is more how he would have made the former if he'd had a
plan. [Hmmm, not right, try again...]
Paragraph One:
Paragraph One: Director Woody Allen cemented his new style with his 1979 follow-up
to his successful Annie Hall in the quieter, more emotional
While in his previous film the relationship was the star, here, it is the title
character, the romanticized, idealized borough of Allen's vision. And while
But even a city like
We have Isaac Davis (Allen), a 42-year-old man who, by his own admission,
doesn't know what it means to say "I love you." He's had a difficult
history with relationships ("I've never had a relationship that lasted
longer than Hitler and Eva Braun...."), including a wife (Streep) that
left him for another woman. When we meet him, he is dating Tracy (Hemmingway),
a high school senior who KNOWS she is in love with him no matter how he tries
to tell her it isn't so. His best friend Yale (Murphy) has had a long and, in
Isaac's mind, ideal marriage, but reveals that he has been seeing another
woman—the abrasive, erudite Mary Wilke (Keaton). When Yale decides to break it
off, he encourages Isaac to see Mary and they hit it off. Isaac breaks it off
with a tearful
Allen's characters ask all the wrong questions when searching for love. His
ex-wife says, "You knew my history when you married me," to
which he replies, " I know, my analyst warned me, but you were so
beautiful that I got another analyst." Funny, VERY funny, but sad in
its example of the emotional damage we risk in the name of desire. While taking
cover from a sudden rainstorm in a Planetarium, Isaac and Mary have the sort of
nervous conversation that people have when they realize they're attracted to
each other. Set against the cosmos, a keen observer understands that the lives
of these people...well, you know. And even Isaac knows, as in the end he
dictates to his recorder an idea for a story:
"...about, um, people in Manhattan who, uh, who are constantly creating
these real unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves 'cause it keeps them
from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about, uh, the
universe...."
Turner
Classic Movies review Jeff Stafford
Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan
Jardine]
Window to the Movies (Jeffrey Chen)
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 1979
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times in 2001
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
DVDBeaver.com [Carsten Czarnecki]
STARDUST MEMORIES A 95
USA
I don’t want to make funny movies any more, they can’t force me to. I don’t feel funny. I look around the world and all I see is human suffering.
In my family nobody
ever considered suicide, this was just not a middle class alternative, my
mother was too busy running the boiled chicken through the de-flavorizing
machine to think about shooting herself.
To you, I’m an
athiest. To God, I’m the loyal opposition.
The Way of Zen. What
are you trying to tell me, that I’m not at peace, right? I think I need more
than a Zen book, I need either a good rabbi analyst or an interplanetary
genius.
—Sandy Bates (Woody Allen)
I’m doing this piece on the shallow indifference of wealthy celebrities and I’d like to include you in my piece. —Film festival fan
My mother shops in the same butcher shop your mother does. Can I have your autograph? Could you just write: To Phyllis Weinstein, you unfaithful, lying bitch? —An adoring fan
A dark and
unflinchingly honest film, an autobiographical equivalent to Fellini’s 8½
(1963), where a confused and neurotic, yet highly successful fictionalized
American film director, Sandy Bates (Woody Allen), has doubts about the meaning
of his existence and suddenly, through the use of a cleverly experimental film
style, finds himself thrust into the middle of a Black and White Fellini movie. Clearly inspired by the great directors of
European art cinema, like Bergman, Fellini, and Godard, to name a few, Allen
pays tribute to them all with this modernist, existential homage to cinema
itself, filled with an unconventional, plotless style that mixes flashbacks and
brief vignettes of real life with dreams and fantasies, creating an
impressionistic, stream-of-conscious effect .
Baron is constantly surrounded by an enveloping throng of wellwishers,
where he can’t help but think perhaps he’s wasting his time telling jokes and
making lighthearted comedies that the public loves instead of doing something
more meaningful with his life. But while
he’s constantly besieged by adoring fans, all calling him a genius and
comparing him to God, though they are unanimous in their preference for his
funnier, early works, he spends most of his time pursuing frivolous encounters,
fluttering from woman to woman, like a butterfly in heat, always wanting to be
at the center of attention. While he
realizes the superficiality of his own narcissim, he constantly vacillates over
what he really wants, which is usually whatever woman he can get his hands on,
where Allen’s libido rules. While this
inventive style was not altogether new, as the public got an earlier glimpse of
it in Bob Fosse’s legendary All That
Jazz (1979), this was a complete shock to Allen’s moviegoing audience, many
finding it “too angry,” breaking the mold of conventional comedy, so the speak,
and branching out anew with an altogether radical vision, something like
PERSONA (1966) was in Bergman’s career.
Despite the intent to expand the boundaries of Allen’s cinema, the film
flopped with the public and most of the critics, where Ebert and Variety didn’t like it, eventually just
breaking even financially. This is
Allen’s final film for United Artists before moving to Orion Pictures, but
looking back today, one has to acknowledge this was a major risk that turned
into one of the director’s most creative efforts in his career.
While the film is an
expression of New Wave cinema vocabulary, where startling images and jump cuts
are meant to keep the audience on edge, but what’s most revelatory is the
insight it offers into the artistic journey, where the director is literally
assaulted by a collective of well meaning, but often intrusive business
associates, many threatening the artist’s control, where they want to recut the
ending of his movie and send his characters to Jazz Heaven, thinking they know
what’s best, but what they really want is not new ideas or artistic
development, but what sells tickets, keeping the artist confined to making the
same kinds of films over and over again, as this is the successful business
formula. Art, however, wants to break
free of this suffocating stranglehold, like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, Picasso breaking from
Surrealism into his Blue period, and later Cubism, or Dylan bolting from folk
music, never knowing exactly what lies ahead, but knowing the journey is all
that matters. After an opening scene
that is amusingly European influenced, an existential fantasia of fear and
paranoia, with the claustrophobic Allen trapped in a train car much like
Marcello Mastroianni in the opening moments of 8½ was trapped in a car in the
middle of a giant traffic jam and can’t escape, both leading to strange
surrealistic dream sequences, the lights come on and the movie moguls describe
what they’ve seen, which can be summed up by an uncredited Laraine Newman, a
film producer, “He’s pretentious, his filming style is too fancy, his insights
are shallow and morbid. I’ve seen it all
before. They try to document their
private suffering and fob it off as art.”
While Bates is wrestling with the making of a film, he’s also struggling
with his life, where one of the more interesting effects is the changing mood
of a giant wall-sized photo backdrop in his apartment of The
Execution of A Vietcong Guerilla | Iconic Photos that later turns into
Groucho Marx when he’s happy, a continually changing device he uses on a half dozen
occasions, including Sandy Bates standing in front of a giant photo of Allen at
one point. Early on we see him with his gorgeous
but mentally unbalanced former girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling),
resembling his own Lauren Bacall, who initially captures his eye by
speedreading through Schopenhauer, where we hear him whisper tenderly into her
ear, “I think they’ve been putting something wonderful in your lithium.”
While attending a
retrospective of his work at the Stardust Hotel in Atlantic City (organized by
none other than Judith Christ), Bates reflects upon his life and loves, the
inspirations for his film, but is on the verge of a mental breakdown, seeing
the world from a distorted view, where memories and fantasies are seamlessly
woven into his reality, as he continually goes through a whirlwind wave of
adulation and praise, while thoughts keep creeping in, like a childhood
Superman image, seen taking off in his backyard, or various old-school
renditions of vaudeville style cabaret songs, where he sees himself as a young
onstage child magician, The Amazing Sandy, levitating a ball to thunderous
applause. The film loses all sense of
time, jumping back and forth between incidents, where he’s also introduced to
Daisy, Jessica Harper from the opening scene of Suspiria
(1977), where they have a transforming moment together after viewing THE
BICYCLE THIEF (1948), while at the same time reflecting upon his life with
Isobel, Marie-Christine Barrault from early Éric Rohmer films of the late 60’s
and 70’s, supposedly an ex-radical from France.
At some point Bates is in love with all three women, or so it seems, but
always more obsessed with the idea of love, something that’s always been
missing in his life. Even during
life-changing moments of great impact, adoring fans continue to approach him,
where he instinctively deals with both simultaneously, not even realizing what
he’s doing. In much the same way, his
mind incessantly wanders through an interior, imaginary world, where in some of
the finer moments we’re able to catch glimpses of the director’s “hostility” as
it goes on a rampage through Central Park leaving behind plenty of dead bodies,
pursued by the police and tracker dogs, or Bates actually proposes to Isobel
while she’s doing grotesque facial exercises.
Even an extraterrestial named Og appears, again confirming the
intergalactic consensus, “We
enjoy your films — particularly the early, funny ones,” while
UFO’s descend to earth in hot air balloons,
gloriously filmed by Gordon Willis, but there’s also a paranoid fantasy
about getting assassinated by a rabid autograph hound, where the release date
of the film predates the assassination of former Beatle John Lennon by psychotic
fan Mark Chapman by just over two months.
During a posthumous speech where he believes he’s already dead, Bates
describes that singular moment in his life that epitomizes his life’s meaning,
a moment with Dorrie in his apartment where she’s lying on the floor flipping
through a magazine, where their eyes and thoughts meet, with Louis Armstrong
playing “Stardust” in the background, The
Movie Roman Coppola Has 'Seen A Million Times' : NPR YouTube (2:11). Rampling has two of the film’s best moments,
as she’s also seen doing an extraordinary dramatic riff on Bergman’s PERSONA Charlotte
Rampling in Woody Allen's "Stardust memories" YouTube (1:30). While there are plenty of bickering and
disjointed moments in the film, where Allen’s character is not entirely
likeable, there are also ravishing sequences that are among Allen’s most
brilliant, which includes the affecting quality of the ambiguous ending, where
STARDUST MEMORIES may be the most autobiographically transparent film he ever
made.
Stardust Memories |
review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
The schlemiel strikes back: at
critics, at sycophants, at pigeons ('rats with wings'), and at a universe that
can contain both Charlotte Rampling's face and human-skin lampshades.
Tactically adopting his most autobiographical persona yet, Allen finally lets
his anger loose, and it dumps on everything with unaccustomed savagery. Crossed
with the strain of vengeance are his own attempts to make a film (which looks
like Art), and also his snagged-up relations with three different ladies. A
movie of great moments rather than the coherence of
They're all over him
like white on rice: goggle-eyed, humorless teenage girls, fat losers in striped
ties, and lifetime-virgin spinsters. Writer-director-actor-inquisitor Woody
Allen didn't have to spell it out for us, but he did anyway: The apogee of all
this Diane Arbus ickiness is an old Jewish man with a hearing aid who accosts
our hero: "Dey love you in Israel
Stardust
Memories - Turner Classic Movies
Jeff Stafford
The true acid test for any fan or critic who loves Woody
Allen movies is Stardust Memories (1980), his misunderstood and
generally maligned ninth feature. Obviously influenced by Fellini's 8 1/2
(1963), Stardust Memorie follows a prominent filmmaker named Sandy Bates
to a weekend movie seminar at the Stardust Hotel in New Jersey where he is
besieged by adoring fans and sycophants.
There's no denying that Stardust Memories paints a bleak picture of
Bates' profession with its stark black-and-white cinematography by Gordon
Willis and a gallery of grotesque characters who wouldn't be out of place in a
Diane Arbus photograph or a Hogarth painting. However, it is entirely
speculative whether Sandy Bates is really an alter ego for Woody Allen. Though
the director has denied it, many critics felt Allen was using this film to
express his disgust with his audience, the critics, and the film industry in
general. The New Yorker's Pauline Kael called the film "a horrible
betrayal...a whiff of nostalgia gone bad," while Andrew Sarris of The
Village Voice thought the film seemed "to have been shaped by a
masochistic desire to alienate Allen's admirers once and for all." Even
Charles Joffe, Allen's steadfast executive producer on most of his films, had
his doubts. In an interview in The New York Times, Joffe said,
"When I walked out of the first screening, I found myself questioning
everything. I wondered if I had contributed over the past twenty years to this
man's unhappiness." But for Allen, Stardust Memories was about an
artist on the verge of a mental breakdown who viewed the world through a distorted
state of mind.
Despite the controversy surrounding Stardust Memories, the film remains
one of Allen's most complex and fascinating works. It was shot mostly in the
Among the many memorable scenes in Stardust Memories are the comic
nightmare where Bates' 'hostility' goes on the rampage in Central Park, pursued
by police and tracker dogs; the appearance of an extraterrestrial named Og who
confesses he prefers the filmmaker's earlier films; a sequence which epitomizes
Bates' idea of a perfect day with his former lover, Dorrie (Charlotte
Rampling), accompanied by Louis Armstrong's rendition of "Stardust"
on the soundtrack; a paranoid fantasy in which an autograph hound assassinates
Bates. The latter sequence would prove to be prophetic when, just a few months
later, former Beatle John Lennon was murdered outside his
Alternative
Film Guide [Dan Schneider] also seen here: STARDUST MEMORIES d:
Woody Allen
DVD
Journal Alexandra DuPont
Stardust Memories -
Jared Sapolin in response to DVD
Journal’s Alexandra Dupont
Every Woody
Allen Movie Trevor Gilks
Stardust
Memories - Comcast.net Richard
Armstrong from Flickhead
The
Year in Film: 1980 [Erik Beck]
Underappreciated Film of 1980
Are
the hills going to march off?: Stardust Memories (1980) A Film by ... Carson Lund
Stardust
Memories (1980) C.B. Jacobson from
The Picture Show
Edward
Copeland on Film (Jonathan Pacheco)
Stardust
Memories (1980) - Bright Wall/Dark Room.
Erin Crumpacker
Spinning
Image Review Graeme Clark
eFilmCritic Reviews Rob Gonsalves
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Ozus' World Movie
Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Photomurals
In Stardust Memories By Woody Allen [Not Related] Greg.org The Making Of
The
Movie Roman Coppola Has 'Seen A Million Times' : NPR Lily Percy’s interview of Roman Coppola,
including why Stardust Memories is
his favorite film, from NPR, February 9, 2013
Baltimore City Paper
Review Eric Allen Hatch
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) also seen here: NY
Times Original Review
DVDBeaver
[Per-Olaf Strandberg]
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S SEX COMEDY B+ 90
USA
Quiet! There’s a man
in the next room singing The Lord’s Prayer.
I'm not a poet. I don't die for love. I work on Wall Street. —Andrew (Woody Allen)
There are no ghosts except in Shakespeare, and many of those are more real than many people I know. —Leopold (José Ferrar)
Apparently this
beautifully realized film was way ahead of its time, as it received mediocre
reviews at best, many dismissing it as a mere trifle, including Richard
Schickel who called it “trivial,” becoming a box office bomb, one of Allen’s
first financial failures, yet it’s a delightful film, the first of 13 films
made with Mia Farrow, filling the shoes of Diane Keaton who was away shooting
REDS (1981). While by no means in the
upper echelon of the best Allen films, this reverie remains one of his happier
efforts. We often forget how funny he
is, and how naturally humor once graced the screen in his earlier films, as both
then and now Allen’s viewing audience takes his comedy gifts for granted. The film is largely overlooked today,
contemptuously dismissed at the time with a sneering derision, called a rip-off
of Bergman’s SMILES OF A SUMMER NIGHT (1955), Renoir’s A DAY IN THE COUNTRY
(1936), THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), PICNIC IN THE GRASS (1959), or Éric
Rohmer’s collection of Six Moral Tales
(1963 – 1972), but none of those are as funny or have nearly as much silly fun
as Allen does with this film. Rather
than play a featured lead character, Allen is only one of a collective ensemble
cast, where it just so happens that all give standout performances. A rare departure outside the city of New
York, the film was shot in the countryside an hour away, where a set was actually
constructed on the John D. Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills located next to the Rockefeller State Park Preserve,
all the ingredients needed to make this pastoral fantasy.
Mostly a riff on the
sophisticated European comedy of manners and loosely based on Bergman’s SMILES
OF A SUMMER NIGHT, a legendary film of razor sharp wit and comic timing,
similarly taking place at a weekend in the country, eventually turning into an
elaborate partner-swapping bedroom farce that exposes pretensions and
insecurities along the way. In a similar
vein, without any real exploration of social class other than to accept one’s
fortunate position to be a part of the middle to upper class, Allen’s is a much
more lighthearted romp through the woods in the early 1900’s where bickering
characters are constantly on edge in an atmosphere fraught with sexual tension,
alerted by an ever increasing sense of paranoia, as intellectual theories are
vehemently protested, hidden secrets are zealously protected, deceiving lovers
camouflage their latent desires for others, and the entire cast is in a
heightened state of sexual arousal, usually frustrated by an unexpected turn of
events, hardly the relaxed weekend saunter they expected, where roving eyes
lead to a choreography of misdirection and a series of continuously
embarrassing missteps. But also, true of
any legitimate love fantasy, this film lays out multiple paths for the promise
of that all-consuming rapturous love.
The film takes place in the summer home of Allen and Mary Steenburgen as
Andrew and Adrian, a marital challenged couple whose non-existent sex life (as
Adrian develops migraines during every attempt at sex) reveals their neurotic
dysfunction, where he’s a crackpot inventor who diverts all his pent-up sexual
frustrations into his wacky inventions.
They invite two other couples for a weekend party, Maxwell (Tony
Roberts), Andrew’s best friend who believes “marriage is the death of hope,” a
doctor that uses his authoritative position to hit on every available female,
and a nurse he chooses almost at random, the free spirited Dulcy, Julie
Hagerty, something of a revelation in the role, culminating in the weekend
marriage of mismatched lovers Leopold and Ariel, José Ferrar and Mia
Farrow.
Leopold is the picture of egotistical hubris, a self-professed genius seen in an opening classroom sequence arrogantly refuting all claims to the metaphysical, a strict 17th century Descartes rationalist denying all existence other than what can be scientifically proven, which makes him an easy-to-hate 20th century target, as he’s a pompous, overbearing, and overcontrolling ass that has no right whatsoever to marry the fair Ariel, a beautiful and overly sensitive former convent student that all men fall in love with. The beauty of the film is how innocently Allen expresses the first pangs of love with Mia Farrow, given a languorous pace, set in a relaxed pastoral setting, where a mixed group of city slickers with plenty of intellectual baggage come to spend a restful weekend in the country, where intellectual gamesmanship and sexual drive are synonymous with the male ego, where the magical elements of a mysterious moonlit forest continually beckon, where the characters spend their time frolicking in the woods while trying to unwrap the many secrets of the night, all of which is a diversion for what they really want, which is to get laid, preferably with the most attractive person they see. Everyone seems to be on erotic edge, where love is literally in the air, and all are similarly susceptible to the whims of Cupid’s arrows (one character literally takes an arrow to the heart). Making beautiful use of Mendelssohn’s transcendent classical music, mixed with bucolic landscapes exquisitely shot by Gordon Willis, creating a pastoral idyllic in the country where everything exists in harmony, including swans, rabbits, turtles, birds in flight, buzzing bees, and Bambi bounding through the woods, it’s a movie with recurrent midnight meetings at the brook under the glow of the moonlight, a place where rapture awaits. Blending fantasy with the surreal, this is a gorgeous looking, well crafted film with a positively delightful musical score, where there’s a feeling of affirmation and curiosity and young love in the air that is truly bewitching. Personally, I rue the day that Allen and Farrow separated, as this is a wonderful example of how they brought out the best in one another.
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy | review, synopsis ... - Time Out Tony Rayns
Monogamous at heart, Allen has ended his brief affair with Fellini (Stardust Memories out of 8 ½) and gone back to his first love Bergman. Allen's version of Smiles of a Summer Night keeps the period country house setting but reduces the characters to six: two medical swingers, an elderly academic and his much younger fiancée, and a long-married couple whose sex-life has ground to a halt. Allen, of course, plays the frustrated husband (he redirects his energies towards inventing flying bicycles, astral lamps and the like), and gives himself nearly all the funny lines. He spends the rest of the movie satirising the men and adoring the changing moods of the women. His best invention remains his own screen persona, and the Bergman borrowings here provide it with a warm, romantic and old-fashioned setting.
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy | Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
After the failure of Stardust Memories, Woody Allen seemed temporarily reconciled with the idea that he's basically a comic filmmaker. Here, unfortunately, he's still going for all the marbles—straining to lift his comedy to the level of Shakespeare and (on film) Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game) and Ingmar Bergman (Smiles of a Summer Night). Allen plays an amateur inventor married to a frigid Mary Steenburgen: they invite two couples (Jose Ferrer/Mia Farrow and Tony Roberts/Julie Hagerty) to their summer home for a weekend of changing partners and spirit manifestations. Though Allen no longer insists so smugly on placing himself at the moral center of his work, the other characters are still defined exclusively by their relationship to him—and such solipsism is irreconcilable with the Shakespearean comedy of multiple perspectives. It's funny and sweet in spots, though the light moments get lost in the haze of imitation and ambitiousness.
The Spinning Image Daniel Auty
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy followed three of Woody
Allen’s deepest, most complex pictures – the intense Interiors,
career-defining Manhattan
and surreal satire Stardust
Memories – and proved to the director’s lightest film since 1975’s Love
& Death. It’s certainly not first-rate Woody, and not as good as those
unassuming gems Broadway
Danny Rose or Radio
Days, but does provide some gentle laughs and a great ensemble cast.
Set in the early 1900s, Woody stars as Andrew, a Wall Street accountant who at
weekends relaxes in his large countryside house, indulging his passion as an
inventor. Andrew and his wife Adrian (Mary
Steenburgen) are having problems in the bedroom, which come to a head when
her pompous professor cousin Leopold (José
Ferrer) comes to visit with his beautiful young fiancée Ariel (Mia
Farrow). Andrew and Ariel knew each other years ago – when she was still a
promiscuous convent girl – but they never consummated the obvious attraction
they had. The group is completed by Andrew’s best friend Maxwell (Tony
Roberts) a womanising doctor, who is accompanied by airhead nurse Dulcy (Julie
Hagerty).
This is essentially a bedroom farce set in the great outdoors, and much of the
film revolves around characters trying to get the objects of their desires
alone. Sexually-frustrated Andrew finds his dormant passion for Ariel awoken,
sex-mad Maxwell declares that he too loves Ariel, Leopold pursues Dulcy for one
last fling before marriage, and
There are amusing lines and good slapstick moments – most involving Woody and
his array of crazy inventions – but in general, it’s not quite funny enough to
prop up such a lightweight plot. The joy of films like Sleeper
or Love
& Death was in the sheer comic propulsion, one gag after another, so
that the cumulative effect was greater than any one joke. A Midsummer Night's
Sex Comedy doesn’t have that, and the characters are too sketchily drawn to
engage on any level other than comic. There’s no denying the craftsmanship
involved here – Gordon Willis’s countryside cinematography is particularly
gorgeous – but it’s all as light as a breeze on a summer’s afternoon.
Underrated
Movie #1: A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
Cockeyed Caravan
Beautifully shot and entertaining from start to finish and
the long shots/takes throughout are amazing.
The Story: Three couples spend a weekend in the country in upstate New York at the beginning of the 20th Century. While there, they debate the existence of the spirit world and clumsily attempt to seduce each other’s partners.
How It Came to be Underrated: The disingenuous title does the movie no favors. This was the period of Allen’s greatest popularity with audiences, but the relationship was an uneasy one. In his previous movie Stardust Memories even aliens from outer space show up to tell Allen that “We preferred your earlier, funnier movies”. But Allen wanted to make intellectual movies like his European heroes, Bergman and Fellini. The title of this one teases the audience by recalling Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (but were afraid to ask), Allen’s last broad comedy, but it wasn’t a return to zaniness. In fact, this may be Allen’s most successful attempt to channel his European sensibilities. (Another factor was that Allen was averaging more than one movie a year at this time. This is a great movie, but it wasn’t even the best movie he released in 1982, since that was the year he also made Zelig, which has overshadowed this movie.)
Why it's Great:
1. “European” can be a bad word for Allen, as when he too slavishly copies Bergman (see Interiors) or Fellini (see Alice), but this movie feels European in the best sense of the word. “Dramedy” is also always a shaky proposition. Why would someone who can make us laugh out loud choose to go for the soft chuckle instead? Why would a dramatic writer toss in a bunch of half-hearted jokes if they had something serious to say? But when dramedy is done right, it can be so buoyant and effervescent that it makes broad comedy or straight drama feel phony. This feels like real life, only richer.
2. Although Allen always hires the world’s best cinematographers, his movies aren’t usually beautiful to look at. This is an exception. Cinematographer Willis (of the Godfather movies) adopts a simple style, using natural light to accent the pastoral beauty of the countryside. Gone too is the Dixieland jazz that Allen usually prefers. Instead, the music is all taken from the work of Felix Mendelssohn and it has a light, joyous passion that invigorates the whole movie.
3.
Allen also breaks out of his usual habits by
writing a role for himself that is wildly against type. The autobiographical
characters that Allen wrote and played in Annie Hall and Manhattan
are tortured artists that hate the country (“It’s filled with creepy, crawly
things!”) and dread their fate in a godless universe. Allen here plays a stockbroker
and crackpot inventor who loves the country and argues vigorously for the
existence of the spirit world. (Of course, he’s still a horndog and a
wisecracker.) It’s easy to watch Allen’s 80s films and forget how good both he
and Mia Farrow are at what they do, but when they get to play different
characters, we are reminded of how talented they really are.
4. At only 88 minutes, this is an incredibly tightly-written movie, but it sacrifices nothing. With effortless speed, Allen establishes six complex and varied characters and sends each one through a unique journey. Too often, in these “weekend in the country” movies, we never understand who everybody is or what they want from each other. Here, no one is merely defined by their relationship to someone else. Each character gets their own introduction and believably states their own philosophy. Once we understand those philosophies, we easily anticipate the conflicts that will arise, yet each encounter has an unexpected outcome.
Underrated Compared To: Broadway Danny Rose (1984) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), both of which Allen and Farrow made later in the 80s. I like both movies, but not as much as this one.
If You Like This, You Should Also Check Out: Zelig (1982) and Purple Rose of Cairo (1984) are Allen’s best remembered films of this period, and they deserve their lofty reputations. Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game (1939), Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles on a Summer Night (1955), and Eric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee (1970), are three of the great “weekend in the country” films that inspired this one.
Availability: It’s on Netflix to “Watch Instantly” right now, and a DVD is in print. Unfortunately, Allen never provides a commentary or any other special features.
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy - Turner Classic Movies Lorraine LoBianco
Only The Cinema [Ed Howard]
DVD Times Mark Boydell
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy | Every Woody Allen Movie Trevor Gilks
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy Movie Review | John Likes Movies John Gilpatrick
My Favorite Movies 34 – A Midsummer
Night's Sex Comedy (Woody ... Isley
Unruh from What Is Best in Life
Joel
Cunningham - digitallyOBSESSED!
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
DVD
Review - A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy - The Digital Bits Graham Greenlee
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy : DVD Talk Review of the DVD ... Aaron Beierle from DVD Talk
Guide
To DVD Review: Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
DVD Movie Guide Colin Jacobson
MacGuffin
Film Blog [Jeremy Berg]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
0-5
Stars Moria - The Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard
Scheib]
Bill's
Movie Emporium [Bill Thompson]
Needcoffee.com
- DVD Review Scott C
Deconstructing
Woody: Self-reflexivity in the Films of Woody Allen ... Ronan Doyle from Strange Enlightenments
December | 2012 | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist | Page 2 also seen here: Hyde Park on the Hudson
Sight
& Sound poll Woody Allen’s Top
Ten Film List, 2012
Woody Allen's
homages to other films - Movie List on mubi.com
Shakespeare
on Film
FILM
/ What Mia Farrow did next: Mia Farrow has many regrets, but ... Sheila Johnston interviews actress Mia Farrow
from The Independent, April 7,
1993
Paris
Review - The Art of Humor No. 1, Woody Allen Michiko Kakutani interview from The Paris Review, Fal 1995
VOTW: Woody Allen On Ingmar Bergman Video interview of Allen by Mark Kermode from
the BBC (17:43)
Smiles
of a Summer Night - The Magic Works of Ingmar Bergman Tom Milne from Time Out London
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) also seen here: NY
Times Original Review
A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
ZELIG B 85
USA
Woody Allen turns into
a human chameleon, able to take on the physical features of anyone within a
close proximity, be it Asian speakers, sumo wrestlers, Greek restaurant owner, doctors,
musicians, or blacks, suddenly he has not only the physical characteristics but
equivalent knowledge to join into whatever activity they’re doing. Known as Leonard Zelig (Allen himself), a
nebbish, an everyday ordinary kind of guy that otherwise blends into the
scenery completely unnoticed, Allen makes a fake documentary that takes us
through the 20’s and 30’s using what appears to be historic documentary black
and white footage placing Zelig at the scene in moments of history, standing
next to Hitler during one of his speeches, or in the on deck circle after Babe
Ruth (where he was detected and thrown out before he got a chance to bat), on
the balcony with the Pope, playing in jazz bands, performing in a Yiddish orthodox
rendition of Midsummer Night’s Dream,
or socializing with the likes of Herbert Hoover, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or
Sigmund Freud. Shown in newsreel
headlines, archival footage, or through interviews with various notables, like
Susan Sontag, Saul Bellows, Bricktop, or Bruno Bettleheim, all of whom relate their
own personal anecdotes, where we get this image of a man who has defied his
place in history, as he could have been promoted as the greatest circus act of
all times, the transforming man who, depending on the circumstances, can take
on any shape.
Enter Dr. Eudora
Fletcher (Mia Farrow, always astonishing), a psychiatrist at Manhattan Hospital
where Zelig is brought in for an evaluation, which more closely resembles an
inspection, a hilarious bit where he’s treated like a rubber man, pushed and
pulled, prodded and squeezed and rearranged, trying to determine what he’ll
turn into next. But all the other
doctors eventually lose interest in the man when he stops changing at a
moment’s notice, where for long stretches, he actually remains Leonard Zelig,
all that is, except Fletcher, who probes his internalized anxieties, his need
to be accepted and liked, how he uses each new identity like putting on a new
suit, which perfectly matches her own neurosis and her need to be needed. Eventually the two enter into a relationship
that resembles Chaplin in the silent era, where love is a look, a glance, a
telling smile, or a hand to hold as they walk off into the sunset together.
The actual archival
footage is brilliant, made in an era before computerized technology, instead using
snappy jazz music, jitterbug dancers, and anything lively that resembles the
fun at an amusement park along with historic footage, with a newsreel style announcer
telling the story of Zelig’s life as the film unreels. The problem is this frolicking fun is then
mixed with endless philosophic discussions by experts attempting to diagnose
his medical condition or provide a rational explanation for what amounts to a
novelty item. It’s like somebody trying
to explain what’s funny about a joke, it goes nowhere, and nobody really wants
to hear that anyway. So part of this
film is hilarious fun, while another part may put viewers to sleep, but all in
all it’s an interesting stab at projecting one’s identity throughout
history. Also recommended, Buster Keaton
in SHERLOCK JR (1924), which obviously influenced Allen’s later work THE PURPLE
ROSE OF CAIRO (1985), and, of course, Allen’s ZELIG evolved into Tom Hanks
winning an Oscar for his wildly popular FORREST GUMP (1994).
Time Out
One of Allen's miniaturist
exercises in style, Zelig is a one-joke movie about a man so self-
effacing that he takes on the physical appearance of the person he is with. In
addition to the chameleon-like ability for personal metamorphosis, Zelig
manifests an equally unique capacity for materialising at important social gatherings
and significant historical events - at a garden party given by novelist Scott
Fitzgerald, on the balcony of the
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)
"Wanting to
be liked, he distorted himself above all measure." –
F. Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted by the narrator
Zelig is an extraordinary feat of cinematic necromancy that defies its
imitators with the single stroke of genius that is Woody Allen. Brilliantly
conceived, skillfully executed and ticklingly funny from beginning to end, this
faux-documentary is an entertaining mosaic of the fad-happy 1920s and 30s, and
one man's impact on his times.
Everyman Leonard Zelig is literally capable of being any and every man, a human
vessel who embodies our sociological urge to conform. He comes to the attention
of the public through the media when he is "sighted" at affluent
social gatherings, appearing to some as one man and moments later, as another.
His metamorphosis is material; he physically takes on the ethnic
characteristics or manifests the weight proportions of those around him,
complete with spontaneous facial hair and costume. The gimmick-crazed public
makes him an instant celebrity, and his popularity soars through merchandising
tie-ins. A cavalcade of dances, songs and games are created around his
phenomenon.
"I worked with Freud in
Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Farrow) is certain he is the victim of a psychological
malady and takes charge of his case when he is brought to
The beauty of this film is the nearly seamless integration of Allen, Farrow and
other contemporary figures into a myriad of vintageóand
vintage-likeóphotgraphs, film clips and newsreels that serve as
"documentation" of Zelig's bizarre disorder, as well as the rise and
fall of his notoriety. Interspersed with color footage depicting topical
interviews of real-life notables such as Susan Sontag, Saul Bellow and other
figures, as well as actors playing various characters "later in
life," the end result is a montage that assists in the suspension of
disbelief: if this human chameleon was someone less recognizable than Allen
himself, we might forget at times the improbable manifestations of Zelig's
neuroses.
The comedy here ebbs and flows; it is difficult to carry this premise for very
long before the situation wears thin, but then our shapeshifting protagonist
finds himself in new circumstances and humor prevails. While there is
relatively little live action footage, Allen commits his character to every
scene through facial expressions, poses and postures. His body language in the
"breakthrough" scene is so comical and real that we suffer his
discomfort with him.
"He is finally an individual, a human being. He no longer gives up his
own identity to be a safe and invisible part of his surroundings." –
narrator
Leonard Zelig desires assimilation and achieves his goal in miraculous ways.
Then, through the new science of psychiatry, he is transformed, finally, into
his own man. The achievements of Zelig the movie are equally wondrous
when we realize it was created without digital effects or computer-assisted
graphics that later retreads like Forrest Gump
would use to full advantage. There are so many clever devices employed to set
the characters in their time that on repeated viewing, it might become a game
to locate them.
While one recognizes seeds sown in his early spoof, What's Up, Tiger Lily?,
this is a film truly unlike any other, and earns its place in the pantheon of
"must see" Woody Allen.
Turner Classic Movies Eleanor Quin
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Movie Reviews UK Damian Cannon
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Review Richard Scheib
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[Brian Webster]
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- DVD Review Scott C
eFilmCritic.com the
Ultimate Dancing Machine
Appreciating Great Trash Chris Coleman
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
BROADWAY DANNY ROSE A 96
USA
You know what my
philosophy of life is? That it’s important to have some laughs, but you gotta
suffer a little too, because otherwise you miss the whole point to life.
It’s very important to
be guilty. I’m guilty all the time and I never did anything
My hand to God, she’s gonna be at Carnegie Hall. But I’ll
let you have her now at the old price, okay? Which is - which is anything you wanna
give me. Anything at all. —Danny Rose (Woody Allen)
The unreserved,
unadulterated Woody Allen at his relaxed best, one of his funniest films, a
film loaded with Yiddish and one-liners, not to mention plenty of Jewish guilt,
a tribute to the Borscht Belt-Catskills comedy circuit, which is told as a feature length long running joke
starring Allen as Danny Rose, renowned throughout the land as the personal
manager of the worst acts in show business, opening and closing with a group of
New York City comics sitting around the Carnegie Deli telling jokes and talking
about the old times. When they get
around to mentioning Danny Rose, each has their own anecdote, but one (Sandy
Baron) says hold on, he’s got the best Danny Rose story there is, which then
takes up the rest of the film.
Beautifully shot by Gordon Willis in black and white, it would be
impossible to understand Danny Rose without comprehending his innate
Jewishness, defiantly non-religious, which happened to be the norm in his
generation, yet something of a beacon of hope in a moral wasteland. The film also stars Mia Farrow in one of her
better roles as Tina Vitale, playing against
type, a manipulative, self-centered, tough-talking bombshell whose wiseguy
husband was recently killed by the mob when he was shot in the eyes. “He had it comin’,” Farrow deadpans, while
Danny nearly faints, remarking “The bullets go right through, don’t they?” Danny has to stop helping his regular acts,
the Jascha Heifetz of wine glass entertainers (“Not one lesson, never taken one
lesson!”), piano playing birds, the balloon twisters, the blind xylophone
player, the one-legged tap dancer, the dressed parrot, or a hypnotist act that
goes wrong when his subjects don’t wake up (“I promise you, if your wife never
wakes up again, I’ll take you to any restaurant of your choice — do you like
Chinese food?”) in order to devote his time
exclusively to one act, Nick Apollo Forte (basically playing himself) as Lou
Canova, an overweight, egotistical has-been lounge singer, a 50’s crooner, and
worse, a serial womanizer with a drinking problem, who is making a comeback
when the country takes an interest in the nostalgia craze.
Canova is two-timing
his wife with an unseen glamour girl he claims he’s in love with, giving her a
white rose every day, and when he’s booked at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, with
the possibility of being the opening act for Milton Berle at Caesar’s Palace,
he pleads with Danny to “be the beard” and bring his girl as Danny’s date so
his wife won’t get suspicious. When
Danny drives to
Despite surviving the
afternoon alive and in one piece, when they arrive at the club, Canova is
smashed, as he was a wreck drinking all day waiting to hear from them. Danny, of course, has his home made remedy
waiting which he’s provided plenty of times before, because, after all, a
personal manager must provide personalized services. Danny also picks out all the clothes, the order
of the songs (‘‘What you should do is ‘My Funny
Valentine’ after you do Great Crooners from the past who are now deceased...”),
even suggesting a few onstage moves as well as offering the advice from a
neverending list of deceased relatives, not to mention his longstanding
professional motto: “You gotta look in the mirror and say your three S’s. Star.
Smile. Strong.” Berle and Howard Cosell show up and Canova is
a hit revitalizing songs that should have stayed dead long ago. So in celebration, Canova decides to go with
new management, leaving Danny in a white-palmed state of flux, like what more
could he do for the guy, and this is the thanks he gets? After a quick uncomfortable moment, followed
by a somewhat hilarious uncomfortable moment, there’s a shot of the big floats
of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade before Danny gathers all his acts
together to come over for a Thanksgiving dinner party to eat frozen turkey TV
dinners. To see all the lovable losers in
the same shot is a bit ludicrous, especially the bird wearing a dress and a
bonnet, as they’re like lost souls, loved and nurtured by the craziest yet most
devoted agent in show business. Allen’s
affection for this character is the heart of the film, often feeling like a Yom
Kippur atonement, where Danny’s fierce loyalty to his acts is supposedly based
upon Jack Rollins and Charles Joffe, who have produced every single movie Allen
has ever directed. When the blind
xylophonist blurts out in a straight face that the cranberry dressing is too dry,
and what he’s actually eating is the mashed potatoes, well it’s hard not to
crack up, as this movie personifies theater of the absurd. By the end, however,
Farrow remembers one of Danny’s uncle Sidney’s best lines, “Acceptance. Forgiveness.
Love,” and underneath all the crazy antics is one of the sweetest love
stories in the Allen repertoire.
Broadway Danny
Rose | review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Admittedly slighter than its immediate predecessor Zelig, this is still a delightful comedy that sees Allen as a no-hope theatrical agent (his clients include balloon twisters, wine-glass players and bird trainers, who all leave him when the Big Time beckons) who acts as beard for an adulterous, unmusical crooner on his books, and gets involved with a brassy Mafia widow (Farrow, unrecognisable). The jokes are firmly embedded in plot and characterisation, and the film, shot by Gordon Willis in harsh black-and-white, looks terrific; but what makes it work so well is the unsentimental warmth pervading every frame.
Edinburgh U Film
Society [Andrew Abbott]
One of Allen's very best, this has a new version of his usual neurotic
character in Danny Rose, the greatest
The music is wonderful, the black and white photography of
digitallyOBSESSED!
DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel
In Broadway Danny Rose, Woody Allen turns
his lens on his "family," the borscht-belt comics he came up with in
the 1950s and 60s. He twills the heirs of vaudeville entertainmentóanimal acts,
magicians, ventriloquists, aging songsters and third-rate comediansótogether
into a tender-hearted homage to the veterans of the Catskills circuit on the
downside of their heyday.
Allen, ever the reluctant exhibitionist, displays a rare humility in the
humanity he gives to the title character, a two-bit talent agent with a heart
of gold, down on his luck. Not that he was ever a success: every act he has
ever handled that had a chance to make it, left him in the wings. A failed
comic in his own right, he knows what his clients suffer and carries them long
after their shtick is passÈ. Danny is passÈ, too, but still gives his
allógai gezundt, as my Nana would say.
"Remember Danny Rose? He was
handling an actor and a one-legged tap dancer. It was his normal handling.
Always the best." –
Comic in restaurant (Sandy Baron)
Allen builds this little cinema ý clef with his usual stylistic
innovation. The film opens in a neighborhood delicatessen where, it seems, old
comics go to die. A swarm of real show-biz veterans, beginning with Corbett
Monica and Morty Gundy, populate a table for an evening, comparing jokes and
swapping stories. Someone throws out the name Danny Rose, and Sandy Baron
claims to have "the best Danny Rose story," and thus begins
our tale through the flashback memories of these washed-out entertainers.
Danny manages to book his best client, the waning (and widening) cantante,
Lou Canova (Forte), at the Waldorf, just as the nostalgia craze takes off.
Danny runs into Milton Berle, who happens to need a singer to open for him at
Caesar's Palace, so Danny convinces him to check out Lou's act. The singer
insists that his mistress be present for the performance, so Danny, against his
better judgement, drives to
Finally, Farrow gains my attention. Disguised in a large blonde bouffant,
oversized shades and tight-fitting bimbowear, she loses herself (and her
Woody-ness) in an outrageous caricature of
Nick Apollo Forte embodies Canova, the crooning Lothario with a
disproportionate ego ("When I'm out there singing, I can feel the women
mentally undressing
Nominated for best director and screenplay, Broadway Danny Rose is a universal salute to those circuit schleps
who carried the baton to the next generation of stand-up comedians and warm-up
acts, and the plaid-clad agents who coddled them.
Broadway
Danny Rose | Every Woody Allen Movie
Trevor Gilks
Broadway
Danny Rose - Turner Classic Movies
Rob Nixon
Woody
Allen: Broadway Danny Rose Derek
Malcolm from the Guardian
NPR.org » The Movie
Michael Peña Has 'Seen A Million Times'
Lily Percy from NPR
Broadway
Danny Rose Movie Review | Jewish Film Guide
Jimmy Gillman
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
The Film Palace
[Edward L. Terkelsen]
What
a Feeling! [Robert Horton]
DVD Times Mark Boydell
DVD Savant Review:
Broadway Danny Rose Glenn Erickson
Carney on Culture:
Woody Allen Modernism for the Millions—The Films of Woody Allen, by Ray Carney
the
best films you've never seen - broadway danny rose
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(Graeme Clark)
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[Chris Jarmick] (No Spoilers)
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Top
Ten Thanksgiving Movies Rated by Deliciousness - AMC Blog ...
Mia
Farrow - Actors and Actresses - Films as ... - Film Reference
My
favourite film: Broadway Danny Rose | Film | guardian.co.uk Andrew Pulver from The Guardian,
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
Broadway Danny Rose -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO
USA
Time Out
During the Depression, downtrodden housewife Farrow so inflames a film's leading man (an explorer-poet) that he climbs down from the screen, and entices her into a chaotic but charming love affair. Woody Allen's deft script investigates every nook and cranny of the couple's bizarre relationship, the irate Pirandellian reactions of the illusory characters left up on the screen, and the bewilderment of the actor whose movie persona has miraculously gone walkies. As the star-struck couple, Farrow and Daniels work wonders with fantastic emotions, while Allen's direction invests enough care, wit and warmth to make it genuinely moving.
filmcritic.com (Christopher Null)
If Radio
Days is Woody Allen's love letter to radio, The Purple Rose of Cairo
is his ode to old movies. Purple Rose, however, is about ten times as
ridiculous, its conceit being that Jeff Daniels' Depression-era movie star
walks right out of the movie screen to be with the girl in the audience (Mia
Farrow) whom he loves. This of course causes havoc for the characters on the
screen (who provide the most hilarity in the film) and the real people here on
earth, who simply aren't prepared for a fictional character to become one of
them.
Eventually, this sends the studio into a tizzy, and the actor who plays the
movie star shows up to try and coax his alter-ego back onto the screen.
Meanwhile, the fictional character learns that you can't use fictional money in
a restaurant and that cars don't just start on their own without keys. It's all
lighthearted and full of whimsy, and that's about it. Allen presumably is
trying to make a statement here about wanting what we can't have, and how harsh
reality can be, but it doesn't really come across. Purple Rose is just
too goofy to carry much of a punch.
Incidentally this is only Allen's second film in which he did not appear, and
according to the disc insert, it's also his favorite movie. That I don't get,
but it's Woody....
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]
A small town in
depression-era
Allen's script pivots on a charming, semi-surreal, inspired conceit by which
Tom somehow 'steps out' of the movie into the cinema auditorium after having
'noticed' Cecilia's repeated attendance. Cecilia is delighted at Tom's
attention - her fellow patrons are perplexed, while Tom's fellow characters
up on screen impatiently await his return so that their story can continue.
Fearing lawsuits, Hollywood bigwigs dispatch Gil to New Jersey - giving
Cecilia a rather uncomfortable dilemma as she finds herself romanced by both
'real' and 'fictional' beaux...
Allen's Purple Rose (as opposed to the one featuring Tom Baxter) is
an acerbic love-letter to the power of the movies (which must therefore
be seen in a cinema rather than on TV). It's an ode to old-fashioned
escapism, though not what you could call an unquestioning paean to the merits
of how art can function in such a manner. Cinema isn't exactly presented as a
new "opium for the masses," but even so many have taken exception
to the "bleak" finale in which Cecilia is (as they perceive it)
punished for her short-sighted, movie-drunk gullibility. But while she
doesn't end up going off to
In the final fade, she has her ukelele in one hand and her suitcase clenched
tightly in the other - giving us grounds to believe that, because of her
experiences with Tom and Gil, she's no longer going to be content with the
thuggish affections of her unworthy husband. Cinema has shown Cecilia the
possibility of transcendence ("In
It's a tough lesson - and, as has been noted, one that hasn't proved to all
viewers' tastes. Allen sugars the "pill," however, by keeping
things moving briskly along (editor Susan Morse cuts it down to a bare 80
minutes of fast-talking dialogue), and through the nimble way he alternates
between the "real world" (in colour) and Baxter's "movie
world" home (in black and white) - the latter an affectionate,
sharply-observed tribute to the 'white telephone' school of decadent
melodramas which proved so popular during the Depression. The fictional Purple
Rose is also notably well-cast - veterans John Wood, Edward Herrmann,
Van Heflin and Zoe Caldwell seem to be having a ball, and it's testament to
Allen and Morse's control of their material that these sly scene-stealers
never quite manage to deflect the spotlight from Farrow and Daniels
and their touchingly unique celluloid romance.
Turner
Classic Movies review Felicia
Feaster
100
films Lucas McNelly
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
Movie Reviews
UK Damian Cannon
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Apollo Movie Guide
[Jamie Gillies]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
HANNAH AND HER SISTERS A 95
USA
somewhere i have never
travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your
eyes have their silence:
in your most frail
gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot
touch because they are too near
your slightest look
easily will unclose me
though i have closed
myself as fingers,
you open always petal
by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,
mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to
close me, i and
my life will shut very
beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of
this flower imagines
the snow carefully
everywhere descending;
nothing which we are
to perceive in this world equals
the power of your
intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the
colour of its countries
rendering death and
forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it
is about you that closes
and opens; only
something in me understands
the voice of your eyes
is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the
rain, has such small hands
―somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond, by e.e. cummings, 1931, somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond | Academy ...
Opening with the soaring notes of Harry
James’ golden horn, You
Made Me Love You - Harry James / Helen Forrest ... YouTube (3:18), this is
one of the better Thanksgiving films, beginning and ending with a lavish Thanksgiving
party given by the family of “three sisters,” borrowing liberally from the idea
of the original Chekhov play, turning this into one of Allen’s most novelistic
films. Generous, warmhearted and funny,
the complexity of the story unravels the lives and tangled relationships
surrounding Hannah, who attempts to juggle a complicated life and a demanding
family that includes her two sisters, her parents, her husband, ex-husband, and
an assortment of friends and relatives, where this is the best ensemble piece
in Allen’s career, a character driven drama, where the performances all enrich
the dramatic detail of the story. At its
core this film feels very incestuous, with men lusting after and even stalking
other sisters from the same family, possibly because their family throws such a
fabulous Thanksgiving dinner party that it’s impossible not to want to be
there. Another way of looking at it is a
Woody Allen love letter to Mia Farrow, providing a “romanticized” view of her,
who as Hannah is at the center of a story that revolves around her two sisters,
each of whom is lusted after by one husband or another, while she remains at
center the rock of Gibraltar for the entire family, cooking and preparing the
Thanksgiving dinners, while seven of her own children play themselves in the
movie, including Soon-Yi Previn, Allen’s eventual wife, adding more than a
touch of authenticity, while her own real-life mother, Maureen O’Sullivan,
plays her mother. Having been involved with
Mia Farrow since 1980, this was their fifth of thirteen films made together,
shot in Farrow’s own Central Park West apartment, with the camera moving in and
out of the rooms, and is Allen’s variation of Ingmar Bergman’s autobiographical
FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982), opening with large theatrical families gathering
together for three successive holiday celebrations, with Bergman’s film
celebrating Christmas, displaying a restless tone of contentment in the first
gathering, signs of turmoil and trouble in the second, with a resolution of the
lingering troubles by the third. Much
like the short stories of Chekhov, a chapter heading opens each new sequence,
with Allen, after having re-read Tolstoy’s Anna
Karenina, experimenting with a literary style that intercuts and
intertwines various stories. It’s a film
that shows a bohemian side of New York City that no longer exists, including
Pageant Books and Tower Records, or Top Shop in Soho, all part of the existing
landscape, with a trio of sisters that are beautifully written and brilliantly
acted, saving one of the best roles for himself. Shot by Carlo Di Palma, it all comes together
with a painterly feel vividly capturing a romantic side of a contemporary 80’s
New York bathed in an autumnal glow, enriched by a newfound maturity in the
artist’s life.
Hannah (Mia Farrow) is
the eldest of three sisters, with Holly (Dianne Wiest) as the middle child, a rebellious
coke addict in the beginning of the film and something of a misfit, while Lee
(Barbara Hershey) is the youngest, most sensual, a recovering alcoholic, and
the target of interest from the leering eyes of Hannah’s husband Elliot
(Michael Caine), who secretly longs for her.
Lee is involved in a relationship with an older father figure, Frederick
(Max von Sydow), a gloomy artist and social recluse. Hannah’s ex-husband is television producer
Mickey Sachs (Woody Allen), a full-blown hypochondriac who believes he is
suffering from symptoms of every known fatal disease, but more likely simply
suffers from the stress and pressures of his fast-paced job. While Holly is a struggling actress, she’s
temporarily cofounder of the Stanislovski catering business that she runs with
her friend April (Carrie Fisher), where they meet a dreamy architect with a
love of opera, David (Sam Waterston), who takes them on an architectural tour
of New York, Hannah
And Her Sisters - David's architecture tour of New York YouTube (5:15),
before dating them both, leaving Holly’s ego bruised as she thought he was
exclusively into her. While the sisters
are very close, tension still exists between them, especially in the changeable
lives of the younger sisters who look up to Hannah for stability, as she is a
constant fixture in their lives, also the darling of her parent’s eyes as well,
continually doting on her throughout their own tumultuous marriage, where Nora
(Maureen O’Sullivan) is the ever flirtatious alcoholic who always wants to be
the center of attention, both still thriving in acting careers of their own,
while Evan (Lloyd Nolan) seems destined to always bring Norma back down to
earth with quips like (in reference to Hannah), “I can only hope that she was
mine! With you as her mother, her father
could be anybody in Actor's Equity!”, continually seen playing piano standards
like “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” over the holidays, which becomes a
central theme of the film. Allen uses
the voiceover to allow each character to describe their inner feelings, which
also has a way of foreshadowing events that are about to happen. What remains unclear is any backstory, as we
never know what drew Hannah and Elliot together, especially since he’s immediately
interested in someone else, attempting to show discretion, but he always seems
to go out of his way to find her, and then very much like Frederick, he’ll
suggest a book, a piece of music, or a poem, like the E.E. Cummings poem that
he marks and notates as a reflection of his feelings for her. Perhaps because she needed to get out from
under the authoritarian vice grip of Frederick, she opens the door for Elliot,
which is bit surprising, considering the respect the sisters have for Hannah,
but that is one of the central strands of the storyline. Allen, of course, frames Frederick’s
realization that Lee is having an affair with a despairing rant about the state
of the world, as he’s actually been bored by the mediocrity of television:
You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question ‘How could it possibly happen?’ is that it’s the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is ‘Why doesn’t it happen more often?’
You see the whole culture. Nazis, deodorant salesmen, wrestlers, beauty contests, a talk show. Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling? But the worst are the fundamentalist preachers. Third grade con men telling the poor suckers that watch them that they speak with Jesus, and to please send in money. Money, money, money! If Jesus came back and saw what’s going on in his name, he’d never stop throwing up.
Allen as himself is easily the funniest
thing in the film, identifying himself in a chapter entitled “the hypochondriac,”
perhaps initiated by a flashback sequence revealing his marriage with Hannah
came apart when a medical report indicated that his sperm was infertile and he
was unable to have children. Causing him
complete embarrassment and utter humiliation, she asks if he might have ruined
himself somehow, perhaps from “excessive masturbation?” In an amusing scene, he then awkwardly asks
his best friend if he’d like to father Hannah’s child by artificial
insemination? After the divorce, for
whatever reason he goes on a disastrous date with Holly, which is like a date
from Hell, where she’s literally scooping spoonfuls of cocaine into her
nostrils at an ear-splitting punk performance in the filth of CBGB’s that
simply alienates Mickey, telling her “I’m afraid once they’re done singing
they’re gonna take hostages!” When she
slams the door in his face afterwards getting into a taxi, he tells her “I had
a great evening. It was like the
Nuremberg Trials.” Later, unexpected
hearing loss leads to thoughts of cancer and a brain tumor, where he’s already
plotting out methods of suicide, where he may have to take his entire family
with him. The build-up of mental
exhaustion sends him into an existential tailspin of endless despair, believing
life is meaningless. Finding no rational
explanation for God, he even hilariously experiments with converting to
Catholicism, an experience that apparently includes a crucifix, white bread and
mayonnaise, which freaks out his own Jewish parents who weren’t even aware you
could do things like that. Thoroughly
desperate, Mickey would try anything to find meaning in life, even talking to
the Hare Krishna’s singing and dancing in the park, reading their literature,
but everywhere he looked he could find no answers, seen eventually perplexed
and confused by a holographic Jesus in a religious bookstore. His moment of revelation comes at the most
dire moment, following an unsuccessful suicide attempt where he simply wanders
the upper west side streets of New York endlessly. Tired and exhausted he winds up at a revival
movie house watching a movie, which quickly becomes reminiscent of the “Let My
People Go” Go Down Moses -
Sullivan's Travels (1941) - YouTube (3:31) sequence from Sullivan's
Travels (1941) where a chain gang sits down in an all-black church to watch
a movie together with the parishioners.
The director Preston Sturges intended to play a Chaplin film, but rights
were denied, instead playing a Disney Mickey
Mouse cartoon featuring Mickey
Mouse 1934 Playful Pluto - Video Dailymotion (7:22), where Pluto’s paws
continually get caught on fly paper, where the animated pranks and pratfalls
leave the congregation in stitches, a welcome relief from the otherwise harsh
human conditions of the Great Depression.
In Mickey’s case, of course, the holy grail of movies turns out to be
the crazy antics of the Marx Brothers in DUCK SOUP (1933), Duck Soup (10/10) Movie
CLIP - To War (1933) HD YouTube (3:28), which resuscitates his declining
spirits, deciding life should be enjoyed, rather than always having to be
understood.
I went upstairs to the balcony, and I sat down, and the movie was a film that I’d seen many times in my life since I was a kid, and I always loved it. I’m watching these people up on the screen and I started getting hooked on the film. I started to feel, how can you even think of killing yourself, I mean isn’t it so stupid. Look at all the people up there on the screen, they’re real funny, and what if the worst is true. What if there is no God and you only go around once and that’s it. Well, ya know, don’t you wanna be part of the experience? You know, what the hell it’s not all a drag. And I’m thinking to myself, Jeez, I should stop ruining my life searching for answers I’m never gonna get, and just enjoy it while it lasts. And after who knows, I mean maybe there is something, nobody really knows. I know maybe is a very slim reed to hang your whole life on, but that’s the best we have. And then I started to sit back, and I actually began to enjoy myself.
Continually borrowing
money from Hannah for her next project, Holly abandons her acting and catering
careers to try her hand at writing with a script that seems to reveal personal
details of Hannah and Elliot’s relationship, including secrets never revealed
by Hannah to either of her sisters, so she’s shocked to see her life exposed
under such scrutiny, threatening to expose Elliot’s relationship with Lee, who
was mysteriously able to provide insight that even Hannah was not aware
of. When questioned, Elliot disavows
having anything to do with it, but this revelation makes Lee step back, as her
affair is obviously threatening her sister, so by the second Thanksgiving she
ends the relationship and decides to go back to school. Hannah, however, is stung by the revelations
that she’s viewed as so saintly that she doesn’t need anybody, that she’s
self-sufficient and overly focused to the point that she displays no weaknesses
or vulnerabilities, always being so reliant and taking care of others that she
becomes impenetrable, which is another way of indicating she doesn’t let anyone
else get truly close to her. Everyone in
the film is exposed, while at the same time showing signs of envy and even
harboring thoughts of secret bitterness at the success of others, making this
one of the most complicated films that he’s ever written, where errors and
imperfections are sympathized with along with personal strengths. Emerging from this myriad of relationships
drifting apart and coming together, the film brings out the most important
ingredients of life and love, while still exploring feelings of jealousy,
confusion, sibling rivalry, sadness, loneliness, and most especially hope. Rather than an out-of-place side character
lost in the struggles of depression and self-loathing, Allen’s own personality
infuses this film with the same sense of humanity found in the other
characters, In fact, his search for
meaning in a meaningless world and what passes for organized religion becomes
quite touching, where his affirmation of life rises above the typical cynicism
found in his other works. Only by learning
from their previous mistakes do they eventually discover their humanity. The knock on the film is that it is too warm
and optimistic, where the ending is at odds with the bleak realism of all but
the last fifteen minutes, as the original ending had Elliot still with Hannah,
but in love with Lee, who had married someone else, where he was forced to
relive the same nightmarish feelings of personal torment, doomed to forever see
her at family parties, a constant reminder of what he had lost, leaving him
emotionally adrift, drowning in his sorrows, which Allen recalled “was so down
for everyone that there was a huge feeling of disappointment and
dissatisfaction every time I screened it.”
He also filmed more explicit sex scenes between Hershey and Caine that
were also cut, but it all comes together in the end with Mickey accidentally
running into Holly in a record store, rekindling forgotten feelings, allowing
him to read something she wrote that he genuinely admires, finally affirming
Holly’s long felt ambition, bringing a note of tenderness and optimism to an
emerging expression of love. Both
Michael Caine and Dianne Wiest won Academy Awards in the supporting actor
categories, while Allen won for best original screenplay. The film is listed at #4
from The Guardian Poll, published
October 4, 2013, "The
10 best Woody Allen films".
Download this essay David Bordwell from Film Art
It’s a typical approach that one person or a couple function as
the protagonists of a film. Yet many
Time Out also seen
here: Time
Out Film Guide 2011 - Page 445 - Google Books Result (pdf format)
Allen's previous three films (Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose,The
Purple Rose of
Pauline Kael -
GEOCITIES.ws
A minor, agreeably skillful movie by Woody Allen, a new canto in
his ongoing poem to love and New York City which includes ANNIE HALL and
MANHATTAN. It's likable, but you wish there were more to like. The principal
characters are members of a show-business family, with the stable, dependable
Hannah (Mia Farrow), a successful actress who manages a career and children
with equal serenity, as the pivotal figure, and Barbara Hershey and Dianne
Wiest as her sisters. Hannah's parents are played by Maureen O'Sullivan and
Lloyd Nolan, her financial-consultant husband by Michael Caine, and her TV
writer-producer ex-husband by Allen himself. The picture would be lifeless
without him; the other roles are so thin that there's nobody else to draw us
into the story. All the vital vulgarity of Woody Allen's early movies has been
drained away here, as it was in INTERIORS, but this time he's made the picture
halfway human. (People can laugh and feel morally uplifted at the same time.)
The willed sterility of his style is terrifying to think about; the picture is
all tasteful touches, and there's an element of cultural self-approval in its
tone, and a trace of smugness in its narrow concern for family and friends. He
uses style to blot out the rest of New York City. It's a form of repression,
and, from the look of the movie, repression is what's romantic to him. With Max
von Sydow as Barbara Hershey's gloomy, rigidly intellectual lover, Julie Kavner
as Allen's TV-partner, and Carrie Fisher, Daniel Stern, Sam Waterston and Tony
Roberts (both uncredited), and Bobby Short as himself. The cinematography is by
Carlo Di Palma. Orion.
For a more extended discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Hooked.
New
York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen
here: "Film:
From Woody Allen, 'Hannah And Her Sisters'
From the first, soaring notes of Harry James's trumpet playing ''You Made Me Love You,'' which is heard behind the opening credits, until the series of reconciliation scenes that bring the film to a close, Woody Allen's ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' is virtually nonstop exhilaration - a dramatic comedy not quite like any other, and one that sets new standards for Mr. Allen as well as for all American movie makers.
It isn't meant to demean Mr. Allen's earlier films, or to imply that he has here reached some sort of end, to say that ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' is the movie he's been working toward ever since ''Annie Hall,'' ''Interiors'' and ''Manhattan.'' It's both a summation of a career to date, as well as a window on a career to come. It's warmhearted, wise and fiercely funny, demonstrating a rigorous command of a talent that, in the manner of Jack's prodigious beanstalk, won't stop growing. The film opens today at the Beekman and other theaters.
Like ''Interiors,'' ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' is an intensely
felt family drama about three very different but emotionally dependent sisters,
as well as about their parents, husbands, lovers and friends. Like ''Annie
Hall'' and ''
Hannah (Mia Farrow) is the eldest sister and, possibly because of her age, the strongest. She's a successful actress who's given up her career to become a full-time, Central Park West earth mother - as wife to Elliot and mother to their children and to her twins from her first marriage.
Holly (Dianne Wiest), the brightest, is the troubled, aimless middle sister, a would-be actress, a would-be caterer and a would-be writer. The youngest is Lee (Barbara Hershey), a perennial student who frequently falls in love with her teachers. Lee is so radiantly pretty and seemingly so in command of herself that one learns with shock she's a recovered alcoholic, though, after the fact, this seems to be perfectly credible.
In addition to Elliot (Michael Caine), a financial adviser to rock musicians, the men in their lives include Frederick (Max von Sydow), the much older painter with whom Lee lives (and for whom she is a rebellious Galatea), and Mickey Sachs (Mr. Allen), a successful, hypochondriacal television producer, formerly married to Hannah and sometime suitor of Holly.
Remaining very much a part of the sisters' lives, for better and worse, are their parents (Lloyd Nolan and Maureen O'Sullivan), who somehow never realized their initial promise as an acting couple and who today live in precarious peace with each other and their failed hopes, doing the odd show in Rochester and the occasional television commercial. ''They liked the idea of having children,'' says Lee at one point, ''but they were never very interested in raising them.''
''Hannah and Her Sisters'' has the narrative scope of a novel. Beginning with a big, festive family celebration - a Thanksgiving dinner at which Elliot finds himself falling in love with the not-unwilling Lee - the film covers several years in the lives of its six principal characters, moving effortlessly from the mind of one into another. Mr. Allen's most surprising achievement is the manner by which he has refracted his own, very pronounced screen personality into the colors of so many fully realized characters that stand at such a far remove from the film maker.
His cast serves him well. Miss Farrow's wise, self-assured Hannah is as radical a departure from the waif of ''The Purple Rose of Cairo'' as that waif is from the brassy doll of ''Broadway Danny Rose.'' Miss Wiest and Miss Hershey are no less splendid. A key scene, in which the camera circles the three sisters sitting at a table in a French restaurant for lunch, is emotionally packed (within the film) as well as a celebration of the actresses themselves.
It's a measure of the way the film works that Mr. Caine has never before been so seriously comic, nor Mr. Allen so comically serious. We've seen the grandly neurotic, possibly suicidal side of Mr. Allen's Mickey Sachs in other films, but never the genuinely (if still comically) compassionate lover he also becomes here. One of the great scenes in all of the Allen oeuvre must be the one in ''Hannah'' in which - in a single, unbroken take - Mickey Sachs, against his better judgment, finds himself courting the emotionally unreliable Holly in a Tower Records shop.
Mr. von Sydow's role is comparatively brief but brilliantly
done.
As photographed by Carlo Di Palma, ''Hannah and Her Sisters'' is as stunning to look at as is ''Interiors,'' though the content is far livelier and far less self-conscious.
With this film, it's apparent that Mr. Allen has become the urban poet of our anxious age - skeptical, guiltily bourgeois, longing for answers to impossible questions, but not yet willing to chuck a universe that can produce the Marx Brothers.
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RADIO DAYS B- 82
USA
Time Out
Woody Allen is always weakest when
nostalgic: indulgence leads to caricature and overstatement. Set at the start
of World War II, the film follows the fortunes of a family of Jewish underachievers.
Against the backdrop of their predictably colourful obsessions, a glimmer of a
story charts the progress of Farrow from
eFilmCritic Reviews Elaine Perroni
Radio Days is a small
treasure, at once the story of a gloriously cluttered Jewish family and a
tribute to the Golden Age of Radio told without one shred of Woody Allen’s
trademark angst. It is also one of his few films in which he doesn’t appear but
tells his tale through his own delightfully wry voiceover narration and the
eyes of a ten-year old boy named Joey (Seth Green).
The short (only 85 minutes long) film
is structured as a series of vignettes – all of them wonderfully acted, the
characters beautifully drawn.
The year is 1943, and all of Joey’s extended family lives under one roof in
Rockaway Point,
The radio is constantly playing in their home, and each family member has a
favorite program. Joey’s mother’s favorite is “Breakfast with Irene and Roger,”
in which the radio couple carries on a conversation – and drops names – each
morning about their nightclubbing adventures with celebrities the night before.
Joey’s dad loves the sports, with a favorite show being about a luckless
baseball player who “had heart.” It is his Aunt Bea, we’re told, who loves all
the music and exposes the young boy to the most wonderful songs in the world.
Ruthie, too, loves the music – most of all, a Sinatra-like crooner and Carmen
Miranda, whose rendition of “
Joey’s hero is The Masked Avenger (Wallace Shawn), whose “secret-compartment
ring” he covets beyond imagining. It is this burning need to own the ring,
Allen tells us, which sets him on a bit of larceny involving his Hebrew
school’s charity funds.
Allen also makes it known that he has a million radio stories, and he shares
some terrific ones here. One of the funniest, and most involving, is about
Sally White (Mia Farrow), a cigarette girl in a nightclub who, through a fluke
involving a mobster and his mother (Danny Aiello, Gina DeAngeles), goes on to
have a brilliant career in radio, in her own right.
The movie is filled with wonderful cameos, including Jeff Daniels as World War
II hero Biff Baxter, Todd Field as “The Crooner,” Kenneth Mars as Rabbi Baumel,
Diane Keaton as a nightclub singer, and Mercedes Ruehl as a radio advertising
rep, among others.
In one of the film’s loveliest
scenes, Joey, his Aunt Bea, and her date step into the lobby of
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ANOTHER WOMAN
USA
Time
Out
A reflective drama
about a college professor in her fifties. On sabbatical to write a book on
German philosophy, Marion (Rowlands) rents an apartment for the necessary
solitude. There she starts overhearing sessions in the psychologist's office
next door, in particular the disclosures of Hope (Farrow), who has cause to
question her marriage, the meaning of life and death, etc.
digitallyOBSESSED! [Debi Lee Mandel]
What Allen began in Interiors and awkwardly attempted
in September wills out courageously in
Another Woman. While the story is actually much the same as that of the
previous year's Alice, here the woman contemplating
her life has a maturity that brings greater depth and realization to the
concept. In the former, Allen forces his protagonist's epiphany through
hypnosis and magic; in this film, a woman is changed by all-too-believable, if
serendipitous, circumstance.
Marion Post is a well-presented woman who has chosen a masculine life.
Relinquishing everything for career and matters of the mind, she is the
successful head of philosophy at a prestigious women's college. Beautiful,
intelligent and gracious,
On sabbatical,
Another Woman is a noble undertaking for a master dialogue comic. A
sensitive film about an insensitive woman, the tone is ironic and humorless,
but never dreary. The dramatic devices Allen chooses to deliver
revelations—simultaneously to his character and the viewer—are brilliantly
conceived through Marion's self-narrative, the overheard plaints of a third party
and a few well-placed memory flashbacks. Perhaps the film's most significant
expedient is the director's impeccable casting: there are lengthy scenes in
which only the lead character appears but does not speak or interact, and there
are too few actors who could carry the screen in such circumstances. Gena
Rowlands is this film, and she is as stunning here as in her
Oscar®-nominated performance in husband John Cassavates' A Woman Under the
Influence, the polar opposite of this contained and distanced woman. Her
distraction becomes ours, her contemplations and reflections spark our own
introspections so that we are not simply complicit voyeurs, but participants as
well.
The supporting ensemble is the usual who's who of accomplished actors willing
to work within Allen's spartan budget, although other than Farow, they are all
first-timers. Gene Hackman earns his keep as the one character at peace with
his emotions, and John Houseman, in his final performance, is a painful shadow
of his once imposing figure. Everyone, as ever, seems to give their best for
Woody.
Another Woman, like Deconstructing Harry and the previously
mentioned Alice, draws somewhat shamelessly from Ingmar Bergman's Wild
Strawberries (Smultronstället), but here Allen finally succeeds in creating
a dramatic honesty that is truly his own. His persona has never been so
completely absent from a film bearing his double stamp, and while this may
alienate some, it is a joyous release for this reviewer to realize the success
of it. Bravo, Woody.
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CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS A 95
USA
I think I see a cab.
If we run quickly we can kick the crutch from that old lady and get it.
―Clifford Stern (Woody Allen)
The 80’s was a
particularly good decade for Allen, arguably his best, with films like Stardust
Memories (1980), A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), ZELIG (1983), my own personal favorite
Broadway
Danny Rose (1984), THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO (1985), Hannah
and Her Sisters (1986), RADIO DAYS (1987), SEPTEMBER (1987), and ANOTHER
WOMAN (1988), a time when he discovered the incomparable Mia Farrow, making
this their 9th of 13 films working together, mirror images of one other with
all their pent-up anxiety and inner turmoil, ending the decade with this film,
doing away with the feel good Hollywood ending, where the edgier, more pessimistic
tone was a direct response to Allen’s feelings that he had been too “nice” to
the characters at the end of Hannah
and Her Sisters, though arguably this may be his most openly Jewish effort,
much like the Coen Brothers’ film A
Serious Man (2009), as each is a journey that attempts to fathom the
essence of their Jewish soul. While some
of the basic ideas for the film were stolen outright by Noah Baumbach in While
We're Young (2015), a film that attempts to deal with the overall ethics
and moral responsibilities of artists, it was Allen who was the original
trailblazer, paying homage to Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Bergman among others,
but the film is so undeniably and uniquely Allen that it could not have been
made by any other director. According to
Roger Ebert in his 1989 review, Crimes
and Misdemeanors - Roger Ebert , “Who else but Woody Allen could make a
movie in which virtue is punished, evildoing is rewarded, and there is a lot of
laughter ― even subversive laughter at the most shocking times?” Since Dostoyevsky’s title was already taken,
this is Allen’s flipside to Crime and
Punishment, a moralistic film that searches for meaning throughout, guided
by God, religious teachings, and the lessons of philosophers, only to discover
this can all be thrown out the window for people of wealth and privilege, where
ultimately the laws of God do not apply to them. Money apparently offers them divine privilege
and protection for their crimes, as after a brief period of agonizing guilt
afterwards, the feeling dissipates and the man’s conscience can be clear, no
longer feeling the slightest tinge of guilt, literally getting away with
murder. At its most outlandish, it asks
what would the world look like today had the Nazi’s won? Jews that survived the Holocaust have a
unique relationship with God, perhaps best expressed by Elie Wiesel in his book
Night, his personal take on surviving
Auschwitz as a child while watching his entire family and nearly everyone else
around him die. A devout religious
student as a child, throughout the ordeal he kept asking himself, where was God
at Auschwitz? How could he allow that to
happen? Apparently these same kinds of
questions haunted Allen as a child, where this film represents a seemingly
futile search for faith in the moral wasteland represented by the Reagan years
(1981 – 89).
According to David
Evanier from the Jewish Book Council,
January 28, 2014, David
Evanier on Woody Allen's references to his Jewish ...
Woody Allen became a comedy star at a time when every preconception about American life came into question. He entered a social milieu that somehow was waiting for and anticipating him. He was the antithesis of the traditional male hero: the archetypal schlemiel with a whining, high voice. His humor was very personal and unique; it was not interchangeable with other comedians. There was a presumption, whether it was true or not, that he was telling you something more personal and autobiographical about himself and his experiences.
It almost strains credulity that a Jewish comedian and film actor who placed his Jewishness front and center and consciously proclaimed it, utilizing constant references to his Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, and with ambivalent ways of defining gentiles (white bread and mayonnaise were the most popular reference) could capture the imagination of and even beguile a huge audience as Woody Allen has done. Jack Benny, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, and Groucho Marx preceded him, but these were not comics advertising their Jewishness; it was implicit and polite. Borscht-belt comics were open about their ethnicities by the 1950s, but they were entertaining largely Jewish audiences. Allen was a national comic from the start.
Allen’s boyhood was lived during the Holocaust from afar and he is obsessed with it. He wrote in Tikkun of his rage when reading Elie Wiesel’s Night: “Wiesel made the point several times that the inmates of the camps didn’t think of revenge. I find it odd that I, who was a small boy during World War Two and who lived in America, unmindful of any of the horrors Nazi victims were undergoing, and who never missed a good meal with meat and a warm bed to sleep in at night, and whose memories of those years are only blissful and full of good times and good music—that I think of nothing but revenge.”
The film wastes no time
getting right into the heart of the action, as within minutes, Martin Landau as
Judah Rosenthal is immediately identified as a “guilty man,” like a villain in
a Hitchcock film, intercepting and reading aloud to himself a letter intended
for his wife from his mistress of several years, airline stewardess Dolores
Paley (Anjelica Huston), where she’s fed up with hiding and being alone and is
ready to expose it all, which puts Judah in a precarious position, where much
of this film is told through brief flashbacks, which act as his conscience,
where he sees his life passing before his eyes.
As a successful ophthalmologist and a pillar of the community, this
revelation could demoralize his wife Miriam (Claire Bloom), who enjoys the
privileges of being married to a successful partner and upset the stability of
a loving family, as both parents are adored by their daughter Sharon (Stephanie
Roth Haberle) and her fiancé Chris (Greg Edelman). All this could be ruined if word gets
out. And there’s charges of embezzling
as well? The central dilemma is
Rosenthal goes on a panicked tailspin, still trying to smooth things over with
Dolores, who won’t give up easily, as she wants what’s been promised to
her. Anjelica Huston plays totally
against type here, as she’s usually a strong, dominant character, but here
she’s a long-suffering woman who’s continually been taken advantage of, who is
reduced to nervous exhaustion in his presence, and grows neurotically angry and
insecure in his absence. Each of the
scenes they play together is a flurry of heated emotions, where Rosenthal is
concerned that the dam is about to break.
Alternating with Rosenthal’s ugly dilemma is the plight of a relatively
unknown documentary filmmaker Clifford Stern (Woody Allen), something of a sad
sack character who is involved in a loveless marriage with his wife Wendy
(Joanna Gleason), where they haven’t had sex in a year (The last time I was
inside a woman was when I was in the Statue of Liberty,” he quips), where the
only satisfaction he receives out of life is taking his young niece to matinee
revival movie houses, where clips from old movies have a hilarious way of
commenting on the present, much like Rosenthal’s flashback episodes. Cliff has discovered an aging intellectual,
Professor Louis Levy, to be the subject of a film he’s been working on for some
time but has yet to complete it. Interestingly,
Levy is played by Martin Bergmann, known personally as a friend and therapist
by Allen, a clinical professor of psychology in New York University’s
post-doctoral program, though his character appears to have been based on Primo
Levy, Italian writer, essayist and Holocaust survivor of Auschwitz. Once again, Allen uses Levy’s eloquent
speeches as if summoning up the voice of conscience. In the opening moments, we hear Judah’s
conscience speaking during a testimonial dinner speech honoring his generous
philanthropy.
I remember my father telling me, “The eyes of God are on us always.” The eyes of God. What a phrase to a young boy. What were God’s eyes like? Unimaginably penetrating, intense eyes, I assumed. And I wonder if it was just a coincidence I made my specialty ophthalmology.
This is a film with
plenty of one-liner zingers, like the Woody of old, where we appreciate the
comic wit of this man, who is like an encyclopedia of Jewish humor going back
to the vaudeville era when comedians had to suffer through the catcalls and
boos of an audience that impatiently waited for the next girlie act to show up,
yet by the end of the film Woody’s character is in abject despair. An interesting counterpoint throughout is the
use of vintage jazz music that sounds so upbeat and happy. Allen’s nemesis is his wife’s highly accomplished
and extremely successful brother, Lester, Alan Alda, introduced with Darryl
Hannah on his arm in an uncredited cameo, a multi-millionaire TV producer who’s
also something of a narcissistic egomaniac in the mold of Donald Trump, where
he has to constantly be the center of attention, which irks Cliff to no end, as
he can’t get anyone to pay attention to him or his films. In reality, Allen loved Alda’s
improvisational style and asked him for more, greatly expanding the role, which
Allen wrote as they were filming, where his personality was supposedly based on
comedy writer Larry Gelbart. As a favor
to Wendy, Lester agrees to hire Cliff, who’s forced to abandon his principles
(a vow of poverty, apparently) by agreeing to film a documentary on the life of
Lester for a great deal of money, where he meets one of the producers on the
set, Hallie (Mia Farrow), as she fends off a series of romantic attempts by
Lester. Hoping to find a fellow comrade
in arms in the war against Lester, they quickly become an alliance of two,
where Hallie shows interest in his documentary, suggesting it could run in the
fall television campaign, and of course they play hooky on Lester by attending
old vintage matinee movies, where Cliff falls madly in love, though for Hallie it’s
more of a budding friendship with a business acquaintance. Meanwhile, Judah is eating himself alive and
confesses his infidelity through the confidentially of one of his patients, Ben
(Sam Waterston), a rabbi that is going blind, who urges him to come clean with
his wife and hope for forgiveness, “It’s a fundamental difference in the way we
view the world. You see it as harsh and
empty of values and pitiless, and I couldn’t go on living if I didn’t feel with
all my heart a moral structure with real meaning, and forgiveness, and some
kind of higher power. Otherwise there’s
no basis to know how to live,” while also having flashbacks of his own father
Sol (David S. Howard) at temple, instructing him as a young child, “The eyes of
God see all. Listen to me Judah, there
is absolutely nothing that escapes his sight.
He sees the righteous and He sees the wicked, and the righteous will be
rewarded, but the wicked will be punished for eternity.” In one of the more memorable flashbacks, at a
family Passover dinner, where Sol again claims “God will punish the wicked,”
his more feisty and radical sister May (Anna Berger) reminds Sol that Hitler
exterminated 6 million Jews and got away with it. With all of this gnawing away inside his
soul, Judah calls on the aid of his brother Jack, the more down to earth Jerry
Orbach, who has sinister underworld connections, afraid of what he’s doing but
he’s desperate to stop Dolores or he’ll be ruined, so he instructs Jack to
“take care of it.” Those few words set
in motion a most foul deed, to which the agonized Judah responds when it’s
over, “God have mercy on us, Jack.”
Beautifully edited in a
gorgeous symmetrical design, where each sequence is quick, establishes itself,
and moves on to another, creating a fluidity of character and ideas that
continually spark interest, making terrific use of old movie clips, all tying
the past into the present, the film is listed as #3, behind ANNIE HALL (1977)
and MANHATTAN (1979) as #1 from an October 4, 2013 Guardian Poll, "The
10 best Woody Allen films".
Interesting that gas was only $1.03/gallon when this film was made, also
that Allen uses Judah’s favorite composer to accentuate the fragmented thoughts
and jarring darkness of his actions, setting the murder motif to a Schubert
String Quartet in G major, Op. 161, D.887, 1st movement by the Julliard String
Quartet, 1.Franz Schubert
D. 887 Last Quartet No. 15 in G major I ... YouTube (10:00), followed by a
quick edit to an amusing film clip of “Murder He Says” from HAPPY GO LUCKY
(1943), Betty Hutton --
Murder, He Says - YouTube (2:51).
While Cliff is supposed to be painting a flattering portrait of such a
successful, larger-than-life man, instead he focuses on how he perceives
Lester, like the belligerent manner that he treats his staff, repeatedly
showing his gargantuan ego and tyrannical rage, edited next to archival footage
of Mussolini delivering an animated speech to the cheering throngs, but
apparently he goes too far with footage of Lester privately cornering women
with sexual advances, which promptly gets him fired. “What is the guy so upset about? You’d think nobody was ever compared to
Mussolini before.” But perhaps even more
deflating, he receives news that Professor Levy committed suicide, leaving
behind a note that simply said, “I’ve gone out the window.” Cliff is beside himself in disbelief,
claiming “When I grew up in Brooklyn nobody committed suicide. Everyone was too unhappy.” Hallie explains they could never use his film
after this event, but in real life it matches what happened to Primo Levy, who
committed suicide in 1987 at the age of 67, which likely had a major impact on
this film, much like the use of Bruno Bettelheim’s appearance in ZELIG (1983),
another Holocaust survivor that committed suicide by asphyxiation a year after
this film was released. Continuing the
downward spiral, Hallie is leaving for work in London for 3 or 4 months,
leaving Cliff feeling like he’s been abandoned and handed a prison
sentence. Cut to a shot of Alcatraz and
clips from the film 20,000 YEARS IN SING SING (1932), as months, months, months
pass by before the film jumps ahead 4 months later to a wedding reception (at
the Waldorf Astoria) for the daughter of Ben, the now completely blind rabbi,
where Wendy and Cliff are finally getting divorced, but Cliff is even more devastated
over his worst fear realized, as Hallie and Lester arrive to the party happy
and engaged. Hallie quietly returns his
one love letter, “It’s probably just as well.
I plagiarized most of it from James Joyce. You probably wondered why all the references
to Dublin,” leaving Cliff alone and in despair, sitting away from the party
having a drink, where he is joined by Judah in a chance encounter, hearing that
he’s a movie guy, pitching his “fictionalized” idea of a chilling murder for a
movie, one where the guy actually gets away with it.
And after the awful deed is done, he finds that he’s plagued by deep-rooted guilt. Little sparks of his religious background which he’d rejected are suddenly stirred up. He hears his father’s voice. He imagines that God is watching his every move. Suddenly, it’s not an empty universe at all, but a just and moral one, and he’s violated it. Now, he’s panic-stricken. He’s on the verge of a mental collapse-an inch away from confessing the whole thing to the police. And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted. He takes his family on a vacation to Europe and as the months pass, he finds he’s not punished. In fact, he prospers. The killing gets attributed to another person―a drifter who has a number of other murders to his credit, so I mean, what the hell? One more doesn’t even matter. Now he’s scot-free. His life is completely back to normal. Back to his protected world of wealth and privilege.
However it is Professor
Levy speaking from the grave who gets the last word, spoken over the jazzy
refrains of “I’ll Be Seeing You”:
We are all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions. Moral choices. Some are on a grand scale. Most of these choices are on lesser points. But! We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are in fact the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to have been included, in the design of creation. It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying, and even to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.
Movie Clips used in the
film
20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932)
The Last Gangster (1937)
Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941)
This Gun for Hire (1942)
Happy Go Lucky (1943)
Francis (1950)
Crimes and
Misdemeanors - Time Out Geoff Andrew
In the first of two loosely interwoven stories, rich, philanthropic ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Landau), afraid his lover (Huston) will reveal all to his wife (Bloom), decides to dispose of the former with the help of a hit-man friend of his brother. In the second, more comic story, earnest, impoverished documentarist Clifford Stern (Allen), falls for the producer (Farrow) of a TV tribute he has reluctantly agreed to make about the brother-in-law he hates (Alda), a conceited, successful maker of sitcoms. Judah and Clifford meet only in the final scene: what links them throughout is guilt, stemming from an obsessive interest in matters of faith and ethics. It's an extremely ambitious film, most akin perhaps to Hannah and her Sisters, the narrative and tonal coherence of which it sadly lacks, though the assured direction and typically fine ensemble acting manage partly to conceal the seams. Dramatically, the film seldom fulfils its promise, and its pessimistic 'moral' - that good and evil do not always meet with their just deserts - looks contrived and hollow. Intriguing and patchily effective, nevertheless.
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum]
The first
"serious" Woody Allen film with Jewish characters (1989) might seem
like an improvement after the pseudoprofundities of Interiors et al, but
it can't be said to dig any deeper. Martin Landau plays a wealthy
ophthalmologist who plots the murder of his mistress (Anjelica Huston) when she
threatens to expose his adultery and embezzlement. In quasi-comic counterpoint
is the plight of an unsuccessful documentary filmmaker (Allen) who's stuck in
an unhappy marriage, goes to work for his obnoxious brother-in-law (Alan Alda),
a successful producer of TV sitcoms, and falls in love with one of his
assistants (Mia Farrow). The overall "philosophical" thrust--that
good guys finish last and that crime does pay--is designed to make the
audience feel very wise, but none of the characters or ideas is allowed to
develop beyond its cardboard profile (though Alda has a ball with his part). With
Claire Bloom and Sam Waterston (as the perfect all-purpose symbolic Allen
character--a rabbi going blind). PG-13, 104 min.
DVDBeaver.com [Gary Tooze]
Ophthalmologist Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) has had an
long-standing affair with Dolores (Anjelica Huston), and now her patience has
waned and she threatens to expose him and ruin his life if he doesn't get a
divorce. His brother suggests resolving the problem by having Dolores murdered.
Woody Allen is one of the most prolific directors the
digitallyOBSESSED! DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel
What is ultimately important to us in the recesses of our
civilized souls: moral veracity or corporeal satisfaction? Some of us invest in
the promise of an afterlife in which this life is judged, and deny ourselves
the physical pleasures generally available, now. Others live only for these
pleasures, even with the threat of eternal damnation looming ahead. The
majority straddles the line, with the most creative among us inventing
elaborate dances that crisscross the boundaries, hoping to obscure it
completely. What is right and what is wrong? Better, how do we weigh what is
right for us against what may be wrong for others?
If you have seen even one of Woody Allen's films you know he is preoccupied
with death. More correctly, he is preoccupied with not dying. In Crimes
and Misdemeanors, the filmmaker explores the consequences of the choices we
make, based upon how we see ourselves and others, in a much broader definition
of "seeing." There are three main threads here, related to this
concept: an ophthalmologist who loses the ability to "see" the line
between right and wrong, a rabbi who sees that line clearly but is slowly going
blind, losing sight of the "real" world around him, and an idealist
who sees the greater good but denies the realities of others. The lesser
characters have their blind spots as well. The ophthalmologist's family is
blind to his affair and his mistress doesn't see how her threats and actions
will not lead to what she wants. The assistant producer loses her clarity about
her subject's shallowness and falls in love with him. A philosophy professor
and Holocaust survivor speaks about the necessity for optimism and suddenly
commits suicide.
Martin Landau was justly nominated for his portrayal of Dr. Judah Rosenthal, a
man who has it all: success and respect in his field, his family and his
community. The story begins as
In another thread, Allen himself plays Cliff, an idealistic filmmaker who
struggles to produce altruistic documentaries. Financially strapped, he takes
on a project he finds loathsome: a PBS-style segment about his wildly
successful and basically superficial brother-in-law Lester (Alda), a decision
he easily justifies as it will help raise money for his own, more dear
undertakings. With his marriage on the threshold of failure, he falls for
Halley (Farrow), a liaison on the project, but Lester has his eye on her as
well.
The rabbi is the tie that binds the central characters together, both literally
and figuratively. He is Cliff's brother-in-law and Lester's brother, as well as
an old acquaintance of
Allen takes the extra step to make
In a scene of sheer brilliance, the doctor returns to his childhood home and
finds it alive with his memory of a certain seder of his youth in which
his familial elders discuss the larger issues he now faces. Allen has done this
before, but this time
With a tangle of philosophical questions, tightly-crafted characters and
intelligent conversation, Woody Allen constructs a morality tale that exposes
the latent amorality beneath our eroding veneer of ethical behavior. We abhor
violence, yet justify it when WE deem necessary. Who decides?
David
Evanier on Woody Allen's references to his Jewish ... Woody
Allen’s Jewish Soul, by David Evanier from the Jewish Book Council, January 28, 2014
Like Woody Allen, I can remember a childhood when being Jewish caused me a certain deep unease, partly because of the shadow caused by the Holocaust and partly because of the anti-Semitism of some public school teachers. My parents whispered when they spoke Yiddish and even when using the word “Jew.” As I write Allen's biography, I continue to be astonished at how boldly Jewish he has been in his films from the start, even constantly invoking his feelings about the Holocaust. And perhaps that is why a younger Jewish generation, more removed from those anxieties and memories, takes this aspect of him so casually and even may regard it as just an aspect of his neurotic comic persona.
The reality is that this candor was—and continues to be—revolutionary, just as ground-breaking as Allen's other writing and comedic gifts, which burst upon the scene in the 1960s and have remained as astoundingly fresh and revelatory today as they were then. (Allen had good company in Lennie Bruce, Nichols and May, Mort Sahl and Shelley Berman.) Allen's work has deepened with the years, just as its Jewish content has continued to grow and unearth windows into his soul—but nowhere more so than in his most avowedly Jewish film, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), in which his Orthodox Jewish past was treated (despite Allen's religious skepticism) with a certain reverence and love. Sometimes that reverence is expressed with comedy, as with the compassionate but luckless subject of Broadway Danny Rose; but who can doubt not only the affectionate Jewish show-business ambiance of this heartfelt film but also the haunting words of simple wisdom that Danny ascribes to his Uncle Sid about how to conduct a moral life: “Acceptance, forgiveness, love.” (Words which are repeated twice, first by Danny/Woody and later by Tina/Mia.) A love for Israel has recently been expressed by Allen in his statement of support last October in the Jerusalem Post. Speaking of the double standard applied in the barrage of criticism of Israel, he said:
“I do feel there are many people that disguise their negative feelings toward Jews, disguise it as anti-Israel criticism, when in fact what they really mean is that they don't like Jews.”
“I've always been a big rooter for Israel,” Allen wrote in Tikkun in 2002.
Allen was quoted this year as saying he wanted to visit Israel for the first time with his two daughters and his wife.
Woody Allen became a comedy star at a time when every preconception about American life came into question. He entered a social milieu that somehow was waiting for and anticipating him. He was the antithesis of the traditional male hero: the archetypal schlemiel with a whining, high voice. His humor was very personal and unique; it was not interchangeable with other comedians. There was a presumption, whether it was true or not, that he was telling you something more personal and autobiographical about himself and his experiences.
It almost strains credulity that a Jewish comedian and film actor who placed his Jewishness front and center and consciously proclaimed it, utilizing constant references to his Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and the Holocaust, and with ambivalent ways of defining gentiles (white bread and mayonnaise were the most popular reference) could capture the imagination of and even beguile a huge audience as Woody Allen has done. Jack Benny, George Burns, Eddie Cantor, and Groucho Marx preceded him, but these were not comics advertising their Jewishness; it was implicit and polite. Borscht-belt comics were open about their ethnicities by the 1950s, but they were entertaining largely Jewish audiences. Allen was a national comic from the start.
Allen's boyhood was lived during the Holocaust from afar and he is obsessed with it. He wrote in Tikkun of his rage when reading Elie Wiesel's Night: “Wiesel made the point several times that the inmates of the camps didn't think of revenge. I find it odd that I, who was a small boy during World War Two and who lived in America, unmindful of any of the horrors Nazi victims were undergoing, and who never missed a good meal with meat and a warm bed to sleep in at night, and whose memories of those years are only blissful and full of good times and good music—that I think of nothing but revenge.”
Born Allan Stewart Konigsberg on December 1, 1935 to a middle-class Jewish family in the Bronx, Allen has always been caught in the reality of his own Jewishness. His persona was the classic Jewish loser filled with lust. “He came along at exactly the right moment, in the sixties, when everything was being questioned about masculinity,” critic John Simon told me. “And he was extremely heterosexual, desperately so. And he worshipped women.” Forty-two films later, he is the only independent filmmaker who has consistently worked for decades, making some wonderful films, some good films, and some bad films. But he kept going and he is internationally beloved. There is no one else in his league. He has bedazzled the world with many indelible moments of romance, comedy, magic and even some morality tales.
His hard work has seen him through. His is a gigantic success story against the odds, but genius always has an inexplicable element to it. We all suffer, many of us have crippling, devastating childhoods, but few find ways of transmuting that pain into art. Early on he achieved a unique comic perspective—a comedic talent that is so instinctive perhaps he cannot fully understand it himself.
His forty-two films declare his Jewishness again and again. How many times does he turn into a rabbi or a Hasid? It's hard to count, as are the references to the Holocaust. In Stardust Memories he tells an envious old classmate: “If I were in Poland I'd have been a lampshade.” He turns into a Hasid briefly in Take the Money and Run and Annie Hall. There are other characters who are rabbis in Radio Days and Crimes and Misdemeanors. When he is trying to become a Christian in Take the Money and Run, he winds up davening in church and making a very feckless sign of the cross. He experiences feelings of Jewish paranoia throughout Annie Hall: Alvy Singer tells his best friend Rob as they walk on the street,“I distinctly heard it. He murdered under his breath, 'Jew.' Rob tells him he's crazy, but he continues: “Well, I pick up on those kind o' things. You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC, so I said...uh, `Did you eat yet or what?' and Tom Christie said `No, didchoo?' Not, did you, didchoo eat? No, not did you eat, but jew eat? Jew. You get it? Jew eat?' Later, Alvy meets Annie Hall to see one of his (and Woody's) favorite films, Marcel Ophuls' The Sorrow and the Pity. Clips are shown from the film and later Alvy talks of the French Resistance and reflects “how I'd stand up under torture,” a question Allen has frequently pondered.
It is during dinner with Annie Hall's family that Alvy is confronted by her anti-Semitic grandmother who stares at him with hostility and he turns into a Hasid with a long black coat, moustache, and beard. Late in the film, Alvy takes Annie to see The Sorrow and the Pity again: The screen shows a Nazi propaganda film, a street with fleeing cars, belongings tied on top and piled in the back seats, and the subtitles read: “The Jewish warmongers and Parisian plutocrats tried to flee with their gold and jewels.” The Ophuls film is referred to yet a third time at the end, when Alvy is pleased to see Annie going to see the film again at the Thalia and he has a brief reunion with her. And Broadway Danny Rose says, “It's important to feel guilty. Otherwise...you're capable of terrible things...it's very important to be guilty. I'm guilty all the time, and I never did anything, you know. My...rabbi, Rabbi Pearlstein used to say we're all guilty in the eyes of God.”
One must return to Crimes and Misdemeanors to fully grasp Allen's search for a Judaism that can have meaning. Judah Rosenthal (Martin Landau) recalls that his father told him, “The eyes of God are on us always.” Rosenthal is struggling with what to do about a mistress who is threatening to destroy his marriage and his career (he is guilty of malfeasance). He consults Ben, a Rabbi, who says “I couldn't go on living if I didn't feel with all my heart that there was a moral structure with a real love and forgiveness. Some kind of higher power. Otherwise there's no basis to know how to live. I know the spark of that....is somewhere in you.”
Rosenthal ultimately arranges the murder of his mistress and gets away with it.
He returns in memory to family seders with scenes at the bimah and at the family dinner table. Later a key role is played in the film by the brilliant writer, psychoanalyst and teacher, Prof. Martin Begmann, portraying Dr. Louis Levi, who is a composite, Allen wrote me, of Prof. Bergmann and Primo Levi. It is Prof. Bergmann who concludes the film by holding out the hope that, despite Allen's despair about the absence of a moral structure, “Most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying to find joy from simple things like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more.” These beautiful words end the film. Seeing Allen's rapt intensity as he watches Bergmann/Levi speak, one is afforded a glimpse into Woody Allen's Jewish soul.
Crimes
and Misdemeanors - Deep Focus Review
Brian Eggert
Crimes and
Misdemeanors | Reverse Shot Deconstructing God, by Cecilia Sayad
Moral Luck in the
Films of Woody Allen - Kinema : : A ...
Ewa Mazierska from Kinema
Films
For Philosophers: Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) Rudy Garns, June 27, 2005
Crimes and Misdemeanors
(Philosophical Films)
Morality
and Blindness in Woody Allen's Crimes and ... James Mooney from Film and Philosophy, March
7, 2013
Woody
Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors Guilt Complex ... Wade Sheeler from CC2K, March 15, 2015
Dan Schneider on Crimes And
Misdemeanors - Cosmoetica
Crimes
and Misdemeanors (1989) | The Film Spectrum
Jason Fraley
Crimes and Misdemeanors
- OoCities Criminal Interpretation of Kant's Guide to Happiness using Woody
Allen's Crimes and Misdemeanors, by Ryan Cofrancesco
Crimes and Misdemeanors
- Chizfilm.net Jonathan Chisdes
Old
School Reviews [John Nesbit]
Crimes
And Misdemeanors - Turner Classic Movies
Brian Cady
Crimes And
Misdemeanors - Movie Reviews - Movie News ... Vadim Rizov from Movie Vault
Journal of
Religion & Film: Job of Suburbia? A Serious Man ... Dr. David Tollerton, Oxctober 2, 2011
Richard A. Gilmore's Doing
Philosophy at the Movies ... Daniel
Garrett from Offscreen, May 2006
Woody Allen
- Film Reference Mark W. Estrin,
updated by Robyn Karney
Crimes And
Misdemeanors - The Woody Allen Pages
Crimes
And Misdemeanors / Crimes And Misdemeanours ... Movie-Film
DVD Savant Blu-ray
Review: Crimes and Misdemeanors Glenn
Erickson
Crimes
and Misdemeanors | Blu-ray Review | Slant Magazine Chuck Bowen
Crimes and
Misdemeanors Blu-ray Review - DVDizzy.com
Luke Bonanno
Crimes
and Misdemeanors Blu-ray Review | High Def Digest David Krauss
Crimes
and Misdemeanors Blu-ray: Limited Edition to 3000 Jeffrey Kauffman
Crimes
and Misdemeanors Blu-ray Review - DVD & Blu-ray Rev Matt Hough from Home Theater Forum
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi
Movie Reviews UK Damian
Cannon
Pauline Kael -
GEOCITIES.ws
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan Jardine]
Discussion
of Woody Allen's 1989 movie “Crimes and ...
Quotes from the film from the Daily Hatch
Crimes and
Misdemeanors - New York Film Locations
Crimes
And Misdemeanors Review | TVGuide.com
Crimes and Misdemeanors |
Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm
"The
10 best Woody Allen films"
Listed as #3, behind Annie Hall
(#2) and Manhattan (#1), from a 2013 Guardian Poll October 4, 2013
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Crimes
and Misdemeanors - Roger Ebert October 13, 1989
Crimes
and Misdemeanors - Roger Ebert September 11, 2005
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Crimes
and Misdemeanors Blu-ray - Woody Allen
DVDBeaver
Crimes and
Misdemeanors - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SHADOWS AND FOG
Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
In the 1920s an unknown town is
under the shadow of a murderer who strangles his victims. Kleinmann (Allen) is
forced by locals to join them in their hunt for the killer while at the same
time a circus arrives in town led by lrmie (Mia Farrow) the sword-swallower,
The Clown (Malkovich) and Marie (Madonna) the high-wire artist. Irmie, after
wandering in the streets, finds shelter in a brothel where she sleeps with Jack
(John Cusack) for $700. After a typically Allenesque series of labyrinthine
encounters between Kleinmann, the Clown and Irmie, the first is mistaken for
the killer and after being chased by the angry mob he finds refuge in the
circus where the killer himself also appears...
Stylistically, this is
undoubtedly a departure for Allen and it is a homage to the films of German
Expressionism, particularly Lang's M and Murnau's Sunrise Hollywood names (including Kathy
Bates, Jodie Foster and Donald Pleasance), the nightmarish atmosphere and the
occasional laughs guaranteed by Allen's portrayal of the helpless Kleinmann.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)
Woody Allen reaches into his own
deep well of nightmares to bring us the vague and disquieting confusion of
Shadows and Fog. An assemblage of literary and cinematic allusions intensifies
the ominous surroundings, offset by humorous spots of familiarity (in the form
of some standard Woody-isms) that serve to anchor us, if only momentarily,
before disappearing into the fog again. But beware: this is more an allegory
for Kristal Nacht than a comedy.
A thuggish band of vigilantes rouse Max Kleinman (Allen) from his warm bed in
the middle of the night and insist he participate in their plan to catch a
"Jack the Ripper"-type killer on the loose in the city. Kleinman,
still sleepy and befuddled, is unaware that this is but the beginning of a
long, strange night. He dresses and hurries outside to meet the posse, but the
streets are deserted. Meanwhile, in a nearby circus caravan, a clown (Malkovich)
and his sword-swallowing girlfriend, Irmy (Farrow) quarrel, and Irmy takes off
into the night. A murder or two later, Kleinman meets Irmy and they have
various encounters with a host of people who move in and out of the shadows, as
they, too, part and meet again and again in this murky gloom.
Allen succeeds in creating an ambience of paranoia and suspense by setting his
story in an undefined time in an unnamed city that, at times, seems like a
village and then something like the London of Arthur Conan Doyle. The damp
darkness becomes almost tactile: the longer I watched the more the chill seemed
to seep under my skin, and the deceptively merry score, consisting mainly of
Kurt Weill songs, facilitated this sensation. He costumes certain characters as
European villagers while others don fedoras and heavy overcoats, reminiscent of
the 1930s. Conspicuous reference to German Expressionist cinema (M, Nosferatu) and Universal's
horror classics are interposed to construct a surreal portrait of uncertainty
and doom.
But this is, after all, Woody Allen, and he does interject the right amount of
humor to counterbalance any amount of suspense he builds. As usual, he plays
the nebbish (his character's name, Max Kleinman, can more or less be translated
to mean "your ultimate average schlemiel"), and delivers the expected
intellectual banter - this time in the town's licensed brothel, it comes as the
wisdom of its denizens. Still, this is no comedy, and his innocuous thriller is
riddled with subtle - and not so subtle - references to the subversive,
anti-Semitic activities of the era that led up to Kristal Nacht. The
vigilantes disagree over how to execute "the plan," and break down
into contentious factions as the hunt for the lumbering killer continues
through the night. Kleinman remarks, "Soon we'll be doing the killing
for him." As the fog thickens and the shadows darken with accusations
and suspicions, the disputing sides indeed begin to murder each other.
The casting is remarkable - every face is a recognizable character actor or
star, down to the smallest cameo roles - as are most of the performances:
Donald Pleasence as the ill-fated doctor and David Ogden Stiers as the brutish
Hacker; Lily Tomlin, Jodie Foster and Kathy Bates as the sagacious
"working girls" and John Cusack as their young "regular,"
with money to burn; Madonna as Marie, the adulterous funambulist; Julie Kavner
as the (literally) hysterical ex-fiancée ("Kleinman's here! Here he is!
Kleinman's here! Get out and die! Get out and die! You rot in hell you filthy
vermin!"); Kenneth Mars, as the Magician who delivers the film's coup
de grace...and the list goes on. Oddly, it is the main characters that seem
slightly miscast. Malkovich is sturdy, but at times his trademark intensity is
a bit too much for the overall feel of the film; however, in the end, he
becomes softer than I believe I have ever seen him. He does have a bit of fun
as the camera introduces him via an over-the-shoulder shot in a small, round
mirror as he removes his greasepaint, recalling the opening scene of Dangerous
Liaisons. Farrow is reliable and lovely, but basically unremarkable - the role
of Irmy might have been better filled by almost any of the women who were cast
in one of the smaller parts.
Allen frames this film to fit the era, somewhat constraining himself to the
style of the 1930s and mimicking the technological limitations of the period.
The camera moves much more here, engaging the viewer more intimately than is
usual in his work, including a dizzying 360-degree pan from the center of a
table in the brothel while the women dissect relationships. Most scenes seem to
be captured in a single shot.
With versatile dialogue supporting a powerful metaphor of dichotomy and
paranoia, Shadows and Fog is, at once, suspense and farce, illusion and
reality...and 100% Woody Allen.
The Film Journal (Richard Armstrong)
Sync: The Regent Journal of Film and Video (Timothy Holland)
Turner Classic Movies James
Steffen
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
The SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)
Austin Chronicle (Kathleen Maher)
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
HUSBANDS AND WIVES
USA
Time Out
When Sally (Davis Davis
Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
Gabe (Allen) and Judy (Mia
Farrow) are visited by their friends Jack (Sidney Pollack) and Sally (Judy
Davies) who announce the break-up of their marriage. This has a profound effect
on Judy who becomes more sceptical as to the success of her own marriage. Gabe
on the other hand finds himself being attracted to his young student Rain
(Juliette Lewis). In the meantime Jack and Sally have found new partners...
This is typical Allen territory,
this time though more polished and more pragmatic as to the scope of its
ambition. In fact it seems to be a return to his highly acclaimed Hannah and
her Sisters, which displayed delicately Allen's major virtues. Again we are
confronted with couples in periods of crisis and the resolution once more is as
orthodox as ever despite the fact that regarding the character of Gabe it is
presented in an apparently ambivalent way (emotional cul-de-sac resolved by his
relationship to his art). There must be indeed much of Allen's' own experience
in this one since it runs parallel to similar events in his life. However it
doesn't prove very useful since it throws us back to an Allanesque world we all
seem to know fairly well by now. What we don't seem to know is Allen's
reference to John Cassavetes in an opening and rather embarrassing sequence
with erratic camera movement which perhaps aims at conveying the unstable
situation between the couples. But Allen is not Cassavetes and such innovations
seem to be out of context.
To Allen's credit the mood of the
film fluctuates beautifully between the tragic and the comic and the commitment
which characterizes his collaborators provides testimony to this fact. Apart
from Allen himself and Farrow who don't deviate from the stereotypical
characters we've been used to see them play, Pollack demonstrates impressively
that he is a better actor than director but it is actually Judy Davies who
overshadows everyone in the film, in what must be her best performance to date.
Avoid comparison with Hannah and her Sisters and you will be pleasantly
surprised!
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Ten years ago, Husbands and Wives
played second fiddle to Woody Allen's all-media split with Mia Farrow. Forget
the film's serendipitous theatrical premiere, Allen's lost masterpiece, along
with Crimes and Misdemeanors three years earlier, remains one of his
most personal and incisive works to date. Though it's as disciplined and
pragmatic as its wellspring (Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage),
this neurotic but frighteningly universal masterpiece is still one of Allen's
least explicitly Bergmanesque ventures. Throughout the film, Allen catalogs the
insecurity and fear that rocks one marriage when another breaks apart. Gabe
Roth (Allen) scoffs at a television scientist's thoughts on God. He thinks God
plays hide and seek, perhaps because man looks for God when he is desperate to
assign blame. His friends Sally (Judy Davis) and Jack (Sydney Pollock) announce
their breakup but Gabe's wife, Judy (Mia Farrow), is the one who turns the
couple's otherwise amicable decision into tragedy.
Grace's
reaction may be audacious and selfish but her rant evokes a woman both in
denial and uncomfortable with change. Gabe falls for his student Rain (Juliette
Lewis), who loves older men and looks for reason (read: God) in Time magazine.
How does Grace reconcile the fact that she is not one of Gabe's fantasy
"kamikaze women"? It may be difficult to separate the events of Husbands
and Wives from Allen's real-life split with Farrow, but while the film is
shot like a documentary, Allen camera doesn't observe the film's marital chaos
as much as it seemingly instigates it. How can Gabe hope to keep his wife when
he does not want to give her a child? Allen makes fabulous use of characters
walking offscreen. In one scene, Gabe and Judy fight over the use of a
diaphragm before she walks out of their bedroom. Allen's camera stays on a shot
of a white door, forcing the spectator to take the role of a neurotic Gabe, who
believes that his wife may purposefully not use protection to defy his wishes.
Judy spends enough time in the bathroom to feign the insertion of a diaphragm
and while she's livid that Gabe would call her honesty into question, could she
be putting on an act? This is the genius of Allen's paranoiac gaze.
Allen
understands the emotionally fragile and confusing period after a breakup: the
jealousy of an ex-lover finding love with another too soon; the desire to
return to an ex-lover when a new lover disappoints; and, most fascinating, the
comfort men and women find in a loveless but comfortable state of constancy.
Sally vows to remain single yet she is driven to replace Jack. Thank God for
Judy Davis, playing cinema's most fascinating neurotic. The hyper-frigid Sally
thinks of men-as-hedgehogs and men-as-foxes when receiving cunnilingus from
Michael (Liam Neeson). She's fond of emotional buzz terms ("It was a
buffer against loneliness") and finds herself frequently hyper-oxygenated.
Metabolically, fidelity is her rhythm though she claims, not unlike Judy, that
change is essential. Allen bravely posits one's fear of change and the comfort in
finiteness. In the end, Husbands and Wives becomes a mirror of false
illusions, relentlessly held up by Allen before the faces of anyone who has
ever looked for a reason to leave only to sheepishly stay behind.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Debi Lee Mandel)
The perspective of time allowed by the DVD format is
exemplified by this anticipated release of Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives.
With the decade that has passed since its theatrical debut, it might finally
find an audience that can separate it from the tabloid events overshadowing
this experimental journey into the deconstruction of a modern marriage.
A frenetic camera intrudes on two couples getting ready to go out for the
evening. The scene is shot in such documentary-style immediacy that the
turbulence erupting before us, engulfs us. Sally (
As Sally and Jack feel their way through their separation, Judy and Gabe
(Allen) begin to question their own motivations, each other and their marriage.
Allen carefully disburdens his characters of their insouciant neutralities in
the process of romantic decay, encapsulated in energetic and disquieting scenes
of suspicion, flirtation, reminiscences, denial and finally, confrontation.
It's impossible—and uncomfortable—to take sides; as each character's interior
dichotomies are exposed, the erratic camera and subtle but dizzying
contradictions leave no surface upon which sympathy can settle. Sally's
aggressive perfectionism reveals her dissatisfaction with everything, belying
her need for passivity and quiescence; Jack takes his disappointment with the
manifestation of his fantasy out on the object of his ill-conceived desire;
Gabe imagines himself as a dimensional being but retreats when confronted by
the opportunity to expand; and Judy basks in an almost primitive denial of her
own passive-aggressive behavior. Nevertheless, their peccadilloes are never
trivialized, but significant in defining each individual, and so a universal
empathy is achieved. The story spreads to encompass a self-aggrandizing English
student with an Elektra complex (Lewis), an under-educated health nut with a
penchant for astrology (Anthony), and the romantically gentile Michael
(Neeson).
Allen's craft is in top form and dominates this film in which he breaks most of
his former conventions, choosing more avant garde extremes of Godard's Breathless (À
bout de souffle) over the rituals of Bergman, Chekov and other early
inspirational sources: source lighting, disruptive edits and jump cuts, a
handheld camera, overt obscenities, nudity and sex, a protracted kiss... This
is an uncompromising Woody Allen, brutally weighing passion against the refuge
of companionship, expanding his already brilliant cinematic vocabulary. (He
even smiles the only time he mentions death!)
The performances are as unique as their package. Farrow is finally credible as
Judy, the manipulative, disingenuous wife who is Denial personified in a frumpy
old sweater. Allen plays Gabe confessional yet restrained, and Sydney Pollack
is surprisingly efficient as the distended Jack. Sending them all back to
summer stock is Judy Davis, who chews through every scene with an insatiable
hunger to find Sally's source. Earning one of the film's two Oscar®
nominations, she is so believably manic one can see the short step to last
year's Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows; she wears
histrionics like one of Miss Garland's dress gloves.
"Can I go? Is this over?" - Gabe
Pithy, painful, funny and terrifically polemic, Husband and Wives would
be Allen's last of 12 projects with Farrow in as many years, and as such, seems
perhaps more divulging than most. Woody understands the intimate psychology of
relationships, and nobody does it better.
Cynthia Fuchs (c/o inforM Women's Studies)
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis)
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
MANHATTAN
USA (104 mi)
1993
Like the Bob Hope movies which it
alludes to, Manhattan Murder Mystery is as light and brazenly generic as
Allen's early work. As a result, it is both unusually insubstantial, and, at
least in the second half, extremely funny. Hope-like in his panicky cowardice,
Larry worries not only about the feelings of his wife Carol (Keaton,
refreshing) for his old friend Ted (Alda), but about her determination to
investigate the death of a neighbour. At first, Larry thinks Carol is
fantasising, but then he starts to witness strange events. Cue to a fast,
ramshackle, thrill comedy as entertaining as it is removed from the realities
of contemporary
Manhattan
Murder Mystery Terrence Rafferty
from the New Yorker
Woody Allen's new
picture is his lightest and most unabashedly frivolous feature since
"Broadway Danny Rose," in 1984. All that the movie aspires to be is a
speedy, bubbly screwball-comedy whodunit—something like a Bob Hope vehicle from
the forties. It's pleasant enough, but Allen hasn't practiced the simple act of
popular entertainment in quite a while, and he's rusty. The humor thins out as
the movie goes along, because Allen tends to labor, and even to repeat, his
gags. The main characters, Larry and Carol Lipton (Allen and Diane Keaton),
suspect that their across-the-hall neighbor has killed his wife, and try to
play detective. The modest message of the screenplay (by Allen and Marshall
Brickman) is that Larry and Carol's cozy, boring middle-aged marriage is
somehow enriched, perhaps even saved, by the danger and excitement of their
amateur investigation. You could call the movie a comic version of "Rear
Window" if it weren't for the inconvenient fact that "Rear
Window" is a much funnier picture. Also with Alan Alda, Anjelica Huston,
Jerry Adler, and Lynn Cohen.
Scott Renshaw
Reviewing a Woody
Allen film is a lot like reviewing a sushi restaurant. You have to keep in mind
that a significant portion of your audience is going to tune out because sushi
just isn't their taste. Whether it's good sushi or bad sushi becomes
irrelevant; the fact that it's sushi is all that matters.
At the risk of
hammering this particular metaphor into the ground, MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY is
good sushi. Not great, but good. While it lacks the emotional scope that made
HANNAH AND HER SISTERS and MANHATTAN
Larry (Woody Allen)
and his wife Carol (Diane Keaton) are a married couple who, after twenty plus
years, have settled into a rather mundane routine. She reluctantly goes to
hockey games with him, he in turn grudgingly joins her at the opera. It's
always business as usual with little spark, until an elderly neighbor in their
apartment building is found dead of an apparent heart attack. Carol becomes
suspicious when the woman's husband (Jerry Adler) acts a bit too nonchalant,
and begins to uncover clues which she believes point to foul play. Larry is
convince Carol is imagining things, causing her to turn to a recently divorced
friend, Ted (Alan Alda), for comfort. Larry, meanwhile, is flattered by the
attentions of a writer (Anjelica Huston), and frustrated by Carol's insistence
that she crack the case.
MURDER MYSTERY sets
up a parallel between Carol's investigation and the search for some remaining
zing in her marriage. Larry is a man who wants little more than a good night's
sleep; Carol wants something more before it's too late. When Ted, who has had a
longtime crush on Carol, shares her enthusiasm for the chase, she begins to
think about what could be. These moments, when MURDER MYSTERY focuses on
relationships, seem to be the weak points. This is a surprise given Allen's talent
for examining relationships, but his heart here seems more squarely in the
comedy.
Those who remember
the classic physical comedy of SLEEPER and EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW
ABOUT SEX will be thrilled by Allen's return to his roots. Certainly, the
moments are more sublime than those early films, but it's the same old Woody
with the flare for choreographed ineptitude. He has some great moments bumbling
through the suspected neighbor's apartment, and a priceless sequence when he
loses complete control of a cassette tape. Nearly as deft is Diane Keaton,
reteamed with Allen for the first time in nearly fifteen years. Keaton, for now
infamous reasons, replaced Mia Farrow in the role, and it's hard to visualize
Farrow as Carol. Over the years Farrow had become more and more like some
parody of a female Woody Allen, and her manner of perpetually whining would
have been completely inappropriate for the confident and focused Carol. Keaton
is an engaging and intelligent screen presence, too often relegated in recent
years to window dressing roles like Steve Martin's wife in the recent remake of
FATHER OF THE BRIDE. It's a pleasure to see her in a well-written role, and
investing it with real energy.
Technical credits,
typical for an Allen film, are first rate. The cinematography by Carol DiPalma
is handsome as usual; the jittery verite camera style, which was used to
stomach-churning excess in HUSBANDS AND WIVES, is thankfully toned-down. And as
usual, there is the score of jazz classics, most notable "Sing Sing
Sing" used to highlight the chase scenes.
The scenes which
highlight Allen and Keaton together crackle with the comic intensity that
characterized their 70's pairing; in fact, those scenes are so funny and so
lively that the moments when they're not on screen together suffer by
comparison. There are a few dead spots in MURDER MYSTERY, mostly those
featuring an excessively deadpan Alda, but they are far outnumbered by the
laughs. MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY is diverting, intelligent comedy that kept a smile
on my face for nearly two hours.
Then again, I also
love sushi.
Movie Reviews UK Damian
Cannon
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
BULLETS OVER BROADWAY
USA
Set in the
Runyonesque New York of the Jazz Age, when artists rubbed shoulders with
gangsters at speakeasies, this is the story of idealistic young playwright
David Shayne (Cusack). With backing from mob boss Nick Valenti (Viterelli),
Shayne can direct his new work on Broadway, and even attract stars of the
magnitude of Helen Sinclair (Wiest) and Warner Purcell (Broadbent). There's
just one catch: Valenti insists that his flapper girlfriend Olive (Tilly) play
a leading role. Not only is she terrible, she comes with a shadow, Nick's
bodyguard Cheech (Palminteri), who oversees the rehearsals with barely
concealed impatience. A merciless satire on the pretensions, hypocrisies and
indulgences of theatre folk, this is Allen's fizziest piece in years. It's
propped up by two fiercely competitive caricatures from Tilly and Wiest, who
completely and appropriately overshadow Cusack's approximation of the
inexperienced author. It must be said that this is scarcely new ground, and
that the staging is sometimes clumsy, but just when you wonder how much life is
left in these stereotypes, Allen pulls off a doozy of a dramatic switch which
takes the farce to unexpected, dizzy heights. No! Don't speak! See it!
Bullets
Over Broadway Anthony Lane from the New Yorker
A nicely structured
piece of silliness from Woody Allen, set in the theatre world of the
nineteen-twenties. John Cusack is the Woody substitute, an earnest young
playwright who needs to discover an existence beyond the stage; Chazz
Palminteri steals the picture as the taciturn gangster who swaps places with
him, becoming as ruthless in his aesthetics as he is with a gun. Around this
neat switch Allen assembles a crowd of near-caricatures—opportunities for
Dianne Wiest, Jim Broadbent, Jennifer Tilly, and others to show their stuff.
The film offers a rematch of Art vs. Life, the old encounter that Allen set up in
"The Purple Rose of Cairo" and at the finale of "Manhattan
Murder Mystery"; this version has the same pleasurable swiftness.
Scott Renshaw
Over the last few
years, no filmmaker's work has been linked as closely to his personal life as
Woody Allen's has been. 1992's HUSBANDS AND WIVES focused on troubled
marriages, and showed Allen's character infatuated with a much younger woman;
the parallels to Allen's life were hard to ignore. Last year's MANHATTAN MURDER
MYSTERY was the kind of light comedy Allen hadn't made in years, and seemed to
indicate a desire to return to simpler times. BULLETS OVER BROADWAY is another
comedy, but it's no pure lark. Hilarious as it is, it's also a sly bit of
self-mockery, an indication that Allen the artist acknowledges the foibles of
Allen the man.
Set in Prohibition-era New
York
Those who found they
needed Dramamine to cope with the hyperkinetic camera movement in HUSBANDS AND
WIVES and MANHATTAN MURDER MYSTERY will be delighted to learn that Allen lays
off the hand-held. In fact, his direction seems a bit too constrained at times,
as though the theater itself were creating a kind of claustrophobia. But while
this is far from Allen's best work as a director, his script, co-written by
Douglas McGrath, is fantastic. The dialogue contains as many laugh-out-loud
lines as any film this year, and the plot takes at least one twist so
delightfully unexpected that its revelation may provide the single biggest
laugh. In a year woefully short on good comedies, BULLETS OVER BROADWAY may be
a saving grace.
As usual, Allen has a
marvelous ensemble cast at his disposal to bring his script to life, though not
all are equally well-used. Jim Broadbent and Tracey Ullman, as two of the play's
cast members, are basically one-note types; John Cusack has some marvelous
early scenes as he realizes the kind of person he is dealing with in Nick, but
his character gets lost in the shuffle a bit. Jennifer Tilly, however, is dead
solid perfect as the simple-minded Olive, and Rob Reiner has a wonderful bit
part as a pretentious playwright who takes great pride in the fact that
"both intellectuals and common people find (his plays) completely
impenetrable." But the two showcase roles belong to Dianne Wiest and Chazz
Palminteri. As Helen Sinclair, the play's haughty star, Wiest brings down the
house with her manipulations of David to spice up her character, and her cry of
"Don't speak!" Palminteri is even better as Cheech, a career hood who
discovers his latent talent, and that he'll do anything to protect his
creation. It's a wonderful, subtle performance worthy of Oscar consideration.
Yet beneath all the
laughs in BULLETS OVER BROADWAY is a moral question framed by the Reiner
character's hypothetical question of which you would save from a burning
building: the last copy of Shakespeare's works, or some anonymous person.
"The artist creates his own moral universe," he says, but the turns
of the story work against that notion. Better to be a good man than a great
artist, Allen seems to argue, and it's difficult not to read that thesis as a
minor mea culpa for his tabloid-headline exploits. In the course of exorcising
some of his own demons, accompanied by a laugh track, Allen has created one of
his post purely entertaining films in years.
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
Movie
Reviews UK Damian Cannon
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
DECONSTRUCTING HARRY
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Woody Allen plays Harry Block, a critically successful but romantically disastrous novelist whose many ex-girlfriends inevitably end up furious with him when they become fodder for his thinly veiled autobiographical novels. Hmmm, sound like a certain filmmaker we know? Deconstructing Harry takes a step back from the incessantly crowd-pleasing Woodies of late to tell the best story Allen's come up with since 1991's Husbands and Wives. Yes, it's one of "the funny ones," but it's also a slyly layered shell game which conceals as much as it reveals. After one of Harry's exes (Judy Davis) nearly shoots him in a fit of rage, Harry plunges into a belated midlife crisis and eventually decides to come clean, dropping the pretense that his work is wholly fictional. The liberal use of profanity and sexually explicit dialogue—both firsts for Allen—are probably meant to seem daring, but although there are few pleasures in life greater than hearing a fighting-mad Judy Davis wrap her sandpaper tonsils around the word "motherfucker," such superficial taboo-breaking doesn't really amount to much. Still, Deconstructing Harry is the loosest, giddiest film Woody Allen has made in decades, and for once the mirth seems genuine and not merely designed to win back a public whom Allen feels has turned against him.
Prior to Annie
Hall, Woody
Allen appeared in his films as a recurring character--the fumbling,
nebbishy "Woody Allen" persona, who, like Chaplin's Tramp, stood in
for the audience's weakness and secret grace. After Annie Hall, Woody
Allen's performances in his films could be divided in two--quirky character
parts, and a new nebbishy guy who didn't stand for the audience so much
as for Allen himself. Through
Now comes Deconstructing Harry, Allen's response to those who would
shelve his films under autobiography. The Harry of the title (played by Allen,
of course) is a drunk, whoremonger, misogynist, bigot, profaner, and all-around
jerk. He's also a writer who uses his life and the lives of his friends as fodder
for his critically acclaimed comic novels. The scenario is as close to Allen's
life as anything he has previously attempted, yet the lead character is so
wildly unappealing that the viewer can reach one of two conclusions--Allen is
in real life an incredibly foul person, or he's out to prove once and for all
that he's never been just playing himself in his movies.
Deconstructing Harry is about what art reveals of its creator. The plot is driven by
an honorary degree that Harry is to have bestowed upon him by his alma mater.
He tries to find someone to go with him, but every friend or ex-girlfriend that
he comes across has given up on him; they're all busy getting on with their
lives. He ends up going with his son (whom he kidnaps) and a prostitute. On his
way to an event praising him for his good-spirited body of work, Harry reflects
on his mean-spirited life; he's aided by his own literary creations, which have
come to life to taunt him.
The structure and the subject matter
of Deconstructing Harry seem to have liberated Allen.
Unlike many of his recent films, which revolve around one simple idea or
gimmick, Harry rolls out a handful of funny sketches in the form of
Harry's stories. The sketches are often quite raunchy--Harry himself swears in
at least every sentence, and the jokes in the film are frequently crude. Thanks
to the film's rapid editing--which fast-forwards Harry's inarticulate
speech--and the whirl of filthy humor, Deconstructing Harry becomes Allen's loosest, least
mannered work in over a decade.
It's also among the most pointed.
There's a line in Annie Hall about how artists make everything work out
OK in art, because it never does in life. Except that Annie Hall does
not end perfectly for its characters; in fact, Allen's films rarely do. Even in
Deconstructing Harry, in which Allen makes his character a novelist who
writes the sort of surrealist social commentary that Allen himself used to
crank out, he undercuts the self-serving fantasy by making the writer a
miserable crank. Does this represent Allen's view of his life--that he can
never be successful as both an artist and a human being?
Does it matter? The film describes what it describes. Perhaps it's time to stop examining Allen's films for insights into the director's life and start analyzing them on their own merits. Deconstructing Harry is a marvelously funny character study about a man who functions best as a creator, rather than a creature of God. It's a spiraling conundrum of a film, one that tears apart a man's life work and finds at the center a contradiction--a productive void.
Deconstructing
Woody: Self-reflexivity in the Films of Woody Allen ... Ronan Doyle from Strange Enlightenments,
February 1, 2013
Nitrate Online (Carrie Gorringe)
Film Journal International (David Luty)
The Spinning Image (Daniel Auty)
Movie
Reviews UK Damian Cannon
The SF, Horror
and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
James
Berardinelli's ReelViews
The
Boston Phoenix review Gary Susman
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
SWEET AND LOWDOWN
USA
Sweet and
Lowdown David Denby from the New Yorker
Sean Penn, in
cream-colored suits and matching hat, a cigarette dangling from his lips, gives
one of the best performances ever seen in a Woody Allen film. He plays Emmet
Ray, the notorious (and made-up) jazz guitarist from the thirties, a great
artist who was also a worm and a loser. Emmet handles his instrument almost as
well as his idol Django Reinhardt, but he's the victim of his own neuroses and
obsessions. His not knowing himself at all is turned into a joke, but it's also
played for pathos—incomprehension is Emmet's soulfulness, mysteriously linked
to his elegant playing. The picture is made up of short vignettes framed by
"memories" of Emmet spoken by various experts, including Allen
himself, and the entire movie is caught in the loving grip of jazz-world
nostalgia, with its stylized glamour of thirties clothes and cars—the tawdry
life on the road, in which the greatest art was made on the run. With the
English actress Samantha Morton, hatted and crumpet-faced, her body hidden in a
shapeless dress, as the mute girl who falls for Emmet. Golden-hued
cinematography by Zhao Fei. The contemporary guitarists Howard Alden and Bucky
Pizzarelli do the playing. In all, one of Allen's finest achievements.
The title of Woody Allen's film just about sums it up in three respects. First, it evokes the '30s jazz scene setting. Second, it pinpoints the two lead characters: waifish laundress Hattie (Morton), a mute, passive, generous-spirited halfwit; and Emmett Ray (Penn), the philandering, hard-living, self-obsessed guitar virtuoso who, having been lumbered with her on a double date, remains far too busy talking about himself ever to finish with her properly once and for all. Third, 'lowdown' might be one's initial impression of this potentially poor-taste conceit, but 'sweet' is spot-on for the film's tender warmth, which lingers in the memory long after it's over. The story is simple, charting the ups and downs in the relationship between Ray (whose idea of showing a girl a good time is to take her rat-shooting, and whose main concern in life is that he'll never measure up to his hero Django Reinhardt) and the devoted Hattie, and their various encounters with slumming sophisticates (Thurman as a writer who lures Ray away from Hattie), mobsters (the dependable LaPaglia), Hollywooders, musos and so on. Meanwhile, 'interviews' with jazz fans - Woody included - commenting on Ray's life and art interrupt and reflect on what is finally a fable of pride, prejudice, self-obsession and redemption. Like many of Allen's best films, this is a deceptively modest affair, funny and charming but seemingly slight and inconsequential - until the killer coda. The sense of period and place is assured, the music delicious, the performances terrific. Penn, particularly, is a joy to behold, never ingratiating or maudlin, wholly credible even in the musical scenes, effortlessly expressing both the latent insecurity and artistic determination that fuel Ray's energies. Bittersweet indeed.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Sweet and Lowdown (1999) Jonathan Romney, July 2000
Various jazz experts, including
Woody Allen, tell the story of the great but obscure 30s guitarist Emmet Ray, a
player second only to Django Reinhardt, but an obnoxious and dishonest
womaniser. Cruising for girls on the New Jersey boardwalk, Emmet meets Hattie,
a mute laundress, and they become lovers. She accompanies him on a
cross-country trip to Hollywood, where he plays in a short film; Hattie is
spotted by a director and enjoys a brief screen career. Emmet's recording
career takes off but his manager warns him about his spending.
Later, after Emmet has left
Hattie, he meets and marries Blanche, a wealthy would-be bohemian writer. When
Emmet is sacked from a club, Blanche goes to intercede with its gangster owner
and ends up running away with his henchman Al Torrio. Different versions are
told of Emmet's pursuit of them. Emmet returns to New Jersey to see Hattie, but
she tells him she is married with children. The experts say that at the end of
his career, before he vanished, Emmet's playing became truly great.
Review
Following the shapeless agitation of Celebrity, Woody Allen's cogent return to form in Sweet and Lowdown proves that he is fascinated less by celebrity and the noisy now, than by obscurity and the sublime mysteries of the forgotten. Sweet and Lowdown is one of Allen's occasional musings, à la E. L. Doctorow, on the apocryphal corners of modern American history (Zelig, The Purple Rose of Cairo) and another of his studies (Bullets over Broadway, Stardust Memories) of the contradictions between artistic brilliance and moral inadequacy. Apocryphal jazz guitarist Emmet Ray, Allen comments at the start, is "sort of pathetic in a way" but he's indisputably fascinating. He's a vain egotist who walks over people, just like the anti-hero novelist of Deconstructing Harry - except Emmet is worse, in that he has considerable charm and knows how to exploit it. As one character remarks, "No genius is worth too much heartache" - effectively the moral proposition under discussion in Harry.
Sweet and Lowdown is as simple and affecting as the title suggests - a series of anecdotes framed with commentary by jazz experts. But through this structure, Allen examines the difficulty of truly fathoming artists of the past, either through their work or through the stories told about them. The hard evidence about Emmet is in his recordings, while the catalogue of anecdotes about him is open to variation. We get several alternatives for Emmet's pursuit of his wife: Emmet gets hi-jacked by robbers, stages a melodramatic confrontation, or has a chance meeting with the nemesis he holds in awe, Django himself.
All stories are equally valid in this patchwork of fragments, and the Emmet Ray legend becomes all the more concrete the less the gaps are filled in. At one point, the story jumps from a time when Emmet and his mute mistress Hattie are inseparable to Emmet single again. We have to imagine his split with Hattie, an elision that makes their final meeting all the more resonant with the unspoken pain he has done her.
The film, in other words, uses muteness as metaphor, dramatising it in the figure of Hattie, Emmet's child-like, trusting and - everyone keeps assuming - mentally disadvantaged lover. Her intelligence comes into its own in their ambivalent reunion, when she tells Emmet that she is now married with children - all of this conveyed without a word from her. If we take her story at face value, it's sad enough that Emmet has lost his great love; but the outcome is that much richer if we imagine Hattie has invented it. Then it becomes not just a tactful way to reject the lover she knows can only hurt her, but also a gift - Hattie is offering him the heartbreak that makes the virtuoso a truly sublime player.
There's a terrible risk of cliché in this figure of the infinitely supportive mute muse - Hattie could so easily have been a return to Chaplin's eroticised waifs. What brings her alive is Samantha Morton's performance, silent but in its own way entirely musical - a subtle repertoire of reactions, gleeful surges and bursts of erotic fire, and much of it from under a horrible knitted hat. Morton and Penn (playing Emmet) duet astutely, her silences forming a complementary punctuation to his rakish bluster. Penn himself is on top form, portraying the musician not as a standard lovable rascal, but as a thoroughgoing creep, redeemed by his appetite and by the kinetic passion he puts into his music. Even more impressive than the fingering Penn learned for the guitar-playing scenes is the expression on Emmet's face as he plays, the look of a man captivated by his own congress with the sublime.
As you'd imagine from Allen, America's most famous enthusiast for a pre-bebop Eden, Sweet and Lowdown is told with real love for the period, and the film's look is typically flawless; Allen's regular designer Santo Loquasto is teamed here with DoP Zhao Fei (who has worked with both Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige) to create a gently frosted image of the world seen as though through a haze of distant memory. Jazz fans, however, may be aggrieved by Allen's perpetual blind spot: his inability to handle black characters. Black musicians do appear, but only as background figures - Emmet jams with them at a party, then steals a lighter. This might be Allen's incidental comment on white musicians' appropriation of the spark of black jazz, but that, I suspect, would be stretching a point.
PopMatters Josh Jones
Nitrate Online (Gregory
Avery)
Film Journal International (Ed Kelleher)
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
Nick's Flick Picks (Nick Davis)
World Socialist Web
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Threat Review Ron Wells
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Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Janet Maslin
ANYTHING ELSE B 89
The
first half is hilarious, wonderfully photographed, with some really
brilliant comedy, but then it gets bogged down in less adventurist
storywriting, many of the possibilities here are never explored. It sort of goes downhill after the Stockard
Channing number, which is remarkably poignant, as afterwards there is this
endless repetition of dreary ennui, which may be Allen’s form of low
comedy now, finding hilarity in the comfort zone of middle class boredom and
paranoia. However, Christina Ricci is
unbelievably fickle in this film, leading one to believe yes, when, sorry, I
guess I really mean no, covering her tracks with cover ups and lies of a
gargantuan proportion, elevating the concept of changing your mind into an art
form.
Anything
Else David Denby from the New Yorker
Better than the last
two Woody Allen films, but still not very interesting. Falk (Jason Biggs), a
young
Time Out
Gangly Jason Biggs is
the latest leading man to undergo the trial of being Woody’s youthful stand-in.
His aspiring comedy writer with woman trouble is exactly the sort of part Allen
would once have played himself, but the creator retains his stamp on it by
insisting Biggs delivers the lines with typically Woody-ish intonation. It’s no
slight on the ‘American Pie’ star to suggest this just isn’t his thing, but,
frankly, that’s the least of the misjudgements on view. You feel sorry for
Christina Ricci, doing everything asked of her as Biggs’ voluptuously maddening
girlfriend, yet her manipulative prick-teaser of a part comes across like
Woody’s hate-letter to womankind. And where does the young man go for advice on
his travails? To Allen himself, of course, as a fellow writer who dispenses
gnomic utterances (‘It’s like anything else really?’) and moral support when
he’s not revealing distinct psychotic tendencies. It seems we’re meant to think
this guy is witty, wise and a little edgy, though the effect is truly
resistible. He’s a pinched ageing misanthrope whose wisecracks about the
Holocaust are screechingly inappropriate.
It’s a painful experience for any Allen admirer to sit through one of his
movies without anything positive to say. There’s Darius Khondji’s warm-toned
camerawork and the soundtrack’s reassuring parade of jazz oldies, but that’s
where the pleasure ends, though it’s only fair to report a sprinkling of
laughter at the screening I attended – someone somewhere was evidently getting
a kick from this stuff. But really, the timing’s gone, the humour’s flat, the
insights mean-spirited. For a supposed light comedy, it’s the year’s most
depressing film.
There’s a moment in Woody Allen’s
Anything Else, wherein Allen’s character admits to killing a police
officer – absurd for Allen, whose tropes of violence in past films are spoofy
japes, such as Allen’s dictator in Bananas or Jerry Orbach’s
hit man in Crimes and Misdemeanors. This isn’t to say that Allen’s
character in Anything Else, Dobel, is sobering – there’s just a
difference in tone – a de-spoofing, with small hints of comedy.
In this film, Allen uses violent behaviour in cathartic, epiphanous ways that
are absent from his earlier films, and Allen’s character is the one acting out
the aggression. Moreover, when Dobel admits to the killing, it’s steeped in
myth – we’re led closer to believing it a falsehood; a catalyst for Jason Biggs’
character to move on with his life. In the end, Allen uses the violence as the
enamel for a soliloquized tale – as poignant to viewers as it is absurd.
For Allen, much of the narrative seems a retread of past Allenisms – a Rube
Goldberg contraption of human fallibility – but it’s the most rebelliously,
subtly and subversively creative he’s been since Sleeper.
As part of post-‘90s Allen terrain, Anything Else joins Hollywood Ending
as a film that probes the ills of illusion – whether looking at people that are
self-deluded or presumptuously silly. Allen takes this recycled concern and
marries it to American
Splendor workaday Americanism, telling us that life isn’t as nihilistic
as once preached – it’s really just like “anything else.”
Falk (Biggs) is essentially a doubling of Allen – a dilettante comedic
personality eager to swat down a world of growing quixotic beliefs with a
sledgehammer of gloomy negativism. Falk, like Allen, uses the quotes of
fatalist types like Camus and Sartre to thicken the sledgehammer’s punch.
The hopeful intellectual curiosity of Falk makes him susceptible to Amanda’s (Christina Ricci)
feminine wiles. Emotionally whomped but pretentiously confident when they meet,
Falk’s more bleak sides are forced to the surface by Amanda. With her constant
sabre rattling and victim baiting, Amanda is less cunning and manipulative then
she is outmanoeuvred by her own self-delusion. Unable to see past her own
façade, a wannabe earnest, Amanda can do no more than set traps for speciously
together men like Falk, who mirror her in their need to feel rejected in order
to feel intimate.
Allen uses the foibles of their relationship – he is Falk’s life coach, as a
“If I only knew then what I know now” comment, and it stacks up hilariously.
Essentially, we see the experienced Allen of 2003 counselling the pessimistic
know-it-all Allen of the early 1960s.
In certain textual senses, the film shares with Jean-Luc Godard’s
Pierrot Le Fou its use of philosophy as intertext, loopy sensibilities
and accumulative malaise. It takes that malaise, however, and dumps it on its
crown – giving us the beginning of a post-9/11 cinematic trend, which like American Splendor
self-consciously ponders the American Dream gone amuck, criticizes it and then
creates a new way to view our ontological questions: Understand your pain and
suffering as “anything else.”
The casting of the film, at first glance, seems misinformed. There are some dry
spots by all principles on hand, excluding Allen, as they come with an
emotionally unregistered Brechtian wisp. But if you watch enough Werner
Fassbinder – say Mother Kuster Goes to Heaven – you’ll find that this
distancing is integral to Allen’s soliloquized aesthetic that addresses the
piss and vinegar of Fassbinder and injects it with the enlightened empathy of a
post-post-modern era.
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MELINDA AND MELINDA C 72
USA
Framed by a casual dinner conversation in a restaurant, one guy pleads his case that the world can be viewed as comedy, while another sees it as tragedy, then they proceed to spin a similar sounding tale, but from their differing perspectives. In each case, Melinda arrives unexpectedly to an evening dinner party, complete with personal tales of woe, and is put up in the residence of a young professional couple who are former schoolmates. But Melinda’s presence wreaks havoc, adding tension to already tenuous relationships, and the couple’s lives unravel. Told in two different settings, each a mirror image of the other, the story exhibits the behavior of rich, indulgent people whose lives are always veering off course attempting to satisfy their latest vanity projects, apparently with no regard for the consequences.
Shot in a golden hue, this is as unlikable an Allen film as I can remember, filled with such loathsome and contemptible characters, whose nonstop consumption of wine rivals the recent film SIDEWAYS, featuring never-ending dinner parties and perpetual scenes with ultra-spoiled and drearily pampered people, all of whom are selfishly and shamelessly obsessed with themselves and think of little else, who exist in some of the more elaborate and expensive real estate in the world, yet they cry about their lack of wealth, and boo hoo about how the world hasn’t treated them right. Who are they fooling? To watch a film where people’s lives revolve around nothing but themselves, where lies and infidelity and cruel manipulation are as common as drinking a glass of water, how can one not think these are warped values being displayed to wretched excess onscreen? Why would anyone be interested?
Radha Mitchell is a superb actress, but here as Melinda she pouts and feels sorry for herself and carries on in double roles as if she is the reincarnation of Scarlett O’Hara, always overwrought, in a perpetual state of high anxiety, a character who exists only to serve the state of being self-centered. Chloë Sevigny, on the other hand, is the best thing in the film, always so comfortable easing into her role, and is the only character anyone actually cares about. Will Ferrell is unobtrusive, and has some interesting comedic scenes showcasing his awkwardness, but all the dialogue “sounds” like Woody Allen, and despite a top notch cast, all I could hear was him saying the lines. The once again all classical, all jazz soundtrack sounds interchangeable by now in Allen films and could easily be dedicated to the piano lounge style of the recently deceased Bobby Short, repeated ad nauseam, diminished in relevance to the irritating background sound of elevator music.
Melinda
and Melinda David Denby from the New Yorker
At dinner with
friends in a
Time Out
Just when Allen’s
career-slide seemed depressingly inexorable, along comes his best film since
1999’s ‘Sweet and Lowdown’. It’s built on his richest conceit in a while:
around a
The Allen of yore might have made this seem less an exercise and more a wise reflection on the human condition, but it’s still far more fluid than his films have been of late, and the cast do him proud. Ferrell plays the Woody manqué role broader than the writer-director himself, but is still most amusing; Sevigny, perhaps surprisingly, offers a delicately nuanced study in disappointment; and Mitchell’s adept delineation of the two Melindas is captivating indeed. And if the slightly creaky self-consciousness forestalls our absolute submission, the combination of wry moral observation and stinging wit still makes it a Woody Allen film worthy of its maker. At this stage, perhaps it’s as much as we could hope for.
The Spinning Image Daniel Auty
Woody
Allen has spent much of his career balancing the serious and the comic,
whether in the same film or in separate pieces of the cinema. It’s generally
considered that Allen’s less successful pictures are joke-free dramas like Interiors
or Another
Woman, although age has been quite kind to these films, especially in
comparison to Woody’s last few comedy misfires – Anything
Else, Hollywood
Ending, The
Curse of the Jade Scorpion – which coasted along on a variable collection
of one-liners and not much else. Melinda and Melinda partially returns Woody to
darker subject matter, and sees him embrace an intriguing concept – the same
story told twice, as both a tragedy and a comedy.
Both stories centre around a young woman called Melinda (Radha
Mitchell) who turns up unannounced at a swanky
Allen’s gimmick is to weave the two stories together, cutting from one to the
other throughout, rather than presenting them separately. There’s a rather
awkward framing device in which two writers (Wallace
Shawn and Larry
Pine) debate the merits of comedy and tragedy – the events in the film
being their illustrations of how the same premise can be taken in two
directions. But to be honest, there really isn’t that much difference in tone
between the two stories – one has more jokes and a happy ending, but its not
like we’re leaping from Bergman
to Airplane!
here. Nevertheless, the narrative switching is surprisingly well done, and
there is never any confusion as to which section of the film we are watching.
The film’s main problem is that neither part would have been strong enough to
stand up on its own, and together makes for a rather unsatisfying whole. The
drama in particular is flat in comparison with Allen’s previous dark
explorations of tangled, failing relationships, in particular the brilliant,
devastating Husbands
and Wives. Tragic Melinda is an unlikable, humourless wreck, and the woes
piled upon her – which reach a climax when she is betrayed by
As the only actor in both stories, Radha Mitchell is superb; she succeeds in
making the two Melindas seem like different characters, and particularly shines
as the comic version. British actor Chiwetel
Ejiofor makes a strong impression as the seductive composer who wins tragic
Melinda’s heart, but while the likes of Sevigny, Lee Miller and Peet are fine,
the stagy dialogue and a strange feeling of artificiality means they never
truly inhabit their characters. Still, Allen does deserve credit for attempting
to get out of the lazy comic rut he’s been in since 2000’s Small
Time Crooks – he’s not found his old form yet, but it’s a step in the right
direction.
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Reverse Shot Steve
Jacobs
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
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ToxicUniverse.com
[John Nesbit]
Film Journal International (Harry Haun)
Reverse Shot Stacy
Meichtry with responses from Jeanette Catsoulis and Michael Koresky
Offscreen
:: Thoughts of a Dry Brain in a Dry Season: Woody Allen ... Daniel Garrett from Offscreen
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
digitallyObsessed!
DVD Review [Dan Heaton]
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Lumière Reader Shahir Daud
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Web Site David Walsh
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Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Sonic Cinema [Brian Skutle] also reviewing
MATCH POINT
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
MATCH POINT B 89
USA Great Britain
A murder mystery chamber drama dressed up as a not so subtle reference to America after 9/11, an interesting and clever look at the British upper class who have the world handed to them through wealth and privilege, who are usually deathly boring, insulated in their private worlds, cold, smug and detached, usually insignificant to the rest of us who actually have to work for a living, and much of this falls into the same territory, but with a twist. An American is thrown into the mix that makes everyone else just a little bit uncomfortable. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is a goldigger, a former professional tennis player that marries into a family of wealth beyond one’s dreams, that accepts a job and a wife from a family that’s all too eager to throw their money and their daughter at him. Though he’s not really in love with the sweet but overly anxious Emily Mortimer, he is in love with her brother’s American girl friend, Scarlett Johansson, who plays a sexually provocative flirt, an out of work actress who depends on the kindness of strangers. Not willing to give up the wealth he’s become accustomed to, he instead has to take care of the American problem, as she becomes pregnant and turns into a self-centered overly aggressive nag, insisting he leave his wife or she’ll spill the goods, ruining his future with that family, threatening to end his world of wealth and comfort. So there’s a bit of THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE to the story, with John Garfield having to deal with an alluring, yet increasingly irritating Lana Turner. Allen even turns the table on the Ugly American theme, using one of the young American glamour girls as the object of everyone's revulsion, all the British love to hate an American.
The dark operatic underside of the story is Enrico Caruso, who is heard continuously throughout the film like a ghost inhabiting the characters of multiple operas. Again, the problem in Allen films is the music over-saturates, so much so that there is almost an aversion to natural sound, or even quiet. Instead, all the relevant dramatic scenes are flooded with the sounds of music, where we in the audience are continually plodded to feel what the director urges us to feel. It’s a form of emotional manipulation not uncommon in a Spielberg film, and my aversion to it is equally negative. But where the New York City of Allen’s MANHATTAN thrives on the sounds and energy of Gershwin, an authentic voice, MATCH POINT’S London moves through the British aristocracy, following the places of the super rich, eventually escaping into back streets and working class flat entranceways to the dusty, archival recordings of Caruso, immersing us in an operatic world where passion inevitably leads to violence.
While I can’t say the lurid sex is really there to justify the
incomprehensible lust, there is a romp in a wheat field in the pouring rain,
which is completely overbalanced by the enormous wealth on display, which
becomes intoxicating and addictive, something no one wants to part with, so an
American in this company always seems like a fish out of water. The histrionics of actually behaving this
badly, having to dispose of the woman you love for the woman you’re not the
slightest bit attracted to, is a hard sell, but what is suggested here is how
the appearance of rational and educated can instantly fly out the window when
your back is against the wall, when someone threatens to take away your wealth
and privilege. This film suggests humans
are capable of anything, even murder.
Interestingly, there is a brief dream sequence, which as it turns out is
being dreamed by a police detective, where ghosts of the dead reappear to the
suspected murderer, judging him for his actions in a makeshift ghost court,
like say Guantanamo, demanding an explanation.
Sounding very much like America Iraq America
Match Point David Denby from the New Yorker
In the opening half
hour or so of Woody Allen's new movie, which sets the scene in upper-class
contemporary London, the exposition feels a little lame: two impoverished
outsiders—Chris Wilton (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an Irish-born tennis pro, and Nola
Rice (Scarlett Johansson), an unsuccessful young American actress—are both
trying to marry into a very wealthy English family. At first, the
conversational idiom is falsely debonair, the plot too easily manipulated. But
then the two interlopers face each other in a bar, and the movie takes off.
Rhys Meyers, who has widely spaced blue eyes and a flattened upper lip, can
look angelic or brutally calculating at will. Johansson, poured into a white
dress, also has an unusual upper lip, curved and fleshy, and a low, smoky
voice. What follow are the most passionate and explicitly erotic love scenes
that Allen has ever directed. The movie's narrative scheme becomes urgent and
will-driven in the manner of Dreiser: Chris suddenly has one woman too many on
his hands. Against our better instincts, we are with this cold-blooded murderer
every inch of the way. With Brian Cox, Penelope
Match
Point Allan
Hunter in Cannes
Match Point would seem to prove the theory that you can’t teach
new tricks to old dogs. Quintessential New
York London
Reworking elements from Crimes
And Misdemeanours, it is ostensibly a drama following a Tom Ripley-like
figure as he sells his soul for a life of comfort and privilege. It also
features a lead actor who doesn’t feel compelled to offer his impersonation of
Allen, which is a blessing in itself, and there isn’t a Gershwin tune on the
soundtrack.
Critical opinion will be divided
on how effectively Allen has managed the sea change and the film is overlong
and uneven. It does have enough sophisticated pleasures and distinctiveness to
shore up Allen’s commercial appeal in his traditional European heartland
without suggesting a sudden reversal of financial fortunes in America
The central theme of Melinda
And Melinda was examining whether life was essentially tragic or comic. The
idea behind Match Point is to explore how significant a role luck can
play in an individual’s fortunes. Chris Wilton (Rhys Meyers) is a former tennis
professional who now works as an instructor at an elite English club. He is
befriended by his pupil Tom Hewett (Goode).
It is his entry to a world of
weekends in the country, boxes at the opera and affluence beyond his wildest
dreams. Tom’s father Alec (Cox) respects the fact that Chris has come from
humble beginnings and made something of himself. Tom’s sister Chloe (Mortimer)
takes a shine to Chris and starts showing him around town. The family conspire
to welcome him into their ranks and are vaguely sinister in the assumptions they
make about what he will want from life.
Chris can see all the appeal of
an advantageous match with Chloe but he is more readily attracted to Tom’s
fiancee Nola (Johansson), a struggling America
Drifting through the Tate Modern,
the West End and fashionable Bond street London New York
British critics in particular
might take issue with Allen’s depiction of an English social scene that seems
to owe more to the pages of Evelyn Waugh than the era of Tony Blair. This is
still a world in which a heartless social climber like Chris will study his
Dostoevsky, have a passion for opera and casually drop a quote from Sophocles
in his conversation.
Although Allen fans will
appreciate the wit of certain lines and situations this is not a typical
romantic comedy but a cocktail of Chekhov and Patricia Highsmith in which the
plot becomes increasingly melodramatic as Chris’s future becomes quite literally
a matter of life and death. Jonathan Rhys Meyers has the impeccable manners and
charm of Chris to perfection. He remains a plausible and even sympathetic
figure despite constant proof of his moral cowardice, ruthless ambition and
heartless eye for the main chance.
Adopting the awkward gait and
gauche manner of a woman not overly burdened by self-esteem, Emily Mortimer is
entirely believable as his innocent, guileless bride.
Allen’s new muse Scarlett
Johansson brings considerable charisma to the role of a blonde, voluptuous
American who can’t help but falling into the traps that she can see looming in
front of her. She makes the character much more feisty and complex than the
femme fatale/tragic victim contours within which is it conceived.
The British cast generally
respond well to Allen with Brian Cox showing a different side of his character
as the benevolent paterfamilias and James Nesbitt and Ewen Bremner making an
engaging double-act as detectives examining a murder.
It was the murder mystery of Gosford
Park that brought fellow American auteur Robert Altman to Britain
The marriage between country
house upper crust drama and Allen’s anguished soul isn’t quite as felicitous
although the film looks extremely handsome and is an improvement on recent
Allen efforts like Hollywood Endings and Anything Else.
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Matthew
Wilder
Woody Allen's Match Point simulates the feeling of flipping through an issue of Town & Country in the VIP lounge of a European airport while sipping a Campari and soda as the sun sets. The hook--the little dose of addictive nicotine, pulling us out of vacation mode--is that we're never allowed to hear the characters' thoughts; we get only the surfaces those characters present to the world around them. This simple choice produces a nearly suffocating tension that, in the last half-hour, has audiences gasping, shrieking, and literally cowering from the screen. (Not since De Palma's The Fury in 1978 have I seen an audience respond like this. It recalls those mythical hillbillies in the silent era who leapt out of the way of the charging locomotive they saw in the very first motion picture.) Forced to set up shop in England for financial reasons, the New Yorker has magically reinvented himself: Unable to write wisecracks for an all-English cast, Allen instead devised a sleek shocker in the Hitchcock/Chabrol vein and, through good luck or an iron will, made the most fully achieved movie of his 40-year directing career.
Chris (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers), an ingenuous and goodhearted Irish tennis pro, befriends Tom (Matthew Goode), the scion of a wealthy London family who brings his less fortunate friend into the bosom of his powerful clan. There, Chris falls for Tom's sister Chloe (Emily Mortimer) and impresses Tom and Chloe's dad (Brian Cox) with his decency and work ethic, finding a posh position in the old man's business. When Chris encounters Nola (Scarlett Johansson), the neurotic, palpably dangerous, smoking-hot American actress whom Tom is dating, we can feel Chris's best-laid plans coming undone, and see a massive train wreck in the works.
Film Intuition Jen Johans
While some critics quickly dismissed writer/director Woody
Allen’s brilliant tale of love, lust, corruption and murder as a simple rehash
of his classic existential masterpiece Crimes and Misdemeanors, Match
Point stands on its own as intelligent and compelling filmmaking by an
auteur filled with more tricks up his sleeve than we could possibly imagine.
Jonathan Rhys Meyers is wickedly calculating as Chris, an ambitious Irish
tennis player who quits the game and takes a position in
New York Press (Matt Zoller Seitz)
Bright Lights Film Journal
review Woody Allen, Misanthropy, and
Match Point, by Jake Horsley, August 2006
Epinions.com [Steven Flores]
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night
Critic]
Reverse Shot [Elbert Ventura) Elbert
BFI | Sight & Sound | Match Point (2005) Edward Lawrenson, January 2006
Chicago Reader Movie Review Jonathan Rosenbaum, also seen here: Another Day, Another Genre
ToxicUniverse.com [John Nesbit]
World Socialist
Web Site Joanne Laurier
DVD Times Alex Hewison
Match
Point Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
The Village
Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Allen, Woody interview by Gerald Peary
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
SCOOP B 86
USA Great Britain
You may be deceased, but don’t be discouraged
Certainly not a brilliant film, not at all dark or complicated, but it’s nice to know that Woody can still have a lot of fun, reprising a Danny Rose-style role for himself as a second rate magician touring London, whose one-liners and phony pleasantries with the audience – any audience – was actually quite comforting. “You’re a wonderful human being and a credit to your race, and I mean that in all sincerity from the bottom of my heart.” This was like a day in the country, as an Allen film filled with jokes as old as vaudeville, or the old Borscht belt circuit, is still amusing and funny. Despite the fact this is a sex suspense thriller, there was very little sex or suspense or thrills, just Woody doing a lot of Woody humor, using Scarlett Johansson as his straight lady. Perhaps it was watching Altman in his recent PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION turn bad jokes into an art form, as it’s not easy being funny, and Woody is still funny.
Using an old mythological image of the River Styx to open and close the film, deceased passengers being transported to the other side, riding a boat on a misty river led by the Grim Reaper on a dark and murky journey, Woody milks this for all it’s worth. Ian McShane plays a British journalist who, by talking with one of the other recently departed, uncovers what may be the solution to a series of recent serial killings, one who leaves his signature with a Tarot card, called the Tarot murders. So McShane is not ready to go just yet, feeling he may be onto the scoop of one’s lifetime, and decides to take a dip in the dark, gloomy waters to avoid his destination and prolong the inevitable. Meanwhile, Scarlett Johansson plays a perky (“pushy, duplicitous, ambitious”) college student, a dental hygienist who aspires to be a journalist, yet when offered clues by an apparition of McShane, whose image appears to her, an audience volunteer inside a hidden disappearing magic trick box, his de-materializer cabinet, that Allen, aka the Great Splendini, is using in a live performance, she is more intrigued than spooked, but hooked on a feeling and wants to get back inside that box for more. Meeting again afterhours Allen obliges, thinking she’s a little wacky, but McShane reappears before them both, much like the ghost of Hamlet’s father.
The secret is getting close to Hugh Jackman, a filthy rich playboy who McShane suspects is the murderer. Well, leave it to Scarlett Johansson in a swim suit, that’d do the trick, and next thing you know, she’s invited to his family’s country estate for a weekend soirée, where she decides to assume a phony identity, including Allen as her alleged father, and the two of them snoop around for clues. Before you know it, she’s fallen for the guy, but not without suspicions, and still more appearances from McShane who encourages her to stick with the story.
All of this is beautifully filmed in the English countryside, segued together with the music of Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite, which becomes the walking music theme song in this movie. There’s even a reappearance of one of those tiny little British cars that are so small, they look like you should be driving them on the sidewalk. Well, this is the car Allen chooses to drive, like an image out of SLEEPER, to come to poor Scarlett’s rescue when he suspects foul play. The acting is nothing extraordinary, the results predictable, but it is all great fun to be able to spend a few hours with a rapid-fire-joke-telling Woody, who is hilarious performing card tricks before the bemused British upper crust, claiming he was born a Hebrew but converted to become a narcissist.
Scoop David Denby from the New Yorker
In Woody Allen's
latest, Woody is a cut-rate magician known as the Great Splendini, and Scarlett
Johansson, who is charming, is his protégée, Sondra, a college-newspaper
reporter who gets a tip on a big story from a dead journalist (Ian McShane)
conjured up by Splendini. The conceit is barely tolerable, but it gets the
movie under way, and Woody and Scarlett are fitfully amusing as an unlikely
pair of sleuths who run around
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
We’re on familiar ground with
Woody Allen’s Scoop—although shooting in London
It begins with a peppy spirit—the
ghost (Ian McShane) of a newly deceased Fleet Street legend who appears to a
young American journalism major (Scarlett Johansson) while she’s taking part in
a vanishing act by a third-rate magician (Woody Allen). The ghost has learned
that the wealthy son (Hugh Jackman) of a lord is a notorious serial killer, and
since he can’t publish the story himself, he wants the girl to nail it down.
Come to think of it, why can’t he publish it himself? Why not materialize in
front of his editor? Oh, right: That would kill the premise, in which the girl
and the kvetching magician are bumbling sleuths, the girl falls for the handsome
aristocrat, and farcical mayhem ensues.
As an actor, Allen is both
welcome and borderline insufferable, like a favorite uncle with uncontrolled
flatulence. He can’t modulate the fluttering hands and spasmodic stops and
starts; he’s like a Woody Allen impersonator. Actually, he is a Woody
Allen impersonator—the persona having long since lost its connection to the
man. That said, the performance is almost a triumph. He’s wonderful when he
jabbers nonsensically at a succession of puzzled English nobles—he has a touch
of Groucho. If he hadn’t conceived of the man as a Broadway Danny Rose–ish
loser, both he and Scoop might have soared.
Johansson doesn’t have the
natural buoyancy to play a screwball Nancy Drew; her normal delivery (which
many find alluring) suggests lazy self-entitlement. But she’s smart enough to
know what’s needed (a young Diane Keaton), and manages to rouse herself.
Jackman gives the wittiest performance as the movie’s breezy straight man.
Although McShane deserved a better exit and the windup makes no sense, this is
the first Allen picture since Sweet and Lowdown that doesn’t leave a bad
odor in its wake.
stylusmagazine.com (Arthur Ryel-Lindsey)
Woody Allen’s new movie, Scoop,
begins with an ending: a funeral. We hear about the recently departed
journalist Joe Strombel, “a credit to the fourth estate,” and it’s not long
before we see Joe (Ian McShane) himself, riding through a murky fog on a boat
piloted by Death. Using this inevitable Bergman reference as his comic
foundation, Allen builds up the remainder of his newest
If this plot sounds implausible, remember that Allen’s previous film, the
acclaimed
Scoop is Match Point. Not an exact copy, obviously; rather, Allen’s
comfortable comic rehashing of his most atypical success. Allen’s comfort here
is the key. While Match Point was tightly wound with meaning and
metaphor, Scoop is a loose collection of long-winded setups to the sorts
of punchlines that Allen has given us so many times before. An entire poker
game begins to develop a joke around the painter Rubens. A tour of an English
manor only allows Allen to pun off the writer Trollope’s name. At times, you
laugh louder than you expect—Woody still has wit—but the gaps of silence in
between laughter prove that Allen’s once unrelenting comic brilliance now
manifests itself in small and unsatisfying chunks.
The film’s performances do
little to help matters. Allen is the best as the mediocre but still
entertaining conjurer, Stanley Waterman. Nevertheless, he is getting old, and
his fatherly banter with the college-aged Johansson will never work on the
level of his past rapport with Mia Farrow or Diane Keaton. Meanwhile, the
Australian-born Jackman plays faux-British posh, while Johansson fails to keep
up with Allen’s humor and language. “It’s just all too much,” she says at one
point, a simple enough line that she delivers like an eighth-grader reading for
a part in the school play.
Where Johansson does not live up to the film’s writing, Allen and
cinematographer Remi Adefarasin do equal injustice to the film’s location. One
of the strongest points of Allen’s filmmaking has always been his recognition
of small beauties in big places, specifically the settings he finds in
Scoop is then a misplaced joke, an empty recreation of an old and, at
this point, fading tone, delivered to a foreign audience. Judged against such
top-tier Allen as
Movie Vault [Friday and Saturday Night
Critic]
The Village Voice [Bill Gallo]
Salon.com [Stephanie Zacharek]
World Socialist Web Site Joanne Laurier
The Onion A.V. Club [Tasha
Robinson]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti)
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
CASSANDRA’S DREAM
Cassandra’s
Dream: Woody at Low Volume Richard
Corliss from Time magazine
Cassandra's Dream is the name of a long-shot greyhound who wins a race and makes a small fortune for an addicted gambler named Terry (Colin Farrell). It is entirely appropriate for him to give the name to the smart little sailboat he and his brother Ian (Ewan McGregor) buy with his winnings. It is also believable that these working-class lads would not know much about the lady after whom the speedy canine was named — mythology's great purveyor of doomy portents. It is, finally, appropriate for Woody Allen to find the title for his movie in this classical allusion. For the brothers are about to embark on a sea of troubles that even the Ancient Greek's grim prognosticator might have hesitated to conjure up.
One of the ideas Allen likes to keep circling back upon is the heavily ironic notion that it is perfectly possible — literally — to get away with murder, totally unpunished, in the godless and amoral modern world. It is the theme of two of his best films, Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point, and it is a central element in this movie. Like the protagonists of those earlier films, the brothers are not inherently evil people. They're just rather careless ones. Or perhaps one should say ungrounded. Terry is hard-working mechanic, rather decent at heart, but afflicted with addictions to gambling and booze. Ian dreams of an entrepreneurial success — something to do with upscale hotels — without quite seeming to know how to achieve it. He's also smitten by an actress (Hayley Atwell) who is much better at using people than he is.
The boys continue to need money: Terry tends to lose more than he wins gambling, and Ian needs serious financing for his slightly dubious ventures. That's where Uncle Howard (the wonderful Tom Wilkinson) comes in. He's a stock figure in middle class dramas — see Death of a Salesman —] the mysteriously successful, almost mythically potent, figure who haunts the dreamy longings of his stuck-in-grade relatives. A source of whimsical largesse and equally whimsical needs, he has always required a bit of placating. Right now, he needs a bit more than that, specifically the death of a business associate who is about to testify against him in a criminal action. Who better for that job than his nephews, whose fees for murder would put them on easy street. And besides, as Uncle Howard argues, isn't blood always thicker than water?
The job turns out to be fairly simple. It's the aftermath
that's hard to handle — especially for the guilt-ridden Terry. It perhaps gives
nothing away to say that his reaction to what he has done takes Allen into
emotional territory he has not this fully explored in his previous reflections
on capital crimes. Which is not to say that Cassandra's Dream is quite
the breakthrough film I think it might have been. It is a talkative film,
rather earnest in its tonalities, not at all a deft, witty or well-paced. On
the other hand, it is, for Allen, a comparatively rare excursion into
lower-class life — the setting is London, as it has been in his two previous
films — and its portrayal of the contortions upward striving can impose on
people eager to move up in class is cool, well-observed and often even touching
— especially in Farrell's confusions and eventual meltdown under guilty
pressure. The scale of this film is right for this excellent realist, much more
appropriate to his talents than the brawnier pictures
I think something similar might be said about Allen. A movie like Match Point worked because, despite the seriousness of its theme, it had the sheen of glamour about it — the fabulous country house, the upscale condo in town, its general air of luxe. You might not like its people, but you couldn't help but admire their lifestyles. "I want that," an inner voice kept crying, as if it were a TV commercial sound bite. Cassandra's Dream is much more tough-minded. And much less immediately appealing. I walked out of the screening, over a month ago, admiring it, but not deeply moved. Yet the movie has stayed with me as a lot of the more heralded year-end films have not. There was a time in his career when Allen's lurches toward seriousness seemed to a lot of people unearned. He himself satirized that take on those films as early as 1980's Stardust Memories. But he's over 70 now — difficult as that is for some of us to believe — and he has fully earned the right to address us in any voice he chooses. Here its volume is turned down low. But if you lean in a bit you can hear it saying intricate and interesting things about the way class, character and morality operate in a realistically rendered milieu that is new for him and, in the context of this movie moment, quite gripping for us.
Cineaste feature and
interview by Cynthia Lucia from Cineaste
magazine (excerpt)
In his latest film, Cassandra's Dream, Woody Allen
contemplates the nature of status—how it is gained, lost, and internalized with
consequences that cut to the very core of identity and self-esteem. This is not
a new theme for Allen—in fact it is arguably a central theme infusing almost
every one of his films since Annie Hall in 1977. Whether consciously or
subconsciously, Allen's characters seem continually to negotiate their
perceived positions as they formulate dreams, desires, and aspirations and as
they conduct their relationships. As his films work and re-work this
idea—whether in the context of comedy or drama, Allen invites us to ask whether
sincerity of emotion or action is possible in a world driven by collective
desires for material acquisition, approbation, and love, which itself is often
clouded or misguided. “Can love and desire function, free from perceptions of
status?” Allen seems to ask. He most explicitly addresses this question and its
ethical implications in
Though a less accomplished film than
Enter Uncle Howard, who offers the money to make Ian's American dream come true and to pay the enormous gambling debt Terry has accrued. Howard asks a simple favor in return: Terry and Ian must “get rid of” his business partner who threatens to expose Howard's financial misconduct. Trading on family loyalty and largesse, Howard makes an offer that the more ambitious Ian cannot refuse, while Terry remains reluctant, even though he's got the most to lose with loan sharks circling. So far, these plot elements could be played for laughs, as they are in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets over Broadway (1994), and Scoop (2006).
But there is no mistaking the serious tone and intent in the opening strains of Philip Glass's musical score—one of the few original scores for Allen, who uses existing jazz recordings, primarily, to accompany his films. From the start, the minimalist circularity of the score telegraphs the claustrophobic and ominous atmosphere even when characters sail on calm and open waters. The score gives too much away too early, draining potential nuance and ambiguity from the narrative and the visual frame. While Cassandra's Dream is most closely aligned in subject and tone with Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005), the jazz interwoven with a Shubert string quartet in the former, and the scratchy Verdi arias performed by Caruso interwoven with modern Verdi recordings in the latter work to create a subtle, textured, and unpredictable counterpoint with narrative and image. It is not until Terry's anxieties heighten leading up to the murder and he begins to unravel following the murder, that the music begins to earn its place in the narrative—particularly as Ian contemplates the only “available” option—murdering his own brother who threatens all that Ian potentially will gain.
The ironic twists that follow tap into themes of fate, chance, expediency, and morality so masterfully expressed in Crimes and Misdemeanors and later in Match Point. We are thrown for a moment into the chaotic and incomprehensible—a powerful glimmer of what Crimes and Misdemeanors was able to more fully sustain and contemplate. Although Cassandra's Dream is not the strongest or most compelling film in Allen's oeuvre, it nevertheless has its wonderfully astute, stylistically nuanced moments. The film is never better than when it sits us down at the family dinner table, the claustrophobic framing and mise-en-scene evoking a lived-in familiarity and carefully calibrated dynamic that dictates the roles and interactions as circumscribed by years of routine and “rehearsal.” And when Uncle Howard takes the family out to dinner, Allen captures the tiniest gesture and glance, speaking volumes about ambition, suppressed desires, insecurity, and false bravado. Cineaste spoke with Mr. Allen by telephone the day before the film's New York release, touching upon, most significantly, his concern that in a world where crime so often goes unpunished, the morality of the individual is our only hope.
The
House Next Door [Steven Boone]
The Village
Voice [Scott Foundas]
DVD Talk theatrical
[Jamie S. Rich]
Film Journal International (Chris Barsanti)
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Screen International Dan Fainaru at Venice from Screendaily
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
James
Berardinelli's ReelViews
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)
Reel.com
[Paul Brenner] also seen here: Filmcritic.com
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
FilmJerk.com
Review [Brian Orndorf] also seen
here: DVD Talk
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin
Chronicle [Josh Rosenblatt]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Crust)
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
Preserving
the template of previous Woody Allen movies, it is no secret that Woody can
steal from the best of them, including himself (!), as this attempts to
resurrect the romantic comedy magic of ANNIE HALL. Using a breezy energy that respects the pulse
of its players, it’s actually the first French film Woody Allen has always
wanted to make filling the screen with sensuous but superficial characters
that have intimate revelations and near inexhaustible bank accounts. Re-interpreting Alfonso Cuarón’s Y TU MAMA
TAMBIÈN and updating Eric Rohmer, we have an idyllic portrait of summer bliss
in
Continually
saturating the screen with works of art by Gaudi and Miro and an incessant
classical Spanish guitar soundtrack that strangely repeats itself to the rhythm
of the film with refrains from a dramatically hushed version of a song called
“Barcelona” by Giulia y Los Tellarini, the film is also bathed in golden pastoral
hues as the two girls and a guy venture through a series of idyllic rural
locations, permeated by a warm summer glow enhanced by the everflowing glasses
of Spanish wine. This kind of upper
class milieu has been fertile Woody Allen territory for years, but never
punctuated by the rambling pastoral landscapes more typically found in Eric
Rohmer romances. However in Rohmer
films, the earthy characters are reflective of the region and emblematic of the
pastoral French soil, but here the common theme is American superficiality on
display with an overblown appraisal of themselves, usually expressed through a
misguided notion that money and class status buys happiness along with the
accompanying snooty superiority, always taking themselves much too seriously
with little or no understanding of others, such as Cristina’s reluctance to
converse with Juan Antonio’s father, who only speaks Spanish. Enter Penélope Cruz as Bardem’s ex-wife,
whose exaggerated hysterics are priceless, causing Bardem to repeat to her at
least twenty times in the film to please “Speak English,” as she continually
rants in Spanish and has for years had a resolute refusal to speak
English. Her notion of being a drama
queen is put to the test in this movie as under Allen’s direction her hilarity
is her utter caricature of herself, yet she steals the film. Scarlett Johansson’s acting career has
suffered under Allen’s direction, as she appears gorgeously appealing but so
out of place and emptyheaded all the time, a confused American who brings with
her the baggage of immaturity and bad acting.
The screenplay attempts to grapple with this obvious oversight by
attributing artistic skills and abilities to her character that are too
preposterous to believe, as the audience continues to see her as that glamor
girl on the cover of People
magazine. She is simply out acted in
every scene, but since the theme of caricature runs throughout, she seems to be
playing a bad version of herself, but somehow the brooding, self-centered
pretentiousness of it all actually works here as it typifies the theme of
American superficiality. Rebecca Hall on
the other hand is impressive and a constant delight, especially her earlier
scenes where she sternly and appropriately fends of Juan Antonio with an
indignant aplomb. When she falls under
his spell, however, her dizzying mood swings questioning what she really wants
out of life are equally appealing, even as they are subjugated by the less than
believable storyline. Her husband
Doug? He’s like a dull, grown up yet
stupifyingly successful version of a now subservient and completely ass-wiping
Ferris Bueller. What’s there to think
about? The emphasis isn’t really on
explicit bedroom scenes or in providing laughs, but instead finds a beautiful
rhythm that delves into an intricate examination of the complex nature of
relationships. But of course, everything
begins and ends with the virtues and values found only in
Cannes
Dispatch: Part Three: Patrick
McGavin at Cannes from Stop Smiling
magazine (excerpt)
Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a larky,
agreeably bittersweet romantic and sexual roundelay that contains some of the
liveliness and funny, observant flair of Allen’s short fiction. Two stunningly
beautiful young American women, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, spending a
couple of summer months in Spain, are quickly drawn to a flamboyant and
handsome painter (Javier Bardem). The sexual intrigue and discrete maneuvering
occasions several funny and clever variations and reversals.
The story kicks into a higher gear with the arrival of Maria Elena (Penelope
Cruz), here wonderfully cast as Bardem’s former wife. She’s a beautiful,
demanding and deeply sensuous presence, a force of nature that further ruptures
the already fractious and fluid relationships. The texture and rhythms of the
city are no more persuasive than Allen’s London portraits in Scoop and Cassandra’s
Dream.
The blend of the puritanical and the contempt for some of the characters is
rather off-putting. Averaging a movie a year for four decades, Allen has
repeated himself of late. I’m not sure he is further capable of making a
sustained and brilliant work, something on the level of Manhattan or Hannah
and Her Sisters. The short story equivalent is more inviting, because Allen
is now better and funnier in miniature.
The material is partially saved by the jaunty style and the charisma of his
performers. It flight in the explosive, provocative exchanges, in Spanish,
between Bardem and Cruz. Their exchanges were wholly improvised on the set and
Allen is judicious enough to allow his ferociously gifted performers a free and
open reign.
My fantasy world is way cooler—and less offensive—than Woody
Allen's. You see, in mine Helen Mirren trips on stage after accepting her Best
Actress Oscar and her golden statuette whirls in fabulous slow motion until it
lands on a flabbergasted Penélope Cruz's lap. With that, at least one Oscar
goeth to its rightful place and the world is spared the inexplicable buzz Cruz
is getting for her insulting part in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Actually,
it's not that inexplicable: Maybe enough people have already caught on to the
tragedy of Cruz having lost the Oscar for her soulful performance in Volver and feel reparations are already
in order—but if that's the case and all this hubbub is in the interest of
justice, why not tout her superior performance in Elegy instead?
But I digress. What else is there to say about Vicky Cristina Barcelona or
Pan-Seared Misogyny in Hot-Blooded Balsamic Mediterranean Reduction that
hasn't already been said about nearly every other shoddy film Allen has made
this decade, from the director's absolutely contemptible views of female
behavior to the 10-dollar words that he scarily jams into the mouths of his
characters? Well, we could praise Rebecca Hall for trying her damndest
to sound as if her off-the-cuff psychobabbleisms are her own and not those of
some neurotic chauvinist who has succeeded in making—if we can consider this a
measure of success—what may be described as an Upper East Sider's version of Hostel, but the last thing Vicky Cristina
Barcelona needs is encouragement.
In Allen's latest, two suckups—marriage-bound Vicky (Hall) and aimless Cristina
(Scarlett Johansson)—travel to Barcelona for some reverse-slumming and fall
into the clutches of a butcher painter, Juan Antonio Gonzalez (Javier
Bardem), who always says what's on his mind—in the beginning, it's to whisk
them away for the weekend to bang them—and doesn't understand why Vicky thinks
he's a lothario if he's so honest. The jaded Vicky
understandably—interestingly, even—wonders if his no-bullshit shtick is itself
an act of bullshit, except the answer is a definite no, at least to Allen, who
paints every man in the film as a pillar of conviction while painting every
woman as a wishy-washy creature of discomfort who either doesn't know what she
wants, doesn't know what to do when she knows what she wants, doesn't know what
to do when she knows what she wants and knows it's not too late to do that
thing, or doesn't know what to do when she knows what she wants and she knows
it's already too late to do that thing.
And boy does Allen paint. Admittedly, some of this gaudy travel
porn's ideas are worthwhile—if not Juan's "speak English" hang-up,
which scans only as an inflated sign of his respect for Cristina (coming at the
expense of his ex-wife's sanity) and not as some kind of commentary on cultural
compromise or appropriation, then definitely the nexus-of-art-and-sexuality
thesis. Except Rohmer (La Collectionneuse), Truffaut (Jules and Jim), Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse)—hell, even Isabel Coixet
(Elegy)—have elaborated on such knottiness
more intuitively and without condescending to the audience as Allen does here,
most egregiously through the obnoxious narration (a play-by-play really) by
Christopher Evan Welch. Yeah, I don't know who he is either, which is possibly
meant to tie in somehow—maybe not at all—with the eye-rollingly full-of-itself
plot nugget about Juan's great poet father never having published a single work
in his life (thus abstaining from notoriety) because he's trying to punish the
world for its centuries-long inability to love. But how does one miss
what they never had?
Vicky Cristina Barcelona is basically the most arrogant film of the
year, an occasion for Allen to feign interest in challenging heteronormic
ideals when all he's doing is advancing a simplified view of female sexual agency,
hoping you won't notice because it all takes place in a Mediterranean locale
where the native woman—here represented by the suicidal Maria Elena (Cruz)—is
defined entirely by how loudly she blows her top. (Well, at least Allen is
generous enough to allow one woman here to know what she wants and act
on it.) So the film is multifaceted, but only in the sense that it works both
as a crass celebration of luxe, what with Allen's camera focusing only on
Barcelona's fanciest parts (the whole thing practically takes place on the roof
of La Pedrera, and even a trip down prostitute row suggests a stroll through
Madison Avenue), and as a reduction of the Mediterranean to a stock tempestuous
type who doesn't abstain from feeling. (Allen confuses stereotyping for
humanness.)
Then there's the ménage à trios between Cristina, Juan and Maria Elena, whose
formation could have been an occasion for Allen to offer genuine insight into
the paradoxes of sexual commitment, linking emotional effect to artistic
collaboration, but Allen is as flippant and vulgar about gay desire as Kate
Perry is. (Cristina's insincere longing for Maria Elena is just a phase, and
she flaunts it as she would a new dress.) Here, lesbianism is more litmus than
identity, for Johansson's Cristina is likened to some type of crucial veneer
that makes the more passionate (ay, ay, ay!) hues Maria Elena and Juan each
represent more beautiful (read: less hot to handle). Somewhere Gaudí is weeping
over this insulting trivialization of the Spanish romantic spirit.
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Bathed in light so lusciously golden and honeyed that you might be tempted to lick the screen, “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a rueful comedy about two young American women who, during a summertime European idyll, savor many of the Continental delicacies that such travelers often take pleasure in: art, music, culture, yes, but also strange bodies and unexpected dreams. These bodies and dreams open possibilities for the women, intimating freer, somehow different lives, despite the persistent tugging of a voice that hovers at the edge of this story trying to pull it and its characters down to earth, where desire can fade quickly.
That narration, which weaves in and out of the story
like a thread, is spoken by the actor Christopher Evan Welch, but more rightly
belongs to Woody Allen, the film’s writer and director.
Although “Vicky Cristina” trips along winningly, carried by the beauty of its
locations and stars — and all the gauzy romanticism those enchanted places and
people imply — it reverberates with implacable melancholy, a sense of loss. Mr.
Allen may be buoyed (like the rest of us) by his recent creative resurrection,
but this is still the same glum clown who, after the premiere of “Match Point,” his pitch-black, near
pitch-perfect 2005 drama, commented that cynicism was just an alternate
spelling of reality. Ah, life! Ah, Woody!
Ah, wilderness of a heart that knows what it wants even when the rest of the body does not! Sensible Vicky (Rebecca Hall) insists that she knows what she wants — her dull fiancé in New York, for one — while dreamy Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) does not. The two have traveled to Barcelona so that Vicky, who speaks little Spanish, can work on her masters in Catalan culture, while Cristina plays her foil, and we play virtual tourist amid the city’s Gaudí splendors. With the narrator setting the brisk, at times rushed, pace, the women move in with some acquaintances (Patricia Clarkson and Kevin Dunn), but their sentimental education doesn’t really begin until they meet one of Spain’s national treasures: Javier Bardem.
Mr. Bardem slithers into “Vicky Cristina” (and in that order) like a snake in the garden, wrapping himself around the two women with blissful, insinuating, sensuous ease. He’s the celebrated painter Juan Antonio, one of those artistic sybarites who attack both women and canvases with bold strokes. Eyes hooded, smile taunting, he invites the Americans to fly away for the weekend — a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, thou and thou — a proposition that inspires mockery from Vicky and girlish excitement in Cristina. Mr. Bardem, relieved of his ghoulish Prince Valiant bob from “No Country for Old Men,” invests the cliché of the Latin lover with so much humor and feeling that he quickly vanquishes the stereotype.
The same goes for Penélope Cruz, who plays a combustible Judy to Mr. Bardem’s smoldering Punch. As Maria Elena, Juan Antonio’s unstable former wife (an incident with a blade botched their happily ever after), Ms. Cruz has her own type to surmount, which she does with fire, smoke and comedy. With her artfully tousled hair and watchful eyes, Maria Elena is a classic screen siren (and totally crazy chick), but one with the pulse of a real woman. Ms. Cruz, slipping between Spanish and English (the latter was once a serious obstacle for her), does especially nice work with her voice, which seductively lowers and sometimes rises with animal intensity, suggesting a more variegated interior world than that provided by Mr. Allen’s writing.
Maria Elena and Juan Antonio give the film such a twinned jolt of energy that you may wish it would head off into Almodóvar country, but that wouldn’t be true to Mr. Allen, for whom desire remains an agony. Still, he’s enough of an entertainer to give the audience its pleasures, which partly accounts for Ms. Johansson. She isn’t much of an actress, but it doesn’t terribly matter in his films: She gives him succulent youth, and he cushions her with enough laughs to distract you from her lack of skill. The appealing Ms. Hall, whose jaw line and brittle delivery evoke Katharine Hepburn, furnishes an actual performance, one that, tinged with sadness, makes evident that this is as much a tragedy as a comedy.
There will always be an audience that hungers for a certain kind of Woody Allen movie, but it’s a relief that he has moved away from the safety and provincialism of his New York. Working in Britain for his previous three films and in Spain for this one has had a liberating effect, perhaps because it’s made it easier for him to step down as a leading man. He gave himself a sizable role in “Scoop,” but mostly he fluttered around Ms. Johansson, tossing off jokes. He was playing the fool rather than inhabiting one, as had become his custom in those films in which he clutched at much younger actresses with whom, like Fred Astaire after Ginger Rogers, he never found the right rhythm.
The characters in “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” by contrast, generally move fluidly — bopping and weaving, going here, pausing there — a looseness that works contrapuntally with the voice-over’s insistent forward drive. Delivered in novelistic third person, the narration allows Mr. Allen to dispense with large chunks of exposition, to fill in the narrative gaps, yet it also puts some aesthetic distance between him and his characters. The film feels personal — “Sentimental Education,” a touchstone here, is one of the things that makes life worth living, as he says in “Manhattan” — though not claustrophobic, another cloyingly needy dispatch from a ravenous id. What Mr. Allen says about life and disappointment still sounds very Woody, but these days he seems content to speak through his characters, not just for them.
The
House Next Door [Matt Noller]
pan Hollywood Elsewhere by Jeffery Wells
indieWIRE
review Michael Koresky from Reverse
Shot
The
Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Ruthless
Reviews review Matt Cale
PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
The Onion A.V. Club review Scott Tobias
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
Cinematical
(Kim Voynar) review
Richard Corliss at
Cannes from Time magazine
The
New Yorker (David Denby) review
DVD Talk
theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Vicky
Cristina Barcelona Mike Goodridge at
Cannes from Screendaily
filmcritic.com
(Chris Cabin) review [3/5]
The
New York Sun (Steve Dollar) review
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
Glenn Kenny at
Cannes from Some Came Running
FlickFilosopher.com
[MaryAnn Johanson]
Movies into
Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review also
reviewing IN SEARCH OF A MIDNIGHT KISS
Scarlett and
Penelope’s Kiss from Vicky Cristina Barcelona Christopher Campbell from SpoutBlog
10 Movies Sold on a Sex Scene Christopher Campbell from SpoutBlog
Cannes
2008 diary: 'Vicky Cristina Barcelona'
Dave Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London
Time
Out New York (Ben Kenigsberg) review [4/6]
Austin
Chronicle (Kimberley Jones) review [2.5/5]
The
Globe and Mail review [3/4] Rick
Groen
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
WHATEVER WORKS B 87
USA France
(92 mi) 2009
“Let me tell you right off, I’m not a likable guy.” —Boris Yellnikov (Larry David)
This film takes us back
to the early days of Woody Allen, where he was used to writing every line as a
joke, where a film was a release of rapid fire dialogue, usually from a central
character played by Woody himself, who spent the entire film bemoaning his own
personal fate using erudite language with such absurdity that at least
occasionally, it was hilarious. It turns
out this script was written by Allen some 30 years ago and was intended for
comedienne extraordinaire Zero Mostel, one of the biggest hams and scene
stealers to ever hit a stage. As fate
would have it, we just happened to be in Stratford, Ontario recently to
experience Stephen Sondheim’s musical tribute to Zero Mostel, A Funny Thing Happened
On the Way to the Forum (1962), a ridiculous drop dead hilarious burlesque
farce staged more like a Monty Python romp through history than musical
theater, but it was a relentless, laugh-a-minute crowd pleaser where one could
sense the omnipresent ghost of Zero Mostel from start to finish, a larger than
life presence. Unfortunately, this film
stays on more earthly grounds using misanthrope Larry David, writer and
co-creater of Seinfeld, as a guy who can’t shut up, Boris Yellnikov, whose vile
stream-of-conscious invective is so replete with insults hurled in every which
direction, it’s impossible for anyone not to be the target of attack. Most of his friends simply ignore it, but for
the uninitiated, it’s at least occasionally hilarious, as much of what he says
is ridiculously absurd, as he’s beyond being cynical, he simply thinks that
everyone else is a moron, sometimes staring straight into the camera and
reminding the viewers as well. When he
presents his worthlessness of existence worldview to others, especially
children, railing against their witless moves as he’s supposedly teaching them
the finer points of playing chess, all he’s really doing is calling them
stupid, usually in front of their parents, feeling not an ounce of remorse for
his unconscionable behavior. For pure
tastelessness, I loved it when he mentions kids go to all kinds of summer
camps, from tennis camp to acting camp to the Boy Scouts, but what he
recommends for kids wishing to discover the real ways of the world is sending
them to concentration camps, as there’s nothing quite like that blunt
exhibition of inhumanity.
The thrust of the story
is based on chance, as one day a homeless woman is sitting in front of his
doorstep asking for something to eat.
Against his better judgment, reminding her of various Three Penny Opera
scams that he’s onto designed to evoke sympathy, he agrees to allow her inside
for a total of 2 minutes. She turns out
to be Melody, Evan Rachel Wood with a Southern drawl, a remarkably naïve,
empty-headed character lost or discarded from a Tennessee Williams melodrama, as her every breath is a
life affirming dramatic event, claiming she won a prize playing Scarlett O’Hara
and a few local beauty contests in Mississippi as well. Boris loathes the wretched stereotypes in
Gone With the Wind, but finds something irresistible in this innocent flower of
the South who hasn’t a hurtful thought in her body, whose mere presence almost
makes him feel “happy,” though he’s 40 years her senior and could be her
grandfather. Two minutes turns into two
weeks, or two months, and eventually she has no plans to leave. The two are an unlikely match, but seem happy
with one another. By chance, her mother
knocks on the doorstep (to Beethoven’s opening notes from his 5th Symphony),
none other than Patricia Clarkson as Marietta, a devout religious believer who
assumes her daughter has been missing due to foul play, and gets down on her
knees to pray for her good fortune in finding her. She’s thrilled to find her daughter but finds
Boris a good-for-nothing snake who will do her daughter no good, and schemes to
find her someone else, eventually staying in
Unfortunately the film
wraps up in a neat little package of liberal “whatever works,” where religious
conservatism is replaced by sexual inhibition and a guy accepting his
homosexuality, two of the larger taboos from a religious fundamentalist
perspective. But rather than point any
fingers at any political view, Boris simply believes that everyone is a
hypocrite and a louse, and no good will come from anyone’s lame efforts to make
the world a better place, continually calling himself a “genius” because he was
once in the running for Nobel prize considerations in the field of quantum
physics. All of this is exaggerated
beyond credibility and belief, and loses its focus when it attempts to add this
extended family of additional eccentrics into the equation. This film had a good thing going with Boris
and Melody, two outlandishly unique individuals. The rest is more formulaic and predictable,
as Woody obviously never figured out how to pull all this together, or he was
downcast when Mostel got sick and either couldn’t or wouldn’t perform the role
(he died in 1977), so it sat on the shelf for 30 years, never allowing anyone
else to touch it. However, it must be
said, despite the tepid reviews by all-knowing film reviewers who don’t find
any humor in this film, forget about them.
This is one of the funniest Woody Allen movies in quite some time
because it’s not written for dramatic character development, but for pure,
unadulterated laughs. There are utterly
hysterical moments to this film that defy belief, and they’re told in a Gatling
gun style of neverending one-liners coming out of the irksome mouth of Boris
Yellnikov, aka Woody Allen’s alter ego, a man whose roots as a Borscht Belt
stand up comedian left him with plenty of comic material.
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Boris Yellnikoff,
the prolix geezer played by Larry David in Woody Allen’s “Whatever Works,” was
once a world-class physicist teaching string theory at Columbia. The only
string he strums now is misanthropy. “Let me tell you right off, I’m not a
likable guy,” Boris says straight to the camera. (That’s the first thing he
says in the trailer, which should get an award for truth in advertising.) He’s
a nihilist, a fatalist -- “on the whole we’re a failed species” -- and, deep in
the Woody grain, an anhedonist who can’t enjoy the extended pleasure of a young
woman’s company. (She’s Melody, a sweetly innocent runaway played by Evan
Rachel Wood.) Larry David’s role was originally written for the late Zero
Mostel, and the clear calculation was that the right actor would make Boris
borderline-lovable in spite of himself. Mr. David isn’t the right actor.
He can be an
amusing scold, and he’s certainly a master of the world-class narcissism that
makes “Curb Your Enthusiasm” a singular pleasure on TV. But he seems to be an
actor playing an actor. He shows none of the performance skills, or the
emotional variety, to sustain a feature film, so this new act wears thin -- and
turns creepy -- as Boris constantly berates his beautiful waif after taking her
in, and she, poor baby, buys into his love affair with doom. The story finally
comes around to a wry celebration of life that includes Melody’s eccentric
parents -- they’re played by Patricia Clarkson and Ed Begley Jr. -- and a
romantic young actor, Randy (Henry Cavill), who adores her. Still, the movie on
the whole is joyless. “Whatever Works” doesn’t.
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Casting the cynical miscreant Larry David in the new Woody
Allen film sounds like a throwback to Allen's nastier films of the late 1990s.
But surprisingly, David works like a louder, even more hopelessly neurotic
version of the beloved Allen character of the 1970s, and despite the negative
tenor of the dialogue, the film itself has a sweet quality. And indeed, the new
film Whatever Works echoes nothing less than Manhattan
(1979), with its mismatched, but truly adoring relationship between an uptight
forty-something and a pretty teenager. Best of all, Allen manages to sidestep
the usual Hollywood convention of "redeeming" his self-serving lead.
David plays Boris Yellnikoff, a curmudgeonly genius who was once up for a Nobel
prize and now teaches chess to "cretins" and "inchworms."
He walks with a lurching limp, the result of a failed suicide. He occasionally
gets together with friends to discuss the meaninglessness of the world. One
night a runaway waif, Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood, using a
darling little Mississippi accent) appears on his doorstep, begging for scraps
of food. Before long, she's living with him and they form an odd but touching
relationship, in which he teaches her things like despair and decay and she
listens eagerly. Things get a little wacky when Melodie's mother (Patricia
Clarkson) and father (Ed Begley Jr.) turn up; they're separated, but both
religious gun nuts, and New York manages to bring out untapped sides of their
personalities. Then Melodie has a crisis of conscience when she meets a
handsome actor. It's a minor Allen, especially coming after his masterpiece Vicky Cristina
Barcelona, and the results are mixed. But when David is in the driver's
seat, Whatever Works is a delightful blend of bitter and sweet.
Christian Science
Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
Woody Allen's "Annie Hall" was originally titled
"Anhedonia" – the inability to feel pleasure – and that title could
easily label most of his other movies, none more so than his latest,
"Whatever Works." While it would not be entirely correct to say that
the film's lead character, Boris Yellnikoff (Larry David), gets no pleasure
from life – he enjoys, for example, insulting people – it's close enough.
The law of diminishing returns is at work in "Whatever Works," which is like a compendium of a half-dozen earlier and better Allen movies. Since some of those movies, such as "Annie Hall" and "Hannah and Her Sisters," were very good, this is not altogether a bad thing. Still, about halfway through the intermittently amusing "Whatever Works," I began thinking, as I often do at middling Woody Allen movies, that he'd be a better film director if he made fewer movies. His one-a-year clip is admirable but also obsessional. When he doesn't have anything particularly new to say, he says it anyway. How many times can he put us through the same old misanthropic paces?
Boris is the generic Woody Allen stand-in. A former physics professor at Columbia whose high-end Upper West Side marriage crashed and burned, he now lives in a crummy downtown apartment and makes money teaching little kids how to play chess. (More accurately, true to his surname, he yells at his pupils for being stupid.) Boris once came close to winning a Nobel Prize, as he never lets anyone forget, and spins out his days and nights in perpetual panic attack mode. He also frequently breaks theatrical convention and speaks – that is to say, whines and grouses – directly to us. This dramatic device, used in other Allen movies, has its mite of justification here: Boris believes he can see what others can't.
His life changes when he reluctantly houses a homeless runaway, Melodie St. Ann Celestine (Evan Rachel Wood), who is so dumb she doesn't usually even comprehend when he is insulting her. Melodie, with her deep Southern drawl and cheerleader sunniness, plays the Chaplinesque waif to Boris's Scrooge. With squirmy predictability, she falls in love with Boris. Let it never be said that Woody Allen is an ageist.
Best known as the cocreator of "Seinfeld" and the creator-star of HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm," David is a funny guy with a very limited acting range. The pairing of Woody Allen and Larry David may seem like a perfect commingling of Jewish urban neurotics but it's perhaps too perfect. David doesn't really add anything new to the mix. I suppose it's better seeing David in the Woody Allen part rather than, say, Kenneth Branagh (in "Celebrity"), to cite the most egregious example. But there isn't enough distance between these two men's comic personas. Allen has stated that he originally wrote a draft of this film years ago as a vehicle for Zero Mostel. Now that might have been a wingding.
What makes "Whatever Works" work, however intermittently, is the graciousness and comic generosity of its supporting players. Wood manages the difficult art of making a stupid person seem angelic. As Melodie's mother, Patricia Clarkson is great fun. She begins the film as a Southern matriarch and ends up a real swinger, and it all makes perfect sense. This is Allen's point: Gay or straight, uptown or downtown, love is where you find it. Whatever works.
There's an element of special pleading in this message, not to mention a heavy dollop of sentimentality. Just when we thought Allen's anhedonia was bone-deep, he turns into Mr. Softy. But I suppose that, in the "indifferent" universe we keep hearing about in Allen's movies, a ray of sunshine is not such a bad thing after all. (Rated PG-13 for sexual situations, including dialogue, brief nude images, and thematic material.)
filmcritic.com
(Jesse Hassenger) review [3.5/5]
Since his underrated nineties streak, Woody Allen has
maintained his film-a-year pace with searching if erratic charm, pinballing
between the lightest of comedies and his darkest dramatic impulses, sometimes
within the same movie and often treading familiar paths. Whatever Works, which
finds Allen back in Manhattan after several films in Europe, ricochets between
any number of Woody touchstones: the philosophizing of Annie Hall, the misanthropy of Deconstructing Harry, the boyfriend as
curmudgeonly mentor as seen in Manhattan and elsewhere.
Its greatest kinship, though, may be with his largely forgotten 2003 film Anything Else, in which Jason Biggs played the
typical Allen neurotic, and Allen himself played the grumpy, unhinged mentor
figure. Whatever Works is a more successful variation on that film's
shoulder-shrugging philosophy, with the aging, limping, semi-suicidal
self-diagnosed genius in the lead, referring to his fellow humans -- especially
middle Americans and the religious -- as "morons,"
"inchworms," and "cretins," among others.
The chief variation, besides this character's upgrade to leading man: It's not
Allen who plays Boris Yellnikoff but Larry David, doing a scrappier, angrier
spin on the Woody standard. David's presence gives the script, which, like a
lot of recent Allen efforts, feels more like a rough draft, some jittery,
irritable bite. While Allen has played hostile characters in recent years, his
persona is so well-established that half the joke becomes the weird nerviness
of his aggression. David looks and acts a bit more like the kind of crank that
would send seventies Woody scurrying away to avoid confrontation, or, worse,
imitation, becoming "one of those guys who wanders into a cafeteria with a
shopping bag, screaming about socialism."
David's surrogacy frees the movie up; suddenly a Woody Allen-ish character can
walk around in shorts and an unkempt jacket, holler at children, and even live
in a rustic (if still cavernous) downtown apartment. Like the presence of cell
phones in Match Point, Whatever Works finds Allen inching
towards acknowledgment of the modern world, or at least his cranky lack of
interest in it. He finally shows his age not by appearing onscreen, but in
hiring still-sixtysomething David to romance a decades-younger girl in his
stead.
The girl in question is Melody St. Ann Augustine (Evan Rachel Wood), who turns
up destitute on Boris's doorstep and winds up sticking around, first as a
guest, then as sort of a platonic nursemaid to Boris's anxieties, and
eventually, however improbably, as his wife. (Allen may give voice to
blue-state rage, but he's not so liberal that he can abide a serious
relationship that doesn't end in marriage.) Melody is outfitted with a
cartoonish Southern naïveté -- she takes much of Boris's bile and sarcasm
literally, yet with wide-eyed good humor, and she's a quick study -- and the
gangly Wood embraces the role with cheer, flailing her arms around and rolling
her head as she speaks. She continues in the fine Woody Allen tradition of
actresses who get just as many laughs out of far fewer one-liners than our wisecracking
hero, through strength of behavior and delivery. (I particularly love Melody's
explanation of banter – "like flirty talk.")
As a study of a fleeting, unlikely, and fairly hilarious relationship between a
crank and goofy Southern belle, Whatever Works mostly does. Unfortunately, the
movie is padded out with far less interesting characters, the best of which is
Melody's religious mother (Patricia Clarkson), initially aghast over her
daughter's new lifestyle. The lesser characters seem to exist as ironic
punchlines, extra bodies for a nominal story of coupling and uncoupling. Add Vicky Cristina Barcelona to the list of
reference points.
It all turns out to be pretty good-natured, but in between one-liners and good
performances, Allen's narrative odds and ends feel perfunctory, even resigned;
Boris's opening monologues threaten to wrap the picture up before it even gets
going. Whatever works for Allen, it seems, is perpetual motion, even when he's
not sure where to go next.
Movies
into Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
Salon
(Stephanie Zacharek) review
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [4/5]
PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
DVD Talk -
Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Film Freak
Central review Ian Pugh
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Moving
Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn]
DVDTalk Theatrical
Review [Tyler Foster]
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Screen
International review David D’Arcy
Slant Magazine
review Henry Stewart
Monsters
and Critics Ron Wilkinson
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review
Emily S. Mendel and Beverly Berning
Black
Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
The
Hollywood Reporter review Frank
Scheck
Entertainment Weekly
review [C] Lisa Scwarzbaum
Variety
(Ronnie Scheib) review
Time
Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [2/6]
Boston
Globe review [2/4] Ty Burr
The Boston
Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin
Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
San
Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review [2/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York
Times (A.O. Scott) review
YOU WILL MEET A TALL DARK STRANGER
Geoff Andrew at
The latest film from Woody Allen
sees him back in London (well, Notting Hill, Bayswater, Maida Vale and other
select locations) with the usual dramatis personae of arty types
(novelists, gallery owners, painters, musicians, bookshop proprietors) and a
predictably philistine hooker. Screened in
Again there's a bit of voiceover stuck in to help us negotiate the narrative's
structural shortcomings, but at least most of the cast – Naomi Watts,
Josh
Brolin, Gemma
Jones, Anthony
Hopkins, Antonio
Banderas et al – do their best to inject some sort of emotional
authenticity into the endless contrivances and coincidences. Centred on two
problematic marriages, it's the usual roundelay of romantic longing,
frustration and folly with the characters falling inconveniently in love,
falling out with each other and falling flat on their faces through a mixture
of desire and delusion. The title alludes to the overall theme that it may be
wiser to place our faith in illusions rather than in a reality that
inevitably proves disappointing, a theme that provides the film's funniest
scenes in which Brolin's medic-turned-struggling writer argues with
once-suicidal mother-in-law Jones, now conveniently convinced of reincarnation
by clairvoyant Lucy Punch.
Still, despite a handful of good scenes (there are another couple between
You
Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger Allan
Hunter at Cannes
Love makes fools of everyone in You Will Meet A
Tall Dark Stranger, a typically wry, rueful ensemble piece from Woody Allen with a mellow
autumnal tone that veers more towards the dramatic than the comic. More
persuasive than some of Allen’s London-town ventures, it improves in the
telling as the failings and follies of the characters gradually reveal the
plaintive poignancy of their lives.
The material hardly breaks new ground for the prolific 74 year-old auteur, and suggests moderately healthy returns in those European territories where he remains a stalwart attraction alongside the traditional indifference in other parts of the world. A starry ensemble cast may add a smidgen of extra commercial appeal but there is nobody with the heat to make that a significant factor.
Propelled by an intrusive amount of voice-over narration, You Will Meet A Dark Stranger sets out its stall with a line from Macbeth encouraging us to anticipate a “tale of sound and fury signifying nothing”.
Love and death are the main themes as Allen introduces a series of characters and allows us to observe as the certainties of their lives are overturned and a new order is established.
The wealthy Alfie Shepridge (Anthony Hopkins) has left his wife of 40 years in a forlorn attempt to recapture his lost youth. His new life is defined by a fast car; a gym membership; sun beds and a befuddled infatuation with Charmaine (Lucy Punch), a vulgar, gormless blonde bimbo with the instincts of a shameless gold-digger.
Alfie’s increasingly eccentric wife Helena (Gemma Jones) is putting her faith in fortune-teller Cristal (Pauline Collins) and now accepts her wild predictions as gospel truth. The Shepridge’s daughter Sally (Naomi Watts) is married to Roy (Josh Brolin), a writer who has never fulfilled the promise of his first novel and is now struggling to complete his new magnum opus.
The roundelay of inappropriate relationships and cruel twists of fate provides some amusing moments as we reach the realisation that there is a tall, dark stranger that we are all destined to meet and that is the Grim Reaper.
Most of the comedy comes from the older generation.
His frequent declarations on the great genes in his family
are said more in wild hope than solid conviction. British veteran Gemma Jones
is also extremely engaging as
Some characters feel a little neglected in the larger sweep of the ensemble and there is no single performance that has the stand-out potential that brought Penelope Cruz an Oscar for her feisty turn in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Set in a sophisticated world of nights at the opera, picnics
in the park, art galleries and rollerblading along the Embankment, You Will
Meet A Dark Stranger seems less self-conscious about its
You Will Meet a Tall
Dark Stranger Patrick McGavin at Cannes May 15, 2010
Woody Allen continues to make a new movie every year, but over the past two decades or so, his work are best understood and appreciated not necessarily as individual units, but as variations of a series of overlapping and interconnected themes, stories and ideas.
His importance is not that of a great stylist, but a romantic
sophisticate whose best movies are imbued with an intelligence and verve. Ever
since “Match Point” five years ago inaugurated a new group of works shot
outside of the
He has become such a brand name, some of his late period works blur in the mind. Some of the plots and formal trappings are becoming a little familiar and overexposed; he finds an idea and repeats it, over and over, draining it of the necessary surprise or subtlety of expression. An Allen film is more distinctive by the sensibility and unmistakable imprint of its author.
His new comedy of manners, “You Will Meet a Tall Dark
Stranger,” is the fourth film he has set in
It is streaked with moments of intermittent laughs, colorful observations and a playful and open structure that allows some good actors to have fun with their parts. It never breaks through into the realm of something glorious, freewheeling and dangerous. It is a very becalming movie, funny, alert, well photographed and designed.
The drama is inert and musty, even occasionally frozen.
Allen’s most underrated talent is the carpentry of his screenplays. Typically the stories are enlivened by the novelistic and fluid structures employing his sharp gifts for creative exposition, in the manner of third-person narrators, flashbacks and remembered tales.
The new movie opens, like “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” with a narrator (abusing somewhat) Macbeth’s soliloquy (in the aftermath of his wife’s death) about a “sound and fury,” signifying “nothing.”
“Stranger” uses the rupture of a long-term marriage between Alfie (Anthony Hopkins) and Helen (Gemma Jones) as the jumping off point for its fresco entwining a group of characters and couples undone by sexual temptation, career disappointment and romantic drift. Alfie becomes obsessed with forestalling aging and turns to exercise to kick start his rejuvenation, effectively kicking his faithful and adoring wife to the curb. Devastated by her husband’s abandonment, she turns to a local mystic, or fortuneteller, for personal advice.
Their daughter, Sally (Naomi Watts), is an art curator blessed with excellent feel for new and emerging talents. To the great chagrin of her mother, Sally’s stuck in her own quagmire. Her marriage to handsome and engaging Roy (Josh Brolin) undermined by his financial irresponsibility and delusions of grandeur. He gave up a promising medical career to publish novels. After a fluke first novel, he’s haunted by crippling writer’s block and has been piling up rejection notices from publishing houses on the novel he is currently involved.
Both are soon tempted by the elaborately constructed fantasy
models:
The film has pleasant and smoothly designed surface. It is
largely a
Despite the lack of emotional authenticity or creative
stylization, the movie is not without interest.
The plot involving
Likewise,
Allen compensates with some very clever plot machinations in the movie’s second half. That mitigates some of the weaker or insufficient characterizations. Too often the movie feels like an in-between work, stripped of the polish and fluency of “Vicky Christina Barcelona” or the volcanic seediness and desperation of “Cassandra’s Dream.”
Too many of the characters are either ciphers, like
CANNES
REVIEW | Leaving New York Again, Woody Allen Does Fine with “Stranger” Eric Kohn at
Cannes:
Woody Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" Andrew O’Hehir at
Cannes
Review: "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" Anthony Kaufman at Cannes May 16, 2010
Woody
Allen on Death: "I'm Strongly Against It" Julian Sancton at Cannes May
15, 2010
Cannes '10: Day
Four Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes
2010. Woody Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" David Hudson at Cannes May 15, 2010
David Bourgeois at Cannes May 15, 2010
Julian Sancton at
Robert E Lauder Interview with Allen from Commonweal,
"Woody's Cold Comforts" Robert E. Lauder’s comments after the
interview, from Commonweal, April 23,
2010
Kirk Honeycutt at
Cannes
'10 Day 4: Mad (at) Money Wesley
Morris at
Cannes
2010, Day 4: Mike Leigh and Woody Allen, Bittersweet Darlings of the Croisette Mike Phillips at
What’s a Woody Allen
movie without wall to wall jazz music, this time by Cole Porter and Sydney
Bechet? This aspect of his filmmaking
since the 1980’s remains utterly unchangeable, as certain as there is film in
the camera, which adds to a peculiar similarity in all his films. Can you imagine Bergman or Kubrick repeatedly
using the exact same style of music in their films, and for decades on
end? This would be preposterous, as
cinema is about seeking new challenges, not treading over the same
material. Unfortunately, with Allen, for
decades now he has continued to make sophisticated comedies about the bourgeois
rich upper class, attempting to blend a myriad of different character
development into this examination of cultural snobbery, but let’s face it, they
all feel pretty much alike. So lately,
instead of writing new storylines, he’s shifted his locations from
Allen was much better
when he was writing about young lovers who were infatuated as much with the
idea of love as each other, where the blossoming spirit of youth was
infectious, where his humor was accompanied by a parade of personal anxieties
about sex and commitment that were as revelatory as it was charming. But in middle age, he has grown tired of the
world around him, which barely interests him any more, surrounded by characters
that hold little interest to movie audiences .
This, oddly enough, is the preface for his latest film, a rich and
glamorous Hollywood couple, Rachel McAdams and Owen Wilson as Inez and Gil, in
Paris accompanying her boringly rich parents on a trip, each approaching the
idea of Paris in separate ways. While
they are engaged to be married, their future is uncertain, as he’s tired of
writing successful movie screenplays, as he believes the economic security of
living in lavish comfort is preventing him from writing a more challenging
novel, while she is just waiting for him to give up on his dreams and accept
the fact that he’s a fabulously successful movie writer. While in
Gil’s curiosity leads
him into a treasure trove of his imagination, where an illuminated Paris of the
20’s mysteriously comes alive before his eyes, where he’s swept off his feet by
F. Scott Fitzgerald and his manic wife Zelda, meeting a dour Hemingway who’s
constantly talking about death and bravery, who introduces him to Picasso and
Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), who’s willing to take a look at his latest
manuscript. Despite wearing modern era
clothes and being somewhat befuddled at how he got there, Gil is immediately
accepted into this inner circle of artists, including the shared mistress of
both Picasso and Hemingway, Marion Cotillard as Adriana, someone who shares his
fondness for the past. With Adriana as
his guide, so to speak, his tour of the iconic Parisian nightclubs of the 20’s
has him sharing drinks at the same table as Salvador Dali, sensationally played
by Adrien Brody, a man who invites Buñuel and Man Ray to his table only to
revel in his personal obsession with himself and, of course, the recurring
image of a rhinoceros. Each night as he
returns back to the hotel, Inez has little use for what she finds to be his
monotonous adolescent excursions, continuing to re-live the fantasies of his
youth, just wondering when he’ll wake up and become an adult. This nod to yesteryear is cleverly handled,
with all too brief appearances by some of the century’s greatest artists, where
the present day era is suffocatingly boring in comparison, offering current
traveling companions that simply reek of vanity and global indifference. From start to finish, the sumptuous
cinematography by Darius Khondji is glowingly luminous, where the opening
montage of Paris is scintillating, capturing an unending landscape of
mesmerizing Parisian allure. While this
does have a rapturous beauty as we glamorize the past in rhapsodic, dreamlike
reverie, this is something of an idyllic, picture post card view of life, never
really tackling any of the important issues of this or any other era, feeling
instead like Allen is namedropping his way through art history.
Foundas On Film: Cannes
begins with “Midnight” Scott Foundas
from Film Comment,
Film festival opening night films are famously cursed objects, less often chosen for their artistic merits than for their ability to placate—or at least not offend—the opening-night constituency of politicians, bureaucrats and important benefactors who rarely resurface over the ensuing days, thereby allowing the festival to get on with the business of being a festival. Some other times, the film in question is simply the only one that was willing to pick up the tab for the opening night party. But if such curses exist to be broken, then Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, which tonight opens the 64th Cannes Film Festival, is the enchanted object that lifts the spell.
Shot on location, Allen's film unfolds in a magical City of Lights where anything can happen, including, for the movie's Hollywood screenwriter protagonist (Owen Wilson), a journey back in time to the storied Paris of the 1920s, where American ex-pats like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald gather at the salon of Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), Cole Porter tickles the ivories at a party for Jean Cocteau, and the city abounds with beautiful muses (like one played by Marion Cotillard) who seem to have alighted from Mount Olympus itself. What follows is a comic and highly personal meditation on the idea of nostalgia—the certainty of so many writers, artists and intellectuals that life was better at the other end of the telescope—coming from a filmmaker, now himself something of an ex-pat, who has often seemed more comfortable referencing the past than coping with the present.
At 75, and clearly as capable of making a great film as an instantly
forgettable one, Allen has, I think, delivered one of his masterpieces—a movie
about the romantic pull of yesteryear that ends up, most unexpectedly and
movingly, as an eloquent defense of today. Of the film, Kent Jones has more
to say in the new issue of Film Comment, including an extended
conversation with the director. Before leaving for
Review: Midnight In Paris Dave Calhoun at Cannes London May 11, 2011
Tides rise and fall, planets spin on
their axes and each new year brings with it a fresh film by Woody Allen.
Maybe fresh isn’t the right word. Artistic crises, monied folk, metropolitan
settings, romantic hiccups, women holding back men, or vice versa – we know
what to expect from Allen, who turned 75 last year. The biggest surprise these
days is where the director of ‘Annie Hall’ and ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ will
take his travelling company next.
For ‘Midnight in Paris’, he opts for the French capital
for the second time after ‘Everyone Says I Love You’, mostly today but also
with some mischievous hops to the city in the 1920s and the 1890s. It’s a
simple, amusing moral tale with the odd hint of Allen’s comic anarchism of old.
It’s familiar, but breezily so, and the cast appear much more at ease than in
Allen’s recent ‘You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger’. Owen Wilson
especially makes a charming, laidback Allen alter ego.
‘Midnight in Paris’ is a love letter to a city and,
like ‘Manhattan’ before it, opens with an adoring montage, set to jazz, of the
city by day and night. As in so many of Allen’s films, our troubled hero is a
writer: Gil (
It’s on those journeys into the city that he finds himself,
by way of hitching a lift in a classic Peugeot, in a Paris of another age,
mixing in the 1920s with the likes of Scott Fitzgerald (Tom
Hiddleston), Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody)
and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). It sounds crazy, but the boldness of Gil’s
late-night trips to the past give ‘Midnight in Paris’ a great lift out of the
more tired arena of Gil’s romantic and creative crises in the present. Allen
and his cast get the tone right, the actors playing the historical characters
with a spirited comic energy and
There are ideas afoot about idolising past cultural
figures and falsely imagining golden ages, but Gil’s line ‘I’m having an
insight now, it’s a minor one’ probably best sums up the film’s simple but
honest vision. Mostly it works as a comedy because director and cast seem to be
on the same page and Allen aims for surprise and amusement rather than anything
more heady. In style and theme, it’s recognisable but not tired and the film’s
lightly-played time-travelling element gives ‘
Cannes
film festival review: Midnight in Paris | Film | guardian.co.uk Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 11, 2011
From this movie's opening postcard-view montage of Paris —
familiar in a number of ways — it's clear the French capital is to be added to
the list of cities that Woody Allen adores, and idolises all out of proportion. His
new movie was an amiable amuse-bouche to begin the
Once again, Allen finds himself in a luxury-tourist European destination, whose interiors he somehow manages to bathe in a soft golden-yellowy glow, like that which might suffuse the lobby of a five-star hotel. As so often, the film features a lead character who should really be played by the director as a younger man, though perhaps Allen intends his movie's main theme — the fallacy of nostalgia — to be targeted at those critics who worry that his films aren't any good any more.
Owen Wilson is Gil, a
wealthy
These great figures from the past — Gil doesn't meet any
non-legends in his time-travel — cause him to fluster and squeak with
excitement, though
It could be that Allen is satirising not just necrophiliac pining
for the past but a kind of "history tourism" and "culture
tourism" to go with the literal tourism described in the movie. Or it
could just be that Allen is hopelessly in thrall to precisely this glib tourist
view of
Midnight
In Paris Mark Adams at
Woody Allen’s lush and charming Midnight It Paris is an amusing and
elegantly constructed love letter to
Its breezy and accessible structure, easy laughs and strong
mainstream cast should help the film secure strong box office and generally
positive reviews, and it looks likely it will be one of Woody Allen’s stronger
performers. On a certain level it is a familiar Allen concoction of smart
urbane laughs that lacks real intellectual depth, but Midnight In Paris
delivers easy warmth and is a sweetly engaging
Woody Allen has gone on record stating that he considers Paris as the equal to New York as the greatest city of the world (despite flirting with London and Barcelona in recent films) and certainly the opening scenes of Midnight In Paris are reminiscent to Allen’s 1978 classic Manhattan with its lush montage of shots of Paris in sunshine and rain set against a jazz classic.
Inez is less enthused about
Gil sees the pompous Paul as an annoying stuffed-shirt, and
starts doing all he can to avoid spending time with them all. After an
evening’s wine-tasting (Paul is also apparently an expert on French wine) Gil
leaves them when they all go dancing and wanders slightly drunkenly around
As the clock strikes
From then on Gil uses the excuse of late night Parisian walks to re-enter this wonderful world populated with his favourite literary and cultural figures. Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) offers to read his manuscript, and while at her flat he meets the beautiful Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who has been the lover and muse to a series of artists (including Picasso, Modigliani and Braque).
In another amusingly charming interlude - after he and Adriana have wondered the city - he has a drink with Salvador Dali (Adrien Brody in a cameo), filmmaker Luis Bunuel and photographer Man Ray.
Gil finally plucks up courage to declare his love to Adriana
though to his - and her - surprise they are approached by a horse-drawn landau
and find themselves in
Woody Allen’s film is very much about romantic attachments to different era - and how the past always seems much more exciting than the moment one lives in - which allows for plenty of amusing and smartly written scenes. It does also get a little wearing as Gil bumps into one famous figure after another.
But Woody Allen has a smart wit, and keeps things nicely paced and amusing and in Owen Wilson has found someone at ease with his flowing dialogue, even delivering the usual Allen lines about fear of death with genial ease.
Marion Cotillard looks terrific in her 1920s dresses, though is
actually given little to do apart from act the romantic muse to the mildly
neurotic Gil, while the ever-excellent Rachel McAdams (who starred alongside
Michael Sheen nails the intellectual pedant role with ease - he is an easy mixture of smarm and charm - and has a nice scene where he argues with a tour guide (France’s first lady Carla Bruni) at the Rodin Museum about Rodin’s wife, while also impressive (and building his reputation nicely) is Tom Hiddleston as Scott Fitzgerald.
To a certain degree the film is the perfect Woody Allen rom-com
concoction (and in truth would have worked just as easily as a concept in
Life is a Dream -
Film Comment Kent Jones, May/June
2011, which includes an interview, Interview:
Woody Allen - Film Comment
Dreams giving way to realities that fan and spiral into new
dreams, spells cast and lifted, beliefs dismantled, expectations realigned. As
Woody Allen has followed his impulses and insights and desires and inspirations
through six decades and over 40 films, he has charted the terrain of
consciousness as it projects and rejects and shatters and reassembles, erecting
structures that seem rock solid only to watch them crumble, and repeating the
exercise. It’s fascinating to look back on so many films and see the psychic
mechanism explored from so many angles. Sometimes a character goes looking to
solve one problem and opens the door to another, bigger one, as
On many occasions, the spell is cast on the audience, summoned by
the director or the characters or both. “This girl singing used to be a
favorite at my house,” narrates Allen at the beginning of Radio Days
(87), “one of many. Now it’s all gone. Except for the memories. The scene is
Rockaway. The time is my childhood.” Allen always makes us aware of the
transitory, only to feel the poignancy of the spell that much more keenly.
Rowlands’s
The opening montage of Midnight in Paris is bound to
elicit comparisons with the glorious city-symphony in miniature of
We are in a five-star
Part of the beauty of Allen’s forays into the uncanny is that they’re left playfully unexplained. When Jeff Daniels steps down from the movie screen, when the inventor’s magic lantern starts projecting phantom images of desire into the midsummer night, when Alice has an herbally enhanced visitation from her dead lover, we’re left in the same gray area that Kubrick entered when Jack Nicholson was let out of the dry-goods closet in The Shining, or that Bergman visited when Erland Josephson temporarily transported Fanny and Alexander back to their room in the director’s magnum opus. We’re allowed to experience the flights in which imagination and yearning provoke and project us without waiting for the hammer of reason to fall, so the question of whether we’re watching, say, a movie about a woman escaping from a humdrum life and an oppressive husband or a man who wanders out of the cinema and into reality is rendered happily moot. These supernatural transformations and visions are all of a piece with that signature moment by the 59th Street Bridge in Manhattan or Josh Brolin pining for the girl across the courtyard in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (10) or the disappearance of the old lady next door, as if on cue to inject some adventure into Woody and Diane’s marriage, in Manhattan Murder Mystery (93). Magic comes in all shapes and sizes.
Sometimes it seems as if Allen has explored every shade of
longing in Western man—for deliverance from the disappointments of the present,
for transport to another more fulfilling realm, for solace from the drudgeries
of shared existence, for recovery of the past, for consummation of love, for a
little bit of luck. And he’s looked at them in every register: playful (Alice,
90; A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, 82; Manhattan Murder Mystery),
tough as nails (Husbands and Wives, 92), sardonic (Match Point,
05; Tall Dark Stranger), celebratory in the face of obsolescence (Radio
Days, Broadway Danny Rose, 84), autumnal (Another Woman), or
a musically modulated combination thereof (Manhattan, Hannah and Her
Sisters, 86; Crimes and Misdemeanors, 89). In Midnight in Paris,
Owen Wilson’s Gil harbors complaints that will be familiar to anyone who knows
Allen’s work. He looks disdainfully on his success as a screenwriter and pins
all his hopes on his novel about the proprietor of a nostalgia shop; he regrets
the fact that he missed an opportunity to live in
At this point, it must be said that Owen Wilson brings something
new to Allen’s universe. On a purely technical level, unlike Kenneth Branagh in
Celebrity (98) or Edward Norton in Everyone Says I Love You (96),
he makes Allen’s overlapping dialogue his own, slowing the rhythm down to the
speed of his own plaintive yearning. And unlike many more Allen heroes (most of
them played by Allen himself),
Gil’s voice of sympathetic encouragement comes collectively from his artistic heroes. Hemingway and Fitzgerald treat him as equals. Dalí buys him a bottle of red wine, compares his sad eyes to those of a rhinoceros and introduces him to Buñuel and Man Ray (when the photographer readily accepts the idea of a man from the future fleeing to the past, Gil remarks, “I know, but you’re surrealists…”). Gertrude Stein makes encouraging comments about his novel. And he feels free to be supportive in turn. He assures Zelda that Scott really does love her (“Believe me, I know…”) and suggests a story to a perplexed Buñuel about guests who arrive for a dinner party and can’t leave (“But why can’t they leave? I don’t understand.”). And in his perfectly realized sympathetic universe, where the enveloping warmth and color of contemporary painting on the one hand and fellow feeling on the other are constant (thanks to Darius Khondji, they don’t settle over the action but breathe their way into it), he meets a woman named Adriana, sometime mistress of Modigliani, Braque, and Picasso (“You take ‘art groupie’ to a whole new level”), played by Marion Cotillard at her most enchanting. It’s Allen’s musical lightness of touch, his most underrated asset as an artist, that keeps these forays into the past aloft. Gallons of ink have been and will continue to be spilled about one-liners and comic “conceits” and Bergman influences and “literary” ironies and so on, and perhaps never enough about the delicacy with which Gil’s midnight excursions, or Cotillard’s evanescent charms within them, come and go with the graceful flow of this wise and lovely film, one of Allen’s most personal and most beautiful.
Speaking of bygone moments, there were years when we would all line up for the new Woody Allen movie the day it came out, and when those characters with their familiar habits and dilemmas and speech patterns and haunts seemed like family to us. Then some of us learned that we loved him too much, that like his hero Bergman he was clinging to shopworn notions of artistic excellence, that his New York was a careful construction, that intellectuals didn’t really talk that way, and so on and on and on—more dreams of young cinephiles with their reflexive distrust of the popular, their addiction to moralistic dismissals, their cultivation of the novel position at the expense of all else. And of course that’s all gone now too, as gone as the heyday of radio. First-run movies no longer open on 59th and 3rd, The New York Times (where Allen had a champion in Vincent Canby) is no longer the first and last word for every movie, the idea of New York that Allen celebrated has dissolved in the light of a less vibrant and more tourist-friendly city, and Allen has in some ways reinvented himself as a transcontinental filmmaker. Now, unencumbered by both extravagant worship and furious reproach, Allen’s films speak differently. To me, their preoccupations with grace, luck, and magic seem to align with the hidden longings of most of the people I know, their broad strokes seem all of a piece with their tonic simplicity and directness, and their gossamer touch is as bracing as their frankness about denial, rationalization, and the moral luck of the draw.
They’re also very funny.
Midnight
in Paris, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ... Joe Morganstern from The Wall Street Journal
Midnight
in Paris | Film Review | Slant Magazine
Ed Gonzalez, also seen here: Slant
Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]
Movie
Review: 'Midnight in Paris' Is A ... - New York Observer Rex Reed
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
David
Edelstein on 'Midnight in Paris' -- New York Magazine Movie ...
Cannes
2011 Review: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris | Film School ... Simon Gallagher at
Midnight in Paris reviewed: Owen Wilson
is a charming ... - Slate Dana
Stevens
Midnight
in Paris - Film Freak Central Ian
Pugh
Midnight
in Paris - Reelviews Movie Reviews
James Bernardinelli
Midnight
in Paris: movie review - CSMonitor.com
Peter Rainer
Living
in Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
FilmFracture: What's
Your Time Worth? [Kristen Sales]
CANNES
REVIEW: Woody Allen Returns to Form -- For Real This Time -- With Midnight in
Paris Stephanie Zacharek at
Cannes
Film Festival 2011: Day One – Midnight in Paris, Bellflower, and Sleeping
Beauty Glenn Heath Jr at Cannes from
The House Next Door, May 11, 2011, also seen here: The
House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
CANNES
REVIEW | “Midnight in Paris” is Enjoyable, but Another Typical Woody Allen
Story Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Midnight in
Paris | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club
Keith Phipps
Moving
Pictures Magazine [Aaron Hills]
Monsters
and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Obsessed
With Film [Matt Holmes]
We Got
This Covered [James Powell]
Jeffrey
M. Anderson: Review: Midnight in Paris
Cannes 2011. Relax and Take Note:
Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris"
Daniel Kasman at
Daily
Film Dose [Blair Stewart]
Boxoffice
Magazine [Pete Hammond]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Jewish Daily Forward
[Dorri Olds]
Review:
Owen Wilson kicks off Cannes in style in Woody Allens - HitFix Drew McWeeny at
'Midnight
in Paris' but Cannes has just begun
Barbara Scharres at
Cannes
’11, day one: Woody Allen and naked self-victimization Mike D’Angelo at
Guy Lodge at
John Lopez Vanity Fair,
Midnight in Paris (2011) Brad Brevet at
Alex Billington at
Midnight in Paris Emanuel Levy
Cannes
2011 – Opening Domenico La Porta at
Melissa Anderson on day one
of the 64th Cannes Film Festival ArtForum, May 11, 2011
Digital
Spy [Simon Reynolds - Cannes 2011]
Cannes
2011. Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris" David Hudson from Mubi, May 11, 2011
Woody
Allen Discusses His New Film Midnight in Paris, Hemingway, Magic Tricks and How
the Yankees Are 'Specks of Light in an Eternal Void' Scott Foundas interview from The Village Voice, May 11, 2011
Woody
Allen's 'Midnight in Paris': Cannes Review
Todd McCarthy at Cannes Hollywood Reporter, May 11, 2011
First
Night: Midnight In Paris, Cannes ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab at
In
the court of Carla Bruni Shahesta
Shaitly from The Observer,
Woody
Allen: the American tourist who works best abroad Andrew Pulver at Cannes from The Guardian, May 11, 2011
Woody
Allen at Cannes: 'I'm no artist' | Film | guardian.co.uk Charlotte Higgins at
Sukhdev Sandhu at
'Midnight
in Paris' review: past perfect Mick
LaSalle from The SF Chronicle
'Midnight
in Paris': Review - latimes.com
Kenneth Turan
Michael Phillips at
Starry
midnight in Paris - Roger Ebert's Journal
Van Gogh-style movie poster
Midnight
in Paris :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
Movie
Review - 'Midnight in Paris' - 'Midnight in Paris,' by Woody ... A.O. Scott from The
Critic’s
Notebook: Paris (and Cannes) in the Spring, Through Woody Allen’s Eyes Manohla Dargis at Cannes May
13, 2011
This
Germ of an Idea Calls for an Antibiotic Woody Allen from The New York Times, May 5, 2011
TO ROME WITH LOVE B 84
USA Italy
Spain (102 mi) 2012
With age comes exhaustion. —John (Alec Baldwin)
One thing can be said
for Woody Allen movies—his actors have to know how to deliver dialogue, as words
remain the heart and soul of his films, still not that far removed from where
it all began as a stand-up comic in the Borscht belt of upstate
More than anything
else, this movie appears to be about superficialities and the illusion of
happiness, much of it questioning the phoniness of Allen himself, where the use
of Alec Baldwin as a Jiminy Cricket ghost of the male conscious is a strike of
the sublime, as he initially appears to be real, supposedly a highly successful
American architect who got ridiculously wealthy selling out his artistic vision
and designing shopping malls. When he
meets the young Allen stand-in character, Jesse Eisenberg as a young American
studying architecture in
To the opening big band
sound of Domenico Modugno singing “Volare,” the audience gets another postcard
view of a modern European city that represents the cradle of civilization,
where the gorgeous 35 mm cinematography by Darius Khondji perfectly captures
the sunny grandeur of
Perhaps the most
ridiculous storyline is the return of Roberto Benigni, an ordinary clerk whose
typical dreary married life is interrupted when he suddenly finds himself as
the center of attention of hounding paparazzi who think he’s a famous actor,
picked up by a limousine, whisked away to a spacious office on a studio lot,
where a curvaceous secretary supplies his every need. With neverending television cameras stuck in
his face while he’s shaving or showering, this is the illusion of celebrity,
believing Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp have all the luck, where he is asked the
most inane questions. All the attention
turns him into someone else he barely recognizes, where he eventually yearns to
be back to his simple and ordinary life again.
While the introduction of each intersecting storyline initially brings
an instant rush of exhilaration, the film runs out of gas by the end as Allen
only understands the initial concepts for a joke, and not really as a
story. The lack of an ending is quite
noticeable, especially considering how well the material works initially, but
none of the segments end well with an apparent return to reality, which couldn’t
be more boring compared to all the props and attention paid to creating such a
hyped up illusion. While an Allen film
remains uniquely grounded in dialogue, despite all the attention to
philosophizing and love, it’s quite apparent by the end that these characters
have served the director’s purpose and have little more to say to one
another. It’s surprising how shallow it
all feels afterwards, almost as an afterthought, where even the orchestrated
Italian music feels generic and overused by the end, leaving no emotional
connection whatsoever. It’s interesting
that Allen is utilizing so much fantasy this late in his career, particularly
in his last two films, where time traveling and an invisible male (middle-age
Allen) conscious are unique choices in expanding the breadth of characters, but
this film only touches the surface of Rome or Italian movies, which is exactly
what his last film did with his nostalgic tribute to Paris in its artistic
heyday.
Director Woody Allen has perfected the art of banging out a new
film every year. Yet, considering his canon, and that pace, it's hard to
imagine what new ideas he could possibly have rattling around in his head.
Continuing his filmic adoration of Europe, To Rome With Love also marks
his return in front of the camera. Yet while he's never dull as a performer, or
short on vision as a director, the script for To Rome With Love feels a
great deal like Laurel and Hardy, if Laurel and Hardy had been fed a diet of
Samuel Beckett and How I Met Your Mother.
To Rome With Love features an all-star ensemble cast portraying
characters searching for importance, yet still finding life rather unsatisfying.
Allen plays a retired librettist who thinks he's discovered the next Pavarotti.
Jesse Eisenberg plays a young architect falling for the con-artist charms of
Ellen Page, much to the suspicion of his wife, Greta Gerwig, and the
curmudgeonly chagrin of mentor Alec Baldwin. Alessandro Tiberi is a small-town
newlywed who must pretend prostitute Penelope Cruz is his bride in front of his
conservative relatives. And Roberto Benigni plays the Kim Kardashian of the
story, who becomes famous for no reason.
Set against the backdrop of a balmy summer at the Trevi Fountain, the Coliseum
and the Spanish Steps, this urban fairy tale attempts to be a lurid brouhaha in
a baroque extravaganza of charms, manners and absurdity. But good luck trying
to revel in each manipulated plot device or neurotic, self-involved character.
There are a few clap-happy moments: Allen's operatic ingénue performs in
Pagliacci, in a makeshift shower stall, loofahing his body during the high
notes; Benigni drops his pants in the middle of the street after his infamy
wanes; and Penelope Cruz, well, she steals every scene she's in.
But what is truly troubling here is how Allen writes women. Alessandra
Mastronardi plays Tiberi's doting bride, yet she has no problem cheating on him
not once, but twice in a mere 24 hours. Page is a conniving actress who
purposefully seduces her best friend's husband. Best friend Gerwig plays the
ignoramus and fool throughout.
Women bed-hop with the suddenly famous Benigni as if they were changing a brand
of cereal. And Cruz, who has of course slept with every man at a garden party,
coerces Tiberi under the guise of showing him "a trick or two," but
it lands on the wrong side of consent. Is this supposed to be a comedic lampoon
of Italian love triangles or is Allen still working out his women issues,
post-Mia Farrow?
Performances by Benigni and Baldwin are particularly pitch-perfect, but these
don't outshine the fact that Woody Allen is flippin' the bird to all of
Hollywood by creating such a hot mess and getting away with it. Usually when
I'm this unmoved it's easy to move on. However, in the case of To Rome With
Love, just as in Waiting For Godot, no one moves.
New
York Magazine [David Edelstein]
At times it looked as likely as squeezing blood from a stone, but Woody Allen’s creative juices can still flow—and flow freely, without fussiness or solemnity, as in his wonderfully buoyant, overlapping omnibus comedy To Rome With Love. At 76, he’s working compulsively fast, death ever closer on his heels, and cutting through the inessentials, flouting naturalism and following his always-great absurdist instincts to their illogical (but resonant) ends. He portrays Rome as a city of roundabouts, from the traffic circle that opens the film to the Coliseum to the piazzas with their seemingly endless points of entry. It’s a city that’s ancient and sublime and yet farce is intrinsic to it. And it’s the perfect stage for Allen’s peculiar inner world—a place where men will always long for women they can’t have, where the women they do have undermine them, where paparazzi swarm out of nowhere on the latest undeserving celebrities, where fame is both a blessing and a curse.
Kudos to Allen’s casting directors, Patricia Kerrigan DiCerto, Beatrice Kruger, and longtime associate Juliet Taylor for once more getting him the hippest actors of the day, all evidently thrilled to work for near scale. The always-winning stammerer Jesse Eisenberg is an American who thinks he’s fine and dandy with a girlfriend (Greta Gerwig) who’s just too stable, at which point her actress friend (Ellen Page) arrives to hypnotize him with her hyperliterate stream of references and stories about sexual escapades—another tantalizing neurotic shiksa goddess, borderline untouchable the way girlfriends’ gal pals or sisters will be. Allen provides him with a fantasy companion, a suave older man (Alec Baldwin) who warns him he’s “walking into a propeller.” But walk this boy-man does because in Allen’s sex-charged dreams he has to. What’s wonderfully surreal about Baldwin’s scenes is that Allen doesn’t bother to make him invisible to other characters. They listen to his acid commentary and continue on their ridiculous tracks.
Eisenberg is standing in for the young Allen, of course, and Baldwin for the middle-aged Allen, and lo and behold Allen himself is on hand as a man his own age: a retired semi-successful opera director married to a killjoy played by Judy Davis, in Rome to see his fresh-faced daughter (Alison Pill) and meet her Italian beau (Flavio Parenti). Like much of To Rome With Love, the Allen subplot has a stream-of-consciousness quality, as if outlandish ideas just jumped out of his pen. His character hears the beau’s mortician father (tenor Fabio Armiliato) singing opera—gloriously—in the shower and becomes dead-set on building a production around this hesitant man with his discouraging wife. To tell you where this leads would be criminal, but the sequence builds to the perfect preposterous punch line and with the added benefit of thrilling music.
I never thought I could bear to watch Roberto Benigni again, but Allen has cast him as a painfully ordinary man, a non-exhibitionist who becomes a celebrity literally at random. Benigni’s rubber face is a hoot when stricken, pure commedia dell’arte, and he uses his loose-limbed body to recoil from the hordes with a clown’s grace. A plot that features a husband, his lost young wife, his pious family that has never met her, a luscious prostitute (Penélope Cruz) in the wrong place, a movie star, and a burglar is full of stock characters, yet Allen’s juggling of them is so assured and his plotting so intricate it’s hard not to marvel at it. I marveled.
I was blissed out during much of To Rome With Love, but I have to acknowledge its creepy side. Allen’s actresses are open-faced and nubile and costumed and shot to make them ripe sexual objects—he wants them, boy he wants them, and he can’t have them. His men get off the hook, but the denouements are defeatist, curdled. It’s not the dark, pessimistic core of Allen’s comedy I object to. It’s the casualness of the hopelessness, the complacency of it, the buildup to a shrug. But I’m in awe of the fact that he can hold that view and still have surprises in him.
Filmleaf
[Chris Knipp] also seen here: Cinescene [Chris
Knipp]
Woody gets busy in Rome, with mixed results
Woody Allen's first movie set in Italy was originally titled "Bop
Decameron." Bad idea. The four interwoven stories set in Rome hardly bear
comparison even with the so-so omnibus film Boccaccio 70, let alone with
the actual tales of the country's second most famous writer. Nonetheless the
best scenes are the ones completely in Italian, which play out longer than the
Spanish ones in Vicky Cristina. The half of the movie involving
Americans stumbling around Roman tourist spots is on the lame side. Luckily the
alternation of story lines is rapid and farcical enough to keep uncritical
viewers happy, but despite the reliably gorgeous settings, this is not Woody's
best recent work.
To Rome with Love is well below the level of Match Point or Midnight
in Paris; likely to be remembered only for several unrelated shticks. The
theme of the opera singer who can only perform well on stage in a simulated
shower stall is utterly silly, but is carried through on a grand scale. A spoof
on Italians' obsession with reality TV involving Roberto Benigni is distinctive
and timely, especially given Matteo Garrone's splash at Cannes this year with
his feature Reality, focused in a more serious way on the same theme.
It's routine for the Italian comic and shows off his improv skills to too
little advantage (see him instead in his two turns for Jim Jarmusch). The
jittery everyman role he plays suits him to a T, but the whole episode lacks
the necessary perspective and irony. The opera singer is, well, an opera singer
(Fabio Armiliato), but the douche-on-stage shtick would wear out very fast were
it not for his lovely tenor voice, as does Allen's own turn as a now-retired
kvetch who's the offbeat opera impresario promoting the douche act. Once again
unthinking viewers, as with Midnight in Paris, will simply enjoy the
camera's touristy ogling, which keeps honing in on such over-familiar venues as
the Spanish Steps and the Sistine Chapel, accompanied by corny, dated theme
songs like "Volare" and "Arrivederci Roma." Those in need
of a truly original or finely turned tale will do better to look elsewhere.
None of the tales are related. In one all-Italian one, a provincial couple
check into a fancy Rome hotel on their honeymoon and promptly get separated. The
bride (Alessandra Mastronardi) is scooped up by a fat, lecherous Italian movie
star (Antonio Albanese). Penelope Cruz, as a louche prostitute, bursts in on
the groom (Alessandro Tiberi) by mistake, and when his in-laws show up, he has
to pass her off as his wife.
Rome is one of the world's great movie capitals, and one associated with comedy
and farce. The scenes of the bride and groom -- as well as those of Benigni
being suddenly taken up as an ordinary man deemed worthy of having his every
action from breakfast toast to boxer shorts to shaving methods reported to the
whole nation -- blend the Roman silliness with a shot of Fellini-esque
surrealism and a timely reference to the country's real obsession with junky TV
reality shows. When these two stories are on screen it feels like we're in the
world of Italian cinema. These are all good comic actors, and they seem to fit
their roles better than any of the Americans fit theirs.
When Greta Gerwig and Ellen Page are competing for the attention of the physically
unimpressive Jesse Eisenberg (as a young architect on a fellowship) with Alec
Baldwin as an inexplicably half-real, half fantasy super-ego, we are not in any
world that really matters, and Page and Gerwig, along with Judy Davis as
Allen's wife, are among the actors whose work is wasted in the movie. In spite
of the glitzy, bright, prettified look of the Rome shots, the camera is not
kind to anyone in this American subplot but Baldwin; it seems to shrink the
others. The Italians in the American-dominated stories are unimpressive too.
Allen doesn't seem to appreciate that in an omnibus comedy collection minor
characters shouldn't just be ciphers; they should all be funny.
Baldwin warns Eisenberg against Ellen Page, who comes to visit his girlfriend Greta
Gerwig. Page is an actress, a pseudo-intellectual, and a liar. But this
portrait is sketchy and unconvincing. The wispy Page seems almost wholly
unsuited to the idea of a brassy, fake seductress. Gerwig's character is too
little developed to establish that she is the better, more trustworthy mate.
When, despite Baldwin's repeated warnings, Eisenberg gives in to temptation and
woos Page, Page gets a movie offer and quickly departs. Do we care?
The opera-singing-that-is-good-only-in-the-shower story is its own reward.
Allen has it play out, and then it's over. Only the two all-Italian stories
have real payoffs. Benigni prays to be left alone, and then, with a comic
poignancy that might have been truly touching in the hands of a great Italian
director (De Sica, perhaps, collaborating with Fellini), when he's dropped from
public attention he feels lost and empty. The bride and groom, after several
good scenes, especially one in which the bride's seduction by the fat actor is
broken off by a hotel burglar, are happily reunited and decide to leave the big
city, a classic comedy finale.
In the prevailing mode these days, Allen seems to have decided to succeed by
excess -- excess of storytelling. Boccaccio 70 had only four separate
tales, but Allen feels compelled to constantly intermix his to cover the fact
that not one of them is truly engaging and nothing holds them together,
certainly not the superficial device of a Piazza di Spagna traffic cop who
"comments" on the action, like the major domo in Grand Hotel,
but without an unforgettable signature line ("People come, people go,
nothing ever happens"). This movie is busy-busy-busy, but lacks a unifying
vision.
While Midnight in Paris had an inspired fantasy behind it, into which
Allen blended a series of romances and amusing recreations of 'Twenties Paris
cultural icons, To Rome with at Love at best momentarily evokes Italian
movies. It hasn't anything perceptive to say about Rome or Italy. Midnight
in Paris was not a brilliant statement about France either. But it did
evoke the city as a bygone expatriate mecca, and its theme of nostalgia for
other times was nicely developed. To Rome with Love has no theme and no
consistent vision. It shows that the tireless 76-year-old Woody is still
inventive -- perhaps too much so. He might do well to settle down and take a
good long look at his story's setting for once. His endlessly productive career
as a writer-director is hit or miss. We can only hope he will hit next time.
To Rome with Love was first released in Italy April 20, 2012 in a
version dubbed entirely in Italian. That might be an improvement, all thins
considered. But this Italian review (by Davide De Lucca) suggests otherwise: "In
Allen's pilgrimages far from New York, with the common thread of love, Venice
has been a city of music and encounters, London a place of crime-and-punishment
and magic, Barcelona a fountain of passion and sensuality, Paris the theater
for an ideal past brought back to life. Now Rome has become the stage for four
flat, colorless, insipid stories, brought to the screen by an ever less sharp
tourist-director (regista-turista) . ." Ouch! This critic is
unimpressed by the bride and groom episode, finding its evocation of Sixties
Italian movie comedy tone-deaf. I may be more indulgent toward it because it's
a relief from Allen's gratingly touristic and one-note American characters.
Fourth
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BLUE JASMINE A 95
USA (98 mi)
2013 ‘Scope Official site
After an 8-year sabbatical
making movies overseas, Woody Allen finally returns to America like he’s found
the promised land, writing his most entertaining and dramatically rich
screenplay since the 1980’s when he was working with Mia Farrow, doing a
constantly inventive and theatrically invigorating variation on Tennessee
Williams, in particular his 1948 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Streetcar Named Desire, featuring an
exceptional international cast led by Australian actress Cate Blanchett as
Jasmine, who is something of a nuclear force operating on another wavelength
from all other Allen actresses, doing a modern riff on Blanche DuBois, a
younger version of the delusional, perpetually fragile woman who has fallen
from grace, but has yet to realize the staggering enormity of the abyss she’s
fallen into. Written with Blanchett in
mind, she is onscreen for nearly every shot of the film, showing a range of
emotion that hasn’t been seen in a Woody Allen film in over thirty years,
perhaps ever. While this is clearly an
Allen film, it’s also something of a departure for him writing such an
intensely dramatic role, easily one of the best in his lengthy career, where
Blanchett seems born to play the part, not seen having this much fun since
NOTES ON A SCANDAL (2006). While she’s
not as prominently featured, equally enthralling is British actress Sally
Hawkins as Ginger, last seen performing against type in Submarine
(2010), playing the sister role of Stella Kowalski, a more earthy, warmhearted
and working class woman who must contend with physical brutes for men,
brilliantly played by Brooklyn-born Andrew Dice Clay (who hasn’t been in a
movie in 12 years) as Augie, her first husband, and later Jersey-born Bobby
Cannavale as Chili, her fiancé, two physically imposing Stanley Kowalski
characters, working stiffs whose foul mouths and quick tempers have a tendency
to “lose it” from time to time, while also seen trying to sweet talk their way
back into good standing. What’s
surprising is the effectiveness of flashback sequences, where half the film
takes place in the past when Jasmine was a wealthy Upper East Side socialite
married to Hal, Alec Baldwin, a Wall Street investor whose financially
fraudulent business practices eventually lead him to the slammer, but not
before he steals every last dime and nickel from all his investors, leaving
Jasmine embarrassed and without a penny to her name, sadly moving across the
country where she hopes to make a new start in San Francisco with her more
commonplace sister.
The culture shock of
living in an ordinary environment leaves Jasmine horrified, depleted of her
reason for living, which appears to be a concept of worth based upon the
accumulated reserve of unlimited funds to spend, where she instead regularly
pops Xanax as if it were candy out of a bottle while slurping down Stoli vodka
martinis with a lemon twist, leaving her in a distorted state of mental
deterioration. Despite her dire economic
situation, Jasmine continues to pass herself off as upper class royalty, where
it’s simply inconceivable for her to alter her lavish lifestyle, continually
criticizing her sister for settling on Neanderthal brutes that only reflect
upon her low self-esteem, while the two men in Ginger’s life never let Jasmine
forget how her conniving thief of a husband stole all their money along with
everybody elses, making him the most wretchedly despicable man on the
planet. But Jasmine is not deterred,
completely incapable of sympathizing with the working class or their real world
problems, consumed instead with her own worries, wondering what has a woman got
to do to escape the doldrums of mediocrity, where she believes all it takes is
the need to think big, bigger than the vacuous trap that defines Ginger’s life,
working at a grocery store, taking care of two kids, and never having a moment
for herself (or her sister) anymore.
Since Jasmine’s life has been a gluttony of hedonism, where every waking
moment has been spent indulging in life’s pleasures, including a husband that
bought her every extravagant gift and luxury item she could ever hope for,
perhaps this made it easier for her to look the other way when her philandering
husband was sleeping around with every attractive woman he set eyes upon, where
both felt it was their God-given right to have whatever they wanted in
life. And for awhile, they were riding
high among the social elite, written about in the celebrity tabloids as an up
and coming power couple, holding extravagant parties where important people
show up, as if this validates their very existence. But now, of course, she’s lost everything,
having to accept criticism from the morons in Ginger’s life that literally make
her cringe, finding their crudeness to be revolting, believing their lack of
sophistication and refinement will only prevent Ginger from ever wanting more
out of life, as she’s settling for these hopelessly undistinguished
losers.
Jasmine’s plans for the
future, of course, make little sense, as she has no work qualifications
whatsoever other than the ability to assemble an overpriced luxury wardrobe
that distinguishes her from those in more practical attire. Her sheer incompetence in learning necessary
work skills sets her apart from Ginger’s efficient reliability, someone who’s
gotten two kids to school and can still show up for work on time. Jasmine, on the other hand, is literally
overwhelmed by anything having to do with work, needing pills and yet another
cocktail to help alleviate all the tension she feels. Jasmine would have us believe that it’s not
easy being rich, where you have to cater to all the whims of eccentric
personalities in people who have never been told no, who are used to getting
what they want, where it’s impossible to please everybody, while at the same
time having to organize tiresome fundraisers for the poor, where extending a
helping hand to others is fraught with difficulties and unending
pressures. In Jasmine’s world, life is a
neverending theatrical performance, where it’s all about style and flair, where
ordinary concerns never even enter into the picture, where the working stiffs
in Ginger’s life are exactly what’s wrong with the world, men who have no
ambition or dreams, who think too small, continually toiling in a dead-end job
working for others, where they’re constantly being told what to do, so they
spend their own lives ordering others around like the narrow-minded bigots and
tyrants that they become. Allen creates
an excoriating picture of the aristocratic mindset, especially when Jasmine and
Hal are flush with money and find it so burdensome to stop thinking about
themselves for a single moment and have to put up with out of town visitors
like Ginger and Augie who are so out of place in “their world” that they may as
well be from another planet, like the world of the mundane. What is initially such a hilarious portrait
of polar opposites grows deathly serious by the end, becoming one of the
darkest works Allen has ever written, a devastating portrait of a dream deferred,
where the unbridled lust and grandiose ambition of the great American Dream has
lost its luster, becoming a pathetic picture of lost and fragmented memories of
an already forgotten era, where the rich are portrayed as manipulating and
conniving thieves, while the poor and middle class are stuck with working off
their accumulated debt, stuck in an endless quagmire not of their own choosing
where they live the lives of indentured servants, like bought and sold
commodities, each one easily replaced by the next sap waiting in line to take
their place.
interview with Variety
Scott Foundas interview from Variety,
June 2013
“Blue Jasmine” is one of those Allen films, like “Crimes and Misdemeanors” and “Match Point,” that turns nimbly and sometimes startlingly from light comedy to dark psychological melodrama. The title character, played by Cate Blanchett, is the recent widow of a Bernie Madoff-like Wall Street fraud (Alec Baldwin), whose crimes have left Jasmine without a penny to her name, forced to look for real work after a plush life as an Upper East Side society lady. Decamping to San Francisco, she takes refuge with her down-at-the-heels adopted sister (Sally Hawkins) and tries to start anew.
Allen, who rarely writes with specific actors in mind, admits he crafted the role of Jasmine expressly for Blanchett, with whom he’d been wanting to work ever since seeing her in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” The actress is in top form as this unstable, self-absorbed woman, by turns loathsome and pitiable, whose increasingly desperate efforts to keep up appearances are like someone trying to mend bone china with scotch tape. “She’s one of the few actresses, I think, who could do this,” Allen says. “It’s like having an atomic weapon or something, to get an actress like that.”
The $18 million production, financed by equity investors, was filmed last summer in New York and San Francisco, marking Allen’s first Bay Area shoot since his second feature, “Take the Money and Run,” in 1969. That gets Allen reminiscing about his early standup days again, when he first came to Fog City to play at the late impresario Enrico Banducci’s North Beach nightclub the Hungry Eye, a venue also responsible for giving breaks to the likes of Bill Cosby, Lenny Bruce, the Kingston Trio and Barbra Streisand (with whom Allen once opened).
Allen is also tantalized by the idea of shooting a full-fledged Hollywood movie in Los Angeles, the city to which his alter ego Alvy Singer famously proved allergic in “Annie Hall.”
“I have one or two ideas particularly for L.A., that would only work in L.A.,” the filmmaker says. “The only problem you have in L.A. is that the sun is relentless, and you have to figure out a way to make it attractive. But I don’t mind the time that I spend in L.A., as long as it’s limited. Compared to when I first went there many years ago, now they’ve got as many good restaurants as New York. But it’s the weekends that kill me. You know, I work during the week and it’s fine, we go to a nice place for dinner, you see friends. Then the weekend comes and there’s nothing to do. You’re stuck in Beverly Hills, you walk around, you make the sardonic remarks about the juxtaposition of the chateaus with the gothic houses and the thatched roofs, but there’s nothing to do. So you wind up going to a movie.”
Blue Jasmine:
movie review | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Joshua Rothkopf
Woody Allen loves his little liars, his self-regarding theater people and swaddled urbanites who, even when pushed up against reality, put on a good show. “Don’t speak!” insists glamorous Dianne Wiest in Bullets Over Broadway, railing against John Cusack’s love talk but also against any upstaging of her special glow. And in Allen’s immortal The Purple Rose of Cairo, the dreamlife of the movies withstands fourth-wall breakage and even a crushed heart; that last shot of Mia Farrow is of someone content to be lost in oblivion.
But has Allen, the most painfully self-aware of American directors, ever allowed his fantasizers to fall on the rocks as ruinously as Cate Blanchett does in Blue Jasmine? I don’t think so. (He may not have been capable of doing it until now, with more films behind him than on the horizon.) Blanchett’s Jasmine enters the movie arrestingly: a fidgety, elbowy presence on a cross-country flight, chatting the ear off a seatmate about sex and the better things in life. The voice is a conspiratorial purr, desperately in need of a confidant; you wait for the trapped stranger’s eye roll, but, almost alarmingly, it becomes clear that this isn’t a comedy.
Jasmine, we learn in a toggling flashback structure that also feels fresh to Allen’s style, is fleeing the scorched earth of a broken marriage to a Bernie Madoff–like fraud, Hal (Alec Baldwin), a swindler of fortunes. Even as she steps disdainfully through the earthy San Francisco apartment of her half-welcoming sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins), another of Hal’s victims, there’s an unwillingness to shed former airs. A vodka bottle on the shelf will help; Allen turns the shot of Jasmine at the liquor station self-medicating into a repeated gag as she settles in for some much-needed “rebuilding.”
Can this gala planner and bruncher, a professional recipient of jewelry, commit to computer classes? How it hurts to watch Jasmine try. A job in the office of a dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg, tops in a tricky part) also goes poorly. Allen’s sharp script, perhaps the most economically minded of his career, situates an array of naysayers around Jasmine: not just Ginger’s ex-husband (a surprisingly deep Andrew Dice Clay), who lost a windfall in the pyramid scheme, but the sister’s new boyfriend, Chili (Bobby Cannavale), a doting mechanic who’s instantly put off by the interloper’s brittle Manhattitude.
It’s real Streetcar Named Desire territory as the fights pile up, and if you think that doesn’t sound entertaining, know that it is, in a hypnotically catastrophic way. Blanchett’s eyes begin to burn with panic (she’s never been this agonizing, channeling the ragged edge of Gena Rowlands) as she lashes out at all the “losers,” and Allen’s material pushes everyone to make terrible choices. The essence of Blue Jasmine feels timely, even years into America’s limp rebound from recession: How do we start over, when guilt can’t be fully processed and sacrifice is demeaned? Boldly, this isn’t a drama that eases into forgiveness or comeuppance; instead, everyone is taken down a peg. Why so cynical, Woodman? We remember Crimes and Misdemeanors (which this film most resembles in tone); now here’s a savage prosecution of the 1 percent. It’s not the movie anyone could have expected—which is stunning in itself. But maybe the time for sweet self-delusions is through.
The
Talented Mr. Allen: Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine Adam Hayman III from Cinema Scope, June 2013
Cate Blanchett’s best film performance remains her slight but crucial supporting turn in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1998). Playing Meredith Logue, a nouveau-riche heiress who has trained herself to swoon at the opera, Blanchett gently underlines this society neophyte’s would-be sophistication. The moment when she strategically nuzzles up to her date on a nighttime carriage ride is at once utterly calculated and endearingly guileless: it’s a debutante’s best shot at being a princess. This finishing-schooled globetrotter is also a naïf, and thus utterly susceptible to a social-climbing sociopath’s hastily contrived lies.
Woody Allen basically tried remaking The Talented Mr. Ripley as Match Point (2005), which tipped its cap to Patricia Highsmith before redoing the ending of Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). Wildly overrated by critics eager to see one of their ’70s heroes experience a septuagenarian renaissance, Match Point hasn’t aged well, or even badly; it’s entirely forgettable. But whatever the shelf life of Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2009) or Midnight in Paris (2011), shooting in Europe seems to have dislodged something long stuck in Allen’s craw: the former was a surprisingly loose and voluptuous exercise in comic irony, more slyly knowing than chidingly cruel, while the latter fairly tingled with gentle good vibes (except for those scenes with poor Rachel McAdams, who was, amazingly, treated more kindly onscreen by Brian De Palma).
Blue Jasmine, which casts Blanchett 15 years after Ripley as another self-deluding socialite involved with a pathological liar, should continue to refract the autumnal glow around its creator until it becomes blinding. It’s already made headlines for having the best first-weekend grosses of any of Allen’s films, and the reviews have been stellar, which is understandable…to a point. Much more successfully than Match Point—and I’d argue any Allen joint since Crimes and Misdemeanors—Blue Jasmine finds the director suppressing his chronic gag reflex in favor of a more stringent sensibility. For the most part, it works.
The movie opens with a startling shot of a commercial airliner in mid-flight over Middle America. The elevated perspective is a fine visual analogy for Blanchett’s Jasmine, who has spent her life hovering above the fray. Her idea of conversation is to talk about how, once upon a time, she threw “the best dinner parties in New York.” But what’s past is past, and in the wake of some sort of comingled domestic and financial calamity, she’s relocating herself. Her manifest destiny is to go west, to San Francisco, to live with her half-sister Ginger (Sally Hawkins) and her brood, a set-up with deliberate echoes of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Aside from a few re-contextualized lines of dialogue and a subtly casual moment where Jasmine asks her sister to fetch her a lemon twist with ice, Blue Jasmine goes light on overt citation á la Midnight in Paris. Instead, Allen is trying to connect with his source material’s themes, with mixed but at times real success. For all its hothouse sensuality and dexterous play with language, Tennessee Williams’ play was about the violent collision between the American gentry—embodied by Blanche DuBois, the displaced plantation matron—and the hard-driving immigrant underclass (represented by the surly, perpetually undershirted Stanley Kowalski) coming up underneath them; it’s a period piece that has proved perennial.
Blue Jasmine substitutes Fifth Avenue for Belle Reve, and the numerous flashbacks to Jasmine’s life in Manhattan have a strange and welcome frisson owing to the fact that for once, Allen isn’t taking bourgeois privilege for granted. The sequences of Jasmine and her millionaire husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) lounging by the pool are stagey in a way that suggest not poor film direction but con artists trying to live up to their glittering self-images. Their aristocratic pantomime is built on a deeper deception: Hal is a shyster moving money around between various fronts. In the most obviously allegorical twist, he cavalierly blows all of Ginger’s savings on a bad investment. Whether one finds it touching or disingenuous, it seems that Allen is striving for a sort of class critique here. What Blue Jasmine lacks in imagination about its working-class characters—gentle dupes—it makes up for in contempt for the white-collar criminals spending their money.
It’s precisely this sense of contempt that makes Blue Jasmine a little more bracing than Allen’s usual, even if it also marks a clear disconnect between Allen and his literary influence du jour. Ever a tender tormentor of his characters, Williams demonstrated compassion for Blanche without dulling his knife-edged insights into her narcissism and weakness. Allen regards Jasmine with at best wary bemusement—as when her newly minted up-by-bootstraps rhetoric dissipates at the sight of the first suitably eligible San Franciscoan she meets (Peter Sarsgaard, playing what feels like his millionth smooth-complexioned rotter in a row) —and more generally with revulsion. Compulsive in all of her behaviours—talking, drinking, pill-popping, lying—Jasmine is hard to take even by the standards of Allen’s usual harridans, and Blanchett goes all in on the performance, recalling not so much Vivien Leigh’s tremulousness in Streetcar but the brittleness of Judy Davis in Allen’s acidic Husbands and Wives (1992).
Jasmine’s repellence is compounded by the fact that neither of the Stanley manqués on hand—Andrew Dice Clay as Ginger’s first husband and Bobby Cannavale as her new boyfriend—are the least bit interested in her sexually. The role of wannabe ravisher falls instead to the nebbishy dentist (Michael Stuhlbarg) who talks in an Alvy Singer stammer and haplessly forces himself on Jasmine, who has taken a rent-paying job as his assistant. It’s an uncomfortable scene for the way it reconfigures the archetypal nerdy Jew/shiksa goddess dynamic into a sleazy parody of Streetcar’s climax. It also plays into the idea that Jasmine’s real fear is of downward mobility: she’s terrified of straying too far from the WASP’s nest. Her yen to become an interior decorator is a source of much cruelly mocking comedy, but at heart, she’s expressing the same yearning as did Blanche when she affixed that paper lantern to a bare bulb: it’s about trying to recreate what she imagines is her natural habitat.
That Blue Jasmine is laboured in its plotting should come as no surprise. Allen has always had a wonderful sense of narrative complication dating back to his whirligig plays and short fictions, but limited suppleness as a screen storyteller. About half of what happens in Blue Jasmine is utterly predictable without being especially likely—as when Jasmine and her new beau run into Ginger’s ex-husband on the street and he reveals all of her past sins—and since he’s stripped away the fable-like flourishes of Midnight in Paris, the contrivances upend the pretense of realism. Sometimes, it feels like Knicks fanatic Allen is using a trampoline to score slam dunks off of his characters, as when Ginger becomes foolishly smitten, and is then summarily discarded, by a schlubby suitor (Louis CK, on autopilot); although Hawkins acts the moment of abandonment beautifully, she’s being emotionally brutalized so that Allen can create a parallel with Jasmine’s cruelly thwarted romance. (Ginger gets her reward at the end of the movie, and yet the vision of couch-splayed domestic bliss Allen conjures up isn’t half as sexy as Stella storming out at the end of Streetcar: who doubts that she’ll end up back in Stanley’s arms yet again?)
Blue Jasmine ends where it began, with Jasmine alone and babbling, ostensibly to strangers but really only to herself (if the last scene is intended as a goof on Forrest Gump [1994], then it’s Allen’s funniest bit of movie satire in years). She can’t even depend on the kindness of strangers, because she won’t shut up long enough to let them get a helpful word in edgewise. Allen has long had a strange fetish for manic street creatures—Alvy Singer fretted about becoming the sort of person “who wanders into a cafeteria with a garbage bag, screaming about socialism,” and the existentially snake-bitten hero of “The Lunatic’s Tale” ends up wandering New York wearing a beanie cap—and Blanchett’s acting is powerful enough that this time, the depiction of psychic damage goes beyond a punchline.
At the same time, one is left with the feeling that a really great movie would amount to more than a thesis statement that rich people are so lonely and unhappy that they’re really crazy (or vice versa), and that a great filmmaker would find a way inside that madness instead of keeping his distance. The late Anthony Minghella was not a great filmmaker, but in The Talented Mr. Ripley he skillfully erected a complex web of desire and deceit between characters who all wanted to be anybody but themselves; and, at the edges of this entanglement, Blanchett made an indelible impression as a woman suffering from a double case of mistaken identity. Just as Meredith believes that the disturbed prole she meets while slumming it in steerage is actually one of her privileged peers, she also perceives herself as worldly and unconventional. The final scene hints that this self-infatuation may end up being a fatal attraction. I suspect that I’ll remember that ending—and Blanchett’s part in it—long after I’ve mostly forgotten Blue Jasmine.
Watching
Her Drown - The New York Review of Books
Francine Prose, August 15, 2013
The
Best Film Woody Allen's Ever Made | New Republic David Thomson from The New Republic, July 24, 2013, also seen here: David
Thomson
Press
Play [A D Jameson] August 15, 2013
Film Freak
Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
David
Denby: “Fruitvale Station,” “Blue Jasmine” Reviews : The New ... David Denby from The New Yorker
Blue
Jasmine: An Interesting Disappointment - Christopher Orr - The ... Christopher Orr from The Atlantic
Blue
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Dissecting
Blue Jasmine: On sympathizing with a ... - The Dissolve On
Sympathizing with a Horrible Character, by Nathan Rabin, Tasha Robinson,
and Matt Singer, July 29, 2013
An
original poster finds the deeper shades of Blue Jasmine / The ... Sam Smith from The Dissolve, September 12,
2013
Movie
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Blue
Jasmine - New York Magazine David
Edelstein, July 21, 2013
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'Blue
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Allen's Blue Jasmine Returns to a World ... - Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek
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Blue
Jasmine, directed by Woody Allen, reviewed. - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
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Turner]
Dud
of the Week: Blue Jasmine reviewed by Armond White for CityArts
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theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
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interview with Cate Blanchett on Blue Jasmine Lily Rothman interviews Cate Blanchett from Time magazine, July 18, 2013
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Blue Jasmine | review,
synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out
Oscar
predictions 2014: Blue Jasmine | Film | theguardian.com Andrew Pulver, August 27, 2013
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[Rick Marianetti]
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Movie
review: Cate Blanchett captivates in Woody Allen's searingly ... Carla Meyer from The Sacramento Bee
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Blue Jasmine Movie
Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Susan Wloszczyna
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MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT B- 81
USA (97 mi)
2014 ‘Scope Official
site
After a brief return to
the United States with the brilliant aberration that was 2013 Top
Ten List #7 Blue Jasmine, Woody returns to his earlier form of making
lighthearted, fair to middling films, insulated again from the world around
him, writing exclusively for the super affluent, where the extravagance of
their luxuriated lifestyle may as well be his reason for living these days, as
he hones in on the life of the 1%, alienating a good portion of his audience
that find these films little more than escapist fantasy. From ANNIE HALL (1977) to MELINDA AND MELINDA
(2004), Allen’s characters bore some resemblance to real life, showing a
distinct preference for the intellectual middle to upper class of
Following another Allen
tradition, this is another film in love with its musical soundtrack, featuring
plenty of “hot jazz” from the 20’s, though some of the popular songs were
written “after” the period in question, nonetheless Allen has been jamming this
music down the audience’s throat literally for decades. This film prominently features jazz
renditions by cornetist Bix Beiderbecke (who died at age 28 in the early 30’s),
while Ute Lemper appears briefly as a period version of herself singing a
traditional Berlin cabaret song, “It's All a Swindle (Alles Schwindel)” (1931) Ute Lemper - It's All a
Swindle - YouTube (4:11), which is the actual theme for this film, making a
much better title, as this one continually gets mixed up with the King Harvest
hit song “Dancing in the Moonlight,” Dancing
in the Moonlight - King Harvest - YouTube (2:53). But enough on that. The film pays tribute to one of Allen’s
childhood loves, as he was a magic buff and amateur magician, opening the film
with Colin Firth playing Stanley, stage name Wei Ling Soo, a celebrated London
illusionist (in yellowface and long Fu Manchu moustache) who makes an elephant
disappear before an adoring crowd. Based
on 19th-century
Howard has been in
contact with a wealthy Pittsburgh industrial family living in the south of
France, where the lady of the house (Jacki Weaver) is being fleeced by a
mysterious young American clairvoyant, Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), with claims
that she can contact her dead husband, while her grown son Brice (Hamish
Linklater) is romantically smitten by the young lady, continually wooing her
with poetry and love songs. Despite his
best attempts, certain she is a scam artist, Howard has been unable to expose
her as a fraud. Stanley never met a
challenge he couldn’t resist and rises to the occasion, thinking of it as
little more than a much needed vacation in the Côte d’Azur, passing himself off
as some unscrupulous businessman named Taplinger, certain he will expose this
sham artist before the night is done, already making evening plans after
dinner. Sophie is living on the grounds
of the estate with her mother (Marcia Gay Harden), where she’s quick witted,
but also something of a scatterbrain with something always catching her
attention, taking Stanley by surprise when she psychically reveals things about
himself that no one else knows. All his
brass and bluster are thrown off track, normally demonstrating an air of
invincibility, driven by his super-sized male ego, where he can’t pin down her
secrets, concluding “A pretty face never hurt a cheap swindler,” but he’s
certainly beguiled by her feminine charm and enthusiastic zest for living,
inviting her to join him on a visit to Province with his battle hardened Aunt
Vanessa, Eileen Atkins in her best performance since Altman’s Gosford
Park (2001). Atkins is the surprise
of the film, where she’s the real deal, adding plenty of spit and polish to her
own character, always two or three steps in front of Stanley, wise beyond her
years, and quite taken by Sophie as well.
The enjoyment of the film is playing along with the game, figuring out
—Is she or is she not a fake? Is it or
is it not love? — and seeing how it all plays out, where it’s Aunt Vanessa who
seems like the clairvoyant one. Perhaps
the real key to Allen’s success these days is providing such terrific acting,
which has become a staple in Woody Allen films, where everyone in the business
wants to work with him. While it’s
old-fashioned and well-mannered, where everyone has to play by the rules of
erudite politeness, Colin Firth never talked so much in a film, taking on the
Woody Allen persona of an incessant talker, turning to mush and mindless
chatter after awhile, quite a contrast to the pompous arrogance of his
character. Perhaps the most obvious
comparison are the seemingly mismatched lovers from Allen’s own A
Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy (1982), where the bombastic egotistical hubris
of José Ferrar as Leopold finally meets his match in Dulcy, Julie Hagerty, a
free-spirited nurse chosen purely at random.
In both cases, love ensues, or is it the illusion of love?
Slant
Magazine [David Lee Dallas]
There's a scene near the conclusion of Woody Allen's latest trifle, Magic in the Moonlight, that recalls the filmmaker's finest work in its fusion of earnest philosophical inquiry and black, self-effacing comedy. Following the involvement of his beloved aunt in a potentially fatal car accident, renowned magician and die-hard skeptic Stanley Crawford (Colin Firth) tries to invoke God's mercy through prayer in a moment of solitude and desperation. Despite his clear unfamiliarity with the ritual, Stanley summons as much sincerity as he can for his appeal, but throws up his arms in disgust just at the moment when he seems to believe his own words, proceeding to half-jokingly castigate himself for such out-of-character weakness and folly. Elegantly performed by Firth and captured in a single take by master cinematographer Darius Khondji, it's a moment straight out of Crimes and Misdemeanors in its seesawing between indignation and aspiration, bitter certainty and terrified hope. The simultaneous maturity and vulnerability present here is otherwise absent in Magic in the Moonlight, a film of obvious characterizations and even more obvious plot machinations that render its moment-to-moment charms moot.
Obviousness is to some extent the point of Magic in the Moonlight, which doesn't merely wax nostalgic about its 1920s France setting, a la Midnight in Paris, but rather resembles an artifact of the period itself. In plot and visual vernacular, it's a doppelganger for the proto-screwball romantic comedies of Hollywood's Golden Age, and the result is an easy-to-swallow piece of confectionary cinema. Stanley is in the south of France at the behest of his friend and fellow magician, Howard (Simon McBurney), who has sought his assistance in debunking the psychic claims of Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), a young American woman whose talents (and beauty) allowed her to ingratiate herself into a wealthy American family. That Sophie and Stanley will embark on a sweet-and-sour romance is a given; the meat of the film lies in the series of existential crises Sophie triggers in Stanley as he grows increasingly nonplussed by her extrasensory powers. Long before he falls for Sophie herself, he's seduced by what she represents: the possibility of an unseen spiritual world, a balm for his cantankerous atheism. Considering that as a character Stanley is hardly fleshed out beyond the word "skeptic," these swift changes of heart are a bit baffling to behold, and it's hardly surprising that it's Stanley, not the sprightly Sophie, who resembles the fool of the relationship by film's end.
If Stanley's characterization is too rigid, Sophie's is just the opposite, as her entire personality vacillates wildly according to the demands of each scene, particularly in the film's final third, once the aura of mystery attached to her psychic abilities has dissipated. Ping-ponging between declarations of love for Stanley and a steadfast commitment to marry her wealthy, foppish suitor, Brice (Hamish Linklater), she resembles a plot device more than she does an indecisive, love-struck young woman; her rapid changes of mind and heart are baldly designed to provoke the maximum amount of anxiety out of Stanley. She's an all-surface creation, with Stone's moonish features worshipped by suitor(s) and camera alike. As he did with Marion Cotillard in The Immigrant, Khondji synthesizes a strategy of period recreation by lighting Stone as though she were a bygone movie star. If Cotillard's monochrome martyrdom was a nod to Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc, Stone is given the Carole Lombard treatment, but while the actress sells this impossible character as best she can, there's no mistaking Magic in the Moonlight for an Ernst Lubitsch or a Gregory La Cava.
“Magic in the
Moonlight” and “A Most Wanted Man” Reviews
David Denby from The New Yorker
In Woody Allen’s new comedy, “Magic in the Moonlight,” Colin Firth plays Mr. Darcy again. The haughty reserve, the perfectly phrased disdain, the deeply romantic nature hidden beneath the chill: Firth does this sort of thing better than anyone. But this time the character’s name is Stanley Crawford, and he’s a famous English magician in the nineteen-twenties. Wearing gold and scarlet robes and a mustache that droops like licorice strips, Stanley wows audiences as Wei Ling Soo, a Chinese illusionist. As a sideline—one that Houdini also performed—he exposes frauds, particularly mediums who receive table-thumping communication from the spirit world. A rationalist and a grouch, Stanley believes in nothing but the perception of the five senses, science, and the finality of death. Self-approval gilds his joyless approach to life. He’s meant to be a classically unhappy man.
An old friend and fellow-magician (Simon McBurney) summons him to the South of France. It seems that a beautiful young American medium, Sophie Baker (Emma Stone), and her mother (Marcia Gay Harden) have taken up residence at the magnificent country home of the wealthy Catledge family. At séances, the well-paid Sophie summons the late Mr. Catledge, which makes his loving widow happy. The rest of the time, Sophie puts up with the crooning young Brice Catledge (Hamish Linklater), the scion of the family, who serenades her with a ukulele. Will she marry her fatuous suitor? Or will she intrigue the older man, who thinks that she’s a criminal? As romantic comedy, “Magic in the Moonlight” is formulaic; you can see the plot reversals before they come. At times, the movie sounds like an overwritten drawing-room comedy from eighty years ago, or like Shaw without the irony. But Firth, in a broad-ranging performance—from rage to enchantment and back again—carries it through. It’s his show.
Allen has been having a prolonged, bankable, gravely appreciative fling with Old Europe. In “Magic,” he shot scenes of the Catledge home at the Villa Eilenroc, in Cap d’Antibes, and at the Villa la Renardière, in Mouans-Sartoux, and he lays on the dignified glamour—the lawns and gardens, the blooming trellised walkways, the damasked interiors. The renowned cinematographer Darius Khondji, shooting on 35-mm. film, with old CinemaScope lenses, achieves a soft, lemon-tinted light. At one point, Firth and Stone drive along the Riviera in a red Alfa Romeo, and the audience may feel a twinge: Cary Grant and Grace Kelly zipped along the same coast sixty years ago, in “To Catch a Thief.” Beauty—old beauty, permanent beauty—has become an emotional necessity in Allen’s work. In a dangerous and incomprehensible world, elegance and luxury are a stable value for him, and, perhaps, a refuge. But the swank is held in place by Allen’s instinctive classicism: the camera that gently recedes as the actors walk toward it; the long-lasting immovable shots as people talk and talk. It’s an accomplished, stately movie—unimpassioned but pleasing.
Emma Stone’s Sophie is the only wild card, and I wish that she were wilder. At first, you can’t quite figure Sophie out. When she has a vision, Stone raises her arms in carny style and flutters her eyelids. Her Sophie seems a fake, yet those big blue eyes do appear to see more than ordinary mortals can see. But Allen might have expanded the character and given her a more dramatic and complicated temperament. As it is, Sophie is not much more than a player in his debate between rationalism and magic, which he probably takes more seriously than his audience does. (He has drawn on these themes before, in “A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy” and many other movies.) Why does he write tirade after tirade for Firth, all with the same idea—that nothing exists beyond the palpable and the real? Stanley is trying to convince himself of this truth, and Allen may be, too. We have certainly thought of him as a twentieth-century skeptic in a world devoted to illusion. Yet he knows that “realism” is limited, an ungenerous and arid view. There’s a startling moment in which Stanley, frightened, prays to God for the first time, and then stops, disgusted with himself. “Magic” expresses a longing to believe in the supernatural, and an equally powerful longing to disbelieve in it. The debate is worked out with almost pedantic thoroughness, but, in the end, Allen resolves everything neatly. The artifice of movies is one kind of magic he definitely believes in.
“Magic
in the Moonlight”: It's time to stop making excuses for ... Andrew O’Hehir from Salon
Can we all stop making excuses for Woody Allen now? I’m not talking about the twists and turns of his personal life, or the allegations that he abused his daughter decades ago. I don’t know what happened between Allen and Dylan Farrow and neither do you, and we’ve all spent too much time discussing it. I’m talking about Allen’s increasingly bizarre and disconnected films of the last 15 years or so, which appear to have been made by a visitor from another planet who has heard human beings described (to use an old gag) but never actually encountered any.
Allen still has an avid posse of fans and defenders who close ranks around these feeble, stilted vanity productions for reasons I only partly understand: Because of his long-ago track record or because he can hypnotize movie stars or because in his own strange way he’s extremely well connected. Who knows? I’m not disputing Allen’s importance in the history of American cinema; he had a remarkable run from the mid-1970s to the early ‘90s, and captured a cultural moment in the life of the New York-centric liberal intelligentsia. But that moment is a long time gone. I suppose in the most sympathetic possible reading you can detect wraithlike hints or echoes of Allen’s earlier work even in the most painfully artificial of his globetrotting films, and I get that for some people he represents congenial entertainment for literate adults, a niche that seems to be disappearing in today’s pop-culture economy. Inept and misanthropic as they may be, Allen’s recent comedies do not feature giant robots or motor-vehicle explosions. Whether that’s a decisive point in their favor is up to you.
None of that excuses the fact that the Allen posse succeeded in giving an Oscar to Cate Blanchett for her twitchy, overwrought Blanche DuBois impression in a ludicrous melodrama that demonstrated that Allen is either so far gone or so isolated from reality that he can’t detect any difference between San Francisco and the working-class suburbs of New Jersey. Blanchett worked really hard in that dreadful role and battled Allen’s script almost to a draw; maybe the academy voters just felt empathy for her struggle. For a dramatist whose stock in trade, once upon a time, was to probe the neuroses of upper-middle-class Jewish New Yorkers with scientific precision, Allen’s WTF tourist-board movies of the last decade or so, in which one world city after another is inserted as the most superficial signifier, are nothing short of a crushing embarrassment. If Woody Allen had set out to destroy his own legacy on purpose, to punish those of us who put too much faith in him way back when, he couldn’t have done a better job.
Some of Allen’s recent films can be granted allowances in various ways, or at least are cannily packaged to paper over their most glaring weaknesses. “Blue Jasmine” was overwhelmed by Blanchett’s scenery chewing; “Midnight in Paris” featured a series of audience-flattering literary gags, dopey as they were; “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” was a little risqué and gleefully anti-American. But it’s difficult to find any ground from which to defend Allen’s alternately tedious, offensive and incompetent new romantic comedy “Magic in the Moonlight,” unless it’s the exquisite 1920s wardrobes. Allen airs out a number of familiar themes here, including his quasi-metaphorical interest in stage magic, his rejection of the spiritual or supernatural in all forms (with the concomitant conclusion that life has no meaning) and – not to put too fine a point on it – his hankering after much younger women. To be clear: Colin Firth and Emma Stone are both attractive adult humans, and if they want to play a couple on-screen (or if they want to hook up in real life, for that matter) it isn’t my business or anybody else’s. In fact, Firth and Stone never seem quite comfortable in “Magic in the Moonlight,” which may have more to do with the bad script and pointless, obvious plot than with their three-decade age difference. Anyway, it’s not any particular instance that’s the problem. It’s the obsessive persistence of the April-October love affair as the apex of Eros in Allen’s work, from at least “Manhattan” in 1979 right through the present, which feels pathological.
Firth plays the obvious Allen surrogate, a prickly and repressed English stage magician of the 1920s named Stanley Crawford, who performs in yellowface as the “Oriental mystic” Wei Ling Soo, an unfortunately accurate historical phenomenon. Stanley runs a side business in debunking mediums and spiritualists of all stripes, who were certainly widespread at the time. A friend and longtime rival (Simon McBurney) has summoned Stanley to confront Sophie Baker (Stone), a wide-eyed American flapper type whose alleged clairvoyant gifts are focused on a wealthy Yank family and their luxurious Côte d’Azur estate. From that description, you could pretty much write the movie yourself, and it wouldn’t necessarily be any worse than the one we see. Despite his embittered monologues about the emptiness and meaninglessness of the universe – delivered, for purported ironic effect, against some of the planet’s more glorious scenery – Stanley yearns to believe in something, or in almost anything. For her part, Sophie turns out to be curiously difficult to unmask, and to promise romantic possibilities the nattily attired Anglo sourpuss has never considered.
Every so-called plot twist is telegraphed in advance, the chemistry between Stone and Firth is negligible (although they both look terrific in period evening wear), and the cast of fine actors around them is arranged as types rather than individuals: Hamish Linklater as the insipid rich boy in love with Sophie, Jacki Weaver as the credulous old biddy, Eileen Atkins (bringing a hint of life to the dismal proceedings) as Stanley’s onetime bohemian aunt. But those things, even the zero-wattage romance, aren’t as fatal as the first-draft quality of the script and the lethargy of the direction. Even in Sophie and Stanley’s scenes together, they appear to be strangers who have just met and are flinging bons mots at each other without listening for signs of life from the other party. There’s considerable pontification in “Magic in the Moonlight,” but no conversation; characters state their positions and click the plot forward mechanically from one scene to the next, without any sense of experience or change. It’s like the work of a bright high-school student who’s been dazzled by Noël Coward’s dialogue, and is finding out it’s not as easy as it looks.
Cinematographer Darius Khondji delivers the requisite pretty pictures of the Provençal countryside, and captures the two principals handsomely enough: Stone with her enormous eyes, slender form and unaffected American-girl demeanor; Firth with his manner of leonine Imperial grandeur run slightly to seed. Maybe that pictorial pleasantness will distract summer moviegoers from the fact that shot-to-shot transitions are often awkward, dialogue scenes are forced and poorly staged and that even by rom-com standards the obstacles created to keep Sophie and Stanley apart until a respectable running time has elapsed are idiotic. All the same, you can feel a peculiar pungency behind Stanley’s supposed struggle with faith, his desperate longing to believe. That desperation is real, even if the story around it is barely there, but it isn’t about God or the spirit world or life after death. It’s an artist’s yearning for the Prospero-like magical powers he once had, the powers he keeps on trying to conjure up again out of nothingness.
Magic
In The Moonlight (2014) Movie Review from Eye for ... Anne-Katrin Titze from Eye for Film
Magic In The
Moonlight / The Dissolve Tasha
Robinson
1NFLUX
Magazine [Steve Pulaski]
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Little
White Lies [David Ehrlich]
Rex
Reed Reviews 'Magic in the Moonlight' | New York ... Rex Reed from The New York Observer
In
Review Online [Kenji Fujishima]
It's
Been a Year Already? | Village Voice
Alan Scherstuhl
Woody Allen's
Magic in the Moonlight: Keeping life at a ... David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site
Magic
in the Moonlight Review | Vanity Fair
Richard Lawson
Review:
Woody Allen's 'Magic In The Moonlight' Starring ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
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Allen Retreats to Uninspired Territory for 'Magic in ... David Sims from The Wire, July 24, 2014
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July 25, 2014
Daily
| Woody Allen's MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT ... - Fandor David Hudson
Woody
Allen, Dylan Farrow, and Magic in the Moonlight ... Jason Bailey interview from Flavorwire, July
21, 2014
'You
know, I'm never happy': Woody Allen discusses new ... Ann Hornaday interview from The Washington Post, July 25, 2014
'Magic
in the Moonlight': Film Review - The Hollywood ... Todd McCarthy from The Hollywood Reporter
Film
Review: 'Magic in the Moonlight' - Variety
Scott Foundas
Magic
in the Moonlight: Woody Allen's film is as airy as they come – first look
review Tom Shone from The Guardian, July 25, 2014
Woody
Allen's Magic in the Moonlight: first reviews published Andrew Pulver from The Guardian, July 18, 2014
South
China Morning Post [Edmund Lee]
Examiner.com
[Travis Hopson] also seen here: Punch
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Examiner.com
[Rick Marianetti]
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Chronicle [Josh Kupecki]
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'Magic
in the Moonlight' is an amusing trifle of a film Betsy Sharkey from The LA Times
Magic in
the Moonlight Movie Review (2014) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny
'Magic
in the Moonlight': Another Woody Allen Odd Couple ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times, also seen here:
New
York Times [A.O.Scott]
Metaphysical
Sleight of Heart The New York Times
Magic in the
Moonlight - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IRRATIONAL MAN B 86
USA (96 m)
2015 ‘Scope
Woody
takes a stab at existential philosophy, love, death, the feeble actions of man,
and even Divine providence in attempting to live with and comprehend the
anxieties of the modern world. While in
many ways it veers towards similar themes of Crimes
and Misdemeanors (1989) and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, it does so in the
absence of God, where moral guidelines are so much more subjective, different
for each person, where each generation is seen as blindly trying to find their
own way in a vacuous world filled with tragedies and pitfalls standing in the
way.
Interestingly,
the title of the film is also a 1958 book by William Barrett that does a good
job tracing the roots of existentialism throughout history, highlighting a few
central figures, and anointing it as the philosophy of our times. While not exactly a novelization of the book,
which is not even credited, much of the subject matter is discussed in a return
to the college classroom, where Joaquin Phoenix plays a well-traveled
philosophy professor named Abe Lucas whose reputation precedes him as he
arrives for the summer session at fictional Braylin College (actually Salve Regina University in Newport), a small town in Rhode Island that braces for his arrival. While he’s something of a brooding loner with
an obvious drinking problem, the faculty find him something of an erratic
disgrace while the students love how off-the-rails he seems to be. While rumors fly about his whirlwind affairs,
he’s actually built a fairly solid reputation from his writings. But in terms of his overt pretentiousness,
we’ve seen the man before in the works of James Toback’s THE GAMBLER (1974)
starring James Caan and Robert Wyatt’s recent remake The
Gambler (2014), starring Mark Wahlberg as the central figure of a man
drowning in debt, who seemingly can’t help himself, loosely based upon a modern
update of Dostoyevsky’s 1867 novella.
Wahlberg is a college literature professor that allows himself to engage
in an affair with the best and brightest of his students, so it should come as
no surprise when Phoenix does the same, singling out Emma Stone as Jill
Pollard, who distinguishes herself with her well-reasoned writings. Somehow drawn to his depressive state, she is
nonetheless inspired by his dilapidated state and outsiderist thinking, which
is so not like the more conventional thinking of her bland but more levelheaded
boyfriend Roy (Jamie Blackley). While
pledging her love to Roy, she runs around on long walks and late night evenings
with the professor, literally smitten by the worldly experience he brings into
her life, which we hear in separate voiceover narrations from both of them,
where she’s literally caught in his energy stream, thinking and talking about
him all the time, where in the eyes of others they have become the “campus
couple.”
Abe,
however, is stuck in a rut of disillusionment, alcoholism and self-pity, but
that doesn’t stop the flirtations of a married chemistry professor Rita (Parker
Posey), who was just waiting for his arrival as if he was the answer to her
prayers, quickly snuggling up to him, arriving with his favorite drink in a
rainstorm, not even deterred when she discovers he’s impotent. Always wondered why Parker Posey didn’t work
more often with Woody Allen, as her impeccable timing and comic wit, along with
her sensational improvisational skills would seem like a perfect match, not to
mention her modest ego and ability to be a team player, where she’s never been
a diva personality, yet throughout her career she’s always delivered on
camera. Apparently it’s taken until she
reached her late 40’s before they clicked, as she’s also scheduled to be in his
next film as well. Posey provides the
needed charisma, while Phoenix continually dwells on his personal torment and
anguish, yet he’s got two women infatuated with him. Only in Woody world. Yet that is part of the fun of the movie, as
it’s well beyond the acceptance level of anything the audience would ever
experience, yet it’s curiously close to the mindset of the director himself,
who seems drawn to the subject of professionally inappropriate, which has
followed him throughout his career.
Abe’s mindset mirrors that of the Allen characters he’s always played,
mired in an apparently longstanding existential crisis, drawing on the feelings
and sympathies of others, which they’re all too willing to give, seemingly
having little to offer himself, where he feels suffocated by the claustrophobic
feelings that are forever choking him.
While the film feels like another breezy and lightweight romantic
comedy, where even the names of Kant, Kierkegaard, and
Sartre were discussed by Allen’s own character Alvy Singer in ANNIE HALL (1977)
nearly forty years ago, the film’s attraction appears to be the pursuit of
happiness from the young developing life of Jill Pollard, who’s also, by the
way, mastered the classical piano. Then
comes a moment that’s like turning on a light
switch, where everything changes.
Suddenly it’s all about Abe’s transformation into a man of action and
self-fulfillment, highlighted by a conversation Abe and Jill overhear in a
diner where a distraught woman was on the verge of losing her children by a
callous judge in a custody case. Gone
are the days of swilling Scotch into the wee hours of the night, making a wreck
of his life, as suddenly this perfect stranger that he’s never spoken to has
given him a reason for living, becoming obsessed with the idea of eliminating
this judge with the perfect murder.
Abe is
instantly motivated and happy, and while he avoided sexual contact with Jill
before, suddenly he’s been invigorated, becoming a ravenous tiger in bed. Sporting a smile instead of that dreary look
of constant regret, Abe is a new man, dispensing with all the old philosophical
baggage that sounded like a lot of crap to him anyway, as he’s discovered a new
reason for living. While this may
conjure up thoughts of MATCH POINT (2005) and certainly Crimes
and Misdemeanors (1989), Abe has got his
mind clear of guilt, believing he’s doing society, and this woman, a favor by
getting rid of this judge and making the world a better place. While it all sounds like vigilantism gone
amok, it certainly changes the focus of the film, where gone is the breezy
comedy and suddenly we’ve entered dangerous territory, with the audience
completely identifying with criminality, especially coming from Woody Allen,
who has tread these dirty waters before in his own messy personal life. There’s a kind of
childlike naiveté with the way Allen approaches the subject, like a child’s
delight at opening a new present. Suddenly the focus is on murder, and the fascination
with pulling off the perfect crime, entering the area of expertise of
Hitchcock, like his real-time chamber drama ROPE (1948), or one of his favorite
writers, Patricia Highsmith, adapting her novel Strangers On a Train into a 1951 film, while Wim Wenders adapted another Highsmith novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley, into The
American Friend (Der amerikanische Freund)
(1977). Each of these films deals with
the idea of pulling off the perfect murder.
The narrative momentum completely shifts to Abe’s new obsession, spelled
out in psychological detail through voiceover as the “idea” literally takes
over the film, where Abe’s character has a noticeably sunnier disposition,
getting this all off his chest, where we’re led to believe he might actually
get away with it. And what sympathy is
there for the judge anyway? Abe is coming
out of his shell and all is sunny and light, until Jill gets word of rumors
that could possibly link Abe to the crime.
While he never thoroughly considered her response, as they shared an
initial macabre elation at the judge’s demise, all the while thinking she loved
and adored him, she’s actually pretty queasy with the revelation that he might
somehow be connected to the crime and seems willing to expose it all, demanding
that he confess and take responsibility.
This is the real world, after all.
Or is it? Just what game are we
playing here? Jill’s interference makes
the entire situation darker and more complicated, as she’s not the blindly
devoted follower he’d hoped for, as she has a mind of her own, and she wants no
part of this filthy matter. This is a
like a psychological schism happening exactly where he thought he’d committed
the perfect crime, as he was in no way linked to this woman, so what possible
motive could he have? Abe’s happiness
turns to grief and despair, and we’re back on murky grounds again with his
future slipping away, where he has to act to set things straight. It’s a bit baffling, where there’s obvious
humor in the dark depravity of his thinking, the ramifications of which are
obscured by the absurdity of what we continually witness onscreen. The world is eventually made right again, as
if through blind chance or Divine providence, interfering in ways we, the
living, could never suspect. Not sure
why all the horrible reviews, as some stoop as low as thinking this is one of
the worst Allen films, but it’s hardly that, as it’s meant to be amusingly disturbing,
like a scary ride at a carnival. But
when it comes so close to the author’s own twisted internal psyche, that
glimpse takes viewers on one hell of a ride, accompanied throughout by a live
version of Ramsey Lewis’s “The ‘In’ Crowd,” The "In" Crowd ~
Ramsey Lewis Trio - YouTube (5:51).
In years past, William Barrett’s Irrational Man was the handy paperback to carry around with your French cigarettes. The 1958 book was a concise overview of trends in the existential thinking of the postwar period, and Woody Allen’s latest makes superficial, if entertaining, use of that material.
Joaquin Phoenix impresses as a no-longer-young philosophy professor called Abe Lucas, starting over at an Ivy League college in Rhode Island, which plays itself. Abe is preceded by his reputation and a notable booze belly (also playing itself), and instantly attracts women drawn to hopeless cases.
First up is age-appropriate Rita, an unhappily married colleague (Parker Posey, almost stealing the movie). But Abe can’t quite resist the attentions of younger Jill (Emma Stone), a brilliant student and budding concert pianist who makes him her project, despite the objections of a bland boyfriend (If I Stay’s Jamie Blackley) who sees her slipping away.
Abe’s a hard-drinking depressive who favours self-pitying generalities. But he finds a new raison d’être when he overhears a woman complaining about a crooked judge in her custody battle. Suddenly, he’s obsessed with the idea of secretly removing that anonymous authority figure, although it never occurs to him to question the veracity of the stranger’s story. Because everyone needs a project.
Like Abe, the movie traffics in book-jacket terms, never going far beyond easy references to Kierkegaard and Sartre. And the story’s debt to Dostoyevsky is made too clear, with references to Crime and Punishment literally underlined on-screen, in case we missed it.
Still, Phoenix is a convincing rascal, and Stone is potent as a smarty-pants who can’t identify her own compulsions. They take turns narrating events, and the writing is often sharp. But undergrads won’t be quoting it in years to come.
Philosophy professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) causes a stir by arriving at Braylin College just in time for the summer session. Abe’s a hot commodity on the campus, the collegiate equivalent of a Lord Byron or James Dean. Rumors fly about his wild past, and he’s widely praised for his writing. Though the dissolute and depressed professor does little more than spout off existentialist clichés and swigs periodically from a flask (lest viewers forget just how disillusioned he is), he still manages to capture the attention of two beautiful and intelligent women (yes, Woody Allen detractors will be eye-rolling right about now). At a faculty party, he meets Rita (Parker Posey), a hot mess of a married chemistry professor so intent on an affair with Abe that she’ll overlook his—metaphorical and literal—impotency.
Though Abe generally finds his students to be a mediocre bunch, there’s one, Jill (Emma Stone), who stands out. Like Juliette Lewis’s Rain in Husbands and Wives, Jill distinguishes herself through a particularly sharp piece of writing, and like Allen’s character in that same film, Abe quickly starts up a friendship with the younger woman, taking her on long walks and sharing his more worldly experiences. While Abe’s initially reluctant to bed his student, smitten Jill offers herself up over and over again, sighing over the man’s clear torment and angst as Roy, her more age-appropriate and level-headed boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), frets over her infatuation with the “charismatic” professor. (The eye-rolling viewers may have transitioned into out and out laughter by this point.)
Things come to a head one day when Abe and Jill overhear a discussion concerning a corrupt judge whose upcoming ruling may end up costing a devoted mother the custody of her children. As Abe begins to mull over whether murdering another human being can ever be justified, he realizes that he’s stumbled upon a way of giving his life meaning, and he begins to emerge from his despondent state. Savvy viewers may be flashing back to Match Point (or even further to 1990’s Crimes and Misdemeanors).
Despite the heavy subject matter, the tone is light, harkening back to Scoop or Manhattan Murder Mystery: a romp with a bit of bloodless murder tossed in. The typical quotable Allen one-liners are absent, but the movie’s not without its charms. A big part of the appeal is the glossy, escapist vibe of the setting. The fictional Braylin, primarily shot on the campus of Salve Regina University in Newport, RI, is lush and impossibly gorgeous. Allen is, admittedly, out of touch with “kids today,” and the film often feels like a college catalog or the wishful thinking of a parent about to pack a child off to university. Jill’s life more closely resembles that of a middle-aged elite New Yorker than a coed (think Diane Keaton and Woody in Manhattan Murder Mystery): piano rehearsals and recitals, dinners with her music professor parents, and even a pleasant but boring relationship that’s hit the skids. Animal House it’s not, but there’s an indulgent pleasure to soaking in the atmosphere.
The acting, too, is solid. Phoenix and Stone do well with parts that aren’t particularly demanding—that in fact border on the stereotypical (jaded professor, plucky and beautiful ingénue). The always excellent Posey, on the other hand, breathes life into her role, giving the desperate Rita a surprising amount of pathos.
However, the film’s often heavy-handed approach at times drags it down. Both Jill and Abe narrate their thoughts in voice-overs. Though Allen has employed this device successfully in the past, here it feels obvious when Abe lets us know that his decision to commit murder makes him feel truly alive or when Jill relates that perhaps she’s more conventional than she thought she was. Allen shoehorns in obvious references to Dostoevsky, which he referred to with far more subtlety in Match Point and Crimes but which now feel tired. These are subjects that the director has tackled in the past with exciting results, but now they come off like old, worn-out toys.
Cribbing liberally from his old works, Allen has crafted an entertaining movie—granted, one with occasionally nail-biting suspense—but ultimately a diluted version of far more successful works.
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
There's an odd, mean little movie kicking around in Irrational Man, if you can sift past the tired bromides about love and continental philosophy to find it. The fifty-first feature from the not-so-venerable Woody Allen reads like a work of sloppy automatic writing given some surprisingly rich shading by an alert, unpredictable performance from Joaquin Phoenix and the steady hand of Allen the director, who once again proves he's as efficient at handling the near-screwball mechanics and black pitch of crime pictures as he is inept at romantic comedies. A nominal May-December romance about an aging fusspot granted a new lease on life by a twentysomething sunflower, Irrational Man is a far more disquieting film than its marketing would suggest--if not a confession of the director's real-life pathologies, then one of the most incisive profiles of a sociopath ever tucked into the back of a dark comedy.
Phoenix plays Abe Lucas, a world-renowned philosopher, philanderer, and drunk, hauled to a small-town college campus in Newport, Rhode Island, where he's expected to bring his game-changing intellect and gross sexual appetites to bear on his sunny surroundings. Impotent, blocked on his new book about Heidegger and fascism, and too depressed to wear anything but pot-belly-revealing opened collared shirts to lectures, Abe fritters away the days care of a budding romance with ace student Jill (Emma Stone) and a dysfunctional, would-be carnal affair with boozy science professor Rita (Parker Posey). That is, until he makes an impulsive choice to put his existential philosophy into practice to see what life looks like on the other side of traditional morality.
Allen has never been particularly good at depicting worlds outside of his blinkered existence, and Irrational Man is an especially egregious case. If the central relationship isn't quite as stilted as the pairing of Stone and Colin Firth in Magic in the Moonlight, it's still hard to get a grip on Jill's interest in Abe, who isn't a much better catch than a surly undergrad, despite his years. It doesn't help that Allen's philosophical education hasn't advanced any farther than Alvy Singer's in the nearly forty years since Annie Hall, forcing Abe to endlessly riff on the cruelty of existence while talking infernal loops around the names of Kant, Kierkegaard, and Sartre, as though the discipline has been dead since Being and Nothingness.
Why, then, does the film wriggle its way into one's mind as well as it does? It's difficult to discuss what sets Irrational Man apart from Allen's weaker genre efforts without touching on its central twist. Suffice it to say that Phoenix's childlike wonder and vivacity in the face of the crime he's about to commit and his smug glow thereafter ring truer than anything in the starchy, talky lead-up. When Allen abandons all pretense of telling a story about existential malaise and hard choices--that is to say, when he embraces his hero's disregard for not just social mores but also the basic sanctity of human life--Irrational Man goes in a surprisingly capable new direction, away from the obvious moralizing of Crimes & Misdemeanors to the point of near-total identification with a serious transgressor.
What Allen is trying to say about Abe's trajectory isn't so easy to parse, partly because he's working in a more ambivalent key than usual and partly because the structure is needlessly complicated by Jill's co-narration, a quirk that never quite makes sense even after it's given some context. You could read Abe through Jill's eyes as a nice-enough guy turned malevolent force that needs stopping, or you could go with the narrative momentum, which favours a world with Abe in it--doing as he pleases, whatever the outcome. This is an unsettling thought, considering Allen's own apparent proximity to ruined lives, and he surely knows it. It isn't the first time he's sampled his life story without naming it in recent years (consider the estranged stepson in Blue Jasmine, a Ronan Farrow doppelgänger), though it might be the queasiest.
Ethics aside, Allen seems as animated by the film's formal mutation as Abe is. Like Abe cheerfully plotting his transgression to the sounds of an instrumental "Smoke on the Water," Allen comes into his own in the back half of Irrational Man. He even rigs some genuinely suspenseful set-pieces that would be the envy of weaker but more critically-admired squibs like Match Point, among them a long take that pays off in a legitimately unnerving tussle in front of an elevator. Irrational Man is a prickly movie that doesn't always work yet stubbornly demands our attention anyway.
Irrational
Man - The Village Voice Amy
Nicholson
At the start of Woody Allen's campus comedy Irrational Man, caddish professor Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) drives up to a new school that's already steeled itself for his arrival. "Of course, my reputation — a reputation — preceded me," admits Abe. Such defensiveness also applies to his tabloid-attacked director, who seems moderately aware of the risk in making yet another movie where a young beauty pursues an old crank.
Here, the ingénue is Jill (Emma Stone), the impressionable daughter of two academics, already fixed up with a preppy twerp (Jamie Blackley). We know handsome Roy is toast when he willingly slips on an emasculating blue sweater Jill bought him for Christmas. By contrast, Abe, her philosophy professor, waddles around school in T-shirts that highlight his bulbous belly — he can't be tamed by a woman's good taste, and boy, isn't that a thrill?
Past Allen would put the joke on Roy for being unmanned by his intellectual superior, the triumph of brains over brawn. But Abe isn't the usual, quippy Allen hero. Phoenix is too much of a cynic for that — he's a true, barn-burning nihilist, not an urbanite grouch. Phoenix's Abe is a puffy alcoholic who would rather drown his neuroses in booze than analyze himself on a therapist's couch. He's sallow-faced and gravel-voiced, crafting his sentences with terse calculation rather than letting loose Alvy Singer's self-effacing verbal flood. As Jill swoons, "He could always cloud the issue with words."
In Irrational Man, the joke is on her for obsessing over this sad man. Finally, Allen is aware that his May-December romances are preposterous and naive. Women in his movies have always fallen for jerks, yet Allen believed that his male characters were worth it. (Even when he admits their flaws, he still thinks these guys have earned the devotion of Mariel Hemingway.) But Abe is such a soul-sucker that Allen shifts gears: Abe doesn't deserve Jill. Yet Jill deserves him, at least a little, for projecting wisdom and depth on his drunkenness. Forget Abe's rambling lectures on Kantian ethics — she really needs him to teach her to wise up about men.
As ever, Stone is commanded to be luminous. She's Hollywood's Miss Perfect, a box that's too small for her gifts. But occasionally, Stone at least hints at Jill's flaws — her idealism, for one, but that's about as damning as a job seeker saying that her biggest weakness is perfectionism. (At least it's a start.) Stone knows Jill is fascinated by Abe for reasons that don't add up. After Abe wrecks a party by playing Russian roulette, Stone bats her eyes and chirps, "He's so self-destructive, but he's so brilliant." Later, she blurts out the head-scrabbling, "He's very conservative in a kind of liberal way." Jill is playacting at being a grown-up. When Abe takes her out for dinner, she tries out an older woman's pickup line: "I don't want to eat, I want to go to your place." Squint and it feels like you can see Allen shrugging: A genius can't help it if a girl finds him irresistible.
Allen has little respect for the hallows of higher education. He failed out of NYU, got expelled by the City College of New York, and promptly reframed himself as a self-taught boy wonder. His fictional New England college town is green and twee and rotting from boredom. Every house has either a wrap-around porch or a de Kooning, and every cocktail party is a time bomb of restless affairs and sour rumors.
Jill's classmates, mostly rich, are mediocre talents who will grow up to run the world — a truth that adds to Abe's despair — but he's not much better. Like them, he's been entrusted with power he hasn't earned. "Much of philosophy is verbal masturbation," he intones to Jill, taking a subtle joy in the sexual innuendo. It's hard to tell if Abe agrees he's a phony, or if he's pretending to be vulnerable in order to manipulate women into throwing themselves on his pyre. "You need a muse," coos Jill's romantic rival Rita (Parker Posey), herself unhappily married to a fellow science professor. "I've never needed a muse before," he sighs, letting it linger like a challenge.
Yet Irrational Man isn't interested in a love triangle, especially when it's the overheated ladies who are acting nuts. (Though part of me wishes it were, just so we'd get more of Posey's pathetic, hungry wife and her floppy blouses.) Then, after a chance overheard conversation, the comedy entirely changes course and gives Abe a renewed purpose in life — one so wicked, it's better left as a surprise. Suddenly, the film's ethical debates have a purpose. Can something bad be good? Abe sees the question as a logic problem. Allen sees it more as a lark. Where the underrated Cassandra's Dream wrestled with guilt, Irrational Man asks guilt to dance. The movie is all sunshine and jaunty, almost desperate jazz. It works better than most of Allen's recent films because it's a trifle without pretense, and because the director's finally smartened up — a little — right when everyone's written him off. Allen doesn't care enough about Abe to ask us to care about his soul. Instead, the audience's relationship to the film is the way a wiser Jill would treat Abe: If you know what little to expect, why not enjoy 90 minutes with a scoundrel?
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(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
CAFÉ SOCIETY B- 82
USA (96 mi)
2016 Official
site [France]
While Woody Allen has
traveled the world making films, taking his talents to London, Barcelona,
Paris, and Rome after earlier affirming his existence in his hometown of New
York, this is his first venture into the glamorous world of Hollywood on the
West Coast, previously foreign territory for this director and a place he
adamantly refuses to visit when they’re handing out Academy Awards. Appropriately, he bathes this venture in a
golden hue of the past, featuring the exploits of cinematographer
extraordinaire Vittorio Storaro, notable for the ravishing look of The
Conformist (Il Conformista) (1970) and APOCALYPSE NOW (1979), though shot digitally this time,
creating a nostalgic tribute to a golden era of Hollywood, much as he did to
Paris in Midnight
in Paris
(2011).
Marking the third time an Allen film has opened the Cannes Film
Festival, the event was met with an article penned by Allen’s own son Ronan
Farrow (though some believe Frank Sinatra may be his biological father) in The
Hollywood Reporter, May 11,
2016 (My
Father, Woody Allen, and the Danger of Questions Unasked (Guest ...)
reminding the world about the lingering sex abuse allegations made by his
sister Dylan, claiming Allen molested her in 1992 when she was just seven years
old, damning accusations that should appall the world, charges that Allen has
vehemently denied, yet somehow he remains free to pursue his own interests as
criminal charges were never filed due to the fragile state of the victim who
remained traumatized afterwards. Dylan
revived her accusations in a letter to the New
York Times February 1, 2014 (An
Open Letter From Dylan Farrow - The New York Times), which was
followed by a strong rebuke by Allen a week later, Woody
Allen Speaks Out - The New York Times, and a summation of the
charges in an article by Maureen Orth in Vanity
Fair, February 7, 2014 (10
Undeniable Facts About the Woody Allen Sexual-Abuse Allegation ...). While there may never be a resolution to this
matter, it leaves behind a moral stain that will always be associated with this
director, where some refuse to see his films, as evidenced by this Melissa
Silverstein article written for The
Guardian, May 12, 2016 (Why
I won't be seeing Woody Allen's new film | Melissa Silverstein ...). Actors working with Allen have to come to
terms with this issue when deciding whether or not to work with him, as Rosie
O’Donnell for one has refused to work with him, though she was the initial
choice for the lead in SWEET AND LOWDOWN (1999), yet so far, he has always had
the cream of the crop at his disposal, with premiere artists literally flocking
to work with him. Nonetheless, this
murky past figures prominently in each and every Allen film, especially when
the films themselves push the boundaries on moral transgressions, perhaps
inadvertently exaggerating the nature of the offense, creating extremely
uncomfortable moments for the audience that exist with no other director. How ironic, then, that Allen is a comedy
writer, as there is an underlying element of personal tragedy linked throughout
all his works that might more accurately be described as Greek tragedy.
Another mixture of
comedy and pathos, Allen himself at age 80 voices the inner narration heard
throughout, the first instance since RADIO DAYS (1987), though he’s not
immediately recognizable, as one of the weaknesses of the film is the hollow
sound quality of the narration itself which sounds as if recorded in a
tunnel. Nonetheless, it’s always a
pleasant experience to hear Allen voicing his own films, and not just have
various characters essentially assume his voice, as the autobiographical
description reflects his singular wit and humor, especially as he introduces
new characters in the film. Opening in
the Bronx during the 1930’s, the exact circumstances of Allen’s own birth,
accompanied by the upbeat jazz riffs of Vince Giordano’s The Lady is a Tramp -
YouTube (3:50) and Benny Goodman’s I Didn't Know What
Time It Was - Benny Goodman - YouTube (3:19), one would have no
recollection that we’re right in the middle of the Depression as Bobby Dorfman
(Jesse Eisenberg) grows weary of his bickering parents, as he’s fed up working
at his father’s jewelry store and leery of going into business with his older
brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a rumored gangster who always brings home a fistful
of cash, whose trigger happy inclinations serve as comic relief, while his
constantly complaining sister Evelyn (Sari Lennick) is already married off to
Leonard (Stephen Kunken), a serious-minded, professorial New York Communist
Jew. Naïve and optimistic, yet wanting
more out of life, he seeks the big dreams of Hollywood, where his mother Rose,
Jeannie Berlin, daughter of Elaine May and so powerful in Margaret (2011), calls in a favor from her Hollywood hotshot brother Phil (Steve
Carell, originally slated to be Bruce Willis, but he was quickly fired), a
hugely successful agent to the stars (who never utters a sentence without
namedropping an A-list celebrity), hoping he can find Bobby a job. Amusingly, Phil surrounds himself with
luxury, constantly traveling and attending swanky parties, remaining so tied up
with work that Bobby continually gets the brush off, as it’s literally weeks
before he can even get an appointment.
When he does, the office is so huge that families of ten could live inside
it, suggesting his ego is even more inflated.
Taking him under his wing, he introduces Bobby to his secretary Vonnie
(Kristen Stewart) and instructs her to show him around town, turning this into
a period costume drama bathed in a continuous stream of jazz music. Noticeably brighter from the constant
sunshine, the mood of the film elevates as well, as the two kids aren’t
particularly impressed by the wretched display of extravagant wealth in Beverly
Hills, preferring instead each other’s company where the is an ease and
non-pretentious air about their developing friendship, much as there was when
working together in Adventureland
(2009), exhibiting a screwball
style of comedy, though she acknowledges already having a boyfriend. When Phil throws one of those extravagant
Hollywood parties at his home, viewed as a mansion among rows of other
mansions, Bobby meets some fellow New Yorkers, Rad Taylor (Parker Posey, bubbly
as ever), who runs a bi-coastal modeling agency and her husband Steve (Paul
Schneider), quickly becoming fast friends.
While watching movies
at Grauman’s Chinese Theater like Barbara Stanwyck in THE WOMAN IN RED (1935)
or running to the beach in Santa Monica, Bobby can’t get enough of Vonnie
(short for Veronica), falling head over heels, though he’s something of a
klutz, while she clings to her longstanding relationship that is a soap opera
in itself, remaining so secretive that Bobby hasn’t a clue, exposing a bizarre
love triangle where a nephew is competing against his uncle for the same girl,
with Uncle Phil promising to leave his wife, but backs down at the last moment,
opening the door for Bobby who dreams of swooping her back to New York,
thinking they can live in the Village and start life anew. Riding a rollercoaster of mood shifts and
changing allegiances, the gist of it is Phil ultimately changes his mind,
leaving Bobby heartbroken when Vonnie chooses him, like it initially plays out
in Billy Wilder’s The
Apartment (1960) with Shirley MacLaine running away with her boss on
New Year’s Eve, similarly referenced here in the final scene. Limping back to New York with his tail between
his legs, he goes into the nightclub business with his brother Ben, who clears
any competitors out of the way in ruthless fashion, burying bodies in wet
cement, paving the way for an upscale afterhours club called Café Society, a
hangout for the rich and famous, including politicians and gangsters, where
Bobby schmoozes with the customers while behind the scenes Ben handles the
money. Bobby thrives in this environment
with his nervous chattiness, allowed to wallow in his misery while continually
meeting new people, with Rad introducing him to a lovely New York socialite,
none other than Blake Lively as Veronica (sharing his lost love’s name), a well
grounded, beautiful girl who becomes his new companion, eventually marrying her
and starting a family together. What’s
perhaps obvious is that no real sparks fly between Bobby and Veronica, while
the same can be said for Phil and Vonnie, which is perhaps the point,
suggesting they are mismatched lovers tossed a curveball by the winds of
fate. So it shouldn’t come as any
surprise when Phil and Vonnie walk through the doors of the club, having
traveled around the world in luxury, yet all they can talk about is themselves,
becoming the picture of a prestigious upper class, suggesting people change
with age, embracing all that she used to ridicule, where the couple’s emptiness
and inherent phoniness is completely exposed.
When Vonnie finally has some free time, she spends it with Bobby,
reigniting feelings they each felt had passed them by, taking a carriage ride
through Central Park that ends with a kiss, with Allen recreating that iconic
shot of the Queensboro Bridge in MANHATTAN (1979), New
York Architecture Images-Queensboro Bridge, this time without the
rhapsodic Gershwin musical score, where if anything, it feels deflating—right
place, wrong time. Like ships passing in
the night, they each go their separate ways, only to dwell on their regrets
about the one that got away in a poignant final sequence. As she did in 2014
Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria, Kristen Stewart excels throughout by
underplaying her character, radiantly lit in each shot, showing a complexity of
character, always leaving the audience wanting more, while others are
underutilized (Lively), feel miscast (Carell), or don’t really stand out
(Eisenberg), yet the concept of Ben the Jewish hit man *is* truly priceless,
eventually arrested and given the electric chair, converting to Christianity at
the last moment, as unlike Judaism they offer an afterlife, posing the toughest
question of all for his Jewish mother, like “Sophie’s Choice,” asking which is
worse, his execution or his conversion to Christianity? While there are zany moments, with Allen
hilarious in spots, where his narration especially is greatly appreciated, adding
brief insights into Jewish family life, but outside of Stewart’s performance, this
is yet another Allen venture that continues to be set in the upper bourgeois
world of the wealthy, like a return to Great
Gatsby territory, where only the down-to-earth characters ring true.
Of special note, this
is the first Woody Allen film, other than LOVE AND DEATH (1975), without
co-executive producer Jack Rollins, the legendary talent agent of Lenny Bruce,
Nichols and May, Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Joan Rivers, David Letterman,
and longtime manager of Allen for over 45 years, who continued to list him in
his film credits even after he retired, but he passed away last year at the age
of 100.
In 1938, in Greenwich Village, Barney Josephson founded the Café Society. It was New York’s first integrated nightclub, where Billy Holiday first sang “Strange Fruit”, and it was named to mock the original meaning of the term, referring to the fashionable white elites who frequented the city’s upscale restaurants. That satire, and that history, are missing from Woody Allen’s Café Society.
This wistful look at glamorous Hollywood and New York of the ‘30s opened the Cannes Film Festival, out of competition, on Wednesday, 11 May. Café Society is less a portrait of an era than a swanky setting for a familiar Woody Allen comedy of failed relationships.
Young idealist Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg) comes from Los Angeles to New York to work with his uncle, vain movie agent Phil Stern (Steve Carell). As Bobby, the slightly stooped, prematurely kvetching Eisenberg pulls off a young version of Allen, much like John Cusack and Owen Wilson before him. When he falls for Phil’s secretary Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), they share a brief, bittersweet romance. She claims she has a boyfriend who’s a journalist, but she is in fact Phil’s mistress.
Disillusioned, Bobby opts for New York over L.A, much as Allen famously did. As is usually the case in Allen’s scripts, all characters are clever, including Bobby’s parents (Jeannie Berlin and Ken Stott) and Vonnie, who’s a far cry from Twilight‘s Bella.
That cleverness carries over into the film’s visual strategies, as Los Angeles stands here for the sweet and New York, the bitter. The cinematographer Vittorio Storaro convinced Allen to use digital video for the first time, a technology that, Storaro says, “enables both director and cinematographer to be conscious of what they are doing; there is no longer any guessing.” Famous as a philosopher of color, Storaro previously used Francis Bacon and René Magritte as inspirations for his cinematic palettes. In Café Society, he paints two memorable worlds, using light pastels for Phil’s Hollywood brunches and chiaroscuro for the New York nightclub favored by Bobby’s gangster brother (Corey Stoll).
But these enticing visuals merely dress up a formulaic story. Though the jokes targeting New York Jews or Hollywood social climbers are funny, they also gloss over salient contradictions of its context. Bobby introduces Vonnie to jazz records (she doesn’t enjoy them) and takes his shiksa girlfriend, Veronica (Blake Lively), to a jazz club (she has a good time), but the movie never confronts the segregation that defines the era’s jazz scene. Allen’s erudite wit, so biting in 1977 when he and Diane Keaton debated art cinema with Marshall McLuhan in Annie Hall, today seems self-congratulatory and nostalgic.
'Café
Society' Is a Blast From an Imagined Past | | Observer Rex Reed
Excelsior! In Café Society, Woody Allen returns to his favorite setting—the past—and emerges triumphant. He does that a lot, squeezing fabulous music, breathtaking scenery and nostalgic charm out of Paris, Rome, London, Barcelona and even Queens. But Hollywood is uncharted territory—a place that has always eluded, disoriented, challenged and intimidated him. Until now. Romantic, bittersweet and funny as hell, Café Society turns Hollywood inside out, rooting through the superficial tinsel to find the real tinsel. You go away gobsmacked, beaming and happy to be both.
The setting is the not-so-great Depression which, through Woody’s eyes, never seemed less depressed. When it begins with “I Didn’t Know What Time it Was” by Benny Goodman & His Orchestra, you know you’re in for some welcome class, and Woody delivers it in spades with the arrival in the Land of La of Bobby Dorfman (Jesse Eisenberg), a Jewish dork from the Bronx who has come to seek fame and fortune, rub elbows with some movie stars and get laid. His only contact is his unctuous Uncle Phil (Steve Carell), a pretentious, cigar-smoking agent who lives it up thriving on rumors, gossip, deals and martinis, entertaining the B-list around his swimming pool at sundown. Uncle Phil drops names with every breath he takes (“Adolphe Menjou is threatening to walk off the picture,” “Ginger Rogers has been trying to reach me!”), but he finally invents a menial job for Bobby out of guilt for the family back in the Bronx.
His sister Rose is Bobby’s mother (Jeannie Berlin, who sounds exactly like her own mother, Elaine May). Phil assigns his pretty assistant Vonnie (Kristen Stewart) to show his nephew around on a tour of movie star homes, and although he never comes any closer to a real star than the ones on the screen at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, Bobby falls for Vonnie. This is a bad idea since Vonnie is sleeping with a lover of her own who must remain a secret because he’s a married man. (He also turns out to be Uncle Phil.) Brokenhearted and devastated, Bobby returns to New York, marries another girl named Vonnie (short for “Veronica”), played by Blake Lively, and joins up at the top of the Manhattan social register running a nightclub owned by his brother Benny (Corey Stoll), aptly called Café Society.
Here the movie switches gears, and the people Bobby met in Hollywood waft in and out of his new life as a Manhattan celebrity, all of them connected by an association with Benny, who without the family’s knowledge, is a gangster with a talent for burying his enemies in cement shoes. The good-for-nothing Benny, played with smarmy but appealing gusto by Stoll, is probably the only man who could tell you the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa. In one of the loopier of the film’s many subplots, Benny converts to Christianity in the hope of an afterlife. The film is chock full of anti-Semitic references, including Lively’s observation as the bodies of Benny’s adversaries pile up in empty parking lots: “It’s true what they say—you people are pushy.”
It might occur to you about now that there is nothing remotely plausible about Café Society, and you’re right. It couldn’t matter less because like Radio Days, Blue Jasmine, Manhattan Murder Mystery and all of Woody’s great movies, this is a tall tale from the unique vision of a man with his own memory of how things were, are and should be. The twisted events that play out like a jazz riff are figments of Woody’s exuberant imagination. The past comes alive like a movie he runs in his mind, in fragments. Instead of a lot of depth, the movie has a linear simplicity that, in light of all the pretentious, convoluted junk we’re getting these days, is wonderfully refreshing. It’s crisp and dripping with style. The music, played incessantly by Vince Giordano and the Nighthawks, as well as some of New York’s other top jazz musicians, is marvelous. Santo Loquasto’s sets dazzle with the sophisticated enchantment of New York in its salad days, whether such a place existed or not. The gorgeous period feel by the great cinematographer Vittorio Storaro (Last Tango in Paris, Apocalypse Now) brings out the hues and color schemes of Woody’s different moods as the film shifts from capricious to solemn, always within the context of the director’s trademark whimsy.
Let us be perfectly clear, as the candidates are so fond of saying in this election year, Café Society is a cause for rejoicing.
Film of the
Week: Café Society - Film Comment
Jonathan Romney, July 14, 2016
As a filmmaker, Woody Allen tends increasingly to be a short-story writer, but now and then he reveals his hankering to be a novelist. His work, especially of late, often hangs on a single simple premise—an American tourist slips through a hole in time, a debunker of magic falls for a beautiful mystic, a jaded philosopher puts his Nietzschean principles to the practical test—and, for better or worse, exploits that premise for whatever comic or dramatic grist it can.
But every now and then, the novelistic aspirations emerge, and Allen expands his stories in parallel subplots that don’t always feel as if they belong in the film—as in the love life of Sally Hawkins’s supporting character in Blue Jasmine. At other times, the subplot becomes a parallel strand related to the main narrative but no less important: the tragicomic tribulations of Allen’s own characters in Hannah and Her Sisters and Crimes and Misdemeanors, to name two examples from his ’80s prime. These are the films that show how much Allen yearns to be a Tolstoy—to fascinate us with the woes of Levin even while we’re reluctant to tear ourselves away from Anna Karenina.
These days, Allen’s stories rarely open out a great deal. But that’s why Café Society comes as a surprise. After the slender sketches of his recent movies, Café Society feels buoyantly ample. That doesn’t mean that it’s exactly crackling with invention: there are few ideas here that are truly fresh. Indeed, there’s barely anything here that isn’t, one way or another, a cliché of some sort. This is a film in which Allen recycles commonplaces, many of them reworked from his previous films. One shot even openly alludes to one of his own greatest hits: a shot of the Brooklyn Bridge that echoes the famous (already very knowingly romantic) image from Manhattan. It’s the only example I can remember of a Woody Allen film overtly nodding to its being a Woody Allen film—beyond, that is, the formulaic use of white-on-black opening titles.
But pretty much everything here tells us that we’re in a Woody Allen film—not least his own voiceover narration, in which he shows his hand as a manipulator of plot and the puppets who enact it. The story is simple to the point of being schematic; the complexities, such as they are, simply leaven it a little. We begin in 1930s Hollywood, where powerful agent Phil Stern (Steve Carell) is seen nervily presiding over a pool party where there are always distractions at hand—names to be dropped (Ginger Rogers, Paul Muni) and phone calls to be made. In this case, the important call comes from Phil’s sister Rose Dorfman (Jeannie Berlin), back in the Bronx, who’d like him to find some work for her son Bobby (Jesse Eisenberg), an aspiring writer at a loose end.
When Bobby arrives in town, Phil eventually finds him something to do, and introduces him to his assistant Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), who shows the kid the town. Bobby is instantly smitten with this free spirit and sharp mind who isn’t remotely impressed by the hollow glamour of Hollywood or its supposedly larger-than-life denizens: “I think I’d be happier being life-sized.” She and Bobby are made for each other, it seems—only she already has a journalist boyfriend named Doug.
There is a catch, of course, and it’s so obvious that a spoiler alert is redundant. There is no Doug in Vonnie’s life, only Phil, who’s having an affair with her and is also besotted—as, in another of the film’s neat but pleasing ironies, Phil soon confesses to his shocked nephew. Bobby returns to New York perhaps not wiser, but certainly more cynical—and finds himself thriving as manager and general front-of-house smiler at a glitzy, celebrity-thronged nightspot named Les Tropiques owned by Bobby’s brother Ben (Corey Stoll), a ruthless hood. It doesn’t matter that nearly all Ben’s moments in the film are all strictly by the book, in a strain of gangster humor going back at least to George Raft’s insouciant line about his lawyers, “all Harvard men,” in Some Like It Hot. The Ben scenes are nevertheless good value: “If you ask nicely, people will listen,” he says, as some stooge gets dumped in a hole prior to acquiring a cement overcoat.
There’s so much in Café Society that is familiar, it almost seems as if Allen had knowingly set out to make a compendium of his previous work—although in general, few filmmakers seem less aware of it when they’re recycling their work. That’s why last year’s An Irrational Man, agonizing wearily over its well-thumbed copy of Crime and Punishment, felt so flat. But here, for the first time, Allen appears to be consciously paying some sort of self-tribute, and enjoying it.
Here then is the hapless, idealistic but ultimately corruptible hero who seems (and sounds like) a surrogate for that infinitely recyclable persona named “Woody Allen”; here is the vigorously bickering 20th-century Jewish family drawn from the director’s own childhood (Radio Days); here’s ’20s/’30s America as a mythical golden age, shown in manifestations both shabby (as in The Purple Rose of Cairo) and gilded (Magic in the Moonlight). Here is also the Cain and Abel pairing of the ostensibly honorable man and his no-goodnik brother, as seen in Crimes and Misdemeanors. And here’s the adored “nice girl,” Vonnie, embodying some distant, idealized purity of soul, like Mariel Hemingway’s character in Manhattan, although today it’s harder than ever—because of changing times and feelings about objectification, and because of the increasingly heated public discourse on Allen’s real-life emotional affairs—to feel remotely comfortable with that archetype.
Café Society is certainly one of Allen’s more awkward films in its depiction of women. Bobby, new to L.A., has a call girl visit his dingy accommodation; the scene is ugly for several reasons, and demeaning to both characters. And when Bobby gets together with glamorous Manhattan socialite Veronica, she’s manifestly all gilded surface but no soul: a golden girl depicted, strangely, as having a physical golden glow that’s very Californian. Silkily played by Blake Lively, Veronica is exposed in one of the film’s stranger moments as casually anti-Semitic: “It’s true what they say,” she remarks to Bobby, fondly but shockingly nonetheless, “you people are pushy.” (The implicit message here is just as shocking in its way: those shiksas are a dream, but trouble.)
If the film works as any kind of depiction of plausible humans, it’s above all because of Kristen Stewart’s Vonnie. The paradox is that, while quintessential New York woman Veronica is the epitome of all things that Allen habitually disparages as glossily Californian, the L.A. girl that Bobby falls for seems East Coast to the core: serious, lucid, high-minded, and, better still, riddled with the contradictions that Allen relishes. She’s seemingly the eternal demure kid sister—it appears to be her apparent asexuality that charms Bobby—yet she’s having an affair with an older married man who embodies all that you’d expect her to disapprove of.
There’s some nuance here for Kristen Stewart to winkle out, which she does surpassingly well. Stewart is increasingly proving to be one of the more persuasively minimalist actors in today’s cinema, adept at the evocation of thoughtful complexity—as witnessed by her anguished but laconic role in Olivier Assayas’s upcoming Personal Shopper. Stewart’s Vonnie doesn’t really seem of the period in which the film is set: this easygoing but undemonstrative sensualist doesn’t quite look or act like someone who exists in 1930s Hollywood, but seems more like a Beat era character two decades early, a precursor to her Marylou in On the Road.
Vonnie, in fact, is neither East nor West Coast, but comes from Nebraska, embodying the American propensity for self-reinvention—just as tweedy, twerpy Bobby can return to New York as a confident sophisticate. A familiar Allen theme here is that everyone is a fraud, everyone’s surface conceals another identity (itself one of the hoariest clichés of movie lore). The Countess von Goren—the most elegant, swelegant habituée of Les Tropiques, is really Chickie something from Passaic, New Jersey.
The most painful example of the yearning to become someone else is Candy (Anna Camp), the nervous first-time prostitute whom Bobby hires for a night but feels too agitated to sleep with: “It’s a sexy name, don’t you think?” she coos, though she’s really Shirley Garfin. “A Jewish hooker—that’s a first,” marvels Bobby, bizarrely. (You wonder just what Allen’s getting at here. Does Bobby really think that it’s a first, or is Allen himself conceivably that naïve? Is his idea that a Jewish hooker is inherently unerotic, or for a Jewish client, just too disturbingly improper?) At any rate, Candy is another variation on the gauche, goofy hooker figure that Allen has reworked so painfully in the past—most egregiously in Mighty Aphrodite and Deconstructing Harry—and this scene is particularly ugly because of the sour cantankerousness, indeed contempt, with which Bobby treats Candy, clearly seeing her as entirely unsuitable for his purposes. The scene is a disaster because it’s not nice and not funny, but also because Bobby, who needs to be established at this point as being at least relatively a Candide-like innocent, registers as a younger version of the curmudgeon played by Larry David in the sourly unlikeable Whatever Works (09). Any affection or respect we have for Bobby is damagingly sabotaged here. Besides, this scene just doesn’t fit the rest; it feels like a loose sketch that Allen had lying around and patched in to make the 96-minute running time.
It’s the only scene that really seems out of place, among others that stand out separately but very nicely, generating their own autonomous energy. They include are the depictions of Bobby’s garrulous, struggling family—including a stoically glum father (Ken Stott), an agonized mother (Berlin), and a philosophizing highbrow brother-in-law (Stephen Kunken). They provide the film’s juicy one-liners, and if a Jewish family gathering can’t do that in an Allen film, what can? (Ah, but… One such line is “Live every day like it’s your last, and one day you’ll be right”—a motto with such a perfect ring, you can’t believe you haven’t heard it before. In fact, Google reveals that it’s variously been used by, or attributed to, Muhammad Ali, Cannonball Adderley, Ray Charles, George Bernard Shaw, and, heaven help us, Benny Hill.)
I must confess that few recent Woody Allen films have meant much to me, except for Blue Jasmine, where for once you could detect a human touch at work—again, because of an extremely rich central female performance. The most assured of his recent films, Midnight in Paris, was impressive in its systematic riffing on a theme, but still left me pretty cold. So I’m surprised by how much I found myself enjoying Café Society as a film—a film that feels like a film, that is, rather than just a filmed treatment of a Woody Allen idea. It’s largely because of the way it looks, the way it for a change actually creates a world, with its own visual textures and density, that the viewer might want to inhabit for 90 minutes or so.
That’s largely due to Santo Loquasto’s production design and Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography; Storaro is working with Allen for the first time, and is the first DP for quite a while who seems as if he’s really enjoying himself with this director. The leisurely drifts around the blue-lit pool party at the start, the warm caramel-gold of Phil’s office, the swanning glides around Les Tropiques—there’s always a sense that the camera is densifying and expanding the space around the action, whereas in many recent Allen films, the settings have felt like backdrops, just sketched in for the action to play against.
Café Society comes alive partly because of the visual execution, partly because of the acting. Stewart, a wonderfully bullish yet vulnerable Carell, and a handful of lively supporting parts all give it substance—although I can’t take as much pleasure in Eisenberg, the latest of many actors to find themselves channeling Allen’s own mannerisms probably more than they’d want. It may all be an illusion achieved by the general air of expansive confidence, but overall, an intrigue that should by rights seem strictly mechanical gives the sense that it’s playing out with classical logic. Café Society is not one of the high points of Allen’s career; it’s not even a Blue Jasmine. But it does feel like something Allen hasn’t given us in a long while—something that feels less like a Woody Allen movie and more like just, you know, a movie.
Café
Society review: the latest fancified peek deep into ... - The Verge Tasha Robinson
Cannes
Review: Woody Allen's 'Café Society' Is His Most Charming ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
Movie
Shark Deblore [Debbie Lynn Elias]
Café Society and the Twilight of Woody Allen Megan Garber from The Atlantic
Movie
Review: Café Society -- Vulture
David Edelstein
National
Review [Armond White]
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Kristen
Stewart: Hiding in Plain Sight - Film Comment Nick Davis, July/August 2016
“Café
Society” and “Life, Animated” Reviews - The New Yorker Anthony Lane
'Cafe
Society': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen - ScreenDaily Jonathan Romney
Café
Society :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
Café
Society · Film Review Café Society lends a bittersweet glow to ... A.A. Dowd from The Onion A.V. Club
Cafe
Society Review - Den of Geek David
Crow
Café
Society Is Woody Allen at His Most Lazily Allen-ish | Vanity Fair Richard Lawson
ErikLundegaard.com
[Erik Lundegaard]
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Narrator Of 'Cafe Society' Might Come As A Total Surprise | Bustle Jen Ficarra
'Cafe
Society': Cannes Review - Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
'Café
Society' Review: Woody Allen Casts Kristen Stewart | Variety Owen Glieberman
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Society review – Woody Allen's amiable, if ... - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Why
I won't be seeing Woody Allen's new film | Melissa ... - The Guardian Melissa Silverstein, May 12, 2016
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Allen responds to Ronan Farrow: 'I never read ... - The Guardian Nigel M. Smith, May 12, 2016
Cafe
Society, Cannes film review: Gentle, whimsical - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
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Stewart admits concern about working with Woody Allen over ... Olivia Blair from The Independent, May 11, 2016
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2016: Café Society fizzes like vintage Woody Allen - review Robbie Collin from The Telegraph
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Woody
Allen finds himself at ease in his lush Hollywood story 'Cafe Society' Kenneth Turan from The LA Times, also seen here:
Los
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Café Society
Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Glenn Kenny
I believe Dylan
Farrow | MZS | Roger Ebert Matt
Zoller Seitz, May 11, 2016
Review:
In 'Café Society,' Rearranging Old Preoccupations A.O.
Scott from The New York Times, also
seen here: New
York Times [A. O. Scott]
Review:
'Café Society' Isn't Woody Allen's Worst Movie - The New York ... A.O.
Scott from The New York Times
Café Society
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Allers, Roger and Rob Minkoff
THE LION KING
Following the inspired
Aladdin and the emotionally involving Beauty and the Beast,
Disney caps a hat trick of box-office hits with this breathtaking picture. The
story hews to Joseph Campbell's maxim: first act, cosy; second act, despair; third
act, redemption and transfiguration. As before, the camera treats the animated
material like a feature film with humans - dollies, zooms, deploying the
movements you'd expect in a James Cameron movie. How's the little lion king in
waiting? Not too yucky. He has to learn the responsibilities of kingship, his
father (Jones) explains, but Uncle Scar (Irons) tempts him off course. Villains
and irresponsibles always have more fun. The hyenas have sharp one-liners to
fledge their jive-ass flight (leader Whoopi
Goldberg). The layabout beasts that Simba, Lion King Jr, hangs with in the
wasted years are very funny. Pumbaa the farting warthog and Timon the meerkat
still offer a viable hippie alternative. Songs variable. Animation staggering.
A winner.
Slant Magazine
review Ed Gonzalez
It began in Africa, so to speak. The
Lion King starts off nauseatingly enough when the animals of the film's
jungle accumulate to bow before their future king, baby Simba (Jonathan Taylor
Thomas), who's held up to the light of the sun in a curious celebration of
patriarchal rule. Simba's father, Mufasa (James Earl Jones), is murdered by the
evil Scar (Jeremy Irons), who takes over the land and allows it to go to seed
with the help of his minority hyenas. What with all the lush vistas and
references to Hamlet, the animators strive for a certain epic familial
melodrama, and though the film's beautiful animation more or less serves as an
emotional response to its many hysterias, several unanswered questions remain.
At the time of The Lion King's release, some were quick to point out its
racist overtones, namely that the evil hyena triumvirate is voiced by Hispanic
and Black actors. But that's a miscalculation of sorts, especially when you
consider that minority voices are also responsible for some of the film's
kinder characters. In the end, the film's racism is mostly subconscious and stems
from the animators' elementary attempts to color-code evil for the film's
target audience (what other explanation is there for Scar's black mane?). The
Lion King is loaded with hoary Biblical references (rays of light, burning
bushes) and Shakespearean shout-outs, but that's all they are. The film's
experimental musical numbers (however screechy the songs) are gorgeously drawn,
but since there's no real conflict implied in the film's mish-mash of styles, The
Lion King pales next to the studio's Sleeping Beauty, a film that was able to
follow through on the struggle between paganism and Christianity implied in its
cosmological smoke and mirrors. When Scar takes over the lion's den, Africa
inexplicably turns into a cloudy ghetto where the hyena population runs
rampant. When patriarchal rule is restored, light returns to Africa. It's a
facile evocation of Good versus Evil that's rendered all the more moot because
the animators refuse to explain how these animals are able to inexplicably
control the forces of nature. Surely if the deceased Mufasa can appear in the
sky in order to offer some wisdom for an older Simba (Matthew Broderick), he
can surely move a few clouds over and let the sun shine down on Scar's ghetto.
Hal
Hinson The
Walt Disney's "The Lion King" is an impressive, almost daunting achievement, spectacular in a manner that has nearly become commonplace with Disney's feature-length animations.
Make no mistake, though: There is nothing commonplace about "The Lion King." Of the 32 animated films Disney has produced, this story of a young African lion's search for identity is not only more mature in its themes, it is also the darkest and the most intense. Shakespearean in tone, epic in scope, it seems more appropriate for grown-ups than for kids. If truth be told, even for adults it is downright strange.
If "Aladdin" was Disney in its comic mode, and "Beauty and the Beast" its romantic, then "The Lion King" is the studio's attempt at a tragic/heroic style. And not only is this last genre the least well-suited to a G-rated children's story, it is also the one that they pull off with the least success.
Though "The Lion King" is being touted as the first of the Disney animations without a literary precursor, the themes and conflicts seem to come straight out of Shakespeare; you wonder why they didn't just go ahead and make a cartoon version of "Hamlet." Disney animations, of course, have always been rich in mythic content, but usually the heavy stuff remained submerged in the subtext. Here, the epic conflicts, plus all the peculiar cultural messages -- the skewed sexual politics, the ecological themes, the pop psychology, the incipient fascism -- are right up front, swamping the characters and just about any entertainment value the story might have had.
The tale begins with the presentation of Prince Simba, son of Mufasa (voiced by the ubiquitous James Earl Jones) and queen Sarabi, to a mass gathering of creatures, great and small, at Pride Rock, the center of the proud lion king's vast domain. The gathering is one of the movie's big set pieces, and it's impressively staged, but the diversity of animal types happy over the arrival of a new boss on the block creates some confusion, even for little Simba. When the adorable king-to-be asks for clarification -- "But Daddy, don't we eat antelopes?" -- Mufasa waxes cosmic, explaining that, yes, the lions eat the antelopes, but when they die their bodies turn into grass and, in turn, the antelopes eat the grass and the whole thing is just one great big circle of life.
Ah, yes. How good it is to be at the top of the food chain.
Not everyone is ecstatic about little Simba's imminent rise to power. Mufasa's lean and hungry-looking brother, Scar (voiced by Jeremy Irons, who plays the character as a vocal extension of Claus Von Bulow), feels that he's been shoved to the end of the royal cafeteria line. And so after he's foiled in his plot to slaughter Simba, Scar sets his sights on Mufasa himself, rigging the murder so that Simba sees himself as the culprit and runs off in disgrace.
Without doubt, the death of the heroic Mufasa will be the most widely debated aspect of "The Lion King," with people taking sides as to whether such things are good or bad for kids just as they did over the killing of Bambi's mother. But, hey, it's all part of the great circle of life.
After the death of Mufasa, Scar takes over the Pride Lands, and the movie takes an even more bizarre turn. As the veld becomes a police state, all the color is bled out of the film's palette, and the camera angles become severe and exaggerated. As a group of goose-stepping hyenas march by in "Be Prepared" -- easily the most dissonant musical number the studio has ever staged -- the iconography appears to come straight out of "Triumph of the Will."
What most kiddies will make of this I have no idea, but in dramatic terms, Scar's ascension to the throne brings the picture -- not to mention the great circle of life itself -- to a dead stop. And while this evil monarch plunders the Pride Lands, Simba is off in a distant jungle having an identity crisis.
This middle section, where Simba (who's voiced as an adult by Matthew Broderick) grows from a cub into an impressive young adult, is dominated by a pair of frolicsome creatures named Pumbaa (an odoriferous hot-pink warthog voiced by Ernie Sabella) and Timon (a wisecracking meerkat brought hilariously to life by Nathan Lane) who teach the tortured prince to lie back and forget his troubles. The audience, too, is happy to get whisked away from the heaviness of the Pride Lands to a jungle so lush and bright that it verges on the psychedelic. Also, Simba's cohorts -- who play Falstaff to his Prince Hal -- are the only genuinely likable characters in the picture; without their comic relief, the movie might have been insufferable.
It's pretty much of a downer anyway. The songs (written by Tim Rice and Elton John) are innocuous enough, or would be if they weren't hammered into your head by the industrial-strength orchestration. Still, none of the numbers really stands out, and without a memorable musical theme to unify the elements, the tale falls into fragments.
Plus, to tell the story of a hero's journey it helps to have a hero, and Simba comes across as the Lion Country incarnation of Fabio. Simba's return to the Pride Lands is prompted by the arrival of his childhood girlfriend, Nala (Moira Kelly), who tells the would-be king that he must return home and assume his rightful place on the throne. To which Simba replies, "That's not me anymore." When the airheaded expatriate does finally confront Scar and his hyena minions -- led by Shenzi (an unremarkable Whoopi Goldberg) -- a sort of kitty Gotterdammerung ensues. With Simba back up on his rocky perch, all is right with the world again. The zebras and antelopes return to the Pride Lands once again to be eaten by the lions, and the great circle of life resumes its turning.
You don't have to get all moralistic to notice that there's a problem here, and that the film's team of screenwriters -- Irene Mecchi, Jonathan Roberts and Linda Woolverton -- haven't solved it. And maybe it can't be solved if your bigger characters eat your smaller ones. As someone once said, the lamb may lie down with the lion, but the lamb isn't going to get much sleep.
The Lion King A Short History of Disney-Fascism, by Matt Roth
from Jump Cut, March 1996
Animated
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Allouache, Merzak
THE OTHER WORLD (L’autre monde) A- 93
France Algeria
From the opening credits, this is a sumptuously beautiful film, using an economy of means, never overshooting or over dramatizing. There’s a gorgeous soprano aria representing the music of Europe sung over the opening credits, the only moments spent in Paris, as a beautiful French/Algerian woman (Marie Brahimi) takes flight for Algeria searching for her missing boy friend. Immediately in her new land, the music changes, the language changes, and the landscape is entirely different. Using a hand-held camera for the street scenes, this filmmaker has a wonderful feel for locations, for his use of non-professional actors, for his brilliant underlying use of music from the region written by Gnawa Diffusion, and for creating such a raw, unflinching realism.
Algeria is fighting a civil war, as terrorists from the neighboring mountains are routinely murdering and dismembering what they perceive to be their enemy, those who do not share their fanatical Islamic vision. The woman’s search takes her into the heart of the war zone where a government commander informs her that her boy friend is missing in action, warning her of the terrorist savagery, where they’d just as soon slit her throat as talk to her, but she persists and is immediately captured, the only one not killed. She discovers what someone later describes to her as “pure, unadulterated horror.” What follows is her harrowing journey through places Westerners never get to see, where cameras never go on newscasts or even in other films, such as HOTEL RWANDA, as they are too dangerous. This is the setting of the film, which never idealizes or romanticizes, which has an evolving feel for landscapes and the various people that inhabit these remote lands. My only complaint is that the young woman is too innocent of the consequences of her actions, as she doesn’t know the land, doesn’t speak Arabic, and relies completely on the kindness of strangers. Watching this film reminded me of PLATFORM in the outer regions or PORT DJEMA in the incredibly coherent cultural mix, while not as skillfully made or written, but these are rare films that provide such authentic views of unknowable cultures.
THE REPENTANT (El Taaib) B+ 92
Because there are not
many films made in Algeria and the region, directors have always felt an
obligation to explain everything in their films, perhaps to over-explain…I felt
compelled to make this film, because the young generation, even the young
actors I employed do not know much about the past. It’s being hidden and I
believe to move forward we must talk about the past and come to terms with it.
—Merzak Allouache, director
Because of Algeria’s
recent troubled history, the government has disallowed films with explicit
political content, but this is a barebones, thinly disguised, historically
relevant film written and directed by veteran Algerian filmmaker Merzak
Allouache, who has been making features since the late 1970’s. Part of the dramatic power of this movie is
how little expository information is provided, yet Mohammed Tayeb Laggoune’s
superb handheld camerawork throughout offers a better understanding of Algeria
than most any other films we’ve seen, using a near documentary style
reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami, especially the long drive taking us through
tiny towns in the rural countryside region, something we’ve rarely encountered
before. In 1999, after 8-years of civil
war and more than 200,000 dead, the Algerian government attempted to end years
of terrorism by offering Islamic jihadists amnesty, where fighters who came
down from their hideouts in the mountains and registered with the authorities
were called “repentants.” The idea was
to fully integrate them back into society, but they were often met with
community outrage, as many local families felt these fighters were responsible
for the deaths of their children. The
return of these men who had been exposed to radically unorthodox underground
military techniques was often met with hostility and violence, where some were
hauled out of their homes and publicly murdered on the street. Opening in the vast expanse of a barren snowy
wilderness, the film follows one such man, jihadist Rashid (Nabil Asli), who
initially seems too young to be taken seriously, but he is a man of few
words.
Once word is out that
Rashid has returned, neighbors congregate around him, with one in particular blaming
him for a murderous assault in town years ago taking the lives of several
children, where despite his denials, some are convinced he was part of the
raid. He is protected by the police,
however, according to the amnesty law, which finds him a job as well, where
Rashid serves coffee in a local café. As
days and weeks go by, he seems like any kid his age, where he enjoys watching
soccer on TV and has his eye on every girl that passes by. His quiet demeanor is mystifying, as he’s a
hard read, rarely uttering a word to anyone, attempting to lead a normal life,
yet the owner notices unexplained absences from time to time. Politics are barely mentioned in this film,
as except for the initial outburst, no one speaks of the past and background
details are absent, where the less said, the more intense is the underlying
tension carrying some unbearable weight, where the close camera scrutiny and
the attention to detail is impressive.
The mood only grows more intense when we meet the local pharmacist
Lakhdar (Khaled Benaissa), a man living in a meager apartment with bare walls,
drinking wine and watching Chinese language television alone at night as a way
of numbing his existence. He receives a
call, presumably from Rashid, that immediately gets his attention, calling his
wife Djamila (Adila Bendimered), where there is plenty of inexplicable anger
between them, as if there is an exposed rift a mile wide, where only later do
details emerge.
The film is largely
seen through a jihadist’s eyes, where despite honest efforts, they may never
fully integrate back into society, as there is a similar deep-seeded chasm,
especially since they are the vulnerable to exposed attacks when they return,
as opposed to working as a collective unit in the field. This different psychology creates an
underlying dread upon return, awaiting death threats to materialize, where a
growing sense of anxiety only rises, and there’s an uneasy alliance with the
police who persist on wanting information, threatened with arrest at any minute. Precipitous events change Rashid’s plans,
especially after someone attacks him with a knife, which he in turn uses
against his assailant. Not expecting
justice or mercy, like a thief in the night, Rashid disappears, where according
to his landlord, “He comes, eats, kills, and leaves.” Leading both Lakhdar and his wife on an
extensive drive through the empty hillsides, Rashid agrees, for a price, to
point out their daughter’s grave, an act so vile in the mother’s eyes that her
rage boils over on several occasions, becoming the central emotional focus of
the film, as her rage reflects the unspoken rage of a nation. Algeria remains a country trying to forget
the hatred and bloodshed, but undercurrents of violence and fanaticism still
remain. Filmed in just 20 days on a low
budget, the director strips down the story to the bare essentials, where the
tight-lipped information (set up through one-way phone calls) and emotional
weight of memories (Djamilah’s remorse) beautifully set up the dramatic finale
by rigorously establishing throughout such a realist and unpretentious
tone.
The Repentant - Movie info: cast,
reviews, trailer on mubi.com
Born in
Fabien Lemercier
Cineuropa
A man flees across an immense desert, a heavy bag on his
back, tripping over rocks and glancing nervously behind him as he runs. Here is
a man deserting terrorism. But here is also
Rachid (Nabil Asli) is a repentant jihadist, and his return to his home village gives rhythm to the fascinating questions raised in the film. After a moving family reunion, three villagers turn up to kill him ("Rachid the killer, the dog, the criminal!"). His relatives give him depressing advice ("You must leave as soon as possible!", "Life is more expensive, do you have money?"), and try in vain to dissuade him from registering at the local police station to make the best of the government's policy to rehabilitate repentant jihadis ("They'll torture you", "force you to betray"). Rachid therefore leaves for the closest town where the local policeman finds him a job as a waiter in a cafe, but also asks him for a favour (the nature of which is never revealed). The repentant starts a new life under the watchful eye of his boss ("No politics", "You're getting on these nerves", "I don't like your ugly hypocrite face"), who puts him up in the cellar. In this same town, another lonely man is trying to forget his past through drink and television: Lakhdar the pharmacist (Khaled Benaissa). When Rachid bursts into his life, he turns it upside down, awakening in him suffering that he needs to address to be able to rebuild himself. Along with Djamila (Adila Bendimered), Lakhdar's ex-wife, the pair form an explosive trio on a journey through open wounds still not healed from the civil war, deep wounds that a quest for truth would so like to heal that it leads to a "treaty" with the old enemy, an alliance that is both ambiguous and very difficult to live with.
One of the many qualities of this film by Merzak Allouache (who wrote its screenplay) is a plot rich in riddles and suspense. Through ellipses in the editing and what the main characters don't say (the repentant never speaks about his past as a fighter, merely defending himself as innocent of the crimes he has been accused of, while the couple never say what separated them), dramatic tension is maintained throughout the story (a gun is unearthed in a flower pot, someone attacks Rachid with a knife). This expectation, which stimulates the audience's imagination, gives the filmmaker the opportunity to sensitively portray three characters trapped in the present because of their past. Many elements of intuitive understanding are contained in their gaze and in the nuances of their expressions. But the director also portrays a country where violence and silence have become normal ("He comes, eats, kills, and leaves", "You didn't hear anything, and you know nothing!"), where madness has taken over men and infected their memories, where misery is the cause of many woes, and where religion holds bloody pacts with their conscience, a country in which it is extremely difficult to turn the page and move on.
Filmed in 20 days on a low budget, The Repentant (co-produced by the French from JBA) is formally very good, and takes us from a bustling town to sublime high plateau landscapes. Under the appearance of a thriller, it gently poses delicate questions that resonate far beyond this country, as suffering, the weight of memories, the desire for revenge, and attempts to forgive and offer peace (to others and oneself) are issues that often haunt many a place and being.
Variety Reviews - The
Repentant - Film Reviews - Cannes - Review ... Jay Weissberg
With: Adila Bendimerad, Khaled Benaissa, Nabil Asli, Hacene Benzerari, Belkacem Bentata, Mohamed Takiret, Mohamed Adar. (Arabic dialogue)
After several misfires, Merzak Allouache delivers not just his best film of the past decade, but arguably his best in 36 years in the helmer's seat. Tracking a former jihadist and a separated couple whose lives were destroyed five years earlier, "The Repentant" is a beautifully made, deeply emotional drama that catches auds up in its troubled protags' lives, all the way to a staggering finale. Though cinema is awash in Islamic fundamentalist themes, Allouache goes beyond mere issues with his intimate approach and narrowed focus. This is one Algerian movie that could finally see worldwide exposure, including Stateside.
Allouache not only strips the story down to basics but reduces the exposition: Background details are spare, and what's not said is more powerful than what is. This suppression is tied to the helmer's message of a country paralyzed by a self-imposed gag order, in which the past remains an unbearable weight that cannot be discussed. But as "The Repentant" demonstrates, the past is very much alive, and a refusal to confront it head-on allows fear, corruption, and fanaticism to thrive.
In the late 1990s, the Algerian government attempted to end years of terrorism by offering jihadists amnesty. Islamic fighters came down from their hideouts, registered with the authorities as "repentants," and were integrated into society. Rachid (Nabil Asli) runs away from his fundamentalist compatriots in the mountain and reports to the cops; the police chief, Redouane (Mohamed Takiret), gets him a job with embittered cafe owner Salah (Hacene Benzerari), and Rachid appears to be fitting into normal life.
Then, he meets pharmacist Lakhdar (Khaled Benaissa). What actually transpires between these two isn't seen or heard: first a one-sided phone call that visibly upsets Lakhdar, then a meeting that isn't shown. What's clear is Lakhdar's intense isolation: He lives in a bare apartment, drinking copious amounts of wine and watching Chinese television at night, though presumably he doesn't understand the language. Like everything else in his life, the boob tube merely fills the hours, since Lakhdar's only engagement is with his inner demons.
After meeting Rachid, he calls his ex-wife, Djamila (Adila Bendimerad), who angrily makes the long drive to see him. They exude tension when together, uncertain how to behave and unsure if the chasm between them can be bridged. When she snaps that she can't go back to the same hell as five years earlier, he replies, "Go back? I'm still in it." They tensely wait for Rachid to call again, yet Allouache withholds explanation of how these three fit together until late in the film. Before the wrenching finale (bring hankies), all that's clear is that Djamila and Lakhdar had a daughter who died five years earlier.
Many of Allouache's films express disheartened concern over the rise of
fundamentalism ("Bab el
All three leads deliver perfs of stunning emotional depth and complexity, quietly embodying the conflicts raging within. Only Djamila explodes, and when she does, Bendimerad's expression of rage and grief is devastating. Young d.p. Mohamed Tayeb Laggoune displays a firm control of his handheld camera, appropriately responding to emotions onscreen. Visuals reflect the story's intimacy while capturing the region's empty landscape, whose vastness can feel crushing.
Camera (color, HD), Mohamed Tayeb Laggoune; editor, Sylvie Gadmer;
sound (Dolby Digital), Ali Mahfiche, Xavier Thibault, Carole Verner, Julien
Perez; assistant director, Nadjib Oulebsir. Reviewed at
CANNES DIRECTORS’ FORTNIGHT 2012: El Taaib (Le
Repenti/The Repentant) (Merzak Alluache) Sarah Nichols from Desist Film
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Directors' Fortnight Awards – Keyframe ... David Hudson
Algerian
director Merzak Allouache: I felt compelled to make “El Taaib” Kaleem Aftab interview from Variety Arabia, May 22, 2012
The
Repentant (El Taaib): Cannes Review - The Hollywood Reporter Deborah Young
Almada,
Natalia
THE NIGHT WATCHMAN (El Velador)
The
Night Watchman Lisa Nesselson at Cannes
Despite its brief running time, enticing title and sociologically rich
subject matter, The Night Watchman (El Velador) overstays its welcome. An
assiduously contemplative portrait of a vast Mexican cemetery that’s a popular
final destination for drug kingpins whose reigns are up, docu-maker Natalia
Almada’s (The General, from Sundance 2009) leisurely film is educational and
handsomely made but not particularly compelling.
Sort of told from the POV of dusk-to-dawn caretaker Martin, the doc makes its ironic points early and, like the decaying bodies in their lavish mausoleums, has nowhere else to go. It takes a lot of live people to build monuments to the dead and keep them squeaky clean. Life goes on, etc.
There is scant exposition besides the soundtrack’s intermittent bursts of radio and TV reports of drug cartel damage. As the media dutifully enumerate fatal shoot-outs, severed heads, bodies found in trash bags or chopped into pieces - and impart the stunning statistic that there have been 21,915 apparently drug business-related casualties in the three years the current president has been in office - the camera watches with greater patience than most viewers will possess.
The multi-storied above-ground tombs, some of which sport spiral staircases, chandeliers and marble fixtures worthy of a top hotel are startlingly interesting the first time around, but become routine to behold. Many of the dead are shockingly young - barely 20 in some cases. In what the filmmaker calls a “narco-cemetery,” there is no violence.
The world beyond the cemetery may be lawless and violent but,
except for the noise from graveside parties, Martin the custodian’s realm is
rather pretty and calm. If you didn’t know this was a cemetery, certain
stretches look like a residential community whose thoroughfares are lined with
peculiar homes influenced by
Along with grave-digging and wreath-transporting, the construction biz is booming and workers labour in the hot sun to keep up with demand for outsized final resting places built to stand the test of time.
Meanwhile, Martin’s ramshackle shack looks as if a strong wind might demolish it. Life is cheap, but eternity can be expensive. The caretaker, who makes do with a hovel while the deceased reside in palaces, waters the dirt in front of a ritzy mausoleum as clouds come and go, ever so gradually altering the light.
The
Night Watchman (El Velador): Cannes Review
Jordan Mintzer at Cannes Hollywood
Reporter, May 11, 2011
An aesthetically impressive but rather trying meditation on the Mexican drug war and its countless victims, Natalia Almada’s The Night Watchman (El Velador) should continue its fest tour following stops at ND/NF and the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, though theatrical play for this minimalist documentary may be limited to museums.
Following the 2005 border doc, To the Other Side, and the 2009 Sundance award-winning El General, Almada once again focuses on her troubled homeland in this restrained, nearly dialogue-free depiction of the “El Jardin” cemetery, located in the notoriously narco-friendly city of Cualican. A work in progress filled with freshly dug graves and kitschy mausoleums erected for the latest fallen kingpin, the place is home to an array of hardworking builders, cleaning women, street vendors and a watchman, Martin, who presides over the morbid theme park with detached aloofness.
The film purposely avoids confronting funeral goers or trying to
identify the bodies that day after day are buried within the ever-growing
necropolis, concentrating on the purely visual and sonic reminders of the
catastrophe that has become modern-day
Certainly, such directorial choices will frustrate viewers who are looking for some sort of in-depth investigation, and the repeated HD images of builders constructing tombs can feel like watching cement dry, which is actually what we see from time to time. If Almada is trying to show the repercussions of narco-trafficking, she’s taken a route that may not reach many, though high-art film admirers will appreciate the way she uses arresting visuals and layered sound to reveal the drug trade’s tragic remains.
Cannes 2011. Snapshots: Critics'
Week Opening Night Film & Two Special Screenings from Directors' Fortnight Marie-Pierre Duhamel at
Almereyda,
Michael
WILLIAM EGGLESTON IN THE REAL WORLD C 71
USA
a war against the obvious
Eggleston is a
controversial, yet prolific photographer, shooting nearly half a million
photos, most shot along the side of the road, ordinary locations everyone is
familiar with, but seen through Eggleston’s eyes, which capture a brief elusive
moment in time, usually set up in split seconds, capturing the look of people
so quickly they don’t have time to react, taking only one shot, and moving on. He was one of the youngest photographers
featured in the art galleries of MOMA at age 37, and he was immediately
despised by Ansel Adams and others, who felt him unworthy of an exhibition, as
his subject matter is so ordinary and commonplace. He grew up in Mississippi, and as he walks
around a small town in Kentucky, supposedly the birthplace of filmmaker Gus van
Sant, snapping shots of what he sees, followed by his son as his assistant, he
appears to be an ordinary man caught up in his vision of escaping mediocrity
with no preconceived notions about art or greatness. Therein lies the problem, however, as the
filmmaker seems infatuated by his every move.
Early on, it becomes
quite clear that the filmmaker has an amateurish approach to filming his subject,
using poorly lit video with terrible sound, where passing cars and trucks
overwhelm the sound of voices, which actually have to be subtitled. I was left with the impression that this man
was incredibly boring, reminding me of my own grandfather, as he was drunk most
of the time, smoking one cigarette after another, spending his time walking
around looking at things, shooting pictures, producing photographs that were
certainly stunning, but he defiantly refused to allow others to interpret them
without disagreement, feeling words can not express photography. The filmmaker makes feeble attempts to
describe what his pictures mean to him, but Eggleston himself feels the camera
can observe and even describe, but not explain.
We see many of the same photos after awhile, some seen in slides, others
in photo albums, some hanging in frames in galleries. It appears the artist is much more
comfortable thinking of his work as images seen in dreams, which the moment one
awakens, suddenly fade from view.
Almodóvar,
Pedro
Almodóvar,
Pedro
from World Cinema
A leading figure in the new Spanish cinema.
Formerly a telephone company employee and a contributor to underground
magazines and comic books, he began dabbling in amateur filmmaking in 1974; his
first film, Dos Putas, was shot in super-8. In the years that followed,
he acted in avant-garde plays, sang with a rock band, and began publishing the
"confessions" of fictional porn star Patty Diphusa. Several years
later, he joined the professional ranks and by the late 80s became established
as one of his country's internationally best known and most admired directors.
Openly gay, he often creates characters who are homosexual or bisexual, and he
has a special affinity for the confusions and desires of people who came of age
in
Film
Reference José Arroyo, updated by
Robert J. Pardi
Pedro Almodóvar is more than the most successful Spanish film export since Carlos Saura. At home, the production of Almodóvar's films, their premiers, and the works themselves are surrounded by scandal, and the Spanish popular press examines what the director eats, the qualities he looks for in a lover, and his weight fluctuations in a fashion normally reserved for movie stars and European royalty. Abroad, the films have surprised those with set notions of what Spanish camera is or should be; Almodóvar's uncompromising incorporation of elements specific to a gay culture into mainstream forms with wide crossover appeal has been held up as a model for other gay directors to emulate. The films and Almodóvar's creation of a carefully cultivated persona in the press have meshed into "Almodóvar," a singular trademark. "Almodóvar" makes the man and the movies interchangeable even as it overshadows both. The term now embodies, and waves the flag for, the "New Spain" as it would like to see itself: democratic, permissive, prosperous, international, irreverent, and totally different from what it was in the Franco years.
Almodóvar's career can be usefully divided into three stages: a marginal underground period in the 1970s, during which he personally funded and controlled every aspect of the shoestring-budgeted, generally short films, and which culminated in Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas de montón, his feature film debut; the early to mid-1980s, during which he was still writing and directing his increasingly costly though still low-budget films, but for other producers and with varying degrees of state subsidization; and, from The Law of Desire in 1986, a period in which he reverted to producing his own films, which now benefitted from substantial budgets (by Spanish standards), top technicians, and maximum state subsidies. Though critical reaction to his work has varied, each of his films has enjoyed increasing financial success until Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, which became 1989's highest-grossing foreign film in North America and the most successful Spanish film ever in Spain.
Almodóvar's oeuvre makes a good argument for the auteur theory. One can trace to his first films themes and strategies that he would explore in different forms, with varying degrees of success but with increasing technical expertise, throughout the rest of his career. Almodóvar's films posit the absolute autonomy of the individual. From Pepi to Tie Me up! Tie Me Down! the central characters in his films (mostly women) either act as if there are no social restrictions, or are conscious of the price of transgression but willing to pay it if such actions lead to, or contain, pleasure.
In Almodóvar's films, the various paths to pleasure lead to a destination and fulfillment (Matador), a dead end and disappointment (Dark Hideout, Women on the Verge), or an endlessly winding path and continuous displacement (The Law of Desire), but never resignation. To explore these varied roads Almodóvar has over the years accumulated a rep company of actors (including Antonio Banderas, who graduated to Hollywoood stardom). When in an Almodóvar film, no matter how absurd the situation their characters might find themselves in, all the actors are directed to a style that relies on understatement and has often been called "naturalist" or "realist." For example, when in The Law of Desire Tina tells her brother that "she" had previously been a "he" and had run off to Morocco to have a love affair with their father, Carmen Maura acts it in a style considerably subtler than that used by, for example, June Allyson to tell us she really shouldn't have broken that date with Peter Lawford. This style of acting is partly what enables Almodóvar's often outrageous characters to be so emotionally compelling.
Almodóvar borrows indiscriminately from film history. A case in point is What Have I Done to Deserve This? which contains direct reference to, or echoes of, neo-realism, the caper film, Carrie, Buñuel, Wilder, Warhol, and Waters. Moreover, by his second period, beginning with Dark Hideout, it became clear that Almodóvar's preferred mode of cinema was the melodramatic. It is a mode that cuts across genre, equally capable of conveying the tragic and the comic, eminently emotional, adept at arousing intense audience identification, and capable of communicating complex psychological processes no matter what the character's gender or sexual orientation.
Almodóvar's signature, and a unique contribution to the movies, is the synthesis of the melodramatic mode with a clash of quotations. This combination allows Almodóvar both a quasi-classical Hollywood narrative structure (which facilitates audience identification) and a very self-conscious narration (which normally produces an alienation effect). This results in dialectical moments in which the absurd can be imbued with emotional resonance (the mother selling her son to the dentist in What Have I Done); the emotional can be checked with cheek without disrupting identification (superimposing a character's crying eyes with the wheels of a car in The Law); and camp can be imbued with depth without losing its wit (the transference of emotions that occurs when we see Pepa dubbing Joan Crawford's dialogue from Johnny Guitar in Women on the Verge). At his best (What Have I Done to Deserve This?, The Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), Almodóvar drills a heart into the postmodern and fills it with an operatic range of feeling.
Although Almodóvar's movies have garnered increasingly heady praise in the 1990s, one senses the critical establishment is consciously trying to legitimize him in their eyes. Why is it that when a comedy expert grows more "serious," he is, perforce, taken more seriously? Fortunately, Almodóvar's mature works remain vibrant, unpretentious melodramas (unlike Woody Allen, whose art films seem like Xerox copies of the masters he slavishly imitates). Although Almodóvar has been chastised for trying to have his soap opera and send it up, too, he accomplished just that impossibility with earlier works like Law of Desire. As arrestingly sentimental as All about My Mother is, and as disturbingly mournful as Live Flesh is, they lack the kick of less-acclaimed works like High Heels, an unabashed glimpse into the soul of Lana Turner. Whereas Almodóvar once passionately embraced the Hollywoodness of Douglas Sirk's women pictures, his most recent movies merely buss those stylized conventions on the cheek. Why is there such a frenzy to commend the new-improved maverick, simply because he now uses humor only as a diversionary tactic, instead of an integral part of his canon? Despite reservations about the shift in his approach, one admires Almodóvar's unabated insight into role-playing, his debunking of machismo, his celebration of tackiness, and his unsurpassed skill with actresses. If something joyful seems missing from latter-day Almodóvar, something has also been gained in his collaboration with actress Marisa Paredes, a gravely beautiful dynamo, whom the director uses to suggest the melancholy behind emotional extravagance. If films like The Flower of My Secret are high-wire acts between pathos and humor, then Paredes helps him keep his balance. Even if one reminisces about Almodóvar's teamwork with efervescent comediennes like Carmen Maura and Victoria Abril, one is relieved that he hasn't become the Spanish John Waters, a filmmaker whose rebelliousness now seems quaint. Exploring his gay sensibility, Almodóvar appeals to straight audiences, who share his appetite for the resurrection and re-invigoration of old movie cliches. In overlooked works like Kika, characters literally die for love, and this slick director understands that classic escapism has undying appeal for a reason. The genius of Almodóvar lies in succumbing to the absurdity of Hollywood romanticism, while recognizing it as an impossible ideal. After enduring bloodless Oscar-winners and critically correct masterpieces, the audience rushes to Almodóvar's movies because they act like a tonic.
Pedro
Almodovar Official bilingual website
Almodóvarlandia the world of Pedro Almodóvar by Karl A. Erber
All-Movie Guide Rebecca Flint
Sony Classics
Profile another bio
TCMDB Turned Classic Movies bio
Pedro
Almodóvar Steven Marsh from Senses
of Cinema
BBC
News: Spain's enfant terrible by Lucie
Maguire from the BBC after All About My
Mother, March 22, 2000
Spain's
answer to Fassbinder Derek Malcolm from The Guardian, March 20, 2003
The Films
of Pedro Almodóvar - Pajiba Jeremy
C. Fox from Pajiba, July 12, 2006
New York
Sun Article (2006) The Spanish punk who conquered the world, by Grady Hendrix August
11, 2006
The
Women of Pedro Almodóvar - The New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn, March 1, 2007
Almodóvar
switches focus to male roles Graham
Keeley from The Guardian, May 20,
2008
Pedro
Almodóvar: I'm not to blame for UK tastes
The Guardian, June 24, 2008
Wigging
out with Pedro Almodóvar Gwladys
Fouché from The Guardian,
And
my next creation will be a film all about ... films Charles Gant from The Observer,
The
director, the artist - and the unframed, unmounted work of art Annie Bennett from The Observer,
Pedro
Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz … the mentor and the muse Louise France from The Observer, August 23, 2009
Almodovar
tempts his star away from Hollywood for brutal role in terror film Giles Tremlett from The Observer, May 9, 2009
A
short history of Spanish cinema
Andrew Pulver from The Guardian,
Psychoanalysts
to break down films of Pedro Almodóvar
Ian J. Griffiths from The
Guardian, March 29, 2011
Pedro
Almodóvar and His ‘Cinema of Women’
Julie Bloom from The New York
Times, December 2, 2016
Almodóvar, Pedro They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Pedro
Almodóvar and Penélope Cruz Maria
Delgado from The Guardian interviews
both August 4, 2006
Interview:
Pedro Almodovar | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Peter Conrad interview from The Observer, August 12, 2006
Close-Up
Film Interview (2006)
The
director, the artist - and the unframed, unmounted work of art Annie Bennett interviews the director from
The Observer,
Almodovar:
An "irrational passion" for movies Andrew O’Hehir interview from Salon,
Ranked 15th on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best
Directors
MATADOR B+ 90
Spain
Well, they just don’t make movies like this any more, which playfully throws in all manner of highly stylized, melodramatic hysteria, opening with a hilarious montage comparing the flamboyance of a bullfighter in the ring to the wicked desires of a sexual predator, who similarly stalks his or her prey before delivering a passionate thrust to their intended victim. Wrapped in all manner of B-movie gore that includes murder, mutilation, suicide, blood splattering, and even snuff films, and that’s just what’s on TV, viewed by a former matador who masturbates while he watches, Diego (Nacho Martinez), who retired after being gored in the ring, so now has this incessant desire to watch mutilated flesh on TV while making love to girls who play dead. Antonio Banderas plays Angel, and the name says it all, a virginal would-be matador who is taking classes from Diego, learning the specialized art of how to kill the bull while living with his over-sanctified, over-domineering mother (Julieta Serrano), who may as well be a stand-in for Franco as the Pope, who sees nothing but evil lurking inside her son, driving Angel insane with Catholic guilt and plenty of doubts about his sexuality. In order to prove he’s a man, that he’s not gay, he stalks Diego’s girl friend, his beautiful neighbor Eva (Eva Cobo) and attempts to rape her on the street, apologizing afterwards and then fainting at the sight of even the slightest drop of blood. He goes to Church and confesses, then to the police department to turn himself in, where he confesses to a female desk clerk who responds, “Some girls get all the luck,” but when the Inspector (Eusebio Poncela) brings in Eva and her manic mother, the wildly eccentric Chus Lampreave, they defend Angel as a sweet kid with a horrible mother. When they won’t press charges, Angel confesses to a string of unsolved sex murders and becomes headline fodder for the evening news reports.
María (Assumpta Serna),
a strikingly beautiful woman dressed in sumptuous high fashion, like a
character out of a Fellini film, arrives unexpectedly as his lawyer. We caught a glimpse of her earlier, as she
has this wild sexual desire to murder her partner with a hairpin to the back of
the neck at the moment of orgasm, continuing to grind away even after they’re
dead. The victims Angel confessed to
killing may have been her own handiwork.
Carmen Maura makes an appearance as Angel’s overly affectionate
psychologist, who at one point gives him mouth to mouth after a fainting spell,
while Almodóvar himself makes an appearance as the prima donna director of a
bullfight-themed fashion show, barking out orders, scolding one young model, “I
told you not to shoot up in the dressing rooms, use the bathroom.” But the real story is the meeting of María
and Diego, both of whom have an erotic fascination with death at the moment of
orgasm, so despite overheated passions, they hesitate getting too close too soon
and instead stalk one another like animals in heat, or like a matador and a
bull, in a dance of death waiting for the appropriate moment to strike. They follow each other into an empty movie
theater showing King Vidor’s 1946 film DUEL IN THE SUN, otherwise known as Lust in the Dust, which features an out
of control love/hate relationship between Jennifer Jones, playing a sultry
half-breed and the man she destroys with lust and desire, Gregory Peck, showing
the scene where they die in each other’s arms.
Both know this typifies their own outcome, which only arouses their
passions even more. Meanwhile, poor Eva
is jilted by Diego, having found his incomparable desire, but when she returns
to his home to get him back, dressed as a highly decked out woman in red, she
overhears them sharing murder stories, which she immediately reports to the
police. While all this is happening, the
country is up in arms over an anticipated solar eclipse and how this produces
strange animal behavior. Angel is having
psychic visions, leading the police to several buried bodies before visualizing
the exact path and dialogue of the escaping couple of death, who hightail it
out of town before consummating their love on the floor in front of a blazing
fire, accentuated by the erect nipples of the tantalizingly gorgeous Assumpta
Serna in sexually explicit foreplay of the highly aroused lovers to the
sensuous music of Mina singing “Espérame en el cielo” Matador - YouTube
(3:17), reaching their climax at the exact moment of the eclipse, when the
screen turns red.
Matador | review, synopsis,
book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Ai No Corrida, literally. Death and Desire are inextricably linked
in this Hispanic mix of sex, symbolism, violence and very chic design. A
trainee bullfighter is driven by his guilt as a failed rapist to confess to the
murder of a number of young men and women; but his maestro (retired from the
corrida after being gored) and his lady lawyer are far guiltier than he, since
the ultimate orgasm can only be achieved through killing. Not so much a
maelstrom as a mess of contrived eroticism, pretentious dialogue, and
voyeuristic sensationalism, Almodóvar's silly, cod-philosophical whodunit
impresses only for its bravado (fans of Paul Verhoeven may love it).
Strictly Film School Acquarello
A dashing former matador named Diego Montes (Nacho
Martínez), prematurely retired after a career-ending injury, rehearses the
principal tenets of the art of the kill at a converted classroom on his estate
to a group of aspiring bullfighters, including an unlikely, hypersensitive
student named Angel Giménez (Antonio Banderas). The training lecture then cuts
to the image of a beautiful, enigmatic woman sitting on a park bench, María
(Assumpta Serna) as she initiates contact with an anonymous man innocuously
passing by, follows him back to an apartment, and, at the height of physical
intimacy, stabs him with a long ornamental pin behind the nape of the neck - in
the region between the shoulder blades defined in bullfighting as the cleft
of the clods. The shot then cuts back to the training grounds as Angel, intrigued
by (and undoubtedly, attracted to) his instructor, follows Diego back to the
house for a drink of water, and soon grows anxious when the conversation
exposes his inexperience with women. In retaliation, Angel attempts to prove
his masculinity by stalking Diego's lover - a young model named Eva (Eva Cobo)
- in an impulsive act that culminates in an equally humiliating failed sexual
assault. However, unable to be taken seriously by the police, Angel decides to
confess to a series of murders after viewing the crime scene photographs on the
commissioner's (Eusebio Poncela) desk, and in the process, unwittingly unites
the paths of the crippled, morbidly aroused Diego and the fatally seductive
María.
Pedro Almodóvar creates a highly sensual, deliriously overripe, and
stylistically audacious portrait of love, death, fate, and violence in Matador.
From the opening shot of the iconic matador, Diego, deriving sexual
gratification from watching a horror exploitation film, Almodóvar establishes
the interrelation between sexuality and savagery: the parallel cutting of the
bullfighting training with María's precise and ritualistic murder; Angel's
validation of his masculinity through Eva's attempted violation; Diego's
initial pursuit of María inside a movie theater as the tragic, final sequence
from Duel in the Sun unfolds; Diego's repeated playback of the his fateful
goring, spotting María on video among the spectators. Almodóvar further uses
environmental elements to underscore emotional state, from the idyllic clouds
that precipitate Angel's consuming, morbid visions, to the portentous inclement
weather that punctuates his encounter with Eva, to the total eclipse that
materializes during the final encounter. By articulating profound connection
through instinctual aggression, Matador serves as a bold and provocative
allegory for the self-destructive cultural legacy of machismo, bravura, and
ritualistic violence.
Pedro Almodovar doesn't exactly film for the
family. His latest "Matador" baits every bull imaginable -- murder,
mutilation, suicide and rape being just a few of "Matador's"
popcorn-incompatible themes. But the Spanish director swirls his cape over
these chargers so imaginatively, shamelessly and inventively, his flamboyance
wins the day.
Beautiful Maria Cardenal (Assumpta Serna), a
criminal lawyer by day, develops a morbid thing for matador Diego (Nacho
Martinez) after she sees him gored in the ring. Meanwhile the disabled matador,
now teaching precision-killing at a bullfighting academy, gets into graphic
mutilation movies and a little human-lancing himself. Diego's student Angel
(Antonio Banderas), a repressed kid trying to prove himself, takes his
admiration of Diego too far by trying to rape his teacher's girlfriend. Turning
himself in, Angel admits (either guiltily or clairvoyantly) to a string of
execution-murders around town, where the victims have been speared toro-style.
And you thought all they did in
Imprisoned as a mass-killer, Angel gets
represented by -- you guessed it -- Maria, who's trying to get close to her
blood-lust heartthrob. Meanwhile, trying to make horn and tail of all this is
the police inspector (Eusebio Poncela) who believes in Angel's innocence.
Almodovar throws chuckles in with these
tormented alliances between ecstasy, death and tauromachy. When the inspector
visits Diego's academy, he can't avert his gaze from the leotarded students.
Almodovar then cuts to the inspector's, er, specifically focused points of
interest. And when Angel turns himself in for the rape attempt, the female desk
sergeant snorts "Some girls get all the luck." Almodovar himself plays
a queen-of-a-director of a fashion show (of bullfight couture): "I told
you not to shoot up in the dressing rooms," he yells at a model.
Those who've seen any of Almodovar's material
(his "Law of Desire," made straight after "Matador,"
recently ended a successful run at the Circle Dupont) know the futility of
outlining his work. It sounds like trashy Spanish television -- and it is, on
one level. But the images and sounds (with nods to cinematographer Angel Luis
Fernandez's flamenco color schemes and Ernando Bonezzi's provocative score) are
too bold to dismiss.
Home Movies by Charles Taylor:
Melodrama queen - Salon.com
The
Women of Pedro Almodóvar - The New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn, March 1, 2007
Film
Review Pedro Almodovar's Matador. Degenderising Gender? Rikki Morgan from Journal of Gender Studies, 1992 (pdf format)
Welcome to
Emanuel Levy » Almodovar Tribute: Matador
VideoVista Steve
Aylett
DVD Talk
[Stuart Galbraith IV]
Epinions
DVD [Stephen O. Murray]
Oeuvre:
Almodóvar: Matador | Spectrum Culture
Shannon Gramas
Review for Matador (1986) -
IMDb David Butterworth
Moria - The Science Fiction,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
The Films of Pedro Almodóvar [Michael E.
Grost]
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
10kbullets John White reviews a 4-dvd set of MATADOR,
LAW OF DESIRE, KIKA, and FLOWER OF MY SECRET
Variety Reviews -
Matador - Film Reviews - - Review by Variety Staff
MOVIE
REVIEW : Sex a Matter of Life or Death in 'Matador' - Los ... Kevin Thomas from The LA Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: Reviews/Film;
Almodovar's 'Matador,' Surrealist Sex Comedy - New ... and here: New
York Times
DVDBeaver.com
- Viva Pedro Package
Matador (film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LAW OF DESIRE (La ley del deseo) A- 93
Spain
Considered Almodóvar’s
most personal, but also one of his funniest films, a blurring of art and
reality, a jumbled mix of comedy, erotic drama, over the top melodrama, and
suspense thriller, murder mystery, featuring a magnificent performance from
Carmen Maura, who is perfect in her sexual ambiguity as a love-starved, overly
sensuous actress who turns out to be a transsexual, who all but steals the
movie from everyone else. Opening with
wild orchestral music by Shostakovich from his 10th Symphony (1987): Opening titles -
Shostakovich's Symphony no.10 ... - YouTube (
Eusebio Poncela plays Pablo (a stand-in for
the director?), a character who’d feel right at home in Fellini’s LA DOLCE VITA
(1960), whose self-centered narcissism is reflective of the gay life in
post-Franco Madrid, as he parades around in silk suits and wild flower shirts
wearing shades, playing the film director from the opening scene who takes home
any young man that interests him, feeding him with lines of coke, so he’s pretty
much butt naked much of the time, while Maura plays his sister Tina that used
to be his brother, and stars in his latest one-woman-show stage production of a
1930 Jean Cocteau play, The Human Voice, a monologue about a woman and a
suitcase which resurfaces again in Almodóvar’s next film as well. Tina is also caring for Pablo’s young
daughter Ada (Manuela Velasco), exposing her to the comforts of the church
(where she sang as a young altar boy) in her own overtly personalized way (“I
used to jerk-off in here all the time.”), breaking out into sacred song for a
priest that is extremely uncomfortable seeing what’s become of this once
favored child. There is a wildly
inventive scene where both Tina and Ada are on stage, Maura is wearing a
revealing silk slip while talking on the phone in one of those life or death
conversations, while young Ada appears to be levitating as if she’s standing on
thin air in a slowly moving dolly-on-wheels, lip-synching to one of the more
overtly dramatic songs in the film, Maysa Matarazzo’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas (Don’t
Leave Me)” La Ley Del Deseo (Trailer) YouTube
(2:27), which works so well, she does it again going back the other way. This becomes even more hilarious when Ada’s
real mother, Bibiana Fernández, one of Spain’s most famous real-life
transsexuals, shows up and wants to take her to Milan, but Ada has no interest
in her mother’s cavalier and overly nonchalant lifestyle and wants to stay with
the more stable and dependable Maura, who she emulates, much of which is acted
out just offstage. Again, the song
lyrics brilliantly match what we are experiencing onstage.
Back to the life of the director, Pablo, who we first see with lover Juan, Miguel Molina, a younger man who is unable to commit, still exploring with the idea of love and is not yet comfortable being gay, so he returns to work in a small coastal town, leaving an opening for Antonio Banderas as Antonio, a bisexual young man who stalks and eventually seduces the director before murdering his boyfriend, making his move with such an all-consuming passion that all hell breaks loose, his first such venture into homoerotic sexuality, expressed by an overwhelming need to possess Pablo all to himself, where he shatters the ties that hold everyone together. He disposes of Juan on a rocky cliff reminiscent of Vertigo (1958), while then covering his murderous tracks hiding behind lame excuses that are backed up by his overly protective mother. Pablo, in despair at the death of Juan, drives into a tree and loses his memory. At the hospital, Tina fills in all the lurid details of their past, including her love affair with her own father, which resulted in her sex change operation incest scene in La Ley del deseo with Carmen Maura (Almodovar movie) YouTube (3:00). Tina is the emotional center of the film, especially her poignant feelings about her tortured past and her distrust of men, where her history recalls Elvira in Fassbinder’s In a Year of 13 Moons (In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden... (1978), where like Elvira, she even gets her sex change operation in Morocco, but ends up being much more comfortable in her own skin. She’s found a new love of her life, and it turns out to be none other than Antonio on another obsessed rampage. The police, the bungling duo of real-life father and son, Fernando Guillén and Fernando Guillén Cuervo, haven’t a clue until eventually Antonio kidnaps Tina, demands Pablo, then in an hour of uninterrupted time that he successfully negotiates, makes love to Pablo while the dramatic music blares out onto the street below, confounding the police who can only scratch their heads as a crowd of onlookers gathers in mass. LAW OF DESIRE is one of Almodóvar’s most explicit treatments of homosexuality in his films, in its day a breath of fresh air, representing the director at his best in the early stages of his career, where his ability to combine social commentary with an extraordinary amount of risk-taking cemented his reputation as an early forerunner in advancing queer cinema.
The Law of Desire |
review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Seventh feature by a Spanish writer/director hitherto unknown in
this country: a lush, overblown, steamy, tragi-comedy murder thriller set in
Madrid, there's something to offend and delight everyone. It opens intercutting
between the filming, dubbing and première of one of fictional director/writer
Pablo Quintero's homo-erotic movies. Pablo leaves the first-night party without
his quasi-lover, Juan, who's straight and loves him dearly, but... desire's off
his menu. Pablo sends Juan to the country to put distance between them, and a
handsome stranger, Antonio, obsessed by the director, makes his move to fill
the gap. Actress Tina, the director's sex-changed brother (the stupendous Carmen Maura), now
a lesbian, has her own problems to deal with, plus her lover's precocious
daughter. Pablo, Tina and Antonio take up their themes in a passionate fugue
which accelerates fast. Wit, sex, drugs and topsy-turvy clichés abound;
Almodóvar's sensuous style carries all before him. A life-affirming joy.
NYC Film Critic (Ethan Alter) also seen here: Law of Desire (links
lost)
Although it's relatively obscure
in this country, 1987's Law of Desire was Pedro Almodovar's seventh
feature film and in it you can see many of the elements that will factor in to
his later, better-known work. For starters, the movie begins with two voiceover
actors recording dialogue in a sound booth, an opening that Almodovar would
repeat the following year for his breakout film, Women on the Verge of a
Nervous Breakdown. In addition, the main character is a brilliant, but
conflicted film director (Bad Education), Antonio Banderas plays a
creepy stalker (Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!) and there's even a plot point
involving incest (which anticipates his latest picture Volver). What
those films have that this one doesn't, however, is a healthy dose of humor to
balance out Almodovar's usual melodramatic scenarios. Don't get me wrong: there
are funny moments in Law of Desire. But there's also an earnestness to
the proceedings that suggests that Almodovar is still searching for his voice.
I enjoyed the film quite a bit anyway and think it's a better picture overall
than Women on the Verge..., which, seen today, is actually very uneven. Law
of Desire also feels like a more personal project than Women,
particularly in its treatment of the characters' sexuality. When Almodovar made
this film in the late '80s, homosexuality was still largely taboo and the movie
is, at heart, an impassioned argument against having to hide in the closet. In
the film, the director character (played by Eusebio Poncela) repeatedly has to
carry out his affairs in secret, referring to his lovers only as "good
friends." The finale drives this point home, as Banderas and Poncela make
love one last time as the police stand outside the apartment shining spotlights
through the window. I'm not convinced that the film's tragic ending is
completely earned (in fact, I'm sure it's not because it requires one of the
characters to do a complete 180 emotionally) but I'd be lying if I said it
wasn't affecting.
Old School Reviews
[John Nesbit]
Unquestionably,
surrealist Luis
Bunuel ranks as the most influential Spanish filmmaker of all time (the
only ambiguity being his nationality since he crossed numerous boundaries
during his career). Following in his legendary footsteps is Pedro Almodovar,
whose brand of surrealism often borders on bad taste while entertaining with
colorful characters in absurd melodrama. Frequently featuring strong females,
Almodovar invariably also includes gay and transgendered characters in his
comedic mix. Although many film buffs have followed Almodovar's work for over
two decades, pretentious cineastes seeking more serious foreign fare frequently
overlook contemporary Spain's preeminent director.
That may
soon change. Sony Pictures Classics recently sponsored a Viva Pedro!
retrospective that began in
Released in
1987, The Law of Desire primarily revolves around gay theatrical
director Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela) and his dangerous affair with
obsessed stalker Antonio Benitez (Antonio Banderas). As the film opens, the
40-year-old director pines for young Juan Benitez, but he realizes that his
twenty-something bi-sexual partner can never fully reciprocate his love. Juan
decides to sort things out and relocates to an isolated lighthouse. When Juan's
first letter home doesn't satisfy, Pablo composes a more romantic letter that
expresses melancholy longing and sends this back to Juan with instructions for
him to sign and mail this back to him. This fake typewritten love memo provides
a pivotal plot device.
Despite
being lovesick for Juan, Pablo continues his sexually promiscuous lifestyle,
and Antonio soon attaches himself to the filmmaker--far too clingy for Pablo's
taste. This time the younger man lusts voraciously for the filmmaker, and is
willing to do whatever he can to be with his man (reminiscent of Glenn Close's
psychotic obsession in Fatal Attraction). When Antonio comes
across Juan's sad, yearning love note, all Hell breaks loose. Neither Pablo's
nor Juan's life will ever be the same as a result of this tragic three-way
unrequited love triangle.
A subplot
involves Pablo's transsexual sister Tina (Carmen Maura), who has a humorous
moment with a lascivious priest that fondly remembers her pure voice when
"she" served as an alter boy. Additional surprises are revealed,
though these won't shock Almodovar devotees. A vivacious actress who is taking
care of her ex-lover's daughter, Tina prepares for her brother's next play, The
Human Voice (that forms the basis of Almodovar's next film, Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown).
The
Law of Desire contains
plenty of Almodovar touches, which makes for great fun. Brightened considerably
by the acting talents of Maura and Banderas, it's no puzzle to see why
Almodovar employed these two in multiple films. American audiences more
familiar with Banderas' low key supporting role to Tom Hanks in
Cineaste Queer
Film Classics, three book reviews by David Greven from Cineaste magazine, 2010
José Quiroga’s study of Pedro Almodóvar’s 1987 film Law of Desire is especially welcome. A bracing film that represents the near peak of Almodóvar’s first phase, which would conclude spectacularly the next year with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Law of Desire showcases the Spanish director’s signature blend of deconstructive cinematic techniques, melodramatic emotionalism that fuses classical Hollywood with the telenovela, vivid, almost cartoonish color and garish costumes imbued with a camp sensibility.
Quiroga brilliantly contextualizes the significance of the film’s individual scenes as well as its idiosyncratic themes and motifs, while linking all to Almodóvar’s oeuvre generally, treating the 1987 film as a particularly pivotal text in not only Almodóvar’s career but also in post-Franco Spanish culture.
“La Movida Madrileña” emerged in Madrid after Franco's death in 1975, a movement that represented the explosive releases from social, cultural, and esthetic repression of the era and that had powerful implications for gender, class, language, custom, race, cultural identity, sexuality. Almodóvar’s joyous and transgressive early work vibrantly foregrounds these elements. As Quiroga puts it, Law of Desire was the first film that, for me, portrayed a “different” Spain, not the obsessive and dark visions of Carlos Saura or the allegorical tales that rework the Spanish Civil War in a multitude of themes. It was an international Spain, signaled wonderfully by Almodóvar’s tapping into Latin American sentimental songs, called boleros, that are at the emotional center of this film. I felt it was a kind of Latin-Americanized Spain, paying homage to forms of expression that Spaniards had, to a certain extent, disdained before Almodóvar came on to the scene.
Quiroga is especially deft at analyzing the complex and often unpredictable social arrangements and emotional ties in the film, which more or less exempifly Almodóvar’s motley medley. The aloof, brooding movie director at the center, Pablo Quintero (Eusebio Poncela), loves handsome young Juan, but Juan does not love him; the hotheaded, sullen Antonio (the astonishingly attractive young Antonio Banderas, a fixture of early Almodóvar) loves Pablo, but Pablo cannot return his love; Tina, Pablo’s sister, was once his brother who eloped with their father and then underwent a sex change operation in order to hold onto him (she couldn’t, however). Played by the great Carmen Maura, Tina is a fascinating character fascinatingly played, and a catalogue of gender- and propriety-defying themes and attributes. Quiroga is perhaps at his best in examining just how poignant Almodóvar’s treatment of the Tina character is—like a post-operative transsexual Holly Golightly, she battles the mean reds of sorrow and rejection with defiant aplomb, as exemplified by the glorious moment in which she asks a street cleaner to douse her with jets of spraying water on a humid nighttime street. Indeed, Almodóvar was quite prescient in his depiction of a transgendered identity in dialogue with homosexuality, and in the way that he populates his filmic world with varieties of sexual difference.
Quiroga analyzes the rich thematic of the “chase” in this film as an allegory of the way that “gender is chased by sexuality, or the other way around—to the way in which gender and sexuality operate as a kind of mutual chase of affection and flight.” This motif dovetails with another prevalent Almodóvarian one, the confusion between art and life. And this in turn leads to the film’s rumination on the qualities of desire itself: “Desire never quite involves the transit solely from one point to another, from a subject to an object, from one body to a different one”. Quiroga’s keen insights here correspond beautifully to the complexity of Almodóvar’s vision in this film, on all of these affectional and textual levels. Perhaps the chief symbol for all of these crosscurrents is the movie theater itself, “the meeting point for all of the characters,” a site that once traditionally served as a meeting place for gay male cruising and for “straight men seeking release.” Law of Desire is the ultimate romantic fantasy, much like Hitchcock’s Notorious, and its climax evokes that great 1946 film in many ways. Just as Cary Grant finally admits that he loves Ingrid Bergman and most importantly tells her that he does (“Oh, you love me,” she moans in plangently quiet ecstasy), Pablo, the cold, aloof, rejecting lover, finally holds Antonio in his arms and makes love to him with sweet, sexy tenderness. Of course, this being an Almodóvar film, they only have one hour to be together in emotional and erotic unison. It’s a spellbinding conclusion to a poignant and deeply complex film.
Quiroga points out that Law of Desire is one of Almodóvar’s few explicit treatments of homosexuality in his films, other than the later, much ballyhooed Bad Education. As Quiroga puts it, before Law of Desire, he had not seen “a love dynamic between men treated in such a way that did not turn it simply into an allegory of its right to exist, but rather took that right as a given”. Responding to the director’s comments that the homosexuality of its main characters is a “purely incidental” issue, Quiroga notes that such positions should not be seen as a disavowal of homosexuality, but rather as the director’s desire to produce much broader social commentary.
To my mind, Almodóvar’s films after Women on the Verge are as emotionally vacuous as they are increasingly cinematically sophisticated. With some important exceptions here and there—The Flower of My Secret, Live Flesh (perhaps), Volver—Almodóvar’s films have become boutique, luxe, vaguely decadent super-Euro-art films designed to appeal to a mass middlebrow audience (this certainly includes the pretentious Bad Education and the astonishingly overrated Talk to Her, which would appear to liken its queer male character to the mentally handicapped). It is hard not to feel that with the jettisoning of his explicit queer, camp sensibility after Women on the Verge that Almodóvar relinquished a vital part of his talent as well. Quiroga doesn’t seem to be nearly as troubled by the forfeiture of queer content in Almodóvar as I am, remarking in the end that he has remained “always in awe at the way in which Almodóvar has been able to combine a profound comic sensibility with incredible risks in terms of screenplay and directing.” Unfortunately, that risk-taking, so vitally present in his early films, would soon seep out of his work. Quiroga reminds us importantly of just how vital that early work remains.
Pedro
Almodovar Presents 'Law Of Desire' & Talks Life, Love & Art ... 25th anniversary screening, Katie
Walsh on the director’s AFI guest appearance, from The Playlist, November 9,
2011
cinemaqueer.com
- law of desire The Last Tango in Madrid, by Michael D. Klemm, November 2009
The
Women of Pedro Almodóvar - The New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn, March 1, 2007
Welcome
to Emanuel Levy » Almodovar Tribute: Law of Desire
Ferdy on Films [Roderick Heath]
Viva Pedro: Law of
Desire | Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert,
Fall 2006
law of desire -
review at videovista Paul Higson
Oeuvre:
Almodóvar: Law of Desire | Spectrum Culture
Lukas Sherman
DVD Talk
[Stuart Galbraith IV] Viva Pedro –
The Almodóvar Collection
10kbullets
John
White reviews a 4-dvd set of MATADOR, LAW OF DESIRE, KIKA, and FLOWER OF MY
SECRET
Epinions DVD [Stephen O.
Murray]
Outrate
— Quentin Crisp reviews Law Of Desire (1987) Michael
Review for La ley del deseo
(1987) - IMDb Edwin Jahiel
Law of Desire Chris Dashiell from CineScene
Lessons of
Darkness [Nick Schager] also seen
here: The Nick
Schager Film Project
Screen Fanatic [David
O'Connell]
Law
of Desire Review (1987) - The Spinning Image Graeme Clark
Eric's
Movie Reviews: Viva Pedro Part Six: Law of Desire
“LAW
OF DESIRE”–personally Almodovar | Reviews by Amos Lassen
movie
la ley del deseo (la loi du desir) - pedro almodovar - 1987 great photos
Pedro
Almodóvar Selects Four Classics, LAW OF DESIRE ... Andre Soares from Alt Film,
AFI
Fest 2011: Pedro Almodovar Named Guest Artistic Director - The ... 25th anniversary screening, Gregg
Kilday from The Hollywood Reporter
Almodovar
brings his 'Desire' to AFI | Variety
25th anniversary screening
Movie
Review : Almodovar's Lurid Yet Tender 'Law' - Los Angeles ... Kevin Thomas from The LA Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin) also seen here: New
York Times
DVDBeaver.com
- Viva Pedro Package
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A
NERVOUS BREAKDOWN (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) B 88
Spain
Using garish colors and highly stylized music, creating absurd Hitchcockian drama using Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrations rather than opera, one could easily be back on the set of Demy’s THE UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG. Though feeling overly silly and somewhat outdated, the film stars Carmen Maura as Pepa, who provides a solid performance as a TV character whose boyfriend, an actor who also works on the same TV show, has suddenly left her, while all around her are tributes to other films with a tone of absurd comical farce, each outdoing the other in a manic screwball comedy style, all exaggerated hyper-emotional responses to the events of the day, leaving her apartment filled with a variety of guests arriving at her door, toned down by her barbiturate-laced gazpacho that at least puts some characters to sleep, including Rossy de Palma, while others continue to reek havoc, especially Julietta Serrano as an escaped mental patient who has jealousy issues with Pepa and her ex-boy friend Iván, Fernando Guillén, who is outstanding as a Fellini-like stand-in who simply cannot resist the allure of any woman, who has an opening segment that is absolutely hilarious, very much in the manner of 8 ½, as he verbally makes love to every woman he sees as he walks down the street.
María Barranco is the sexually driven friend, Candela, who Pepa all but ignores until she attempts to jump off the roof, while Loles León is also terrific as an absent-minded television secretary. Also of interest are the repeated sequences with the same bleach-blond Mambo taxi driver, Guillermo Montesinos. Maura also has a terrific segment doing a soap commercial, wiping the blood out of her television character’s sheets, leaving no clues for the TV detectives who come up empty. The story itself is silly and hardly noteworthy, but the characters all contribute to a mad romp, including a brief appearance by Joan Crawford and Sterling Hayden in JOHNNY GUITAR, leaving the viewer exhausted from the overblown hysteria filmed in Douglas Sirkian hyper color schemes, which includes an early performance from a young, fairly subdued Antonio Banderas. An over the top Lola Beltrán belts out the infectious song “Soy Infeliz” over the opening credits as we view images from women’s fashion catelogues while La Lupe sings a gay anthem “Puro Teatro” over the closing credits.
Loosely based upon a play by Jean Cocteau, and by Almodóvar
considered his key film, "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown"
demonstrates many of the future elements of his oeuvre, here especially hysterically
women.
The story begins with Pepa (Carmen Maura), distraught my her break-up with her
boyfriend, prepares her suicide by gazpacho with sleeping pills, as she is
saved by her best friend, who is on the run, only later to have her ex-lovers
grown up son's fiancée falling asleep, because she ate of the gazpacho and him
having an affair with her best friend.
When Almodóvar talks about it as his key film, it may be because we here find
motifs later explores in especially "Live Flesh" and "All
about my Mother", but also here he hits the tone of this flamboyant often
campy colorful mise-en-scene, where he pays
homage to his many influences, as for instance Salvatore Dali.
from imdb Author: Ivanhoe Vargas (rangonin@aol.com) from Jersey City , NJ
MUJERES AL BORDE DE UN ATAQUE DE NERVIOS is,
from its classic opening title sequence in which Lola Beltran belts out her
powerhouse ranchera ballad "Soy infeliz" to a montage of pictures
taken from women's fashion catalogues to its appropriate closing with La Lupe
(a gay icon herself in Latin America) singing her diatribe, "Teatro",
a perfect parenthesis that encapsulates a gay man's wet dream: the assortment
of strong but beautiful females, filmed to the beat of a potboiler, the eyes of
Douglas Sirk, a devotion to over-the-top divas, and the heart and essence of
farce taken to its limits. Seeing Almodovar's comedic masterpiece is not
enough: it has to be tasted like the fine wine it's become as it approaches its
twentieth year from when it first exploded into theatres and rocked Spanish
cinema. Quite frankly, this is the greatest screwball comedy ever filmed, and
for a genre created in the
As a matter of fact, television audiences who follow the satirical
"Desperate Housewives" should make the effort and see Almodovar's
WOMEN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN. It's the only real way to appreciate
what goes on ABC's hit show, because from the moment Pepa awakens from her
slumber and frantically runs to the phone to get that awaited phone call from
Ivan but misses him by seconds to when she learns that he's abandoned her and
faints in the middle of dubbing Joan Crawford as Vienna in JOHNNY GUITAR, and
her destiny and that of Candela, Lucia, Marisa, and Paulina all cross in one
afternoon at Pepa's apartment, we're in the same league as Bree, Lynette,
Susan, and Gabrielle from the "Housewives." Of course, the latter is
less concerned with the extreme and is darker in nature, where Almodovar's plot
is, despite the elements of the loss of love and the occasional gunshots that
are fired, the ultimate party to go to, let one's hair down, and dance 'til
dawn. And with those actresses -- Carmen Maura, Julietta Serrano, Maria
Barranco, Rossy de Palma, Kiti Manver, and even Loles Leon in a small but
hilarious part, who could ask for more?
Chicago Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Women on the Verge of a Nervous
Breakdown" (star)(star)(star)(star), the wild tale of Spanish television
actress Pepa (Carmen Maura) and her attempts to get over a jilting by her
faithless lover and fellow actor Ivan (Fernando Guillen), is the most
celebrated movie of
They're all memorable--sardonic, witty, packed with emotion and personality and
filled with lusty comic performances of tormented women and irresponsible men
(and vice versa) by Almodovar's formidable acting troupe.
"Women," loosely inspired by Jean Cocteau's play "The Human
Voice," is the funniest of all his movies: a madcap farce/romance/drama
that suggests a great
In comes Candela (Maria Barranco), a fugitive with a Shiite terrorist
boyfriend, and also Lucia (Julieta Serrano), Ivan's abandoned lover and the
mother of his son. Most disturbingly, here comes the son: Carlos (played by
Antonio Banderas in one of the early performances that made him famous), his
girlfriend Marisa (Rossy de Palma) in tow, and his own wandering eye drawn to
both Candela and Pepa.
Sex and emotional trauma are subjects both amusing and painful for Almodovar,
whose own gay perspective is more obvious in male romances like 1987's searing
"Law of Desire" (also in the series). So, in "Women," he
can both laugh at Pepa's predicament and view her with due seriousness. With Maura
delivering an explosive performance, Almodovar presents Pepa's tale with
gusto--vibrant colors, gaudy personality, mad jokes and a sexiness that erupts
off the screen. "Women" is a feminist comedy with real bite; it
always brings down the house.
Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown Easy Women, by Chris Fujiwara from The
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
Apollo Movie Guide
[Scott Renshaw]
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
DVDBeaver.com
- Viva Pedro Package
TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN! (Átame!)
Spain
Pedro Almodóvar’s controversial 1990 Tie Me Up! Tie Me
Down! was originally rated NC-17 before being released unrated, but,
ironically, it was one of the director’s least risqué films to date. A black
comedy about the (literal and figurative) bonds of love, it’s an off-kilter –
and off-putting – mix of humor, sex, and Stockholm Syndrome obsession that
never quite gels into something believable or appealing. Nutjob Ricky (Antonio
Banderas, sporting a Norman Bates haircut that goes with Ennio Morricone’s Pyscho-esque
stalker theme) escapes from a mental ward and kidnaps B-movie actress (and
former porn star and smack addict) Marina (Victoria Abril) because he believes
– on the basis of an anonymous one-night fling with her years earlier – that
she’ll fall in love with him once she gets to know him. Love does blossom, largely
via both of them caring for each other (he cooks her breakfast, she nurses his
wounds after he’s beaten up stealing drugs for her), and Almodóvar expertly
frames shots with doorways and bedposts to visually convey the couple’s
constrictive passion. Still, given
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
The cords that tie us one to another -- silken, insidious, invisible -- become literal ropy metaphors in Pedro Almodovar's fleshy love story "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" Though initially rated X (it was released without a rating) and hotly debated, it's a tale not of kinky sex, but of a sweeter human bondage, of loose ends tied into lover's knots.
If "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" was a satire of the faithless Lothario, "Tie Me Up!" is its darkly comic, slightly spooky antithesis, the story of an all-too-devoted lover. But don't expect "Moonstruck." This is stronger stuff, a combination of "The Collector" and a lurid technicolor romance. Or as a line of dialogue informs us, "Horror or love story, it's hard to tell them apart."
Victoria Abril, an Almodovar heroine from the tip of her sharp tongue to her painted toes, is Marina, a former junkie and porn star struggling for equilibrium. She seems just to be coming into her own as a relatively respectable B-movie queen when she runs up against Ricky (Antonio Banderas), a 23-year-old handyman just released from a mental hospital.
With his Bates Motel burr, gaunt good looks and tortured eyes, Ricky is
obviously not your ordinary stage door Johnny. Should there be any doubt, a
"Psychoesque" refrain announces him like an insistent doorbell on a
stormy night in
"I'll never love you, ever," says
Upon finally discovering the heroine's plight, her sister Lola (Loles
X marks the G-spot perhaps, for this is an orgiastic comedy of terrors and errors. More likely X denies the disquieting truths that only art can speak, with brazen guile in this instance. Viewed superficially, "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!" is a NOW nightmare, but suffice to say it's the women, calm and sure, who take the reins.
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan
Jardine]
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET (La flor de mi
secreto) B 87
Spain France
Probably the most disjointed direction of the Almodóvar films seen so far, as it’s a mixed bag, perhaps over-utilizing the frantically paced, mile-a-minute, comic conversations of previous fims with characters that aren’t always that interesting, while also extending the length of the purely dramatic sequences, attempting to create a more vulnerable lead character. This seems to be the blueprint for future films, less ensemble works and more lead oriented, a hurdle the director needed to overcome in order to develop a different kind of more mature signature style. Marisa Paredes is splendid, though she’s much better in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, some of the opening hospital training film sequence and similar dialogue regarding organ transplants is reiterated again in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, there’s some terrific music and dance sequences, set to the music of Miles Davis “Solea” from Sketches of Spain, also a beautiful Caetano Veloso song sung over the end credits, "Tonada de la Luna Llena," though both evolve significantly into artistic perfection by TALK TO HER. Also the fully mature orchestration of Alberto Iglesias, so effective in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, or the more dramatically effective sorrow elicited in TALK TO HER, had not developed yet, and wasn’t as prominently distinguished in this film.
Like A WOMAN ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, Marisa Paredes’s man, by his absence, a typical Almodóvar male abandonment, is causing her nothing but personal grief, so she’s drowning her sorrows in alcohol, falling into a midlife crisis where she’s not herself anymore. The result is she can’t churn out those romance novels like clockwork anymore as she’s been doing for the past 20-years. Instead, her stories have taken a U-turn into the neighborhood of more serious, downhearted and even sad (perhaps a parallel in Almodóvar’s own worldview?), so her publishers are losing their patience with her, calling her latest work a breech of contract. Dispirited, she decides to remedy the situation by offering to write a critical piece under a pseudonym in the newspaper El Pais, challenging her own published works as being puff pieces filled with artificial sentiment. The editor (Juan Echanove) is so overjoyed with how much she hates this author (herself) that he writes the critical article defending the merits of her works under his own pseudonym, which is something of an open love letter. This leads to a meeting of the minds which takes a long and meandering road to find their apparent common ground.
Chus Lampreave, who usually settles for small character roles in other films, playing the same part in two of them, WOMAN ON THE VERGE and TALK TO HER, where she’s the chatty landlady living on the ground floor, feeling her way for some public sympathy that she never receives, gets a plum role as Paredes’s mother, constantly feuding with her “other” daughter, Rossy de Palma, who actually cares for her aging mother, yet gets nothing but insults hurled in her direction by her own mother, who constantly threatens to move back to her hometown village, which she eventually does, and once there, has a wonderful, heartfelt explanation for wanting to be there. Only in an Almodóvar film does the household maid, Manuela Vargas, turn out to be an internationally acclaimed flamenco dancer as well, performing a beautiful dance sequence with her onscreen son, Joaquín Cortés, to the music of Miles Davis’s “Solea.” The color schemes of reds and blues are as extravagent as ever, and there are several other brilliant musical renditions which become stand-ins for Paredes’s troubled state of mind, such as the Bola de Nieve song "No Me Dejes Vivir." Despite the unevenness of the film with a few momentary lapses, most likely attributed to the unsettled state of mind of the director himself, who may not have known what he wanted to do, perhaps changing into a different vision in his head during production, the flair for exaggerated color schemes alone make this a unique film experience, but its supported by a terrific cast always humorously engaging and surprisingly inventive.
Leo (Marisa Parides) writes popular romance novels under a
pseudonym, but, mired in a loveless marriage to an adulterous military man in
Edinburgh U Film Society [Neil Chue Hong]
A romantic novelist
finds that her life is heading in the opposite direction to her sweetly sick
stories. Leo Macias (Marisa Paredes), writing under the pseudonym of Amanda
Gris, is in a failing marriage and her mood is so gloomy that she is unable to
tap out more saccharine prose. Verging on alcoholism, she seeks advice from her
friend Betty (Carmen Elias). Betty suggests that she take up journalism, and
keeping her other identity secret, Leo starts working for Angel (Juan
Echanove). After a small hitch, where Leo is asked to review the latest Amanda
Gris novel, she settles down enough to visit her sister and mother. This
fragile balance is disrupted by a phone call which brings a new twist to Leo's
various relationships; but who knows about her secret?
The Flower of my
Secret represents a turning point in
writer/director Pedro Almodóvar’s career. Earlier films, culminating in Women
on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Kika,
presented a manic, emotional style full of bright colours and with strong
female characters. In this film, there is a change towards a more
reflective,mature Almodóvar and away from the outrageous storylines. This does
not mean that the visual flair is gone - it is simply reined in and put to
better use. The colour schemes are still very evident in the
What has not changed
is Almodóvar's fascination with the female universe,and his desire to explore
the flaws which make up a person. Paredes, now a semi-regular in Almodóvar's
films, puts in an accomplished performance as a woman on the brink of collapse.
But it is the ability of Almodóvar to present an intricate view of entangled
emotional relationships which make this film so satisfying.
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
For those who've slogged through such recent Pedro
Almodovar movies as Kika and High Heels and found them terribly
wanting, and have been missing the fun and entertaining Almodovar of his
halcyon years with films such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
and Matador, the good news is that the old Almodovar is back. Though The
Flower of My Secret is not as crazed as Women on the Verge, the
movie marks the return of Almodovar's delicious humor and a departure from the
nastier streak that this Spanish director has been on recently. The story's
protagonist is a middle-aged woman named Leo (Paredes), a writer who publishes
under the secret pen name Amanda Gris, the author of fabulously popular romance
novels. She's having a hard time accepting the dissolution of her marriage to a
dashing NATO negotiator, and she's also having a hard time with her
rambunctiously spatting mother and sister. Leo's also begun publishing
newspaper articles under her real name and sparks an unanticipated relationship
with the paper's pudgy editor, Angel. Plot description, however, is a vastly
inadequate way to describe this florid movie. It comes across like Almodovar
riffing on Fassbinder (The Bitter Tears of
Tucson
Weekly [Stacey Richter]
Senses of Cinema (Carla Marcantonio)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)
VideoVista Steve Aylett
Movie
Reviews UK Damian Cannon
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times sounding a
bit flustered
The New York Times (Caryn James)
DVDBeaver.com
- Viva Pedro Package
LIVE FLESH (Carne trémula) B- 82
France Spain
My least favorite of the Almodóvar films seen so far, perhaps more contrived, overly calculated, less emotionally compelling, not in any way believable, though brilliantly acted and expertly told, a film that is suggestive of the paranoid police state era of a Franco occupied Madrid, where the police would rather shoot first and ask questions later. Adapted from another source, a mystery writer Ruth Rendell novel, Penélope Cruz, who we discover later is a prostitute, opens the film with a humongous pregnant cry in the dark which is heard by no one due to Franco’s announced crackdown on civil liberties, so the streets are empty. With no time to get to a hospital, the baby is born on a city bus, which subsequently entitles the young lad to a lifetime bus pass. Advance 20 years, this same young man, Victor (Liberto Rabal), is obsessed with a beautiful woman he had ravenous sex with in a pubic restroom a week ago, Elena (Francesca Neri), who is more interested in scoring narcotics than listening to this annoying interloper who arrives uninvited to her apartment. The police cruising by, rookie David, Javier Bardem, and Sancho, veteran José Sancho, who downs a couple pints of whisky just to prepare him for duty, pissed that someone is screwing his wife, both arrive on the scene and immediately suspect Victor. After a choreography of gunpointing, the deal goes down and David is accidentally shot, causing him to be paralyzed, while Victor is blamed and sentenced to several years in prison.
Years later, Victor is released from prison. David has become an Olympic paraplegic basketball star, living in a wheelchair paralyzed from the waist down, and has married the beautiful Elena, who has cleaned up her act and now sponsors a children’s center. Victor’s mother has died, leaving him her house and a large sum of money that she accumulated from turning tricks. Ángelina Molina as Clara takes Victor home one day, noticing his neighborhood looks surprisingly like the bombed out remains of Sarajevo, but they develop a torrid affair, though she’s married to another man. Also, Victor volunteers at Elena’s children center, causing David to pay him a threatening visit, which turns into a momentary farce when they each stop their threatening remarks to exclaim jubilant shouts of joy when a soccer goal is scored on TV. However, Victor is terrific with the kids, but later reveals his real motive, to become the world’s greatest lover, to make love to Elena to such a shocking degree, that it’s the greatest sexual experience in her life, and then leave her on the spot and never see her again. That would be his ultimate revenge.
Tantalized at the
prospects, Elena shows up one night and starts taking her clothes off. Both are still in each other’s arms at
dawn. She reveals all to David the next
day, who has surveillance photos of Victor with Clara, Sancho’s wife, and
brings them to Sancho, who has just been left by Clara, as he is a perpetual
wife beater. They both head to Victor’s
apartment to catch him red handed, but Victor has already surprised David by
revealing what really happened to him the night he was shot; his own partner
pulled the trigger, which caused his paralysis, because David was screwing his
partner’s wife. When all the players
converge at Victor’s home, it results in another silly game of choreographed
gun pointing, where no good can come from violence, and in a kind of musical
chairs, the film instead begins and ends with another birth on Christmas Day, a
day of rebirth and redemption, a day of salvation, a memorable day when Franco
no longer controls the lives of people now walking freely again on the streets
of Madrid.
This free but sensitive adaptation of Ruth Rendell's thriller is Almodóvar's most impressive film to date - darker, straighter and far more controlled than his camp extravaganzas. A story of obsession, hatred, jealousy and revenge, it concerns a young man sent to prison for his accidental involvement in a police raid that went disastrously wrong. He comes out - and he wants the crippled cop who helped to put him away. The performances are spot on, the control of pace, mood and narrative is assured, the visuals are crisp, stylish and imaginative, and the whole film has, for Almodóvar, an unprecedented weight and substance.
Austin Chronicle (Russell Smith)
Let's squelch those troubling rumors right up front, shall
we? Live Flesh (euphonious Spanish title: Carne Tremula) is a
different kind of Pedro Almodovar movie, but the 46-year-old director has not
followed the dismal path of other former enfants terribles who've
embraced bloodless conservatism in the name of "maturity." He still
shoots the hottest and most stylish sex scenes in the business, still works
with a color palette drawn from 1960s Xavier Cugat album covers, still retains
a fair measure of the bracing, "nothing is true, everything is
permitted" satirical perversity of early hero Luis Buñuel. What's really
different about Live Flesh is that, to a greater degree than ever,
Almodovar seems fully engaged with the inner lives of his characters, regarding
them as worthy of sustained exploration and even -- @en serio! --
compassion. The key players are Victor (Rabal), a handsome young misfit whose
obsession with hard-eyed beauty Elena (Neri) has a lingering impact on the
personal lives of two cops who, in an early scene, bust him for harassing
Elena. During the arrest, one of the cops, David (Bardem), is accidentally shot
and paralyzed from the waist down. Fate balances his misfortune by causing
Elena to fall in love with him. Victor, meanwhile, takes the rap and goes to
the slammer. After he's released, he sets up in a squalid tenement flat from
which he patiently stalks (woos?) Elena to the violent chagrin of hubby David.
Rabal, who for much of the film sports a crewcut rough-trade look similar to
Antonio Banderas in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, isn't quite the magnetic
presence that Banderas was. He's a bona fide talent though, and he nails the
heartsickness of a character whose only durable possession is the ride-free-for-life
pass he received for being born on a
Live Flesh is about passion, love, hate, revenge, marriage, money, politics, jealousy, sex, infidelity and wheelchair basketball. Or rather, a film that’s so busy juggling these elements that it never bothers to reach too deeply into any of them: a triumph of style over substance? Perhaps – but a kind of triumph all the same.
Very loosely adapted from Ruth
Rendell’s novel, the plot follows the ups and downs of Victor Rabal (Liberto
Rabal) from his birth on a
Victor spends six years in jail, his
desire for revenge heightened when he sees David on TV, national hero as a key
member of
There’s a fair bit more to this story than even this crowded synopsis can convey – despite having only five proper characters, Live Flesh is so packed full of incident that it almost becomes a parody of passionate melodrama: operatic popular songs on the soundtrack do their bit to exaggerate the mood even further.
An early shot of Elena playing solitaire with a tarot-like pack of cards hints that we’re in the classic film noir territory where destiny is all-important.
Victor (an aggressively charismatic performance from Rabal) certainly fits the noir bill as an essentially decent, ordinary bloke whose life is turned upside down after encountering a femme fatale. He makes a telling contrast with the introverted, physically restricted David – an interesting use of the outsize Bardem, with that freakishly large, expressive face (Bardem’s mother Pilar pops up in the prologue as the ‘midwife’ who helps Victor’s mother – Penelope Cruz! – through her labour.)
Crucially, Almodovar controls the implausible shenanigans with a confident, engagingly light panache. He springs a fantastic visual joke early on when a gun goes off in Elena’s apartment, coinciding with an almost identical discharge seen on her TV set. But a similar conceit later, when David and Victor pause during a punch-up to cheer on a goal in a televised football game, falls completely flat. The whole film is similarly hit and miss: in the end all the entertaining quirks Almodovar accumulates around the characters remain just that: quirks, diverting but arbitrary.
While the wheelchair basketball idea is an original twist, it’s ultimately as inconsequential as the Bulgarian learnt by Victor in the slammer. The epilogue, meanwhile sees Almodovar tacking on a political subtext that feels like it’s strayed in from another film altogether. Despite these problems, Live Flesh is an unusual thriller from one of European cinema’s most striking talents - though God only knows what Ruth Rendell made of it.
New York Magazine (David Denby)
LIVE FLESH Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan
Jardine]
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
New York
Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER (Todo sobre mi madre)
A 95
Spain France
Probably the first brilliant work of art from Almodóvar, a brazenly risqué melodrama that starts a little rough around the edges, especially using a similar organ donation hospital sequence that we’ve seen before in THE FLOWER OF MY SECRET, followed by another depicting the ugly violence that comes to women and transvestites, but building on its fabulous color schemes, it gains momentum and finds itself midstream, as the female characters, by confronting their own grief, find their dramatic voices and become startlingly warmhearted towards one another, finding maternal compassion through their own personal heartbreak, especially Antonia San Juan as the transvestite, Agrado, who is nothing short of phenomenal, becoming by the end a powerful tribute to mothers, women, and actresses who play strong women.
At first, the prominent feature of transvestites as lead characters may sound outlandish, and it certainly is, but what is supremely remarkable is Almodóvar’s ability to fuse their off-center humanity into our own, where they’re not a freak show, as they are displayed in the beginning with typical Fellini-like relish, but through some interesting character development, they become the heart and soul of the film, simply gushing with an innate yearning to care for others, laughing at themselves and the strange things they’ve tried to do just to be able to live with themselves, which has given them greater tolerance and insight into others. This is a wonderful entry into the human heart, which, like Chaplin, is the essence of this film.
Bette Davis hits the screen in ALL ABOUT EVE before anything else. Cecilia Roth plays Manuela, a nurse seen in the opening moments of the film taking her 17-year old son Esteban, a budding writer, to see a theatrical performance of Streetcar Named Desire, a play where Manuela met his father, playing Stella and Stanley, but has subsequently revealed nothing about him to Esteban, as he disappeared before he was born. All the family photos he’s found have part of the image cut out from the picture. The missing pictures are the missing part of his life, he discerns, and persuades his mother to tell him everything about his father when they get home. But in a tribute to OPENING NIGHT, when a young fan pursues an autograph from her favorite actress, Gena Rowlands, only to be hit by a car in the rain, Esteban pursues his favorite actress, Huma Rojo, Marisa Paredes in a triumphant role as Blanche, with the same result. In utter agony over losing her only child, Manuela decides to track down his father, which leads to the carnivalesque atmosphere of hookers and transvestites, where Manuela saves Agrado from a horrible beating, recognizing her as a friend of her husband 20-years ago, also known as Esteban, but who has now reportedly undergone a sex-change operation and is an HIV+ junkie known as Lola.
Agrado decides to clean up her act and seeks out the counseling of a
particular nun who has offered her assistance to downtrodden whores, Sister
Rosa, played by a young Penélope Cruz, who, yes, you guessed it, has somehow
become impregnated by Lola, and is also HIV+.
Rosa’s mother is too hysterical taking care of her senile husband,
claiming that’s a full-time job, to even listen to her daughter, so Rosa
persuades Manuela to nurse her through her difficult pregnancy, despite the
horrible coincidence of the parentage.
Manuela has become the personal assistant to Huma Rojo, and even
substituted in the part of Stella when the regular actress, Niña (Candela Peña), Huma’s junkie lover,
couldn’t make it to the theater. Niña becomes inflamed with jealousy
when she hears about it and suspects Manuela of evil motives, forcing her to
come clean about their intersecting pasts.
Huma is moved by the story of her son and agrees to allow Agrado to be
her assistance, leading to a brilliant sequence where one night the show can’t
go on, so Agrado announces the theater will refund money to anyone who wishes
to leave, or they can stay to witness her blunt one-woman show revealing the
story of her life, which is the ultimate in self deprecating humor. Despite everyone’s best intentions, a series
of unfortunate events continues to occur in each of the women’s lives, where
they somehow end up taking comfort and strength in one another’s
camaraderie. The broad range of
character, much of it evolving back stage, becomes surprisingly tender and
intimate, exposing such rich personalities.
Almodóvar leaves the audience with a dramatic rendition of Huma Rojo
rehearsing her new role as a woman in mourning in Federico García Lorca’s Blood
Wedding, accompanied by the profound orchestration by Alberto Iglesias, who
intersperses quiet distant sounds like the muted horns of Miles Davis
throughout the film.
Philadelphia City Paper review by Cindy Fuchs
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar is famous for making gorgeous, ambitious movies filled with powerful, fabulous women. With a title inspired by his love for the smoke and smoldering passion of All About Eve, his latest is a vibrant paean to actresses who have played actresses in movies. It’s also a sophisticated meta-melodrama featuring some of his most complex and compassionate characters – not so over-the-top campy as much of his previous work, yet as politically and sexually adventurous in its own shrewd ways.
The plot involves an intricate coming together of a group of women who seem,
on the surface, to have precious little in common, aside from the fact that
they all have to deal with men. Manuela (Cecilia Roth) is an organ-transplant
coordinator at a
As they learn to trust and support one another, the women must stretch beyond their expectations and assumptions, much as the film asks its viewers to do. Exploring the difficulties of gender roles and daily performances, the film celebrates the women’s generosity, tenacity and authenticity (of emotion as well as identity, no matter their biological apparatus), and especially, their openness to the kindness of strangers.
Though nearly every scene feels as if it could break into camp at any moment, Pedro Almodóvar's All About My Mother instead stays firmly rooted in masterful melodrama. Sure, there are drag queens, fake breasts, heroin addicts, and nuns who stray from the convent's calling, but Almodóvar somehow brings these elements together like a latter day Joseph Mankiewicz — delivering a film that finds remarkable poignancy in the most unsuspecting ways. Forget Steel Magnolias and Hope Floats; Mother represents a level of intelligent, female-centered storytelling that hasn't been seen since John Cassavetes' time.
Mother follows the story of Manuela (Cecilia Roth
from What Have I Done to Deserve
This?), a transplant unit nurse in a
Each of these women is given vibrant life by these marvelous actresses (Roth, especially, is amazing) and Almodóvar's screenplay and direction. There's a mad glee to scenes like the one in which the women briefly talk about the word "cock," and Sister Rosa, with delight, exclaims that she also loves the word "prick." Almodóvar's balanced, three-dimensional portraits of women bursting with vitality cleanse the viewer's mind of the patriarchal themes of Runaway Bride and the histrionic caricatures of The Story of Us.
In the States, at least, audiences favor the stereotype-dependent
"chick flicks" of Nora Ephron
and her ilk over challenging, authentic looks at the female sex. Almodóvar is
the anti-Ephron, a man whose understanding of women is far deeper and vastly
more intelligent than any female director in
I would rather present a slide show of stills from All About My Mother than sully it with a written review. However, because I get paid $100 a word from the benevolent site administrator, pictures be damned and hearken ye to paragraph upon paragraph of unevocative description. It’s disheartening that I cannot convey the passion displayed in every moment of All About My Mother. Director Pedro Almodóvar clearly loves his subjects – women, mothers, actresses, and actresses who play actresses. Each frame gushes with beauty. The film would be garish if it weren’t supported by worthy characters whose experiences inspire anguish, hope, and laughter. Instead, All About My Mother is bold and lively filmmaking, which plumbs jewels from cinema’s past and builds on them to resonate in new directions.
The heart of All About My Mother is Cecilia Roth. She plays Manuela, a nurse at an organ-transplant clinic who acts in medical training videos detailing the organ-transplant process (she plays the distraught mother). Manuela possesses the beauty of experience. Her hardships are worn on her face, but rather than projecting a beaten-down portrait, Roth imbues the sad knowingness in her eyes with a tremendous compassion and vitality. It’s a performance that anchors the film perfectly, as she embodies the remarkable traits in women that Almodóvar finds fascinating. Manuela is the mother of Esteban (Eloy Azorín), half her age and just turning eighteen. For his birthday, she gives him Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons, from which he reads, “When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for self-flagellation." Esteban is a budding writer who is given the inspiration to write a piece on his mother called “Todo sobre mi madre” after he watches Joseph Mankiewicz’s classic All About Eve with Manuela. Their bond is so close that they seem almost to be one. When Esteban asks Manuela to grant him a birthday wish to know more about his absent father, she refuses. The time is not right, she feels. In reality, she has run away from her past and never wants to look back.
On Esteban’s birthday, Manuela and Esteban go to see a production of A Streetcar Named Desire starring the diva Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes) as Blanche. Like All About Eve, Tennessee Williams’ play is a running theme throughout the movie, particularly its closing line, “I have always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” Esteban is enraptured by Rojo’s performance, and he convinces Manuela to stay with him after the show (in a torrential downpour) to obtain the actress' autograph and speak with her (shades of Anne Baxter in All About Eve). Rojo is in a hurry though and is off in her car before Esteban can reach her, though she notices him through her window as she speeds off. Esteban is left out in the middle of the street. We can see what will happen next, yet it is no less powerful for our knowledge. In a stunning scene, Esteban is struck by a car and killed. The camera rests beside his body and the rain pounds down. Manuela appears in the frame, overwhelmed with grief, her bright red overcoat accentuating her tragedy in its incongruity. She doesn’t learn he’s dead until she’s at the hospital. The most heartbreaking scene in the movie is when the doctors must inform her that her son has died. Having acted the grieving parent for the video production so many times, Manuela knows as soon as they pull up their chairs. Her pre-emptive anguished cry stabs outward as she realizes she is now alone.
These first twenty-five minutes are perfect, but I wondered where the film would go from there. A more predictable film would languish in ennui, as the mother would desolately try to relate to others in the absence of her son. Or perhaps she would secretly follow the young man who receives Esteban’s heart transplant. Instead, Almodovar wisely chooses a change of locale for Manuela. She leaves Madrid for Barcelona, the city she fled 18 years before when she carried Esteban inside her. Manuela goes to look for Esteban’s father, formerly named Esteban also, but who now goes by Lola since ‘he’ became a ‘she.’ If Manuela cannot indulge her son’s last wish to meet his father, at least she can let his father (whom she describes as the “worst of a man, and the worst of a woman”) meet their son. She looks for Lola at a hang-out for prostitutes called “The Field,” where she runs into the delightfully outrageous La Agrado (Antonia San Juan), an old friend of theirs from the whoring days. Agrado, whose name means “agreeable” as she often points out, is a transsexual prostitute who provides the film’s comic relief and delivers its linchpin monologue.
Agrado introduces Manuela to Sister Rosa (Penélope Cruz), a nun who works at a shelter. Like Agrado and Manuela, she has her problems, and the three bond in scenes of dialogue that Almodovar theorizes is the essence of life–the ability for women to align with each other. As Manuela begins building a surrogate family of sorts, she runs into Huma Rojo again. She becomes an assistant to her, as Rojo and her lover Nina share a tempestuous relationship that occasionally requires Manuela to substitute for Nina’s Stella in the production of Streetcar. It turns out that Manuela and Lola had played Stella and Stanley in Streetcar twenty years earlier, and her return to the role and its signature line about the kindness of strangers, now carry a greater meaning. Almodovar’s larger meaning is the appreciation of a woman’s capacity to act in everyday life. She is always acting, playing roles, be it mother or lover. Her acting keeps her grounded during tragedy. It provides a buoy for others to cling to, and a method by which to regroup.
Though All About My Mother, in the course of its story, takes us through familiar conventions like the death of a loved one and the birth of a new baby, it manages to feel new. Almodovar tells his story in a way that convinced me it was the first time I’d heard it. When it ended, I wanted more. In retrospect though, the film ends on a perfect note. The key line in Agrado’s wonderful monologue onstage the night the cast is unavailable is, “a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself.” This is not simply in respect to her physical self, but also applies to her emotional terrain. When the curtain closes on All About My Mother, Manuela has crafted herself into a mother once again, a part she was born to play.
Film Monthly (Sudha Narasimhan)
Every once in a while, a film
comes along that is full of raw machismo, male sexuality, and the essence of
true testosterone-driven mayhem that pulls people in by the truckload to stare
at car crashes, explosions, and arsenals larger than most countries. All About
My Mother, an import from Spain
Firstly, Almodavar is legendary
for his provocative commentaries on the lives of Spanish and Latin American
citizens, specifically women. Hyperbole, melodrama, and colorful characters are
just a few of the tools that Almodavar uses in his cinematic works. His last
film, The Flower of My Secret, was an exploration into the mind of a
woman confused on how to make an honest life while not betraying the most
important people in her life. I know that this is a rather vague description,
but this is the core of most of Almodavar's films - including Mother. His
sensitivity to women and ability to maintain a very masculine voice shows
Almodavar's versatility and unique style. Almodavar, who is gay, is not afraid
to show sexuality in all its forms, and his refusal to pander to his audience with
Hollywood conventions makes him an honorable,
honest, and poetic filmmaker. Almodavar has always been fascinated by the
female psyche and All About My Mother is truly a homage to the woman as
actress, mother, wife, daughter, and friend. The title of the film itself is
paying respect to All About Eve and Bette Davis' vitriolic performance.
The central character, Manuela
(Cecelia Roth) is a nurse who works in the organ transplant/donor section of a
hospital. She witnesses death on a daily basis with little or no emotion. Her
son, Esteban (Eloy Azorin) is an aspiring writer. On his seventeenth birthday,
the only wish that Esteban has is to find out about his estranged father.
"All of the pictures were
cut in half. My father, I suppose. I have the impression that my life is
missing that same half," states Esteban, in his meticulous journal.
Esteban represents the young artist-prodigy - a boy with a wonderful ability to
create, but who also feels the pressures of his gifts. A quote, which appears
in a Truman Capote book given to Esteban by Manuela, describes this struggle:
"When God hands you a gift,
he also hands you a whip; and the whip is intended solely for
self-flagellation."
The bond between Manuela and
Esteban is immensely strong, for they have only had each other for so many
years. After the two of them see a production of A Streetcar Named Desire,
Manuela reveals that she once played Stella, and Dad played Stanley Barcelona Madrid
Manuela is a woman always in
motion or transit; whether it is leaving one destination for another or from
one character to another. As she arrives in Barcelona
The next hour into the film is a
wonderfully interwoven pattern of irony, pathos, and tragedy. When Streetcar
lands in Barcelona Rosa was involved with Esteban's father,
another transvestite prostitute named Lola (formally named Esteban too), who
not only gave Rosa AIDS but also is Rosa 's
baby's father. Rosa holds no anger or
hostility towards Lola or her own horrible situation. She simply wants to live
long enough to give birth and reconcile with her own prejudiced mother, a woman
who is ashamed of Rosa .
I realize that there is a lot of
twisting and turning in plot and character development, but when you see this
story unfold, it is truly unforgettable and moving. It is truly rare when a
film can sink under your skin and make you walk away feeling so thankful for
your own life. One really cannot believe that such a small group of people can
endure so much unhappiness and misfortune, but there is a positive lesson to be
learned from all of this.
All About My Mother is a film about redemption and the ability to love
someone beyond their frailties and mistakes. All of these characters hide
behind a guise of gender, sexuality, religion, character, and/or fear, except
Manuela. She is the only one who remains true to her and holds her position as
the motherly nucleus of the troubled group to which she belongs. At the end of
the film, Manuela ends up caring for Rosa 's
child and reconciles with Lola. In a rather beautiful scene, Lola finally gets
to see Esteban's picture and reads his journal. Everything has come full
circle, and the past has caught up with the present and future.
Almodavar has not only made a
film about his love and admiration for women, but also for the process of birth
and rebirth, the ability to forgive and forget, and the transformation from a
guise to the real person underneath. Using vibrant cinematography, the film is
a colorful and lively background against its darker subjects. Agrado as comic
relief is also genius; silicone implants will never be the same to me. All the
actresses' performances are amazing and heartfelt. I hope that American
moviegoers will pay more attention to Almodavar's presence in film and his
eloquent messages about humanity.
DVD Journal Dawn Taylor
eFilmCritic.com (Robert Flaxman)
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
All about My Mother José Arroyo from Sight and Sound
Silicone And Sentiment Paul Julian Smith from Sight and Sound
Raging
Bull[Mike Lorefice and Tina Goldberg](english) both discuss the film together
Film Journal International (Wendy Weinstein)
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil
Young] also reviewing TALK TO HER
World Socialist Web
Site David Walsh
PopMatters J. Serpico
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
Edinburgh U Film
Society [Beth Gilligan]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Janet Maslin
DVDBeaver.com
- Review [Gary W. Tooze]
DVDBeaver.com
- Viva Pedro Package
TALK TO HER (Hable con ella)
A 97
Spain (112 mi)
2002
Almodóvar’s greatest
work, a sublime work of elegance and classical art that keeps reinventing new
ways to express itself, not the least of which is the bold, ultra-dramatic
music by Alberto Iglesias that continues to evoke passion all the way through
to the very last end credit. This is a
moving, hypnotic film with a wonderfully unusual rhythmic pace, largely
underscored by some extraordinarily sensuous music and dance sequences
choreographed by Pina Bausch, as well as a live performance by singer Caetano
Veloso, which are fully integrated into the storyline, along with a
unique inner black and white silent film called THE SHRINKING LOVER that
is both hilarious and sad, all at the same time, yet somehow explains the weird
mentality and rationale of one of the characters. The depth of feeling in
this film is remarkable. I'm not aware
of another film so sensitively probing a relationship between two men, who
each, themselves, are searching for the love of a woman, certainly not in the Almodóvar
oeuvre, which has thus far specialized in the emotional realm of dynamic
women. This is a superbly directed film about improbable
circumstances and the mysterious search for love, where there is so much
going on under the surface, almost all of it unrealized, perhaps similar to
Kieslowski's A SHORT FILM ABOUT LOVE, and while invisible to the human
eye, this is an inspiring film that magically weaves its way into our hearts
with some deeply compassionate, beautifully told storytelling, always balancing
boldness and originality with such an effortless,
artistic grace. What transpires at
the end is nothing short of mind-boggling, yet it’s power remains in the beauty
of understatement, matched by the unforgettable artistry of the expression of
dance. Once again, as he did earlier
with ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, not since Chaplin perhaps has another film director
found such a unique form of expression accentuating the human heart as what
Almodóvar accomplishes here.
Almodóvar takes a
storyline that many would find patently absurd, even criminally degrading, one
that certainly stretches the boundaries of credibility, yet when examining the
full spectrum of motive in love, human behavior is not always what it appears.
Using highly stylized cinematic means to over-accentuate the story, the
audience may be disturbed, but also overwhelmed by the degree that this film
transcends human frailties or limitations, until we’re willing to accept not
only plausibility, but faith in what we’re witnessing. It’s a silly melodrama that would make no
sense in any other director’s hands, but the superb performances and the sense
of such a far-reaching commitment from the lead characters demands nothing less
from the viewer. Javier Cámara and Darío
Grandinetti are Benigno and Marco, an unlikely pair seen sitting next to one
another in the film’s opening, an unusual Pina Bausch dance number called “Café
Müller,” featuring dancers that appear to be blind, where others on the set
must remove obstacles standing in their way.
Years later, they meet again under the most unlikely circumstances and
become lifelong friends.
Benigno is the
caretaker at a hospital for a beautiful young woman in a coma, Alicia, the
alluring Leonor Watling, a former ballerina he used to watch from his window
taking her dance class at the studio across the street. Just as he was building up his nerve to
approach her, she was struck by a car and has been in a coma for years. He has completely dedicated himself to her,
expressed in the all-consuming manner of care he provides, completely
humanizing her despite her condition, personalizing every minute detail,
including the lava lamps and pictures from her home, carrying on a constant
conversation, describing the events in his life as if she couldn’t wait to hear
more. Benigno’s sexual orientation is curious,
explaining to her family that he is gay, so they won’t worry about such
intimacy with their daughter, yet he explains to a fellow nurse that this
explanation was a lie. His effeminate,
admittedly virginal behavior suggests he’s closeted, living in a repressed
sexual state, as before this, for fifteen years, his life was dedicated to
caring for his ailing mother. Now the
only person in the world he can communicate with is this woman lying in a coma,
having social intercourse with her every day, and is clearly obsessed, yet
loves her unconditionally. In his eyes,
his love affair with his mother and patient are completely satisfying and
normal. They are the two loves of his
life.
Marco is perhaps
fifteen years older than Benigno, an Argentinian writer of travel guides,
having written several books on different countries, who traveled around the
world with a young love of his life, who later left him, leaving him displaced,
alienated and alone. When he sees a
failed television journalistic exposé on a female bullfighter, Lydia, Rosario
Flores, he calls his editor to write about her in the Sunday newspaper. During his initial contact, he witnesses a
break up with her boyfriend in a bar, and dutifully escorts her out gracefully,
agreeing to drive her to Madrid, where through events told out of time, they
become lovers. In a beautiful sequence,
they attend a performance of Caetano Veloso singing “Cucurrucucú Paloma,” a
quiet, tender rendition filled with such longing that Marco can’t bear to hear
it, walking out for a smoke, joined by Lydia who makes it her ambition to rid
him of his despair over his recent breakup.
Equally mesmerizing is the graceful depiction of Lydia in the ring,
slowed down to allow us to breathe in the personal connection with this huge
animal, as the music lures us into the drama and immediacy of the moment. Her hand-embroidered toreador outfit is
literally custom stitched closed the moment before she enters the ring. Lydia was never able to tell Marco that she
reconnected with her former boyfriend, another bullfighter, and in what appears
to be an intentional act, she allows herself to be gored by a bull the moment
it races into the ring, leaving her in a coma as well.
Marco and Benigno meet
again at the hospital where both women, who thrived in extremely physical
professions, lie completely inert in comas.
Marco is stunned to observe the degree of care and personalized
relationship that continues to exist between Benigno and his special patient,
knowing that medically she is brain dead, yet as they continue to spend time
together in the hospital, he comes to admire his professional standards as
being above reproach and trusts him completely, a trust that we share as well,
up to the moment the hospital discovers Alicia is pregnant and charges Benigno
with rape. This moment is preceded by
Benigno’s description of a recent film he saw entitled THE SHRINKING LOVER,
which we see as he tells Alicia the story, where a couple is in love, but the
man has taken a potion that leaves him so diminished in size that she can put
him in her purse and carry him around.
The man, however, has other ideas, and one night as she lays sleeping,
he decides to make a total committment and remain with her forever, literally
crawling between her legs and placing himself inside, which cuts to a colorful
image of Alicia’s lava lamp where the strange floating forms merge together,
becoming the personification of the sex act.
In a film that has
dazzled us with a variety of brilliantly shifting styles and tones, with
frequent use of flashbacks and events out of time, what happens afterwards is a
fairly straightforward depiction of events, yet remains utterly
fascinating. Marco becomes Benigno’s
caretaker in prison, his only friend in the world, his eyes and ears to an
outside world that is no longer available to him. Yet the film continues to evolve in almost
unfathomable ways that leave us breathless, culminating with a final sequence,
a delicate and sublime Pina Bausch dance number called “Masurca Fogo” that
suggests an ethereal world of sensuous beauty with unending possibilities. This is a film that transcends human
dimension and belongs in Tolkien’s vision of the Gray Havens with the
immortals.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Though weighed down by its
jazzy-theatrical formalism, Talk to Her still finds Pedro Almodóvar
pushing a uniquely soulful blend of comedy and drama.
Since
the early '80s, Almodóvar's penetrating cinema has been challenging our
perceptions of sex and sexual behavior via modes of camp, and this time around
he grapples with rape and unconsciousness. Alicia's ballet teacher, Katerina
Bilova (Geraldine Chaplin), is the Spanish director's proxy: She speaks of
femininity emerging from masculinity and the earth giving way to that which is
ethereal. Her fascination with such physical transformations is indicative of
her spiritual comforts, and if it weren't for her commentary, or the fact that
Marco and Benigno are seen as the film's true cripples, Talk To Her's
justification of rape would be infinitely more troublesome.
Just
as there is a distance that separates men and women and a passageway that
brings them together (celebrated via a delirious silent-film-as-fantasy
sequence), Almodóvar's gliding camera evokes the remoteness between freedom and
imprisonment when Marco visits Benigno in a far-off
Talk To Her seems
less about the communication between men and women than it is an evocation of
the rebirth of the body and spirit. Almodóvar never stresses this point but
it's telling that the virginal Benigno is both Jesus and Mary rolled into one,
willingly crucifying himself and vilifying his honor in the hope that Alicia
will also change form. Nothing here may be simple but Almodóvar makes it all
seem so effortless.
Steve Erickson in Cineaste, 09-15-2002 (link no longer
available):
After pointing out the funny side of
rape, a bad boy can’t go much further. The questionable taste exercise of Kika
(1993) must have convinced Pedro Almodóvar that he couldn’t push many more
buttons without falling flat on his face. As a result, his recent films have
taken the form of subdued melodrama; his latest, Talk to Her, is basically a
male weepie. Seemingly slight and sober, the slowly film nevertheless has more
staying power than his more conservative critics’ darling, All About My Mother
(1999). But under its placid surface, Talk to Her reveals Almodóvar is still a
provocateur. The difference is he’s just practicing a subtler, more mature
version of the game.
Until the emergence of the New Queer
Cinema, Almodóvar took over Fassbinder’s mantle as the world’s most famous gay
director. Despite this, he’s always kept his distance from
A character as sexually and morally
ambiguous as Talk to Her’s lead, Benigno (Javier Camara), is unlikely to pop up
in a contemporary North American film. Slightly pudgy and wide-eyed, Benigno
shows the scars of having spent 15 years caring for his sick mother. Almodóvar
encourages us to conclude that he’s stuck in the closet, and relies on idiotic,
obvious clichés to make this point: Benigno is a male nurse who practices
needlepoint, took correspondence courses in makeup, and enjoys cutting his
patients’ hair.
However, his sexuality is more
complex than these signs suggest. At an early meeting with a psychiatrist,
Benigno says he’s a virgin. Flippantly, he then says he’s “no longer alone,”
referring to his infatuation with a woman who cannot reciprocate emotionally,
and tells a fellow nurse he was lying about being gay. While jailed – one of a
number of plot twists better left unrevealed – Benigno suggests he could be
permitted to meet a friend if he tells the authorities the man is his lover.
Benigno makes these statements in a breathily self-conscious voice. Though he
talks about sexuality casually, his actions indicate that his tone covers up a
situation that’s far more muddled. His detached flirtations with women are
simply chaste crushes that can’t easily be acted upon, until he makes one major
mistake.
Camara’s performance makes his
character’s naïve confusion completely believable. Benigno not only plays out
his confused sexuality through his distant relationship with the comatose
Alicia (Leonor Watling), a ballet student he used to watch from his window, but
through his friendship with Marco (Dario Grandinetti), an Argentine travel
writer, which comes to resemble a one-sided love affair. After exchanging
glances at a Pina Bausch dance performance, their paths eventually cross at
Benigno’s hospital, where Marco’s girlfriend
Despite having two comatose women
among its main characters, Talk to Her doesn’t wallow in misery. Unlike a
hospital’s typically sterile, fluorescent environment, Benigno’s clinic looks
pleasant and colourful, with Almodóvar deliberately transforming it into a
place where people could fall in love, rather than a warehouse for the sick.
The rooms occupied by Alicia and
Benigno’s desire for Alicia eventually leads to a craving for self-obliteration that may stem from his repressed homosexuality. As the film develops, the borders between Benigno, Marco, and Alicia’s lives become fluid. Benigno’s tendency to treat comatose women as if they were fully alive begins as a respectful gesture that gradually becomes an excuse to abuse them. The consequences of this behaviour, in which Almodóvar subtly implicates film itself, raise enormous questions about the limits of love and the boundaries of personal and sexual identity. Benigno and Marco make converted attempts at expressing passion in a world that continually confuses and blind-sides them. Without fully embracing or condemning their actions, Talk to Her offers them nothing but love.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Only Connect Paul Julian Smith from Sight
and Sound, July 2002
Reel.com
DVD review [Kim Morgan]
Film Journal International (Erica Abeel)
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
Film Monthly (Parama Chaudhury)
World Socialist
Web Site Joanne Laurier
REVIEW:
The Postmodern Melodrama of Almodovar's "Talk to Her ... Peter Brunette from indieWIRE
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado)
eFilmCritic.com (Elaine Perrone)
CineScene.com (Shari L. Rosenblum)
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin Chronicle (Kimberley Jones)
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
BAD EDUCATION (La mala educación) B 89
Spain
Ed Gonzalez from The Village Voice (December 29 – January 5):
Overheard
before a New York Film Festival screening: "Bad Education is a
gay film." Which explains why
people who swooned for All About My Mother and Talk to Her seem
to be passing on this radical hall of mirrors, which is no more and no less a
queer flick than Mulholland Drive
Well made, well written, well acted, but
ultimately unsatisfying story about growing up gay in Generalissimo Franco’s
Spain, expressing the untold anguish of a young boy unable to conform in a
corrupt authoritarian society, told in a film noir style that resembles, both
in plot twists as well as the ultra dramatic orchestral score, the films of
Alfred Hitchcock. The opening and
closing credit sequences are near perfect, very suggestive of the music of
Bernard Hermann. Gael García Bernal
plays triple roles in what can only be described as a gender bender, complete
with a few Buñuelian notes, particularly one sequence inside the church where a
hall of statues is a wall filled with laughing priests that seem to be laughing
at the futility of the characters in the film, which include a child molesting
priest, the boy he molests and his best friend, who turns out to be his first
love, and then the imagined impact these characters have on one another later
in adulthood. What may be most
outrageous here is that Almodóvar refuses to show contempt for the priest, and
instead shows a certain amount of compassion for his character, driven by his
dark desires.
The best friend has become a gay filmmaker, and
as he is making his latest film, taken from an autobiographical story written
by the molested boy as a young man, a period in his life that we never actually
see, we witness revolving stories, the actual past and the storied future, told
within several flashbacks in a strange mix of fantasy and reality, moving back
and forth in time from the 60’s to the 80’s.
The childhood sequences have a greater sense of poignancy, but are dramatically
weakened due to the abominable behavior of these same characters as
adults. In what can be described as an
almost painfully personalized film statement, there’s an interesting homage to
a Spanish film actress, Sara Montiel, who fled to Mexico during the Franco
years, who in a hilarious film clip, returns as a stunningly beautiful woman to
visit a nun after a sex change operation, and includes a scorching version of
an in-drag Bernal lip synching her song, “Quizás, Quizás, Quizás,” also a tribute
to noir films where, after seeing a film at a noir festival, one of the
characters remarks, “It’s as if all the films were talking about us,” complete
with a gorgeous mix of sacred and profane music, accentuated by the music of a
boy soprano, including an unforgettable rendition of “Moon River.”
Bad Education David Denby from the New Yorker
In an obscure
parochial school in rural
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
With Bad Education, the great Almodóvar delivers the
finest movie of his career. In this film the Spanish director maintains his
now-familiar visual style with its dazzling compositions and candy-colored
palette, as well as his ripe characters bursting with their melodramatic lives
and messy emotions. Yet in addition to these distinctive traits Almodóvar here
contributes his most elaborate and fully developed script, making Bad
Education his most satisfying and well-rounded work thus far. Bad
Education is a modern film noir (even though the film's settings bounce
between the early 1960s and the year 1980). The story is full of noir?s
standard deceits and double-crosses, its passions, desires, and seductions, and
its crimes of the flesh and the lucre. From the film?s opening credits with
their Saul Bass-style look and the amazing Bernard Herrmann-like score by
Alberto Iglesias, there is no doubt regarding the effect Almodóvar is going
for. However, this being an Almodóvar film noir, it would be foolish to
"cherchez la femme": Here "la femme" is a male-to-female transsexual.
The storyline is appropriately convoluted and dark, and involves blackmail,
false identities, lust, drug addiction, and cover-ups, although Bad
Education is not without ample comic moments and melodramatic interludes.
The story's forbidden sex, however, is not the common film noir kind between a
man and woman but instead the illegal and immoral kind between a Catholic
priest and his prepubescent male student. Despite the explosion in films and
news coverage about this subject in recent years, leave it to Almodóvar to be
the only filmmaker to receive an NC-17 rating (no doubt for his film's
more-than-acceptable number of head bobs during oral sex scenes rather than for
its minimal frontal nudity and the sight of a young molestee filmed in long shot
without his pants). Playing three different roles in the movie – one of them
the tranny Zahara – Bernal is spectacular. Whether playing a man or a woman,
Bernal conveys a strong physicality that is nearly impossible to resist. (Due
to the complications of playing three roles, Bernal?s seductiveness reaches a
pinnacle in Bad Education, but look to some of his other films – Amores
Perros, Y Tu Mamá También, The Crime of Father Amaro – for
further evidence. This actor is seriously dangerous.) Almodóvar has also
confessed to there being some autobiographical elements in Bad Education,
the most obvious being the role of the successful gay filmmaker Enrique Goded
(Martínez), who at the beginning of the film is scouring the tabloids for story
ideas. When an old classmate appears on his doorstep with an unpublished novel
about their old school and its abuses, and the adult consequences of that early
imprinting, the only way Enrique can get to the bottom of things (so to speak)
is to make it into a movie. This is the director's process of sorting out the
story. Sam Spade would have burned through shoe leather, the director through
celluloid. Bad Education also carries on some of the anticlericalism of
Buñuel and the humanism of Renoir, while adding in some of the American noir
trappings of the likes of Wilder and Hitchcock. The comedy is Almodóvar's own,
but the director's noir is a shade more sanguine than the Americans'.
Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]
Now after more than a dozen films to his
credit—from the punk-era gonzo comedy Pepi, Luci, Bom to the comatose
rape dramedy Talk to Her—Pedro Almodóvar
releases something of a greatest hits package: the spectacularly meta Bad
Education, the story of two friends and their complicated love for one
another and the cinema. For the first time in his career, Almodóvar has made a
film that will appeal equally to fans of his anarchic screwballs (High Heels
and Kika) and his more popular mainstream dramas (All About My Mother and Talk to Her). A giddy
cinematic pastiche of film noir and high camp, Bad Education is about
the shape-shifting artifice of dreams and the experience of going to the
movies. If it isn't the best film of Almodóvar's career, it's certainly his
best work since 1987's Law of Desire.
Ignacio
Rodríguez (Gael Garcia Bernal) walks into the office of film director Enrique
Goded (Fele Martínez), who's flipping through newspapers looking for a gimmick
for his latest screenplay. Fascinated by the story of a dead man riding a
motorcycle and, much later, the hysterical account of a woman eaten alive by
alligators, Enrique's writer's block suggests a form of memory deprivation. In
love with Enrique when they were students at a Catholic school in the '60s,
Ignacio reconnects the director with his past and suggests that he turn their
experiences of abuse at the school into a film. But along with the film's
aspect ratio, realities and identities frequently shift, and it becomes
increasingly difficult to tell truth from fiction and the ruthless desire to
love with the even more insatiable desire to create.
More
so than Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers, Almodóvar's
heartbreaking Pieta acknowledges cinema as an extension of the soul. Because it
seems to touch on every theme and perversion seen throughout the director's
illustrious 20-plus-year career, Bad Education truly evokes the
sensation of a Jackson Pollock "action" painting: Almodóvar's
canvas—like that of another hot-blooded drama queen, Federico García Lorca—is
one of uncensored emotion and pure energy. There isn't a single person in the
film (or film-within-a-film) whose life isn't fractured, states of unrest the
director fabulously emphasizes by frequently situating actors before mosaic art
or walls covered in paper decorated with jagged lines shooting in all sorts of
directions.
Just
as everyone remembers the silent film sequence from Talk to Her, no one will
forget the "
Like
Talk to Her, Bad Education
similarly touches on themes of unconscious desire, except its characters are
always, well, conscious. But being conscious doesn't always mean being lucid,
something embodied by Ignacio's sad relationship to Enrique. Like Eusebio
Poncela's bond to Antonio Banderas in Law of Desire (and Naomi Watts's
obsession with Laura Harring in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive), this power
struggle is one part ego trip, one part wish fulfillment—a dangerous
combination Almodóvar likens to our quasi-narcissistic relationship to movies.
We respond most to films that reflect our deepest aesthetic and emotional
passions and notions of the world. So when Enrique discovers—semi-spoiler
alert—that Ignacio isn't who he says he is, he continues the relationship
because it's easier on his conscience to accept that Ignacio turned into
someone who looks like Gael Garcia Bernal and not the ostensibly fictional
junkie transvestite from The Visit. And if truth is stranger than
fiction in Bad Education, Enrique hopes to make it sell.
An
embarrassment of riches, Bad Education addresses the almost vampiric
relationship between audiences and movies—a give-and-take that helps Ignacio
and Enrique keep their memories alive. As children they jerk each other off
inside a movie theater that plays the 1969 melodrama Esa Mujer starring
Sara Montiel as a naughty nun. Before they reach orgasm, Montiel's face turns
toward the camera and the children don't miss a beat. Almodóvar understands the
rapture of going to the movies, and if he had his way the director would
probably never stop making them. Throughout Bad Education, memories and
images repeat, none more memorable than a young Enrique (Raúl García Forneiro)
leaving two lovers behind. In both cases, a gate impacts their separation
anxiety, and the ecstasy and pain of the moment is not unlike leaving a movie
you never want to end.
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Reverse Shot
[Lauren Kaminsky]
DVD Times Alex Hewison
The Village Voice
[Michael Atkinson]
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Bad Education (2004) Ryan Gilbey, June 2004
indieWIRE
[Michael Koresky] Michael Koresky
with responses from Jeff Reichert and Cecilia Sayad
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
filmcritic.com (Nicholas Schager)
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally)
World Socialist
Web Site Joanne Laurier
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
ToxicUniverse.com (Lucas Stensland)
Bad Education Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)
Strictly Film School Acquarello
James
Berardinelli's ReelViews
Educating Pedro Simon Hattenstone
interviews Almodóvar from the Guardian
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Stephen Holden
DVDBeaver.com
- Viva Pedro Package
VOLVER B 85
aka: The Return
Spain
Easily the least
inspiring Almodóvar film in awhile, as much of it appears to be a retread of
similar themes in ALL ABOUT MY MOTHER, a much more inventive and original
work. While Penélope Cruz looks stunning
in her wardrobe of brightly colored dresses and provides a sensually vivacious
performance, perhaps the best in her career, the rest of the film falls a
little flat. Despite the detection of
similar themes, that men are unreliable, in many instances despicable and
cruel, that women need to learn to fend for themselves, expressed through the
image of women keeping vigil over each other’s death beds, and despite a
warmhearted feeling that develops between mother and daughter relationships,
essential in understanding Almodóvar, there were no emotional crescendos in
this film, or at least very few, as much of this film plays on a fairly even
keel.
The best scene in the
film is Cruz lip-synching to a flamenco song, Estrella Morente's 1961 tango
classic by the film name, surrounded by a film crew that is feasting on food
and drink during their wrap up party, so there’s a feeling of festivity in the
air as she pours out her aching heart.
This is prefaced by her teenage daughter’s (Yohana Cobo) remark that
she’s never heard her sing before. And
off in the distance, hiding discreetly from her family, lies the ghost of
Cruz’s mother, Carmen Maura, who is moved to tears. One should also point out that while this is
happening, the corpse of Cruz’s husband lies stashed in a freezer a mere few
yards away. Convoluted narrative
structures are a common touch in Almodóvar films, but despite the revelations
at the end, which might better explain some of the beginning, one gets the
feeling that much of the film works without it, that they’re not really all
that necessary.
Cruz and her sister,
Lola Dueñas, blend into the working class atmosphere of their lives, each
having to cope with their own private secrets.
Cruz’s daughter has killed her father after attempting to dissuade his
drunken advances, while Dueñas, in keeping with the Spanish lore of Lorca and
others, has visions of her dead mother.
This follows a scene where their aunt, (Chus Lampreave), recently passed
away, but everyone in her small village knew she was visited by her sister’s
ghost until the end. Meanwhile, the
owner of the restaurant next door has decided to shut down his establishment
and move out of town, offering Cruz the keys in case of prospective
buyers. But when a film crew asks for a
place where thirty or so people can eat nearby, she can’t resist the
temptation, and after asking some of her friends for help, they turn it into a
first class establishment. Some of the
most colorful imagery in the film is watching Cruz in her brightly adorned
attire (see above) cut and chop colorful vegetables while preparing a sumptuous
feast. Women being women is the
highlight of this film, as men, for the most part, are out of the picture. When I heard about this, I had thoughts this
might resemble Fassbinder’s THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VON KANT, but this is
instead a safe, warmhearted film that offers nothing remotely new or original,
but instead allows Cruz center stage, a vehicle to display her considerable
assets.
Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]
The albatross of Pedro Almodóvar's
flamboyant '80s oeuvre will encumber the director as long as he makes films
like Volver, which, not unlike Talk to Her, is an
exceptionally well-crafted work that never threatens to fabulously and spontaneously
combust before our eyes like his transgressive masterpiece Law of Desire.
The title of this new film is not two-faced: it doesn't herald the return of
the once punk-spirited master of Spanish cinema but the reemergence of dead
people and buried secrets. It's almost tempting then to side with Armond White,
who, in condescending to "baby critics" in the 2004 Slate "Movie
Club" for digging Bad Education, stated that
Almodóvar's cultural advances no longer matter to straights and gays, except
the director's appreciation of women and love of color is still vital to film
culture.
Volver doesn't
take the risks of João Pedro Rodrigues's Two Drifters, but it pushes a
casually profound appreciation of foreign rites and emotions. Almodóvar's women
are always kissing each other (it's the film's running gag), and by
exaggerating the sound of their smooching, the director stresses the intimacy
and modes of communication that connect these females, who live in a town that
appears to suffer from a draught of men, and where the living tend to the dead
as fiercely as the dead guard over those who are still alive. Call it All
About My Women, because in stripping the story's rural milieu of husbands,
fathers, and sons, Almodóvar is able to acutely hone in on the way a group of
Spanish females treat each other in very specific, sometimes extravagant social
and personal situations.
These
fierce women include: Raimunda (Penélope Cruz), whose husband lusts for their
daughter Paula (Yohana Cobo); her mousy sister Sole (Lola Dueñas), who runs an
illegal beauty parlor out of her apartment; their mother Irene (a fearless
Carmen Maura), who died in a tragic fire years ago and whose ghost tends to
unfinished business, including the care of her ailing sister Irene (Chus
Lampreave, wearing glasses that exaggerate the size of her eyes); and their
neighbor Agustina (Blanca Portillo), whose mother, a former hippie, has been
missing for years. These women are perpetually haunted (by duty and
superstition), staying close in spite of their bitter spats, helping each other
in times of stress without question, perhaps sensing the world might implode if
they turned their backs to each other.
Mildred Pierce won Joan
Crawford an Oscar, and Almodóvar's quaint riff on the Michael Curtiz classic
may do the same for Penélope Cruz, who plays a mother who achieves autonomy
through the success of a restaurant she surreptitiously takes over from her
neighbor and who will do anything to keep her daughter safe. This is clearly
the performance of Cruz's young career—so good that it helps to ease the strain
of a gimmicky storyline that tries to sneak up on the audience. Cruz achieves
this by suggesting—through tears that are scarcely crocodile—that Raimunda's
strong countenance disguises sinister goings-on. When the story's floodgates
open, what's surprising is how casually Almodóvar allows the waves to roll,
leisurely acknowledging that melodrama is fiercely imbedded in Spanish culture.
One door closes in the film and another opens, tragedy doubles back on itself,
and through it all these women stay close in mind, body, and spirit—always
forgiving.
The Tracks of My Tears Stuart Klawans from the Nation (subscribers only)
The first time I watched Penélope Cruz lip-sync "Volver," the old song that lends its sentiments and title to Pedro Almodóvar's new film, I wept--though why, I couldn't have said. The voice was dubbed; the musical idiom had been shifted, with Spanish imperiousness, from tango to flamenco; and the character's deepest motivations could only be guessed at, since Almodóvar was waiting for the final reel to reveal them. As perfect moments go, this one was odd and incomplete; and yet, when a plump droplet spilled across Cruz's eyelashes, tears came to me, too.
The next time, of course, I was prepared. Now every implication of the scene was known; every seam of Almodóvar's narrative stitchery had been exposed. I wept even more, as the title might have foretold. Volver: to return. All the emotions came back.
What else returns in this beautifully improbable movie? The list might begin with an actress, Carmen Maura, who is closely identified with Almodóvar but had long been absent from his films. Next comes the character Maura plays: a ghostly mother who reinserts herself into her family's affairs, while giving off (despite death) the flatulent scent of life. Then there's a repeated wrong. Years ago, Maura's character unwittingly harmed her daughter (Cruz), who now has done much the same to her own teenage child (the indelible Yohana Cobo). Like the wind-powered turbines you periodically see in this movie--the characters having come from a town of incessant gales, which are said to drive people crazy--the story keeps spinning back to these recurring elements, and more: a scuffed suitcase, a native landscape, a good deed, a corpse.
Memories of older films return as well, as they often do in Almodóvar's work. They are for him what biblical texts used to be for English poets: basic materials of thought. And so in Volver he imitates a bit of Psycho here, some Mildred Pierce there, to articulate his ideas. If I had to explain the themes in general terms, I'd say they concern the sin of not seeing what's before your eyes. Volver is about invisibility as a just punishment for this sin; about the false visibility, or self-exposure, promoted by a degraded form of show business; and about the revelations made possible, by contrast, through a true performance, which can be public and personal at the same time. Most of all, though, Volver is an exciting crime story, comedy and tear-jerker about the ways these themes may loop back through generations of women.
Which just goes to show you: To explain Volver in general is to explain nothing at all. That's why Almodóvar needs his scriptures, including (most significantly) a clip from Visconti's Bellissima. A segment of that film, appearing late in Volver, encapsulates the events as no synopsis could. It also transforms Cruz retrospectively into another example of something that returns. Implicitly, the excerpt makes her a double of Bellissima's star, Anna Magnani.
As types, the two are not much alike, except for their swarming heaps of dark hair. Cruz pokes skyward instead of pulling toward the earth; she lingers over her emotions, nestling them within, rather than hurling them out impatiently. Whereas Magnani instinctively, famously, shouted for help, Cruz is capable of suffering in silence. But as Almodóvar knows, his star can stride through a working-class district with all the authority of her predecessor. She, too, can seem to carry in her limbs the weight of a long day's labor. And if her body is too finely drawn to be entirely convincing in her present role--"These characters are always big-assed women," Almodóvar has written, "and Penélope is too slim"--a loving director knows how to show off what flesh there is. In an early shot that summarizes much in Volver and foreshadows more, Almodóvar photographs Cruz from directly above, so that the perspective lines run down the inner surface of her breasts into the profound shadows of a cleavage that the costumer keeps perpetually exposed. The character is standing at a kitchen sink, stoically washing the evening's dishes, while you gaze over this site of troubled, uncontainable sexuality, looking down toward the object at the vanishing point: a very large, very sharp knife, which will only temporarily remain clean.
Of course, any dramatist can bring out a knife in act one. But once the knife has been used, it takes an Almodóvar to blend realism instantaneously into melodrama, and melodrama into a moment of comic relief that's cutting in its own right. First Cruz's character feels the full moral gravity of her situation; then, though worn out by a day on the job, she has to set to work again with mop and rubber gloves. When interrupted at her grim task by a knock on the door, she next must hold off a friendly but inquisitive neighbor. "Did you hurt yourself?" he asks solicitously, having noticed a splash of blood on her neck. Fortunately, Cruz knows what makes men look away. With a dismissive wave of her hand, she explains, "Female trouble."
I give away this joke--and only this one, I promise--because it so neatly demonstrates the superiority of Volver's women to its men. For a long while, in fact, you might imagine there aren't any men, but only one man here, another there. Taken singly, they're pretty bad, or weakly good. Viewed in a cluster--as they're seen, I think, only once--they can literally make a character gasp.
The women, by contrast, are almost always shown in a group: organizing meals, doing one another's hair, exchanging stories, giving or receiving aid. Much of the buoyancy and humor of Volver comes from this female conviviality--as when, for example, Cruz abruptly goes into the restaurant business and elicits impromptu help from half her neighborhood. Even the ghostly mother wants to be sociable--which is why she gets rid of her veil of loose white hair, so she will no longer look like one of Mizoguchi's spirits dressed in a cheap housecoat. Some of Volver's biggest laughs come from Maura's down-to-earth manner, as she overcomes the indignities involved in rejoining human company. (When put in a tight spot, she can't just vanish, as a normal ghost would. She needs to duck under the bed, with the smile of a kid playing hide-and-seek.) At the end, though, when she once more returns to her solitude--or almost goes back to it--the sweetness of Maura's resignation gives the film its deepest pathos.
For that final return, Maura steps back into a region of timelessness--someplace that's separate from her daughter's world of bustle and worry ("I'm busy," Cruz continually complains) but is different as well from the conventional image of eternity. The film starts in a small-town cemetery, where women are busy cleaning the tombs. It concludes within the shadows of an old provincial house, where Maura will tend not a slab of marble but another woman's body and spirit. Sociability and hope win out in Volver over solitude and despair--tentatively, just a little--if only because "ghosts aren't supposed to cry."
The living may weep, though--which brings me back to that core scene in which Cruz performs the title song. I think "perform" is the right word, even though you hear someone else's voice, because Cruz makes her whole face sing: "Though time's passing, which wipes away the whole world/ By now has killed off my oldest, dearest dreams/Still I hold within me, hidden like a treasure/Just the simple hope to come back home."
Why is she crying out these lines, and crying over them? On the public level, she is thanking the patrons of her restaurant, and maybe showing off a little for them. More privately, she sings because her mother, who's been lost, taught her "Volver" many years ago, and now she wants to give this song to her own daughter, who came close to being lost.
Cruz sings in two directions at once, to the past and the
future, weeping for both. And if on first viewing you don't fully understand
why she feels as she does, you weep for her anyway, just because she's there,
in the present, alive. You, as her audience, help to make her so.
Volver
(Knight) Ryland Walker Knight from
the House Next Door
Reverse Shot [Vicente
Rodriguez-Ortega]
At the Movies Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, September 21, 2006
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The Village
Voice [Rob Nelson]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Volver (2005) Peter Matthews, September 2006
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Women, Windmills And Wedge Heels
Paul Julian Smith from Sight and Sound, June 2006
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] - standalone review for Tribune magazine
Not Coming to a Theater Near
You [Leo Goldsmith]
Volver
(2006) Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
Film Journal International (David Noh)
Film Intuition Jen Johans
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti)
stylusmagazine.com (Nancy Keefe Rhodes)
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
DVD Talk theatrical
[Jamie S. Rich]
World Socialist
Web Site Lee Parsons
Cinema
Without Borders Rosa Laura Lucherino
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd)
BROKEN EMBRACES (Los Abrazos Rotos) B 83
Spain (127 mi)
2009
A love
story about a man who loves to tell stories, so this film is a series of
interrupted stories that all suddenly shift into flashback mode, much like THE
This story’s
hero is blind filmmaker Mateo Blanco (Lluís Homar) who reflects upon his life in
flashback, basically explaining how he arrived at this point in his life and
how his career came to a sudden halt when he lost his sight. It all revolved around a girl. Not just any girl, but the kind whose beauty
would take a man’s breath away, or so the story goes. Enter Penélope Cruz as Lena, a secretary for a
powerful movie producer Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez), whose lives become entangled in
the most contrived manner, but she becomes his adoring concubine of sorts, but
after two years wants to return to her life’s ambition to become an actress and
auditions for Blanco’s film, where she is immediately hired as the lead. Martel, being the rich, possessive swine that
he is, has her followed night and day, using his own son as the spy sent on a
mission to document everything on camera while he, with the aid of a
professional lip reader, would view the dailies every evening and fume about
what appears to be a budding romance.
This sets the stage for tragic events to follow, which feels like a
mixed bag of film genres, with Cruz as the femme fatale lady in red, Martel as
the rich bastard that everybody hates, Blanco as the guy who got himself in
over his head, all for the love of a girl.
Blanca Portillo plays Judit, Blanco’s faithful assistant whose grown son
Diego (Tamar Novas) helps out in the office assisting the blind director. Everything happens under Judit’s watchful eye
as well, so we have a battle of various points of view, all in conflict with
one another, which leads to the inevitable day that the director lost his
sight.
The
problem is everything has to happen for the convenience of the story, where the
storyline becomes bigger than the film itself.
Somehow it feels like mathematics, like for every action there must be
an equal and opposite reaction, so that everything is balanced out by the
end. But despite the obvious relish the
director is having on the set, it is not translating to the viewers in the
seats who may lose patience early on in this film. Among the most personal films for the
director, as this is a film about his profession, mixing soap opera and comic
tragedy as easily as scene changes, a film where Blanco as the film director is
actually wearing clothes from Almodóvar’s own personal wardrobe. Penélope Cruz is given an equally wide
range of roles within the film, as a daughter, a lover, and as an actress, with
a wide variety of accompanying costumes (and wigs) to match, but we never really
come to understand the director or his muse, or get a handle on what he was
really trying to film, where the final cut is mutilated beyond recognition by
the jealously conniving producer looking for payback. If this is telling us something we don’t already
know about the insider racket behind the scenes of the film industry, it’s not
making it any clearer here. What is
clear, from Almodóvar’s point of view, is that the industry itself is blind to
the artistic vision until the director actually completes the film. Not only does the final product become more
comprehensible, but this is the only hope of witnessing true art on the
celluloid screen. In this regard, Almodóvar’s career is a tribute to those who
have paved the way in an industry he obviously loves.
The "new Almodóvar" is a delicious riddle. On the surface, Los Abrazos Rotos is a dramatic love story cut short by tragedy, and embellished with father-son and artist-muse issues. In structure, it's a film within a film, complete with its own "making of" (which spirals hopelessly out of control) and director's cut. Emotional depth is conspicuously lacking: it's as if Almodóvar is doggedly determined to make you think before you feel, remaining on the surface of all of his characters, showing only and strictly what can be seen. An interesting choice given that his protagonist is a blind former film director (Homar) who now writes scripts and who goes alternately by his "real name" Mateo Blanco (which could come straight out of an Auster novel) and his noir-ish pseudonym Harry Caine. Almodóvar's approach mirrors the sightlessness of his protagonist – seeing is believing, and if you don't see, what can you believe? Then again, what you see is a treacherous illusion. Almodóvar makes sure that we, the audience, although we can see, can never be sure of what we're looking at. Perception teflons off reality the way a woman's tear slides off the smooth skin of a tomato she's about to cut. It's all clearly influenced by Hitchcock's Vertigo (the soundtrack contains several clear references) - the handicapped protagonist and his desperate love affair (like Kim Novak's Madeleine, Cruz's Lena walks though the film like a ghost, a woman whose altruism borders on, and sometimes becomes, prostitution) - except that Almodóvar has more sympathy with Mateo/Harry's best friend Judit, and allows her to slowly wander from the margin of the film into the center. Vertigo's Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) disappears at some point; Judit (Portillo) is the emotional core of Los Abrazos Rotos. A film full of parallels, layers, depths and shoals, a postmodern house of mirrors.
Jigsaw Lounge /
Tribune [Neil Young]
The latest recipient of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar - Penelope Cruz, who won for her latina-spitfire turn in Woody Allen's otherwise decidedly so-so Vicky Cristina Barcelona - returns to our screens in Broken Embraces, her fourth collaboration with writer-director Pedro Almodovar after Live Flesh (1997), All About My Mother (1999) and Volver (2006). But whereas the latter pair were genuine masterpieces - and Live Flesh a more-than-diverting little thriller - Broken Embraces is a very rare dud from Spain's leading auteur.
A twisty, knowingly self-referential tale of amour fou set in the world of film-making, it's the story of a blind writer, Mateo Blanco (Lluis Homar). When a millionaire former associate of Blanco dies, the messy aftermath unearths long-buried secrets involving events from a decade before - which we observe via a series of lengthy flashbacks. Back then, Blanco was an acclaimed director working on a movie in which the millionaire's mistress Lena (Cruz) was cast in the central role. Romantic, criminal and creative complications quickly ensue(d).
There's a long cinematic tradition whereby coincidence-ridden soap-opera-style melodrama is used as a vehicle to explore social, psychological and even philosophical issues - most notably via the oeuvres of Sirk, Fassbinder and, currently, Christian Petzold. Almodovar himself has often worked within this sub-genre, usually with dazzling results. But for some reason Broken Embraces never really feels much more than a soapy melodrama with lofty pretensions - lacking the invention, imagination and audacity that one expects from this particular camp (and from this particular brand of camp.)
Despite the endless talk of intense passions and the
dangerous power of cinema, Broken Embraces itself comes across as an
oddly inert, underpowered sort of enterprise - with only occasional flashes of
wit, and a characteristically vibrant production-design to keep us going
through what turns out to be a decidedly taxing two-hour-plus running-time.
Like Almodovar, Cruz is on something akin to autopilot here - she's stuck in
what's essentially a supporting role, and is never given anything like the
opportunities to dazzle that she so strikingly grasped in Volver. Or
even, unlikely as it may seem, in the underwhelming Woody Allen picture.
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Penélope Cruz does her best to act badly during several passages in Pedro Almodóvar's "Broken Embraces," but her effort is doomed to failure. She's magnificent even when her performance is supposed to be clumsy, and those passages aren't what they seem anyway. They're part of a wonderfully elaborate joke in a film that serves as a love letter to the movies, and a demonstration of the medium's mysterious power.
The drama unfolds in the flashback recollections of a Spanish screenwriter (Lluís Homar) who took the name Harry Caine after an accident took his sight, his career and the love of his life; before then he was a director, Mateo Blanco. Ms. Cruz is Lena, Mateo's beloved and the star of his final movie. Lena is also the mistress of an ominously ardent tycoon named Ernesto Martel (José Luis Gómez). This makes the plot a triangle, at the very least, but it's also a quadrangle that involves Judit (Blanca Portillo), Mateo's former production assistant, and a multilayered melodrama that includes scenes from Mateo's movie, a comedy of dubious quality called "Women and Suitcases."
If that sounds complicated, it is and it isn't.
It is, because Mr. Almodóvar always loves to play games, thicken textures, keep us enthralled by keeping us guessing. Movie allusions abound. (To cheer himself up, Harry asks to hear the voice of Jeanne Moreau in "Elevator to the Gallows.") Judit's son, Diego (Tamar Novas), has a story of his own. The most fateful complication is Ernesto's decision to keep a watchful eye on Lena by becoming the movie's producer; that leads to some elegantly creepy espionage employing the services of a lip reader played by Lola Dueñas. What's more, "Women and Suitcases" undergoes a transformation from a foolish piece of fluff into a sophisticated fantasy that could pass for an Almodóvar film, maybe a prequel to "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown." It's an inspirational case of a director triumphing, however belatedly, over a producer who tried to take his movie away from him.
Ultimately, though, "Broken Embraces" (which opens
today only in New York) isn't complicated at all. For one thing—the main
thing—the presence of Penélope Cruz is incendiary, whether or not she's wearing
the red dress that conforms just as closely to the traditions of melodrama as
it does to the contours of her body. And Mr. Almodóvar's love of movies informs
every frame of this beautiful film. When Harry's fingers explore the dotted
landscape of a Braille script, they bespeak the writer's unbroken embrace of
language and drama. When they caress a flat screen filled with scenes that
Harry can't see, they express the essence of visual images—magical, ephemeral
and ineffably precious.
The
Guardian at Cannes 2009 (Peter Bradshaw) review [4/5] Almodóvar's
Broken Embraces reels you in, May 19, 2009, also seen here: Peter Bradshaw
Pedro Almodóvar has
always managed to combine elegance and exuberance, and his latest movie is no
exception: a richly enjoyable piece of work, slick and sleek, with a sensuous
feel for the cinematic surfaces of things and, as ever, self-reflexively
infatuated with the business of cinema itself. Yet I wonder if Almodóvar isn't
in danger of retreading old ideas. It doesn't quite match the heartfelt power
of his 2006 Cannes
film festival contender, Volver; Broken Embraces is always conspicuously
concerned with passion, but without being itself fully passionate.
The action of the movie unfolds
in two periods: flashing back and forth between the present day and 1994. It is
a measure of Almodóvar's absolute technical mastery, and that of his editor
José Salcedo, that this is never disconcerting or confusing. Lluís Homar plays
Mateo, a former film director who lost his sight in a car crash whose full
tragic importance is only disclosed in the movie's closing act. Now he writes
screenplays under his pen name "Harry Caine", a pseudonymity which
parallels Mateo's yearning to escape his ruined real self for the
fantasy-refuge of the cinema. A newspaper obituary of a shady financier,
Ernesto Martel, tremendously played by José Luis Gómez, triggers memories of
his movie-making career in the 90s: Martel bankrolled Mateo's final movie on
condition that his mistress was given the lead.
This of course is Lena, played by
Penélope Cruz in a
state of almost hyperreal gorgeousness, a sublime beauty in whose presence
Almodóvar's camera goes into a kind of swooning trance, and whose exquisiteness
consists at least partly in its fabricated quality; she is part of cinema's
magnificent artifice. When Lena poses for still shots in a Marilyn wig, an
ecstatic Mateo tells her: "Don't smile, the wig is false enough."
Naturally, Mateo and Lena begin an affair, and the obsessively jealous Martel
gets his highly-strung gay son from a previous marriage to spy on them with a
video camera, on the pretence of preparing a "making of" segment for
the DVD. In torments, old Martel watches this grainy surveillance footage every
night, like a producer watching the daily rushes, while a lip-reader must
recite the lovers' amorous whisperings live.
The film-within-a-film motif is
head-spinningly sophisticated, though the theme of cinema itself within cinema
(traditionally rather overrated by cinephiles in terms of interest and
importance) is kept fresh and alive through Almodóvar's sheer energy. His style
harks back to Hitchcock and Douglas Sirk; the allusions are technically
splendid and utterly confident, though this self-awareness is a little lacking
in substance and weight. After the film is over, its images and characters may
well vanish into the air leaving little or no residue in your memory, yet I defy
anybody to watch it without a tingle of pure moviegoing pleasure.
Cannes 2009: Leave Her to
Hell ("Abrazos Rotos," Almodóvar)
David Phelps at
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review
Plume
Noire review Moland Fengkov
Salon
(Stephanie Zacharek) review
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
Eric Kohn “Broken” Record: Almodovar’s Latest Repeats
His Greatest Hits,
The
Village Voice [Rob Nelson]
The Onion A.V.
Club review [A-] Keith Phipps
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Andrew Robertson]
filmcritic.com
(Jesse Hassenger) review [3/5]
DVD Talk (Jason
Bailey) review [4/5]
Confession
of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Screenjabber review Michael Leader
Screen International review Barry Byrne, also here: Broken
Embraces (Los Abrazos Rotos)
Slant Magazine
review Nick Schager
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [B+] also
seen here: eFilmCritic Reviews or here:
DVD Talk and
here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf]
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Offoffoff.com
review Joshua Tanzer
Urban
Cinefile (Australia) - [Louise Keller + Andrew L. Urban]
Daily Film
Dose [Blair Stewart]
exclaim!
[Joseph Belanger] also seen
here: Black
Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]
Cannes
'09: Day Eight Mike D’Angelo at
David Bourgeois Broken Embraces' Pedro Almodóvar on How to Direct With Your Tongue, at
What
has Almodovar done to deserve this'
Barry Byrne and Chris Evans from Screendaily,
Cannes.
"Broken Embraces" David
Hudson at
Tom Carson GQ magazine Cannes Blog, May 19, 2009
The
Spanish director on his delirious new movie-movie with Penelope Cruz Review and terrific Penélope Cruz photos from Media 360, November 2009
The
director, the artist - and the unframed, unmounted work of art Annie Bennett interviews the director from
The Observer,
Pedro
Almodóvar interview David Gritten
from The Daily Telegraph, August 6,
2009
Penélope
Cruz: playing with fire Benjamin
Secher interviews Penélope Cruz from The
Daily Telegraph, August
17, 2009
Almodovar:
An "irrational passion" for movies Andrew O’Hehir interview from Salon,
Entertainment Weekly
review [A-] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The
Hollywood Reporter review Kirk
Honeycutt at
Variety
(Jonathan Holland) review
Nick Funnell at Cannes London
Time Out London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6] also: Click here to read an interview with Cruz
Time
Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [3/6]
The curse of Almodovar Paul Julian Smith at The Guardian, June 17, 2008
The
Irish Times review [4/5] Donald
Clarke
David Gritten at Cannes from The Telegraph U.K., May 20, 2009, also here: The Daily Telegraph review [3/5]
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Tim
Robey,
The
Independent (Kaleen Aftab) review [3/5]
The
Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [3/5]
Cannes
'09 Day 7: Almodovar, Adjective
Wesley Morris Cannes Blog from The
San
Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [2/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York
Times (A.O. Scott) review also
including: More
Photos »
THE SKIN I LIVE IN (La Piel Que Habito) D+ 66
This is a wretchedly
ugly film, using a sterile, medically antiseptic, super clean gloss along with
a healthy dose of women’s naked breasts to disguise the fact that this is
really a sadistically appalling subject matter, where one wonders what the
attraction was in the first place.
Perhaps there is something inherent in the Spanish character going back
to the Middle Ages that has a love for the grotesque, artistically speaking,
from Velázquez and Goya to Gómez de la Serna and García Lorca, or more
particularly the cinema of Fernando Arrabal which can be gruesome and
revolting, showing sequences of extreme brutality. Perhaps these are the aftereffects of
enduring the darkly repressive Franco era, which was really a Fascist police
state for nearly 40 years. But that
said, there’s really no excuse to deliver this kind of junk on the public, as
there’s little to no redeeming value.
The film itself is very competently made and a welcome return for
Antionio Banderas, who plays a wickedly sinister character with utter calm and
nonchalance, a world renowned plastic surgeon who specializes in unorthodox
methods, but also reports fantastic results, making him something of a God-like
superman in the field. And therein lies
part of the problem, as Banderas exhibits a feeling of invincibility, where no
power on earth can stop him from practicing inscrutable experiments, some of
which recall the exploits of Burt Lancaster in THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
(1977) or Charles Laughton in ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932).
What’s different here
is rather than disfigured characters who reflect the barbaric methods of
grotesque experimental surgeries gone wrong on human beings, each left in the
garbage heap of mutilated scrap parts, Banderas is such a gifted surgeon that
his patients become idealized pictures of beauty, yet his methods are the same,
as he keeps a beautiful young woman Vera (Elena Anaya) locked up in a room at
his estate like a prized guinea pig, practicing the most advanced, as yet
untested, scientific techniques on her, supposedly with unparalleled
results. Almodóvar has a penchant for
unseemly close ups that actually get too uncomfortably close to the subject,
where the camera actually feels
invasive. Initially the viewer has no
idea why she would be kept in a room like this, but when we see a gigantic, one
way, wall-sized window in the good doctor’s adjoining room, where he can sit
and observe his prized specimen like a living work of art, we’re quick to catch
on. There isn’t an ounce of character
development anywhere in this film, so there’s simply no identification with the
doctor or the patient, as neither are particularly appealing, nor is anyone
else in the movie, creating a loathsome air of disgust with what’s happening
onscreen. The film only descends further
into more revolting territory.
Almodóvar uses another
trademark device featuring a fabulous artist performing live onstage, this time
Concha Buika, a bisexual Spanish artist who performs a kind of flamenco jazz
fusion onstage, singing two songs at an elaborately upscale party, but unlike
earlier works where the artistic blend of cinema with other art forms like
dance and music only enhances the experience, especially in the utterly sublime
TALK TO HER (2002), this falls flat this time as Almodóvar mixes disturbing
rape images during the middle of love ballads, which all but seals the deal of
doom for this picture, where one considers actually walking out on this one, as
is there nothing worth hanging around for?
And if truth be told, there really isn’t, as the back story revelations
are equally disturbing, where it turns out the story itself just isn’t all that
fascinating, where the overall experience offers little substance or meaning,
but instead just grows more revolting.
It’s none of the actor’s faults, as they perform admirably, including
Banderas who got an early start working with Almodóvar in MATADOR (1986) and
LAW OF DESIRE (1987), but they haven’t worked together in twenty-one years and
he creepily inhabits the role, so the fault lies with the director, never
pulling all the pieces together, never creating any tension or suspense, as the
tone of this film fills the viewer with disgust bordering on complete
disinterest, as there’s simply nothing to identify with here. It’s all an exercise that takes place in a
loathsome vacuum of dreary unpleasantness, easily the worst Almodóvar film on
record.
The
House Next Door [Glenn Heath Jr.]
"Don't look at the surfaces," says Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) during one of the more sane moments in Pedro Almodóvar's fantastically nutty The Skin I Live In. His words sum up Almodóvar's core motif: the organic relationship between layers of emotion and trauma. The Spanish director melds his consistent themes of conflicted sexual identity, family struggle, and interconnected paths with an unsettling combination of warm compositions and sinister desires. The combination is unsettling and fascinating. The Skin I Live In revolves around Ledgard's attempt to construct a new type of human skin using the beautiful Vera (Elena Anaya) as a human guinea pig. Held captive in Ledgard's posh villa, Vera's sleek body is covered in a body suit that only accentuates her angular curves. She bares a striking resemblance to Ledgard's dead wife, burned to death in a car crash.
Still, that's only the distrusting façade of The Skin I Live In, and to divulge any more would be to ruin the truly nasty plot turns and reveals. There's of course a flashback structure, but Almodóvar uses temporal space in exciting ways, jumping through time with an attention to the darker reaches of fragile memory. The director's invigorating compositions guide the eye toward darkness by way of primary colors (the image of dildos lined up in descending size is particularly telling), adding texture to almost every inch of the frame. Moral and ethical boundaries are only the platforms for Almodóvar's nastiest intentions, and the repellant nature of the narrative is amplified by the strangely sunny lighting design. Almodóvar wants to display his worst nightmares in the brightest of natural light.
While many have deemed The Skin I Live In beautiful but hollow, the assertion ignores the fact that Almodóvar insists on reveling in multiple façades despite the consequence. The outlandish dialogue, the obsessive focus on video monitors, and the juxtaposition of multiple faces in any one frame proves Almodóvar's law of surface-level desire. There's also paintings covering Ledgard's mansion, all contorting limbs and faceless bodies, ciphers trying to regain their slipping identity. The Skin I Live In constructs a colorful and dynamic purgatory for the fragmented human versions of these drawings, men and women gracefully sliding toward a rude mental awakening. Their descent is intoxicating.
The
Skin I Live In Dave Calhoun at Cannes London May 19, 2011
Once again Pedro Almodóvar reveals his
genius for turning the ridiculous into the sublime with this creepy skin
flick – a melodramatic thriller that is sombre but never sober and that
moves through time and space with much of the boldness and style we’ve come to
expect from Spain’s leading director, even if it doesn’t have the overall sense
of unity and authorial command of the likes of ‘Volver’ or ‘All About My
Mother’. Almodóvar’s ambition sometimes overtakes his writing, and at points
his storytelling tends towards the knotty. It’s also a film that’s more
interesting in the unveiling than the conclusion, and its last twenty minutes
feel a little underwhelming and pedestrian compared to much of what’s come
before. Mostly, though, this is a wonderfully strange, oddly sexy and
attractively perverse mystery.
‘The Skin I Live In’ also reunites Almodóvar with Antonio
Banderas, who puts in a charismatic turn as a tragic figure touched by
evil. The last time Banderas worked with Almodóvar was for ‘Tie Me Up! Tie Me
Down!’ in 1990. Twenty-one years later, they’re back together for an adaptation
of Thierry Jonquet’s French novel ‘Mygale’ (‘Tarantula’ in English
translation), the story of a plastic surgeon, Dr Robert Ledgard (Banderas),
whose skills with the knife allow him to take control of a supremely messy
personal life in ways unimaginable to anyone but him. Banderas puts in a
commanding performance in a film whose thriller tendencies are made doubly
interesting by also being an artful study of masks and identities, sex and
flesh, bodies and power.
The less said about the story, the better, as it’s
built on slow revelations and quick surprises. ‘The Skin I Live In’ is rooted
in pain and loss, which pulls the film’s more melodramatic side into a more
thoughtful, provocative place than its surface suggests. It begins in
Vera’s strange presence is compelling and alienating,
and she’s a mystery that the film takes its full length to solve. Robert
observes her from elsewhere in the house through video screens. We learn that
his wife was horribly burned in a car crash several years earlier and killed
herself, and we learn that he lost a daughter, Norma (Blanca Suárez) in similar
fashion. A lengthy flashback to six years earlier reveals what happened to
Norma and starts to explain why Vera is now a prisoner in Robert’s home…
After ‘Broken Embraces’, ‘The Skin I Live In’ continues
Almodóvar’s journey into darker, more sombre storytelling and into more upscale
and interior worlds. Again, too, he chills his palette, rejecting the brighter
colours of old for something more maudlin and steely. There are flashes of
humour, usually of the nervous kind. Mostly, though, this plays as a
psychosexual thriller whose wild events and plot turns are anchored soberly in
both Almodóvar’s meticulous direction and a performance from Banderas that
swerves the more maniacal aspects of his character to offer an intensely
controlled, deadly charming screen presence.
The
Skin I Live In Fionnuala Halligan at
Cannes May 19, 2011
Pedro Almodovar’s 18th feature - and the first to reunite him with
Antonio Banderas since 1990’s Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down - finds the man from La Mancha in dazzlingly
idiosyncratic form with a sexual melodrama which unites the visual austerity of
his more recent work with elements of sheer Almodovarian entertainment.
The Skin I Live In (La Piel Que Habito) sees the director working with his usual creative team - cinematographer Jose Luis Alcaine, production designer Antxon Gomez, and perhaps most notably, composer Alberto Iglesias - to distil their elegant and restrained art into an entertainingly preposterous story which is nudged even further along by Almodovar’s trademark gender preoccupations.
At times The Skin I Live In feels like rejuvenation for the 61-year-old director. Despite the dark theme, it boasts his confident playfulness of old. Recently Almodovar has referenced the great filmmakers in noir homages; here he mostly references himself and is, yes, at ease this time in his own skin.
Commercially, The Skin I Live In should play wide: it’s not as immediately accessible or dramatically compact as Volver, but All About My Mother could be the best commercial benchmark, aided by a revitalised Antonio Banderas. Fans of the director will be overjoyed after the chilly remoteness of Broken Embraces and reviews should be warm, although not everyone will respond whole-heartedly to the film’s relaxed attitudes to narrative and convention.
Adapted by Pedro and his brother Agustin from the crime novel Mygale (released in English-speaking markets as Tarantula) by Thierry Jonquet, The Skin I Live In is a long-awaited and much worked-upon reunification of the director with Banderas - first announced a decade ago - and while it seems inevitable that somebody would be tied up, everyone in The Skin I Live In is incarcerated in their own prison.
The action starts out in
We already know, at this point, that Robert has not achieved this
breakthrough via conventional means. He maintains a full surgery in his house.
He has a laboratory in his basement. He keeps a woman (Anaya) dressed head-to-toe
in a compression garment in a windowless room while he spies on her, feeds her
opium, and works on her skin transplant. Marisa Paredes is
Clinically shot in warm, glassy grays and flesh tones, The Skin I Live In appears to be moving along genre lines - despite notable visual flourishes such as the giant Titians and faceless Jorge Galindos adorning Robert’s walls alongside shots of bubbling petri dishes.
This all takes a marked turn into Almodovarian territory,
however, when a man dressed as a tiger (it’s Carnival in
The source material wasn’t called ‘Tarantula’ for nothing: about an hour into proceedings, Almodovar suddenly shoots a web back six years in time to a plot strand involving Robert’s dead daughter and a young boy called Vicente (the promising young Jan Cornet). But not before a delicious scene-setting monologue from Marisa Paredes which includes the memorable line: “I’ve got insanity in my entrails”.
To give any more away would be ruinous to the considerable pleasure derived from a fresh viewing of The Skin I Live In: suffice to say that waking up from an operation will never be the same again.
Visually marrying surgery with sex, Almodovar is the anti-David Cronenberg, providing unexpectedly provocative frissons in scenes involving the beautiful Anaya (Sex And Lucia). Her lithe physical presence also lends the film a sensual grace and form, helped by costumes from Paco Delgado, working with Jean Paul Gaultier.
Throughout The Skin I Live In, Almodovar references Louise Bourgeois, the artist and sculptor known as The Spiderwoman and the founder of confessional art; he thanks her in the credits for personal inspiration and for the character of Vera. And the trapped characters of The Skin I Live In pluck constantly at fabrics, straw, Vera’s alternating black-and-flesh-coloured suits, to express themselves in stuffed, ripped, doll-like sculptures.
In the film’s most beautiful marriage of sight with the escalating sounds of Alberto Iglesias’ Vivaldi-influenced soundtrack, Vera shreds her clothes before sucking them up in a bizarre vacuum; an escape bid is also pulse-quickening. Jazzy songs from flamenco fusion artist Concha Buika add melancholy to a late tragic interlude.
Supported by Almodovar’s regulars (Paredes, Broken Embrace’s
Gomez,
New
York Magazine [David Edelstein]
Little
White Lies Magazine [Adam Woodward]
FlickFilosopher.com
[MaryAnn Johanson]
Jigsaw Lounge
/ Tribune [Neil Young]
James Rocchi at
Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 19, 2011
Film Freak
Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Digital
Fix Noel Megahey
The
Skin I Live In: Almodovar's Surgical Thriller - Corliss at Cannes ... Richard Corliss from Time magazine
CANNES
REVIEW | Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Skin I Live In” Is a Messy Medical Thriller Eric Kohn at
Subdued
Pedro Almodóvar Returns to Cannes, and Cannes Returns to Normal Stephanie Zacharek at
Fangoria.com
[Michael Gingold]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [David
Graham]
Plume-Noire.com
[Sandrine Marques]
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey] also seen
here: DVD Talk [Jason
Bailey]
@
Moria - The Science-Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
The
Skin I Live In reviewed: Pedro Almodóvar's new film. - Slate ... Dana Stevens
The
Skin I Live In | The Man Nobody Knew ... - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The Skin I Live
In | Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club
Noel
Reeling Reviews [Robin
Clifford, Laura Clifford]
The
Film Pilgrim [Kevin Knapman]
Spectrum
Culture [Trevor Link]
Battleship Pretension [David
Bax]
REVIEW:
Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In a Twisty, Sci-Fi - Movieline Alison Willmore
Mark Reviews
Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Filmcritic.com Sam Kressner
Confessions
of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Salon [ANDREW O'HEHIR] at
Mad-scientist
Tale Minus the Moral Compass in The ... - Village Voice Katrina Longworth
Review:
Antonio Banderas does very bad things in ... - HitFix Drew McWeeny
Wildside
Cinema [Jason Meredith]
Uinterview.com
[Justin Jannise]
The
House Next Door [Elise Nakhnikian]
Combustible
Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
"The
Skin I Live In" is damaged, but in a good way Dara Nai from AfterEllen.com
Shalit's 'Stache [Matthew Schuchman]
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Tonight at the Movies
[John C. Clark]
Monsters
and Critics [Anne Brodie]
ColeSmithey.com
[Cole Smithey]
Hope
Lies at 24 Frames Per Second [Adam Batty]
Spirituality
& Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Bloody Disgusting Horror -
"The Skin I Live In (La Piel que Habito ... Brad Miska (Mr. Disgusting)
Critic's
Notebook [Martin Tsai]
We Got This
Covered [James Powell]
Cannes
'11, day nine: The two most entertaining films in Competition, and neither one
is directed by Pedro Almodóvar. Mike D’Angelo at
Melissa Anderson on day
nine of the 64th Cannes Film Festival
ArtForum, May 19, 2011
The
Skin I Live In — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Box Office Magazine Richard Mowe
The Skin I Live In
review | Screenjabber Neil Davey
FirstShowing.net
Cannes 2011 [Alex Billington]
The
Film Stage [Raffi Asdourian] at
Digital
Spy [Mayer Nissim - Cannes 2011]
The
House Next Door [Veronika Ferdman]
(capsule)
The
House Next Door - Slant Magazine
Sean Axmaker (capsule)
Sci-Fi
Bulletin [Brian J. Robb]
Almodovar’s
Skin a fine fit for competition Mike
Goodridge at Cannes from Screendaily, May 19, 2011
Bonjour
Tristesse (English) great photos
Cannes
2011. Pedro Almodóvar's "The Skin I Live In" David Hudson at Cannes May 19, 2011
"Room
in Rome" star Elena Anaya talks about "The Skin I Live In" J. Halterman interview from AfterEllen.com,
Black
Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
including an interview with actor Antonio Banderas,
The Skin I
Live In Review | Movie Reviews ... - Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
The
Hollywood Reporter [Kirk Honeycutt]
at
Variety [Justin Chang] also seen from
The
Skin I Live In (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
The
Skin I Live In – review | Film | The Observer Philip French
Cannes
2011 review: The Skin I Live In
Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The
Guardian, May 19, 2011, also seen here:
The
Guardian [Peter Bradshaw]
Review: The
Skin I Live In - Reviews - Boston Phoenix
Sheila Johnston
Antonio
Banderas' 'Skin' nearly flawless - BostonHerald.com James Verniere
The
Skin I Live In (La piel que habito) - Washington Post Michael O’Sullivan
'The
Skin I Live In' review: Pure Almodóvar - SFGate Mick LaSalle
'The
Skin I Live In': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Sheri Linden
Movie
Review - 'The Skin I Live In' - 'The ... - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis
The Grotesque Mode in Contemporary
Spanish Theater and Film
I’M SO EXCITED (Los amantes pasajeros) B 85
Spain (90 mi)
2013 Official
site
Something of a
throwback to the 70’s, a simpler era that delighted in VHR’s, video games, and
expanding the limits of broadbased comedy with the launch of unedited cable
telelvision, where social themes were often targeted with ever-expanding comic
satire, not the least of which was the prevalence of more gay oriented
characters. But the nation as a whole
has been slower to accept gay liberation than Civil Rights or feminist issues,
largely due to the strict moral intolerance of certain religious groups, which
extends to political leaders. Pedro
Almodóvar, however, has been on the forefront of queer cinema since the early
80’s, where his first commercially distributed film, PEPI, LUCI, BOM AND OTHER
GIRLS LIKE MOM (1980), became a cult sensation and was actually released while
the original bad boy of queer cinema, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, was still alive
and making movies. A film with zany
characters that captured the spirit and sexual freedom of the times, with its
campy style, outrageous humor, and explicit sexuality, it is the only film with
an appearance by the director in one of his own films, where he’s seen as the
judge of a penis size competition. While
both directors were among the first on the arthouse circuit to be seen internationally
promoting openly gay films, Fassbinder had a tendency to attack a complacent
contemporary bourgeois society, while Almodóvar’s subversive, counterculture
nature was reflected in his earlier years writing comics and stories for
underground magazines, featuring the marginalized lives of women, homosexuals,
transsexuals, and drug addicts, where his satiric themes are often bathed in
exaggerated Sirkian melodrama and extreme artificiality, using color as a way
to express volatile emotions. While
Fassbinder was part of the New German Cinema movement challenging the political
failings of postwar reconstruction developments, Almodóvar was part of a Madrid
cultural renaissance that followed the death of Franco, unleashing a radically
different agenda, which included carrying the mantle of advancing queer cinema
after the death of Fassbinder at the premature age of 37 in 1982.
Following several films
with darker and grimmer themes, Almodóvar’s latest is one of his campier
efforts, taking place almost entirely on an airplane from Madrid to Mexico
City, where you’re almost surprised John Waters is not a passenger on this
plane, as he would have found this his ultimate dream flight. Set in the claustrophobic confines of
exclusively business and first class passengers and the busy dealings inside the
cockpit, as both the other air stewardesses and all the economy passengers have
been sedated for the flight, called the “economy class syndrome,” depicting a
middle class deep in slumber, seen as mindless and sheepish followers (where
only the rich stay awake to plot the future), as they are in several Buñuel
movies, VIRIDIANA (1961) or THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL (1962). The film is a demented chamber drama of
drugs, alcohol, and sexual excess further exaggerated by an all gay flight crew
who have their own way of making passengers (and each other) comfortable. With an inner-title that announces everything
we are about to see is a work of fiction and bears no resemblance to reality,
the audience is forewarned that everything that follows is a sunny Almodóvarian
fantasy, splashed in color and a mocking artificiality, more of a coming out
party celebrating the freedom of being gay, an over-embellished satire that
pokes fun at queer culture while at the same time reveling in all manner of gay
stereotypes. What’s always interesting
is there’s no requirement that the actors are actually gay themselves, but the
beauty is that there be no reservations in playing gay characters. In effect, that is the uniquely tolerant spirit
underlying the liberating aspects of the film, that gays can be just as silly
and stupid, but also observant, caring, and very much in love. This film exaggerates the boundaries through
overblown melodrama, but certainly humanizes the trio of gay flight attendants
whose lives unravel with the zany passengers like an ongoing soap opera. Once they discover the landing gear is
missing and they’re simply circling aimlessly until receiving instructions on
what to do next, the flight crew spends their time tossing down shots of
tequila, drinking more champagne, whisky and wine, not to mention marijuana and
the somewhat rare mescaline tablets, you’d think they’d all be walking on air
with no need of a plane, but this eventually turns into a sex farce, where the
Spanish title is “fleeting lovers,” all designed to calm the nerves.
Because of the stated
emergency, the film suggests a state of paralysis, like a flying purgatory in
the air accompanied by underlying feelings of fear and uncertainty, not really
knowing what will happen when they try to land, but disaster is a distinct
possibility, which may parallel the economic flux that is currently sapping the
energy of Spain of late, as no one really has an answer for the economic woes,
where just under 27% of the nation is currently unemployed, while the rate for
those between the ages of 16 and 24 is 57%, calling them Spain’s lost
generation. But in this film, everyone’s
heads are in the clouds and there is little interest in facing reality, where
passengers storm the cockpit to register complaints about the service, which
resembles a Marx Brothers routine, but when one of the flight crew, whose
Pinocchio-like fate is he cannot tell a lie, spills the beans on everybody’s
sexual interests, it quickly clears the room as everyone is suddenly familiar
with everybody else all of a sudden. To
fill time and to alleviate nerves, the flight trio mimes an absurdly comic
dance routine to the Pointer Sister’s “I’m So Excited,” I'm
So Excited (Official Trailer) - In Theatres July 5 2013 - YouTube (60
seconds), though it appears no one on the plane is even paying attention, as
they’re all mired in their own emotional distress, where the only available
phone can be heard throughout the entire plane, offering no privacy, so one by
one passengers call home and unearth their tiny tragedies that play out like
serial episodes of Days of Our Lives, while each of the other passengers listen
intently, enthralled by the elevated human drama. These result in a series of smaller films
within the film, where contact with people on the ground allows Almodóvar to
extend his fantasy world to include overlapping vignettes of hyper real life
incidents, adding additional characters, expanding the parameters of the story,
and drawing a more vivid picture of the passengers on the plane, all of whom
seem to be protecting secrets. While
much is sexually suggested in this film, some of which resembles late night
porn on TV, nothing is actually shown, so this is in reality a rather mild and
tame version of the subversive film this pretends to be. While the film doesn’t delve too deeply into
the human condition, nonetheless, it goes places few films dare to go by
flaunting a free wheeling, guilt free sexuality, showing Almodóvar still has a
wildly exaggerated sense of humor, with actors that effortlessly accentuate his
rapid fire wit and screwball comedy, while adding plenty of decorous style and
panache.
If Alfred Kinsey’s sexual-experience scale went from zero through to six, from exclusively straight to exclusively gay, Pedro Almodóvar figures everyone is really a 12—but they just won’t admit it. He makes his campy case in I’m So Excited!, an odd throwaway item following his best run ever, covering the roughly 10 years from Talk to Her to The Skin I Live In.
Here, the former bad boy of Spanish cinema indulges in a quickly assembled spoof of ’70s disaster movies. When a flight from Madrid to Mexico City develops problems and has to keep circling Toledo looking for a landing strip, it becomes a metaphor for, well, something. Mainly, it’s a reason for the ultraflamboyant crew of male stewards (Carlos Areces, Raúl Arévalo, and cast standout Javier Cámara) in an almost empty first-class cabin to drink heavily, gossip, harass the bisexual pilots (Antonio de la Torre and Hugo Silva), and, of course, lip-synch—poorly—to the Pointer Sisters tune of the title.
The passengers in the front include sleeping newlyweds, a top dominatrix (a surgically altered Cecilia Roth), a corrupt CEO (José Luis Torrijo), a mysterious Mexican businessman (José María Yazpik), and a roguish actor (Guillermo Toledo) whose juggling act with two gorgeous women (Paz Vega and Blanca Suárez) allows the only visual departure (Madrid) once the ill-fated journey gets going.
On some level, Almodóvar must be commenting on the politics of social collapse, with Spain’s role in the chicanery satirically prominent. But the movie is too willfully silly to have much bite, and the horn-dog byplay is delivered with a less-than-exciting snigger.
Mainly, though, I was disappointed that the film missed a golden opportunity to have Karen Black flying the plane.
I'm So Excited |
review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Ben Walters
One litmus test for auteurism could be whether a director is able to do his or her thing in a tightly confined space. ‘Stagecoach’ and ‘Lifeboat’ are unmistakably the work of John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock, despite being largely confined to, well, a stagecoach and a lifeboat. Some thrive on this model, others seem perversely ill-suited to it: Roman Polanski’s ‘Repulsion’ is in many ways his creation story, while part of the appeal of ‘127 Hours’ was seeing how the ceaselessly kinetic Danny Boyle would tell a story about a man stuck under a rock.
The vast majority of Pedro Almodóvar’s ‘I’m So Excited’ takes place on board a passenger jet, and there’s no question of it having been made by anyone but this Spanish filmmaker. High camp and high drama, family secrets and festering lies, the uses of storytelling and abuses of the unconscious, supernatural twists and melodramatic turns, telephones and television, the power of patterns – his signature concerns are all aboard and ready for take-off.
An opening disclaimer disavows any connection between the film and reality, but still ‘I’m So Excited’ is something like a state-of-the-nation screwball farce. Business class bubbles with a handful of high-stakes plots with oblique socio-political resonance, revolving around a celebrity diva (Cecilia Roth), a dodgy banker (José Luis Torrijo), a mysterious Mexican (José María Yazpik) and a psychic virgin (Lola Dueñas). Economy is out cold en masse. The flight is in trouble. The cabin crew (Javier Cámara, Carlos Areces, Raúl Arévalo) are dedicated to distraction, a hot mess of booze, drugs, blow-jobs and lip-syncs. There’s a dance break, a sex break, a lot of tequila. It’s crazy fun, even if it’s not always clear where it’s going.
As with any Almodóvar film, connections with his earlier work abound: we might think of the gazpacho from ‘Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown’, the queasy bedside ethics of ‘Talk to Her’, the terrorist hijackers of ‘Labyrinth of Passion’. Indeed, with its sprawling satire and knockabout tone, ‘I’m So Excited’ is the closest Almodóvar has come in years to early romps like ‘Labyrinth’, ‘Pepi, Luci, Bom’ and ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’ The context, of course, has shifted from post-Franco liberation in Spain to post-meltdown anxiety: having endured one crash, these characters face another. The auteur’s advice is to try honesty and get laid. Fasten your seatbelts – it’s going to be a bumpy night.
For three decades, Pedro Almodovar has been the most internationally successful purveyor of queer cinema. His first film, 1980’s Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap, was released just two years before Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s too-soon swan-song, Querelle. Though the directors possess distinctly different approaches to the medium (Almodovar hasn’t yet gone sci-fi ala World on A Wire, for instance), their films were among the first brashly and unapologetically queer films that were both critically accepted and widely seen. Fassbinder’s films, operating under the New German Cinema umbrella, aggressively proclaimed their institutional critique by way of difficult, at times unpalatable imagery (Remember In A Year of Seven Moons?), while Almodovar’s commentary is often, but no less importantly, couched beneath the artifice of camp and melodrama. Because Almodovar oftentimes uses tragicomedy as a narrative device, the intimacy and sheer likeability of his characters can, at times, overshadow the profound discourse inserted within each of his films. His newest, the joyously over-the-top I’m So Excited, is another such effort that is both delightful to watch yet deceptively discursive.
The conceit for Excited is a silly one, akin to something you’d see in the fourth season of a successful television sitcom, including the pre-show commercial tag. Action begins on the tarmac of the Madrid airport, when the luggage cart Jessica (Penelope Cruz) is driving runs over one of her co-workers, alerting her boyfriend, Leon ( Antonio Banderas), to come rushing over. The third party is slightly injured, but his primary concern is tweeting and texting about the incident, not seeking medical treatment. Once together, Jessica tells Leon about the new baby the couple is expecting, resulting in the sort of untimely confession that has become commonplace in Almodovar films. It’s almost a slapstick setup in the vein of a working-class comedy like The King of Queens, only with A-list stars, lots of queer characters, and high-end production value.
From here the tone remains light and frothy, as the remainder of the comedic thrust takes place on a Peninsula Airlines flight to Mexico City. The plane is naturally divided into three distinct spaces: cockpit/flight attendant area, first class, economy/second class. In terms of the natural order of things, it’s the sort of understood hierarchy one often takes for granted when flying, but Almodovar sees it as a ripe opportunity for social commentary. More on that later.
On the plane, a trio of gay male stewards intermittently services both the first class passengers and the two pilots in the cockpit. They utilize their work environment to hem and haw about any and everything, treating it as veritable Sunday brunch with friends. In true Almodovar fashion, there’s nothing fettered about this bunch: in between gossip, they drink vodka and snort cocaine, all the while casually reminiscing about sexual exploits. One of the stewards, Joserra (Javier), is the openly-discussed, longstanding lover of Alex (Antonio De La Toree), the married pilot. The co-pilot, hunky Benito (Hugo Silva) is “straight,” although he did drunkenly fellate Alex once before, a fact which Joserra brings up often.
About those first-class passengers, the one thing they have in common is secrets. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Norma (a delicious Cecilia Roth) is hell-on-heels; she runs a successful S&M escorting business. Bruna (Lola Duenas), a row in front of her, is a pseudo-medium who’s virginity is in tact well into her mid-30s. Then there’s a tall dark and handsome “security” man, an anxious hedge-fund manager, and a philandering television actor who’s girlfriend, both current and ex, has a bone to pick with the him. It’s a diverse bunch drawn together by an extremely extenuating circumstance.
Almodovar manipulates the action through a flight that literally seems unending: because of a problem with the landing gear, thanks to Cruz and Banderas’s error, the plane circles the nearest airport for hours until the runway is clear for its potentially problematic descent. While the passengers in coach have been ruffied to sleep during the flight, those in first-class enjoy cocktails and the privilege of lodging complaints about poor service- and entry in the cockpit to complain some more. During this extended suspension, the passengers slowly reveal their proclivities (some sexual, but not all) and double-lives; an ultimate bonding experience.
Thanks to a snappy visual pallette and punchy dialogue, the film proceeds mostly as a comedy in the highest Almodovar order. By the time the plane is cleared for landing and the passengers descend to the runway, they’ve been able to shed the skin of expectations, albeit briefly, to rid themselves of any shame they may feel in the “real world” down below.
Part of what makes Almodovar so wonderfully unique is that his texts are almost entirely free from the shackles of innuendo: his characters engage in hedonistic pursuits with enviable free-spiritedness. Like the best melodramatists, Almodovar’s meaning derives through a perfect storm of artifice and undiluted respect for his characters. While this film is the lightest, most brashly sexual comedy he’s made in well over a decade, there’s still insightful takeaways.
By bouying the characters in an environment mostly free of convention, they are free to proclaim their identities loudly and proudly, even the parts that might be harder to digest. Almodovar creates a dialectical universe, the clouds and the ground, in which the chasm between want and need is fully exploited: in the air the characters freely discuss their wants (through the help of some drugs and alcohol, of course), while the life they speak of on the ground seems burdensome. The comraderie they forge is a metaphor for Almodovar’s ideal world, one in which people accept one another for who they are. As in his best comedies such as Law of Desire or Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, any discursive innuendo in I’m So Excited occurs post-factum, allowing his films to be enjoyed on both an experiential, immediate level, as well as on an intellectual level when reflecting on the film.
I’m So Excited is lighter by design (yes, the title derives from the song by the Pointer Sisters, and yes there is a fabulous song and dance number that accompany it), a welcome change of pace from the director’s more serious fare of late. Featuring a who’s-who of Almodovar regulars, it’s a comfortable entry into an already impressive catalogue of boundary-pushing.
I'm
So Excited: Pedro Almodóvar's Most Political Movie? | PopMatters Jose Solís Mayén
“I'm
So Excited!”: An air disaster, made fabulous - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
Pedro
Almodóvar's I'm So Excited, reviewed: So ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
Angeliki Coconi's Unsung
Films [Angeliki Coconi]
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Lisa Williams]
Slant Magazine
[Nick McCarthy]
I'm So
Excited (2013) Movie Review - Film School Rejects Mark James
'I'm
So Excited!': Almodóvar's Bumpy Flight | TIME.com Richard Corliss
'I'm
So Excited': Sex and Emergency Landings | PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
[Review] I'm So
Excited - The Film Stage Nick Newman
Review:
I'M SO EXCITED! Sends Mile High Club ... - Twitch Brian Clark
FilmFracture
[James Jay Edwards]
theartsdesk.com [Emma
Simmonds]
'I'm
So Excited': Pedro Almodovar's Spanish Metaphor : NPR Jasmine Garsd
I'm So
Excited! is a Minor Work by a Major Master ... - Village Voice Zachary Wigon
I'm So
Excited (2013) Movie Review - Film School Rejects Allison Loring
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[David Graham]
Black Sheep Reviews
[Joseph Belanger]
SubtitledOnline.com
[Laura Maxwell]
DAILY |
Pedro Almodóvar's I'M SO EXCITED | Keyframe - Explore ... David Hudson from Fandor
Pedro
Almodóvar interview - I'm So Excited - Time Out Film Dave Calhoun interview from Time Out, May 2, 2013
Pedro
Almodovar books trip back to sexy comedy in 'I'm So Excited ... Reed Johnson interviews the director from The LA Times, June 25, 2013
I'm
So Excited! (Los Amantes Pasajeros) - The Hollywood Reporter Jordan Mintzer
I'm So
Excited! – review | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French
I'm So
Excited – review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
I'm
So Excited!: Pedro Almodovar's latest sex farce is a letdown - The ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail
L.A.
Film Festival opens with Pedro Almodovar's 'I'm So Excited ... Mark Olsen from The LA Times
I'm So Excited!
Movie Review & Film Summary (2013) | Roger Ebert Michael Oleszczyk
Pedro
Almodóvar's 'I'm So Excited! - Movies - New York Times Manohla Dargis
Comedy
Needs Color Mekado Murphy from The New York Times
JULIETA B 87
Spain (99 mi)
2016 Official
site
Almodóvar loves his
Hollywood tributes, where films are open love letters to golden eras in
Hollywood history, complete with garish colors, floral costumes, exquisite
hairstyles, strong performances from all the featured women, emotionally
controlled, boiling-under-the-surface melodramas, clever touches and strange
narrative twists that catch viewers off guard, where the element of surprise
adds significantly to the audience’s enjoyment, often seen leaving the theaters
with smiles on their faces. While the
knock on Woody Allen is that he doesn’t make films that are as funny as his
early works, to a certain extent the same goes for Almodóvar, who has lost his
daring indulgences with sex and personal obsessions that used to be a laugh
riot, now making safer and more conventional films, where he’s a one man
industry in himself, paying attention to the minor details of filmmaking, where
his expressive use of lush color is wildly uninhibited, paying particular
attention to art direction, wigs, wardrobe, costumes, and make up, where his
taste in production design is as exquisite as ever, all of which means the film
looks great on the surface. What’s happening
under the surface is a little different this time around, drawing from a
trilogy of three short stories combined into one, Chance, Soon, and Silence from
a 2004 anthology called Runaway written
by Canadian Nobel Prize-winning author Alice Munro, where one of her earlier
stories was used by Sarah Polley in her
film Away
from Her (2006). Following
the same titled character of Julieta in different phases of her life, Emma
Suárez in middle age and Adriana Ugarte in the character’s youth, the
overall dynamic mysteriously blends them both into one, similar to PERSONA
(1966), where an impassioned written letter connects the present to the past,
drawing the audience in to years of darkness, fueled by a mysterious missing
connection, where the film comprises an extended flashback sequence. Examining the periphery of middle class life,
it appears happy and cheerful on the outside, though there are unseen scars
that have deep-seeded ramifications, where these wounds fester and contaminate
Julieta’s emotional stability, sending her into a spiral of guilt and regret,
wondering what she could have done differently, blaming herself for the
unfortunate turn of events.
At the opening, viewers
are caught off guard by the shifting tide of emotions, as Julieta (Suárez) is
holding a wrapped artifact as she is about to move from Madrid to Portugal with
Lorenzo (Almodóvar regular Darío Grandinetti), but a chance encounter on the
street changes her plans, running into a young woman who claims to have
recently seen her daughter, now with three kids, which completely alters her
equilibrium, suddenly shunning the man in her life for inexplicable reasons,
frantically moving to a different apartment in Madrid, shutting out the outside
world, and instead sitting down to write an extensive letter to her
daughter. It’s only much later in the
film that we understand the significance.
The letter turns into a diary-like memoir, which comprises the narrative
of the film, flashing back thirty years when Julieta is played by Adriana
Ugarte, a popular classical literature professor, with students no doubt
stimulated by her rare beauty, which makes learning about the mythological
adventures of Ulysses so much more pleasurable, yet the emphasis in her class
is on how Ulysses refused the nymph Calypso’s offer of immortality and instead
chose to be human, daring instead to explore the unknown, with the implication
being that we each have the same opportunity to discover our own humanity by
turning our own lives into a great adventure.
As if on cue, Julieta takes an overnight train to Madrid, but feels
uncomfortable with an older man in her booth attempting to make conversation,
though he’s polite and never crosses the line in social manner, but it’s enough
to make her move to the dining car, where she meets a younger man named Xoan
(Daniel Grao), a fisherman who immediately captures her attention. But the train comes to a screeching halt, as
a passenger, who turns out to be the man in her booth earlier, threw himself
from the train in an apparent act of suicide, a tragedy for which she
immediately takes blame, wondering how it could have been prevented. Perhaps sensing her changing mood, Xoan makes
love to her on the train, where by morning the two are simply fascinated with
each another. But before this happens,
Almodóvar pays a cheesy tribute to Harlequin romance novels with those
exaggerated, highly erotic figures on the cover, where in the emptiness of an
endlessly snowy landscape, out the window they see an image of a male stag,
like an apparition, where Xoan suggests he’s “looking for a female he can smell
in the air.” At another point, he even
jokes about being mistaken for a character from a Patricia Highsmith novel, a
writer used to elaborate effect in Hitchcock films. Reportedly it was this train sequence that
drew Almodóvar to the film, something apparently brewing in his imagination for
quite some time, creating a strange mixture of emotions, somewhat evocative of
earlier intrigue expressed in Hitchcock’s STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951).
Originally Almodóvar
purchased the rights to Munro’s stories in 2009, where the screenplay was
initially written in English, with Meryl Streep agreeing to play the lead in
three different periods of her life, aged 20, 40, and 60, with British Columbia
locations scouted, in keeping with Munro’s stories, where this was planned to
be the director’s English-language debut, but the Spanish director grew uneasy
shooting a film in a place he didn’t really know, never really comfortable in
the language, so the project was dropped and revisited years later, reworking
the story in his native Spain. Months
after the train incident, Julieta receives a letter from Xoan inviting her to
his small fishing village on the coast, which she accepts eagerly, but upon her
arrival, she is deterred by his somewhat sinister housekeeper, none other than
Rossy de Palma, who has worked with Almodóvar since his very first film, who
apparently resents anyone else’s happiness, whose appearance recalls the
malicious intent of Mrs. Danver (Judith Anderson) from Rebecca
(1940), Hitchcock’s first film in America, revealing Xoan is with another
woman, where she seems obsessed about sending her away as quickly as
possible. Despite the unwelcoming
reception, Julieta sticks around and both couldn’t be happier to see one
another, where it turns into an idyllic relationship, living in a home
overlooking the sea. In a quick stream
of events, Xoan reveals he was with a friend, Ava (Inma Cuesta), a local artist
who quickly becomes Julieta’s best friend, while she spiritedly announces she’s
pregnant, leading to marriage and giving birth to a daughter Antía, whose happy
childhood speeds by in breathless fashion.
In contrast, when Antía is just two years old, Julieta visits her own
parents, where her father (Joaquín Notario) has resigned his post as a teacher
to become a farmer, partially to care for his invalid wife (Susi Sánchez), who
is suffering signs of dementia. To her
discernible disappointment, Julieta’s father has also hired a beautiful young
worker to help with the farm and around the home, Sanáa (Mariam Bachir), with
whom he is also openly having an affair.
One of the more curious scenes of the film is Julieta sleeping in the
same bed as her mother, who didn’t recognize her at first, but shows obvious
affection by morning, greeting her warmly, happy to feel her presence. Nonetheless, it’s clear her father barely
pays any attention to her anymore, where instead Julieta can see she’s slowly
wasting away.
The story dramatically
shifts to when a teenage Antía (Blanca Parés) is reluctantly sent away to
summer camp, though she expresses little interest and needs to be encouraged by
her parents. While away from home,
however, the irritating housekeeper stirs up more trouble, suggesting Xoan has
been sleeping again with Ava, which causes a brief marital flair up, as Julieta
makes a beeline to Ava while Xoan takes his fishing boat out to sea. Ominous storm clouds appear in the late
afternoon, surprising a few inattentive fishermen, including Xoan, who is lost
at sea. At camp, however, Antía meets
Beatriz (Michelle Jenner), with the two fast becoming best friends, where they
are literally inseparable afterwards, where her exuberant youthful enthusiasm
is a stark contrast to her mother’s dour mood, having to report the mysterious
death of her father, which leaves Julieta emotionally crestfallen afterwards,
as if walking in a coma, where one of the scenes of the film is Antía helping
her mother dry her hair after a bath, where her face is covered by a towel,
revealing a different actress (Suárez) afterwards, a technique utilized by
Buñuel in his final film, THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977), using two
actresses to play the same role.
Interestingly, Almodóvar has never worked with either actress before, so
what he gets out of each actress is noticeably different, where Ugarte’s perky
sexiness is more vibrant and alive, a literal fountain of youth, while Suárez
is more mature, but psychically scarred and wounded, with a dark cloud hanging
over her, where she’s constantly feeling that weight. At age 18, Antía announces she’ll be heading
into the mountains for a three-month spiritual retreat, where the kicker is she
will remain out of communication the entire time, creating a stressful
situation for all involved, but Antía thinks her mother’s time alone might be
therapeutic for her as well. But by the
time she drives into the Pyrenees to pick her up afterwards, she is informed
her daughter was spiritually distraught when she arrived and has intentionally
disappeared, leaving no forwarding address for her mother. Enraged by this almost blasé explanation,
Julieta turns to the police, but to no avail, as she never hears from her
daughter again, other than a blank card that arrives on her birthday every year
with no returning address. The
internalized guilt associated with her loss is simply indescribable, as it’s an
emotional abyss one can never crawl out of, feeling forever lost and abandoned,
first by her husband, followed by her daughter.
What’s left is a shell of a human being, destroying all of her
daughter’s belongings, eventually moving back into the same Madrid apartment
where they once lived, as it’s the only way Antía would know how to contact
her. One of the film’s narrative
disconnects is how long it waits to reveal the source of Julieta’s pain,
Antía’s disappearance, so by the time we realize the extent of her loss, and
the connection back to the opening scene, it barely makes any sense, as there
are no hints or clues for such a drastic action, so the full effect of her
agonizing despair is never really felt.
Nonetheless, Julieta is a wounded soul that grows more apathetic with
herself, finding herself adrift, having lost her bearings, where life has
little meaning. If not for the
reappearance of Lorenzo, she might not have survived on her own, but he helps
resuscitate her broken heart, and by the end, there’s actually a resurgence of
hope in the air, beautifully transformed by another one of Almodóvar’s
priceless choices of music that plays over the end credits, “Si No Te Vas (If
You Don’t Leave)” from 1996 by acclaimed ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, SI NO TE VAS - CHAVELA
VARGAS - YouTube (4:20).
If you leave, my world is going to end, a world where only you exist. Don’t leave, I don’t want you to leave, because if you leave that’s the very moment I’ll die.
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 18, 2016
Almodóvar's Julieta also has an open relationship with genre. The occasional sequences of mild supernatural suspense in Assayas's Personal Shopper reflect the protagonist's fear of both moving on and looking back, a queasy stasis born of her inability to let go. In Almodóvar's film, Alberto Iglesias's score surges with noirish menace while the story itself — filled with sudden disappearances, betrayal, clues from the past — keeps threatening to turn into a crime thriller. (Almodóvar probably understands better than any other filmmaker the intersection of classic film noir and the so-called women's picture.) The brooding suspense of Julieta reflects the protagonist's sense of inchoate guilt: She always suspects that she's done something wrong, but she's never quite sure what.
Based on a trio of Alice Munro short stories, Almodóvar's film follows the title character, who discovers that her long-lost daughter may have resurfaced and delves back into her own painful past in order to understand what broke them apart. When we first see the middle-aged Julieta, played by Emma Suárez, she's dressed head to toe in bright red, and in Almodóvar's impeccably designed, color-coordinated world, that means something. When we first see her younger self, played by Adriana Ugarte, she's decked out all in bright blue, and the film is a steady cataloging of how blue became red, of the ways in which the one woman transformed into the other and learned to accept the hurt of the world. (The striking switch from the younger to the older actress actually comes right in the middle of a scene, and it's beautifully, heartbreakingly well-done.)
Guilt seems to run Julieta's life, and it infects those around her as well. These women absorb guilt and responsibility for the men around them, often unfairly; they judge themselves for the corrosive, sometimes fatal decisions their men — husbands, fathers, boyfriends — wind up making. But like many Almodóvar films, the story bends toward unity and common ground. His women find strength in one another — as opposed to Assayas's women, who usually serve as each other's rivals or functionaries and are almost always alone.
Cinema Scope: José Teodoro September 02, 2016
A melodrama draped in reds and blues, Almodóvar’s 20th feature spans decades and geography to spin a mother-daughter love story populated by sickly women, meddlesome housekeepers, and virile but inconstant men. Bobbing in the heart of this tempest is the eponymous madrileña whose only child, Antía, went to some spiritual retreat in the Pyrenees ten years ago, when she was 18, and never returned. Alternately embodied by Emma Suárez (in middle age) and Adriana Ugarte (in young adulthood), long-grieving Julieta is set to finally abandon her vigil and start a new life in Portugal, when she runs into someone who has just seen Antía. Thus Julieta’s desperate hope for reunion is suddenly renewed, prompting much letter-writing and flashbacks to a life largely dictated by chance.
Julieta is based on a brilliant trio of stories from Alice Munro’s Runaway which, read in sequence, possesses the density and entrancing biographical sweep of a novella. Almodóvar’s adaptation is surprisingly faithful to Munro’s plotting, though less so to her themes—and to her tone, not at all. It’s this dissonance that’s somewhat problematic: narrative compression and the impetus to escalate tension through red herrings and Alberto Iglesias’ overcooked score drive Julieta toward a climax and catharsis that never quite arrive.
Still, Julieta works on you, slowly. (And fittingly: this is a movie about the long-term effects of absence.) Antía’s inexplicable vanishing summons harrowing questions about emotional inheritance and guilt. The moments Julieta selects from her past for scrutiny betray a reliance on magical thinking to make sense of what is inherently senseless, to impose causality on events that would otherwise seem random: the suicide of a stranger on a train or the coinciding of marital turmoil and bad weather. Let Julieta sit with you a while: it makes up in long-term resonance what it lacks in immediate closure.
Review: Julieta -
Parallax View Robert Horton
He is now 68, but in recent years Pedro Almodóvar hasn’t been making films like an old master. His astonishing The Skin I Live In (2011) blended identity politics with Frankenstein and The Island of Dr. Moreau, in a mix that apparently disturbed even his ardent fans (I think it may be one of his greatest films). I’m So Excited (2013) was either too silly or not silly enough in its embrace of zany comedy. But then who wants Almodóvar, once the bad boy of international cinema, to behave like an old master?
Like it or not, Julieta has an unmistakably masterly touch. This is a controlled, sure-handed drama, made so that every scene is in place. The acting is uniformly excellent, the production design impeccable. Almodóvar’s expressive use of color is wonderful to watch—he might be making a Technicolor Hollywood melodrama in the 1950s. I wonder if this mastery itself could explain why the movie, strong in many ways, also feels just a bit vacuum-sealed.
The gorgeous opening shot sets the tone: We stare at the sensuous waving of deep-red drapes, their folds leaving no doubt that this will be a female-centric movie. They’re not drapes, it turns out, but a kaftan worn by our protagonist and title character (played in the present-day scenes by Emma Suárez), who is preparing to move away from Madrid. But a chance encounter with her daughter’s childhood friend sets Julieta on a different course, and sets the movie on a series of long flashbacks to her younger years. In the past, Julieta (Adriana Ugarte) experiences a series of events that seem to have left her with long-simmering feelings of guilt.
The movie is full of letters that carry great importance, a reminder of how uncinematic e-mail is. There are also chance encounters and accidents that leave a mark. One of the earliest is young Julieta’s rebuff of the interest—innocent? creepy?—of an older man during a train ride. A few minutes later, he is dead, apparently by suicide, during which time Julieta has met Xoan (Daniel Grao), who will occupy a crucial role in her life. A different letter later brings Julieta to his home by the sea, where Almodóvar indulges in some pleasantly sinister memories of Hitchcock’s Rebecca, especially given the recent death of Xoan’s wife and the stern presence of a hatchet-faced housekeeper (Almodóvar regular Rossy de Palma), who announces, when Julieta arrives, “I’m in charge of the house.” You get the feeling she’s not talking about keeping the place clean.
If some of the plot turns invoke Hitchcock, it’s more the Hitchcock of difficult pictures like Marnie than the master’s fun thrillers. In the film’s very elegant look and roundabout emotions, Almodóvar also pays homage to the glossy, color-soaked 1950s dramas directed by Douglas Sirk. Each shot is a formal arrangement of color and composition—actually, each shot is practically a floral arrangement, given how pretty it all looks. At the heart of all this is a mystery that Almodóvar chooses not to fill in: Why did Julieta become estranged from her daughter (Blanca Pares) when the latter was a young woman? This is where Almodóvar strays from Hitchcock and Sirk; he doesn’t answer all the questions posed by the plot.
This leads to a bold ending that refers again to letters sent but seems to withhold a final resolution. I think Almodóvar is right to leave it at that, as the main business of telling the story has ended anyway; anything more would be a Hallmark card. Julieta may be a minor entry in the director’s work, but it is finely wrought, like a novella. Perhaps it is no surprise that Almodóvar’s script is drawn from three short stories by Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning Canadian author. One does not usually ponder the similarities between Spanish and Canadian cultures, but there you have it—the language of tangled family dynamics and quiet guilt is truly universal.
Film Comment: Eugene Hernandez May 17, 2016
A profound and moving study of family, guilt, and growing old, Pedro Almodóvar’s 20th feature—and one of his best recent films—is a spectacular new Competition entry (and opens in French theaters today). While he’s never taken the top prize in Cannes—he’s won Best Director for All About My Mother and Best Screenplay for Volver—Almodóvar is a rock star on the Riviera at a festival that has warmly embraced him film after film. His early screening today filled quickly, as did a morning press conference that greeted him and his cast with an enthusiastic round of applause. At an evening gala premiere later in the day he received a standing ovation before he and his cast and crew headed to a hot-ticket after-party on the beach.
The delicate story of a family in which grief destroys a bond between a mother and her daughter—the loss of a husband and father drives the two apart—Almodóvar’s latest is a dark turn following the light, airborne frivolity of his previous film, I’m So Excited. An avid reader who is known to consume two books per week, the sixty-something Spanish director was struck by the short stories in the Canadian author Alice Munro’s 2004 work, Runaway.
The title character of Julieta, portrayed by two actresses—Emma Suárez and Adriana Ugarte—is a broken woman who, in Almodóvar’s words, is sapped of her power by the end of the film. He said that after losing the people closest to her, “she’s almost like a zombie who walks through the streets without hope.”
The movie captures Julieta’s struggle to navigate abandonment and tragedy. “I had to find the loneliness, I had to go deeply into the loneliness,” Almodóvar admitted during today’s press conference. He said that in order to do so he immersed himself in Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Bergman films, explored the German painter Lucian Freud and Spanish artist Antonio López García, and even studied French actress Jeanne Moreau’s walk.
A dark, brooding, percussive soundtrack by frequent Almodóvar collaborator Alberto Iglesias punctuates Julieta. The filmmaker also relied on a song performed by acclaimed ranchera singer Chavela Vargas, another regular heard often in his work, to cap the picture. The tune, “Si no te vas” (“If You Don’t Leave”) by Cuco Sánchez, reveals the emotional underpinnings of the story.
“If you leave, my world is going to end, a world where only you exist. Don’t leave, I don’t want you to leave, because if you leave that’s the very moment I’ll die.” These lyrics could have just as easily been used as dialogue in his new film, Almodóvar said today.
Almodóvar initially intended to adapt the stories “Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”—the independent pieces share a common character named Juliet—from Munro’s collection. “She was a housewife and that’s what I am too,” the Spanish auteur quipped today. “[Like her] I am at home thinking and writing.” The film was to be his English-language debut, perhaps shot in New York, but after writing the script, he said that he got cold feet and shelved it. Returning to it years later, Almodóvar decided to adapt the stories to his home country. A lover of trains, both toys and those that appear in movies, Almodóvar said he built the movie around the locomotive scenes that he lifted from Munro’s story.
Now, Almodóvar says that Julieta is more of a tribute to Munro than an adaptation of her work. “There’s a great deal of mystery in the stories of Alice Munro,” he said. And he was up for the journey to find his story. “Where will these characters lead me?” Almodóvar asked himself. He said today in Cannes that he “more or less forgot Alice” and that he’s “come back to a place. To a place that would never leave me. A place of women.”
Set in two time periods, the 1980s and the present, Julieta is also about the passage of time and the toll that life can take on a person. “It’s not that I feel like an old man, but I’m getting there,” Almodóvar reflected today. After quoting Philip Roth (“Age is not an illness but it’s a massacre”), he said, “That’s how I experience the passage of time right now.”
Without elaborating, Almodóvar said that he has been forced to make decisions for his health that he considers sad and boring, “I’m not a nostalgic person, but I miss my youth and I miss the ’80s. I think that feeling can be seen in the films I am making in this decade.”
His own struggles with aging can be found in his films, Almodóvar explained, noting that his connection to the older version of the title character is particularly striking. But don’t even think about trying to capture his life directly on the screen or the page, he warned and pleaded this morning in Cannes. “I do not want biographies, authorized or unauthorized, about me,” he said today. “Please don’t let anyone do a biopic about me. Please promise me that right now and also pass on the message to future generations. My life is in these 20 films.”
Fandor:
Duncan Gray December 19, 2016
Reverse
Shot: Mayukh Sen Wide Awake, October 08, 2016
Sight & Sound: Jonathan Romney August 25, 2016
International
Cinephile Society [Jaime Esteve Bengoechea]
Another Gaze:
Laura Nicholson September 18, 2016
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri December 21, 2016
PopMatters
[Alex Ramon] May 18, 2016
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
We
Got This Covered [Lauren Humphries-Brooks]
Review:
'Julieta' Is Pedro Almodóvar's Best Film in Years - Newsweek Zach
Schonfeld
A
Potpourri of Vestiges [Arun Kumar]
Queer
Guru [Roger Walker-Dack]
Every
Movie Has a Lesson [Don Shanahan]
Screen Daily: Fionnuala Halligan
Brooklyn
Magazine: John Oursler December 20,
2016
Film Review:
Julieta | Film Journal International
Doris Toumarkine
ScreenAnarchy
[Shelagh Rowan-Legg]
The
Film Stage [Rory O'Connor]
Film-Forward.com
[Rania Richardson]
Spectrum
Culture [David Harris]
Filmmaker: Vadim Rizov September 08, 2016
Little
White Lies: David Jenkins also seen
here: Julieta – first
look review - Little White Lies
AwardsCircuit.com
[Clayton Davis]
Sight & Sound: Sophie Monks Kaufman May 18, 2016
Observations on Film Art: David Bordwell October 15, 2016
Brooklyn
Magazine: Elise Nakhnikian October
08, 2016
The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo December 16, 2016
The House Next Door: Sam C. Mac
Flickering
Myth [Chris Haydon]
Talking
Pictures [Freda Cooper]
The
Upcoming [Catherine Sedgwick]
Cineuropa.org
[Alfonso Rivera]
Compuserve
Film [Harvey Karten]
The House Next Door: Jaime N. Christley July 17, 2016
“20th
Century Women” and “Julieta” - The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew Cannes
2016, My Top 15, May 24, 2016
Senses of Cinema: Alison Taylor September 14, 2016
n+1: A. S. Hamrah December 12, 2016
Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
Time:
Stephanie Zacharek May 19, 2016
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
'Julieta':
Film Review | Hollywood Reporter Leslie Felperin
Film
Review: 'Julieta' - Variety Peter
Debruge
Julieta (2016), directed by
Pedro Almodóvar | Film review - Time Out Dave Calhoun
Julieta
review – Almodóvar's five-star return to form | Film | The Guardian Mark Kermode
Julieta
review: Pedro Almodóvar ties himself down with fractured ... Peter Bradshaw from
The Guardian
Julieta
review: Pedro Almodovar's new film is a ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
Pedro
Almodóvar's Julieta is a guilt-soaked pleasure ... - The Telegraph Tim Robey
South
China Morning Post [James Mottram]
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
Austin
Chronicle [Steve Davis]
The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang
San Diego CityBeat: Glenn Heath Jr.
Julieta Movie Review
& Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert
Godfrey Cheshire
Review: Another Woman on the Verge in
Almodóvar's 'Julieta' A.O.
Scott from The New York Times
The
Munro Doctrine (washingtonpost.com)
Carolyn See, November 19, 2004
Leave
Them and Love Them - The Atlantic
Lorrie Moore, December 2004
Realizing
That Certainty Is Inevitably Uncertain - The New York Times Michiko Kakutani, December 7, 2004
Review:
Runaway by Alice Munro | Books | The Guardian Alan Hollinghurst, February 4, 2005
Alice Munro's “Silence”: From the Politics
of Silence to a Rhetoric of ... Corrine Bigot from Journal of the Short
Story in English, Autumn 2010
Short
stories: the Juliet stories by Alice Munro – edge of evening Sarah, February 26, 2016
Alnoy, Siegrid
SHE’S ONE OF US (Elle est des nôtres) C+ 79
France
Stylistically unusual, a film that moves at a snail’s pace, yet is visually stunning, cinematography by Christophe Pollack, with some John Carpenteresque electric music by Gabriel Scotti which plays very quietly underneath the first 30 minutes of the film, giving the viewer some wary insight into the unstable nature of the subject matter, as nothing is at it seems. Sasha Andres plays an awkwardly unappealing temp worker who dissolves so completely into the cold, nameless, imagery of the corporate world, which is brutally oppressive, ruling out any hint of individuality, where she, from the beginning, struggles to find herself or even the slightest hint at friendship. She desperately needs to be appreciated and needed, clinging to each manager, reminding them of how well she performs, yet she remains barely distinguishable and disappears after each assignment into another dimension of Kafkaesque alienation and indifference, barely mattering to these companies at all.
So she begins to imagine things differently. Everything that we see is subject to our own scrutiny, as what we see may never have happened at all, but remains lodged instead in the inner recesses of her imagination. What we witness, instead, is a woman losing herself, already an immaterial cog in an immense organizational structure that barely knows she exists at all, but she gets accidentally shoved into the deep end of a pool, which pushes her still deeper into the faceless caverns of a dark void. From out of nowhere, we witness an act of extreme violence, where she seems to put her coworker out of her misery for screaming too loud. Nothing makes any sense whatsoever, yet the imagery is beautifully rendered, with a choreography of body parts slowly moving on and off the screen. Somehow, afterwards, she becomes more assertive, and takes charge when she is offered a full time position, and is appreciated in strange relationships that seem to appear out of thin air, all following what appears to be a random murder of a lonely coworker. Slowly, but surely, she starts losing more and more pieces of herself until eventually, by the last scene, she disappears altogether. She’s not there at all, completely losing any sense of her identity. While there are extraordinary images of fog intermixed with the luminescent steel and concrete, ultimately all seems lost, she simply disappears off the face of the earth, devoured by a strange, lethargic creepiness that suffocates every frame of this film. While the developing sense of atmosphere may sound murky, it thrives in a cocoon of complete indifference.
She's One of
Us Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
SPOILERS] There's a kind of cynicism that I recognize in
my responses to certain works of art, a fear that I may be responding
positively to effects that are present in the work not by design but due to the
creator's lack of control, overreaching pretention, or worst of all, my
subjective desire to bestow mastery onto those effects in the face of ample
evidence to the contrary. In short, I occasionally find myself worrying about
getting duped. I think this is logical in some ways; one wants to feel secure
in the knowedge that we have standards for judgment, that we've been around the
block enough times not to fall prey to cheap charlatanry. It becomes a question
of belief, a willingness to trust the impulses the art object is
creating for our sensoria or, conversely, a tendency to dismiss them as shallow
flash and surface. Alnoy's film has haunted me because it confounds my usual
criteria for evaluation. The easiest, most straighforward account I could give
of this film -- i.e., one that, as I hope to show in a minute, is wholly
inadequate -- would go something like this: the director, along with actress
Sasha Andres, have created Christine Blanc, a stern, allegorical figure whose
lack of any firm subjectivity serves to mirror the soullessness of her
environment (numerous corporate offices in France) as well as her position
within the economic hierarchy (she's a temp worker with a French subsidiary of Adecco). She has a tenuous friendship with
her supervisor at the temp agency (Catherine Mouchet), who, in the course of a
friendly outing, Christine murders. At this point in the film, Christine
miraculously attracts the attention of her co-workers, is offered a permanent
position, and is seen slowly but steadily climbing the ladder of success
heretofore out of her mousy reach. Within this pat narrative structure (derided
by some as a kind of Time Out meets Single White Female),
Alnoy constructs a steely, corporate-De Stijl mise-en-scene, all hard laquered
reds and blues, overcast exteriors through glass walls and just-so arrangements
of desks and credenzas. Each composition is rigid, exacting, but slightly
off-kilter, mirroring the psychic state of Christine, a woman who yearns to fit
into this Mies van der Rohe world but whose Aspergeresque inability to function
socially keeps her in a glass cage all her own.
This sounds ridiculous, jejune, overdetermined, precious, the epitome of an overly ambitious first film. And here is where things truly get bizarre, both in the film itself and in my reactions to it. For one thing, this overbearing physical enclosure would be nowhere nearly as disconcerting without Gabriel Scotti's glitch electronica soundtrack, so insistent and repetitive that for the first reel I mistook it for a problem with the projector's sound head. Essentially Alnoy uses this score along with the architectural claustrophobia not just to "put us inside Christine's head," but to transform the entire visual and sonic environment into something palpable, something physically transmitted to the viewer for us to contend with. There is a bodily discomfort that watching She's One of Us entails. The only valid points of comparison, in terms of generating a space with sound, are Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Cure (thudding bass-notes of ocean wind and unbalanced washing machines encasing the viewer's skull) and Michael Snow's Wavelength (the piercing sine-wave that enters your sinuses and nests right behind your eyeballs). And while the sound design does go a long way towards transforming Alnoy's film into something greater than the sum of its parts, this isn't the whole story either. At about the midway point, Blanc is toasted by her co-workers for passing her driving test. (The French title, Elle est des nôtres, is the name of the common drinking song the gang chants in her honor. Culturally it functions like "For She's a Jolly Good Fellow," but is altogether more ribald.) Shortly after this scene, the film goes haywire from a narrative standpoint. Minor characters come to the fore, become love interests, and then disappear into the background again. The detective investigating the murder Christine committed becomes implausibly smitten with her, treating his inquiry into the crime as an occasion for authorized stalking. And then he stops, and starts again, looking like he'll let her go, and for a time the investigation simply stops becoming a factor in the film at all. What we have here is a conundrum in evaluation. It would be easy to write off the final act's incomprehensibility as fatally flawed filmmaking, or at the very least a misguided grab at Euro-auteur ambiguity, Fellini or Bergman for lunkheads. But as a total package, even the descent into nonlinear impressionism worked for me (and on me) . She's One of Us starts out as a mathematically rational film about a woman who cannot find her place in a fully rational world. Then, this world begins to mold itself around her, making the sense for her that she cannot make for herself. In the end, the diegetic world has given itself over to her strange obsessions, her pulsions and drives. She is an improbably desired object, her complete passivity the ultimate accouterment and her psychosis the final measure of reality. And what's most unnerving for me is how she, and the film, became so persuasive, successfully insinuating themselves into my psyche, so that in the end I don't know whether I too am overvaluing this meticulously overworked Rorschach blot of a film. It scares the hell out of me.
Alonso, Lisandro
My films aren’t narratives. I observe people, different moments, and I put them all together in the film. The audience has to imagine or create something sitting in the chair. —Lisandro Alonso
Wavelengths
4 TIFF09 Program Capsule (Andréa Picard)
Lisandro Alonso was born in Buenos Aires. He studied film at the Universidad del Cine, and founded the production company 4L to produce his own films. He co-directed the short Dos en la vereda (95). His acclaimed feature films include Freedom (01), Los Muertos (04), Fantasma (06) and Liverpool (08).
Into the Unknown |
Film Comment Quintín,
September/October 2014
“It is necessary to understand with what vigor certain ideas seize certain men, who have passed through certain things and have occupied certain stations, in order to understand that a mission to the Ranquels [a tribe in northern La Pampa] can become, for a moderately civilized man like myself, a desire as vehement as a Paris embassy’s secretariat can be for a civil servant.”
—Lucio V. Mansilla
An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians
Jauja, the latest film by Lisandro Alonso, was a surprise for many critics. That’s not because it’s so different from his four previous features, but because it demonstrates that his cinema has a much broader range of possibilities than many previously assumed, and obliges you to look at the entirety of his work, as you would the work of any filmmaker of grand aesthetic ambitions.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that Alonso’s filmography can be described in just a few words: all five of his features deal with solitary men in desolate lands, though the hidden dynamic between a majestic landscape and a society off-screen provides the tension in each story. Alonso’s narratives exist in opposition to those that are articulated by means of a traditional script; he has always found it tough to write a treatment, that almost mandatory instrument for obtaining funding and ensuring that a project becomes a film. Until Jauja, his films had virtually no dialogue, much less any that advanced the plot or defined the characters. The primary needs and desires of Alonso’s characters (food, sex, freedom of movement, family) are on full display, but their inner lives are opaque even to the filmmaker, and that’s what gives rise to the atmosphere of these films, so seemingly simple and yet so difficult to interpret.
It’s been this way since La libertad (01). The first of Alonso’s protagonists is a tree cutter named Misael Saavedra. The film presents his cyclical and solitary life: he is depicted chopping wood with admirable skill, eating, sleeping (and dreaming), going to the village, selling the wood, and returning to cut down more trees. The title of the film (which translates as Freedom) has a certain oneiric implication, but the rock music in the opening titles and a final scene that reveals Misael to be an actor in a film (removed at the time of its Cannes premiere at the behest of the festival’s programmers) ensure that we don’t confuse the contemplative nature of La libertad with that of an anthropological documentary. Nothing could be further from Alonso’s mind than the social sciences, though watching Misael cutting wood is a fascinating cinematographic experience.
La libertad was shot in 35mm, a format that Alonso has continued to use to this day. It was a luxury then for a very low-budget film (made with $50,000 of family money) and seems like an eccentricity now, but it’s one of the many examples of this director’s uncompromising attitude. With Alonso, care for the image has always been paramount.
Born in 1975 in Buenos Aires, raised in the city but fascinated by the countryside, where he worked on his father’s ranch, Alonso studied at the recently created Universidad del Cine (University of Cinema) in the early Nineties, but didn’t graduate. His classmates never imagined he’d make a career for himself. But Alonso also learned from being an assistant to Nicolás Sarquís, a filmmaker who made slow, laconic plein air films and also programmed the legendary Contracampo section of the Mar del Plata film festival. (Alonso’s job was to deliver film reels and transfer videotapes.) Between 1996 and 1998 Sarquís introduced Argentina to the films of directors like Kiarostami, Sokurov, Sharunas Bartas, and Tsai Ming-liang.
La libertad forms with Los muertos (04) and Liverpool (08) a trilogy in which the protagonists are as taciturn as Misael. In Los muertos, a man named Argentino has just served a prison sentence for killing his younger brothers. The film picks him up at the prison’s exit and follows him in his journey downriver to find his daughter. Critics speculated that he is a compulsive murderer who would end up killing her after the film ends. We’ll never know, because the director doesn’t have the slightest idea. There are two constants in Alonso’s cinema: nature and the desire to confront the viewer with primitive ways of life that are far removed from so-called civilization. Cinema becomes a space in which man inhabits indescribable realms of human nature.
Alonso’s first films rely on figures like these, and he never views them with a paternalistic eye; at the same time, he was forging a unique approach to cinema that is meant to be as unreadable as the characters themselves. This approach is made explicit in Fantasma (06), in which Misael and Argentino wander through the Cinemateca Argentina building in Buenos Aires as their films are projected in an empty screening room. The characters are as solitary here as they are in their natural habitats, phantasms invisible to an audience that is absent, somewhere out there beyond the windows that face the street—and that presumably prefers to watch other films. Fantasma expresses Alonso’s identification with his characters’ invisibility—it’s as if they, together with the films in which they appear, belong to a phantom dimension.
Liverpool, Alonso’s third film featuring a silent loner, centers on alcoholic sailor Farrel, who disembarks in Usuaia, at the far tip of Patagonia. From there he sets out for an even more remote destination: an inland sawmill where his mother lives with a mentally disabled girl who turns out to be his daughter. Liverpool has a very particular narrative structure: like Misael and Argentino, Farrel starts out as the subject of the camera’s gaze, but when he arrives at his destination, he himself functions like the camera, faced with a deeply strange reality at a zero degree of humanity that he can hardly bear and from which he finally flees. Neither circular like La libertad nor linear like Los muertos, Liverpool is a mise en abyme that treats the cinema as an instrument whose function is to explore its own limits. Alonso’s filmmaking goal is to acknowledge his own ignorance and make it manifest in order to avoid turning his characters into spectacles. Instead, they are his accomplices or symbols of his own perplexity.
After Liverpool, it was said that Alonso resolved to change his approach in an effort to avoid repeating himself. And Jauja is a change. To begin with, Alonso is going for neither conventional cinema, to which he is unwilling to conform, nor the costumbrismo (representation of ordinary life) style of dramaturgy that forms the nucleus of current Argentine cinema. His risk- taking approach has even less to do with academicism, with the repetition of a formula that maintains his position in the festival world, where his explorations end up being mistaken for miserabilism adorned with virtuous images, a cinema about marginalized people made for museums. Alonso has never aspired to engage with ethnography or installation art, but instead, with Jauja, aims for something purely cinematographic (or rather, impurely cinematographic, following André Bazin’s view that true cinema is an “impure art” always on the brink of being something else).
Jauja is the first time that Alonso has collaborated with a writer and with an internationally recognized star. Both were crucial factors in enabling him to venture into new territory, resulting in his most important film to date. Jauja gives new meaning to Alonso’s past work, proving that his poetics isn’t necessarily tied to the use of non-actors, non-verbal performances, and minimalism. But the participation of Argentine poet and novelist Fabián Casas, actor Viggo Mortensen, and longtime Aki Kaurismäki cameraman Timo Salminen doesn’t merely imply higher production values—it also suggests a combined effort in which literary values, professional performances, and high-quality visuals fuse with and modify Alonso’s approach.
Casas’s contribution consisted not so much in charting the protagonist’s trajectory as in constructing the background of a fictional 19th-century Argentina that ties in, via a dream, with 21st-century Denmark. The film is set in these two distinct places and time periods, which are connected by a small toy soldier that serves the same function as the key chain in Liverpool, which is passed from Farrel to his daughter and represents the same kind of link between two mutually antagonistic ways of life, but set within a realistic framework. In Jauja the toy soldier connects the Patagonian desert circa 1870 with a Danish castle in the present day. There, an adolescent girl named Inge (Viilbjørk Agger Malling) dreams (or perhaps is dreamt, as in Borges) that she is the daughter of Captain Dinesen (Mortensen), a Danish military engineer hired to build up the Argentine army’s defenses against the country’s indigenous peoples. Drawn to the desert, Inge runs off with a soldier (Misael Saavedra, the woodcutter from La libertad), and Dinesen sets off in pursuit, a little like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (it must be said that Mortensen’s presence is as powerful as John Wayne’s).
Jauja is a radical confirmation of and commentary on what’s at stake for Alonso. For him, cinema is a kind of bridge between a civilized modern world and an alternate primitive and barbaric world to which the former feels drawn and watches with fascination—just as Alonso and his viewers are fascinated by La libertad’s tree cutter, the inexplicable killer of Los muertos, or the world of Liverpool, in which incest isn’t taboo. Here the stakes are doubled thanks to the historical context, through allusions to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 Civilization and Barbarism, one of Argentine literature’s fundamental texts, and Lucio V. Mansilla’s An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians, which was published in 1870 when Sarmiento was president of Argentina. In Jauja, the character of Angel Milkibar (Esteban Bigliardi) is intended as a caricature of Mansilla, a refined aristocrat who served in the military and signed a peace treaty with the indigenous peoples, then became an ambassador and divided his time between Europe and Argentina.
In a sense, Mansilla and Inge embody the ambivalence of Alonso’s cinema toward the primitive, its mixture of attraction to and revulsion from the barbaric. In Jauja, the levels of estrangement become mixed up and confused, and that’s what accounts for the film’s singular tone. As in Alonso’s other films, nature plays a fundamental role as the immutable backdrop to the action, and in this case Timo Salminen’s cinematography endows it with an even more mysterious aura. As filmed by Salminen, Mortensen’s hallucinated journey resembles a more restrained version of Debra Winger’s in The Sheltering Sky. The film’s tone shifts into a realm of unreality that lays the groundwork for a crossover into another dimension, one that will materialize at the end as a counterbalance to the frontier world, and ends up giving Jauja its unique shape. Leaving behind the simple figures of circularity and the straight line of a journey, this new form suggests a game of mirrors. The titular land of Jauja—a mythical medieval domain of abundance and leisure—is also an illusion, a reflection of desire like the worlds depicted in the film, whose artificiality is underscored by the rounded corners of the film’s image. (Although it’s actually just the result of shooting full frame, without a matte.)
Jauja also features one Colonel Zuluaga, an army deserter disguised as a woman who leads a band of natives dedicated to looting. Like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Zuluaga faces the horror of barbarism by merging with it, switching sides and even gender. But unlike the solemnity of its European and North American antecedents, Jauja adopts a tone of humor and farce in order to portray the dilemmas of a civilization faced with the unknown. The comedic aspect is clear enough in the scenes at the fort, with its lecherous officials obsessed with Inge, or the theft of Dinesen’s horse and rifle as he sets about the killing of his daughter’s abductor. But it’s also evident in the whole civilizing enterprise, which is tinged with enormous confusion: to begin with, the white soldiers, being mestizos, are not so civilized in the eyes of the Europeans. This confusion corresponds to the particular history of Argentina. As in the case of Masilla, a certain duality existed in the psyche of the ruling class, who looked as much to France as to the Pampa for their sense of identity, never quite knowing where they belonged, while regarding the natives as gaucho barbarians—much as cinema gazes disconcertedly into the abyss between high art and popular entertainment.
The characters’ ambivalent gazes rove across the movie as in all of Alonso’s previous films: the fascination with the dynamic between the primitive and the civilized here is identical to Alonso’s fascination with Argentino, Misael, or Farrel and his shady family. Jauja augments this by crossing between classes, ethnicities, and nationalities. While the camera travels with Dinesen into the desert, Alonso likewise enters unknown territory, delving into the history of film and of Argentina. He stands revealed as a filmmaker reflecting on the relative nature of his oeuvre: how provisional it remains, beyond a single constant, namely the energy and pleasure that goes into its realization. A full interpretation of Jauja will emerge over time—but until then, neither the director, nor the lead actor, nor the screenwriter necessarily understand it any more clearly than viewers or critics will. Alonso and his collaborators undertook an endeavor that has few parallels in contemporary cinema, one whose core is related to Alonso’s artistic freedom and his refusal to follow cinematic paths paved with certitude. The title of Alonso’s first film (which is never explained precisely and is a word seldom applied to contemporary films) continues to be the driving force of his explorations.
Lisandro Alonso > Overview -
AllMovie
The History of Cinema.
Lisandro Alonso: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi
Don't Be So
Naïve! | Film Comment Kent Jones,
July/August 2008
Kathleen Murphy on Liverpool at TIFF 2008 Kathleen Murphy from TIFF, October 2008 (3rd
paragraph)
Deep and Wide Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal, February 2009
Days
in Buenos Aires: Lisandro Alonso
Robert Koehler from Film Journey, April 13, 2009
Argentine
Cinema: Liverpool — The Evening Class Interview With Lisandro Alonso Michael Guillen feature and interview from
The Evening Class, August 27, 2009
NWFF press release
Northwest Film Forum, September 1, 2009 (pdf format)
Unspoken
Cinema: LINKS :: Lisandro ALONSO
links to a variety of articles at Unspoken Journal for Contemplative
Cinema, September 30, 2009
No Man's Land –
The Cinema of Lisandro Alonso - Harvard Film Archive November 6 – 8, 2009
At
the End of the World: The Cinema of Lisandro Alonso at the NWFF Nov. 11-19" Bill White from Seattle Post Globe, November 9, 2008
LISANDRO
ALONSO PRIMER « Hot Splice Adam
provides a list of various links and articles from Hot Splice, November 9, 2009
Northwest Film
Forum :: Series Archive At The Edge Of The World: The Cinema of
Lisandro Alonso, November 11 – 19, 2009
Lisandro
Alonso in Seattle and At the Edge of the World | Parallax ... links to various articles, Parallax View, November 12, 2009
Lisandro
Alonso: Space, Time, Cinema - Parallax View Lisandro
Alonso: Space, Time, Cinema, by Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, November 12, 2009
Into
the Wild - Film - The Stranger Sean
Axmaker, November 12, 2009
A
Hole in the Heart of Man, Out At the Edge of the World: Some ... A Hole
in the Heart of Man, Out At the Edge of the World: Some Remarks On the Cinema
of Lisandro Alonso, by Jay Kuehner from Parallax
View, November 16, 2009
James Quandt on the films of
Lisandro Alonso - artforum.com / film
Ride, Lonesome, James Quandt
from ArtForum magazine, November 25,
2009, also seen here: Cinematheque
Ontario - Programmes - RIDE LONESOME: THE FILMS OF ... and here:
micropsia:
Ride Lonesome: The Films of Lisandro Alonso (TIFF ...
ARGENTINE
CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—A Few E..
A Few Evening Class Questions for
Lisandro Alonso, by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 25,
2009
ARGENTINE
CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandr...
Lisandro Alonso On La Libertad,
by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 25, 2009
ARGENTINE
CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandr...
Lisandro Alonso On Los Muertos
(2004), by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 26, 2009
ARGENTINE
CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandr
Lisandro Alonso On Fantasma
(2006), by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 27, 2009
The
Evening Class: ARGENTINE CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD ... Lisandro
Alonso On Liverpool (2008), by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class,
November 28, 2009
Lisandro
ALONSO | Directors' Fortnight Cannes
Film festival, May 13 – 23, 2010
The
Films Of Lisandro Alonso | The Seventh Art
Just Another Film Buff, June 5, 2010
The Neutral
| Online Only | n+1 Jonathan Kyle
Sturgeon, February 24, 2011
FRR
[Michael Pattison] Front Row
Reviews, March 30, 2012
Lost in a Dream |
Filmmaker Magazine Alix Lambert,
January 21, 2015
Lisandro Alonso –
The Art(s) of Slow Cinema January 4,
2016
Give them
‘Liberty'; Give them ‘The Dead': Lisandro Speaks Neil Young interview
from Jigsaw Lounge, May 17, 2005, also seen here: Lisandro
Alonso
Lisandro
Alonso, Mostly in His Own Words • Senses of ... Gabe Klinger interview from Senses of Cinema,
July 22, 2005
Interviews
| Shore Leave: Lisandro Alonso's Liverpool - Cinema Scope Shore Leave: Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, Adam Nayman and Violeta
Kovacsics feature and interview from Cinema
Scope (2008)
The London Film
Festival: Liverpool - Interview - BFI Maria Delgado interview
from Sight and Sound, November 2008
The Rumpus Interview (R. Emmett Sweeney) February 9, 2009
“Who's
John Ford?”: An Interview with Lisandro Alonso ... Darren Hughes from Senses of Cinema, April
14, 2009
Twitch: director interview Michael Guillen interview, August 28, 2009,
also seen here: LIVERPOOL--Interview
With Lisandro Alonso | TwitchFilm
Argentine
Cinema: At The Edge Of The World—A Few Evening Class Questions For Lisandro
Alonso Michael Guillen from The
Evening Class, November 25, 2009
Lisandro
Alonso on Space, Time, Illusion and the Reflection of Desire ... Paul Dallas article and interview from Extra magazine, 2015
Lisandro
Alonso - Reverse Shot Adam Nayman
interview, March 18, 2015
Lisandro
Alonso On Why Viggo Mortensen Was the - Indiewire Eric Kohn interview, March 20, 2015
Filmmaker
in Residence Lisandro Alonso's 'Jauja' Opened ... Brian Brooks interview from Film Comment, March 21, 2015
Interview:
Lisandro Alonso | Film Comment
Nicolas Rapold interview, March 25, 2015
Lisandro Alonso -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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LA LIBERTAD B- 82
aka: Freedom
To me he’s a sage. Someone who isn’t interested in society, who creates his own world. People talk about Whitman, Rousseau, Nietzsche, and other names I’ve never heard of.
—Lisandro Alonso, speaking of Misael, the protagonist of his film La Libertad
Narration is all but
absent in Alonso’s first feature, where in his words, “I don’t want to tell a
story. I’m interested only in
observing.” The son of a cattle rancher,
at the age of 25, Alonso decided to spend time in the country on land purchased
by his father, taking him into Argentina’s Pampas region
where he met the film’s protagonist, a tree cutter (hachero) named Misael
Saavedra, spending 8 months with him before pitching the film to his former
film school, Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires, immediately encountering
resistance, as neither his family, his friends, nor his school liked the idea,
so he financed it independently with $50,000 from family money, making his
father the producer. Using a 12-person
crew, they shot for ten days, basically presenting a day in the life of
Misael. Told with lyrical power and a
scarcity of information, the film is far from a documentary portrait, as you
could imagine how this would be so differently presented in the hands of Werner
Herzog. Instead it resolutely refuses to
provide any background information, where it’s 30-minutes into the film before
a single word is spoken, providing an unflinching look at a man living a
solitary life in the countryside, where the bold declaration of the title
provides the viewer all they need to know, as it’s a question asked throughout
the film, which is itself a conglomerate of fiction, documentary, and
improvisation, where the camera, mostly in long takes, follows this young man
around as he cuts wood with an ax and chainsaw, rounding up tree stumps,
cutting off branches, marking tree trunks, then placing them all in a woodpile,
as we see him walking through the high grass, even defecating in the woods,
with the sounds of cows heard in the background. After a while he takes a break to eat,
washing his hands, changing his T-shirt, warming up prepared stew in a pot,
turning on a radio playing Latin Salsa music, while also gulping water and
smoking a cigarette. A rhythm of motion
is established through simple means, and like the director’s other works, this
exceedingly spare and minimalist film takes the form of a silent, solitary
journey.
Misael greets a man and
his son as they pull up in an empty pickup truck by his woodpile, loading the
bare logs in his truck, while Misael rides in the back with a giant white dog
panting all the way. They get off at
home, allowing Misael to continue by himself, reaching a rural lumberyard where
he hops out and rolls a cigarette, where one hears the sounds of dogs in the
distance as he waits for the owner to inspect his lumber. Offering 15 stumps at two pesos each, he ends
up selling them for one peso and 80 cents each, or 27 pesos (approximately $9
dollars). After unloading his truck, he
immediately spends 10 pesos on cigarettes and a cold soda, as well as a gallon
of gasoline for his chainsaw that he pours into a plastic jug. Returning the truck to its rightful owner, he
heads off into the open fields, past cows and wheatstacks, disappearing into
the treeline where he catches an armadillo, lugging it along with him as he
ambles through the forest back to his tent.
Making a fire, placing a metal grill over it, he whacks the animal a few
times before slitting it open and roasting it on the fire, skin down. Later in the evening, he lights a pile of
brush on fire in the woods before sitting down to eat his meal, illuminated by
campfire, where the film opens and closes with mirror images of Misael eating
the cooked armadillo with his knife, where lightning and thunder can be heard
in the background, though at the end, he boldly eyes the camera with furtive
glances before the film fades to black, showing the title sequence as the rains
fall. Interestingly, the credits
actually play at the beginning, along with a bass-heavy, pulsating vibe of
contemporary music by Juan Montecchia, where the opening credits to the
glacially paced LA LIBERTAD and Liverpool
(2008) both feature strangely uptempo music, where this is the first in a
Lonely Men Trilogy that also includes LOS MUERTOS (2004) and Liverpool
(2008), one of the more intriguing trilogies in contemporary cinema, as one
wonders whether these solitary men operating in isolated rural regions, outside
the constraints of society’s reach, are really more liberated, or does their
extremely limited economic opportunity keep them in a neverending cycle of
powerlessness and poverty? While they
answer to no one but themselves and have skills that allow them to survive in
the wilds of nature, yet their silence is reflected in their absence of
political power, remaining marginalized, and perhaps even exiled from the
broader community that all but ignores them.
In a broader view, they may as well be invisible, which is why Alonso
chooses to shine a light on them.
The film screened at
the Un Certain Regard section of
Cannes in 2001, quickly becoming a festival favorite, largely due to its daring
originality and almost complete absence of language, yet it is inexplicably
listed as the #3 film of the decade by Cinema
Scope magazine, Cinema
Scope Top Ten Films of the Decade - Cinema Scope, which is a head
scratcher, but an example of how well Alonso is received in critical
circles. Described as “a poetic
meditation on labor and landscape,” the film is reduced to its barest
necessities, which perhaps increases the observational focus of the viewers,
with Alonso describing the experience, “It’s a mirror, but empty,” allowing
each individual viewer to fill in the empty spaces with their own thoughts and
reflections, projecting their own idea of liberty. While the woodcutter is nearly
self-sufficient, deriving his income and basic needs from nature itself, his
isolation, however, allows him to be economically exploited, so that the wood
that he cut so carefully ends up being sold cheaply, where he’s at the mercy of
market prices set by the lumberyard.
Who’s to say they don’t continually take advantage of him, as he’s a
small time operator, where the sale may even be off the books, as Misael is
part of a continuing journey from nature to the market and back again, somehow
balancing work and nature. The film
never romanticizes the labor, but this is the lengthiest section of the film, shown
with cinematic realism, where the slow pace of the film seems to extend our
time with a man alone in the woods, literally expanding our boundaries, taking
viewers on a journey at the margins of civilization. But like Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922),
this is a staged reality, a kind of fictionalized documentary, starting and
ending in the same place, creating a mythical structure of a routine day in the
life, as if every day is pretty much like this one. Because of the relationship between Misael
and his environment, there is a fine line between loneliness and freedom, where
there may be days when he speaks to no one, but remains at a distance,
preferring solitude to socialization, becoming a prisoner of uncertainty,
subject to a different kind of inner life, something the camera never sees,
that each viewer themselves must discover.
As an art film, outside the guidelines of commercialization, the
director has already escaped the norms of traditional film language, driven by
a desire to establish his own artistic freedom, refusing to follow the paths
paved by others, using a radical stylization that is both provocative and
informative, which may be uncomfortable to many, where each new generation will
have to decide for themselves the worth of this kind of artistic approach, but
as a first feature, it’s rare.
La Libertad,
directed by Lisandro Alonso | Film review - Time Out Geoff
Andrew
So low-key as to come across as a kind of real-time sociological documentary, this uses long, slow, uneventful takes to chart a day in the life of a woodcutter who spends most of his time working alone in the Argentinian countryside. So we see him select and chop down trees, empty his bowels, listen to the radio, drive the staves to a buyer, drive back, and finally kill, roast and eat an armadillo(!). Certainly, there's an integrity to the film, and it's fascinating to watch someone so at home with nature, so isolated from people; but whether there's any deeper purpose to Alonso's austere methods than just showing how its subject lives is unclear.
La Libertad | Film Society
of Lincoln Center
Alonso’s landmark feature debut, based on months of closely observing its subject’s routines, follows a day in the life of Misael, a young woodcutter in the Argentinean pampas. Using long takes that are at once uninflected and hyper-attentive, La Libertad chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of Misael’s largely solitary existence: he searches for trees and chops wood, pauses to defecate or eat, prepares and transports the logs for sale, returns to his camp to build a fire and cook his dinner. The title crystallizes a question about this man’s life: is the cyclical daily grind a burden or a kind of freedom? Or does the title refer to Alonso’s conception of an anti-dramatic, materialist cinema, absolutely in-the-moment and liberated from the traditional confines of fiction and documentary? “An account of everyday work that transforms the banal into poetry, maybe even myth,” James Quandt wrote of La Libertad, named one of the top 10 films of the past decade in Cinema Scope magazine. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
La Libertad | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Lisandro Alonso's La Libertad is a penetrating peek into
the daily life of a woodcutter from
World Socialist Web
Site review David Walsh
La Libertad (Freedom) from
The director’s motives may be the noblest, but La Libertad is muddleheaded from at least two points of view. On the one hand, director Alonso maintains he decided to make the film after seeing the solitary wood-cutter in a field and thinking, “This is how I feel in the city.” How silly, and condescending. A middle class city-dweller compares himself to a rural laborer because they both work in conditions of isolation.
On the other hand, the film’s title, one fears, is only half-ironic. Out of some combination of misguided “multicultural” sensitivity and political timidity, the filmmaker seems afraid to condemn Misael’s conditions. After all, one existence is as good as another. One can only account for this holding back from stating the obvious—these are wretched, backward circumstances that need to be abolished!—by considering the decades of political confusion and backsliding and the erosion of confidence in a revolutionary perspective that make it up. Hardly anyone these days dares suggest that something needs changing. ( Bonanza from Argentina suffers from something of the same malady.)
As much as anything else, it is passivity that is doing the most damage to film art. Artists have not always been this modest in the face of existing institutions and morals. Where is Byron’s “sworn, downright detestation/Of every despotism in every nation”? Or Mayakovsky’s “slap in the face of public opinion”?
Though only 73 minutes long, Freedom begins with an unusually protracted set of opening titles – bold red letters quickly flash up against a black background, detailing the many people involved in the production.. Pounding techno music promises a slick, hip, tough urban thriller. But then the film begins: a man sits eating some kind of meat with a knife, illuminated by a campfire. In the background, lightning flashes on the nocturnal horizon. The camera does not move. After a couple of minutes, one last caption reveals the film’s title: La Libertad.
For the next hour or so, we follow the man – Misael (Misael Saavedra) - over the course of one day. We see him at work in the morning: long sequences in which he chops down trees in a quiet, sunbaked corner of the Argentinian Pampa. Misael prepares the trunks for sale, and a neighbour and his son arrive in a truck and help him transport the goods to the buyer. Misael and the buyer haggle over the price of the trunks. Eventually a deal is struck and money changes hands. Misael goes to a local store and buys cigarettes, food and drink. He calls home and asks after his sick mother. That night he catches an armadillo, and cooks it over his campfire. In the background, lightning flashes on the horizon. The camera does not move. After a couple of minutes, one last caption reveals the film’s title: La Libertad.
Neither documentary nor fictional feature, Freedom is in many ways a remarkable film. By paying such close, patient, attention to apparently ‘mundane’ happenings, Lisandro achieves a process of transfiguration comparable to that wrought by James Benning in Los and El Valley Centro – in films like these, the buzzing of a fly constitutes a major event. Leaving the cinema and returning to the ‘real world’, viewers may see their surroundings in a slightly different way.
But Freedom will undoubtedly frustrate and even enrage many. As with Benning, the static shots in which ‘nothing happens’ deliberately flirt with tedium – boredom is a very dangerous weapon in the film-maker’s arsenal, and Lisandro isn’t yet sufficiently experienced to deploy it so effectively as Benning or, say, Tarkovsky. At times, the long takes feel gratuitous – tiptoeing towards Carlos Reygadas’ insufferable Japon, which Freedom superficially resembles (both won major prizes at the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival).
While Japon bluffs profundity through its ostentatiously painterly camerawork and classical score, Freedom succeeds by being much more focussed, much more assured of its own methods and destination. The images are often beautiful, but this is, emphatically, a film about work, and the simplest processes of human activity life. Misael works, rests, then sells the product of his work. He eats, then shits out the waste products. He takes money from the trunk-buyer and spends it in a store. In a sequence which may well disturb many, he hunts, traps, kills and eats an animal.
In short, Freedom condenses the essential activities of mankind into a small time-frame. The philosophical and allegorical angles are plain. So plain, in fact, that Lisandro does his film a disservice by saddling it with such a portentous title as Freedom (almost as bad as Reygadas, for whom ‘Japan’ supposedly symbolises rebirth.) Lidandro may as well have called the film ‘Freedom? Discuss!’ or perhaps ‘Capitalism.’ A simple Misael would have done the job just fine. We can work out the rest for ourselves.
James Quandt on the films of
Lisandro Alonso - artforum.com / film
James Quandt, November 25, 2009
SINCE DEBATES OVER AUTEURISM now seem as distant as Madame de Staël, it was hardly noticed at the 2008 Cannes International Film Festival, even as the Directors’ Fortnight celebrated its fortieth birthday, that the politique’s monism had created a small crisis. Through caprice, impatience, or sheer fatigue, critics experienced collective irritation with the staunch constancy of several celebrated auteurs. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, even while extending his muted narrative into once unimaginable modes of suspense and melodrama in Three Monkeys, was scorned for relying on his patented long takes and meteorological effects. Jia Zhang-ke alienated some erstwhile supporters by retreading familiar territory in 24 City, which contemplates China’s social history of the last half century by recounting, as did his Still Life (2006), the erasure of a symbolic locale: here, Chengdu’s Factory 420, an aeronautics and munitions plant demolished to make way for the eponymous complex of luxury apartments. Although Jia audaciously makes a secret military site the object of his quasi-utopian nostalgia, and interpolates several scripted interviews, including ones acted by Joan Chen and Zhao Tao, into his ostensible documentary, he was accused of leaning on established Jia-ist strategies—“auteurism for the sake of it,” as one critic put it.
Everywhere in Cannes—including the Market, where Hong Sang-soo’s Night and Day transported his axiomatic tale of male fecklessness from Seoul to Paris and abridged the expected sex, though, ironically, the result was echt Hong—directors were chastised for being too much themselves: Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne for turning their drama of moral quandary into self-styled formula in Lorna’s Silence; Atom Egoyan for retrenching after the failed departure of Where the Truth Lies (2005) with a work that gathers so many of the director’s motifs and themes that it verges on self-parody (Adoration); Lucrecia Martel for again returning to her terrain of oblique unease among the rural bourgeoisie of Argentina (The Headless Woman). (Detractors noted with exaggerated relief that Martel’s next project would be a detour into science fiction.) Some directors, mindful of the traps of predictability, seem determined to avoid reiteration: Apichatpong Weerasethakul abashedly joked in private that his forthcoming film, Primitive, would not be structured in two contrasting halves, as has long been his identifying modus.
The young Argentine auteur Lisandro Alonso shares no such compunction. Presented in the Fortnight, Alonso’s fourth feature, Liverpool, explored once more his signature theme of men alone on a journey, reticent men of obscure emotion and motive traveling through isolated landscapes, unchanged by their encounters with others. More Bresson than Boetticher (despite surprising affinities with the latter), Alonso’s films observe their battened protagonists with intent detachment. The men’s unyielding features and solitary, taciturn ways—they all “ride lonesome”—register less as enigmatic, the way the neutrality of Bresson’s “models” serves an aura of immanence and mystery, than as ramparts against the world. Precarious, inward, lost even to themselves, Alonso’s men are separated, estranged, or sundered from their families—Vargas from his daughter in Los Muertos (2004); Farrel from his addled mother in Liverpool; Misael from his madre in La Libertad (2001)—and wary of connection; they make small talk but withdraw at any demand for divulgence. They evade—“I don’t remember anymore; I’ve already forgotten everything,” Vargas tells a boatman inquiring after his crime in Los Muertos—or look past the question (Farrel’s sodden silence in Liverpool when asked why he has returned home after such a long absence), but whether they are unable or merely unwilling to answer remains moot. Alonso’s withholding cinema exhibits an opposite fault. Compulsively subtle, proceeding by hint and implication, it sometimes tells too much, no doubt because in the director’s rigorously delimited approach, the slightest insistence can appear as exaggeration.
Alonso established his themes and method with La Libertad, a slip of a film shot in nine days for very little money. (Alonso’s father is credited as a producer.) Steeped in Neorealism and influenced at the time by Abbas Kiarostami, the then-twenty-five-year-old graduate of the Universidad del Cine in Buenos Aires transformed, with great tact and modesty, a single day in the life of Misael Saavedra, a young woodcutter whom Alonso met on his father’s farm, into the simplest of scenarios. The incongruous, semiominous thrash of techno percussion accompanying the credits would become an Alonso trademark, but once the film proper begins, the director foregoes all nondiegetic music. (The profusion of birdsong on the sound track here and in Los Muertos makes one think the ideal orchestrator for Alonso’s films would be Messiaen.) Dedramatized, shot in watchful long takes, La Libertad opens on a nocturnal image of Misael’s bare torso as he saws and chews a hunk of meat, a lone tree and sky flickering with lightning behind him. After a fade to black and the appearance of the title, the film emerges into daylight, Alonso’s slow pans lingering over the landscape—fissured earth, tangled trees, the woodcutter’s bare encampment—as they follow Misael’s search for the best specimens to fell. The depiction of nature, immense, entropic, indifferent, stops just short of awe—Malick minus the mysticism.
Alonso’s quotidian approach becomes graphically apparent when the camera suddenly fixes on the woodcutter’s face as he blankly empties his bowels and wipes himself before continuing his search. Far from Rüdiger Vogler’s aestheticized defecation in Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976), Misael’s act seems nothing more than a shit in the woods. So matter-of-fact and uninflected is the film’s recording of Misael’s daily routines (faithfully re-created from weeks of Alonso’s close observation of the man’s actual life and edited so that several sequences seem to adhere as real-time) that La Libertad has been hailed as the apotheosis of Bazinian realism. Spare in dialogue—the first bit, a simple salutation, comes as a shock more than half an hour into the seventy-three-minute film—and attuned to the rhythms of daily existence (chopping, eating, shitting, sleeping, buying, and selling), the film elicited inevitable claims that the boundary between fiction and documentary had been blurred, collapsed, or straddled. But Alonso’s reliance on Bressonian synecdoche, both within the image (truncated framing) and within the narrative, and his exacting management of sound and image suggest a reality heightened enough to leave all notions of a modern-day Flaherty behind.
For its quietly confrontational finale, which earned the film a review titled “The Solitary Life and Interesting Diet of an Argentine Woodcutter” in the New York Times, La Libertad reveals what Misael was first seen eating, and what, in the film’s corporeal cycle, he will be excreting the next day. Misael partly severs the head of an armadillo he has caught, its limbs flailing and thrashing, before tossing the animal on the grill. He roasts it a little, scrapes its shell, bloodily guts it at great length, salts the meat, and returns it to the grate, before an inexplicable sequence in which he lights a fire in the forest, feeding the blaze into inferno—an act of purgation? revenge? brush clearing?—and strips off his shirt. (One is momentarily reminded of the ritualistic climax of Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s great Himatsuri [1985], but Alonso’s materialist approach cannot brook the numinous.) The film then returns to its opening image, that long close-up of Misael eating as the night sky flares with lightning. Lowing cattle, birdcalls, wind, and distant thunder provide elemental counterpoint to his feast, before sound and image dissolve into darkness and rain, and the credits begin. Alonso’s original version reportedly ended differently, with a half-minute coda in which Misael openly laughs at the camera, joined by the off-screen mirth of the crew, before the Cannes festival convinced the director to remove this Brechtian breach. The circularity, the symmetry of the film’s structure as it now stands, may seem too schematic, but the film, as free as it leaves the viewer to extrapolate meaning from Misael’s actions, is nothing if not disciplined. Its libertad is strictly provisional.
If Lucrecia Martel is the Chekhov of the so-called New Argentine Cinema, there is a touch of Tolstoy in Alonso’s portrait of this country peasant who, despite the brands he partakes of (Ford, Fanta, Marlboro, Richmond), seems untouched by the city (which, Alonso has said, is associated with the techno music at the film’s beginning). Simple, authentic, uncorrupted, Misael is, unlike Alonso’s subsequent protagonists, gregarious in his solitude: On the telephone, he asks about his mother, and about Roxana and Micaela (sisters? girlfriends?), and he jokes to a gas station attendant that he will hang around until the ladies show up. His solitude seems less innate than imposed by circumstance. By comparison, Argentino Vargas, the fifty-six-year-old principal of Alonso’s next film, Los Muertos, appears pathologically opaque, his reticence and detachment the result of guilt, grief, or homicidal instincts, it is never clear. Vargas’s concealed emotions and motivation allow Alonso to explain nothing while manipulating narrative expectation and assumption as willfully as any genre director.
Whether the film’s opening sequence, shot in one virtuoso take, answers its closing one, the way La Libertad’s does, is central to the overly controlled mystery of Los Muertos. Slowly gliding and panning through lush forest, playing with shallow focus as if to undercut its omniscience, Alonso’s camera glances at a child’s bloodied body sprawled in a brackish stream, then continues to traverse dense foliage to disclose a naked corpse before briefly capturing the murderer’s arm as he moves past, clutching a machete. (One uses “he,” “murderer,” and “machete” tentatively, as the sequence is determinedly oblique, any inferences confirmed only by later evidence.) Alonso employs the tropes of revelation and occlusion in classic horror-film fashion before embarking on a journey that appears to be as cyclic as that in La Libertad, though here narrative closure proves to be anything but.
Like Misael in La Libertad, Vargas is a nonactor whose character carries his real-life name, but whose being is subsumed more intensely and intensively into Alonso’s fiction. Released after decades in prison for, as we later learn, murdering his brothers—“the dead” of the title, one assumes—Vargas spends his last day in jail sanding a chair, feeding a dog, drinking maté, eating lunch. (All of Alonso’s films feature protracted scenes of men eating by themselves—social ritual becoming its opposite.) Though he is capable of banter, Vargas’s natural disposition is mute aloneness, and, as with Farrel in Liverpool, the director repeatedly shows his protagonist at a remove from humanity, isolated in the frame or tellingly separated from surrounding groups: men watching soccer or huddled in the prison yard, a clutch of children buying treats in a rural store. Unsettled, Vargas grabs at his long, graying hair or cracks his knuckles; his energy is wary, implosive.
Vargas journeys through the hinterland by road and then boat to deliver a letter to María, a jail mate’s daughter, and to visit his own offspring, unseen for decades. Alonso again strives to make unstudied his aesthetic of the everyday, of basic drives and desires: Vargas buying bread and cigarettes, fucking a roadside prostitute, hitching a ride on the back of a truck (an act repeated in La Libertad and Liverpool). The brusque treatment of the sex scene, in which the camera lingers twice on a little girl playing in the yard as inside her mother gives Vargas a standing blow job and then submits to his pent-up thrusting, reminds one that Los Muertos appeared not long after Carlos Reygadas’s Japón (2002), another Latin American movie in which a grizzled, existentially unmoored man travels into backcountry in search of decease. But the explicit sex of Japón, like the long takes of elemental landscape that film also shares with Los Muertos, strains for the transformative, even the transcendental, while Alonso aims for the opposite. The film’s incidental religious-mythological associations aside—a shot of Vargas’s head in frame with a devotional in the police station; Vargas’s carrying bread and wine to a pair called María and Angel; the Charon-like aura of his boat drifting toward death—Los Muertos retains the minimal, materialist approach of La Libertad. Alonso wants to besot with the ordinary.
“Having described a circle in La Libertad, Alonso now draws a straight line,” claimed the program notes for Los Muertos when it screened at Cannes. The film does initially appear linear, especially in the drift of Vargas’s downriver trip, shot in long takes and desultory pans that sometimes swing away from the boat to the other bank or to the water’s surface, leaving Vargas out of frame altogether. When he raids a beehive, extracting great slabs of honeycomb to suck on as he rows, Vargas appears, like Misael, as man-in-nature, but his pastorale has an undercurrent of imminent violence. The original title of the film was Sangre, and its final third traffics in bloodletting, imagined, implied, and real. Clues as to whether Vargas murders María and Angel in their bed are intentionally equivocal: mysterious nighttime shots of their vulnerable bodies, a sudden shock sound bridge of a rooster’s violent cry as Vargas washes his face and hands (of carnage?) in the morning and departs with no sign of his hosts, caressing a machete by the boat before fashioning a spear from a long reed. Spying a goat onshore, Vargas grabs it, slits its throat, drains the blood into the canoe, his feet and legs spattered with gore. An obvious counterpart to the armadillo kill in La Libertad, the slaying and evisceration of the goat, the fierce shove and suck of its organs as Vargas rips them out and mops the gaping cavity, seem less like Misael’s natural act of sustenance than an expression of bloodlust.
Typically impassive when he first meets his young grandson, who is caring for his baby sister—the absence of their mother suggests another of Alonso’s fractured families—Vargas restively sits outside their tent, twisting and turning the limbs on a figurine, his machete driven into the earth beside him. Whether menace turns into actual violence is left to the viewer: Vargas tosses the toy away, takes the machete inside, lays it down, and disappears behind a flap into the interior where the boy and his sister await. The camera hangs back, swings slowly to look down at the ground, shadows of trees playing over the toy splayed in the sand. Blackout. Is Vargas a serial killer? Alonso says adamantly not, and that any violence portended in his ellipses is imagined, merely a sign, the director insists, of Vargas’s primitive existence. Perhaps. (Alonso removed the motive for murder that had been explicit in the original script: that Vargas killed his brothers because they were starving.) But if not quite La Libertad’s repetition of its opening image, the film’s egregiously ambiguous finale hints mightily that there will be blood, as in that first sequence of fratricide, and that Vargas has added his grandchildren to the little brothers he killed many years before, to his growing domain of Los Muertos.
Duration is of prime importance to the economical Alonso, who is sparing with both edits and running time. (The average shot lengths of his films must run extraordinarily high.) The diurnal span of La Libertad and the elliptical, four-day course of Los Muertos are further abbreviated in Fantasma (2006), which barely breaks the one-hour mark in transcribing the short visit of Argentino Vargas to a Buenos Aires theater to watch, for the first time, the film he starred in. Though set within the confines of the San Martín cultural center and its Leopoldo Lugones cinema, Fantasma is no less a film of landscape than the previous two. Like the pampas of La Libertad and the jungle of Los Muertos, the labyrinthine San Martín becomes Fantasma’s second character: As much as the camera may linger on a now gaunter Vargas, in from the wild and uneasier than ever, Fantasma makes setting its preoccupation.
Flagrantly cinephilic, Fantasma displays the influence of Kubrick (ominously underlit interiors, steely textures, private sanctums become catacombs) and Bresson (a loping dog whose offscreen scamper and whine are an obvious homage to L’Argent [1983] just as the elevators’ winking red lights recall Le Diable probablement [1977]; the original plan to insert a clip from Pickpocket [1959] was eventually dropped) and affinities with two of Alonso’s acknowledged contemporary exemplars, Tsai Ming-liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul: The film appears inspired by the former’s fond farewell to traditional cinema-going, Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003), complete with Tsai’s requisite toilet scenes, and anticipates the latter’s treatment of subterranean light and space in the second half of his Syndromes and a Century (2006). But, oddly, it is Tati who most comes to mind in surveying the San Martín’s modernist horror of malfunctioning elevators, confounding staircases, and harshly lit hallways, rooms too ample or cramped, humanity subjugated to decor, architecture, mazes, and machinery. Like Tati, Alonso sees in this surrounding a kind of elegant inutility, a vast contraption in which people stumble, turn back, retrace their steps, push buttons that don’t work, tentatively position themselves in spaces not designed for their being, much less comfort. And, again like Tati, he embeds this vision of errant modernity in a musique concrète of mechanical sound: outside traffic; the whoosh, buzz, and hum of elevators; a computer whirring to life; an incessant, unanswered telephone; the squeal of an unoiled door; the roar of the projector showing Vargas the rural world of Los Muertos, with its contrasting quiet and cacophony of birds.
Stealthily shot in slow dollies, pans, and tracks, with two precredit ploys—a long, dreamy image of Vargas holding a woman’s red shoe and staring out a night-lit window, followed by an audience-testing blackout, lasting almost three minutes, accompanied by slashing guitar—Fantasma has been both dismissed as insular or narcissistic (one of the other characters transiting the San Martín is none other than Misael Saavedra) and justified as an experiment or étude. Though Alonso stated at the time of its release that Fantasma completed a trilogy with his first two films, it is now best seen as a pendant to the actual trilogy, which consists of that early duo plus his latest, Liverpool. Longer, more complex, with greater reach and maturity than La Libertad and Los Muertos, Liverpool nevertheless repeats their template, from the driving drums and guitar over the credits, to its inscrutable, tamped protagonist, who travels alone through an adverse landscape only to arrive where he departed: “I’m off,” Farrel mutters as he escapes the place to which he has so laboriously journeyed.
Forever “off” as a world-wandering sailor, Farrel is granted leave in Tierra del Fuego to visit his mother, whom he has not seen in years and is not even sure is alive. The opening shipboard sequences, shot in extended takes that pan and pivot at a vigilant distance, repeat both the mechanical imagery of Fantasma and the detachment of the jail sequences in Los Muertos; shunted into near obscurity by both foreground-background composition and shallow focus in the film’s first image, Farrel is frequently isolated within the frame, contrasted with groups of men playing together (video sports at film’s start, a card game later), Alonso’s suggestive use of offscreen sound and a motif of windows further sequestering Farrel from the “normal” world. Swigging from an ever-present bottle, like Vargas on his boat journey, Farrel takes to the land as a loner, eating dinner in front of a trompe l’oeil autumn landscape that, like rear projection, eerily separates him from his surroundings, before visiting a strip club, rendered Bresson-style in two quick shots: the first showing a couple of strippers, one bare-assed and trussed, the other distractedly text-messaging, the second a countershot of Farrel at table, the dancers’ shadows gyrating on the wall behind him. Drink, food, sex: Alonso again pares to basics and implies that none grants comfort to his rootless protagonist.
Liverpool seems designed for auteurial legibility. Even as its snowy environs contrast with Alonso’s previous films, much harks back to compositions and themes in his earlier work, from the hitched ride on the back of a truck, to the long shot in which Farrel trudges through a field toward the horizon line, recreating Misael’s cross-plain journey near the end of La Libertad. Alonso’s fondness for abruptly cutting from loud sound to silence (a curt transition from buzz saw to the quiet of a bedroom), for disorienting transitions of setting (that mockery of an establishing shot in the unidentifiable transport equipped with ripped seats and torn mattress), and for restating moments in variation (Farrel’s two solo meals, the twinned inscriptions on a post) also remain. But Liverpool exhibits a greater variety of settings and shots, color, if not new, newly emphasized. The green motif of Los Muertos—the jungle and foliage, the blouse Vargas buys his daughter, the two bottles hanging on the wall in María’s home, the “green-out” after the opening sequence—is here replaced by an insistence on red, all the more marked against the chill, achromatic locale. (One thinks of Oshima, another chronicler of broken families, who banished green from his palette as too anodyne, and aggressively filled his images with red.) Liverpool’s many red objects—barrels, jumpsuit, Scania truck, backpack, winch, wheelbarrow, plaid jacket, stripper’s chemise, car siren, casserole, basin, canteen table—emphasized by Farrel’s painting a rope that color at film’s beginning, culminate in the deep red walls of the bedroom in which Farrel’s mother sleeps away her final days—walls that could be incarnadine imports from the villa in Bergman’s Cries and Whispers.
As temporally compressed but more expressive and psychological than early Alonso—Juan Fernández, the highway worker from Tierra del Fuego who plays Farrel, physically resembles an older, wasted version of the director, and the film verges on self-revelation—Liverpool nevertheless keeps to his antidramatic ways, attenuating narrative through empty time and withheld information. (Alonso’s dilatory style affords as much attention to the packing of a haversack as to an encounter between characters.) A cipher whose feelings can only be guessed at, Farrel averts disclosure, but his “backstory” can be inferred from the reactions of others: the bitter comments of Trujillo, the old man tending Farrel’s mother; the befuddled memories of the old woman, who may be feigning nonrecognition of her son; and the demands for money of Analía, the damaged girl we take to be Farrel’s daughter (and, according to some, sexually exploited—like much in Alonso, possible but not provable). “I would like to know what Farrel did to his mother,” Alonso says in the film’s press materials, but he works hard to deny us many clues about their relationship. In Alonso’s art of arduous intimation, the danger of overstatement lingers. When the film’s hitherto mysterious title is explained in the final image, one feels that the flaking red letters on the gift Farrel has conferred upon Analía, a talisman of his drifting life and familial neglect, should read Rosebud instead of Liverpool.
Parallax
View [Jay Kuehner] A Hole in the Heart of Man, Out At the Edge
of the World: Some Remarks On the Cinema of Lisandro Alonso, by Jay Kuehner
from Parallax View, November 16, 2009
AT
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: Lisandro Alonso On LA LIBERTAD Michael Guillen from Screen Anarchy, November
26, 2009, also seen at the Evening Class here:
Argentine
Cinema: At The Edge Of The World—Lisandro Alonso On La Libertad
Into the Unknown -
Film Comment Quintín,
September/October 2014
Parallax
View [Sean Axmaker] Lisandro Alonso: Space, Time, Cinema, by
Sean Axmaker from Parallax View,
November 12, 2009
Into
the Wild - Film - The Stranger Sean
Axmaker, November 12, 2009
The
Films Of Lisandro Alonso | The Seventh Art
Just Another Film Buff, June 5, 2010
The Neutral
| Online Only | n+1 Jonathon Kyle
Sturgeon
Other
Worlds: New Argentine Film - Page 67 - Google Books Result Other
Worlds: New Argentine Film, by G. Aguilar (pdf)
No way
home: Silence, slowness and the problem of authenticity in the . Robert Cavallini from Aniki (pdf)
Certains
Regards: La libertad (2001) & Ten Canoes (2006) Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, June 27, 2010
Guadalajara Film Fest, Entry 1 – Film
Journey Robert Koehler from Film Journey, March 9, 2008
Slow
Cinema Weekend, Part 3 - Three Films by ... - Front Row Reviews Michael Pattison, also seen here: FRR
[Michael Pattison]
No Man's Land –
The Cinema of Lisandro Alonso - Harvard Film Archive
La libertad (2001) directed by
Lisandro Alonso • Reviews, film + cast ... Vadim Rizov from Letterboxd
Karlovy
Vary International Film Festival | La libertad July 2 – 10, 2010
A to Z – The Art(s) of Slow
Cinema
Favourite
Film Things 2001 - Part 2 • Senses of Cinema Mark Peranson, December 29, 2001
Cinema
Scope Top Ten Films of the Decade - Cinema Scope
Lisandro
Alonso, Mostly in His Own Words • Senses of Cinema Gabe Klinger interview, July 22, 2005
A
Second Look: Lisandro Alonso, director of few words - latimes Dennis Lim, November
28, 2010
Movies|The
Solitary Life and Interesting Diet of an Argentine Woodcutter Elvis Mitchell from The New York Times, October 1, 2001
Freedom (2001
film) - Wikipedia
LOS MUERTOS B 89
aka:
The Dead
Argentina France Netherlands Switzerland
Born in Buenos Aires,
raised in the city but fascinated by the countryside, where he worked on his
father’s ranch, Alonso studied at the Universidad del Cine (University of
Cinema) in the early 90’s, but didn’t graduate, instead learned by being an
assistant director to Nicolás Sarquís, an Argentinean filmmaker and
screenwriter who made slow, near wordless films and also programmed the
legendary Contracampo (reserved for innovative narrative forms) section of the
Mar del Plata Film Festival, the only recognized competitive feature festival in
Latin America, where Alonso’s job was to deliver film reels and transfer
videotapes. It was Sarquís who
introduced Argentina to the films of directors like Kiarostami, Sokurov, and
Tsai Ming-liang in the late 90’s before dying of lung cancer in 2003. By then, Alonso had already released his
first film, La
Libertad (Freedom) in 2001, a low-budget film made for $50,000 from his
family’s money, yet shot on 35 mm, as are all of Alonso’s films. After spending a few years on land in the
country purchased by his father, he was drawn by the less complicated lives,
where people spent less time talking, yet were arguably more aware of the natural
world around them. With the director
present at the screening, the first thing Alonso does before making a film is
search for an interesting location, finding an excuse to film there, where his first film took him into
Argentina’s Pampas
region, literally immersing himself, bringing a sleeping bag and tent, living
alongside locals in the region until he discovers a feature subject,
essentially ignoring a traditional narrative.
The three films, La
Libertad (Freedom) (2001), LOS MUERTOS (2004), and Liverpool
(2008), comprise an aptly named Lonely Men Trilogy, as each examines
the solitary lives of the rural poor by following a near wordless journey of
isolated protagonists in remote regions who barely utter a word as they journey
through unchartered territory that may as well be the end of the world, as one
of the director’s interests is to confront the viewer with primitive ways of life that are as far removed from civilization as
possible, where the mysterious world they live in becomes the central
focus of the film. Discovering
non-professionals in their own environment, his films use long, contemplative
takes to observe otherwise unknown and invisible characters in their own
natural habitat, using experimental and abstract methods, establishing Alonso
as one of the leading proponents of slow and contemplative cinema.
Made three years later
for only $29,000, LOS MUERTOS was shot in four weeks using the same crew as his
first film, where Alonso’s idea to procure financing was to shoot an opening
scene, then show it to prospective buyers in order to secure the needed
financing to complete the film. It took
nearly nine months before they could begin shooting in the northern province of
Corrientes where native people including the Guaraní
were still living in the tropical jungle regions. Traveling by canoe, he met the film’s
subject, Argentino Vargas, while scouting locations, putting up his tent and
staying with him for two or three days before asking if he’d want to be in a
film. By understanding that he’d get
paid for work, the same as any other job, he agreed. Opening with a mesmerizing slow burn through
a dense jungle, where the camera acts as the eyes of the audience exploring the
vicinity, which turns out to be a crime scene, as first one, then two bloodied
bodies are seen sprawled on the ground.
Only a brief glimpse of the legs of the perpetrator along with a machete
are seen in a portion of the frame before the entire screen fades to the color
green. The opening and closing shots are
both spectacular, as is the accompanying sound design, but especially that
virtuoso opening sequence, where cinema cohabitates with the outer reaches of
the natural world, literally immersing viewers into the uniquely special
terrain of the film, planosecuencia02 - Los muertos
YouTube (3:39). More happens in the
first half of the film than the second, though little actually happens, almost
all of it is wordless, as we watch a man sit, smoke, or drink maté out of a
thermos. Argentino Vargas is serving out
his prison term in a work release camp without any mention to the previous
images, though at some point we realize his lengthy prison sentence was for
killing his younger brothers, and when he gets out, some twenty years after the
crime, the film picks him up at the prison’s exit and follows him on his journey
downriver to find his daughter, traveling down the Paranà River
towards home, delivering
a message en route to the family of a prison mate before borrowing their
rowboat, where he keeps traveling further and further into the jungle, feeling
a strange connection, or is it disconnection (?) to the lurking everpresent
physical environment of Conrad’s Heart of
Darkness. What we discover is there
was more regimen and purpose while he was in prison, that in freedom he finds
himself disconnected to his former self and his life altogether, where one
tends to fade in and out of various stages of consciousness while watching due
to the hypnotic and somnambulistic quality of the film.
Mostly dialogue free,
silent and mysterious, it seems the director has a distinct interest in
expanding the edges of human consciousness, using a very non-judgmental,
explorative process, where film becomes an avenue for human interaction in
regions where little is known, so he simply immerses himself in unknown terrain
and waits to see what happens, capturing what he can on film, using only the
barest traces of a story, where he’s more interested in finding people that
he’d like to shoot, where certainly part of his unique approach to cinema is
using an ambiguous style that is meant to be as unreadable as the characters
themselves. As poetically beautiful as
it is disconcerting, the film brims with the richly somber mood and unmatched
visual attentiveness that defines the director’s oeuvre, where a mysterious
aura emanates from Vargas, just as it does from the inscrutable depths of the
jungle, so that they meld together in a way that blurs the lines of the man’s
identity. There is a hugely disturbing
scene, where Vargas first kills and then skins a goat that he finds onshore,
that plays out in real time, but this stark reality amplifies the special
skills it takes to survive in this environment, becoming something of a deeply
contemplative analysis of the intersection of unflinching natural events with
the actions produced by man’s haunting interior psyche. Interestingly, the film sets up the narrative
expectation of a quest in which Vargas will reunite with his daughter, only to
thwart those expectations, much as a similar protagonist does in Liverpool
(2008), as what his life amounts to are fragments searching to be a part of
a whole, returning to the scene of the crime, trying to find out what’s left of
his family, but none of these ends ever connect. In the reverberations of his past actions that
spread themselves out before him like invisible
waves, a reference to a 2006 film by the same name from Thai director
Pen-ek Ratanaruang, he remains lost and displaced. Screening at the Directors’ Fortnight at
Cannes, some have speculated that Vargas is a compulsive murderer who would end
up killing his daughter after the film ends, where the end is hugely ambiguous,
as after returning back to the region where it all began, nothing has changed
after twenty years, where the final shot leaves viewers wondering what happens,
as it’s all offscreen, leaving it to the audience to decide. But then an
excellent music track plays out over the end credits, expressing more energetic
vitality than anything we’ve seen in the film, which turns out to be Argentine
punk band Flor Maleva (Malevolent Flower), offering an eerie vibe, and only
then does the title pop up, Los Muertos
in bold red lettering, giving it an incendiary and menacing effect, where if
you weren’t thinking about it before, that and the ominous prevalence of
machetes, the possibility that he might have returned to finish the job he
started “before” he went to jail is a distinct possibility, yet to this
wavering eye he seems perfectly innocent, but we'll never know what
happened. Richly abstract, the film
plays out with a puzzling elusiveness, where the dream logic of the dazzling
opening sequence continues to shroud the film in mystery.
Los Muertos, directed by
Lisandro Alonso | Film review - Time Out
Alonso's first film was La Libertad (Freedom), and that name might apply equally well to his second, a minimalist road movie with exotic scenery. Vargas, who is in every scene bar the opening sequence, is released after serving a prison sentence for murder. He journeys back home into the jungle to rejoin his family. As far as plot goes, that's it - and while the writer/director doubtless has big themes in mind, you pretty much have to take these on trust. For most of the second half we watch Vargas paddling upstream in a canoe. At least he has an interesting face. If you let yourself slip into its verdant glide, the film does have a seductive, immersive quality, but then there's a pretentiously ambiguous non-ending to cope with, followed by a heavy blast of techno over the credits, the first music we've heard in 78 minutes.
Los
Muertos | Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
A taciturn ex-convict (nonprofessional actor Argentino Vargas)
leaves prison after a 20-year sentence and crosses a tropical forest by boat
and on foot to find his daughter. This 2004 feature is the second by Lisandro
Alonso (La Libertad), a singular and essential figure of the Argentinean
new wave; he's not quite the minimalist some claim, but he can make the simple
act of filming feel so monumental that storytelling seems secondary. The hero's
crime, though indicated in the film's title and opening shot, is acknowledged
only fitfully in the spare dialogue, and his killing and gutting of a goat is
shown with the same matter-of-factness as his visit to a prostitute. Vargas and
the wilderness are such great camera subjects that a sense of quiet revelation is
nearly constant. In Spanish with subtitles. 82 min.
los muertos - Melbourne
International Film Festival
The Fipresci-winning [Los Muertos] (Cannes, 2004) places Lisandro Alonso firmly in the ranks of Argentina's best. Alonso achieved much with his 2001 debut feature, [La Libertad], but this powerful and primal film is unequalled in its creation of atmosphere and uncompromising realism. Masterful long takes combine with a beautifully restrained narrative to deliver filmmaking at its best. Vargas is a man who has been incarcerated for murder. On his release, he makes a journey through the remote wilderness in search of his daughter, engaging with others only as circumstances dictate. The past is largely unknown in [Los Muertos] and yet it is everywhere, haunting and shaping both Vargas and the film's action. The towering natural environment diminishes the self-contained Vargas, evoking a sense of his isolation and inevitable return to the past. "[Los Muertos] is a self-confident and daring film with an utterly original visual language... Right up until the end, one continues to wonder whether Vargas is a man of silent resignation or of latent bloodlust." - Rotterdam Film Festival Contains scenes that may offend some viewers
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs
A mesmerizing experience, in which every stray gesture or sound suggests an epiphany just out of reach. LOS MUERTOS, the second feature by Argentina's Lisandro Alonso (LA LIBERTAD [2001] and LIVERPOOL [2008] are the first and third), proceeds with patient intensity, letting most actions run at a mellifluous slowness far removed from the pace of modern life. Which seems to be the point. The film follows an older man on his return to his indigenous village after many years in a rural prison equally as isolated. Seemingly untouched by the Industrial Age, Argentino Vargas (who shares a name with the non-actor who plays him) is taciturn with people but blunt in his actions, several of which jolt the movie out of its hypnotic vibe with sudden violence. Is this man a psychopath or a force of nature? As in his other films, Alonso withholds explanatory information until LOS MUERTOS has cast a unique audio-visual spell—or, in keeping with the centrality of nature to Alonso's art, until the film's atmosphere begins to thrive like a living organism. The privileging of mood over narrative can make for frustrating viewing (It's hard to tell, in fact, whether certain scenes take place in reality or dreams), but Alonso is a cannier storyteller than he first lets on. The details observed along Vargas' upriver journey accumulate in revelations of character as shocking as any of the film's brutality.
Strictly Film School notes Acquarello
Los Muertos opens to the visually atmospheric and strangely surreal image of an unpopulated tropical forest, tracking sinuously (and disorientingly) through the lush wilderness, momentary revealing the dead bodies of two young people splayed amid the obscuring brush, before returning to the idyllic shots of foliage that becomes unfocused and diffused, imbuing the image with a sense of organic, subconscious somnambulism. The film then takes on a more mundane and naturalistic tone with the shot of Argentino Vargas waking (perhaps from the haunted dream), assembling chairs at a workshop, and eating in silence, before an intervened confrontation reveals that the setting is a rural prison, and Vargas is serving the final days of his sentence for the murder of his siblings. Eventually released from prison, the taciturn Vargas sets out to honor a promise that he had earlier made to a fellow inmate and deliver a letter to the old man's daughter before embarking on his long, lonely journey home. Lisandro Alonso creates an evocatively atemporal and even otherworldly experience through the film's indigenous primitivism. Like the seeming mystery of the dead bodies in the jungle of the opening sequence, the film represents a subversion of expectation, most notably in Vargas' seemingly arrested memories of - and anticipated reunion with - the daughter he left behind (his purchase of candies and a fashionable blouse for her seems to indicate a young girl or teenager and only later does it become evident that she is already a grown woman). It is this process of supplanted expectation that is perhaps alluded to in the film's contextual reference to the titular dead: a laconic and unstructured presentation of images without narrative form, rather like cinematic ghosts, existing outside of time and physical space in the ephemeral, dense, and impenetrable medium of personal memory.
Los Muertos Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
[MINOR SPOILERS] A strong festival closer for me, since it eschews some of the sloppy faux-rigor of La libertad in favor of a slow-boiling, ambulatory landscape film with a vague, enigmatic central character as our guide. Argentino Vargas thinks like an animal, terminally incapable of making distinctions. (Q: "Do you always get your hair cut this way?" A: "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." Q: "Weren't you the man who killed your brothers?" A: "I barely remember any of that, I don't know anymore.") He just smokes, drinks maté, and rows, rows, rows his boat. The advantage to this indistinct approach is that it doesn't allow the physical environment to be relegated to some sort of metaphor for Vargas's subjectivity. It's presented as a natural fact, and Alonso's attention to the jungle thicket and surrounding village life is wonderful. The last shot sort of squanders this, though, neatly closing the film with a rather unambiguous emblem of homecoming. And luckily, Alonso keeps my favorite affectation from the last film, ending his nature idyll with grinding European-sounding techno. Finally, the goat. Yes, I too have big problems with violence against animals in films. But Alonso's fiction / documentary hybrid style complicates matters quite a bit (the main performer is actually named Argentino Vargas and clearly knows his way around the killing floor), so I can't just wag my finger at the filmmaker. It's shocking, but it doesn't strike me as gratuitous. More than likely, the film is creating a narrow fictional context around an activity Vargas would perform from time to time even when the cameras weren't rolling. And besides, as long as I'm a consumer of animal products myself, I'm in no position to judge.
Having seen Alonso's debut La Libertad, I knew what to expect from Los Muertos: enigmatic slowness arising from natural rural rhythms, which means minimal plot, sparse dialogue, extended takes. And I wasn't disappointed. But if I hadn't already seen evidence of Alonso's talent, it's likely I would have joined my press colleagues who opted for an early exit: around a third of the audience walked out long before the end. I toughed it out - and was duly rewarded when the film suddenly picked up around the hour mark with a remarkable scene in which the movie's protagonist, in a single unbroken matter-of-fact take, kills and skins a goat.
This procedure isn't easy to watch, but it isn't offensive: there's no cruelty involved and it's clear that the goat, like the armadillo consumed on-screen at the end of La Libertad, is soon destined for human consumption. There's then a final, mysterious sequence culminating with a protracted shot which is so beautifully fascinating that, perversely, I desperately wanted to see the whole movie again. That said, I don't think Los Muertos is quite as good as La Libertad, which chronicled a day in the life of a taciturn rural forester in a slightly more focussed and accessible way than this second picture chronicles a day or two in the life of a taciturn ex-prisoner in his late fifties or early sixties.
He's Argentino Vargas, "playing" a "character" named Argentino Vargas. After a lengthy prologue in which the camera swoops around a forest before finally stumbling across the bodies of two murdered children (presumably "the dead" of the title) we observe Vargas's last hours in confinement. This takes place in a prison so open it takes some time before we realise that he's in jail at all. Vargas then carries out an errand for one of his ex-jailmates which involves visiting a far-off village. He then makes his way to visit his own grand-children in another remote rural spot. Along the way Vargas sips an inordinate amount of the local drink mate - and we eventually discover the nature of Vargas's crime: he apparently killed his own brothers. So are these the bodies glimpsed at the start of the movie? Or was this a premonitory flash of murders to come? Or are the corpses not connected with Vargas at all?
There are of course no answers in Los Muertos, a film which will inevitably be attacked on the grounds of pretentiousness, slowness, artsiness for its own sake. And it's hard to see Alonso's work obtaining any significant degree of distribution beyond the Film-Festival circuit - though in such rarefied zones his reputation is steadily increasing (Los Muertos went down quite well in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes), and may soon reach the stage where an intrepid distributor takes the plunge. He emphatically deserves wider exposure - while something of an acquired taste, he's clearly a much more interesting and accomplished film-maker than the arthouse-clogging phoneys like Carlos Reygadas, whose ludicrously overpraised Japon is an example of how not to make poetic, meditative, glacial-paced cinema.
Los muertos -
Archive - Reverse Shot The Killing Floor, by Benjamin Mercer,
October 27, 2010
Parallax
View [Jay Kuehner] A Hole in the Heart of Man, Out At the Edge
of the World: Some Remarks On the Cinema of Lisandro Alonso, by Jay Kuehner
from Parallax View, November 16, 2009
ARGENTINE
CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandr...
Lisandro Alonso On Los Muertos
(2004), by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 26, 2009, also
seen at Screen Anarchy here: AT
THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: Lisandro Alonso on LOS MUERTOS
Into the Unknown -
Film Comment Quintín,
September/October 2014
Parallax
View [Sean Axmaker] Lisandro Alonso: Space, Time, Cinema, by
Sean Axmaker from Parallax View,
November 12, 2009
Into
the Wild - Film - The Stranger Sean
Axmaker, November 12, 2009
The
Films Of Lisandro Alonso | The Seventh Art
Just Another Film Buff, June 5, 2010
The Village
Voice [Nathan Lee] also seen
here: Got Your Goat |
Village Voice
FRR
[Michael Pattison] Front Row
Reviews, March 30, 2012
Towards an Aesthetic of
Slow in Contemporary Cinema Matthew
Flanagan from 16:9, November 2008
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from
Berkeley, California
FIPRESCI
- Documents - Vienna Talent Press 04 - Los Muertos That’s
How a Man Lives, by Andy Rector from
Fipresci magazine (2004)
Films
That Got Away Andy Rector from Kino Slang, July 1, 2006
“Los Muertos,” “Quiet
City” – IFC Michael Atkinson from
IFC, January 28, 2008
stylusmagazine.com
(Andy Slabaugh) review
The History of Cinema.
Lisandro Alonso: biography, filmography ... Piero Scaruffi
Los
Muertos (Lisandro Alonso, 2004)
Dennis Grunes
Out
1 Film Journal: DVD of the Week: "Los Muertos" (Lisandro Alonso ... James Hansen from Out 1: Film from the Inside
Out, September 1, 2009
Beyond the Multiplex - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, April 5, 2007
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Arbogast on
Film March 11, 2008
Los
Muertos (2004) Movie Review from Eye for Film Scott Macdonald
Los
Muertos, 2004 Mohit Sabharwal from The New Delhi Biscuit Company, April 24,
2005
Day
7 – Los Muertos (Alonso) – The Art(s) of Slow Cinema
Los Muertos: Reviews various film reviews from Facets
Lisandro
Alonso An interview with the
director from Neil Young’s Jigsaw Lounge, May 17, 2005
Lisandro
Alonso on Space, Time, Illusion and the Reflection of Desire ... Paul Dallas article and interview from Extra magazine, 2015
Lisandro
Alonso, Mostly in His Own Words • Senses of Cinema Gabe Klinger interview, July 2005
Variety
(Deborah Young) review
The New York
Times (Matt Zoller Seitz) review
April 5, 2007, also seen here: Los Muertos
FANTASMA
Argentina France Netherlands
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] also seen
here: "The Phantom of
Liberty : Lisandro Alonso's 'Fantasma'
and here: Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Bradford Film Festival report
Writer-director-producer-editor Alonso quickly established
himself as one of the most original, poetic, challenging and
uncompromising of current bumper crop of Argentinian filmmakers with
his first two features, La Libertad (2001) and Los Muertos (2004)
- both of them audaciously slow, meditative, near-wordless affairs,
half-fictional and half-documentary, focussing on the quotidian
activities of a solitary male. La Libertad chronicled a
day in the life of logger Misael Saavedra; Los Muertos followed
ex-convict Argentino Vargas as he journeyed downriver to visit
family-members.
Though set in the city rather than the country, Fantasma is in some
ways more of the same: for roughly an hour, we observe the (non-pro)
"stars" of Alonso's previous films, Saavedra and Vargas,
wandering (separately) around a near-deserted, multi-level, labyrinthine Buenos
Aires theatre-complex where Los Muertos is being shown. Again, it's an
audaciously slow, meditative, near-wordless affair, half-fictional and
half-documentary, focussing on quotidian activities. One is reminded of Wim
Wenders' instructions to Dennis Hopper during the making of The American
Friend, when the actor was told to come up with things that one might
do "only alone."
As such a description perhaps indicates, Fantasma may not win
Lisandro many new converts - which would be a shame, as the film (though
supposedly only an interim production while Alonso readies his long-gestating,
Patagonia-set project, provisionally and enigmatically entitled Liverpool)
represents a quantum-leap for the film-maker - right into the very first rank
of current international cinema.
Alonso's achievement is to take seemingly dull material - almost nothing
'happens' over the course of these 63 minutes - and turn it into something
absorbing, transcendent and hypnotically powerful. His smooth-gliding camera,
whether at rest or in motion, is constantly coming up with striking
compositions loaded with significance and mystery: the way he choreographs the
movement of his 'performers' (five in total, including three individuals who
seem to be employed by the theatre-complex in various capacities), placing them
in a variety of interior settings, is consistently intriguing, forcing the
viewer to fully engage with this seemingly unremarkable location's various
public, semi-public and 'private' spaces; their decor and lighting; their
relationships with each other; the glimpses they offer of the world
beyond.
But the element which elevates Fantasma to the level of minor
masterpiece is Alonso's astonishing use of sound: if there's a
"story" to be somehow divined here, it's to be found in the subtle
symphony of human, mechanical and even animal (whose is that dog?)
noises - which are so diverting that never for a moment notice the fact that
there's hardly any dialogue in the movie at all. Alonso meanwhile bookends
the "action" with two blasts of loud electric-guitar music which
provide suitably mood-enhancing punctuation. The cumulative effect is
stunning and spellbinding: a spooky, darkly witty journey around a
"cinema" that's also a bold journey around, into - and perhaps even beyond
- cinema itself.
Cannes
2006. Alonso Ascends the Staircase
Robert Koehler from Fipresci
(2006)
ARGENTINE
CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD—Lisandr
Lisandro Alonso On Fantasma
(2006), by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 27, 2009
Fantasma Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Cinema
Scope » Spotlight | Playing with Fire: The Craziness of the ... Spotlight
| Playing with Fire: The Craziness of the Quinzaine des réalisateurs, by
Christopher Huber from Cinema Scope (5th
paragraph)
Fantasma
(2006/Alonso) Harry Tuttle from
Screenville, June 4, 2006
Haunted
Cinema (Fantasma) Matt Riviera from Last
Night with Riviera, August 13, 2006, also here:
Last
Night With Riviera [Matt Riviera]
The
Stranger [Sean Axmaker] November 11,
2009
Parallax
View [Sean Axmaker] Lisandro Alonso: Space, Time, Cinema, by
Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, November 12, 2009
Lisandro Alonso: Into the Wild | seanax.com Sean Axmaker frm
Seanax.com, November 12, 2009
Parallax
View [Jay Kuehner] A Hole in the Heart of Man, Out At the Edge
of the World: Some Remarks On the Cinema of Lisandro Alonso, by Jay Kuehner
from Parallax View, November 16, 2009
Variety.com
[Deborah Young]
LIVERPOOL A- 93
Argentina Netherlands
France Germany Spain (84
mi) 2008
"What interests me in Liverpool – Farrel – is what he gets from the world he lives in, his submission, his loneliness, his lack of motivation and his lack of hope that something might change, that his life might be different, that he might have the possibility of relating to someone without distrust. I would like to try and see what goes on in his head full of dark, blurred memories, hangovers and awakenings on floors splattered with wine, his body bearing wounds the origin of which he could not tell."
—Lisandro Alonso
A near wordless movie
that takes place almost entirely in the viewer’s head, as the filmmaker only
provides the sparest of details, leaving the rest to the imagination. Like his earlier efforts, film is an
exploration of memory and self-identity, discovering how easily they can each
lose their place in our lives. Opening
with the end credits while a fabulous (wordless of course) rock ‘n’ roll song
wails away by Alonso’s longtime composer Flor Maleva, "Moneda Sucia" -
Flormaleva - YouTube (3:10), this is the only pulsating energy that
jettisons the viewer directly into the film’s journey, as after that it’s all
about time and place, using long extended static shots, opening inside the
bowels of a ship at sea, where we may as well be in one of Eugene O’Neill’s sea
plays. As they are approaching Tierra del Fuego and the town of Ushuaia
at the southernmost tip of
Argentina, the weather, as usual, is cold, blustery, and snowing. One of the navigators, Farrel (Juan
Fernández), asks permission to take a shore leave to visit his mother who he
hasn’t seen in awhile and doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. While there are some brief, yet extraordinary
shots of a town nestled beneath the mountains from the ship, Farrel eventually
hitches a ride with a logger truck, dropping him off within walking distance of
where his mother used to live, which is followed by a solitary sequence shot in
real time of isolated individuals in an informal diner waiting for dinner to be
served, a lengthy sequence that does an excellent job of establishing the
setting in a faraway place, where people are not rushed, are patient with one
another and generally kind and helpful.
The boundaries between people are not crossed and personal space remains
respected, which might be the best way to describe this director’s film
aesthetic.
What follows after that
remains ambiguous, as the back story is never filled in, but suffice it to say,
Farrel is not exactly welcomed back with open arms, for reasons that remain
unknown, but may have something to do with his reasons for leaving in the first
place. In the earlier eating sequence,
no one said a word acknowledging his presence, so not feeling much like
introducing himself, he instead keeps sipping from an everpresent bottle of
vodka, perhaps the only friend he has in the world, and ends up spying on his
mother’s house peeping through the windows before passing out in an outhouse
outside in the snow, where the next morning he’s carried inside, thankfully not
frozen to death. By this time, people
know who he is, but haven’t a clue why he’s returned. His mother is extremely sick and may not even
recognize him, but she remembers him as a boy, but he has little to nothing to
say to her. There is a young girl who
may be mildly retarded or disabled, Analia (Giselle Irrazabal), possibly
abused, as women are rare in this part of the world, and there’s certainly the
possibility that he may be the girl’s father or sister, which might shed light
on the circumstances of his leaving, but this is not mentioned or
explored. Instead, Farrel floats through
this experience as if in a dream, never really relating to anyone. Without connections, he eventually is seen
like a ghost wandering through the immense landscape through the snow making
his solitary trek back to his ship. The
scenic mountains in the snow couldn’t be more appealing, beautifully shot and
composed by Lucio Bonelli, and this may be the only chance most of us have of
ever visiting this remote and forbidding place.
It’s clear, however, that despite spending his life traveling the world,
Farrel will continue to wander alone, never really connecting to anyone, like a
lost spirit. All that’s left for him is
the drudgery of work and routine aboard an endlessly sailing ship.
Yerba
Buena Center for the Arts
An intense, trance-inducing study in solitude, Liverpool is
the tale of a sailor who, after 20 years at sea, returns to his birthplace in
the southernmost town of Argentina, to see if his mother is still alive. A
drunkard, a loner and a whore-monger, he discovers that his mother is indeed
still living but someone else has become part of the family… (2008, 84 min,
35mm)
eye WEEKLY capsule review
[5/5] Adam Nayman
Like Lisandro Alonso’s earlier Los Muertos, Liverpool
details one man’s difficult homecoming in a remote section of Argentina. In
lieu of a Conrad-ian trip upriver, however, we get an even more grueling
physical journey into the frosty nowhere-land of the Martial mountains. Our
designated trudger, Farrel (Juan Fernandez) is a typical Alonso protagonist —
taciturn and opaque — and while Liverpool is aesthetically flush with its
predecessor (Alonso continues to use long takes to great effect), it’s
ultimately a very different film. For the first time, Alonso diffuses his
observational style across a community (however small and marginal) and in
doing so, takes a step forward into the first rank of contemporary
filmmakers.
LIVERPOOL Facets Multi Media
One of the New Argentine Cinema's most distinguished directors, Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Los Muertos), has a singular voice that speaks once again in Liverpool. A graceful ode to solitude and the existential need for meaning, this story follows a sailor named Farrel on a lonely journey to the southernmost region of Argentina. After traveling the world, Farrel asks the captain if he can leave the ship to see if his mother still lives in their old village. Alonso's wide shots of formidable mountain ranges connects Farrel's gloomy trek through the snow with the dark past that haunts him, creating an engrossing aesthetic that sets the director apart as a master of style and technique.
Time Out (Geoff
Andrew) review
Another of Alonso’s minimalist parables in the form of a slow, largely mute and obscurely motivated oddyssey, this chronicles the journey of a middle-aged sailor from the Atlantic freighter on which he works, via Ushuaia, the southernmost town in Argentina, to the remote and snowy hamlet that was his birthplace. After years of travelling, this loner, who communicates with a bottle of booze more comfortably than with humans, wants to see if his mother is still alive. When he finally reaches home, he not only finds her dying and unable to recognise him, but discovers that he has a sister he never knew existed, a young woman lost in her own sad and abused world. The imagery is meticulous, the pacing carefully measured, and the mood generally melancholy and enigmatic. Whether the film adds up to more than the some of its parts is moot; Alonso certainly seems keen not to give away any superflous information.
Film Comment
Review (Kent Jones) July/August
2008, also seen here: Cannes 2008. Don’t Be So
Naïve!
Like every Lisandro Alonso film,
Slant Magazine
review Fernando F. Croce
To Lisandro Alonso's wandering characters, every place they
go seems like the edge of the world. In Liverpool, the fourth of the
Argentine filmmaker's languid, effulgent odysseys, the protagonist is first
seen inside hemmed-in spaces that suggest the prison in Alonso's Los Muertos,
until a cut to the blinding daylight outside reveals the deck of a ship off the
Patagonian coast. Farrel (Juan Fernandez), a sailor whose most faithful
companion is a vodka canteen, gets off the freighter and sets out for the snowy
The House
Next Door (Andrew Schenker)
During the last couple of decades the long-take, fixed-shot school of filmmaking has become something of a default for directors with an eye toward the festival circuit—the signature style of many of the world’s leading arthouse auteurs. You know the drill: the filmmaker sets his camera at a certain distance from his impassive protagonist and observes him enacting the minutiae of daily life. No music is there to cue the viewer’s emotions and we’re never invited into the character’s headspace. At its best, as in the films of Tsai Ming-liang, the approach encourages a certain intellectual distance between audience and character, granting the viewer sufficient freedom to mentally maneuver about the film’s staged environment, while never precluding the possibility of a direct emotional involvement. Such works encourage the viewer to adjust his mental rhythm to the pace of the picture, to recalibrate his body’s clock to the film’s tempo. Finally, this long-take approach promotes an appreciation of composition for its own sake, focusing audience attention for extended periods of time on a series of static framings.
But how does such an aesthetic, based as it is on the elimination of traditional narrative and character cues, produce sufficient meaning to make the project something more than an exercise in style? It’s a question well worth asking when considering the films of Argentinean director Lisandro Alonso, since of all the long-take, fixed-shot filmmakers, his approach is arguably the most extreme and thus the most susceptible to devolving into pure aestheticism. Alonso’s shots are longer, his characters more expressionless, his narratives more oblique than nearly all of his stylistic peers. In 2004’s Los Muertos, the director trained his camera on a nearly silent man, just released from prison, as he made his way down a jungle river to reunite with his daughter. The film was all open spaces; like the lead character’s unreadable visage, a blank on which the viewer was encouraged to create his own meaning. And Alonso’s latest film, Liverpool (2008), which similarly involves an impassive man searching for a lost family member, demands to be viewed in precisely the same terms.
From its first shot, a triangular composition which fixes three men in profile, two playing a video game and the other looking on, Liverpool announces its intention to proceed as a series of precisely rendered tableaux, the successful reading of which is key to an understanding of the film. For most of the picture’s running time, these compositions center on Farrel, a middle-aged sailor with a sharp nose, dull eyes and a penchant for vodka, and who figures in nearly every shot until he disappears from the film altogether roughly three-quarters of the way through. Sometimes Alonso brings his camera in close to his protagonist’s face; more often he fixes him in medium distance—as in an extended sequence where he films the hapless seadog packing his belongings in his tiny chamber—or at the margins of a more remote shot, one unimportant figure among a handful of others.
As Farrel’s ship approaches harbor, he asks permission to disembark for several days at the snowy southern tip of Argentina to see if his estranged mother is still alive. Granted leave, he enters the city of Ushuaia, where he dines at a restaurant (in a comic bit of mise-en-scène, Alonso films him at a table against a kitschy lake-side mural, an imagined respite from the snow-drenched landscape outside) and goes to a strip club before securing passage to the tiny village he grew up in and left years before. When he does arrive at his hometown, he finds he’s completely unknown to the villagers, recognized only by his father. Even his mother, sick in bed and largely senile, can’t recall him. He does, however, discover that he has a daughter, Analia, who is being cared for by her grandparents. The young woman—possibly retarded—is, if anything, even less garrulous than her father. As Farrel spends a brief moment at his familial home, he exchanges a few words with his own father, vainly tries (but not too hard) to jog his mother’s memory and makes small overtures to his daughter. But then he leaves, walking slowly away from the fixed camera against a snowy field, never to be seen again. The film’s final twenty minutes shift attention to the banalities of village life—peeling potatoes, cutting wood, trapping animals—the town continuing on as before, just as if Farrel had never returned.
But what, if anything, does it all amount to? Liverpool is so focused on stripping its screen of anything but the most banal actions and so committed to eliminating even the slightest show of expression from its characters’ faces that at times it seems like there’s nothing left to the film except a series of artfully rendered compositions. It’s within these compositions themselves, though, that Liverpool’s meaning is to be found, even if, taken cumulatively, their effect remains maddeningly diffuse. In a pair of shots staged as Farrell’s ship nears the port, the director fixes the character by the deck railing, smoking a cigarette and gazing out to sea. From the darkness emerge blurry circles of light, an abstraction of a city that is destined, for Farrel, to always remain an abstraction, even when he enters into its borders. At such moments, the character’s isolation from any notion of society—an isolation which becomes apparent when he reaches his hometown—registers not as an intellectual concept, but as a palpable sense of loss inherent in Alonso’s staging. And then there’s the tender ache of the film’s final Rosebud moment, as a gift from father to daughter is turned over and over in the recipient’s hands. A token of escape that will never come, a souvenir of a remembered past, like Kane’s sled, the trinket says everything and nothing about its owner. At moments like these, Liverpool fairly bursts with meaning, though, in what that meaning finally consists, it’s not always so easy to say.
James Quandt on the films of
Lisandro Alonso - artforum.com / film
Ride,
Lonesome, James Quandt from ArtForum magazine, November 25, 2009
Cinema
Scope Interview (Violeta Kovacsics & Adam Nayman) Shore
Leave: Lisandro Alonso’s Liverpool, feature
and interview (2008)
The
Evening Class: ARGENTINE CINEMA: AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD ... Lisandro Alonso On Liverpool (2008), by Michael Guillen from The Evening Class, November 28,
2009
Liverpool Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
The
Stranger [Sean Axmaker] November 11,
2009
Parallax
View [Sean Axmaker] Lisandro Alonso: Space, Time, Cinema, by
Sean Axmaker from Parallax View, November 12, 2009
Lisandro Alonso: Into the Wild | seanax.com Sean Axmaker frm
Seanax.com, November 12, 2009
Parallax
View [Jay Kuehner] A Hole in the Heart of Man, Out At the Edge
of the World: Some Remarks On the Cinema of Lisandro Alonso, by Jay Kuehner
from Parallax View, November 16, 2009
Deep and Wide Megan Ratner from Bright Lights Film Journal,
February 2009
The London Film
Festival: Liverpool – A trilogy of closely observed characters Quintín from Sight and Sound, November 2008
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review
Daily Plastic -
Festival Report [J. Robert Parks] at
Toronto
The Evening Class Review of Liverpool (Michael Guillén) September 4, 2008, also seen here: Twitch (Michael
Guillen) review
filmcritic.com
(Chris Cabin) review [3/5]
Cannes
Film Festival, 2008: “Liverpool” (Alonso, Argentina) Daniel Kasman at Cannes from The Auteur’s
Notebook, May 21, 2008
Now in Theaters:
“Liverpool” (Alonso, Argentina)
Daniel Kasman at Cannes from The Auteur’s
Notebook, September 6, 2009
New
Film: Liverpool & Extract
Michael J. Anderson from Tativille, September 8, 2009
Toronto Dispatch. 2 Michael Sicinski from Toronto, September 7,
2008
Being There Ed Halter from ArtForum magazine, August 31, 2009
Argentine
Winter Benjamin Mercer from L magazine, September 2, 2009
Liverpool artversussport from Via the Fog, November 1,
2009
Liverpool
(Alonso, 2008 – SLIFF 2009) M. Leary
from Filmwell, December 1, 2009
Strictly
Film School review Acquarello
Liverpool Jonathan Romney at Cannes from Screendaily
Wanderlust
down in Ushuaia | Nak's Nook Julio
Nakamurakare
AvaxHome
-> Lisandro Alonso - Liverpool (2008)
The Auteurs Daily:
Liverpool David Hudson from The
Auteurs, September 1, 2009
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Viennale '08 capsules
Senses of Cinema Interview (Darren Hughes) “Who’s
John Ford?”: An Interview
with Lisandro Alonso (2008)
The London Film
Festival: Liverpool - Interview
Maria Delgado interview from Sight
and Sound, November 2008
The Rumpus Interview (R. Emmett Sweeney) February 9, 2009
Twitch: director interview Michael Guillen interview, August 28, 2009
The
Hollywood Reporter review Ray
Bennett at Cannes
Variety Robert
Koehler
Time
Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [5/6]
Seattle
PostGlobe | Arts | Film | At the End of the World: The ... Bill White from Seattle Post Globe, November 8, 2009
Robert Horton’s review of Liverpool Herald Net, November 13, 2009
The
Withdrawn Narration of 'Liverpool' Moves With the Stealth Purpose of a Folk
Tale Max Goldberg from The SF Bay Guardian, September 15, 2009
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Making of Liverpool
(Lisandro Alonso, 2008) 1 on
YouTube (9:08)
Making of Liverpool
(Lisandro Alonso, 2008) 2 (6:30)
Watch Documentary /
Short films : Liverpool by lisandro Alonso
entire film may be seen here (81:40)
Sin Título (Carta para Serra)
aka: S/T
Argentina (23 mi)
2011
Days in Buenos Aires: Lisandro Alonso
| Film Journey Robert Koehler from
Film Journey, April 13, 2009
Owl.
Was this the single most memorable image of the entire BAFICI? Perhaps. Just as Godard’s festival trailer for last year’s Viennale, Une Catastrophe, stamped the entire festival with the filmmaker’s own form of visual-audio music and sense of the Zeitgeist, so Lisandro Alonso’s BAFICI trailer, mysteriously titled S/T, seemed to stamp this edition of BAFICI. I would say that it’s the single greatest festival trailer I’ve ever seen: A close, static shot trained on an owl, in turn very much trained on the camera, its whole body undulating with the inhaling and exhaling of breath timed perfectly to a pulsating soundtrack of beating, pounding drums. It was Alonso’s entire cinema encapsulated into a single minute, a cinema defined by remorseless observation, of the power of solitude, of the essential nature of nature and the nature of watching and listening. After a minute of Alonso’s Owl staring back at us, demanding our attention and some explanation of ourselves, we are able to watch anything that follows…..
Here’s the maker of the Owl Trailer, Alonso himself, dropping by the festival just outside BAFICI’s Festival Space. The title S/T? A mystery…..And excellent news for Southern California lovers of Alonso’s films: He informed me that he’ll be starting a residency at CalArts, starting in mid-April. (Meaning, starting just about NOW.) He’ll be based at CalArts for several weeks, screening and discussing his films, and who knows what else. Stay posted at Film Journey and the usual places for any further Lisandro sightings/events/encounters in Los Angeles.
We may be seeing the start of a shift in Alonso’s cinema, which reached a new development in Liverpool. Whether this also means a shift away from Argentina to….somewhere else, only time will tell. With what some consider the world’s most interesting director, it is always worth keeping track….
S/T -
MUBI
JAUJA B+ 92
Argentina Denmark
France Mexico Germany
Brazil Netherlands USA
(109 mi) 2014 Official
site [Japan]
My films aren’t narratives. I observe people, different moments, and I put them all together in the film. The audience has to imagine or create something sitting in the chair.
—Lisandro Alonso, from Michael Guillen interview, August 28, 2009, Twitch: director interview
This may be the most
accessible of all of Alonso’s films, most of which are imbued with a plotless,
dreamlike quality that resembles more of an atmospheric state of mind than a
coherent storyline. Every one of his
films pits solitary men in extremely barren and isolated circumstances in
search of some largely unknowable destiny, using little to no dialogue, where
the harshness of the desolate landscape offers a commentary on the difficult
and often deteriorating psychological state of mind. While
all his films include lengthy, uninterrupted wordless sequences bordering on
the abstract, this one does as well, while also offering a bit more clearly
defined dialogue and an actual historical backdrop, including a
recognizable narrative and more clues
than usual that at least initially offer a map to begin with before the
journey takes us into unchartered territory, leading us into mysteriously
inexplicable destinations that remain elusive and ambiguous, leaving each
individual viewer something of a Rorschach
test to make sense out of. One thing’s
for sure – a significant amount of time passes which does seem to alter the
landscape considerably, where there is a final coda, much like there is in
Pocahontas’s abrupt visit to the ornate civilization of British royalty in
Malick’s The New
World (2005), that in this film jumps ahead more than 100 years, offering
an unusual perspective to say the least.
Like Malick, the film begins in a specific moment in history, and while
never named, it is likely the 1870’s and early 1880’s campaign by Chile and
Argentina to wipe out the indigenous populations in Patagonia, and what might
be read as an allegory about colonialism soon takes a circuitous path through
mythology into an unrecognizable dreamscape, with touches of the supernatural
found along the way. No historical
background of this purge is provided, though in a time of Chilean expansion
into Patagonia, historian Ward Churchill has claimed that the indigenous Mapuche
population dropped from a total of half a million to 25,000 within a generation
as a result of the notoriously brutal military assault on the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia
that led to their subjugation.
Coinciding with the Chilean intrusion, Argentina General Julio Argentino Roca (who was eventually named
their President) was instructed to settle the frontier problem of Patagonia, which he did
by directing a military campaign known as the Conquest of the Desert, which established
Argentine dominance in the region and effectively ended the possibility of
Chilean expansion while also killing and displacing tens of thousands of
Indians from their traditional lands.
Once rid of Indians, ethnic European settlers eventually developed the
lands for agriculture, turning Argentina into an agricultural superpower in the
early 20th century. This is a
particularly contentious period of Argentinean history, where the Conquest is
commemorated on the 100 peso bill in Argentina, which some historians have
claimed brought Civilization to an otherwise wild frontier, opening the lands
to European farmers, while others have claimed it was little more than
genocide.
Alonso has always used
nonprofessional actors and written his own material, though here he
collaborates with a professional writer, Argentine poet and novelist Fabián
Casas, while working with an internationally recognized star in Viggo
Mortensen, who also contributes the music, as well as longtime Aki Kaurismäki
cameraman Timo Salminen, who certainly elevates the look and production values
of the film, where much of it, with the boxed frame and rounded corners, is
meant to resemble old photographs.
Coming six years after his previous feature Liverpool
(2008) that remains arguably
his best work, and the first to feature such extensive interior psychology, as
does this follow up work, the film opens with inner titles making reference to
Jauja, an ancient Incan settlement founded by the Spanish
conquistadors that subsequently became Peru’s capital city, suggestive of
a land of plenty, or El Dorado, a mythical utopian paradise that drew many on
an endless quest for its discovery, but eventually driving them to ruin. This “big lie” was invented to get Europeans
on board the ships in quest of adventure, where the inhospitable lands that
greeted them were endlessly desolate and empty, a sparsely populated region at
the southern tip of South America consisting of deserts, steppes, and grasslands
where only indigenous Indians roamed wild.
Nonetheless, the lure of hidden riches suggests Werner Herzog’s AGUIRRE,
THE WRATH OF GOD (1972) and the ruthless Spanish expeditions in search of lost
cities filled with wealth and gold. This
brief outline guides us to a journey into a distant new world, where Danish
captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen) and his fifteen
year-old daughter Ingeborg (Viilbjørk Mallin Agger) are stationed with the
Argentine army at a remote coastal outpost in Patagonia teeming with giant
seals sunning themselves on the rocks, their purpose only vaguely hinted at, as
Dinesen is a military engineer, with dozens of soldiers dispatched to dig
trenches in the hot sun under his orders, presumably hired to build up the
army’s defenses for the Conquest. The
film is uniquely set in two distinct places and time periods, linking the past
to the present, where the lengthy opening sequence may all be a dream by Ingeborg,
a young girl living in a Danish castle in the present, imagining herself
connected to Dinesen in some mysterious way.
Dressed in the finest European fashion, she is of an age to be leered at
by the crude and lecherous army officers, whose racist regard for Indians is
equally troubling, causing her father some concern, but rather than allow them
to indulge their pleasures, she decides instead to run off into the wilderness
with a handsome young soldier (Misael Saavedra), where the outlying landscape
becomes some idyllic natural paradise.
Dinesen quickly chases after her, where the marshy grasslands turn into
a desolate rocky terrain, as the everpresent sounds of birds disappear
altogether, leaving him alone in a solitary existence where the changing
topography only grows more empty and barren, where he may as well be on the surface
of the moon.
Through a long and
treacherous journey, much of which resembles the years-long search of Ethan
Edwards in THE SEARCHERS (1956), Dinesen loses all traces of his former self,
where the very things that define him, his map, his discipline, his hat, his
firearm, and even his horse, are lost along the way, where he’s forced to
continue his seemingly endless journey on foot, step by step, where the man is
literally consumed by the enveloping landscape of emptiness that stretches to
infinity in all directions. With its
similarly congested box shape and equally futile search through the expanse of
the arid desert, though in search of water, the film parallels Kelly
Reichardt’s Meek's
Cutoff (2010), as both reveal the aimless wanderings across a desolate
frontier, leading to a deteriorating state of mind as they run short of faith
and water. In one extraordinary
sequence, Dinesen rides off into the desert singing what is perhaps an army
song, where the accompanying piano and guitar composition was written by the
man seen drifting offscreen, where only the sound of his voice remains, as if
the reality of his existence has literally disappeared, crossing into
mythological territory. Action as we
know it has ceased to exist, replaced by signs of a treacherous journey, riding
horses, climbing mountains, or crawling through challenging landscapes. By then the pace of the film has slowed to a
crawl, yet he persists, where it becomes apparent that what he’s pursuing
exists only in dreams, long ago having lost any contact with reality. Like Antonioni’s Zabriskie
Point (1970), Hellman’s Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971), and Jarmusch’s Dead Man
(1995), these are films that make extraordinary use of natural landscapes,
where man’s quest across the wilderness gradually loses steam, where the
context is altered over time, where the original reality vanishes into thin air
while something new emerges, driven by a spiritual realm that is expressed in
near hallucinogenic, dreamlike imagery.
His strength depleted from lack of food and water, Dinesen follows a
stray dog in an interesting parallel to one of the last thoughts his daughter
spoke, speaking of her desire to own a dog, one that would follow her
everywhere. Little could he suspect,
that’s exactly what Dinesen becomes late into the film, blindly following every
last trace of her, where the dog leads him into a mountain cave where he
encounters an elderly witch (Ghita Nørby), whose pronouncements defy logic,
making little sense initially, much like the witches riddle from Macbeth, but the moment resonates simply
due to her mere presence, evoking unknowable mythological destinies. “What is it that makes a life function and
move forward?” Like Alice down the
rabbit hole, where it all leads is a spiral into an inexplicably mysterious
abyss, coming out on the other side where a completely new world exists in
another time dimension, strangely connected to the original one, but curiously
different. In this case the end of the
journey is back at the beginning, where it takes an exceptional determination
and a willful plunge into the unknown to retrace those steps to board those
same ships for another journey in search of El Dorado, where European prosperity
is linked to this colonialist era of plundering the resources from distant
nations.
No Man's Land –
The Cinema of Lisandro Alonso - Harvard ...
Harvard Film Archive November 6 – 8, 2009
Few directors today possess the fortitude of vision and resolute commitment to an ideal of formally rigorous narrative cinema of Argentine filmmaker Lisandro Alonso (b. 1975), one of the most accomplished and original artists working in contemporary Latin American cinema. Alonso’s four films – La Libertad (2001), Los Muertos (2004), Liverpool (2008) and the featurette Fantasma (2006) – have renewed the promise of the nuevo cine argentino of the 1990s by turning away from the decidedly mainstream direction subsequently taken by many of that movement’s more prominent directors and towards a mode of radically minimalist cinema that bends traditions of both documentary and narrative film. Meditative and melancholy, Alonso’s films offer lyrical variations on the theme of solitude, with each of his three features haunted by the enigma of lonely wanderers drifting with deliberate but unstated purpose through remote hinterlands – the endless pampas in La Libertad, the teeming jungle in Los Muertos, the frigid snow country of Tierra del Fuego archipelago in Liverpool. The sensorial detail evoked by the films’ desolate settings – and captured by Alonso’s exquisitely choreographed 35mm cinematography – marks a powerful contrast to their deeply interiorized protagonists, an elemental tactility of heat and cold and wind and stars that gives Alonso’s cinema the mysterious lucidity of a waking dream. Richly abstract, the films of Alonso’s tetralogy of loneliness are anchored by the weight and mystery of their remarkable non-professional actors and by the almost fable-like dimension of Alonso’s stark and mesmerizing tales.
Empire of
Light | Film Comment Kent Jones,
July/August, 2014
Lisandro Alonso also finds a new direction with Jauja. The better part of Alonso’s cinema has been wordless, allowing the physical journeys of his heroes and the terrain through which they travel to hypnotically evolve in lengthy stretches. Alonso ventures into places that few of his fellow filmmakers would consider visiting let alone filming, and he also has an uncanny way of finding landscapes with their own drama. Los Muertos, for instance, isn’t just “set” along the Paraná River: its hero’s every action is tied to this particular bend or that section of the bank under that tree or thicket. Similarly, in Jauja, the section of seashore and the series of pathways further and further inland and up the mountain taken by military engineer Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen, who speaks only Danish and heavily accented Spanish), in search of his runaway daughter, are as integral to the texture and force of the film as the meticulously selected objects and constumes in Visconti’s work were. What is new here is the historical setting, laid out in the opening declamatory dialogues—the Conquest of the Desert in the 1870s, during which the Argentinean army attempted to drive all indigenous peoples out of Patagonia. The film gradually shifts emphasis, as Mortensen’s character advances up the mountain, from the historical to the mythical to the oneiric. Jauja, shot by Aki Kaurismäki’s usual DP Timo Salminen on 35mm in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, is a stunning visual achievement: almost every image is an adventure in color and light, and there are many passages that manage to divine the color values of Manet without any apparent trickery or manipulation. Jauja is, like all of Alonso’s films, both a feat and a small-scale wonder, but the more intricate narrative framework actually adds a whole new dimension. It’s a film that continues to grow in the mind.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info James Stroble
Lisandro Alonso's JAUJA (pronounced
"HOW-ha"…really lean into the voiceless velar fricative for those
looking to defy their Midwestern roots at the box office) begins following a
deceptively familiar arc, detours into mythic territory, and pushes further
still somewhere altogether unknowable. "Jauja," in addition to being
an actual province in Peru, is better known as the Spanish language Xanadu: a
mythical land of abundance and happiness according to the opening titles. The
film follows Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), a Danish engineer stationed in
Patagonia in the late nineteenth century, along with his 15-year-old daughter,
Ingeborg, and an assortment of local soldiers and laborers. The plot turns on
Ingeborg's absconding with Corto, a young officer she's fallen for, and
Dinesen's subsequent pursuit of his missing daughter. To concentrate on JAUJA's
exposition though is to decidedly miss the point of Alonso's gorgeous and
borderline spiritual feature. The film, framed in striking 4:3, is the
Argentinean avant-garde director's first feature to employ professional actors
and a proper script. According to the principal players in interviews the
project is a genuine collaboration between producer/actor Mortensen (who spent
the first ten years of his life in Argentina), director Alonso, and the two's
mutual friend, writer and poet Fabian Casas. Comparisons have been made to the
usual suspects/serial surrealists: THE SEARCHERS by way of Tarkovsky, Reygadas
or Lynch. The involvement of populist Mortensen and the expert
cinematography—filmed on 35mm by frequent Aki Kaurismäki collaborator, Timo Salminen—coupled
with a pace and narrative that make nary a commercial concession does indeed
lend itself to the ubiquitous David Foster Wallace "Lynchian"
descriptor. JAUJA is not quite an art film, not quite a commercial film, but
some uncanny other that causes us to, as Wallace puts it, "lose some of
the psychic protections we normally (and necessarily) bring to bear on a medium
as powerful as film." Alonso himself acknowledged in a recent Reverse
Shot interview that JAUJA is a step in a new direction towards the
subconscious, describing it as "something more like a fairy tale, or a fabula."
The film is many things—beautiful, menacing, confounding—but most of all it's
compelling on its own terms, without the need for the relentless dissection
that similarly elliptical movies often inspire in viewers. The director
continues, "With Jauja, it's going to take me a while to understand why I
did certain things, and I love that. It keeps me feeling alive, and keeps me
feeling curious about my own process." Alonso's willingness to relinquish
control and the resultant energy and curiosity are infectious, and make for a
singular work that deserves to be seen on the big screen.
Films
of the Week: Kumiko & Jauja | Film Comment Jonathan Romney, March 19, 2015
Like Kumiko’s voyage, the journey in Lisandro Alonso’s Jauja is based on a myth—but while the Zellners’ heroine is headed towards a specific magnetic point that may not really exist outside the Coens’ movie, the trajectory in Jauja leads into the open, unmapped spaces of the irreducibly unknown and unknowable. Alonso begins his film with a caption telling us that Jauja is a mythical land of plenty which many have sought, getting lost in the process. In reality, Jauja is a city in Peru, but it’s also a metaphor—the phrase país de Jauja means “land of milk and honey.” In Alonso’s film, the more appropriate translation might be “never-never land”—and it’s by no means certain that this no-place is what the protagonist is seeking in any case.
Jauja is set—according to Alonso’s notes, although the film never states this—in Patagonia in 1882, and all we know from what we see on screen is that a small detachment of Argentinian is soldiers posted on a remote stretch of coast inhabited mainly by loudly roaring seals. Posted with them is Danish captain Gunnar Dinesen (Viggo Mortensen), accompanied by his teenaged daughter Ingeborg (Villbjørk Mallin Agger). The company’s boorish lieutenant, Pittalunga (Adrian Fondari), first seen bare-chested and masturbating in a rock pool, has designs on Ingeborg, but she elopes with a young soldier. Dinesen rides off into the wilderness after Ingeborg and her lover, but it’s a dangerous terrain—inhabited by indigenous people whom Pittalunga contemptuously names “coconut heads” and commanded by a renegade officer named Zuluaga, a sort of Kurtz of the pampas, said to have gone mad, to wear a dress, and to be possessed of superhuman powers.
Much as it resembles a classic American Western, Jauja is every bit a Lisandro Alonso film, with all that entails. Since his 2001 debut La Libertad, Alonso has been Latin American cinema’s great poet of slowness and solitude, but, mesmerizing though his last feature Liverpool (08) was, it seemed to represent a point of exhaustion in its particular strain of screen nomadism. This was a work that caused even devout adherents of “slow cinema” to wonder whether we hadn’t finally seen enough of films in which a man walked across Patagonia very, very slowly.
Jauja gives us that again, up to a point, but it’s also different. Co-written with poet and novelist Fabian Casas, this is Alonso’s first venture into out-and-out fabulism, in which the journey becomes not just implicitly mythic, as in Liverpool and Los Muertos (04), but overtly so. Once the hero lights out for the grasslands—which soon become a labyrinth of rocky outcrops, then an altogether more lunar prospect—Dinesen* has lost his map, his inner compass, and much of what had defined his stable 19th-century officer-class self, including his hat and his horse.
I won’t say too much about what happens en route, except that the story eventually ceases to be remotely realistic and becomes truly dreamlike, metaphysical, mystical—classify it as you will. Jauja seemed to me to drift into a too-vaporous impasse during an eerie episode in which, in the middle of nowhere (but where are we ever, the film really asks, except Nowhere?), Dinesen encounters a strange elderly woman, played by Danish veteran Ghita Nørby. But then the film goes somewhere else again, in an enigmatic, subtly dazzling twist—with faint, eerie echoes of 2001—that makes you question the laws of space and time (perhaps), and of narrative and imaginative logic (definitely).
Jauja is a departure for Alonso in other ways. One is the casting of a known star—and Danish-American Mortensen, raised in Argentina, might have had this film tailor-made for him. He’s rather wonderful in the role of a taciturn military father, touchingly comical as he subsides into embarrassed fluster at his daughter’s vagaries; then he assumes the true grandeur of a Western hero as he sets out into the altogether Fordian desert, where he becomes, like Kumiko, a walking embodiment of determination and absolute solitude.
The other departure is a highly stylized visual approach; DP Timo Salminen, known for his work with Aki Kaurismäki, shoots in a 4:3 ratio with rounded edges, redolent of 19th-century photographic vignettes. The early, hyper-composed images suggest still photos: the opening shot of Dinesen and Ingeborg, sitting together like twin statues, the father with his back to us; and later, Ingeborg standing immobile in a blue dress, a horse nearby, grassy hills in the background. Later, the landscapes remind us that ’Scope is not indispensable for evoking vastness: the tight parameters of these frames encourage us to imagine an infinity outside their edges. Rich colors suggest both dream and the artifice of Hollywood Westerns: deep blue clouds on a sky fading to yellow at its base resemble a painted backdrop; pools of golden firelight in a night shot are manifestly lit, as if on a studio set. Visual leitmotifs suggest threads through the maze: pools and streams whose mirrored surfaces suggest doors into other worlds, a tin soldier that turns up in unexpected places.
Jauja is hugely suggestive for what it doesn’t show: notably the historical context, only alluded to on screen, but explained in Alonso’s notes, of the genocidal “Conquest of the Desert” undertaken in the 1880s by Argentine troops against Patagonia’s indigenous peoples. Also unseen are the land of Jauja itself and the possibly apocryphal Zuluaga (unless that’s his arm, in a deliciously comic shot, creeping into frame to steal Dinesen’s hat). It’s a wonderful sound film too, with birds, wind, sea and seals sonically “framing” those vignettes at the start, and an extraordinary moment in which Dinesen rides off into the far desert singing, while his voice comes right into the foreground. Mortensen himself, on piano, also collaborates on the score with guitarist Buckethead—their sparse, lyrical interlude marking the point at which the film truly crosses the border into dream territory.
Like Kumiko, and like Alonso’s previous work, Jauja is one of those films that specialize in the profound making-strange of natural landscapes, turning the real into the backdrop of hallucination: I’m thinking of Zabriskie Point, El Topo, and, of course, Jarmusch’s Dead Man. These are all examples of the metaphysical or oneiric Western, in which the traveller’s soul contacts to its sparest essence—and in which the real treasure, the mythical object for which the film sets out, is finally nothing more than the very film that it ends up being.
*His very name, echoing Isak Dinesen, the nom de plume of writer Karen Blixen, evokes the realm of the imaginary.
Into the Unknown |
Film Comment Quintín,
September/October 2014
Lisandro Alonso travels back in time to find a way forward with Jauja
“It is necessary to understand with what vigor certain ideas seize certain men, who have passed through certain things and have occupied certain stations, in order to understand that a mission to the Ranquels [a tribe in northern La Pampa] can become, for a moderately civilized man like myself, a desire as vehement as a Paris embassy’s secretariat can be for a civil servant.”
—Lucio V. Mansilla
An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians
Jauja, the latest film by Lisandro Alonso, was a surprise for many critics. That’s not because it’s so different from his four previous features, but because it demonstrates that his cinema has a much broader range of possibilities than many previously assumed, and obliges you to look at the entirety of his work, as you would the work of any filmmaker of grand aesthetic ambitions.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that Alonso’s filmography can be described in just a few words: all five of his features deal with solitary men in desolate lands, though the hidden dynamic between a majestic landscape and a society off-screen provides the tension in each story. Alonso’s narratives exist in opposition to those that are articulated by means of a traditional script; he has always found it tough to write a treatment, that almost mandatory instrument for obtaining funding and ensuring that a project becomes a film. Until Jauja, his films had virtually no dialogue, much less any that advanced the plot or defined the characters. The primary needs and desires of Alonso’s characters (food, sex, freedom of movement, family) are on full display, but their inner lives are opaque even to the filmmaker, and that’s what gives rise to the atmosphere of these films, so seemingly simple and yet so difficult to interpret.
It’s been this way since La libertad (01). The first of Alonso’s protagonists is a tree cutter named Misael Saavedra. The film presents his cyclical and solitary life: he is depicted chopping wood with admirable skill, eating, sleeping (and dreaming), going to the village, selling the wood, and returning to cut down more trees. The title of the film (which translates as Freedom) has a certain oneiric implication, but the rock music in the opening titles and a final scene that reveals Misael to be an actor in a film (removed at the time of its Cannes premiere at the behest of the festival’s programmers) ensure that we don’t confuse the contemplative nature of La libertad with that of an anthropological documentary. Nothing could be further from Alonso’s mind than the social sciences, though watching Misael cutting wood is a fascinating cinematographic experience.
La libertad was shot in 35mm, a format that Alonso has continued to use to this day. It was a luxury then for a very low-budget film (made with $50,000 of family money) and seems like an eccentricity now, but it’s one of the many examples of this director’s uncompromising attitude. With Alonso, care for the image has always been paramount.
Born in 1975 in Buenos Aires, raised in the city but fascinated by the countryside, where he worked on his father’s ranch, Alonso studied at the recently created Universidad del Cine (University of Cinema) in the early Nineties, but didn’t graduate. His classmates never imagined he’d make a career for himself. But Alonso also learned from being an assistant to Nicolás Sarquís, a filmmaker who made slow, laconic plein air films and also programmed the legendary Contracampo section of the Mar del Plata film festival. (Alonso’s job was to deliver film reels and transfer videotapes.) Between 1996 and 1998 Sarquís introduced Argentina to the films of directors like Kiarostami, Sokurov, Sharunas Bartas, and Tsai Ming-liang.
La libertad forms with Los muertos (04) and Liverpool (08) a trilogy in which the protagonists are as taciturn as Misael. In Los muertos, a man named Argentino has just served a prison sentence for killing his younger brothers. The film picks him up at the prison’s exit and follows him in his journey downriver to find his daughter. Critics speculated that he is a compulsive murderer who would end up killing her after the film ends. We’ll never know, because the director doesn’t have the slightest idea. There are two constants in Alonso’s cinema: nature and the desire to confront the viewer with primitive ways of life that are far removed from so-called civilization. Cinema becomes a space in which man inhabits indescribable realms of human nature.
Alonso’s first films rely on figures like these, and he never views them with a paternalistic eye; at the same time, he was forging a unique approach to cinema that is meant to be as unreadable as the characters themselves. This approach is made explicit in Fantasma (06), in which Misael and Argentino wander through the Cinemateca Argentina building in Buenos Aires as their films are projected in an empty screening room. The characters are as solitary here as they are in their natural habitats, phantasms invisible to an audience that is absent, somewhere out there beyond the windows that face the street—and that presumably prefers to watch other films. Fantasma expresses Alonso’s identification with his characters’ invisibility—it’s as if they, together with the films in which they appear, belong to a phantom dimension.
Liverpool, Alonso’s third film featuring a silent loner, centers on alcoholic sailor Farrel, who disembarks in Usuaia, at the far tip of Patagonia. From there he sets out for an even more remote destination: an inland sawmill where his mother lives with a mentally disabled girl who turns out to be his daughter. Liverpool has a very particular narrative structure: like Misael and Argentino, Farrel starts out as the subject of the camera’s gaze, but when he arrives at his destination, he himself functions like the camera, faced with a deeply strange reality at a zero degree of humanity that he can hardly bear and from which he finally flees. Neither circular like La libertad nor linear like Los muertos, Liverpool is a mise en abyme that treats the cinema as an instrument whose function is to explore its own limits. Alonso’s filmmaking goal is to acknowledge his own ignorance and make it manifest in order to avoid turning his characters into spectacles. Instead, they are his accomplices or symbols of his own perplexity.
After Liverpool, it was said that Alonso resolved to change his approach in an effort to avoid repeating himself. And Jauja is a change. To begin with, Alonso is going for neither conventional cinema, to which he is unwilling to conform, nor the costumbrismo (representation of ordinary life) style of dramaturgy that forms the nucleus of current Argentine cinema. His risk- taking approach has even less to do with academicism, with the repetition of a formula that maintains his position in the festival world, where his explorations end up being mistaken for miserabilism adorned with virtuous images, a cinema about marginalized people made for museums. Alonso has never aspired to engage with ethnography or installation art, but instead, with Jauja, aims for something purely cinematographic (or rather, impurely cinematographic, following André Bazin’s view that true cinema is an “impure art” always on the brink of being something else).
Jauja is the first time that Alonso has collaborated with a writer and with an internationally recognized star. Both were crucial factors in enabling him to venture into new territory, resulting in his most important film to date. Jauja gives new meaning to Alonso’s past work, proving that his poetics isn’t necessarily tied to the use of non-actors, non-verbal performances, and minimalism. But the participation of Argentine poet and novelist Fabián Casas, actor Viggo Mortensen, and longtime Aki Kaurismäki cameraman Timo Salminen doesn’t merely imply higher production values—it also suggests a combined effort in which literary values, professional performances, and high-quality visuals fuse with and modify Alonso’s approach.
Casas’s contribution consisted not so much in charting the protagonist’s trajectory as in constructing the background of a fictional 19th-century Argentina that ties in, via a dream, with 21st-century Denmark. The film is set in these two distinct places and time periods, which are connected by a small toy soldier that serves the same function as the key chain in Liverpool, which is passed from Farrel to his daughter and represents the same kind of link between two mutually antagonistic ways of life, but set within a realistic framework. In Jauja the toy soldier connects the Patagonian desert circa 1870 with a Danish castle in the present day. There, an adolescent girl named Inge (Viilbjørk Agger Malling) dreams (or perhaps is dreamt, as in Borges) that she is the daughter of Captain Dinesen (Mortensen), a Danish military engineer hired to build up the Argentine army’s defenses against the country’s indigenous peoples. Drawn to the desert, Inge runs off with a soldier (Misael Saavedra, the woodcutter from La libertad), and Dinesen sets off in pursuit, a little like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (it must be said that Mortensen’s presence is as powerful as John Wayne’s).
Jauja is a radical confirmation of and commentary on what’s at stake for Alonso. For him, cinema is a kind of bridge between a civilized modern world and an alternate primitive and barbaric world to which the former feels drawn and watches with fascination—just as Alonso and his viewers are fascinated by La libertad’s tree cutter, the inexplicable killer of Los muertos, or the world of Liverpool, in which incest isn’t taboo. Here the stakes are doubled thanks to the historical context, through allusions to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 Civilization and Barbarism, one of Argentine literature’s fundamental texts, and Lucio V. Mansilla’s An Expedition to the Ranquel Indians, which was published in 1870 when Sarmiento was president of Argentina. In Jauja, the character of Angel Milkibar (Esteban Bigliardi) is intended as a caricature of Mansilla, a refined aristocrat who served in the military and signed a peace treaty with the indigenous peoples, then became an ambassador and divided his time between Europe and Argentina.
In a sense, Mansilla and Inge embody the ambivalence of Alonso’s cinema toward the primitive, its mixture of attraction to and revulsion from the barbaric. In Jauja, the levels of estrangement become mixed up and confused, and that’s what accounts for the film’s singular tone. As in Alonso’s other films, nature plays a fundamental role as the immutable backdrop to the action, and in this case Timo Salminen’s cinematography endows it with an even more mysterious aura. As filmed by Salminen, Mortensen’s hallucinated journey resembles a more restrained version of Debra Winger’s in The Sheltering Sky. The film’s tone shifts into a realm of unreality that lays the groundwork for a crossover into another dimension, one that will materialize at the end as a counterbalance to the frontier world, and ends up giving Jauja its unique shape. Leaving behind the simple figures of circularity and the straight line of a journey, this new form suggests a game of mirrors. The titular land of Jauja—a mythical medieval domain of abundance and leisure—is also an illusion, a reflection of desire like the worlds depicted in the film, whose artificiality is underscored by the rounded corners of the film’s image. (Although it’s actually just the result of shooting full frame, without a matte.)
Jauja also features one Colonel Zuluaga, an army deserter disguised as a woman who leads a band of natives dedicated to looting. Like Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Zuluaga faces the horror of barbarism by merging with it, switching sides and even gender. But unlike the solemnity of its European and North American antecedents, Jauja adopts a tone of humor and farce in order to portray the dilemmas of a civilization faced with the unknown. The comedic aspect is clear enough in the scenes at the fort, with its lecherous officials obsessed with Inge, or the theft of Dinesen’s horse and rifle as he sets about the killing of his daughter’s abductor. But it’s also evident in the whole civilizing enterprise, which is tinged with enormous confusion: to begin with, the white soldiers, being mestizos, are not so civilized in the eyes of the Europeans. This confusion corresponds to the particular history of Argentina. As in the case of Masilla, a certain duality existed in the psyche of the ruling class, who looked as much to France as to the Pampa for their sense of identity, never quite knowing where they belonged, while regarding the natives as gaucho barbarians—much as cinema gazes disconcertedly into the abyss between high art and popular entertainment.
The characters’ ambivalent gazes rove across the movie as in all of Alonso’s previous films: the fascination with the dynamic between the primitive and the civilized here is identical to Alonso’s fascination with Argentino, Misael, or Farrel and his shady family. Jauja augments this by crossing between classes, ethnicities, and nationalities. While the camera travels with Dinesen into the desert, Alonso likewise enters unknown territory, delving into the history of film and of Argentina. He stands revealed as a filmmaker reflecting on the relative nature of his oeuvre: how provisional it remains, beyond a single constant, namely the energy and pleasure that goes into its realization. A full interpretation of Jauja will emerge over time—but until then, neither the director, nor the lead actor, nor the screenwriter necessarily understand it any more clearly than viewers or critics will. Alonso and his collaborators undertook an endeavor that has few parallels in contemporary cinema, one whose core is related to Alonso’s artistic freedom and his refusal to follow cinematic paths paved with certitude. The title of Alonso’s first film (which is never explained precisely and is a word seldom applied to contemporary films) continues to be the driving force of his explorations.
Sight
& Sound [Adrian Martin] April
10, 2015
theartsdesk.com
[Demetrios Matheou]
Vérité
[Sophia Satchell Baeza]
Lisandro Alonso |
The Art(s) of Slow Cinema Nadin
Viggo's Face Is
One of Jauja's Great Wonders | Village Voice Stephanie Zacharek
In
Jauja, Cinema Takes on Colonialism, Slowly - In These ... Michael Atkinson from In These Times, March 18, 2015
Review:
Beautiful, Philosophical, Episodic 'Jauja' Starri | The ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
'Jauja'
and 'The Princess of France': Inside the Impenetr ... Jackson Arn from indieWIRE
Lost In Time's Terrain - The Academic
Hack Michael
Sicinski
Chris
Knipp • View topic - Lisandro Alonso: Jauja (2014)--NYFF
Movie Review –
'Jauja' | mxdwn Movies John
Wedemeyer
Review:
Viggo Mortensen is lost in the wilderness of ... - HitFix Guy Lodge
Jauja / The Dissolve Scott Tobias
Jauja | Film Review |
Slant Magazine Jake Cole
[Cannes Review]
Jauja - The Film Stage Peter
Labuza
Little
White Lies [David Jenkins]
Grolsch
Film Works [Michael Pattison]
NYFF:
Lisandro Alonso's Jauja Sends Viggo Mortensen to ... Danny King from The Village Voice
Jauja Movie,
Review - Way Too Indie Nik Grozdanovic
Viggo
Mortensen loses himself in the droll, mysterious Jauja Ignatiy Vishnevetsky from The Onion A.V. Club
JAUJA
Is A Mystic Paradise Of Fiction - Twitch
Patrick Holzapfel
Jauja (2014) Movie Review from Eye for Film Jennie Kermode
Film
Pulse [Kevin Rakestraw]
Lisandro
Alonso's new film "Jauja" at Northwest Film Forum ... Jefferson Petrey
JAUJA | siskelfilmcenter.org Barbara Scharres
Daily
| Cannes 2014 | Lisandro Alonso's JAUJA | Keyframe ... David Hudson at Fandor
Lisandro
Alonso, a Filmmaker Who Prefers Movies That ... Lisandro
Alonso, a Filmmaker Who Prefers Movies That Puzzle, interview by Steve
Dollar from The Wall Street Journal,
October 3, 2014
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Pamela Jahn]
Interview with Viggo Mortensen, October 16, 2014
Interview:
Lisandro Alonso On JAUJA And Cinema Of ...
Dustin Chang interview from Twitch, March 18, 2015
Lisandro
Alonso On Why Viggo Mortensen Was the - Indiewire Eric Kohn interview, March 20, 2015
Filmmaker
in Residence Lisandro Alonso's 'Jauja' Opened ... Brian Brooks interview from Film Comment, March 21, 2015
Interview:
Lisandro Alonso | Film Comment
Nicolas Rapold interview, March 25, 2015
'Land
of Plenty' ('Jauja') - Hollywood Reporter
Deborah Young
Film
Review: 'Jauja' | Variety Scott
Foundas
Jauja
review - The Guardian Jonathan
Romney
Jauja
review - The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
Jauja
Review - Los Angeles Times Robert
Abele
Jauja Movie Review &
Film Summary (2015) | Roger Ebert
Matt Zoller Seitz
Review:
'Jauja,' a Desperate Odyssey in the Argentine Desert A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Jauja (film) - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Altman, Robert
American
Exuberance: The Films of Robert Altman
Samuel Puliafito
No director has so successfully melded popular instincts with an auteristic creative vision as Robert Altman. Altman's successes can be seen as rejections of both the banal sentiment of mass Hollywood and the austere focus on technique of the art house. Instead, he distills aspects of both to create films of pathos and cinematic beauty.
His greatest films tinker with genre. The Long Goodbye revises a classic hard-boiled detective tale. McCabe & Mrs. Miller flouts masculine and feminine stereotypes in its interpretation of American Western mythology. Nashville appropriates our cultural language to create an endearing and epic vision of mid-twentieth century America. Frequently, his work, in all its vitality, leaves the viewer with an exuberance and a feeling that they better understand the people around them.
Yet, the dominant thematic subject of Altman's films is loneliness. Several of his central characters are loners. People, who in their lack of companionship, find solace in their lonesome corners of desire. Brewster's obsession with flight. Marlowe's apathetic quest for truth. Frances Austen's frustrated sexual yearnings.
There may never be a shot so poignant as the one that closes California Split as it frames Bill Denny (George Segal) in what should be the happiest moment of his life, utterly alone.
And Altman's ensemble films only accentuate the sense of loneliness around his characters by their diminishing ability to act in a world of babble and appearance. Instead, they must find hope in their private affairs: familial ties and friendship.
Altman's vision of America is at once terrifying and optimistic. The threats of militarization, apathy, consumerism, and most damningly, cynicism, are leveled only by the forces of truth, understanding, and, most importantly, humor.
Altman has heart.
Cosmopolis:
Robert Altman
Robert Altman was born in Kansas
City, Missouri, on February 20, 1925, as the oldest son of a wealthy insurance
salesman. At six, the Roman-catholic boy entered St. Peters Catholic school and
spent a short time at a Catholic high school before he went to Rockhurst high
school where he began to experiment with a tape recorder. Afterwards he went to
Wentworth Military Academy Lexington , MO
After his discharge from military service, Robert Altman worked for the Calvin
Company. There, in the 1950s, he began making industrial and sports documentary
as well as employee training films and advertisements. He left the Calvin
Company in 1955.
His debut as a director of a feature film came in Kansas City
From 1956 to 1964, Robert Altman worked for several TV companies. Alfred
Hitchcock gave him a chance as director of episodes of his television series Alfred
Hitchcock presents. Robert Altman went on to direct other TV series such as
The Millionaire and Bonanza. His 1964 episode of the Kraft
Suspense Theatre series about a serial killer was expanded to the
feature-length Nightmare in Chicago. In 1968, he directed the feature
film Countdown, a taut space drama. A year later followed the enigmatic
thriller That Cold Day in the Park. In 1963, he founded his own
production company Lion's Gate which he had to sell in 1981.
In 1969, Robert Altman was offered the script for the black comedy-drama about
surgeons in a Korean War medical unit, M*A*S*H (1970). It was not only
his breakthrough with a larger public and a global box office success, it also
won him the Palme d'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival.
In 1970 followed his quirky fantasy Brewster McCloud and in 1971 his
reinvention of the American Western genre with McCabe & Mrs. Miller,
a film about the building of a frontier bordello.
In 1973 he explored film noir with his adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The
Long Goodbye. It was followed a year later by Thieves Like Us, a
film about the Depression and the communion of two male gamblers on a spree, California
Split. Images (1972) and and 3 Women (1977) were haunting
explorations of the interior lives of women. 1979 saw the release of a romantic
comedy, A Perfect Couple and a social satire, HEALTH. He also
directed a comic-book adaptation, Popeye (1980).
Robert Altman's second major commercial success came in 1975 with Nashville,
a sprawling drama set in the world of country music in which he displayed his
talent for working with large ensemble casts, a talent he also used in A
Wedding (1978), Short Cuts (1993) and Gosford Park (2001). Nashville
In the 1980s, Robert Altman turned to the theater and theatrical adaptations
with movies such as Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
(play and film, 1982), Streamers (1983) and Fool for Love (1985).
In 1987, he shot TV versions of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter and The
Room. A year later followed a television staging of Herman Wouk's original
play The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
Robert Altman's five episode HBO series Tanner '88 about a fictional
candidate, shot among actual politicians in the real-life 1988 elections, won
him an Emmy Award for directing.
He shot biopics such as Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976) and Vincent
and Theo (1990) about the painter Vincent Van Gogh and his brother. In
1984, Altman's fictionalised private history of Richard Nixon, Secret Honor,
was released.
In 1992, Robert Altman returned to popular and critical favor with The
Player, a dark, comic and subtle film about the Hollywood
movie scene. Another critical and comic film followed with Short Cuts
(1994), a farce about the haute-couture fashion scene which was less
convincing. By the way, Altman lived partly in Paris
Among his more recent films are the rather pale gangster-themed Kansas City Kansas City
Robert Altman's work goes against Hollywood
conventions and methods. The independent maverick tries to unmask questionable
aspects of American life and its glitter and glamour worlds in satirical, often
quasi-documentary films. He favors parallel actions over linear narration and
encourages improvisation. He is a master in working with large ensemble casts.
Robert Altman also works as a screenwriter and producer and has successfully
staged operas such as Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress. He has produced
films such as Welcome to L.A. (1977), The Late Show (1977), Remember
My Name (1978), Rich Kids (1979), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious
Circle (1994), Afterglow (1997) and Trixie (2000).
Robert Altman died on
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson] Altman in
the 1970’s
Perhaps no American director has
been with us, and maintained such an august station in the media forebrain, for
as long as Robert Altman. Last year's Gosford Park
Altman's belle epoque of
semi-consistency was the 1970s, when Hollywood
Instead, hone in on Altman's less
hallowed, and less questionable, masterpieces, all of them Lasik cuts into
American mythology, starting with McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), a
seminal, foggy frontier odyssey that looks like it was shot in a muddy 1830
mining town and which has come to occupy its own exclusive subgenre: the
neorealist anti-northwestern. One of cinema's wittiest and savviest
deconstructions, The Long Goodbye (1973), transposes Chandler to the
'Nam era and ends up an anti-noir anthem, with Elliott Gould as a beleaguered,
slovenly Marlowe slumming around glitzy '70s L.A. like an old dog who's lost
his sense of smell. Perhaps the least revered of Altman's peak movies, Thieves
Like Us (1974), California Split (1974), and Buffalo
Thieves, a wide-eyed adaptation of Edward Anderson's
slackjawed-outlaw-lovers novel, captures the Depression-era landscape with
dusty fidelity and remains an underseen American New Wave incarnation of
nostalgia reflux. The modern-day California Split is even more bitter,
tracking Gould and George Segal into a maelstrom of obsessive gambling that
climaxes, for better or worse, with a bone-chillingBig Score. Sold as a comedy,
the film scans more like American-century Dostoyevsky, with comp cocktails. In
many ways, Buffalo Bill caps off Altman's '70s project, cynically
boiling down his accomplished naturalism into a death march of commodified
suffering. This grim parade of mutated history—which focuses almost entirely on
the eponymous Wild West show and its heroic depiction of Native American
subjugation—barely acknowledges the requirements of dramatic narrative in its
disgusted litany of showbiz prevarications. Easily the least entertaining of
Altman's key movies, it's also his most outraged.
Film Reference Charles Derry
Senses of Cinema
– Robert Altman Robert T. Self from
Senses of Cinema, February, 2005
All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Ankeny
TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies
Print Article -
American National Biography Online
biography
The Criterion
Collection brief bio
Fuck Yeah Robert Altman photos of the Altman collective cast
A Sense of Altman A
Sense of Altman, by
Dana Knowles from the High Hat
A Certain
Detachment The
“New Altmans,” Altman’s influence on American filmmaking, by Gary
Mairs from the High Hat
A Field Guide to the Altman Actor A Field Guide to the Altman Actor, by Phil Nugent from the High Hat
Raising the Stakes Notes on Performance in Some Films by Robert Altman, by Steve Hicken from the High Hat
5 Directors You've Never Heard Of Open Directory Project
"Altman,
now more than ever"; Altman links (MZS) an overview on everything Altman from The House
Next Door
"Be
like Bob"; Altman links (MZS) more Altman links from The
House Next Door
Jam Showbiz: Robert
Altman links to a dozen Altman
stories from Jam! Movies
Guardian Articles links to Altman related articles
Son
of Noir Richard T. Jameson from
Parallax View, originally published in Film
Comment, November/December 1974
“Writin’
it down kinda makes me feel better”: Robert Altman’s “Nashville” Richard T. Jameson from Parallax View,
originally published in Movietone
News, September 1975
Robert Altman (1975) | Jonathan Rosenbaum London National Film Theatre’s program guide in December-January 1975-76
Out of the Past: Brewster McCloud Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View,
originally published in Movietone
News, August 1976
More
Than Meets the Mogwai “Sissy's Roles” (1977) – a look at editing through Robert Altman Meets
"Saturday Night Live"
Review: Quintet
Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View, originally published in Movietone News, December 1979
Wherever I
lay my hat | Nicholas Kralev
Nicholas Kralev from The Financial
Times, January 26, 2002
Christian Science
Monitor: Altman by David Sterritt,
February 8, 2002
The
Evening Class Michael Guillen recalls a
2003 Altman tribute at the Castro Theater in San Francisco
Still up
to mischief by Suzie Mackenzie, from the Guardian May 1, 2004
Pleasures
Worthy of Guilt: A Cinephile's Confession
Dennis Cozzalio from 24LiesASecond, March 21, 2005
Altman
and Coppola in the Seventies: Power and the People Robert
C. Cumbow from Parallax View, September 29, 2008, originally published at 24LiesASecond, November 26, 2005
New
York Times Article (2006) Robert Altman's Long Goodbye, by
Terrence Rafferty from The New York
Times, February 19, 2006
81
CANDLES FOR ROBERT ALTMAN (Part 1)
Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule, February 20, 2006
81
CANDLES FOR ROBERT ALTMAN (Part 2) - Sergio ... Part 2, February 23, 2006
81
CANDLES FOR ROBERT ALTMAN (Part 3) - Sergio ... Part 3, March 3, 2006
81
CANDLES FOR ROBERT ALTMAN (Part 4) - Sergio ... Part 4, March 12, 2006
Be Like Bob | The
House Next Door | Slant Magazine
Matt Zoller Seitz, an overview on everything Altman from The House Next Door, March 2, 2006
Altman,
Now More Than Ever | The House Next Door | Slan Matt Zoller Seitz, an overview on everything
Altman from The House Next Door, March 3, 2006
Editors
Guild Magazine - Cover Story The Sound Crew's Best Companion, by Kevin Lewis,
May, 2006
Robert Altman -
Artline.ro September 29, 2006
Film International Article (2006) Cavell,
Altman, Cassavetes, by Charles Warren from Film International,
indieWIRE
Tribute (2006) Saluting a Maverick Filmmaker, Robert Altman: 1925 – 2006, Eugene
Hernandez from indieWIRE, November 21, 2006
Newsweek David
Ansen on Robert Altman’s Legacy from Newsweek, November 21, 2006
TIME
Obituary (2006) Remembering Robert Altman, by Richard Corliss from Time magazine, November 21, 2006
The Guardian
obituary Jonathan Romney, November
22, 2006
Robert Altman
1925-2006 Guardian links on Altman’s death, November 22, 2006
Robert
Altman's "7 secret wars"
Destiny from 10 Zen Monkeys, November 22, 2006
Robert Altman: The long goodbye |
The Economist November 23, 2006
Broadway World Photo
Tribute (2006) November 24, 2006
Telegraph
Article (2006) Altman was an artist in a pulp world, by Michael Henderson
Boston
Globe Article (2006) The real world of Robert Altman, by Ty
Burr
Observer
Article (2006) Showman and shaman, by Kristin Scott Thomas from the Observer,
Village Voice
Article (2006) A Critics' Duet on '
"Robert
Altman, 1925-2006" (Uhlich) from
The House Next Door
"The
Long Goodbye"; R.I.P. Altman links (Uhlich) from The House Next Door
A
tribute to Robert Altman (1925 – 2006) | Film | Interview | The ... Reflections on Robert Altman from the staff
of the Onion A.V. Club
An
Altmanesque Celebration For A Maverick American Director: Robert Altman, 1925 -
2006 a celebration of Altman’s
would be 82nd birthday
He Needs Her a tribute to Shelley DuVall, from Eric
Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled
Armond White :
A Year Without Altman Armond White
from the
The
Cinematic Art: The Altman / Williams connection February 8, 2008
10th best Altman movie
of all time Alex Carlson from Film Misery, October 4,
2009
The
Top 10 Robert Altman Films of All-Time | Film Misery Alex Carlson from Film Misery, October 4, 2009
Short Cuts
| New Republic David Thomson book
review of Robert Altman: The Oral
Biography, by Mitchell Zuckoff (592 pages), from The New Republic, October 13, 2009
'Robert
Altman: The Oral Biography' by Mitchell Zuckoff - L Richard Schickel’s scathing review of Robert Altman: The Oral Biography, by
Mitchell Zuckoff (592 pages), from The LA
Times, October 22, 2009
Robert Altman:
An Annotated Webliography Also Like
Life, November 20, 2009
The Gambler
Nathaniel Rich reviews Robert Altman: The Oral Biography,
by Mitchell Zuckoff from The New
York Review of Books, March 11, 2010
Robert Altman | Film
| Primer | The A.V. Club Noel
Murray, June 23, 2011
10
Robert Altman Films You May Not Know | The Playlist March 13, 2013
TOH!
Picks Robert Altman's Top 15 Films|Thompson on ... Thompson on Hollywood, April 4, 2014
Sergio
Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: ROBERT ALTMAN IN ... Robert
Altman in the Rear-View Mirror, April 4, 2014
Home Movies: Robert Altman, Hollywood
Renegade Richard Corliss from
Time magazine, August 6, 2014
The
Chicago Blog: In memory of Robert Altman
Roger Ebert interview June 12, 1977
“… they
take on their own life…”: Robert Altman Interviewed Richard T. Jameson and Kathleen Murphy
interview from Parallax View, originally published in Movietone News, September 1977
“I
had to risk not being liked in that scene” – Michael Murphy Interviewed Judith M. Kass interview with actor Michael
Murphy from Parallax View, originally published in Movietone News, February 1979
The
"Health" of Robert Altman | Interviews | Roger Ebert Ebert interviews Altman,
audio
clips Altman interviews from the BBC
4 in 1990
Robert Altman August 2, 2000 Onion interview with Keith Phipps
Salon Feature Robert
Altman, by Stephen Lemons from Salon, includes an interview with Altman,
August 15. 2000
Gerald Peary
Interview (2001) December, 2001
Robert Altman October
13, 2004 Onion interview with
Noel Murray
Film Scouts
Interviews Various Altman
interviews
Reverse Shot Interview
(2006)
Nick Pinkerton Summer, 2006
It's Okay With Me:
ROBERT ALTMAN (Complete ... - Stop Smiling James Hughes interview with Altman from Stop Smiling,
Robert Altman NFT interview with Altman
by Geoff Andrew
Robert Altman Bio Another long article/interview with Altman
Robert
Altman's subliminal reality June Werrett’s
review in Screening the Past of Robert T. Self’s book, Robert Altman’s
Subliminal Reality
Liverputty
examines
Altman's nudes
Rob's Favorite Films a list of Robert Altman’s favorite films
Broadway World Photo Tribute (2006)
Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)
Survey
of Filmmakers: Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal)
Altman,
Robert from Wikipedia
CORN’S-A-POPPIN’ C+ 78
While it’s not known
exactly what role Robert Altman played in this rare early work, preserved by
the Northwest Chicago Film Society with funding from the National Film
Preservation Foundation, but it most likely did not include directing, though
there are rumors to the effect that Altman may have directed some scenes, from
anonymous sources on IMDb, repeated again by the local theater website, Corn's-A-Poppin'
| Music Box Theatre, both listing him as a co-director, but there is no
credible evidence to support this.
When one of the user reviews pointed out this
discrepancy, IMDB corrected the listing, noting only a writing credit. So more accurately, Altman co-wrote the
screenplay and it was directed by someone else, Robert Woodburn, who also
served as co-writer and cinematographer.
Woodburn, as it happens, never directed anything else in his short-lived
career. After a brief attempt to
establish a career both in New York and again in Hollywood as a screenwriter,
Altman returned to Kansas City in the late 40’s without any filmmaking
experience, where he initially helped produce industrial films in the service
department of The Calvin Company, a job that included writing, editing,
directing, and doing his own camerawork, eventually moving into the production
division by directing about 65 documentaries by 1955. Typically twenty minutes in length, shot on
16 millimeter, industrial films were either educational films or product
sponsored films that placed the spotlight on one of the featured products,
where the first completed Robert Altman film was reportedly Honeymoon for Harriet, made
in 1948, with a camera following a veteran retiring mailman and his young replacement
along country roads as he trains his apprentice. The film tells the story of newlyweds whose
honeymoon was constantly delayed because an International Harvester dealership
was located on the way to the travel agency. Written by Altman, Calvin allowed him to
direct the film because no one else could figure out how to record the
soundtrack of the open road conversation, where the film is currently housed in
the International Harvester Film Collection.
The film is also notable because it starred Altman’s second wife, Lotus
Corelli. In a later 1954 film called The Perfect Crime, sponsored by the
Caterpillar Tractor Company and the National Safety Council, Altman
experimented with quick cuts and personal subjectivity, writing an action
sequence, the holdup of a neighborhood Mom and Pop convenience store, including
a shot from Pop’s point of view as Mom and another little girl get shot. As the killers get away “scot-free,” the case
is made for better highway construction, suggesting if taxpayers invested in
better roads, in other words those built by Caterpillar construction equipment,
these unfortunate roadside incidents could be avoided. The film won Altman an Oscar award by the
association of industrial filmmakers in 1955.
More fun than any
rating could indicate, CORN’S-A-POPPIN’ originated with Elmer Rhoden Jr., an
old school friend of Altman’s whose father co-owned the Commonwealth Theatres,
a regional chain of 102 movie houses, while his brother Clark was chairman of
the Popcorn Institute, a local trade organization. With money to invest, Elmer got the idea to
shoot a film promoting popcorn, hiring Robert Woodburn of The Calvin Company to
direct, while Altman was brought along to help with the script, with both
flying out to Los Angeles in search of talent for a musical review, discovering
nightclub singer Jerry Wallace, who was actually from Kansas City. To back him they hired the local country band
Hobie Shepp and the Cowtown Wranglers.
Originally entitled Ozark Hoedown,
the title was a variation on HELLZAPOPPIN’ (1941), a spoof of the many Mickey
Rooney and Judy Garland backstage musical shows that they headlined while
raising money for the war effort, not to mention the exuberance of their overly
formulaic MGM musicals. While the film
clearly falls into the camp category, a film so bad it’s good, where you may be
besieged afterwards by corny jokes and hokey country music songs in your dreams
at night, leaving behind an unmistakable imprint of something altogether
bewildering, featuring some of the worst performances in history, Wallace as
Johnny Wilson, it turns out, is a real discovery as a singer, not to mention
his sidekick, amateur actress Cora Rice as Susie who is the show’s scene
stealer. Unfortunately, they’re not
onscreen for the majority of the film, but when they are they literally light
up the screen, Corn's-A-Poppin'
(1956) Trailer - YouTube (2:20). Instead it’s bogged down by an atrociously
poor production design that makes FLASH GORDON (1936) seem like the gold
standard and an insipid story about Thaddeus Pinwhistle (Keith Painton), owner
of Pinwhistle Popcorn, who’s about as interesting as that relative you least
look forward to seeing again. Timid to
the point of dysfunction, Thaddeus allows his newly hired PR man Waldo Crummit,
James Lantz, who also starred in Honeymoon
for Harriet, by the way, to run roughshod over
him in order to sabotage The
Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour, a half-hour variety show that features
lame musical acts in between the important commercial spots of Johnny Wilson
live on camera pushing the popcorn.
Crummit’s plan is to feature the worst acts he can find while lowering
the quality of the popcorn, making it inedible, in an attempt to have a rival
company “buy popcorn for peanuts,” where they purchase the popcorn empire for
next to nothing. The beleaguered
Thaddeus hasn’t an inkling he’s being hoodwinked, though his secretary Sheila
(Pat McReynolds), always introduced as “more than a secretary,” couldn’t be
more bored sitting alone at her desk all day, seen communicating with her boss
via phone intercom, sees right though the con man’s smoke screen. But its little Susie that expresses it best,
seen throughout holding her nose as she watches the show, complaining “It
stinks!”
While there’s not an
ounce of the Altman ingenuity behind the camera, shot in a strictly point and
shoot mode from a fixed position, where each shot features a square box, not
much different than the way television was shot in the early 50’s. Filmed on the cheap using two or three
threadbare sets from the old Lyceum Theatre, which was at that time an old
abandoned Baptist church, now Missouri's oldest professional
regional theatre, where much of the film takes place in a makeshift TV
station, featuring corny jokes, amateur acting so bad that it will make you
squirm in your seats, and a dull central storyline that is occasionally
interrupted by somewhat inspired musical numbers. Underneath it all is some uncomfortable
intimations, as what’s initially creepy is the audience doesn’t know the relationship
between Johnny Wilson and Little Susie, seen living together, where she is
seemingly the pint-sized boss of the relationship, always in full make up, just
like the other adult women, where she belts out her lines with authority, at
times carrying the picture on her shoulders.
She actually cooks a meal when Johnny invites the band over after the
show for a spaghetti dinner party, seen dressed in her apron, where for all
practical purposes she may as well be taking care of Johnny, ordering him around
like a hen-pecking wife, where she could be his midget wife. It’s only much later in the picture that we
learn they are brother and sister, where the actual suspense for the audience
is waiting for her to finally appear on the show, as she has such a unique
camera presence, like Judy Garland as a child, capable of belting out musical
standards with ease. But instead we get
the bullying antics of a conniving Waldo, who continually butters up Pinwhistle
with neverending compliments and a rosy outlook for this ridiculously awful TV
show, featuring hog-caller turned singer extraordinaire, Lillian Gravelguard
(Nora Lee Benedict), whose Tiny Tim resembling rendition of “Drink to Me Only
With Thine Eyes” will surely make you wish you were elsewhere. What we hear at Johnny’s place when he
relaxes with the band, on the other hand, is a true delight, reminiscent of
those episodes on The Andy Griffith Show
(1960 – 68) when Andy would get together with Denver Pyle as Briscoe Darling,
who’s come off the mountain for some real down home bluegrass music. It’s in these freewheeling musical numbers
that we realize Susie is the real star of the show, as Johnny has a raw and
appealing talent, especially singing the upbeat “Running After Love,” but
Susie’s 12-year old swagger is like nothing we’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, we’re forced to spend most of
the movie watching the back and forth shenanigans of Pinwhistle and Waldo, two
pinheads that grow extremely tiresome after awhile.
As it turns out,
Pinwhistle may have been based upon a real figure, Kansas City popcorn mogul
Charles T. Manley, an innovator whose electrical popping machine helped make
popcorn a staple in movie theaters. It
wasn’t a fixture during the Silent era, but could be purchased in other areas
like circus or stage shows. Popcorn
exploded during the Great Depression, sold for as little as five cents a bag,
where vendors could obtain a space either inside or outside the theater to sell
their product, which was at that time generated by hand. It was only during the labor shortage of
World War II, which also saw sugar rationing that cut out popcorn’s main
competitor, candy bars, that mechanical machines made popcorn faster and easier
to make. It was the war years, and the
rise of the National Popcorn Association, that made it patriotic to eat popcorn
at the movies. CORN’S-A-POPPIN’
exaggerates this love of corn, where it’s a dark and dreary world depicted by a
dearth of quality popcorn, continually undermined by the dreadfully
unprincipled Waldo Crummit, who’s like a dastardly character out of the
cartoons, where it takes a cavalry saving appearance from a popcorn guardian
angel, Dora Walls as Agatha Quake, whose Norman Rockwell visage could easily
make her a kissing cousin of Margaret Hamilton as Miss Gulch/The Wicked Witch
of the West from THE WIZARD OF OZ (1939), who just happened, by chance, to make
a sinister appearance in Altman’s Brewster
McCloud (1970). Ms. Quake’s secret
ingredients not only improve the taste of popcorn, but create orgasmic effects
at the popcorn machine, where the performers onstage are deluged by flying
kernels of corn that quickly resemble a blinding snowstorm. Ms Quake’s success is immediate, in more ways
than one, offering a deliriously happy ending, but not before Little Susie
finally gets a chance to sing onstage with older brother Johnny in what turns
out to be the sequence of the film, singing “On Our Way to Mars” On Our Way To Mars - Jerry
Wallace and Cora Rice - Corn's
YouTube (2:42) while sitting on one of those toy rocket ships that used
to sit outside grocery stores along with rocking horses for kids to ride on for
anywhere from a nickel to a quarter, only here it’s a cardboard rocket
ship. It’s exquisitely innocent, given a
slightly jazzy flair, imagining what it might be like to “dream in Cinemascope”
and find a grilled cheese sandwich on the moon, ending in “Zoom! Zoom!” While Wallace made a few singing appearances
on television, neither he nor Cora Rice ever made another movie. What all this has to do with Robert Altman is
anybody’s guess, where Altman all but disowned these crude early works. Patrick McGilligan, in his
Altman biography Jumping Off the Cliff, Robert
Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff - Page 100 - Google Books (pdf format), has
offered his own views, calling it “one of the worst movies ever made…the movie
is slumberous, hammy, amateurish and clichéd, ultra-boring. Folks who rate Quintet the nadir of Altman’s career have not seen Corn’s-A-Poppin’” While it’s one of the final films Altman made
while working at The Calvin Company, as the same Elmer Rhoden Jr. offered
Altman a chance to write and direct his first feature, a film about juvenile
delinquency in Kansas City, THE DELINQUENTS (1957), which has the distinction
of being one of only two films, the other being 3 Women
(1977), made throughout his entire career where Altman worked without
collaboration and was the sole writer of one of his films.
From Kyle Westphal, one
of those Northwest Chicago Film Society forces, along with Julian Antos and
Rebecca Hall, behind the film preservation, written after the film was
rediscovered in 2007 at the University of Chicago DOC Films, calling it “a
truly insightful look at the kind of unaccountable cinema that a certain
contingent of Doc people/alums are particularly entranced by,” October 9,
2011: Northwest
Chicago Film Society Blog [Kyle Westphal]
A rabid auteurist might stretch the connection and claim Corn’s-a-Poppin’ as a clear antecedent to Nashville or The Prairie Home Companion, as all three share a vaguely similar down home milieu. But this suggests a clear line of personal development—and one that leads quickly, conveniently, and inexorably away from Corn’s-a-Poppin’—rather than the messier, and inherently collective, mystery of the film itself.
On its own, Corn’s-a-Poppin’ is a beguiling experience. Few films have seemed prouder of their low-rent constraints. The sets are dressed-down television leftovers, which is actually appropriate, as the plot revolves around the trials of producing an inept program called The Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour. The show, a wild scheme hatched by marketing man Waldo Crummit (James Lantz) to boost sales for Thaddeus J. Pinwhistle (Keith Painton) hovers between an embarrassment and outright sabotage. In the first reel Waldo introduces Pinwhistle to his newest headliner, former hog-caller Lillian Gravelguard (Nora Lee Benedict) whose rendition of “Drink to Me Only” actually makes the anemic popcorn seem the rightful highlight of the program. Just about the only positive effect of this enterprise is the flirtatious manner affected by Pinwhistle’s “more-than-a-secretary” secretary Sheila (Pat McReynolds) and folksy Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour announcer Johnny Wilson (Jerry Wallace), whose charm helps viewers to forget that the show only runs half an hour. The only obstacle to their union is Johnny’s pushy kid sister Susie (Little Cora Rice) who orders him around like hen-pecking wife and airs her opinions about his TV show with minimal tact. Susie speaks with all the bluster and toughness of a boozed-out Hollywood sideshow, cooks all of Johnny’s meals in an apron, and possesses a disposition very unbecoming of a child star.
Part of what makes Corn’s-a-Poppin’ so unaccountable is the way it moves effortlessly between studied sarcasm and stiff line readings. Waldo Crummit seems like a creation shoplifted from a Frank Tashlin comedy—a vulgar showbiz mover who profits in proportion to the talent’s bust. When Pinwhistle finds Crummit making a deal with an executive at Chicago’s Crinkly Corn, Crummit deploys some improbable hooey about negotiating with a senator. We’re clearly meant to take Crummit’s listless recitation as a bad joke. Likewise when he insists that the vocal talents of Miss Gravelguard are not a danger to Pinwhistle or his popcorn, reasoning that his business is about corn, not critics. Or when he laments a strain of ‘vocal cord-itis.’ These are lousy one-liners and lame locutions infused with a consciously pathetic air. Much in the same manner, Gravelguard’s singing is meant to be bad, horrendous, an ongoing train wreck of a thing. She becomes the butt and embodiment of a familiar joke about no-talent floozies crooning through a sea of cheap whiskey tears.
The performances are all over the map. How are we to reconcile the knowing dumbness of James Lantz’s performance and the near-documentary coyness of Pat McReynolds and Jerry Wallace? Keith Painton screams all his lines into an intercom, frets while twirling his girly fisticuffs, and always dances on the line of being hip to the whole ploy but never quite crosses it.
Satirically speaking, the main targets of Corn’s-a-Poppin’ are amateur ambition, outsized egos, outrageous shysterism. Yet all these qualities are abundantly present in the film, too. If the Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour is supposed to be a pathetic outpost for fifth-rank talent—horrible enough to wreck the whole popcorn empire—then what does that make Corn’s-a-Poppin’? Even rowdy crowds in the back row intuit the silliness (and limited promotional value) of pelting musicians with popcorn during a set.
And yet, the characterizations are so insistent that they overwhelm the material. After seeing Corn’s-a-Poppin’, you may find yourself referring to someone as ‘a real Waldo Crummit.’ If only more people could see this film, the name might enter the cultural lexicon and take on a real Dickensian largess. It’s such a useful and illustrative shorthand—a spot-on accurate rendition of a certain kind of marketing sensibility that has made so many of our relationships stilted and false. There’s a lesson here.
My
World of Film: Top 100 Films: 50-41
David Holland
Well here's my "what the hell is this film?" film. For those of you not priveleged enough to see it in one of the random screenings here in Chicago then I hope to holy hell it gets released somewhere. Never on VHS, never on DVD, and not even a version of it floating around on youtube or in torrent form. If any of you have a copy of it please let me know. I went to see this film after hearing one of the characters was named Thaddeus Pinwhistle and another Waldo Crummit. The film was described as a film version of the show that Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were always putting on to save some barn or something in all those formulaic MGM musicals. What makes this film elevated from just pure camp is the songs. They're really damn good and apparently the actor who played Johnny Wilson (Jerry Wallace) wound up with a pretty respectable singing career in country music. There's also Little Cora Rice who made her debut here, but according to her imdb page this was her first and last film. Anyways this is the best thing Robert Altman ever did, even if he completely disowned it.
Northwest
Chicago Film Society presents: Corn's-A-Poppin ...
A regional independent film? A western swing musical? An early Robert Altman script? A roman à clef about real-life popcorn baron Charles Manley? A masterpiece? Corn’s-A-Poppin’ is all these things and more. Produced on the cheap in a Kansas City by a band of young talent schooled in the production techniques of The Calvin Company, the Midwest’s most innovative industrial film studio, Corn’s-A-Poppin’ is just about the most free-wheeling and sing-able hour of cinema we’ve ever seen. Down-home crooner Jerry Wallace plays Johnny Wilson, the star of the Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour, a half-pint (and half-hour) variety show with acts ranging from pro-hog caller Lillian Gravelguard to Hobie Shepp and the Cowtown Wranglers. Might the cornpone bookings be an act of sabotage by rogue PR man Waldo Crummit in a bid to gut the Pinwhistle Empire? It’s up to Little Cora Rice to save the day. Songs include: “On Our Way to Mars,” “Running After Love,” and “Mama, Wanna Balloon.” Financed largely by regional showmen and out of circulation for decades, Chicago’s new cult classic has now been restored to its original earnest glory.
Down-home crooner Jerry Wallace plays Johnny Wilson, the star of the Pinwhistle Popcorn Hour, a half-pint (and half-hour) variety show with acts ranging from pro-hog caller Lillian Gravelguard to Hobie Shepp and His Cow Town Wranglers. Might the cornpone bookings be an act of sabotage by rogue PR man Waldo Crummit in a bid to gut the Pinwhistle Empire? It’s up to Little Cora Rice to save the day. Songs include: “On Our Way to Mars,” “Running After Love,” and “Mama, Wanna Balloon.”
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kian Bergstrom
Waldo Crummit, the mendacious press
agent of Pinwhistle Popcorn and the villain of this bizarre and lovely little
oddity of a film, is sabotaging his own company with substandard corn kernels
so that the Crinkly Corn Company in Chicago can buy it out. As his killing
stroke, he has convinced his boss to sponsor a humiliating weekly, half-hour
long musical variety television show, starring the former hog-caller Lillian
Gravelguard. To hear Gravelguard croak through 'Drink To Me Only With Thine
Eyes' is to know the sound of fear, and all seems lost for Pinwhistle Popcorn.
However, salvation comes in the form of Agatha Quaid, a nearby farmer with a
secret recipe for popcorn, and Johnny Wilson, host of the show and the
boyfriend of Sheila, Pinwhistle's secretary. But is it too late, and will
Johnny's mysterious sister come between him and Sheila? This rough synopsis of
the action of CORN'S-A-POPPIN' might well imply that the movie itself holds
some kind of narrative coherence. Be assured: nothing of the sort is in play.
The film is a loving backstage musical, a bitter attack on corporate
sponsorship, and a celebration of underdogs gaining the upper hand, but in
aspiration only, for to be any of these things in actuality, it would first
have to make some sort of rudimentary sense at all. As a completed work, it
wavers amongst strange parody, wide-eyed sincerity, technical incompetence, and
out-right strangeness to such a dazzling, exhausting, and thrilling degree,
that mere description fails. The performers move in stiff, robotic jerks,
planning out laboriously blocked gestures multiple lines ahead of time that
often literalize the lyrics of songs they're singing. The sets, weirdly
over-lit from too many sources, are awash with uncannily multiplying shadows
and reflections, and display that antiseptic appearance only normally possible
in model homes and department store display furniture. The camerawork tends to
group all action into the lower 2/3 of the frame, leaving the upper sections of
most images strangely mesmerizing fields of negative space, and the editing
betrays the panicked jump-cut aesthetic of the home movie. Every cut is
jarring, shocking; no rhythms, no patterns are developed, only the growing
sense of alarm that at any moment some strange cutaway or alternative angle
will erupt on to the screen. The 'loving' relationships amongst Johnny, Sheila,
and Johnny's sister, Susie, are inscrutable, angry, and disturbingly
incestuous. Susie, dressed always in the clothes of a grown woman despite her
pre-teen age, repeatedly insinuates herself between Johnny and Sheila, bragging
about how well she takes care of her brother's needs. From one
perspective, then, one of conventional cinematic standards, CORN'S-A-POPPIN'
must surely be a very bad film, but to watch it is to experience a kind of
cinema wholly alternate from the staid, tedious movies that gave us those
standards. Woodburn may have set out to make a low-budget version of
Hollywood's glamour--the heart-rending penultimate song, the love song, 'On Our
Way to Mars,' sung by Johnny and his sister to one other, is the closest
CORN'S-A-POPPIN' ever gets to that--but their film falls so far short of
Hollywood's styles, structures, and even ideas, that it's almost impossible to
figure out how to know what to make of what's on the screen. How many
times can a work of art fail to adhere to a set of rules before we realize
those rules aren't being broken but instead are simply irrelevant?
CORN'S-A-POPPIN' is a signpost, pointing to an unused, blind alley of undeveloped,
ignored potential within film history, a delicate, confounding, alien
thing. I love no musical in the world more than it. Also showing are
several vintage country music soundies and concession snipes. (1955, 58 min,
Newly Restored 35mm Print)
The
Robert Altman film Altman never wanted you to see ... J.R. Jones from The Chicago Reader
Legendary filmmaker Robert Altman wanted Corn's-a-Poppin' to be forgotten. And it was. Until a crew of cinephiles set about restoring the 1955 musical comedy.
Robert Altman was one of the greatest filmmakers America ever produced, a true maverick with a panoramic vision of the United States and sharp insights into the national character. His first big success, the antiwar comedy M*A*S*H (1970), introduced people to his signature style of large ensemble casts, overlapping dialogue, corrosive social satire, and sudden, startling moments of drama. Altman followed it with several more strong, idiosyncratic movies—Brewster McCloud (1970), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), The Long Goodbye (1972), California Split (1974), Nashville (1975)—before settling into a long career trough, though before his death in 2006, he managed to recapture his former brilliance with such knockouts as The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Kansas City (1996), Gosford Park (2001), and A Prairie Home Companion (2006).
Interviewers always found Altman reluctant to talk about the movies he directed before M*A*S*H, and he had even less to say about his screenplay for Corn's-A-Poppin' (1955), a low-budget musical comedy shot in his native Kansas City, Missouri. Altman biographer Patrick McGilligan calls it "one of the worst movies ever made," and most books about Altman don't even mention it. But that hasn't stopped the Northwest Chicago Film Society from carrying out a meticulous restoration of Corn's-A-Poppin' that will receive its Chicago premiere Monday at Music Box. For NWCFS founders Rebecca Hall, Julian Antos, and Kyle Westphal, the movie is not only a notable piece of juvenilia from a legendary filmmaker but a crackpot gem in its own right.
"You can giggle about Corn's-A-Poppin' all you want," says Westphal, 28, who spearheaded the operation to rescue the film, "but it has a verve, a charm, a real 'Let's clean up the barn and put on a show' energy that's genuinely rare." Thaddeus Pinwhistle, president of the popcorn company that bears his name, hopes to boost sales with a big TV show featuring live western-swing music, but Waldo Crummit, the press agent he's hired to put the thing together, is secretly working for Pinwhistle's competitor to ensure that the show will be a fiasco. Things look pretty bad until the company acquires a new brand of explosively poppable corn that sprays all over the set during the broadcast, creating a public sensation and pushing Pinwhistle sales through the roof.
Corn's-A-Poppin' originated with Elmer Rhoden Jr., an old school pal of Altman's in Kansas City. Rhoden's father co-owned Commonwealth Theatres, a regional chain of movie houses, and his brother was chairman of the Popcorn Institute, a trade association; together they came up with the idea of a locally shot, popcorn-related feature that could play the circuit. To direct the movie, Rhoden turned to Robert Woodburn of the local Calvin Company, which cranked out 16-millimeter industrial films, and Woodburn brought along his colleague Bob Altman to help on the script. Woodburn and Altman traveled to Hollywood to audition talent, though their main catch, nightclub singer Jerry Wallace, was actually a Kansas City native. To back him, they hired the local band Hobie Shepp and the Cowtown Wranglers. Kansas City actors—some of whom had appeared in industrials for the Calvin Company—filled out the cast. The coup de grace turned out to be amateur child actress Cora Rice, whose snot-nosed character monitors the progress of the TV extravaganza and periodically announces, "It stinks!"
Some might say the same of Corn's-A-Poppin', with its rinky-dink sets, hambone acting, and convoluted story logic. Mystery Science Theater 3000 would have had a field day with it. Yet Corn's-A-Poppin' has some swell musical numbers, particularly the up-tempo "Running After Love" and the interstellar novelty tune "On Our Way to Mars." And for Altman aficionados, it's essential viewing: his sarcasm and jaundiced view of the business world are already much in evidence, and the live country-western show at the center of the story makes the movie a fascinating precursor to two of his most beloved films, Nashville and A Prairie Home Companion.
Westphal first came across Corn's-A-Poppin' back in 2007, when he was a University of Chicago student assembling the summer calendar for the venerable Doc Films series. Kian Bergstrom, another Doc staffer, sent him a list of several dozen 35-millimeter prints held by the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research in Madison, Corn's-A-Poppin' among them. The Altman connection was sufficiently intriguing for Doc to book the movie; it drew only 25 people, but Westphal remembers it as a head-turning experience: "We've been working ourselves into a frenzy about it because—well, it's Corn's-A-Poppin'. It has to be great, right? . . . And it just shatters our expectations. It's so utterly strange." Eventually the film's legend grew large enough for Doc to screen it again; by that time Westphal had graduated and was studying film preservation at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, but his friend Rebecca Hall called to report that the film had drawn a large and appreciative crowd.
As Westphal began to investigate, he discovered that the Wisconsin Center had the only known print, and the original camera negative had been destroyed when its storage facility in Kansas City was shut down. Incredibly, Rhoden's Crest Productions had neglected to copyright the movie, so it was now in the public domain. In fall 2011, Antos found a print of Corn's-A-Poppin' listed on eBay from an estate sale in Kansas City, and the three Doc Films alumni, who had formed Northwest Chicago Film Society earlier that year to present weekly repertory screenings, decided to buy it. "It wasn't perfect," Westphal recalls. "There were a few splices. But it was very good overall—not much cinching, not much scratching. A few light scratches on the base side of the film, but those can effectively be hidden through wet-gate printing, where the scratches are filled in chemically during the printing process."
The partners had always considered striking out into restoration work, and Maxine Ducey, then head film archivist at the Wisconsin Center, agreed to lend its print for use in the project. "Their print had some problems, too—splices here and there, some cinching, some arc burn," Westphal says. "But miraculously, the two prints complemented each other. Everything missing in ours—a frame here, a frame there—was intact in theirs."
As a nonprofit 501(c)(3), NWCFS was eligible for a preservation grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation, which has also funded projects by Kartemquin Films, Chicago Filmmakers, and Chicago Film Archives. Last April the foundation came through with $12,000 to restore Corn's-A-Poppin'. "NFPF grants target so-called 'orphan films'—documentaries, silent-era films, newsreels, home movies, industrials, and independent films," explains Jeff Lambert, acting director of the foundation. "Corn's-A-Poppin' was a natural fit for our programs. It's also significant as a regional showcase for the music scene in Kansas City in the mid-1950s. The fact that Altman cowrote the screenplay is an added bonus."
FotoKem, a Burbank film laboratory whose clients include Universal Studios and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, carried out the restoration, working mainly from the NWCFS print but replacing certain shots with footage from the Wisconsin Center print. A new negative was created, and from it two prints were struck, to be maintained by NWCFS and loaned out for exhibition. Westphal hopes that more screenings, including the Music Box engagement, will stoke demand for a DVD edition: Cora Rice is still alive to do an interview and/or commentary, and Westphal would like to record a commentary track with Kian Bergstrom, who got the revival going, and local film writer and programmer Patrick Friel. Corn's-A-Poppin' may have a whole new life ahead of it now, though Robert Altman must be rolling over in his grave.
Northwest
Chicago Film Society Blog [Kyle Westphal]
October 9, 2011, also seen here: Peanuts
for Popcorn: A Tentative History of Corn's-a-Poppin ...
motion
within motion: Corn's-A-Poppin' (ca. 1956)
Kyle Westphal, June 26, 2007
evanevanevan »
Corn's-a-Poppin' @ Doc Films April
9, 2009
Kansas
City - Searching the WCFTR Collections
Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
Sergio
Leone and the Infield Fly Rule: ROBERT ALTMAN IN ... April 4, 2014
Archive
to Premiere Robert Altman Restoration | UCLA Film ... John Kostka from UCLA Film Archives, May 1,
2014
The
Popcorn-Themed Robert Altman Music You Never ... Sam Adams from indieWIRE
Film
Preservation Grants Awarded To Northwest Chicago ... Rob Christopher from Chicagoist, May 2, 2013
Corn's A Poppin' at The
Nightingale , on JBTV
Corn's-A-Poppin' - Chris
Gray's Blog
The
Rediscovered Lost Films of 2014 (so far) | Classic Film ... Classic Film Haven
Print Article -
American National Biography Online
biography
COUNTDOWN
USA
Countdown | review,
synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Made before MASH (and subjected to re-editing by the studio), Altman's drama about American astronauts being rushed to the moon in an attempt to beat the Russians is a surprisingly human affair, concentrating less on sci-fi hardware than on the emotional crises affecting the men and their families. Slightly soapy in parts, but overall it's an intelligent and taut little film, interesting for the way it foreshadows not only the actual look of the Apollo capsules but also Altman's later style: the lack of interest in 'plot', the overlapping dialogue, and the imaginative use of the 'scope frame are all there, if in embryonic form.
Countdown
- Turner Classic Movies Jeff
Stafford
Made during the space race of the late sixties when Russia and
the U.S. were competing to land the first expedition on the Moon, Countdown
(1968) is not only prescient in its storyline (the Apollo 11 would make a
historic landing on the Moon the very next year - July 1969) but it also marks
the feature film debut of Robert Altman, who would go on to become one of the
most original and uncompromising American directors of his generation.
In Countdown, a trio of astronauts - Chiz, Rick and Lee - are subjected
to rigorous training and simulated space flights in preparation for a future
Moon expedition. When it is learned that the Soviet Union already has a mission
orbiting the moon with plans to land on the surface, NASA officials race
against time to land their own man on the lunar surface first. At first, Chiz,
an Air Force colonel, is selected to pilot the Pilgrim I to the moon. The
President, however, feels that the mission should not appear to be a military
endeavor and requests that Lee, a civilian, guide the expedition. Bitterly
disappointed at the turn of events, Chiz, acting as Lee's trainer, pushes his
protégé to the limits of his endurance in training, putting his life at risk in
one situation. The intense preparations pay off, however, once the Pilgrim I is
launched and Lee encounters genuine life-threatening problems during his flight
to Mars.
Prior to being assigned Countdown Altman was at a low point in his
career. He had recently given up his rights to produce and direct Petulia
(1968) in exchange for his involvement in a prime-time television series
entitled Nightwatch. Unfortunately, the network cancelled Nightwatch
after pressure from Lucille Ball who demanded the same time slot for her
company's new series, Mission Impossible. Altman's loss was compounded
by the fact that Petulia ended up on most critics' top ten lists for
1968 with Richard Lester basking in the acclaim. Meanwhile, Altman had no new
prospects though he was determined not to return to television work and was
dead set on breaking into the film industry one way or another.
Thanks to his association with William Conrad (from previous Warner and
Universal Studios work) and James Lydon (from Kraft Suspense Theatre),
Altman was offered the opportunity to direct Countdown by the two former
actors who were now presiding over Warner Bros.' B-picture unit. Although
Altman's account of the making of Countdown differs substantially from
Conrad and Lydon's, the final result is unmistakably the work of the same man
who would go on to direct M*A*S*H* (1970) and Nashville (1975).
According to the director in Altman on Altman (edited by David
Thompson), "There was a book I tried to buy called The Pilgrim Project
by Hank Searls, which I thought was terrific. It was about sending a guy to the
Moon on Gemini, and then he had to wait there until they could develop Apollo
to come and pick him up. It was all about beating the Russians. It was owned by
someone else; then Warner Brothers got it, and they had a low-budget film
programmer. They offered it to me, and I took it without hesitation. That was Countdown.
I thought it was a pretty good little film. I tried to show astronauts as human
beings with problems, and I had scenes with over-lapping dialogue, in which I
made sure that every word wasn't being heard. There was quite a bit of
excitement over my work at the studio."
Countdown also benefited from the outstanding ensemble cast which
included Robert Duvall and James Caan in the key roles of Chiz and Lee,
respectively, and several actors from Altman's television days such as Barbara
Baxley, Charles Aidman, Joanna Moore, Ted Knight, Steve Ihnat and Michael
Murphy. Equally important was the fact that NASA cooperated with the production
and members of Altman's "production teams visited NASA sites and conferred
with scientific and technological personnel. Art director Jack Poplin did an
estimable job designing mock replicates of the Apollo capsule, Mission
controls, and Gemini simulators, as well as a lunar-landing module years before
its actual use. At Altman's insistence, there were to be no process shots, no
miniatures. Using sound stages 14, 15, and 17 at Warner Brothers, Poplin
devised a credible rendering of outer space and the moon's surface. The moon
landing scene was simulated in the Mojave Desert. There is also one all-out
party sequence set at Altman's then-Mandeville Canyon digs." (from Robert
Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff by Patrick McGilligan).
At the end of Countdown's production, the relationship between Altman
and Warner Brothers suddenly broke down. According to Altman, he was undermined
by the legendary studio head. "When I was finishing the film, Jack Warner,
who had been in Europe, came back, although when he came on the set I wasn't
there," the director recalled. "Then over the weekend he watched the
dailies. On Sunday I got a call at home - I was going to start editing the next
day - and it was Bill Conrad...He told me, 'Don't come to the studio, they
won't let you through the gates.' I said, 'What do you mean?' 'Well, Jack
Warner saw your dailies and he said, "That fool has actors talking at the
same time."' And I had to drive up to the gate, and there was a cardboard
box with all this stuff from my desk, which the guard handed to me. I was not
allowed in the studio. And they cut the picture for kids...Actually, being
fired from Countdown was great for me, because each time something like
that happens, you get a battle scar and you know how to protect yourself in
that situation again."
Altman also accused Warner Bros. of tampering with the conclusion of Countdown:
"They rewrote the ending we shot. I left it ambiguous - the guy was
probably going to die on the moon. When he landed there, he was supposed to
find a shelter with a beacon on it. But he only had so much life support, and
he landed prematurely and hadn't seen the beacon." If Countdown had
actually ended here as Altman suggested, the film would probably have gone down
in history as the most anti-climactic space race drama ever made. As it is, the
conclusion is more hopeful and less ambiguous than Altman intended but it is
still far from a conventional ending for a commercial feature.
Counter to Altman's version of his Countdown experience, producer Lydon
insists that Altman was never fired by Warner and that the studio mogul approved
Altman's final cut despite his concerns about the "muddiness" of the
overlapping dialogue. "Studio records indicate that, one way or another,
Lydon and Conrad were in fact reconciled to Altman's footage," wrote
Patrick McGilligan in his biography of Altman. "Only one additional day of
filming was clocked, well after Altman had finished directing, by a substitute
director, Conrad himself. Duvall was the only star on the set for a day set
aside for cutaways to smooth out transitions." Lydon emphasized to
McGilligan that "The final cut of Countdown was the taste and
judgment of Bill Conrad and me - according to our contract with Altman. The
changes we made were technical only...I believe now as I did then that it's the
best film Altman ever made - except for M*A*S*H* - and I'm still a
fan."
When Countdown was finally ready for distribution, Warner Bros. made the
mistake of placing it on a double feature with the infamously bad John Wayne
Vietnam war saga, The Green Berets. It went virtually unnoticed as most
critics were too busy attacking Wayne's right wing film polemic so Countdown
was pulled from the double bill and released as a single feature a year later.
It didn't perform any better at the box office but it did garner a few positive
reviews. Variety called it "a model example of what can be achieved
on a relatively modest budget...far superior to cheap exploitation
product." For Altman fans, it's certainly worth a look and its importance
is best summed up by Geoff Andrew in his TimeOut review: "Slightly
soapy in parts, but overall it's an intelligent and taut little film,
interesting for the way it foreshadows not only the actual look of the Apollo
capsules but also Altman's later style: the lack of interest in 'plot', the
overlapping dialogue, and the imaginative use of the 'scope frame are all
there, if in embryonic form."
Robert
Altman Before and After 'M*A*S*H': 'Countdown ... Michael Barrett from Pop Matters, February 7,
2012
The
Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
DVD Savant Review:
Countdown - DVD Talk Glenn
Erickson
Classic Sci-Fi
Movies: Countdown
FilmFanatic.org » Countdown
(1968)
Cagey
Films [kgeorge] Kenneth George
Godwin
10
Robert Altman Films You May Not Know|The Playlist March 21, 2013
Cinepassion.org
Fernando F. Croce
Altmania:
"Brewster McCloud" (1970) / "Countdown" (1968 ... Dark Forces Swing Blind Punches
Scopophilia:
Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
A
Spoiler Alert [Mipplefapple Whipplethorpe]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Fantastic
Movie Musings and Ramblings Dave
Sindelar
Countdown (1968) -
Roger Ebert
New
York Times [Howard Thompson] also
seen here: NY
Times Original Review
Countdown (1968
film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK B 89
USA Canada
I want things to stay
the way they are.
I remember my mother never stopped saying how lonely she
was after my father died. She kept
talking on and on, always reminding me how little company I was for her.
—Frances Austen
(Sandy Dennis)
Born February 20, 1925
in Kansas City, Missouri in a family descended from the Mayflower, Altman had
an upper class background, raised in Catholic schools, graduating from a
military academy in 1943 when he enlisted in the Air Force at age 18, becoming
a crewman flying over 50 bombing missions in Borneo and the Dutch East
Indies. When he was discharged in 1947,
he studied engineering at the University of Missouri, breaking into the motion
picture business by accident, writing short stories and screenplay drafts at
age 20, selling RKO studios the script for THE BODYGUARD (1948), which he
co-wrote with Richard Fleischer. When a
move to New York City failed to jump start his career, he returned to Kansas
City in 1949, accepting a job as a director, writer, cameraman, and editor of
industrial films for the Calvin Company, directing about 65 industrial films
and documentaries by 1955, securing $60,000 in financing for his first feature
film about juvenile delinquency in Kansas City, entitled THE DELINQUENTS
(1957), purchased by United Artists for $150,000. While a primitive work, more of a teen
exploitation film, it does contain naturalistic dialogue, an aesthetic
associated with Altman throughout his career.
Moving to Los Angeles, he next co-directed THE JAMES DEAN STORY (1957),
an exploitive documentary capitalizing on the recent death of a legendary movie
icon, and while it was a box office disappointment, it did attract the
attention of none other than Alfred Hitchcock, who hired him to direct several
TV episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1957-58),
but after just two episodes, “The Young One” and “Together,” Altman was
fired. His exposure, however, led him to
a successful career working for several television companies from 1956 to 1964,
directing various episodes of Whirlybirds
(1958-59), U.S. Marshal (1959), Bonanza (1960-61), Combat (1962-63), and the Kraft
Suspense Theater (1963). According
to Robert
Altman's "7 secret wars", Altman directed nearly the entire
second season of Bonanza, claiming
“they’re some of the darkest in its 14-year run,” while also suggesting “Altman's dark style was better suited for the gritty war
stories in the series Combat.” Television
also allowed Altman the chance to experiment with narrative technique as well
as develop his trademark overlapping dialogue, while at the same time learn to
work with speed and efficiency on a limited budget. Despite his apparent refusal to conform to
network requirements, causing frequent firings, Altman was never out of work
for long, as his wealth of experience continued to attract work in a burgeoning
television industry. His success allowed
him to form his own production company, Lions Gate Films in 1963, but his
prolific gambling debts nearly brought about its demise, eventually forcing him
to sell his interests in 1981. One of
his episodes about a serial killer for the Kraft
Suspense Theater, “Once Upon a Savage Night,” was expanded to a feature
length film, commercially released as NIGHTMARE IN CHICAGO (1964), where he did
not work again until he was hired to direct a low-budget space thriller called
COUNTDOWN (1968), but he was fired near the end of the project for his refusal
to edit the film to an acceptable length.
The recognizable Altman
style was not much in evidence in his first few studio efforts, but that would
change with his next film, THAT COLD DAY IN THE PARK (1969), a disturbing
psychological drama financed by inheritance money from the Max Factor cosmetic
empire, shot in Vancouver (circumventing the Hollywood unions), where the film
screened out of competition at Cannes and features a dazzling directorial
style. The opening shot reflects the
cold, subdued atmosphere of melancholy where the camera follows a woman as she
takes a winding path home through a park in Vancouver, zooming in and out,
constantly altering the focus, stylistically underscoring the significance of
duality, where something sinister is going on under the surface, while the
camera holds her in the frame during a lengthy pan where at times the sun
explodes onto the lens, as the camera continually keeps up with her all the way
home. Immediately we get a taste of a
unique visual style, beautifully shot by László Kovács, where there is also
ample evidence of an overlapping soundtrack, with the camera keying on one
subject while the soundtrack is dominated by the improvised conversations of
others nearby. The film was a critical
and box office disaster, followed up by a comical adaptation of a little-known
Korean War novel satirizing life in the armed services, a film passed over by
more than a dozen other filmmakers, where production was so tumultuous that
stars Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland attempted to have Altman fired due to
his unorthodox filming methods. Upon its
release, however, MASH (1970) was
widely hailed as an instant classic, winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film
Festival and five Academy Award nominations, with Ring Lardner, Jr. winning the
Best Adapted Screenplay, becoming the point in Altman’s career when he was
recognized as a major talent. THAT COLD
DAY IN THE PARK is the first of what might be called Altman’s “female
subjectivity” trilogy that also includes Images
(1972) and 3
Women (1977). The focus of the film
is Sandy Dennis as Frances Austen, vulnerable and overly naïve, actually one of
the better performances of her career as a seemingly oversensitive, unmarried
wealthy woman whose desperate loneliness is so acute that her psychological
state of mind remains questionable, where one gets the impression, through
oddly out-of-place extended confessional revelations, that she is extremely
fragile and weirdly out of touch, symptomatic of the Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie syndrome where she
is isolated from the outside world even as she associates with others. The film’s greatest strength lies in its
suffocatingly repressed atmosphere, where the characters live in
self-imposed prisons, which is fully sustained throughout, even as the story
itself disappoints, showing little sympathy for anyone onscreen, feeling like a
well-crafted studio concoction figured out ahead of time, as so much of what’s
memorable is the glossy, artificial stylization. Interestingly, it was during this filming
that Altman discovered the music of Montreal native Leonard Cohen and his debut
album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, Leonard Cohen - Songs of
Leonard Cohen FULL ALBUM ... YouTube (41:38), so prominently featured in McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (1971), both films shot in the dreary dampness of Vancouver.
Perhaps Altman’s only
real stab at a genre film, this is a grim, uneven effort that veers into the
gothic horror realm, where Frances is listlessly entertaining a group of older
guests when she spies a young man sitting on a park bench in the rain, who
holds her rapt attention throughout her party, where her gaze out the window
through the Venetian blinds remains fixated, eventually inviting the young man
(Michael Burns, known only as the Boy) inside where she offers him every
hospitality, food, a change of clothes, a hot bath, and even his own private
room. While she rambles on in an
extended monologue, talking incessantly, he remains mute but passively
accepting, which allows Frances to delve into her own private world, one of
manners and politeness and orderly décor, barely concealing her sexual
attraction as she has her eyes on him all along. In a bit of a surprise, she locks him in his
room at night, guaranteeing he’ll be there in the morning when she serves him
breakfast in bed. While she goes out on
meaningless social engagements, it’s all a distraction from her real intent
which is to return to this young man later in the evening. As the day progresses, however, it unfolds in
dual sequences, one where Frances visits her gynecologist, sitting apart from
the other women who remain unseen, yet their voices dominate the soundtrack,
reflecting a psychological schism in her character, and one where the Boy
returns home, escaping out the window and down the fire escape, living in a
cramped apartment with his sister Nina (Susan Benton) and her boyfriend Nick
(David Garfield, son of John Garfield), where we soon learn he has a voice and
a noticeable attraction to his sister, who continually flaunts her sexuality in
front of him. The Boy describes the
overly generous treatment he has received from this strange woman whose lavish
attention obviously still fascinates him.
When Nina hears she gave him a bath, she comes to the apartment to see
just what her brother has gotten himself into, and treats herself to a
luxurious bath, despite her brother’s protestations that the woman is expected
back at any minute. Paying him no mind,
she casually strips completely naked in front of him, where she seems to thrive
on his sexual powerlessness, making him a passive onlooker, provoking him at
every step, until eventually they are both splashing around in the tub
together. Altman ratchets up the tension
with shots of Frances returning home while the mess created in the bathroom
turns into a disaster area, holding the shot at length as he builds the
suspense.
When she returns to the dark and quiet of
her home, the audience is clueless what to expect, though it does have the feel
of gloom hovering in the air. After
puttering around the apartment putting things away, she discovers nothing is
amiss, entering the Boy’s bedroom, speaking to him anxiously, even crawling
into bed with him, finally offering herself sexually, only to discover a doll
and some stuffed animals under the covers, where she lets out a blood curdling
scream. Enraged in disappointment, she
waits for his return, where her calm demeanor and impeccable manners helps set
the trap, but not before he returns with pot-laced brownies, where they play a
sexually charged game of blindfolded hide and seek, where soon she’s in a state
of childish bliss, eventually peeking through the keyhole into his room,
completely distraught to discover he’s left through the window again. Only then does she decide to take matters
into her own hand, bolting the windows shut to lock him in, keeping him
prisoner next time. The oppressiveness
of her apartment, with each object perfectly placed, belies the underlying
psychological turbulence, where the viewer is witness to plenty of fractured
mirror images, shooting people through objects, like glass or candlelight,
where humans are seen as abstract reflections constantly moving in and out of
focus, bringing to mind Fassbinder’s elegantly shot but as yet unmade CHINESE
ROULETTE (1976), both opulent uses of dual imagery through mirrors to show a
deteriorating psychological rift. The
cold precision and austere formality in each case is created through artificial
means, while also creating an exaggerated, near hallucinogenic state of mind. Altman is obviously fascinated by the marginalized
female character and the lengths that she’s willing to go, where the extent of
her disturbance is never fully realized until it’s too late, shown through calm
and tranquil surface imagery, where even the viewer has a hard time believing
what’s actually taking place as it seemingly evolves with the calculating
shrewdness and detachment of a chess match, yet hysteria eventually supplants
the existing reality, much like Norman Bates in Psycho
(1960). If the story weren’t so coldly
literary, following an orderly story logic without the meandering Altmanisms
that would later define his true talent as a director, it instead feels overly
technical and even cliché’d, dropping the homosexuality angle of the Boy from
the book, also a club with performed sex acts, but featuring another sexually
repressed character who can only unleash their inhibitions through violent
means. That she mothers the Boy with
affections and sweet talk throughout is a mere diversion from her real intent,
feeling a bit too calculated and overly obvious by the film’s end, where the
better film is the slow build-up of tension through meticulous detail, where
the extent of psychic disorientation does come as a surprise, where perhaps the
film is ultimately about a strange and mysterious passivity resembling normalcy
that has the capacity to turn destructive.
When asked if he ever
looks at his older movies, Altman replied,
I look at them. And there’s nothing I’d change in any one of them. They’re finished works, reflecting a specific film experience. To change them would be like doing plastic surgery. And, honestly, I like ‘em better than I did at the time. I looked at That Cold Day In The Park recently and I wanna tell you, that’s one hell of a movie!
Chicago
Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)
Robert Altman's inauspicious first theatrical
feature--recognizably his work, meandering zooms and all, but the material is
somewhat pretentious and hackneyed: spinster Sandy Dennis picks up hippie
Michael Burns in a
That Cold
Day in the Park | review, synopsis ... - Time Out
Made immediately before MASH, this has Sandy Dennis, in her characteristic role as a frustrated spinster, picking up a dropout (Burns) on a Vancouver park bench and inviting him home for food, care and shelter. The results are distressingly predictable (though, to be fair to Altman, this area of modern Gothic hadn't been quite so overworked in 1969). With signs of the visual daring evident in Altman's later work, however, there is sufficient interest in his treatment of yet another woman character going bananas to repay committed admirers.
It is certainly well directed (by Robert Altman), it's well written (by Gillian Freeman), and it is beautifully shot (by Laszlo Kovacs). But does anybody want to see a movie about a desperately lonely spinster (Sandy Dennis) who traps a young man (Michael Burns) and walls him up in her home? There may be something in the film medium itself that works against these stories of obsessional incarceration (THE COLLECTOR also failed): we in the audience are trapped along with the prisoner, and we long to get away. One can admire this film for its craftsmanship; it has a cold brilliance. But that's all. With Luana Anders, John Garfield, Jr., Suzanne Benton, and Michael Murphy. From a novel by Richard Miles; music by Johnny Mandel; art direction by Leon Ericksen. A Canadian production, filmed in Vancouver.
Robert
Altman's "7 secret wars"
Destiny from 10 Zen Monkeys, November 22, 2006
Robert Altman's career started with
corporate training films in Missouri. The experience landed him Hollywood work
filming TV shows in the 1960s — but his personality rebelled against creating
false fables of comfort. Before M*A*S*H
and The
Player, Altman had forced his fierce honesty onto unsuspecting television
characters. It marked the beginning of a forgotten march through America's
cherished archetypes, challenging one beloved hero after another.
For example, when network executives handed him the characters from Bonanza,
his first impulse was to torture them.
1. Bonanza
(1961)
Hoss, Adam and Little Joe were a happy all-male family on a Nevada ranch in
that magical TV west. Altman opens his episode Silent
Thunder with rednecks sexually harassing a deaf mute female (played by
Stella Stevens). Good son Little Joe intervenes, and later teaches her how to
read, but then she falls in love with him. In a series of painful scenes,
Little Joe struggles to convey rejection to someone who doesn't understand,
can't communicate, and is full of the rawest emotion.
Altman directed eight episodes of Bonanza, all but
one in the show's second season — and they're some of the darkest in its
14-year run. In The Rival,
gentle Hoss loves a woman, but she loves a fugitive. In a typical Bonanza plot,
a showdown seems inevitable, but Hoss agonizes over the ambiguity. Is he
hunting his rival because of his crimes — or to vindictively avenge his scorned
heart? There's no easy answers as a lynch mob starts forming, and even before
any triggers are pulled, a devastated Hoss knows that the woman he loves will
never, ever be his. Altman heightens the episode's tension with evocative
lighting tricks. In one scene, a gun emerges from the shadows for several
agonizing seconds before the triggerman is revealed — Hoss himself.
2. Combat
(1962)
Altman's dark style was better suited for the gritty war stories in the series Combat.
In one episode the survival of the entire unit rests on a single captured
prisoner not giving away their position. Pinned down in a chateau, the soldiers
can escape by swimming down a river at night — but they can't haul their
prisoner underwater. The commander faces an impossible choice. He can kill the
young Nazi conscript before escaping — or risk all their lives on the soldier's
pleas and promises of secrecy. Again — there's no easy answers. Altman used the
chateau to good effect, including long shots to show the soldiers on its upper
level with the lone Nazi below.
Altman's TV career would be short-lived. It was reportedly
hobbled by his clashes with TV executives, but there were other controversies.
Wikipedia notes that Congressional hearings were held over an episode of a
forgotten TV show called Bus Stop which showed a murderer successfully
escaping both capture and punishment — a favorite Altman theme.
That
Cold Day in the Park (1969) | UCLA Film & Television ... Shannon Kelley
By 1969, Robert Altman was a prolific director of episodic television, craving a transition to feature filmmaking, but facing a steep climb toward his goal. His first few feature outings (the 1957 independent feature The Delinquents, a documentary about James Dean from the same year, and the 1968 space thriller Countdown), had not sufficiently captured the imaginations of audiences or the film industry to sustain a feature career.
That Cold Day in the Park represented a daring gambit in this context: quiet and cryptic, it displayed Altman’s iconoclastic fascinations: a sensitivity to schisms within normalcy, a fascination with female subjectivity, and the construction of atmospheres as expressive of psychological states. Sandy Dennis portrays Frances Austen, a young spinster who occupies a well-appointed apartment in Vancouver. There she listlessly entertains a suitor several years her senior, and engages in rote domestic routines. From her window one day, Frances spies a young man (Michael Burns) on a park bench outside, visibly cold and wet. Inviting him inside, she shows the handsome stranger, who is apparently mute, every hospitality—food, clothes, profuse conversation, and a room of his own. Little does she realize that her charming, receptive listener has a complex life of his own, to which he escapes nightly through his bedroom window. The stage is set for conflict as Frances’ loneliness takes on a ferocity that drives the story to a harrowing conclusion.
Altman draws a fascinating, restrained performance from the famously mannered Sandy Dennis. Her Frances seems related to other troubled women in contemporaneous films, by the likes of Roman Polanski and even Alfred Hitchcock (for whom Altman had directed television episodes). But Frances may also be said to represent a general bourgeois type to whom comforts and social rituals represent suffocating dead ends—in contrast to glimpses of the boy’s unconventional outer life, or the tawdry streets and underground lesbian bars that Frances trolls before the story is over.
Par for the course, the film was received with ambivalence and disdain by many critics, and did not meet with commercial success; hardly the calling card that Altman needed. However, fate brought M*A*S*H (1970) and great fame to Altman soon afterward, while That Cold Day in the Park has gathered admirers over time, particularly among those who recognize in it a first flowering of its director’s unique gift.
girish:
That Cold Day In The Park
The Robert Altman style we know and love was born not as
much in his first studio feature film, Countdown (1968), as in his
second, That Cold Day In The Park (1969). It strikes me as the first
film of a loose “female subjectivity” trilogy, later to include Images
and 3 Women.
What we have here, at least nominally, is a psychodrama with some
suspense-thriller elements. Sandy Dennis is Frances, a thirty-ish spinster who
sees a young man getting soaked by rain on a park bench. She invites him in to
dry off and clean up; he does so silently; she assumes he’s mute; he goes along
with her assumption. He spends the night in the guest room; she locks him in
and makes him her prisoner. He quietly makes away through the fire escape, but
returns to continue “playing her game”. One thing leads to another, and soon
we’re in gothic-land.
The true star of the movie is the signature audiovisual strategy that Altman
puts into place here, fully-formed, for the first time. He uses a potent
combination of: (1) fluid, prowling pans, (2) zooms, both in and out, and (3)
constant play with in-focus and out-of-focus. In the opening shot we watch
Frances take a winding path home. The camera keeps up with her—steadily panning
and zooming, but not moving—catching the sun and exploding briefly with a lens
flare, but doggedly following her without cutting. Fifteen seconds into the
film, you already know it’s going to be a visual treat.
Minutes later, she sets the table for her elderly guests and serves them dinner
but her attention keeps wandering over to the young man she sees through the
venetian blinds. (I believed that film noir had exhausted the possibilities of
venetian blinds until I saw this movie—they’re ubiquitous and ominous here, and
not just as instruments that provide effects of light and shadow.) At first the
blinds are in perfect focus through her POV, like black shiny blades. Then the
zooms begin and the blinds turn soft, becoming fat horizontal bars (confining
her in her subjectivity?) until finally they turn into large foggy smears on
the screen. The boy comes into focus at last; the rest of the image swims in
milky out-of-focus. This blending of distinctness and indistinctness in the
image somehow makes you feel a bit queasy.
Much of the movie takes place in the oppressively brown and beige apartment,
and this is where Altman has a field day, lavishing care on shooting both
people and objects, or often shooting people through objects.
Unexpectedly, we discover the optical properties of glass-block, mirrored
tables, gently swaying candle-flames, translucent plastic panels, and shiny
cutlery. It's also interesting to witness how each of these objects is
transformed—even expressionistically charged, one could say—with abstraction
when examined in luxuriant out-of-focus for extended periods of time.
In one scene, Frances and the boy feast on pot brownies and play an erotically
loaded game of hide-and-seek with blindfolds. In a wonderfully perverse touch,
Altman shoots the scene, despite their altered state, with no visual effects.
The zooms and other visual devices are used, rigorously, only to connote
Frances’ instability. They (wisely) don’t belong in this scene, which finds her
at her most blissful. The scene ends oddly with the boy escaping into his room,
and Frances peeking through the keyhole and then swooning limp by the door,
exactly as Jacqueline Sassard did in Chabrol’s Les Biches the previous
year (coincidence?). Also reminiscent of Chabrol’s films of that period—which
were scored by Pierre Jansen—is the modernist music by Johnny Mandel, all
spooky tone clusters played on solo piano, and a world away from Mandel’s
gorgeous orchestrations of “Suicide Is Painless” in MASH, Altman's next
film.
Which brings me to the use of sound, which in this movie is not quite as
radical as the visual aspects but is nevertheless unmistakably Altman. There
are numerous ingenious instances but the one I’ll never forget takes place at a
gynecologist’s office where Frances waits for her appointment and we hear
numerous overlapped women’s voices all around her (as in Dr. T & The
Women). And did I mention that the entire scene is shot from outside
the building, through venetian blinds? When we watch her meeting with the
nurse, it's a dead ringer for the shot of Alan Rudolph’s pitch to Tim Robbins,
also seen through venetian blinds, in The Player (Ghost meets The
Manchurian Candidate, remember?).
One final example: An elderly man invites himself into Frances’ apartment, and
declares his love—or more precisely, his lust—for her. She finds him repellent,
but she doesn’t stop him as he drones on about making love to her. As she
watches him catatonically, Altman abruptly cuts to the gynecologist’s table,
Frances’ legs spread, as the doctor unsheaths a terrifying metal instrument.
Meanwhile, the man drones on in the soundtrack. It's every bit as creepy as
anything in Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, twenty years later.
Around the time he made A Wedding, Altman was asked about his old movies
and if he ever looked at them. He replied, "I look at them. And there's
nothing I'd change in any one of them. They're finished works, reflecting a
specific film experience. To change them would be like doing plastic surgery.
And, honestly, I like 'em better than I did at the time. I looked at That
Cold Day In The Park recently and I wanna tell you, that's one hell of a
movie!" Not perhaps an objective viewpoint but I think he's right. And yo,
distributor-man: put the darned thing on DVD already.
“It’s
time to come inside now” – An appreciation of Robert Altman’s “3 Women” Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View,
originally published in Movietone
News, August 1978
The Bottom Shelf Scott von Doviak from the High Hat
Dreams
Are What Le Cinema Is For [Ken Anderson]
also seen here: THAT
COLD DAY IN THE PARK 1969 - Turner Classic Movies
Combustible
Celluloid Review - That Cold Day in the Park .. Jeffrey M. Anderson
Mondo Digital [Nathaniel Thompson]
MichaelDVD Region4 [Steve Crawford]
DVD
Talk - Blu-ray [Christopher McQuain]
DVD
Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson]
Blu-ray.com
[Jeffrey Kauffman]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey] THAT COLD
DAY IN THE PARK, IMAGES, and 3 WOMEN
Girish seeing the film through a visual lens
Robert Altman -
Artline.ro Altman biograph, September
29, 2006
Channel
4 Film [capsule review]
New York Times (registration req'd) Howard Thompson, also seen here: The New York Times [Howard Thompson]
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
MASH B+ 92
USA
Hot Lips (Sally Kellerman) angrily to Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland)
I wonder how a
degenerate person like you could have reached a position of responsibility in
the Army Medical Corps?
Father Mulcahy (René Auberjonois)
He was drafted.
And then there
was…Korea, which flashes at the opening (at the studio’s insistence) to
distinguish it from the Vietnam War, which was in full battle mode at the time
this film was made, offering Altman’s own commentary on the military
experience, sort of his own cinematic CATCH-22 (1970), both films satirizing
American wars, which were ironically released in the same year. The director’s cynical views are based on his
own World War II experiences in the Air Force, flying over 50 bombing missions
in
The politically
subversive tone of the film struck a nerve with audiences in the late 60’s when
people were feeling rebellious and anti-war, where the dark humor fit the
times, much like the mocking tone of Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE (1964) towards
the Cold War. Movies with liberal,
anti-authoritarian themes were all the rage in the late 60’s, like Bonnie
and Clyde (1967), THE GRADUATE (1967), Rosemary's
Baby (1968), MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969),
Easy
Rider (1969), or The Wild
Bunch (1969), a time when the studios were still run by powerfully staunch
conservatives. To make a film like this
within the Hollywood studio system of the times took some clever subterfuge,
where Altman describes the journey as having escaped mostly unscathed without
anybody noticing, where he did his best to keep a low profile, as 20th
Century Fox was more concerned with their other big budget war movies being
produced at the same time, PATTON (1970), which went on to win 7 Academy
Awards, including Best Picture, also the 4th top grossing movie of
the year, and TORA! TORA! TORA! (1970), the 8th top grossing film,
while MASH surprisingly topped them both at #3, while also winning the Palme
d’Or Best Film at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. The origin of the film was Richard Hooker’s
1968 book MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, a pen
name for Dr. H. Richard Hornberger, a former military surgeon whose book
fictionally recounts the exploits of three insubordinate Korean War surgeons,
revealing how they comically resort to zany antics in order to maintain their
sanity during the insanity of war.
Screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr, a former communist, was one of the
blacklisted Hollywood Ten during the late 40’s and early 50’s era
of McCarthyism,
notable for serving a year in prison for contempt of Congress by not naming
names of other alleged communist sympathizers, dismissed by Darryl Zanuck, the
head of 20th Century Fox studios in 1947, where the blacklist was
not lifted until he as given co-writing credits for Norman Jewison’s THE
CINCINNATI KID (1965). His interest in
the novel, as he identified with the blasphemous nature of anti-establishment
tone, prompted the interest of the same studio that blacklisted him, ironically
rehired by Zanuck’s son, Darryl Zanuck, Jr.
Supposedly a list of about 15 directors (including Stanley Kubrick,
Sidney Lumet, Bud Yorkin, and George Roy Hill, among others) turned down the
project until it was finally offered to Altman, something of an unheralded novice
at that time with a reputation for going against the grain of studio
wishes. His work in television on the
gritty war-oriented show Combat
(1962–63) was notable for its anti-war flavor, which got him fired as the
networks hated it, so here he gets the chance to reprise the same subversive
elements again in a movie.
One of the film’s
revelations is the historical accuracy about doctors being drafted out of
medical school, some after only a year or two in medical practice, where they
were whisked off to the front lines in helicopters and placed somewhere close
to the battlefront in one of these emergency mobile hospital units. As soon as their boots hit the ground,
they’re thrust into immediate action where they’re up to their elbows in blood,
amputations, and death, where they routinely worked 16, 18, or 24-hour shifts,
with one doctor reportedly working 80 straight hours due to the continual
onslaught of maimed, wounded, and dead soldiers. Some of these medical students didn’t even
know where
Shot on back lot of 20th
Century Fox studios in the Lake Malibu area, recently flooded just before
shooting began, so the green foliage was quite pronounced, giving the film what
could possibly be a lush Southeast Asian look, though in the background are the
Santa Monica Mountains outside Los Angeles.
This is a curious little war film with no guns, no battle scenes, and is
perhaps more anti-authority than anti-war, as the war itself is never in view,
but instead features three doctors and a continuous line of casualties,
blending comedy and carnage, where at the heart of the film are the bloody
operating scenes that take the place of the battlefield operations. Confined to their tiny geographical area,
this medical unit remains psychologically confined or imprisoned by their
so-called safety zone, where there are few, if any, quiet or silent moments,
while they’re also restricted by the ineffectiveness of the military order and
chain of command that seems to have little plan or interest in actually winning
the war or understand the ramifications of any of its arbitrary rules. In a
Both Sutherland and
Gould couldn’t understand why Altman was paying all this attention to the
extras in minor roles when they were supposedly the starring lead characters,
questioning his sanity, complaining to their agents and the Fox producer that
they wanted Altman out, as they felt he was an irresponsible madman who had no
idea what he was doing, as there was such a chaotic atmosphere on the movie
set. Little did they know how
magnificently Altman creates order out of chaos, as that is his signature style
as a director, a reputation only further enhanced throughout his brilliant
career. Altman tends to get everyone
involved on the set, even the minor characters, as no one knew who was miked or
where the focus of the camera was during each shot, so everyone had to remain
on high alert, as if the camera was on them, and it wasn’t until they saw the
final edit that they had any idea what the overall vision was for the
film. In this manner, a wonderful sense
of camaraderie develops on the set, as Altman loves to use an ensemble style
where everybody matters. Altman is known
for embellishing the screenplay, in this case, making it more exaggerated and
outrageous, creating a total farce, where the only way to survive the madness
of war is by laughing in the face of certain death. For most of the new faces, Altman raided
One of the more
farcical elements in the film is the meeting of the two strictly by-the-book
soldiers, Major Burns (Robert Duvall), an old school, Bible-reading surgeon of
questionable medical skill, ridiculed relentlessly by both Hawkeye and Trapper,
and Major Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), brought in as the new head nurse, who
finds the contempt for Major Burns an appalling example of military
protocol. When the two devise a plan to
write a letter of complaint for such a deplorable example of army morale, they
can’t take their hands off each other, leading to an infamous bedroom scene
where Radar places a microphone into their tent so their sexual antics can
eventually be broadcast throughout the camp over the loudspeaker. Houlihan gets the nickname “Hot Lips”
afterwards, based on her own sexual ferocity on display, while Major Burns is
goaded mercilessly into a ridiculous fight, where he’s sent home afterwards in
a straight jacket under psychiatric evaluation.
The sexual taunts toward women aren’t the least but subtle, but are
crude in nature and continue throughout the film. While some find this an example of Altman’s
misogynist nature, it’s more reflective of how women are treated in the
military, showing the attitudes that existed then and now, especially with
those giant male egos involved. Despite
the exaggerated satiric absurdity on display, the distrustful, anti-authority
tone was reflective of the mood of the country, which was also growing tired of
hearing the endless military assessments of successful missions that only
sounded more and more absurd when so many dead soldiers continued to return in
flag-draped coffins. The script was
about the Korean War, but all the criticisms were aimed at Nixon and the war
regime. The studios themselves felt the
display of blood and guts was excessive, that it would be too grotesque for
audiences, but those were the scenes that provided the authenticity of soldiers
maimed and dying, which reflected the reality of a protracted war. All the attempts to take advantage of their recreational
time only grow more deliriously bizarre, going to ridiculously comic heights,
like Hawkeye and Trapper turning the helipad into a driving range, wearing
flamboyantly snazzy attire just to hit golf balls, where Trapper grows annoyed
when an actual helicopter lands, “Wish they wouldn’t land those things here
when we’re playing golf,” yet the extravagance of these outrageous stunts are
continually contrasted against the bloody carnage of war.
One other notable
development involves John Schuck as Captain Waldowski, the Painless Pole who
provides dental expertise, known for being the most endowed member of the male
species throughout the entire Asian front, where soldiers actually line up to
get a peep when he’s taking a shower.
When he has an in-bed performance crisis, which completely contradicts
his Don Juan prowess, he’s ready to admit life’s not worth living anymore, that
the only option is suicide. A black
capsule is the method of choice, suggesting a quick and instant (and painless)
death. On the day of the shoot, Altman
changed the original plan and after a break for lunch, had an entirely new set
design, also an enlarged photo of Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper, lining up his
characters in a similar looking, brilliantly staged scene, creating an homage
to Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961), which also creates an unforgettable beggar’s
banquet Last Supper moment set to
Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” This scene
is set to the movie theme song, beautifully sung by Kenny Primus, who performed
in a Broadway production of Cats for perhaps
twenty years, where Hawkeye has to convince the always likable Father Mulcahy
(René Auberjonois) to offer the last rites, who of course considers suicide a
mortal sin and an abomination. But
according to Hawkeye, he’s not really committing suicide, he’s only “intending”
to commit suicide, drawing a distinction, where a little church intervention
might actually prevent the poor soul from actually going through with it. The solemn ritual is carried out with a great
degree of gravity, eventually lying down in a coffin, removing his gum, and
washing down the poison pill (actually a sleeping pill) with some Scotch, with
everybody bringing mementos to take with him to his grave. Bud Cort as Private Boone is deeply
disappointed, reminding him that “You’re throwing your whole education
away.” While the method worked for
Hitler and Eva Braun, Painless has an altogether different reaction, requiring
the therapeutic services of an attractive nurse known as Lt. Dish (Jo Ann
Pflug), where apparently Mulcahy’s prayers were answered.
There’s also the
infamous Hot Lips shower sequence, where the group sits around and drinks
martinis in folding chairs as if they’re having a country picnic, but they’re
waiting for the nurse’s allotted time to use the shower, where as they arrive
each woman is casually pulled away in some needless conversation, leaving Hot
Lips alone in the shower, where one side of the tent is set up to collapse on
demand, leaving the poor woman naked on display in front of the entire unit,
where she’s so infuriorated afterwards that she runs to the commanding officer
shouting “This isn’t a hospital, it’s an insane asylum! And it’s your fault, because you don’t do
anything to discourage them!” Certainly
one of the memorable moments, as they do behave like animals, where it’s
typical of the adolescent bathroom behavior exhibited throughout, where this
vein of ridiculous humor is the lifeblood of the movie. Adding to that is the infamous football game,
where two military units make obscene bets over a football game. Shot in Griffith Park in Los Angeles, the
opposing team is actually a collection of professional and semi-pro players,
including 6’ 8” defensive tackle Ben Davidson and tiny punt return specialist
Noland Smith (aka Super Gnat), who opens the game with a touchdown, both stars
from the Kansas City Chiefs, while the MASH squad enlists the aid of Fred
Williamson as “Spearchucker” Jones, another Kansas City Chief defensive back
player (both Davidson and Williamson also played for Oakland, but Altman knows
them through his Kansas City connections) in his first film before leading a
long and active career in the movies, starring in blaxploitation films during
the 70’s and 80’s, where he’s still working today. The game itself, when looked at from today,
could easily be perceived as racist, where just the name “Spearchucker” was a
lot for Williamson to overcome, but Fred is always a cool dude and he rises
above the indignity of the occasion, as does the humor, which includes players
on the opposite team smoking a joint, one of the few mainstream films of the
times besides Easy Rider
(1969) to freely acknowledge
smoking dope, and the first use of the word “Fuck” in an R-rated film, where
Painless makes a crack on the scrimmage line across from Ben Davidson, telling
him “You’re fuckin’ head is coming right off,” which gets him run completely
off the field. With Hot Lips as a
surprisingly enthusiastic cheerleader, putting everything she has into every
cheer, even as she remains clueless about football, the game turns into a
demolition derby pile up of MASH unit injuries, where Altman has a chance to
add more battlefield metaphors. There’s
perhaps no way to avoid the existing racism among the troops that existed then
and now, but Altman’s over-the-top portrayal is joyously crafted, grounded in
ribald humor.
While the movie features a single Korean
character, Kim Atwood as Ho-Jon (who learns to mix a perfect dry martini),
though that is apparently not a Korean name, and features populated street
scenes in Seoul, Korea with people uncharacteristically (and amusingly) wearing
Vietnamese hats, in reality MASH units were saturated by Koreans working as
cooks, hospital attendants, where they were regularly assigned to clean up
afterwards and keep the surgical areas and medical instruments clean. Also, nurses, like doctors, were equally
indispensable during the Korean War, though almost all were volunteers. While it’s likely none would have actually
been as openly harassed as Hot Lips, but the high percentage of rape of women
in the military, where more than 20% of currently serving female veterans will
be sexually assaulted according to the statistics from the recent Kirby Dick
documentary 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: # 5 The Invisible War, keeps the situation a hot
button issue to this day. Nurses from
the Korean War era do report placing a Korean woman with a baseball bat in
front of the shower door when it was reserved time for nurses to shower. The last MASH unit in Korea New
York April 30, 1975 , the year Altman released Nashville
(1975), a film some consider his greatest work.
By that time Altman had made eight consecutive uniquely original
visionary films that alone would have placed him among the great legendary
directors of all time, but it also established him as one of the few great
American auteurs with such a distinctive style to his work, where he continued
to make films for another thirty years.
MASH | review, synopsis, book
tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Altman's idiosyncratic career received a dramatic boost when he
took Ring
Lardner Jr's script (already turned down by a dozen directors) and turned
it into a box-office smash. Dealing with the crazily humorous activities of a
Mobile Army Surgical Hospital's staff amid the carnage of the Korean (read
Vietnam) war, it shows Altman's stylistic signature in embryonic form: a large
number of fast-talking eccentric characters, a series of revealing vignettes rather
than a structured plot, comparisons of real life with media versions purveyed
by the camp's radio, and semi-audible, overlapping dialogue. It's frantic,
clever fun, but in comparison with later works such as Thieves Like Us and
The Long Goodbye, its cynical stance often rings hollow; its targets -
military decorum, religious platitudes and sexual hypocrisy - are too easy, and
there's little of the director's muted, unsentimental humanism in evidence.
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Malcolm Maclaren]
"Suicide is painless. It
brings on so many changes". So run the lyrics to the title tune, written
by director Robert Altman's fourteen year-old son. Altman produced a box-office
smash in 1970 with this anti-Vietnam ... er ... Korean war comedy. Inevitable
comparisons with the earth-shatteringly successful T.V. series (which ran for
considerably longer than the Korean War) aren't panicularly useful. The film is
much cruder and blacker. Altman cuts from soldiers with their guts spilling
onto Mobile Army Surgical
Hospital
M*A*S*H - Film
Reference Clyde Kelly Dunagan
M*A*S*H , one of the most popular films of the early 1970s, achieved stardom for Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, spawned a successful television series, and gave its innovative director, Robert Altman, his first financial and critical success.
In M*A*S*H —and to a greater extent in his later films—Altman abandons conventional Hollywood narrative techniques in favor of a very personal style characterized by overlapping dialogue, improvisational acting, elliptical editing, wide-screen Panavision compositions, telephoto shots (specifically shots through windows and past obstructing foreground objects), and the development of a large community and of major characters within a limited time and space. These techniques alter conventions of narrative structure in two ways. First, the improvisational acting, the multiple babble of overlapping dialogue, and the frequently voyeuristic telephoto shots (particularly the shots of explicit gore in the operating scenes) generate a sense of spontaneity and authenticity usually found in documentary, rather than narrative, films. Second, the large number of characters arranged within the wide Panavision frame, the compression of space caused by the telephoto lens, and the continuous barrage of overlapping dialogue, music and P.A. announcements on the soundtrack combine to create an aural and visual denseness that demands much more of a viewer's attention and active participation than does the shallow-focus cinematography, the separation of major characters from peripheral characters, and the one-speaker-at-a-time dialogue of conventional narrative.
When M*A*S*H appeared in 1970, audiences—caught up in the spirit of rebellion generated by the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the drug culture, the demonstrations against the Vietnam War, etc.—revelled in the film's iconoclastic humor, its joyous deflation of patriotism, religion, heroism, and other values cherished by the establishment. The film became an immediate box office success, earning over $36 million in domestic rentals by 1983. The critics also favored M*A*S*H , but while they praised its innovative techniques, some critics thought that the film's humor was too smug and the scenes involving the trip to Tokyo and the football game were flaws in the film's structure. Today critics feel that M*A*S*H is inferior to most of Altman's later films (none of which proved as successful at the box office), though the film is still highly regarded for its innovative narrative techniques and its effective humor.
MASH
(1970) - Turner Classic Movies Sean
Axmaker
Raw, ragged, mordantly hilarious, and savagely cruel, M*A*S*H
(1970) was not Robert Altman's first movie. The 45-year-old director had been
in the business for 15 years, directing over a hundred hours of TV episodes and
a few feature films, before shooting the first frame of the film. Yet M*A*S*H
in many ways stands as the first "Robert Altman" film. Bustling with
spontaneous ensemble performances, captured with a restless camera, and
enriched with a dense soundtrack of competing conversations and extraneous
sounds, it set the tone and style of his filmmaking for the rest of his career.
The film did not originate with Altman. Screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr.
discovered the novel, a black comic memoir of life in a mobile army surgical
hospital during the Korean War written by Richard Hooker (a pseudonym for H.
Richard Hornberger), and he thought it would make a great movie and a possible
comeback project after spending years blacklisted by Hollywood for his
politics. His agent, George Litto, took the book to Ingo Preminger, a former
agent anxious to move into production, and they sold the package to 20th
Century Fox. All they needed was a director, but all the big directors they
approached turned them down. Litto was also Altman's agent and Altman was very
interested, but he couldn't even get a meeting until the A-list filmmakers
passed on it.
Ingo Preminger brought in Donald Sutherland and Elliott Gould, rising stars
with counterculture credentials, to play the practical-joking doctors Hawkeye
Pierce and Duke Forrest. Gould told Altman that, while he could put on a
southern accent for Duke, he felt more confident about another role, Trapper
John McIntyre, and Altman made the change. Altman then cast the rest of the
film with relative unknowns, drawing from old friends and collaborators (Tom
Skerritt as Duke, Michael Murphy, Robert Duvall) and actors from the San
Francisco theater community (John Schuck, Rene Auberjonois, Bud Cort, Sally
Kellerman, and others). The publicity department boasted of fourteen feature
film debuts in the twenty eight speaking roles and Altman gave everyone their
moment. While Sutherland and Gould were clearly the central characters, Altman
made the film an ensemble piece. He filled scenes with minor characters and
extras doing extraneous bits of business in the background, much of it
improvised and fine-tuned through rehearsals and retakes, and had microphones
placed throughout the set to catch everything. "What Bob loved to do was
to create a scene that has a lot of density, a lot of levels going on, all
these simultaneous conversations and overlaps," explained actor Corey
Fischer to Mitchell Zuckoff. "He liked having more than one center to a
scene or a shot."
His methods endeared him to the supporting cast but frustrated Sutherland and
Gould, the film's nominal stars, who were used to more emphatic direction.
"I never understood exactly what he wanted," Sutherland told an
interviewer in 1971. Gould, who committed himself completely to the role, clashed
with Altman on the set. Litto and Preminger stepped in to cool tensions, though
Sutherland never warmed to Altman or his methods. Gould, on the other hand,
went on to star in The Long Goodbye (1973) and California Split
(1974) for the director. "I think that, in hindsight, Donald and I were
two elitist, arrogant actors who really weren't getting his genius,"
admitted Gould decades later.
Altman decided that a key scene, where the doctors give camp dentist
"Painless" Waldowski (John Schuck) a party (staged as a parody of The
Last Supper) to stir him from his depression, needed a song. He came up with a
title, "Suicide Is Painless," and asked his son, Michael, to write
the lyrics. No one thought much of the song, not even Michael or Johnny Mandel,
the composer, but it was added to the credits of the film and subsequently
turned into the theme song of the TV incarnation. The royalties ultimately
added up to millions and Michael made more money from the film than Altman, who
had no share in the profits. But in a reflective moment years later, Altman
decided "I'm cool about it, because what I got out of it was better than
money."
Like the novel, the screenplay is largely a collection of episodes and comic
scenes. With no defining story arc, Altman turned the atmosphere and the chaos
into the film's through-line. The jagged editing jumps from scene to scene,
stitched together with a dense soundtrack of improvised lines, Japanese
versions of American pop songs (a suggestion of composer Mandel), and
announcements blasting from the PA loudspeakers, which Altman came up with in
post-production. "I knew I had to have connective tissue, and that
worked," the director later recalled. According to biographer Patrick
McGilligan, it was John T. Kelley, a scriptwriter on many of Altman's TV
productions, who suggested that Altman use the same loudspeaker narration for
the film's memorable end credits.
M*A*S*H bounces between bloody gallows humor in the operating theater
and the brutal practical jokes played by the doctors between shifts.
Sutherland's Hawkeye Pierce is the closest the film has to a moral center and
Elliott Gould is his slightly more anarchic buddy Trapper John, but unlike
their TV counterparts, these guys can be downright cruel and misogynistic. In
war, Altman suggests, you have to go mad to save your sanity.
The studio was nervous about the unconventional project - the blood, the
language, the nudity, and the free-association editing - and wanted a complete
overhaul after a private screening of Altman's cut. Litto and Preminger
suggested a preview in San Francisco, where the enthusiastic response put the
studio's fears to rest. Altman's vision was released to huge profits. It was
also the right picture at the right time, a commentary on the madness of war,
set in Korea but clearly seen by audiences as a stand-in for Vietnam, featuring
characters who don't just defy authority but flaunted their insubordination.
The little $3 million picture went on to earn $40 million, as well as the Palm
d'Or at Cannes and five Academy Award nominations, and earned a rave review
from Pauline Kael, who called it "the best American war comedy since sound
came in, and the sanest American movie of recent years."
For all of its acclaim, it took home a single Oscar, for Ring Lardner, Jr. for
Best Screenplay. Altman, who was nominated for Best Director but lost to
Franklin J. Schaffner (for the much more conventional war film Patton),
was less than gracious to Lardner: he publically took credit for rewriting the
script. He told The New York Times writer Aljean Harmetz in 1971: "My main
contribution to M*A*S*H was the basic concept, the philosophy, the
style, the casting, and then making all those things work. Plus all the jokes,
of course." The authorship has been a contentious issue through the years,
with many of the actors siding with Altman and the producers standing up for
Lardner. Altman biographer McGilligan argues that Lardner's script provided the
scenes, the structure, and the dialogue, and Altman improvised within the structure,
giving the film its distinctive style, flavor, and attitude. What is clear,
however, is that the fortuitous meeting of director, script, and supportive
producers produced something unique, almost revolutionary, within the studio
system, and turned Robert Altman into an overnight success. It only took
fifteen years to get there.
This
Island Rod [Roderick Heath] also
seen here: 49. MASH |
Wonders in the Dark
M*A*S*H
(1970) Robert Altman « Twenty Four Frames
John Greco
Classic
Throwback: MASH (Robert Altman, 1970) - The Film ... Andy Buckle from The Film Emporium
What's the Big
Deal?: MASH (1970) - Film.com Eric
D. Snider, June 14, 2011
Top
100 Directors: #34 - Robert Altman (M*A*S*H review)
The
History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1970 [Erik Beck]
Deconstructing
MASH (1970) | - Tdylf.com John LaRue
M*A*S*H | Film Review
| Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
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thoroughly despicable picture from start to finish
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rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] January 1, 1970
New
York Times [Roger Greenspun] also
seen here: The New York Times
The New York Times
A.O. Scott, August 8, 2011
DVDBeaver.com
[Gregory Meshman]
DVDBeaver
- Blu-ray [Gary W. Tooze]
BREWSTER MCCLOUD B 88
USA
Altman: Your
screenplay was a piece of crap!
Cannon: My screenplay was perfect.
Altman: It was crap.
Cannon: You bought it!
Altman: You sold it!
Often listed as the director’s favorite, where Altman is quoted as saying “It was my boldest work, by far my most ambitious,” it was this madcap farce that followed the huge success of MASH (1970), a popular audience favorite, while this film divided audiences with its go-for-the jugular style of humor. The original Doran William Cannon screenplay, Brewster McCloud’s (Sexy) Flying Machine, passed through all the major studios, becoming one of the legendary unproduced scripts in Hollywood, where even Bob Dylan at one point expressed an interest, but it was dying a slow death until music producer Lou Adler, who produced The Mamas and the Papas, passed it along to Robert Altman. Altman had his own problems with the script, initially asking Brian McKay, who he had worked with during the 60’s on the TV series Bonanza (1959 – 1973), to revise the script, but Altman hated the script so much that he eventually threw it out, where it became something of a challenge not to use a single word of the original screenplay, relying on improvisation, coaching the actors on lines as they shot the scenes. Cannon, of course, was outraged when he saw the finished product and disassociated himself with the film, all of which is part of the legendary making of this film. It was Altman’s idea to use the Houston Astrodome as the principle shooting location, the first film to shoot inside the mammoth structure, but there were clashes on the set where he replaced cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth with Lamar Boren, where he was uncomfortable with leading man Bud Cort, whose very next film would be the quirky black comedy HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971), listed at #9 on AFI's 10 Top 10 of American romantic comedies, and production slowed when Altman was hospitalized with a hernia. However, typical of Altman’s working methods, he enjoyed hosting informal gatherings with his cast and crew after hours, where marijuana and alcohol were plentiful, making it more of an experience than a typical film shoot, something of a holdover of 60’s counterculture thinking that Altman maintained throughout his lifetime.
While this was a
college campus favorite, perhaps reflective of the anger and cynicism of the
era, it may be viewed today as a raw and unpolished film that is often
politically incorrect, where Altman early in his career was not afraid to make
racial jokes, yet it is this unbridled freedom that expresses what’s best about
this director, as he’s not afraid to take chances, where the freewheeling and
irreverent tone is the whole point of the film.
The 1970’s was dominated by a New Wave of younger American filmmakers
like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas,
Brian de Palma, and Peter Bogdanovich, all of whom were not only
contemporaries, but often colleagues.
Altman was an outsider to this group, characterized as a brash young
rebel whose own personal vision was just as comfortable railing against the
establishment as the counterculture, much like Cassavetes,
both perhaps the decade’s best chroniclers of human behavior. In BREWSTER however, a parody of conformism
and bizarre even by Altman’s standards, an example of his vulgarity,
provocatively going beyond conventional taste, targeting bullies, racists,
authority, and the wealthy, where we have a less than perfect film that seems
to glorify its failings, considered a failure in some critical measure, yet it
feels strangely enough like Hitchcock’s Rebecca
(1940), a somewhat overpraised early work, yet a film Hitchcock, and Altman here
as well, had to make in order to unleash their artistic potential, as both
films contain evidence of the brilliance that is yet to come. It’s impossible to think of the sprawling
mess/masterpiece that is Nashville
(1975) without first thinking of this film, where Altman has the luxury of
getting the quirks out of his system, where BREWSTER is clearly a trial run for
some of the effects that Altman perfects in Nashville.
Both are nearly plotless, set in the
South, with a cast of thousands, featuring a kind of American populism in the
musical numbers throughout, where P.T. Barnum’s “Greatest Show on Earth” turns
into The Grand Ole Opry, where American flags are unfurled to marching bands
and the colors of red, white, and blue, and patriotism is stood on its
ear. The spirit of community is
celebrated at the end of both films, but only after having undergone a terrible
tragedy, the death of the mythical hero, where there’s a lingering feeling of
an essential moral lesson yet to be learned, a cynical expression that suggests
we are not in touch with the rapid rate at which the world around us is
changing.
This is ostensibly a
post-60’s fantasy, a challenge of mainstream convention, the story of a boy,
Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort), a likeable misfit living in the bowels of the
Houston Astrodome who builds a pair of mechanical wings so that he can fly,
presumably to escape from this incomprehensible world. From the outset, things are not what they
seem, where the MGM logo appears, but instead of a lion’s roar, we hear a voice
feebly explain, “I forgot the opening line,” whereupon we are taken into a
classroom lecture by René Auberjonois pointing out, in minute scientific
detail, the various differences and characteristics of certain birds. Brewster, however, has what appears to be a
Guardian Angel (or Angel of Death) known as Louise (Sally Kellerman), an angel
who has lost her wings, a somewhat eccentric woman seen dressed in a trench
coat who encourages his dreams of flight while apparently strangling anyone
that poses a threat to Brewster, while the opening credit sequence inside the
Astrodome becomes a parody of the movie structure itself, featuring none other
than Margaret Hamilton, aka the Wicked Witch of the West in THE WIZARD OF OZ
(1939), as Miss Daphne Heap attempting to lead a marching band of black
musicians and twirlers in her own truly terrible rendition of the national
anthem. But she’s forced to stop and try
again, as she berates them to play in the proper key, “I want everything
exactly the way it should be. That’s why
you’re in these uniforms. That’s why I
bought you these uniforms!” where the opening credits begin again, but this
time the band breaks out into gospel in a completely out of control
free-for-all, where they appear to have been struck by a liberating spirit of
joy. Immediately we are introduced to a
theme of unrestricted freedom and continued constraint, pointing out the
post-60’s tensions inherent with repression and the need to escape it, where at
every turn the world appears challenged by the stupidity of the prevailing
order, where the viewer quickly realizes they are in for manic silliness in
this outlandishly strange black comedy.
Altman has always relished large ensemble casts, where we see him early
in his career having a blast with the remnants of Doran William Cannon’s
decimated script which contains a zillion wacky characters, somehow orchestrating
this mayhem into a wonderful mess of a movie.
Brewster is an
inconspicuous limousine driver for the wretchedly greedy Alexander Wright
(Stacy Keach in Scrooge makeup), an
elderly man in a wheelchair continually barking out orders as he bullies the
residents in several retirement homes for his rent money, literally taking
every last dollar. It’s only a matter of
time before his wheelchair flies out of control and we see him barreling down
the freeway. Almost simultaneously, we
see the return of Miss Daphne Heap, this time berating a nearby raven perched
nearby her cage of pigeons, screaming “Get out, you nigger bird!” before she is
struck dead, somehow strangled, seen wearing her ruby red slippers as bird shit
drops on her inert corpse. This kind of
racial nastiness is all but absent from films today, but it takes Altman’s
darkly satiric notions to perfectly express Miss Daphne’s superficial veneer of
racial tolerance covering up the ugly racism lying underneath. Houston is besieged by a string of unsolved
stranglings, calling in an out of town police expert, “San Francisco super cop”
Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy wearing blue contact lenses to resemble Steve
McQueen) to investigate. Shaft
immediately fixates on the bird droppings, linking the murders to Brewster. In Brewster’s underground lair, where he has
stolen a Nikon camera as well as a historical museum book on the Wright
Brothers to help him develop his mechanical wings, he is visited by Hope
(Jennifer Salt), a young girl who is a health food nut that has a nearly
fetishist thing for him, but he ignores her and instead develops a friendship
with the kooky and dimwitted Astrodome tour guide Suzanne, Shelley Duvall, who
got her start in this film, with the world’s largest eyelashes. Suzanne confidently slips on the gloves and
turns into a daffy wannabe race car driver of a Plymouth Road Runner who helps him escape from Shaft, as well as the police, in
a riveting car chase scene parodying BULLITT (1968), though in truth looking
back from today, it’s much closer to the SMOKY AND THE BANDIT (1977) chase
scenes. Shaft’s humiliating exit from
the chase, and the film, seems to suggest Altman simply grew tired of the
character, so he got rid of him.
This coming-of-age
story surrounding McCloud is accompanied by equally absurd bird lectures from Auberjonois
(known only as the Lecturer) that continue throughout the film, always
interrupting the flow of action with some ridiculous comment about “man’s similarity
to birds, and birds’ similarity to men,” often describing the mating habits
(interspersed with Brewster’s own sexual exploits), where eventually it appears
the Lecturer himself is slowly transforming into a bird. While the police are flabbergasted as to why
their strangulation victims are covered in bird droppings, Brewster is also
trying to finalize the work on his flying machine before the police close in. While Louise urges against the temptations of
the flesh, Brewster thinks he’s found his soul mate in Suzanne, becoming
intimately involved, where the sensuous use of music is reminiscent of Hair and other counterculture musicals. Perhaps the most perfectly realized scene in
the entire movie, one that beautifully sits apart from all the chaotic madness,
is Louise’s exit, as she not only leaves Brewster once he becomes lovers with
Suzanne, but she mysteriously leaves this earthly presence. Kellerman’s role should remind Altman fans of
Virginia Madsen’s part as the presumed Angel of Death in the director’s last
film, A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION (2006).
Suzanne, however, is not ready to leave her life in Houston behind to
run away with the infinitely strange Brewster, who she suspects in the murders,
so in no time she betrays him to the police.
For Brewster, it’s now or never, retreating to the Astrodome for his
wings as he runs to the bleachers even as the police are arriving on the scene,
where, like BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID (1969) or THELMA & LOUISE
(1991), he has little choice but to take flight. Unlike Disney’s DUMBO (1941), however, this
one has a more ill-fated ending, where even as he initially soars through the
air, he cannot escape the bizarre claims of the Lecturer that man is inherently
unsuitable for flight, eventually growing exhausted and crumbling in a heap on
the floor of the Astrodome as a three-ring Circus of the cast now returning as
costumed clowns and circus performers march around oblivious to Brewster’s
remains.
Though it bears more than a few
traces of the forced outrageousness that marked Doran William Cannon's previous
screenplay, for Preminger's lamentable comedy Skidoo, Altman's
unexpected follow-up to MASH is pitched fairly successfully between
escapist fantasy and satirical comment on the same. Cort is the Icarus figure
attempting to become airborne in the Houston Astrodome, Kellerman the sort of
guardian angel who appears to have wandered in from a Dennis Potter play, and
Murphy the cop mulling connections between bird shit and murder.
Pauline Kael -
GEOCITIES.ws Pauline Kael
Robert Altman's film was shot in Houston. Gentle Brewster
(Bud Cort), who is building wings for himself, is a boy Phantom of the
Astrodome who is also an imperilled virgin-a sort of mad, murderous Peter Pan,
or Rima the Bird Boy. Sally Kellerman is his bird-mother, who deserts him when
he loses his virginity. The idea seems to be left over from a Victorian fable,
but the style of the picture is parodistic and manic-like a Road Runner
cartoon. The whole thing is amorphous and rather silly, but it's clearly a
trial run for some of the effects that Altman brings off in NASHVILLE. MGM.
Robert
Altman: Critical Essays - Page 13 - Google Books Result Robert Altman:
Critical Essays, edited by Rick Armstrong
(excerpt, pdf format)
Two essays reference the historical relevance of Altman’s own favorite film, Brewster McCloud. Marcos Soares argues that Brewster McCloud represents the limits of artistic freedom. He maintains that Brewster’s failed attempt at flight anticipates the failure of 70’s directors to transform mainstream filmmaking into a more aesthetic art form. He argues that Brewster’s rebellion is a mer adolescent prank rather than a collective resistance to repressive institutions. Soares points out that this lack of mass mobilization in the film parallels the 70’s filmmakers’ reliance on individual achievement rather than a unified transformation of Hollywood. In contrast, I connect the narrative of Brewster McCloud to the differing interpretations of 60’s politics throughout history. I argue that the film satires both the establishment and the counterculture, indicating that the extremes of the political discourse leave an empty space where no legitimate thinking occurs.
Robert Altman was a master of the ensemble film, bringing together large casts to weave complex narratives that actually meant something. Exactly what that is in Brewster McCloud, I’m not sure. But is that a matter of me missing something or rather the film losing its relevance over the course of the last 40 years? Regardless, there is something delightful in the absurdity and chaos of the movie that kept my interest even as I struggled to pinpoint exactly what it was that I was watching.
Bud Cort stars as the reclusive titular character who spends his time working madly on a pair of mechanical wings in the dank recesses of Houston’s Astrodome, then an architectural milestone that offered a way to guarantee no baseball games would be called due to rain and little else. He’s watched over by a guardian angel named Louise, who also appears to be behind a string a deaths connected by bird poop. Have I mentioned Brewster McCloud is absurd? Other characters include Shelley Duvall’s debut as a temptress tour guide with some of the biggest eyelashes ever created and Det. Lt. Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy), a turtleneck-wearing Steve McQueen parody on the case to solve the apparent murders. If all this weren’t enough, the entire film is framed by the narration of a science teacher (Rene Auberjonois) getting all academic about birds.
Breaking Brewster McCloud down, it’s a modern retelling of the Icarus myth. You’ve got your young man working hard to build his wings, all the while receiving warnings to be careful – in this case, Louise heeding Brewster to avoid sexual relationships.
And then there’s the academic narration drawing comparisons between the characteristics of the folks who inhabit the film and different fowl. The Astrodome is a birdcage, which, is therefore a trap. Brewster’s workshop is his place of comfort, his nest. With the wings, there’s the need to get out and escape. And this is where I question the lasting relevance of the film. While escape from the mundane is a timeless theme, I’m leaning more toward Altman condemning the artificiality and coldness that modern architecture and technology were bringing forward four decades ago. The Astrodome appears as a horrible place, just like other dome stadiums. But they’re all disappearing now and being replaced by open-air structures with more personality and retractable roofs. Today, technology is helping us maintain the natural, all the while saving games from rain delays. But was Altman really just knocking baseball and football stadiums? I seriously doubt it.
Weird, irrelevant, confusing – these are all feelings I had running through me watching Brewster McCloud. Even still, it left me wanting more. At least after a coffee and some raisin toast. The film left me enough bread crumbs to make me want to go back and further decipher it and enjoy the absurdity of it all. That’s what being challenged is all about. Altman left little doubt that he was a confident director who told the stories he wanted to in the way he wanted. Brewster McCloud is certainly an example of this.
Modern-Day
Icarus tale [Jerry Saravia]
My feeling of "Brewster McCloud" is that it is an allegory of rebellion and freedom in the 1970's - to be a non-conformist and follow your own road, your own yellow brick road. Though the movie is full of "Wizard of Oz" homages, "Brewster McCloud" is as unconventional and inaccessible as any movie can get by the usually deeply inaccessible Robert Altman, and yet as evocative of the magic of movies as any other.
Bud Cort is Brewster McCloud, a young man who steals Nikon cameras and cars, strangles people (!), lives in the Houston Astrodome's fallout shelter, and is building wings so he can fly freely in the Astrodome, Icarus-style. Sally Kellerman is a guardian angel of sorts who is nude when bathing Brewster, and helps to serve as a distraction so Brewster can go about town creating havoc. In the beginning of the film, Brewster is a limousine driver for a racist, wheelchair-bound millionaire (Stacy Keach, in old age makeup) who fires people on the spot. Brewster seems to have some animosity but he never expresses it verbally or emotionally, and the stranglings are all off-screen. Racist, piggish characters are instantly eliminated, whereas young Bohemian chicks are embraced, especially one with pigtails who is aroused by Brewster's pull-ups.
What sort of movie is "Brewster McCloud"? I can only say that it serves as an offbeat antidote to the angry rebel pictures of the past and up to the late 60's and early 70's. It is about rebellion but done with a muted and naturalistic style, completely Altmanesque in every manner. There is a little bit of everything here including absurd car chases; birds pooping on people (poop gags were also in stench display in Altman's "Ready to Wear"); a supposedly brilliant cop a'la "Bullitt" (Michael Murphy) with blue contact lenses; Margaret Hamilton as a bad singer who hates black birds and gets her comeuppance in a bird cage; Shelley Duvall in her film debut as an Astrodome tour guide; Rene Auberjonois as a lecturer on birds who slowly transforms into one; a scene on how to test if a marijuana cigarette is marijuana; a silent roar from the MGM lion, not to mention the only time in movie history I can recall a repeat of the film's title and production company within the first few minutes; and perhaps more aviary shots than in any nature documentary.
Bud Cort is mostly stone-faced in this movie, and I believe by design. I would have still liked a little emotion, especially with the subtlety in mannerisms he later expressed in "Harold and Maude." Still, he has got charisma and keeps you glued to his every whim. Shelley Duvall is simply sweet and delightful and completely innocuous. It is really Sally Kellerman, though, who shows understated comic energy as the only person who cares about Brewster. Her final scene is so astounding that it deserves more than a footnote in light of her Academy Award nomination the same year for Altman's "MASH."
"Brewster McCloud" has been one of the least-known of Altman's films, right up there with "O.C. and Stiggs" and "Quintet." The only way it has been seen since its theatrical release is on television, laserdisc and limited VHS copies. Ultimately, it is Brewster's final flight of freedom that showcases not just Brewster but Altman himself. They are both iconoclasts who take risks and, in some cases, suffer the consequences. Outside of "Nashville" and "Short Cuts," it may be Altman's most personal film.
Out of the Past: Brewster McCloud Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View,
originally published in Movietone
News, August 1976
BREWSTER
McCLOUD (Robert Altman, 1970) - Money Into ... Paul Rowlands from Money Into Light
Tales
From the Warner Archives #8: "Brewster McCloud" Glenn Kenny from Some Came Running
Every
Robert Altman Movie: Brewster McCloud (1970) Wilbert Takken
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The
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eFilmCritic.com
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Qwipster's
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The Japan Times
[Giovanni Fazio]
Baltimore City Paper
(Bret McCabe) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
also seen here: rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert]
The
New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
also seen here: The New York Times
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary W. Tooze
Brewster McCloud -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MCCABE & MRS. MILLER A 100
USA
All you've cost me so
far is money and pain...Pain, pain, pain...
—John McCabe (Warren Beatty)
Traveling lady,
stay a while
until the night is over.
I’m just a station on your way;
I know I’m not your lover.
—Leonard Cohen, “Winter Lady” Leonard Cohen - Winter Lady YouTube (2:17)
Much like jazz music,
the movie western is uniquely American, born and bred in this nation, where there
is a unique relationship with Americans to westerns, which took the world of
television by storm in popular long running programs like Gunsmoke (1955 – 75) and Bonanza
(1959 – 73), television staples of the 60’s and 70’s, where Altman actually
directed some of these early episodes.
There are the Western purists, who tend to favor the traditional John
Ford westerns, and there are the revisionists who attempt to break down the
myths and stereotypes created by the exaggerated news coverage, hastily written
dime store novels, and the first 100 years of cinema, often at odds with one
another. While John Ford lauded the
bravery of a few rugged individuals that literally won the West from “savage”
Indians and dreaded outlaws, where good triumphs over evil, paving the way for
laws and civilization to follow, The
Ox-Bow Incident (1943) is often considered the first modern western, a
grim, ultra realistic look quite ahead of its time without a touch of false
sentiment, going against the grain with an unglamorous story that has little
action to speak of, but could be considered an anti-Western, moving away from
those immense landscapes of Indian wars, gunfights, stagecoach robberies, or
outlaw shoot outs, narrowing the focus, becoming smaller in scope, literally
exposing a defining moment when no heroes rush in to save the day.
Altman’s film follows in the footsteps and could certainly be described as an
anti-western, where rather than focus upon the myths of the frontier or rugged
individualism, the director takes a particular interest in re-defining period
authenticity, imagining it as the messy business that it likely was,
deconstructing myths while creating a scathing critique of American history,
suggesting it was the “savage” and unchecked capitalism in the West that
steamrolled over everything in its path, grabbing whatever it wanted through
greed and brute force, where the conquering of the West is no noble ideal, but
part of the inevitable movement of capitalism, the outward growth of economic
power.
While many
traditionalists really despise this movie for not having the very elements that
it admires in a western, especially heroicism, yet it’s one of the richest
works in the entire western genre, where the gentle lyricism is unparalleled,
often listed as among the greatest westerns of all time, #1 here, The
50 greatest westerns – Film – Time Out London, and #2 here: IMDb:
Top 20 Greatest Western Movies of All Time (The Ultimate List ..., and #8
here: Western - AFI: 10 Top 10. While Ford mourns the passing of the
frontier, and with it the loss of individual freedoms which make way for
strengthened law abiding communities, Altman sees no healing spirit, but simply
the lies of the western mythology, suggesting rural communities miles from
anywhere only reinforce a feeling of abject loneliness and isolation. What Altman values is tone and atmosphere above
action, where this could be the most authentic representation of wilderness
life and the most gorgeously poetic western ever made, filmed by Hungarian
cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, whose earlier career had only included
B-movies, making this his finest work, where Altman insisted upon a specific
color palette to capture the look of an old photograph, briefly exposing the
film stock to light in order to fade it, also using filters to diffuse the
colors, and “to compliment the period, the set and the look of the
people.” Warner Brothers was furious
with the original footage, but Altman blamed the Canadian film processing
company, suggesting they could fix it in
Coming shortly after
MASH (1970), where the director first used layered, multi-track sound, this is
one of the more extreme uses of overlapping dialogue with multiple
conversations going on at once where the audience has to pick and choose which
ones to pay attention to, often hearing only bits and pieces, but that’s
enough, as the keenly established atmosphere is the main thing, offering the
audience a chance to eavesdrop into a piece of the American West in the early
1900’s. Similarly, there are few
utterances coming out of lead actor Warren Beatty as John McCabe that don’t
sound a bit mumbled or lost in the various conversations, where he’s often
captured humorously talking to himself, often inebriated, yet his overall
thought process remains clear by observing his actions, where others usually
defer to him or make space for him at a table.
Adapted by Brian McKay from the little-known 1959 novel McCabe by Edmund Naughton that is filled
with western cliché’s, Altman places his own stamp on the film from the outset,
setting his town in the damp and chilly rain of the Pacific Northwest close to
the Canadian border instead of the dry and dusty deserts bordering on
Mexico. Here drowning in nature, it is
always wet and cold, and later on it snows.
McCabe’s initial entrance as a lone man slowly riding into town over the
opening credits wearing a giant bearskin coat is a classic, Leonard Cohen McCabe
& Ms Miller opening scene YouTube (4:55), walking into a dark saloon,
having a look around, and then returning to his horse where he brings in a red
cloth that he neatly places over a table.
Before he is even halfway through, men are pulling up chairs. Known only as McCabe, a gambler, the
bartender (René Auberjonois) immediately starts spreading rumors about his
alleged past, which includes shooting a man at a card game, warning the men
“That man’s got a big rep boys, he’s got a big rep.” When McCabe sees the awe that this story
inspires, he neither acknowledges nor denies the rumors, but uses it to enhance
his elevated stature among the men. One
common element in western lore is the mysterious stranger is always portrayed
as a man whose reputation precedes him.
Here it’s accompanied by the gloomy and prophetic voice of Leonard Cohen
singing “He was just some Joseph looking for a manger.” Leonard Cohen: The Stranger
Song - YouTube (
McCabe’s big idea is
building a saloon and whorehouse, with an attached bathhouse, and bringing
prostitutes into the nearly all-male world of Presbyterian Church, mostly
filled with builders, miners or prospectors, men used to working outdoors who
rarely ever see a woman, much less take a bath, which seems compatible with
images of a half-built town where structures remain unfinished throughout the
film. In this town, besides work, there’s
little else to do besides drink, gamble, and partake in the pleasures of women,
where McCabe brings in three of the most unrefined and ragged women on the
planet that work out of outdoor tents, one with no teeth, another largely
oversized, but they’re an instant hit in this scruffy town layered in mud and
filth, though one is quickly seen stabbing a man with an unexpected
ferocity. Enter Mrs. Miller, Julie
Christie, a sophisticated, take charge woman with a Cockney accent who arrives
in town on a steam engine, bringing along a mail-order bride (Shelly Duvall)
for a man who is soon stabbed to death for defending her from a man who thinks
she’s a prostitute, inadvertantly forcing her to become one, shown simply by
eye contact with Mrs. Miller at the funeral.
McCabe & Mrs. Miller become business partners, a relationship born
out of economic necessity, bringing in high-class prostitutes from San
Francisco, as she knows he doesn’t know the first thing about properly taking
care of the women or running a respectable business, but she needs his investment
capital. Of course, despite McCabe’s
constant griping about “money and pain,” their business is a huge success,
drawing interest throughout the territory, charging a dollar a girl, and a
whopping $5 dollars for the madam of the house, Mrs. Miller herself. The relationship between the two, who were
lovers in real life, is particularly noteworthy, as it takes place almost
entirely under the surface, where both are loath to admit their feelings and
instead sit on opposite ends of the bar in near silence counting their daily
profits, with McCabe never really admitting to his feelings except when he’s
alone muttering under his breath. While
McCabe is quick to confess “Madam, I’m not here as a customer” when entering
the premises, actually he is, as he’s quite simply amazed at what he sees,
never believing that a bunch of roughnecks would ever be able to appreciate
such classy elegance. Of course he takes
all the credit for building a successful enterprise, eventually drawing the
outside interest of other potential investors, while privately he’s seen paying
the $5 dollars whenever he needs the madam’s company.
This is one of the
first films to capture the visual poetry of the as yet undiscovered Terrence
Malick, whose first feature BADLANDS (1973) was still two years away, as the
rhythm of the film is consistently driven by the unique beauty of the imagery,
where the golden interior lamplight in otherwise darkened rooms has a painterly
detail that matches the extraordinary outdoor beauty of the natural landscape,
where it looks like a town is built in the middle of a vast timber forest. As the weather turns colder, the plot
darkens, taking a bleak turn when two businessmen from a wealthy company show
up interested in the nearby mining deposits, wanting to buy out all of McCabe’s
interests. They are simply baffled at
McCabe’s uncouth business manner and can’t make any headway with him, as to
their amazement he turns down their offers, leaving them little choice but to
send in the hired guns to do the talking.
McCabe never realizes the full implications of his actions, always
thinking he was negotiating, driving a hard bargain to up their price, but Mrs.
Miller is more astute, telling him you don’t say no to men like that, and she
fears for his life, knowing at any minute that the next men riding into town
could be the killers. By the time McCabe
sees the error of his ways, the businessmen are long gone, leaving behind an
oppressive emptiness of fear and dread, which is a signal for the snow to fall. In the wintry landscape, filled with an
ethereal silence, the hand of fate is about to call John McCabe’s bluff. How it plays out is what separates this film
from other westerns, as the suspense is palpable, but the unique beauty is a
joy to behold, showing Altman at the peak of his creative powers, bringing all
the forces together in a snowy choreography of doom, allowing nature to take
its course. Snow falls steadily
throughout the finale, showing at first a heartbreakingly senseless death of an
innocent, which is just a prelude for the main course, told with a wordless
precision, including an apocalyptic fire that threatens to destroy the entire
community. Altman brings us back to the
Western myth, of an ultimate showdown between the individual pitted against the
threat of more powerful forces, where it’s hopeless to think he can win, as
hopeless as Gary Cooper in HIGH NOON (1952), or Alan Ladd in SHANE (1953),
iconic moments in Western mythology, breaking new grounds here where all hope
gives way to an inevitable end of Manifest Destiny. While the town rejoices in saving itself,
reminding us there is power in numbers, they’re cluelessly unaware of the fight
taking place in their midst, where exhilaration soon gives way to an exhaustive
and mournful death of the frontier myth, where a man is undone by refusing a
business deal and believing in the mistaken notion that he is a gunfighter, a
hero despite himself, whose heroic actions are never seen by anyone, who dies
for no noble purpose or higher cause, but for absolutely nothing, shown here in
the sad and devastating, yet magnificent ending sequence McCabe
& Mrs. Miller - Finale YouTube (4:18).
Joshua Klein from 1001
MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
At the peak of his 1970’s powers director Robert Altman seemed capable of anything. Even so, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, arriving between M*A*S*H and Nashville, is something special, an elelgiac tale of the Old West imbued with a sense of contemporary filmmaking adventure. Set in the Pacific Northwest in the early 1900’s, the film stars a quiet Warren Beatty as the titular braggart, a cowardly by charismatic man who has lucked into a position of power. But the nature of the country is changing around him, and Beatty can’t see the inevitable, violent consequences of progress for all his narcissistic pipe dreams.
Altman wanted his film to capture the feeling of an old photograph, so he instructed cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond to flash-expose the film, resulting in a heavy haze that hangs over the image. Another brilliant decision was the use of Leonard Cohen for the film’s anachronistic soundtrack, as the singer-songwriter’s gloomy folk music perfectly suits the somber mood and darkly lit, snowy scenery. But best of all may be the casting of Julie Christie as an opium-addicted madam. She lends the role an ethereal quality at odds with Beatty’s more natural performance as a bearded buffoon in a big fur coat, and hers is a ghostly presence that portends bad things to come.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller mourns the death of the Wild West as it signals the fertile start of the 70’s filmmaking renaissance. The picture is filled with striking widescreen imagery as well as Altman’s usual roving camerawork, but the exercise exudes a palpable sadness here. McCabe and Mrs. Miller’s message seems to be that progress and capitalism go hand in hand, and not always for the better. The flourishing success of Beatty’s frontier town initially draws workers, then well-wishers, but his hard work and vision mean nothing to the men who ultimately want to take it away. Altman’s view of America as an experiment in Darwinism (accelerated with guns) might strike some as cynical, but the spectral visuals lend the film a palpable sadness that supplants any specific message.
Time Out David
Jenkins
One of the best of Altman's early movies, using classic themes - the ill-fated love of gambler and whore, the gunman who dies by the gun, the contest between little man and big business - to produce a non-heroic Western. McCabe (Beatty) hasn't the grand dimensions of a Ford, Fuller or Leone hero; he is an amiable braggart, a bungling lover, a third-rate entrepreneur with chronic indigestion and a penchant for bad jokes. Mrs Miller (Christie) is a whorehouse madame who prefers her opium pipe to McCabe's amorous overtures. Their relationship is to a large extent a mournful background to Altman's central concern of chronicling the harsh conditions of life in a rawly developing mining town in the Northwest. His vision of the role of the individual represents another removal from genre tradition. Confronted with the primitive character of social organisation and the brutality of nature, Altman's Westerner is insignificant, isolated and vulnerable; his survival is chancy, a question of luck rather than skill.
Robert
Altman: McCabe and Mrs Miller | Film | The Guardian Derek Malcolm, December 23, 1999
A great many westerns can be roughly divided into Democrat or Republican variants of the genre - Fred Zinnemann's liberal High Noon, and Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks's riposte to that film, being obvious examples. But there are some which manage to transcend such considerations.
Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller - one of the three best films he ever made - is surely an example. It's like no other western I've seen. For one thing, Altman's heroes are hardly the stuff of western legend. One (Warren Beatty) is a rather seedy pimp-cum-entrepreneur, who rides into the shell of a small frontier town determined, somehow or other, to get rich. The other is a tough cockney (Julie Christie), who convinces him that, if he wants to start something like a brothel, he ought to have a competent manager of women. Which is her.
These two are very human characters, nothing like as confident as they would have us believe. The actors playing them, as often happens in Altman pictures, seem to subsume their star personalities in a way most well-known faces in westerns signally fail to do. And surrounding them is a town growing up before our eyes as a wet autumn progresses into a cold winter.
It's the kind of movie that eavesdrops not just on its cast but also on the grocery stores, the saloons, the brothels, and the weather too. One critic has said that the camera is so unobtrusive that you feel everybody continues their conversations long after the filming has ended. This, of course, is Altman's great strength. But he has seldom employed it with more discipline, though to say the film is beautifully staged somehow betrays it.
What the pair of potential misfits want is to get out of this canvas-tented dump and go back to San Francisco, where the real money, and the real con artists are. But then, just as it looks as if they'll eventually make it, the enforcers come to town. They are prepared to kill people who won't sell out to the mining company, and their first victim, who is murdered on the suspension bridge that leads across the river to the general store, is a nice kid who meant no harm to anyone. It's a superb sequence, and it tells you everything.
Later, as the church burns during an eerie snowstorm and the townspeople try to save it, McCabe finally gets his comeuppance, with his lover back in Chinatown, puffing opium. He sits dead in a snowbank almost as if reflecting how money and greed have finally undone him. That's what the film's about - the fact that almost everyone's on the make but the bigger fish eat the smaller ones.
America, Altman once told me, puffing at a cigarette that certainly wasn't tobacco, has been like that from the beginning, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future. The west was built by crooks, not by the patriotic pioneers let loose upon it. Yet this is not a cynical film, though it certainly is ironic. It manages to be romantic and deadly at the same time.
I wrote at the beginning that this beautiful, oddly affecting film is one of the three best Altman movies. The others are Nashville, which is not so much about the state of the union at the time, as some say, but a near-perfect summation of a certain strata of American society in decline, and the relatively unknown Tanner '88, a long television satire, shot during the presidential campaign of that year, which tells us more about the absurdities of American politics than we would comfortably wish to know. At his best, Altman is a treasure we should cherish, warts and all.
McCabe
and Mrs Miller | Neil Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge
McCabe and Mrs Miller is usually bracketed as a ‘Western,’ but it’s
really a hazy, opiate dream of a Western. And, since it takes place up
in
He’s a gambler with a gunslinger’s reputation – a ‘big rep’ he’ll neither confirm nor deny. Presbyterian Church has never seen anything like this brash smooth-talker, who sets up business pimping a trio of homely whores. But when English madam Mrs Miller (Christie) passes through, she not only spots McCabe for the opportunistic small-timer he really is, but also the potential for a more professional kind of ‘establishment.’ She’s spot-on – things go so swimmingly it isn’t long before a bigger out-of-town operation makes a bid for the place. But McCabe turns out to be an even more incompetent negotiator than he was a pimp, and his refusal to play ball has tragic repercussions as the suave men with contracts are replaced by ruthless men with guns…
McCabe comes during the middle of Altman’s five-year golden period between M*A*S*H (1970) and Nashville (1975), and, like all his best movies, it’s two hours of loose drift, of floating camera, improvised dialogue, sudden cuts. The movie is deliberately murky, unresolved, and visually this is fine, -- Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography plays with golds, greens, sepia tints to make an oddly Russian landscape, constantly threatened by snow and frost, just as the free-flowing camera captures Mrs Miller’s opium reveries. Sound-wise, however, it’s more problematic: Altman’s experiments with multiple microphones are still at an early stage, and the dialogue is often muddy. This wouldn’t be too much of a distraction, except it occasionally obscures some key plot points, requiring audiences to pay unusually close attention, just as, in the remarkable final shot, the opium-tripping Mrs Miller loses herself in minute scrutiny of a miniature bloodstone ornament. As the camera zooms in, the vase takes on the portentous dimensions of a planet, a mysterious lost world…
This is Altman’s technique – a close examination of the textures of time and place, building up a patchwork of rough edges to construct a convincing vision of the past, all throwaway glimpses, fragments, characters. It’s a believably impermanent 1902 of hand-written signs, half-built churches, improvised streets, legends, myths. His sets have hollow floors, and the characters’ boots resound as they walk. This is a town as work-in-progress, with history in permanent flux: the business of the American people is, emphatically, business, and although the place is named ‘Presbyterian Church,’ the real centres of the community are Mrs Miller’s whorehouse, and the bar run by innocuous Irishman Sheehan (Rene Auberjonois). The church is little more than a bric-a-brac storeroom, the priest (if that’s what he is) a peripheral weirdo, a Jesus freak unnoticed until he’s caught in crossfire of the final showdown – a jarringly Peckinpah-esque moment of gory bloodshed.
Altman’s movie deconstructs the
underlying frontier myths than underpin American society, showing how easily
legends can be born and perpetuated in this legend-hungry, not-quite-real ‘new’
land. Typically, he sometimes plays this for laughs – McCabe was once known,
we’re told, as ‘Pudgy,’ and we actually hear the out-of-towners’ heavy, an
Englishman named
This is what gives the film its backbone – Altman’s ever-present flippancy otherise might allow the film to float harmlessly into whimsy. Though there’s much humour in the movie (and McCabe is, essentially, a comic figure, even borderline buffoonish) it’s a serious film, as the presence of so many extracts from Leonard Cohen on the soundtrack should underline. The Cohen songs are a much-criticised element of McCabe, but they’re sufficiently timeless to earn their place – they certainly help the tone of the film to gradually deepen and darken, shifting into unambiguously sombre, downbeat territory with the famous, heart-stopping ‘rope-bridge’ sequence featuring Keith Carradine as a doomed young cowpoke.
This readies us for the breathlessly tense, largely silent finale in which McCabe must finally prove himself a man of action in the heat of battle: a tricky feat, since he’s always been mainly concerned with constructing a carapace of words, not armour or bullets. He’s always either mumbling to himself, or to us, or sounding off to the other characters, using colourful, salty language – a front which now, he realises, only goes so far. Mrs Miller, all business as usual, diagnoses his problem straight away: “Another frontier wit…” is her damning dismissal, just as she mocks his ‘Jockey Club’ cologne. She soon establishes that he can’t add up, that he isn’t especially bright, that he’s all bluff, a Gatsby before his time – perhaps, when it comes down to it, not quite worth dying for.
Christie is fine in a tricky role,
although there are times when she overdoes the
But there’s a reason why
Senses
of Cinema [Adrian Danks] September
2000, also seen here: "Just
Some Jesus Looking for a Manger: McCabe & Mrs. Miller"
10.
McCabe and Mrs. Miller | Wonders in the Dark James Clark, November 25, 2013
Ruthless
Reviews [Hondo] (Potentially Offensive)
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Leo Goldsmith]
McCabe
and Mrs. Miller - Turner Classic Movies
Michael Atkinson
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
McCabe
& Mrs. Miller | Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
McCabe
& Mr. Milch | The House Next Door | Slant Magazine Deadwood
and McCabe & Mrs. Miller, from Matt Zoller Seitz from Slant, March 6, 2006
Newsweek David
Ansen on Robert Altman’s Lagacy from Newsweek, November 21, 2006
The
Listening Ear considers "McCabe" at length, in the context of
Jean-Luc Godard's movies
Bill
Roundtree Writings about Mostly
Film
Jerry's
Armchair Oscars or . . . They Wuz Robbed [Jerry Dean Roberts]
erasing clouds film
review: nashville & mccabe and mrs miller Dan Heaton from Erasing Clouds
Filming
McCabe & Mrs. Miller in Vancouver - PopMatters Regan Payne
Notes
of a Film Fanatic (Mat Viola)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller -
Salon.com Charles Taylor from Salon,
March 21, 1997
Arctic Shores Contemporary Reviews Bob Miller
The DVD
Journal | Reviews : McCabe & Mrs. Miller Gregory P. Dorr
digitallyOBSESSED.com
[Mark Zimmer]
McCabe & Mrs. Miller/DVD
Review/Dan Schneider - Cosmoetica
also seen here: The
Spinning Image [Dan Schneider]
Movie
Metropolis [John J. Puccio]
Fulvue
Drive-in [Nate Goss]
KQEK Mark R. Hasan
The
Wit of the Staircase on "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." on the occasion of Altman’s 81st
birthday, March 20, 2006
Combustible
Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Robert
Altman - Director - Films as Director:, Other ... - Film Reference Charles Derry
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Whine-Colored
Sea short reflections. March 3, 2006
What Dope Does to Movies
| Jonathan Rosenbaum March 18, 2001
Thoughts
on Stuff Patrick
ALTMAN'S
“McCABE & MRS. MILLER” | TSY REQUIRED VIEWING ... great photos at The Selvedge Yard
The Guardian Xan
Brooks
McCabe
and Mrs Miller Philip French from The Observer
Cleveland
Press [Tony Mastroianni]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times July 30, 1971
McCabe
and Mrs. Miller Movie Review (1971) | Roger Ebert November 14, 1999
New
York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen
here: Movie
Review - McCabe Mrs Miller - McCABE AND MRS. MILLER
McCabe
and Mrs. Miller - Julie Christie - DVDBeaver.com Stan Czarnecki
McCabe
& Mrs. Miller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
IMAGES B+ 92
USA Great Britain Ireland
I’m not really making
love with him. That will make anything
all right.
—Cathryn (Susannah York)
Made at the peak of his
creative powers between McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (1971) and The
Long Goodbye (1973), two of the director’s most memorable works, Altman
made this strange little film about schizophrenia, the second of his “Female
Subjectivity” Trilogy, coming between That
Cold Day In the Park (1969) and 3 Women
(1977). While it’s not hard to imagine a
little girl living in a fantasy world of fairy tales and dreams, viewed as the
picture of innocence, yet here’s it’s a beautiful grown woman who appears
equally stuck in an imaginary world, a strange and haunting place where the world
is not as it seems, where reality comes and goes with the whims of the
imagination, all running together creating a peculiar netherworld, much like
the macabre and sinister universe of Carl Dreyer’s VAMPYR (1932), but this is
the world as she sees it, where she seemingly floats in and out of both worlds,
as the film takes place almost entirely inside a woman’s subconscious. It’s interestingly one of the least
Altmanesque films the director has ever made, where it doesn’t feature
overlapping dialogue, a multitude of characters, multiple themes, several
events happening simultaneously within the same frame, or an improvisational
feel, instead it has a narrow focus, perhaps his most complete foray into the
horror genre with its array of creepy effects, venturing into the Dario Argento
art house horror genre to reveal one woman’s descent into madness. Susannah York won the Best Actress Award at
the premiere in Cannes, where Sandra Dennis in That
Cold Day In the Park is a direct link to
Susannah York here, offering a striking performance as the central character
Cathryn, where the camera never leaves her, as Altman uses a more experimental
style to capture a woman caught between two worlds, both merging into one
another, with a brilliant sound design by musical composer John Williams and
Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta, mixing wind chimes fluttering in the
breeze with special sound effects to reflect her altered state of
consciousness, where the audience is continually questioning what is real and
what isn’t. Cathryn has a complacently
bourgeois husband Hugh, René Auberjonois, who sees the world as it is,
representing one reality, combined with the world as it appears to her, where
the majority of the film is reflective of her continuously fluctuating interior
moods. When viewed as a cultural
oppression of women, there seems to be little fallback position, as Cathryn
both rebels against and then withdraws from her real husband, inventing
alternative options only through an abnormal psychology, perhaps viewed as
unfathomable by men, where throughout the trilogy Altman deals with the crises
of women through various internalized neuroses.
On the other hand, it’s not too far fetched to see the film as a
portrait of an artist, seeing the world much as Cathryn does, where the jagged
edges of creative artistry continually fluctuate and evolve over time.
Originating from an
Altman idea, the film is brilliantly shot in Ireland around a lakeland location
of Lough Bray, County Wicklow by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, with
breathtaking panoramic vistas capturing a wintry desolation, where much of this
film has a painterly appearance, beautifully mixing the natural pastoral beauty
outside, occasionally delving into fantasy, with exquisitely designed interior
sets by Leon Ericksen that reflect a super modern look, where each door or room
leads to another world, all feeding into Cathryn’s psychosis. Opening with a story that she’s writing that
at the same time is taking her into a world that is frightening, the entire
film is layered in a children’s book called In
Search of Unicorns, a children’s fantasy novel actually written by Susannah
York that she narrates throughout, where the story is her escapism from her
twisted sense of reality, finding comfort in the safety of children’s images,
where things the audience sees appear to be other things to her. Throughout the film, the presence of the
camera gives the viewer the intimate effect of being outside looking in, where
there are strange incongruities throughout, becoming a fascinating portrait of
mental instability, much of it captured with dreamlike imagery. The audience is immediately struck by her
distorted sense of reality, where she suspects her husband of sexual
indiscretions that exist only in her own mind, which is probably her way of
avoiding her own indiscretions. Perhaps
the biggest jolt is when her husband Hugh turns into someone who isn’t there,
René (Marcel Bozzuffi), a ghost from the past who has come to pay a visit,
where the “visitor” remains to her just as real as anything else. While she tries to ignore the reappearance of
these haunting apparitions, knowing in some instances (a dead lover) they’re
not really there, but they inevitably lure her into their sexual fantasies
where she relives past experiences in her life that are most likely based on
real occurrences, where for her, the present and the past exist simultaneously,
like a kind of involuntary time traveling, which is especially evident in a
scene when she stands atop a hill overlooking a view of herself pulling into a
driveway below. It’s not a stretch to
think this influenced Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), with Jack Nicholson
similarly gazing down into the maze at the Overlook Hotel, tracking his wife
and son as they navigate its corridors.
When her husband Hugh
takes her out to their country estate, a dream cottage beautifully located on a
lake and within walking distance of a majestic waterfall in what appears to be
a magical forest with a herd of sheep running free, Cathryn continues to see
visions, having violent episodes often when she’s left alone, where the world
closes in on her much like Catherine Deneuve’s hallucinations in Roman
Polanski’s REPULSION (1965). Haunted by
unwelcome memories that she tries to suppress, and the thought of a lonely
childhood where she was often forced to “invent” friends, we’re never told
specifically what is ailing Cathryn, or if the frequency and intensity of her
schizophrenic episodes have grown more acute.
Instead, alone with the subjective point of view of the central figure,
the audience is reeled into the same claustrophobic existence where these
episodes are conspiring against her.
Hugh also brings home a creepy old friend, Marcel (Hugh Millais), who
has recently obtained custody of his 12-year old daughter Susannah (Cathryn
Harrison), who bears a striking resemblance to a young Cathryn. The lecherous Marcel instantly hits on
Cathryn, much like René, with both characters (along with her husband) feeling
almost interchangeable, where they obviously have some history, though it’s
Susannah that attracts the attention of Cathryn, where they’re both seen
attempting to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of what turns out to be the
country house where they live, where it’s clear in Susannah she sees a younger
version of herself, fused together in a mirror image out of Bergman’s PERSONA
(1966), where the lines of reality are blurred, mixed with the fantasy elements
of the story and the nearby magical forest.
Marcel’s perceived sexual aggressiveness is fended off while at the same
time succumbed to, where he tells her, “You know what you are? You’re a schizo one minute fighting like a
tiger and the next all love and kisses.”
Because she imagines characters that don’t exist, she can’t distinguish
whether his sexual advances are real, though she eventually confronts her
“visitors,” awakening something deeply unsettling inside that resembles a
madness within, where eventually the dead mix with what’s real, and she’s left
questioning what she’s done. Cathryn is
always quick to invent fictitious scenarios to explain what otherwise resembles
a catastrophe, as schizophrenics that live with this condition are used to
covering up their hallucinations, where they routinely invent excuses or lies
to convince others that everything’s all right, even as they are slipping
further into the void.
By the end, Altman’s
film resembles the surreal landscape of David Lynch’s LOST HIGHWAY (1997) with
its infamous identity schism. Cathryn
drives along the road at night returning back to the city for what she believes
is her waiting husband, where she encounters along the way, among other things,
haunting images of ghosts, including one of herself beckoning for help, “Let me
in Cathryn. What’s the matter with you?”
where she is literally fighting for control of her own soul, which appears
fragile and easily lost in the mist. She
thinks she has a handle on her visions, growing elated at the thought all the
ghosts are gone, leaving her feeling somewhat euphoric, driving ecstatically
through a phantasmagorical world of brightly saturated colors, illusion and
hallucination, where Altman loves to use shots through glass, odd camera
angles, zoom in and out of focus, or use mirrored images that serve as
reflections of the past, providing an altered expression of reality, where the
camera sees what Cathryn sees throughout, a window into schizophrenia. The entire film plays out like a nightmarish
fever dream that literally breathes psychological intensity, using eerie and
atmospheric sounds of percussion along with weird images that seem to offer a
view of the occult. The film is an
impressionistic drama that takes us on a mysterious journey into the maze of a
mental labyrinth, where each twist and turn leaves us even further removed from
where we started. By the end, Cathryn
remains an Alice down the rabbit hole enigma and has only retreated further
into her stories, where her grip on reality is even less tenuous, relying upon
the kindness of others, “Hugh will be here in a moment and we’ll see who’s here
and who isn’t.” The complex and smartly
thought-out film is well acted, beautifully constructed, and not like anything
else Altman has ever done, where he presents the fear and isolation associated
with a personality disorder, showing how little support and actual
communication is offered, reflecting the depths of alienation and trauma. One of the clever touches is Altman creating
characters using the real names of the actors, where Cathryn is played by
Susannah York, Susannah is played by Cathryn Harrison, René is played by Marcel
Bozzuffi, Marcel is played by Hugh Millais, and Hugh is played by René
Auberjonois. The film was originally
released in Chicago at the Biograph Theater on a double bill with Nicolas
Roeg’s Don't
Look Now (1973), both emotionally cold films, but dreamy, psychologically
obtuse thrillers having much in common, particularly in the extraordinary
visual compositions and artful expression of a fractured reality, but this is
one of the few Altman films that actually excels in weaving a tightly
constructed narrative.
Time
Out Geoff Andrew
Underrated film about a lonely
woman cracking up and suffering disturbing hallucinations about sex and death.
Unlike most of Altman's movies, which parody and reinvent genres, Images
stands rather in a loose trilogy with That Cold Day in the Park and 3
Women, in its investigation of madness and its concentration upon a female
character. The fragmented style of the film, in which
10
Robert Altman Films You May Not Know|The Playlist
Sandwiched between two of his most celebrated artistic triumphs ("McCabe and Mrs. Miller" on one side, "The Long Goodbye" on the other), "Images" is something of a doodle – an intense, psychosexual thriller in the vein of "Repulsion" or "Don't Look Now" (released the following year) – but a wildly entertaining, impressively acted doodle nonetheless. The movie centers around (and is narrated by, in some of Altman's very best writing) Cathryn (Susannah York), a wealthy children's book author. One night at their home (which looks like a quasi-futuristic hobbit hole, in the way only '70s architecture and design can), Cathryn receives a series of disturbing phone calls indicating that her husband (Rene Auberjonois) is having an affair. When he returns home she confronts him, and he seemingly changes into another man altogether. (In one dizzyingly impressive shot the camera starts on York talking to the other man, played by Marcel Bozzuffi, who suddenly transforms into Auberjonois. The choreography boggles the mind.) Her husband suggests that they retreat to a cabin in the countryside, which is never a great idea, and the madness and intensity only escalates, with Cathryn tempted by adultery and plagued with visions of the mystery man and her own devilish doppelganger. "Images" is embroidered with pervasive weirdness – everything from the driving gloves Auberjonois is always wearing to sequences later in the movie when a rotting corpse lies on the kitchen floor, more a nuisance than anything else. In many ways a kind of companion piece to the similarly dreamlike "3 Women," "Images" is anchored by an utterly fearless, compulsively watchable performance by York (she bares body and soul) and Altman's razor-sharp screenplay. Scary, funny, and totally nightmarish, "Images" (the title refers to the images York is seeing and a heavy old camera that features predominantly in the plot) is definitely an Altman oddity worth seeking out.
Images (Robert Altman, 1972) | When Canses Were ... Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled
Before getting into the film proper, a digression: what the hell
happened to leading female performances like Susannah York’s? I remember a few
years back Pauline Kael remarked of Good Will Hunting that, although she
found the film worthless (agreed), she found Minnie Driver’s voice a pleasant
distraction. “She has a wonderful gurgly quality of voice,” she said something
like. Susannah York has a gurgly, husky, kazoo voice not unlike her
contemporary Glenda Jackson’s. She also has a hell-banshee squeal of a scream.
But what I’m truly talking about, I think, is her sexuality. In this, the age
of the abstinence movement in school sex education, female performances like
The Bottom Shelf Scott von Doviak from the High Hat (excerpt)
If nothing else, Cold Day served as a dry run for Images, Altman’s freaky 1972 descent into feminine madness. For many years, Images could be seen only in rare theatrical retrospectives or on a hazy nth-generation VHS bootleg. Indeed, it was oft rumored that Columbia Pictures had destroyed the original negative, but the film’s 2003 DVD release put the kibosh on that theory. (And while it’s great that the picture is now widely available and that Vilmos Zsigmond’s usual stunning cinematography has been restored to full crispness and clarity, it is the duty of the Bottom Shelf to advance the heretical notion that Images was actually a more haunting, disturbing viewing experience on the bootleg tape, when its images were at their murkiest. But anyway.)
Like Cold Day, Images hinges on a woman with issues between the ears. In this case it’s Catherine (Susannah York), a schizophrenic writing a children’s book about unicorns. While waiting for her husband Hugh (Rene Aberjonois) to return home from work one night, Catherine received a series of ominous phone calls from an unidentified woman warning her of her husband’s infidelities. As it turns out, it is Catherine who has been unfaithful, as we learn when the couple takes a vacation retreat to their cottage in the countryside. Catherine is visited by not only her current lover Marcel (Hugh Millais), but former lover Rene (Marcel Bozzuffi) who is, curiously, long deceased. These visitations are anything but linear; at various points Marcel and Rene appear without warning, sometimes shifting identities with each other or even with Hugh. On some level, Catherine is aware this can’t all be real, and she attempts to rid herself of these hallucinations in the most expedient manner: with knives and guns. And then ... how to put this without spoiling the climax? Her actions lack the requisite clarity of mind to be entirely successful. In fact, things could hardly go worse.
The director himself would likely be loath to frame it in these
terms, but make no mistake: Images is a horror movie, and Altman pushes
all the right buttons with his array of creepy effects. He employs a
nerve-rattling soundtrack (by John Williams, no less) featuring wind chimes and
bizarre electronic noises courtesy of Japanese percussionist Stomu Yamash’ta.
He makes the most of the film’s remote, nearly mythical location (although shot
in
Images probably takes itself a little too seriously (its Euro-artiness is most apparent when the end credits roll and we see that the characters share their names with the actors, but that Rene played Hugh and Hugh played Marcel and so on) and it may not add up to much more than “Wimmins - they sure is crazy!” But it’s an unsettling creepshow nonetheless.
Despite the fact that Susannah York goes all in with her performance, embracing the madness and even supplying the spooky “In Search of Unicorns” narrative layered over the proceedings, her guilt-ridden serial adulterer isn’t much more than the flipside of Sandy Dennis’ repressed spinster. Neither Cold Day nor Images offers compelling evidence to change the mind of anyone who views Altman as a misogynistic filmmaker, but the third entry in this loose trilogy of crazy lady features is another matter.
Images Mark Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
I am continuing to fill in my Altman gaps. Images
is another striking, important, neglected film, although about as different as
you could imagine from my other recent Altman rediscovery, A Perfect Couple.
One of the ways in which it is different is subtle. A Perfect Couple
is a "sport," both within film history and within Altman's oeuvre.
Its closest filmic relations, and they are not even that close, are with other
Altman films; but essentially, it is out there on its own, a glorious oddity,
of uncertain parentage and with no progeny.
Images, despite its obscurity and persistent non-availability, is
situated quite differently: it is connected in a dozen ways to other films and
film-makers; it has obvious parents and children; it is deeply embedded in both
film history and its particular cinematic moment.
Images focuses intensely on the mental breakdown of an upper middle
class woman played by Susannah York, and takes place largely at a remote
country house in a magnificent Irish landscape. Psychological thrillers and
psychological art films were something of a rage in the Sixties and Seventies.
Altman has admitted explicitly that Bergman's Persona was his
starting-point and is in "the DNA" of Images. Patrick
McGilligan in his Altman biography Jumping Off the Cliff states that:
Altman has said that, with Images, he wanted to make a Joseph Losey- type
film. Losey was one of those few film directors, like Huston and Welles, whom
Altman would admit to admiring.
Losey, a great and singularly under-rated director, is worthy of Altman's
admiration, and Images indeed bears the Losey stamp. It also has a
good deal of Polanski in it (Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby;
there are also strong affinities with The Tenant, which postdates Images).
A line can be drawn from Images, backward or forward, to almost any
film that depicts mental instability largely from a mentally unstable
protagonist's point of view (Barton Fink and A Beautiful Mind,
to cite two wildly different examples).
McGilligan also positions the film in a quartet of Altman projects having to do
with unstable women: That Cold Day in the Park; Images; Three
Women; Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
Another affinity is with other highly polished, stylized, sharply and precisely
visualized and auralized films: Losey fits there, so does Nicolas Roeg, and I
was strongly reminded of Fassbinder's Chinese Roulette. Images,
like Chinese Roulette, uses plenty of glittering glass, mirror, and
crystal imagery. The cinematography of the justly celebrated Vilmos Zsigmond is
eye-popping, both in the tricky-to-film interiors and the hypnotic landscape
exteriors.
Images also shares its DNA (love that phrase of Altman's!) with, and
perhaps even exerted a direct influence upon, Peter Weir's Picnic at
Hanging Rock, made just a few years later. Images might very well
have played theatrically in Australia; a number of Altman films seem to have
had better distribution abroad than in the United States.
Altman never made a visually and dramatically tighter film than this; his famed
looseness is nowhere in evidence. With a cast of only six and the isolated
setting, Images does play like one of Bergman's famously tight chamber
films; it's reminiscent not just of Persona in that respect, but also
of Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and others.
The actual title on the film's title-frame is Robert Altman's Images,
which is a gambit reminiscent of Fellini and is as acutely self-reflexive a
title as any film-maker has ever dared. Robert Altman's Images,
indeed! That's a signature card for his entire work.
In an interview on the Images DVD, Altman reiterates his
frequently-made point that all his films are installments in an ongoing vision
and that assessments of the installments as being higher or lower in quality
don't matter much to him: if you're interested in the vision, you're interested
in the vision, right? I think we should take Altman seriously on this: it is a
challenge to us to re-frame our way of experiencing films. This is not to say
that there are no differences of quality between films or that those
assessments don't matter; it is to say that, once a director has shown their
artistic distinction and their ability to control their projects without major
compromise, everything they do is interesting and of value because it expresses
their vision.
Look at most of the directors mentioned in this post: Losey, Polanski, Bergman,
Fassbinder, Coen, Fellini, Roeg, Huston, Welles, Weir -- all of them have
tremendous artistic distinction, all control their projects to a very large
extent (certain exceptions involving studio interference easily noted), and I
would therefore advance the thesis that none of them ever made a
"bad" film. We need everything they have done.
This business of charting an artist's work strictly in terms of peaks and
valleys is pop journalism, not serious criticism. Pauline Kael set the tone for
discussion of Altman in her early reviews, which went up and down like a
ping-pong ball; loved MASH, hated Brewster McCloud, loved McCabe
and Mrs. Miller, hated Images (and at that point she said that
since she had discerned a definite alternating hit/miss pattern, she couldn't
wait for his next film). She continued on in that opinioneering way throughout
his career. Kael wrote much that was interesting on Altman, but I would submit
that as his biggest champion, she nonetheless misunderstood the nature of his
work (and everyone else's, frankly) in some very crucial ways. This was because
Pauline Kael didn't care about Robert Altman's vision, shocking as that may
sound; she only cared whether she liked the particular movie,
not how it fit into the pattern of the whole. That's a serious, indeed a
damning flaw in a critic.
Images (1972) «
HORRORPEDIA Stephen Thrower
The
Insane Natural: An Unconscious Film Trilogy - Cinespect Robert Altman’s Images (1972), Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t
Look Now (1973) and Roman Polanski’s The
Tenant (1976), referred to as the “Supernatural/Insanity Trilogy” by
Charles H. Meyer from Cinespect, February 23, 2011
DREAMS ARE
WHAT LE CINEMA IS FOR...: IMAGES 1972
Ken Anderson
The
Cinematic Art: The Altman / Williams connection February 8, 2008
Dispatches
from Zembla: Robert Altman: Images
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The
Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
DVD Savant Review: Images
- DVD Talk Glenn Erickson
DVD Verdict Review - Images Tom Becker
Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey] THAT COLD
DAY IN THE PARK, IMAGES, and 3 WOMEN
The
Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Scopophilia:
Movies of the 60's, 70's, 80's [Richard Winters]
Images
(1972) Review - Man with a Movie Blog
Images rare, beautiful film
defying logic : Film Review : By ...
Tony Macklin
Drifting David Lowery
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Combustible
Celluloid Review - Images (1972), Robert ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Thoughts
on Stuff Patrick
Fantastic
Movie Musings and Ramblings [Dave Sindelar]
Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey]
Whine-Colored
Sea short reflections
Channel
4 Film [capsule review]
Images Movie Review &
Film Summary (1974) | Roger Ebert
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Howard Thompson, October
9, 1972 , also seen here: New York Times Review of "Images",
and again here: Movie
Review - Images - Susannah York Plays Disturbed ...
Images (film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THE LONG GOODBYE A 97
USA
The private eye is
admittedly an exaggeration — a fantasy. But
at least he’s an exaggeration of the possible.
—Raymond Chandler
With the opening and
closing notes to the self-congratulatory sound of “Hooray for
Bogart … is also so much better than any other tough-guy actor that he makes bums of the Ladds and the Powells. As we say here, Bogart can be tough without a gun. Also he has a sense of humor that contains the grating undertone of contempt.
Chandler’s protagonist
Philip Marlowe, along with Hammett’s Sam Spade in John Huston’s THE MALTESE FALCON
(1941), are synonymous with film noir, where in the 40’s Humphrey Bogart is the
quintessential private detective in both films, becoming the archetype against
which all subsequent film detectives were measured, where his tough-guy persona
always oozes masculinity while maintaining a sympathetic appeal, perfectly
capturing the particular flavor of Hammett’s and Chandler's hard-boiled
style. Bogart had the perfect face for
film noir, a face filled with character, one that radiates a world-weary
complexity, exuding strength under fire, as if he had survived many battles
before, where he was right at home when seen with a drink in one hand and a
cigarette in the other, where his keen shrewdness reveals a man of principle
with his own code of honor, where his hard corps cynicism often covers up his
essential decency towards women and his own personal integrity. Chandler was over 60 when he wrote The Long Goodbye in 1953, written while
his wife lay slowly dying, where the novel is more contemplative than his earlier
books, where the author clearly understands that the era of the private eye is
coming to an end, as the mean streets of the city were rapidly expanding into
the comforts and security of the postwar suburbs, which sounded the death knell
for pulp detective writers. From
Altman’s film, Martin Scorsese’s Mean
Streets (1973) and Taxi
Driver (1976), Arthur Penn’s NIGHT MOVES (1975), also Roman Polanski’s
Scriptwriter Leigh
Brackett, who co-scripted Hawks’s THE BIG SLEEP with William Faulkner and Jules
Furthman, was well liked by Howard Hawks, as “she wrote like a man,” but when
she was shopping around her screenplay of Chandler’s last completed novel,
which had never been made into a movie, both Hawks and Peter Bogdanovich turned
it down, with Bogdanovich recommending Altman for the picture, but initially he
also turned it down, as the studios were pushing either Lee Marvin or Robert
Mitchum for the role of Marlowe. It’s
only when Elliot Gould’s name got mentioned, an actor who hadn’t worked in
nearly two years, that Altman expressed an interest, as Gould is the antithesis
of Bogart and the conventional 40’s portrayal of Marlowe, a reinvention of the
character in a different time setting, whee the film tries to recreate the
morals of an earlier time in the Los Angeles landscape of the early 70’s which
had a prevalence of hippies, was caught up in a health food craze, along with
yoga and transcendental meditation, where, according to Altman, “everything is
glazed in a haze of pot smoke,” all new stuff for Marlowe to grasp, where his
chain-smoking is contrasted with the health-conscious southern California world
where no one else in the movie smokes, an example of how out of touch he
remains with his surroundings. Of
interest, Bogart was age 47 when he filmed THE BIG SLEEP, while Robert Mitchum
was 58 when he played the part of Marlowe in FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975), while
Gould was only 34 in this picture. While
he remains a character out of step with the times, a private eye still charging
the 40’s rate of $50 dollars a day plus expenses, always seen wearing a dark
suit and tie while casual wear with open shirts is the theme of the day in
sunny LA, Marlowe drives a classic 1948 Cabriolet Lincoln Continental
Convertible (http://pics.imcdb.org/0ge24/244761-t8.jpg),
which was Elliot Gould’s own car. Gould
is younger, more of a smart aleck, who brings a brash irreverence to the role,
often seen mumbling to himself or completely lost in his own world, where he’s
downright insolent when interrogated by the cops, called a “smartass,” but his
sardonic wit and inspired humor can feel patently absurd, where he’s literally
a walking parody of the profession. Yet
according to Gould, Altman insisted that Marlowe was the only character in the
film with a conscience.
When the film was
released, Raymond Chandler fans were outraged, calling it a con job, as Altman
had so completely subverted super sleuth Philip Marlowe’s black and white film
noir world of the 40’s into the sunny, smug and self-centered, Southern
California culture of the 70’s, employing laser-sharp irony and comic wit,
becoming one of the high points of Altman’s career. Yet when the film was initially released it
was poorly attended and received bad reviews, linked to misleading ads
suggesting a crime fighter with a gun, hyping the tagline “Nothing says goodbye
like a bullet,” so Altman pulled it from the screens and re-released it 6
months later using a more irreverent marketing campaign. Part of the ultimate success of the film,
besides the music and outstanding production design, is how much Gould seemed
to relish playing Marlowe in such a radically different way. The film was nearly dropped when Altman’s
longtime friend Dan Blocker died, whom Altman had known from their earlier days
of working together on the television show Bonanza
(1959-73). It was a stroke of genius to
replace him with Sterling Hayden, an actor with a reputation for being
difficult to work with, but he offers a towering, larger-than-life performance
as Roger Wade, one of the wonders of Altman’s creations, an alcoholic
Hemingwayesque writer with writer’s block, a supremely tormented soul living in
an idyllic residence with giant floor-to-ceiling glass windows overlooking the
beach in Malibu Colony, which, like his contemporary Cassavetes,
offered Altman the chance to shoot a film in his own house. Of note, Sterling Hayden wrote his own
scenes, taking his character to new levels, where the authenticity of his
eccentric nature helps define the uniqueness of the film. While earlier Chandler films feature plenty
of dialogue and snappy film noir voiceovers that narrate the story of the
novel, as Chandler wrote “with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a
disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness,” here Marlowe offers a
different style of commentary as he largely talks to himself in a kind of
incoherent muttering, where the ad-libbed opening sequence features Marlowe
with a cat (a superb performance by Morris the Cat before he became an
advertising star), in a rambling sequence where he tries to convince the cat to
eat an inferior brand of cat food, which he’s out of, going to great lengths to
convince this cat that he’s giving him what he wants, but the cat is not fooled
and runs away. It’s an interesting
comment on deceit and dishonesty, as the theme of the missing cat continues
throughout the film, but it also establishes that Marlowe is more loyal to his
finicky cat than anyone else around him.
According
to Daniel O’Brien from his book, Robert
Altman: Hollywood Survivor, THE LONG GOODBYE has been described as “a study of a moral and decent man
cast adrift in a selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away
without a backward glance ... and any notions of friendship and loyalty are
meaningless.” Marlowe lives atop the
Hollywood High Tower apartments, High Tower
Court: Hillside Living with a Private Tower ..., just around the corner
from the Hollywood Bowl, with a delicious overview of the city of Los Angeles,
where ironically just across the walkway is a group of topless or semi-clad
girls who still appear to be living in the Age of Aquarius, usually stoned out
of their minds, as they’re largely immune to the world outside, where they’re
continually seen on the shared balcony practicing yoga exercises or meditation
techniques, always attracting the gawking eyes of the male cops or gangsters
that happen to be paying Marlowe a visit.
As it happens, Marlowe is visited by a childhood friend, Terry Lennox,
(Jim Bouton, former Yankee pitcher, and author of the book Ball Four), who’s gotten himself into a scrape with his wife,
complete with scratches on his face, and needs a ride to the border at Tijuana,
which Marlowe gladly offers even though it’s the middle of the night. Upon returning back home, the police are
waiting for him, throwing him into the slammer when he refuses to cooperate
after questioning him in connection with Lennox’s suspected murder of his wife
Sylvia. He’s inexplicably sprung after a
few days when Terry Lennox’s body is found in
Marlowe’s frequent
visits to the Wade residence take him through the security gates of Malibu
Colony, with the affable Ken Samson playing the guard, where in one of the
running jokes, in a community famous for its movie star inhabitants, he does film
impressions of Barbara Stanwyck, Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Walter Brennan,
adding a classical touch of Hollywood within an industry genre picture. It doesn’t take him long to track down Roger
Wade, holed up in a local “drunk farm,” a Burbank sanitarium run by Dr.
Verringer, Henry Gibson in perhaps the most despicable role in his career,
playing a slimy psychiatrist who comes across like an oily, snake-oil salesman,
a loathsome quack of a doctor getting rich off the perceived neuroses of the
rich, a diminutive little man always dressed in a white suit, seen more
interested in getting paid than in providing treatment. When Marlowe brings him home, there’s
obviously a riff between his wild, extroverted behavior and his more reserved
wife, who clings to their Doberman Pinscher dog, though he quickly takes to
Marlowe, calling him “Marlboro, the Duke of Bullshit,” inviting him in for a
drink, telling him, “I wish you’d take that goddamn J.C. Penney tie off.” Nonetheless, the calm by the beach with its
sunny serenity belies the storm that will follow. Marlow has a run-in with local gangster Marty
Augustine, Mark Rydell, who directed ON GOLDEN POND (1981), who always
surrounds himself with hoods, but he claims Terry Lennox was working for him and
was carrying $350,000 of his money when Marlowe drove him to
Eileen tries to suggest
to Marlowe that her husband may have been having an affair with Sylvia Lennox,
and could possibly have killed her in a drunken rage once their affair was
exposed, but the police are disinterested, claiming they already knew, and
they’ve already closed the case.
Meanwhile Marty Augustine picks up Marlowe, again asking for his money,
where
While this may be a
devastating portrait of broken friendships, Marlowe spends nearly the entire
movie trying to protect his friend, remaining true to the idea of friendship,
refusing to believe the charges against him, and in doing so, believes every
sort of lie that comes his way. Just as
emphatically, characters remain cut off from one another, whether the oblivious
girls on the balcony or the more powerful Malibu characters seen through glass
windows, where Wade and his wife may be seen arguing, but we don’t hear a word,
and instead see Marlowe reflected in the image of the window as he strolls
equally as clueless along the beach. In
Altman’s vision of film noir, rather than a tough guy hero, the detective
becomes a patsy, continually lied to and manipulated by the motives of others,
yet he continually goes with the flow, even as he doesn’t comprehend the
circumstances, where his catch phrase throughout is “It’s OK with me,” a theme
that persists in another form in Nashville
(1975), becoming “It Don’t Worry Me.”
Today this has evolved to the all-to-often used phrase, “No
problem.” This was the third consecutive
Altman film shot by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, beginning with McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (1971), which uses a similar post-flashing technique
originated (at least by Altman) in that film, exposing the original negative to
a brief flash of light, where the film negative, the essential source of the
movie, is permanently altered in the development, which has the effect of
softening the film, creating a more hazy, pastel feel, giving it the look of
old postcards from the 1940’s. It’s also
a film where the camera is never still, but continually moves throughout the
film, adding a depth of space, giving the movie the you-are-there feel of a
hand-held camera or cinéma vérité. In
one of the more improvisatory moments of camera movement, when Marlowe exits a
bus in Mexico and starts walking down the dirt road in town, the camera
curiously changes the focus to two dogs fornicating in the middle of the
street. The musical theme, composed by
John Williams and Johnny Mercer, interestingly occurs throughout the film each
time using a different variation, from different singers or groups, including the
Dave Grusin Trio, Jack Sheldon, Clydie King, Jack Riley, the Morgan Ames’
Aluminum Band, and the Tepoztlan Municipal Band during a funeral procession in
Mexico, but it can also be heard as supermarket muzak, a hippie chant, radio
music, a piano lounge, and even a doorbell plays the theme. It should be mentioned that Raymond Chandler
identified with the characters of this novel, showing autobiographical insight,
using them to comment on his own life, where much like Roger Wade, he became a
celebrity writer who was also a self-hating alcoholic clinging to ideals that
time had already passed by, where the novel detests the self-pity that propels
much of the action, beautifully expressed by Marlowe telling Mrs. Wade, “Your
husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is
there. Most people go through life using
up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had.”
Kim Newman from 1001
MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
The Long Goodbye,
Robert Altman’s languid, free-form version of Raymond Chandler’s last great
novel, relocates the 1953 story to 1973, subtly critiquing the out-of-time
values of Phillip Marlowe, Elliot Gould’s slobby, unshaven, chain-smoking
private eye is an all-time loser, introduced in a brilliant sequence that has
him try to pass off inferior pet food on his supercilious cat. Shambling through the remains of
John Williams’ brilliant score plays endless variations on
the title tune, and many sequences are astonishing: violent gangster Jack Rydell making a point
by smashing a coke bottle on his mistress’s face (“That’s someone I love, you I
don’t even like”), Hayden’s stumbling suicide on the beach, and an
invigoratingly cynical punch line (“and I lost my cat”) that turns Marlowe into
some sort of winner after all. Arnold
Schwarzenegger, no less, has an unbilled cameo as a minor thug. Altman makes sure a lot of the vital action
happens almost unnoticed in the corners of the frame and loves highlighting
tiny moments of visual and aural impact in a sun-struck tapestry of
The
Long Goodbye | Chicago Dave Kehr
from The Reader
Robert Altman's antiheroic rewrite of Raymond Chandler. Elliott Gould plays Marlowe as a chain-smoking nebbish—an innocent child of the 40s set down in what Altman sees (problematically) as the grown-up, shades-of-gray world of the 70s. The film is so inventive in its situations and humor that its shortcomings—the blunt ideas at its core—don't become apparent before several viewings. Somewhere deep down inside, there's a screenplay by Leigh Brackett (The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo); Altman has lost it in his improvisation, but it does give this 1973 film a firm, classical shape that eludes his other work. With Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, and Nina Van Pallandt.
Time
Out Geoff Andrew
Despite cries of outrage from hard-line Chandler purists, this
is, along with Hawks' The Big Sleep, easily the most intelligent of all
screen adaptations of the writer's work. Altman in fact stays pretty close to
the novel's basic narrative (though there are a couple of crucial changes), but
where he comes up with something totally original is in his ironic updating of
the story and characters: Gould's Marlowe is a laid-back, shambling slob who,
despite his incessant claim that everything is 'OK with me,' actually harbours
the same honourable ideals as Chandler's Marlowe; but those values, Altman
implies, just don't fit in with the neurotic, uncaring, ephemeral lifestyle led
by the 'Me Generation' of modern LA. As Marlowe attempts to protect a friend
suspected of battering his wife to death, and gets up to his neck in blackmail,
suicide, betrayal and murder, Altman constructs not only a comment on the
changes in values in America over the last three decades, but a critique of film
noir mythology: references, both ironic and affectionate, to Chandler (cats
and alcoholism) and to earlier private-eye thrillers abound. Shot in gloriously
steely colours by Vilmos
Zsigmond with a continually moving camera, wondrously scripted by Leigh Brackett
(who worked on The Big Sleep), and superbly acted all round, it's one of
the finest movies of the '70s.
The Long Goodbye is a crazy dream of a movie – and it’s a crazy dream
of the movies, made up in equal parts of genial, easy-going tribute and
vicious, sourpuss parody: pure Altman, in other words. His starting point is
Raymond Chandler’s early-fifties detective novel, but this is a private eye
drastically different to any we’ve seen before: Elliott Gould is a Philip
Marlowe for the seventies, adrift in a bizarre, violent, sexy, woozy,
dangerously seductive
In his novel, set in 1953, Raymond Chandler situated his
incorruptible knight Philip Marlowe in Los Angeles, the city famed as the place
where you go to sell out. And Chandler wrote to his agent that what he cared
about in this book was "how any man who tried to be honest looks in the
end either sentimental or plain foolish." Chandler's sentimental
foolishness is the taking-off place for Robert Altman's heady, whirling
sideshow of a movie, set in the early 70s LA of the stoned sensibility. Marlowe
(Elliott Gould) is a wryly forlorn knight, just slogging along; still driving a
1948 Lincoln Continental and trying to behave like Bogart, he's the gallant
fool in a corrupt world-the innocent eye. Even the police know more about the
case he's involved in than he does. Yet he's the only one who cares. Altman
kisses off the private-eye form as gracefully as BEAT THE DEVIL parodied the
international-intrigue thriller. Less accidental than BEAT THE DEVIL, this
picture is just about as funny, though quicker-witted and dreamier, in soft,
mellow color and volatile images. Altman tells a detective story all right, but
he does it through a spree-a high-flying rap on Chandler and the movies and LA.
The film drives you a little crazy, turns you on the way some musicals (SINGIN'
IN THE RAIN, CABARET) and some comedies (M*A*S*H, parts of BANANAS and
EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT SEX (BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK)) do.
Gould gives a loose and woolly, strikingly original performance. With Nina Van
Pallandt, Sterling Hayden, Mark Rydell, Jim Bouton, Henry Gibson, Jack Riley,
and Ken Sansom. Vilmos Zsigmond is responsible for the offhand visual
pyrotechnics (the imagery has great vitality); John Williams' score is a witty
series of variations on the title song; the script is credited to Leigh
Brackett, but when you hear the Altman-style improvisatory dialogue you know
you can't take that too literally. United Artists. For a more extended
discussion, see Pauline Kael's book Reeling.
Set in Los Angeles where America is slowly mutating into a
colony of new age fanatics. Marlowe lives in the penthouse of a tall compound
building. His neighbors are a bunch of marijuana-smoking, yoga-practicing, and
perpetually half naked women who seem to be catching the attention of Marlowe's
frequently uninvited visitors. The Long Goodbye's Los Angeles is a town
of degenerate weirdos, with Marlowe the biggest weirdo of them all. He
frequently talks to himself when his only companion cat is in absentia. He is
far too smart to be a private eye, and he states that his practice does not
delve into divorce stuff --- probably the only client base private eyes have
during the seventies. Like the gate guard of the exclusive beach side community
who imitates noir screen actors and actresses, Marlowe seems to be living in a
perpetual era of crime thrillers and murder mysteries when in fact, the
seventies are slowly transforming into an age of police procedural and artless,
mystery-less murders.
Leigh Brackett's dialogue, adapted from a Raymond Chandler novel, is populated
with topnotch wit that oddly seems out-of-place underneath the bright
California sun. The domestic drama between the writer and his wife is
heightened by a sterling approach to the subtle emotions sparking between the
two. The writer says that his writer's block is almost equal to his impotence,
and the wife quickly alludes to the fact that their marriage has impotence
written all over it. The net of connections between the original murder mystery
and the beachside literary couple seems to be a lot looser than the noir of the
forties or the fifties, but the written work, in the hands of Robert Altman
flows with earnest ease, and welcomes parody and commentaries within the tense
structure of the genre.
The Long Goodbye is supplemented by a repetitive
playing of John Williams' somewhat incomplete song of the same title. The song
never reaches a refrain or a second stanza but is often repeated in different
styles and rhythm, and from different sources. Like Altman's film, the Williams
song is smoky and nebulous in form. Altman's visuals inhabit a somewhat aerial
form, often drifting in and out of locations then steadily concentrating on the
face of Gould (and Gould's face isn't exactly one that matches the hardened
faces of the anti-heroes of noir). It's an effective visual style, coupled with
Altman's aural mastery. It's a dizzying roller coaster ride of perhaps the last
murder mystery that Hollywood will make which is in the vein of the original
noirs of old. Other films will follow suit, but I doubt they can replicate
Altman's extraordinary vision and wit in telling this crime tale.
The Long Goodbye | Tony
McKibbin
Robert
Altman's The Long Goodbye: Adaptation or Travesty ... Robert Merrill from Explorations: The
Twentieth Century
FrontiersLA.com
| The Long Goodbye Mike McCrann
The Long Goodbye
and the End of the Crime - Bright Lights ... Allen H. Redmon from Bright Lights Film
Journal, August 2011
The Believer
- Greg Cwik reviews PHILIP MARLOWE in The ... Greg Cwik from The Believer
Hooray
for Hollywood: Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye ... Ryan Kent from Kubrick on the Guillotine,
March 5, 2013
Son
of Noir Richard T. Jameson from
Parallax View, originally published in Film
Comment, November/December 1974
The
Village Voice [Andrew Sarris]
November 29, 1973 (pdf format)
New
York Magazine [Judith Crist] October
29, 1973 (pdf format), also seen here from Peter Labuza: Interlude:
Judith Crist on "The Long Goodbye"
Not
Coming to a Theater Near You [Michael Nordine]
Phillip
Marlowe films by William VanWert - Jump Cut
Marlowe, The Long Goodbye, hardboiled to softboiled to poached, by
William VanWert from Jump Cut, 1974, also seen here: Phillip
Marlowe films
For
Criterion Consideration: Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye James McCormick from The Criterion Cast,
Radiator Heaven:
The Long Goodbye
Spleen
on Spleen: Why I think Altman’s The Long Goodbye is just teh suck zunguzungu,
The Long
Goodbye (1973) | Film Noir of the Week
Steve-O
The Long
Goodbye | Film Review | Slant Magazine
Eric Henderson
PopMatters Christopher
Sieving
The Long Goodbye:
Recreating Noir Justine Smith from
House of Mirth and Movies
Jerry
at the Movies [Jerry Saravia]
Why
I Love Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye
Alexander Chow-Stuart
The
High Tower Apartments and The Long Goodbye ... Alexander Chow-Stuart
High
Tower Court: What it's Like to Live in the Famous ... Marissa Gluck from The LA Weekly
DVD
of the Week: The Long Goodbye : The New Yorker Richard Brody
The
Digital Fix [Raphael Pour-Hashemi]
Movie
Metropolis [John J. Puccio]
digitallyObsessed!
[Jon Danziger]
10,000
Bullets [Michael Den Boer] Blu-Ray
DVDActive
- Blu-ray [Marcus Doidge]
REVIEW:
ROBERT ALTMAN'S "THE LONG GOODBYE" (1973) STARRING ELLIOT GOULD;
BLU-RAY RELEASE FROM KINO LORBER Raymond Benson from Cinema Retro
Notes
of a Film Fanatic [Mat Viola]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Robert Altman: The long goodbye |
The Economist November 23, 2006
Projections Jon
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Film
Notes From the CMA Dennis Toth
CineScene.com
[Chris Dashiell]
Cinepassion.org
[Fernando F. Croce]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Whine-Colored
Sea short reflections
Movie Reviews
UK Damian Cannon
Film
Intuition Jem Johans
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Iain Lang]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
"The Long
Goodbye: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack" Quartet Records
Alan
Rudolph on The Long Goodbye - robert altman Neil McGlone interview with Assistant Director
Rudolph, from The Robert Altman Gallery
BBCi
- Films Michael Thomson
The
Long Goodbye | Film | The Observer - The Guardian Philip French from The Observer
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Baltimore
City Paper [Jack Purdy]
Laramie Movie
Scope: The Long Goodbye - Lariat
Robert Roten
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] March 7, 1973
RogerEbert.com
[Roger Ebert] April 23, 2006
New
York Times [Vincent Canby]
The New York Times Long Goodbye Proves a Big Sleeper Here, by Paul Gardner,
A
Gumshoe Adrift, Lost in the ’70s
Terrence Rafferty from the New
York Times,
April
25, 1954 review of The Long Goodbye in The New York Times book review
Writing The Long Goodbye Mark Coggins essay
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Long
Goodbye (novel) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Long
Goodbye (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
THIEVES LIKE US
USA
Time
Out Geoff Andrew
Perhaps Altman's most persistently
charming film, a remake of Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night (or rather,
second adaptation of Edward Anderson's novel), in which a trio of
semi-competent bank robbers attempt to emulate the big-time gangsters
publicised by the media, comics, and radio serials, and finally get their
come-uppance after a brief respite from prison and poverty. Altman adheres to
Ray's conception of the youngest criminal (Carradine) and his plain-Jane lover
(Duvall) as innocents all at sea in an uncaring world, although the tone here
is one of bitter-sweet irony rather than romantic pessimism. And while casting
a critical eye on Depression America, with a New Deal being promised that would
keep democracy safe, there is none of the cynicism that has occasionally flawed
some of Altman's fascinating genre parodies/tributes. Never portentous, never a
mere spoof, this is a touching, intelligent, and - in its own small way -
rather wonderful movie.
CineScene.com
[Chris Dashiell]
Three convicts (Keith Carradine, John Schuck and Bert Remson)
escape from a
The story is a remake of Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night ('49), but Altman's style and purpose couldn't be more different from that darkly romantic work. Here the outlaws are portrayed, with startling realism, as brutal, ignorant, and amoral, and the film has an overall tone of deadpan social comedy. By limiting the characters' psychological horizon to a minimum prescribed by the 1930s American cultural milieu, the director achieves a sort of tragicomic determinism. These guys rob banks because they don't know how to do anything else very well, and society doesn't really offer them any other way to get ahead. It's a brilliant strategy because it manages to tell these people's stories in a fresh and provocative way, while at the same time wryly commenting on our own (and the characters') romantic preconceptions that are based on fiction rather than the way people really act.
One of Altman's primary devices towards this end is the omnipresence of radio, particularly radio drama, as a counterpoint to the action. Radio was the TV of that era, and the crooks are constantly listening to crime and adventure shows on their car radio - the melodramatic stories and pretentiously high-flown speech of the announcers on these programs form a delicious contrast with the crude, inarticulate ways in which the real people in the movie actually communicate. The director knows he's on to something here, so he uses this method a lot, to the point where at times it seems heavy-handed. Still, it's a vantage point on that era that had rarely been explored on film - the ambivalent relationship between the common people in the Depression and the messages they were getting from the media.
The acting, for the most part, is alarmingly good, with Remson's genially vulgar opportunist a real standout. The film doesn't indulge in a moralistic view of the bank robbers as psychological types - they are so individual, so human in their various limitations, that one can only observe them with Altman's laconic, naturalistic eye. My only problem, and a minor one at that, is with Duvall, one of the director's favorite performers, who I suppose is meant to embody an antidote to the 30s cliche of the crook's tough, glamorous, fatally naive girlfriend. Duvall is of course not a bit glamorous, and she's very good when she's stolid, but at other times she seems to play a more 70s type of innocence, which I thought clashed with the period.
Although bitterly funny at times, the picture also creates a
somber mood that is very affecting. Altman is adept at using long shots to
emphasize the characters' smallness. One bank robbery sequence is shot
completely from an overhead angle, which conveys with remarkable clarity the
criminals' emotional detachment. The excellent screenplay, never faltering in
its commitment to a loose, non-dramatic approach, is by Joan Tewkesbury and
Calder Willingham, with help from Altman. The film failed to find an audience
at the time of its release. Perhaps its hope-free vision was just too strong
for people to take.
Don't
let a thief steal into your heart Hayden Childs from the High Hat
The house is half-finished. Junk from the past clutters its rooms. The walls are papered in sheet music. The only place to stand is next to the warmth of the stove. One could also sit in a rocking chair or lie in a bed. The radio drones constantly. On the bed is a beanpole of a man, recovering from recent injury. On the rocking chair is another beanpole, the woman who has been caring for him. She’s a teenager and he’s barely out of his teens. She moves near him to pick up a light for her cigarette, and he grabs her suddenly, full of need, and kisses her and holds her close, whispering “Don’t you leave me. Don’t you ever leave me.” The music on the radio swells and the announcer states importantly, “Thus did Romeo and Juliet consummate their first union by falling madly in love with each other.”
This is a beautiful scene, a Romantic vision of first love
through the lens of a 70s humanist pothead thinking of hardscrabble Great
Depression lives. The half-finished house papered in music is a perfectly
evocative metaphor for young people falling in love. The two beanpoles are
Keith Carradine, playing a young bank robber named Bowie, and Shelley Duvall,
playing a girl with almost no prospects named Keechie. Duvall has never been
more lovely than she was in this scene, her eyes Modigliani-big, her hair
caressing her long face tenderly, her mouth an enigmatic grin full of
possibility. You can see why
Well, yeah, but it’s a comedy about murderous bank robbers made by Robert Altman at the height of his directorial powers (I’m talking 1974). Second in his oeuvre only to McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us manages to be funny and tender on the subject of desperate men in desperate times, as if Altman saw Bonnie and Clyde and found it a movie full of good intentions, but devoid of real people.
There’s real-seeming people galore in Thieves Like Us.
Besides Bowie and Keechie, there’s the other bank robbers Chicamaw (John Shuck)
and T-Dub (Burt Remsen). There’s T-Dub’s sister-in-law Mattie (Louise Fletcher,
still a year away from forever being Nurse Ratched), and her sister Lula (Ann
Latham), T-Dub’s Lolita love interest. There’s Keechie’s drunkard dad Mobley
(Tom Skerritt), who’s jealous of the attention Bowie and the other receive in
the press. There’s the overly chatty taxi driver Jasbo (John Driver) and
Captain Stammers (Al Scott), the courtly prison warden fooled by
The movie opens on a scene of a damp
Over the course of the picture, they rob a few banks with a near-casual competence, murder a few people who get in their way, hide out at Matties’s place, split up, get back together, get busted (Chicamaw), break out, and get shot. The radio is ubiquitous, although people don’t pay much attention to it. It’s an interesting counterpart to TV culture in that people are obsessed enough with the mass media to leave it on all the time, but rarely entranced by it enough to interrupt conversation.
In other words, the plot’s OK, but the characters and details are the movie. I’ve already said this is Altman at his best. Although the man has been often accused of misanthropy by those who don’t understand him, when he turns his always-devoted eye on the wonders of human experience, he catches the minutiae that give life its character. Besides the people who feel real, Thieves Like Us is full of detail.
Later, when things are going bad (and what, you think things are
going to go well for bank-robbing Mississippi prison-escapees?), Bowie takes
Keechie, pregnant and too inexperienced to realize it, to the motor home T-Dub
bought Mattie before he met the end of his tale.
At the end, Keechie is waiting for a train to anywhere else (Dallas, really, an anywhere else kind of place) and tells another woman that her child’s father was no good, anyway. What else can you do when your heart’s been stolen and your love is dead? Father Coughlin, the Rush Limbaugh of his day, drones on in the background as Keechie walks up the stairs to her future. Yeah, it’s a comedy, but life’s only funny in bursts and starts, too.
"Thieves
Like Us" by Catherine Plumb, Virginia ... - Jump Cut Thieves
Like Us, Mississippi dreamin,’ by Catherine Plumb and Thieves Like Us and the love scene, by Virginia Wright Wexman, from
Jump Cut, 1974
Thieves Like Us -
Kamera.co.uk Tim Applegate
Thieves
Like Us - Turner Classic Movies Jeff
Stafford
Thieves
Like Us (1974) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com Glenn Erickson, also seen here: Thieves Like Us :
DVD Talk Review of the DVD Video
Movie
Review: Thieves Like Us… I Like You Too. | coreysbook July 19, 2011
RvB's
After Images: Robert Altman's Thieves Like Us - The . Richard Von Busack, November 27, 2006
THIEVES
LIKE US (Dir. Robert Altman, 1974, US) - The ... Omar Ahmed from Ellipsis, September 23, 2008
Thieves Like Us Chris Barsanti from Contact Music
New
York Magazine [Judith Crist] The New Yorker, February 11, 1974 (pdf
format)
The
Village Voice [Molly Haskell]
February 21, 1974 (pdf format)
The
New Yorker [Pauline Kael] (pdf
format)
Thieves
Like Us | DVD Review | Slant Magazine
Jeremiah Kipp
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Thieves Like
Us - Directed by Robert Altman • DVD Reviews ... Travis Mackenzie Hoover from Exclaim
The
Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Altman's
revisionist gangster film - Thieves Like Us on MUBI Mubi Forum, September 27, 2012
When
Canses were Classeled Eric Henderson looks at
Shelley Duvall
Channel
4 Film [capsule review]
The
New York Times [Vincent Canby] also
seen here: NY
Times Original Review
Thieves Like Us
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thieves Like Us:
Information from Answers.com
CALIFORNIA
USA
I’ve had a couple of
good wins, but they don’t compare to the losses. People only remember the wins.
—Robert Altman
One of the
unsung films of the 70’s, coming on the heels of Vietnam, Watergate, and ending with the resignation of President Richard Nixon
in August, 1974, just two days after the American release, films such as
Altman’s The
Long Goodbye (1973), Polanski’s
CHINATOWN (1974), Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974), and this one all
contribute to a pervasive feeling of nihilism running rampant throughout
America, where a government of laws and even a Presidency that we once thought
was sacrosanct are suddenly fallible.
Slamming the door on 60’s idealism, when the deflated hopes of the Civil
Rights era and anti-war protests did not eradicate poverty, racism, or even
ignorance, the 70’s was an era of especially edgy and well-made paranoid
conspiracy thrillers in movies, including Alan Pakula’s KLUTE (1971), THE
PARALLAX VIEW (1974), ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), and Sydney Pollacks’s
THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), all of which express an impending doom
creeping into the moral fabric of society.
But rather than deal with this issue head-on, Altman chooses to make a
modest film where not a lot happens, yet the atmosphere is rich with intimate
detail, becoming one of his loosest and freest expressions, feeling as if there
was plenty of on-the-set improvisation.
The film was unseen for decades other than out-of-print VHS tapes due to
music clearances and copyright issues and when a DVD was finally released in
2004 there were three minutes missing, with specifics detailed here: DVDBeaver.com
[Gregory Meshman]. Nonetheless, this is easily Altman’s most naturalistic,
Cassavetes-like film, especially the way the lead characters spontaneously
break out into song at a moment’s notice, unleashing pent-up emotions, where
this is largely a dense, character driven portrait of the effects of gambling
addiction (the director and screenwriter are both recovering gamblers,
where Altman acknowledges “At one time I could stand at a craps table for two
days”), starring George Segal and Elliot Gould as Bill
and Charlie, two compulsive gamblers, where one is unfortunately
down-on-his-luck, while the other is a more free spirited soul that takes a
liking to him. Accentuating the
authenticity of the gambling lifestyle, and the theme of addiction, the
director chooses to use extras in the opening gambling sequence that are
actually recovering drug addicts from Synanon, while also using real life
gamblers and bystanders throughout the film from authentic locations
Mostly shot
in gambling casinos using an 8-track recording device, which allows 8
overlapping layers of dialogue to be heard simultaneously throughout the room,
this method creates a mix of chaos amidst a world on the verge of spiraling out
of control, where the two are caught up in random events, where the attempt to
gain control seems futile and senseless, yet their will to prevail feels
infinitely complex and ultimately absurd.
While
this is not an acid tinged, nightmarish vision, it’s more a Dostoyevskian
plunge into the lower depths of reality.
The two
characters meet, seemingly by chance at a poker table in a room filled mostly
with older women, like typical bingo parlors, where one guy at the table is a
particularly sore loser. As Bill and
Charlie celebrate their winnings in a nearby bar, they get stinking drunk,
delving into the hazards of memory loss where neither one can remember all of
the Seven Dwarfs, where their euphoria is short-lived, as the sore loser laying
in wait (Edward Walsh, brother of the screenwriter Joseph) beats the crap out of
both of them, stealing their money, where the two can be seen licking their
wounds over breakfast in Charlie’s apartment the next morning, which he shares
with two call girls, Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles, who provide a kind of ditzy
LA alternative mindset. While Bill is
more close to the vest and has a somewhat square job working as a magazine
editor, Charlie is a freewheeling, live wire act who continually lures him away
from his desk with the promised land of a world out there filled with fast
action at the track, where the two quickly become best friends, giving this the
unique feel of a buddy road picture, as these guys are always on the run
somewhere, going to boxing matches, playing poker, or drinking, where their
world consists of drifting from one impulsively driven, adrenaline-packed high
to the inevitable lows that follow, where Bill in particular starts
accumulating heavy debt, where writer and co-producer Joseph Walsh also makes
an appearance as his loan shark, Sparkie, whose patience runs thin. “Didn’t I
tell you that I’ve got busts happening all over the city, that my parents are
in town, and you come in here and you don't have dollar one?”
Down and
out and seemingly at his wits end, Bill gets the harebrained idea to sell his
car and most of his belongings in a desperate attempt to make a splash in Reno,
where he just has a good feeling and he doesn’t need Charlie spoiling it for
him. Never afraid to bet a hunch,
Charlie gets behind this crazed energy, where the two agree to split whatever
winnings. Told in episodic segments that
are little more than real life vignettes, the two spend a wild weekend in Reno,
resplendent in its artificiality, but once we get a feel for the lay of the
land, beautifully expressed by the running musical commentary of piano lounge
singer Phyllis
Shotwell, Altman
takes us underneath the surface through the differing perspectives of these two
guys. Bill is driven to succeed with
near manic zeal, searching out a private, high-stakes poker game, while Charlie
is equally enthralled just taking it all in while sitting at the bar. Before a seat opens up at the table, Charlie
gets into Bill’s ear, sizing up each of the men sitting at the table like a
boxer getting last minute instructions before entering the ring, while Bill is
maintaining his composure by staying sober.
But after the first few games, Bill asks Charlie to leave the room, as
his presence is affecting his concentration.
Both men then go into their own internalized rollercoaster ride of
changing emotions, where Altman uses Charlie’s exclusion to feed into the
audience’s own expectations, as they likely feel just as cheated missing out on
all the action. Without a dime to his
name, as he’s given everything to Bill, Charlie wanders around kibitzing on other
poker games going on in the casino, where his overly sarcastic running
monologue matches the song selection by Phyllis Shotwell, who keeps churning out
the old standards, all of which continually coats the film in a layer of
superficiality, while offscreen reverberations continue to swell, as Bill
occasionally comes out for air, reporting the latest update, but he keeps going
back for more, intermixed with an improbably driven need to switch to
blackjack, or roulette, all the while keeping Charlie away, who is dying a slow
death not knowing what’s happening.
Finally, Bill allows Charlie to join him at the craps table, where Bill
goes on a roll that most can only dream of, where the house players and the
watching public are simply in awe, pointing at the guy who’s winning all the
money, like he’s a headline story. When
Charlie collects the winnings, he can’t contain his unbridled enthusiasm, like
pulling his finger from the hole in the dam, and all the water comes gushing
out, breaking into a frenzied moment of delirious, nonstop commentary. But Bill is exhausted, in a state of hushed
quiet, where he literally doesn’t feel anything, no jubilation, no joy, no
ecstasy, only the hollowness of the moment, where the American Dream is viewed
as an empty landscape filled with pitfalls, suddenly feeling senseless and
self-defeating. There’s a river of
delusion under both men’s vantage point, continually covered in cocktails,
lounge songs, and the everpresent red carpet that beckons, but by the end,
despite the comic tone, both players feel equally lonely and pathetic in what
is ultimately a devastating portrait of crumbling dreams.
The Chicago Reader
Don Druker
Robert Altman's masterful 1974 study of the psychology of
the compulsive gambler. Elliott Gould, loose, jocular, and playful, and George
Segal, neurotic, driven, and desperate, are really two halves of the same
personality as they move from bet to bet, game to game, until they arrive for
the big showdown in Reno. As in all Altman films, winning is losing; and the
more Altman reveals, in his oblique, seemingly casual yet brilliantly
controlled way, the more we realize that to love characters the way Altman
loves his, you have to see them turned completely inside out. R, 108 min.
User
Reviews Author: matthew wilder (picqueur@aol.com)
from los angeles
Altman at the absolute top of his form--which is to say among the freest, loosest and sensorily densest great movies ever made in America. Visually and sonically thick as a brick, it also represents some of the highest-flying improvisatory acting you've ever seen. Put the Godard of the early sixties in a polyester shirt, lay him down among the rummies and compulsive cases of the American gambling subculture, and fill him with equal parts beer and caffeine, and you have some idea of this thoroughly amazing, free-and-easy comedy, which has a scary undertow: the scene where George Segal tries to persuade co-addict Elliott Gould of the hollowness of the big win might be the most scarily desolate in any Altman picture.
California Split |
review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Gould and Segal on
some wild casino sprees in
"California
Split," Matthew Wilder from City
Pages (link lost)
This plotless, multitrack stereo jamboree finds director Robert
Altman working at the absolute top of his game--which is to say that it's among
the freest, loosest, and most sensorily dense great movies ever made in
Senses of Cinema –
California Split Peter Tonguette,
May 2003
Too often, it seems to me, Robert Altman is valued for his riffs on genre – whether it be the war comedy (M*A*S*H [1970]), the Western (McCabe & Mrs. Miller [1971]), the detective story (The Long Goodbye [1973]), or the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery (Gosford Park [2001]) – and undervalued for his more direct and personal films, the ones which are least self-aware of other movies and most interactive with real life. I don't want to fall into the same trap as those who under-rate that side of Altman by underrating myself the titles I've just rattled off – each and every one of which I love – but simply make the point that to prioritise this strain of Altman above others is to cut oneself off from what may be the purest expressions of this great director's particular vision of life.
California Split belongs to this side of Altman (the only 'genre' it could be said to belong to is the 'gambling movie') as well as another: it joins Images (1972), A Perfect Couple (1979) and Quintet (1979) as one of the least seen and most infrequently discussed of all of his '70s works. Nevertheless, it seems to be on its way to something like a canonisation thanks to some recent Altman retrospectives around the world (though it still remains, unforgivably, unavailable on video in the United States); while the responses I've read – through e-mail lists and personal correspondence – from Altman fans who've just seen it for the first time recently usually borders on the effusive. I myself only saw it for the first time last year and suffice it to say that I was so taken with its rough-and-tumble humanity that it was the one Altman film to figure in the Top 10 of all-time list I submitted to Senses of Cinema.
This is a film about gambling, a metaphor-for-life which seems to have a particularly compelling pull for Altman. Altman, a self-confessed recovering gambler, returned to the theme with Quintet – a sci-fi picture which stands as one of his strangest and most gripping films – and increased the stakes: play the game or face death. Quintet was set during a future Ice Age in a world with dwindling resources; who lived and who died depended on participation in the game of the title. There's nothing so novel going on in California Split – a wholly naturalistic picture set in the 1970s – and yet its characters feel just as lonely and pathetic (and lovable) and the outcome of the games they play just as live-or-die important.
California Split was the third collaboration between Altman and actor Elliott Gould, here playing Charlie, the aggressive and impudent half of the two friends who are the film's focus; George Segal is the more buttoned-down, but despondent Bill. (In Altman, even friendship is contingent: the two meet by chance at a casino and stick together only on a superstitious hunch that they may bring each other good luck.) In his three major films with Altman (the other two are M*A*S*H and The Long Goodbye), Gould came closer than any other actor, perhaps, to, in his loose, uncontainable acting style, embodying in physical form the qualities which help constitute the Altman vision: sometimes committed to ideals, sometimes not and almost always a little sarcastic.
In his capsule review of California Split written for the Chicago Reader, Don Druker observes, "…the more we realise that to love characters the way Altman loves his, you have to see them turned completely inside out." Indeed, I can think of few directors more compassionate towards their characters than Altman, but like Stanley Kubrick, his films are so rooted in honesty and satirical portraiture that many observers miss (or choose to ignore) the abundant generosity behind the lens. Though I generally reject the notion that Altman is an excessive director or that his films lack focus or direction, he is indulgent in one way: to his characters, for he loves them with, perhaps even for, their warts and flaws and desperation.
We follow Bill and Charlie through their misadventures, games, pick-ups, and
pranks and we come to love them. One of the film's most remarkable achievements
is to gradually redefine what we hope for them: what seems like an outcome to
root for at the film's outset – Bill making a big win in
What's more, for a director who is constantly being accused of hovering above his characters in 'snarky' contempt, California Split is a remarkably self-critical film. It doesn't require any deep reading of the work to recognise that Altman undoubtedly sees himself in Bill and Charlie and acknowledges his own complicity in their struggle with an addiction.
The director who pursued California Split most aggressively before Altman became attached was Steven Spielberg. While I don't want to make a snap judgment about what kind of film Spielberg would have made – indeed, his early work (eg Duel [1971], The Sugarland Express [1974]) showed just as much willingness to portray desperation and unhappiness as his most recent work does; it's only mid-period Spielberg which seems to me sappy or unambiguously sentimental – I think it's safe to say that it would have been a considerably different film from what Altman made. The very fact that an atmosphere existed in Hollywood where Altman could have access to properties being pursued by Spielberg – a player and company man even before Jaws (1975) validated him as a money-making player in the eyes of the studios – is astonishing.
But it's some measure of the greatness of this film that this fact is perhaps the least of the astonishing things going on in California Split: Altman's astonishing mise en scène – contemplative of every level of interaction within a room, a bar, a place – has rarely been put to more revelatory or personal ends. It's a masterpiece.
THE HIGH HAT |
Potlatch: "For Barbara": California Split Tom Block, also seen here: The
High Hat [Tom Block]
DOING THE
CALIFORNIA SPLIT :: Stop Smiling Magazine
Jonathan Rosenbaum from Stop
Smiling magazine, June 22, 2008
Radiator
Heaven J.D. Lafrance
California
Split - Philip Brophy
California
Split (1974, Robert Altman) - Also Like Life Kevin Lee from Shooting Down Pictures
California
Split (1974) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Jay S. Steinberg
California
Split - Turner Classic Movies
Michael Atkinson
The Village Voice
[Michael Atkinson] December 3, 2002
ReFramed
No. 4: Robert Altman's 'California Split' | PopMatters Calum Marsh and Jordan Cronk from Pop Matters
California Split | A Regrettable
Moment of Sincerity Rhett Miller,
Shawn McLoughlin, and Adam Lippe
Surrender to
the Void [Steven Flores]
California
Split Lesser Known Altman Gem with George Segal and ... Chris Jarmick
CinePassion Fernando C. Croce
Ruthless
Reviews Matt Cale, also seen h
ere: Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Film-Forward.com Jack Gattanella
DVD Journal Clarence
Beaks
DVD Verdict Review
- California Split Patrick
Bromley
Digitally Obsessed
Robert Edwards
Movie
Freak.com Dylan Grant DVD Review
California
Split | Film Review | Slant Magazine
Eric Henderson with a gay subtext
eFilmCritic Reviews Jay Seaver
Movie House Commentary
Silver Dollar Sam
The Spinning Image
Graeme Clark
New York
Magazine David Edelstein
Cockeyed
Caravan: Underrated Movies: Special Guest Picks #10 Dan McCoy
Criterion
Confessions [Jamie S. Rich]
California Split Dennis Schwartz from Ozus' World Movie
Reviews
Your
favourite obscure film (that nobody else has even seen ...
Stop Smiling
[James Hughes] reviews a 6-dvd release
Robert Altman | Film
| Primer | The A.V. Club Noel
Major
achievements - Sound - actor, film, movie, tv ... - Film Reference Stephen Handzo
California Split - Film Forum on
mubi.com
California Split
Movie Review (1974) | Roger Ebert
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Vincent Canby, also seen here: "California
Split Deals Winning Hand" or here:
NY
Times Original Review
DVDBeaver.com
[Gregory Meshman]
NASHVILLE
USA
The price of bread may
worry some, but it don’t worry me
Tax relief may never
come, but it don’t worry me
Economy’s depressed
not me,
My spirit’s high as it
can be
And you may say that I
ain’t free, but it don’t worry me
It don’t worry me, it
don’t worry me,
You may say that I
ain’t free, but it don’t worry me
They say this train
don’t give out rides, well it don’t worry me
All the world is
taking sides, but it don’t worry me
In my empire life is
sweet, just ask any bum you meet
And life may be a one
way street, but it don’t worry me
It don’t worry
me, it don’t worry me,
You may say that I
ain’t free, but it don’t worry me
It don’t worry me, it
don’t worry me,
You may say that I
ain’t free, but it don’t worry me.
It don’t worry
me, it don’t worry me,
You may say that I
ain’t free, but it don’t worry me
Barbara Harris - It Don't Worry Me - YouTube (Finale, 5:02), written by Keith Carradine, Nashville OST It Don't Worry Me-Keith Carradine - YouTube (2:47)
One thing Altman railed
against throughout his lifetime was phonies, probably because in Hollywood he
had to deal with so many of them, where this theme resurfaces in any number of
variations in his movies where a character is not who or what they appear to be,
such as McCabe in McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (1971), or they’re cynically exploiting their false mythology,
such as Buffalo Bill, who sees himself as a bogus entertainer willing to
exploit his famous name for fame and fortune in BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS,
OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON (1976).
But in this film, Altman takes aim at celebrity worship, where you’re
not anybody unless you’re somebody, where the general consensus seems to be,
why should we listen to anyone unless they’re famous? Of course, the problem being, famous people
often find it hard to tell the difference between their own legend and who they
really are, like Ronee Blakely as a down home Loretta Lynn style country singer
Barbara Jean, caught up in her own myth, perpetuated by her self-interested,
overcontrolling husband and manager Barnett (Allen Garfield) who literally
pulls the strings like a puppeteer, where she can’t tell the difference between
what’s real, and what’s not. The cynical
message being broadcast throughout the entire film is an unseen political
candidate running for office on the Replacement Party, where a car drives
around town using a bullhorn to announce his platform is little more than - -
not those guys - - railing against the status quo at every turn while never
really revealing what he’s running for, except an early 17th century
concept, sort of Shakespeare’s Henry VI
Part Two platform, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” claiming that’s why government doesn’t work. Oh, and he wants to change the national
anthem. This film is one of the great
ensemble masterpieces, where it has 24 main characters, an hour of
musical numbers, and multiple storylines interwoven into a
fractured narrative about life in Music City, the country music capitol of
America, where the underbelly is just as exposed as a coterie of stars.
NASHVILLE came at an interesting
time in history, following two major scandals, having only recently pulled out
of Vietnam, and Watergate was exposing the imperial secrets of the Presidency,
where Nixon had just resigned (in fact, the scenes in the Grand Ole Opry were
shot on the day Nixon resigned), and furthermore, hardly anyone had heard of an
oddly ambitious Southern governor named Jimmy Carter. Somehow Altman tapped into a very
serious and traumatizing time in America with a show-stopping piece of
Americana that is a blisteringly hilarious satire, where often you
can't tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t, including
the performers, as it’s all an illusion.
In effect Altman has created a disaster film about the American Dream
that may draw upon Hitchcock’s themes of fear and complacency in The Birds
(1963), where despite the plethora of musical numbers, safe, family oriented,
and unthreatening by all accounts, the American public is hiding behind a
security net of fantasy escapism, where like Hitchcock, both use surprising,
somewhat apocalyptic acts of nature to strike back at foolish humans who
continue to believe they are exempt from life’s tragedies. Central to this theme is the use of the song
“It Don’t Worry Me,” which brings the final curtain down at the end, which is
essentially a song of openly acknowledged ignorance, “The price of bread may
worry some/It don’t worry me” or “Economy’s depressed, not me,” coming from a
Southern town that doesn’t wish to have anything to do with the rest of the
country’s problems, a blissfull ignorance that actually reflects the same state
of mind as Mrs. Bundy (Ethel Griffies) in Hitchcock’s film, the local expert ornithologist
who swears birds would never attack humans and that people have nothing to
worry about. It’s an interesting
parallel that suggests both directors working at the top of their game tapped
into similar themes a decade apart, where The Birds
release preceded President Kennedy’s assassination by 6 or 7 months, with his
brother Robert, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X all assassinated before the
decade of the 60’s was over, while Altman’s release of this film preceded the
election of President Jimmy Carter just a little over a year later, initially
dismissed as a regional candidate, followed by the energy crisis, record levels
of rising inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, America’s first taste of
international terrorism. In both
instances, these prescient films were followed by a lingering social malaise of
untold proportions.
A
Nashvillian looks at Nashville / The Dissolve, Noel Murray, former
Nashville resident and current film and culture critic, from The Dissolve:
The movie Nashville isn’t trying to be docu-realistic when it comes to Nashville itself. This is something a lot of actual Nashville residents—in the music industry especially—didn’t get back in 1975. (My friend Jim Ridley examined the whole local kerfuffle over Nashville in this well-researched 1995 Scene article.) It’s something a lot of big-city music and film critics didn’t get at the time, either. Nashville follows an eclectic, loosely related mob of superstars, wannabes, fans, and hangers-on over the course of five days, watching how country-music royalty like Haven Hamilton (played by Henry Gibson) and cred-seeking young folk-rockers like Tom Frank (Keith Carradine) enjoy and exploit the privileges of fame. The film builds to a galvanizing act of violence, which leads to a surprisingly noble reaction from Haven, and a unifying performance of one of Tom’s songs. Prior to that, though, Nashville roams freely through a Southern mini-metropolis that’s much sillier than the real one.
As a result, the movie’s version of country music, while tuneful, is intentionally cartoonish. Which means that as part of coastal critics’ apparently eternal need to protect defenseless middle-Americans from mean-spirited showbiz types like Alexander Payne, the Coen brothers, and Robert Altman, some tastemakers grumbled about Nashville, claiming Altman was making fun of hicks and disrespecting a grand tradition of American folk music. Reviewing the soundtrack, The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau complained that the actors weren’t even authentic country singers, writing, “If the music makes the movie, as more than one film critic has surmised, then the movie is a lie. Another possibility: the critics are fibbing a little to cover their ignorance.”
That particular take on Nashville is based on the misperception that Robert Altman set out to make a movie about country music. That was more the goal of producer Jerry Weintraub, who saw in this project a hit soundtrack album waiting to happen. Altman, on the other hand, saw an opportunity to make a grand statement about celebrity, politics, the deep-rooted conservatism of the South, and a nation on the cusp of its bicentennial. Knowing nothing about Nashville, he sent screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury on a couple of scouting trips, which she came back from loaded down with anecdotes about a medium-sized city with a small-town vibe, where she kept running into the same people whether she was visiting a recording studio, a racetrack, a church, or a bar.
Because Altman liked to improvise, with input from his cast (who in Nashville also wrote some of their own songs), Tewkesbury often doesn’t get enough credit for her contributions to Nashville. But she was the one who helped devise a structure with two dozen major characters wandering into and out of each other’s storylines—even if it’s just to stand mute in the back of a shot, barely noticeable. And it was Tewkesbury who established the recurring moral dilemma these characters face, which she pinpoints on the Criterion Blu-ray when she talks about the scene in Nashville where a terrible singer (played by Gwen Welles) gets duped into performing a striptease at a political fundraiser. “I can fix this so I won’t have to take off all my clothes,” says Tewkesbury, describing what every character in Nashville thinks as they make compromises with their careers, ideals, and personal relationships.
Make no mistake, though: Nashville is Altman’s movie more than anyone’s. He had a capable team helping him achieve a revolutionary sound mix—with every character miked-up and woven into the soundtrack—and helping him cut hours of material into a fluidly paced film that sometimes ping-pongs rapidly between scenes, and sometimes stays still to take in a musical performance. But it’s always Altman pulling the strings, constructing a world so teeming that it seems to spill off the edges of the screen. (One of the movie’s best tricks is playing key songs like “It Don’t Worry Me” in the background well before they’re performed in the film, so they already seem like massive hits that everyone knows.) Though Altman and Tewkesbury based some of the major Nashville players on Loretta Lynn, Roy Acuff, Charley Pride, and others, they weren’t intending to satirize or celebrate country music. The songs—sometimes funny, sometimes sweet—express the characters’ feelings, and their view of the world, irrespective of the location.
Altman’s film
acknowledges a period of diminished faith in government while tapping into the
populist fervor of country music, actually equating the two, comparing the
hypocrisy of politics with the sleaze and dishonesty of the entertainment
business. Yet somehow, when looking back
over Altman’s career, while no two films are alike, they all convey similar
themes, ideas, story, or style, and point back at one another, as if part of a
continuing conversation. Altman enlarges
the world of expanding characters depicted in California
Split (1974), adding many more characters, each with their own individual
narrative. Much more than his earlier
films, Altman strove for something larger, where the film would become a grand
cultural statement, encompassing many attitudes and points of view, or in
Altman’s words, “a metaphor for America,” while screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury
adds her view, “All you need to do is add yourself as the twenty-fifth
character and know that whatever you think about the film is right, even if you
think the film is wrong.” In this way,
simply by the expanding and open ended film process, yet clearly set in a
specific time and place, Altman intentionally adds the viewer into the
conversation, even after repeated viewings where one’s view may shift or change
through the years. As an experiment of
integrating multiple narratives into a cohesive whole, Altman has refined what
he began in Brewster
McCloud (1970), where fragmented pieces of mid 70’s American culture are
reflected in the various characters, where each is vulnerable and hurt in some
way, often seen as flawed and even foolish, but there’s also an underlying
ugliness or moral stain in their own behavior, often conniving, hurting, or
bringing harm to others, yet somehow, rationalized within their own collective
conscience, this is acceptable behavior.
While there are moments of stunning emotional force, they are undercut
by Altman’s direction and his continually shifting editing scheme, such as the
moment Mr. Green (Keenan Wynn) during a routine hospital visit learns that his
beloved wife has died, where his grief is quickly interrupted by a joltingly
intrusive conversation from an upbeat soldier visiting another patient, who
offhandedly remarks “You give my best to your wife” as Mr. Green literally
crumbles before our eyes. But rather
than hold the shot for emotional effect, Altman quickly edits to another scene,
keeping the audience at a distance, where the viewer remains an impartial
observer witnessing various events as they unfold over the course of five days.
Despite the revolving
door of quirky characters, in NASHVILLE they all seem to be on some kind of
personal quest or journey, perhaps to get away from something while pursuing
their dreams, like Barbara Harris as Winifred, seen abandoning her husband early
on during a freeway pile-up of people all driving into the city of Nashville,
transforming herself into Albuquerque, her chosen stage name, as she aspires to
become a country western star, joining the legions of others all following the
same yellow brick road to fame and fortune.
Part of the curiosity comes from characters asking others what they are
doing in town, suggesting people are arriving for some major event, creating a
sense of anticipation for the intersecting paths of a political campaign and a
music festival. Part of a running joke
throughout is how quickly people in this town describe themselves as
apolitical, disinterested in politics, or even declaring they don’t vote,
confirming a tone of abject disinterest, yet all display undaunted enthusiasm
for gaining a foot in the music business.
Somehow their fates are intertwined.
Political alienation is symptomatic of deeper, often unexplored issues,
yet the political reality is passivity breeds manipulation, as the space you
vacated leaves a spot open for ill-fated winds of empty rhetoric and hot air to
blow while searching for a foothold in the political landscape. Disinterest allows the ambitions of others to
set the terms of their own politicized agenda, while you sit by and passively
allow them to do it. Similarly, the
paying customers of these musical legends exude their own loss of identity,
transferring all the power to the performer, often fawning over celebrities,
where they are easily duped into becoming ardent believers, like submissive
cult followers. These competing
interests of music and politics comprise the moral dilemma of many of the
characters, especially the established musical stars, who don’t wish to be
affiliated with any political party, but aren’t against a little back-roomed
arm twisting if they think they can gain an advantage over their rival
competitors. What brings them together
is both sides want attention, popularity, which in their eyes breeds success,
as that is the nature of the business.
Again, the viewer remains an impartial observer sitting outside the
events, so may render judgment on the ethical boundaries crossed in pursuit of
both goals, especially how easily people allow themselves to be duped and
fooled. With so many different
characters with personal agendas, what catches the viewer’s eye may be
altogether different in subsequent viewings, which is part of the hidden beauty
of the film, as it evolves as we do.
Shot in only 45 days on
a $2 million dollar budget, which was considered small, where each of the two
dozen lead characters drew similar salaries somewhere between $750 to
$1000/week, the film was originally conceived as a possible TV mini-series,
where Altman shot a great deal of footage, viewing two hours of rushes every
day, with the director at one point considering releasing the film in two
parts, Nashville Red and Nashville Blue, before finally settling
on a more conventional format. But the
film is anything but conventional, something like a sprawling epic trainwreck
about to happen with plenty of detours along the way. When the film was previewed in Boston by
Paramount, the audience stood for several minutes both cheering and
booing. Joan Tewkesbury’s screenplay
moves from one giant set piece to the next, a multi-car freeway pileup,
recording sessions, night club performances, The Grand Ole Opry, an amateur
night that becomes a strip show, to a gathering in front of the Parthenon (1,280
× 853 pixels) in Centennial Park.
Altman received a huge boost from the lavish praise received from film
critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker,
calling it a masterpiece before it was even finished after seeing an early cut of the movie, describing Altman “as
identifiable as a paragraph by Mailer when he’s really racing. ‘Nashville’ is simply ‘the ultimate Altman
movie’ we’ve been waiting for… It’s a pure emotional high, and you don’t come
down when the picture is over,” actually comparing Altman’s methods to James
Joyce in Ulysses. In The
New York Times,
Vincent Canby protested: “If one can review a film on the basis of an
approximately three-hour rough cut, why not review it on the basis of a
five-hour rough cut? A ten-hour one? On the basis of a screenplay? The original material if first printed as a
book?” While they used the script
primarily as a guide, as the movie was shot almost entirely in sequence, the
film is largely improvised by the actors, who spent a great amount of their
time in character, each one individually mike’d for sound, where the use of
multiple cameras prevented the actors from knowing precisely when they were on
camera. Each actor was required to write
and perform their own songs for the movie, where Altman’s talent was juggling
all the various storylines of the two dozen characters, creating clarity out of
chaos.
According to Altman:
I felt we were doing something that had the potential of being terrific. I had complete artistic freedom in this; I had nobody — nobody — saying you had to do this or do that....We had the framework, which was the city of Nashville, and I had the music as the through line. Then, you’ve got to understand that at that time everybody was politically charged — one way or another. So when they found out we were free to express these...attitudes, everybody became very creative.
Opening with the
blaring noise of an advertisement for the film itself, where the announcer
promises to proceed “without commercial interruption,” what follows is one
continual commercial advertisement from a political campaign van driving
through the streets spouting cliché’d political banalities that pass for wisdom,
where Altman has a habit of celebrating the same interests and themes that he
also subjects to ridicule. A freeway
multiple car pile-up leaves traffic at a standstill as Opal (Geraldine
Chaplin), an alleged BBC Reporter, walks through the carnage of cars spouting
platitudes into her pocket tape recorder about violence in America, as she
arrives in town to do a story on Grand Ole Opry star Haven Hamilton, Henry
Gibson from television’s Rowan &
Martin’s Laugh-In (1970 – 73), a part originally intended for Robert
Duvall, but his salary demands were too high.
Hamilton is recording an ode to our national heritage, “We must be doin’
somethin’ right to last 200 years,” but he’s amusingly interrupted by Opal’s
invasion of the privacy of his studio, where she’s quickly escorted out into
another studio where Linnea Reese (Lily Tomlin) is cutting a record with a
black gospel choir, where Opal rambles on into her recorder about “darkest
Africa with its naked, frenzied bodies.”
Across town at the airport, fans are welcoming back the return of the
reigning queen of country music, Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely, a backup singer
for Hoyt Axton, who met with Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton in preparation for
the role originally intended for Susan Anspach), who’s been recovering from an
injury and near-nervous breakdown, where her swoon causes a near panic,
expecially from her nervously manipulating manager and husband Barnett (Allen
Garfield).
We follow the continued
near misses of a folk trio, Bill and Mary (Allan Nichols and Cristina Raines)
who keep missing Tom (Keith Carradine), who is sleeping with Mary while
secretly attempting to pursue a solo career.
Tom also calls Linnea at home, hoping for a hotel tryst, where we learn
she’s married to Delbert (Ned Beatty) while raising two deaf children. Lily Tomlin’s role could based on actress Louise Fletcher who was the
child of deaf parents. Ironically, Louise
Fletcher won the Best Actress Award that same year for her role in a film that
won all the major categories at the Academy Awards, ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S
BEST(1975). Rising country star Connie
White (Karen Black) takes advantage of Barbara Jean’s absence and fills in for
her at the Grand Ole Opry. While this
music world is bustling with behind-the-scenes activities, with characters
continually crossing paths, political advance man John Triplette (Michael
Murphy) meets with Delbert to line up contacts, celebrities, pocketbooks, and
entertainers for both a fund-raising smoker and an outdoor political rally at the
Parthenon. While there are more stars
and secondary characters galore, with a beautiful interweaving of various
interests and personalities, the three characters that really stand out are
Lily Tomlin, also a regular on Laugh-In
performing in her first film, whose grace and eloquence couldn’t be more
surprising, whether singing in the choir, having a delightful sign language
conversation with her kids, or sitting alone in a club actually listening to a song, turning that into
one of the profound moments of the movie, where she may actually be the heart
and soul of the film. Geraldine
Chaplin’s Opal is appallingly insensitive, yet she gets the majority of the
laughs for her fawning celebrity worship, utter daffiness, and infinite
rudeness, where she’s seen wandering aimlessly through vacant junkyards or a
giant parking lot filled with yellow school busses spouting
stream-of-conscience jibberish wherever she goes, where after stepping all over
everyone to get close to anyone resembling a celebrity, she rejects even
talking to the driver for Bill, Mary, and Tom, claiming, “I make it a policy
never to speak to the servants.”
Finally, this film belongs to Barbara Harris, who makes the most of an
underwritten part, yet she is probably the most hopeful and optimistic
character in a film that is otherwise filled with people who might be described
as unhappy, pathetic, devious, manipulative, miserable, or even delusional,
where she takes the baton at the end and leads the crowd in a surprisingly
soulful rendition of “It Don’t Worry Me,” Barbara Harris
- It Don't Worry Me - YouTube (Film finale, 5:02), becoming a transcendent
moment, where her rousing performance resurrects a shocked and stupefied audience,
becoming the film’s driving force, an emblematic theme song that could easily
become the Replacement Party’s choice for the replacement national anthem.
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] January 1,1975
After November 22, 1963 [the date
of President Kennedy's assassination] and all the other days of infamy, I
wouldn't have thought it possible that a film could have anything new or very
interesting to say on assassination, but Nashville does, and the film's
closing minutes with Barbara Harris finding herself, to her astonishment,
onstage and singing, It Don't Worry Me are unforgettable and
heartbreaking. Nashville, which seems so unstructured as it begins,
reveals itself in this final sequence to have had a deep and very profound
structure - but one of emotions, not ideas. This is a film about America. It
deals with our myths, our hungers, our ambitions, and our sense of self. It
knows how we talk and how we behave, and it doesn't flatter us but it does love
us.
Joshua Klein from 1001
MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Robert Altman’s
With so much going on culturally, Altman tried to replicate
that confusion cinematically.
But populating Altman’s mosaic is a wide and richly drawn
variety of characters, some blindly ambitious but others barely holding on in a
world caving in around them. It’s these smaller characters that stick out from
the vast cast and rambling story, and you root for their success and happiness.
But these and all of
Instead of a straight narrative, Altman works with various
themes, but he never stresses one over the other. Instead he uses country music
(written and performed by his actors) as his Greek chorus, directing the flow
of the film with their songs of banal populism and passivity. By the time the
film is over it is unclear exactly what
Gosford Park Bright Lights Film
Journal Footnote #9 from Alan Vanneman’s
Nashville | review,
synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
A landmark American film, Altman's
breathtakingly assured C&W epic has perhaps exerted an even greater
influence on non-Hollywood cinema. Certainly its disdain for the tidy niceties
of conventional narrative (it merely follows the mostly none-too-consequential
fortunes of 24 musicians, managers, politicians, promoters and punters
variously involved in, or connected to, a weekend music festival in Nashville,
Tennessee) makes for an unusually illuminating perspective in terms of
character, mood and moral insight. But the impressionistic vignettes, coupled
with the expert use of overlapping dialogue, also build slowly but surely to
create a coherent and persuasive portrait of a society that has somewhere along
the way carelessly abandoned its original ideals and turned instead to the
false gods of fame, fortune, easy sentiment, self-congratulation and political
expediency. If, as some claim, the final assassination attempt is a rather weak
attempt at gathering up the many loose ends, that invalidates neither
The
Current Cinema: Coming: "Nashville" : The New Yorker Pauline Kael from the
New Yorker, March 3, 1975, also
seen here: Five
Classic Pauline Kael Reviews : The New Yorker (pdf format)
Is there such a thing as an orgy for movie-lovers—but an
orgy without excess? At Robert Altman’s new, almost-three-hour film, “
Altman has prepared us for it. If this film
had been made earlier, it might have been too strange and new, but in the five
years since he broke through with “M*A*S*H” he’s experimented in so many
directions that now, when it all comes together for him, it’s not really a
shock. From the first, packed frames of a recording studio, with Haven Hamilton
(Henry Gibson), in bespangled, embroidered white cowboy clothes, like a short,
horseless Roy Rogers, singing, “We must be doing somethin’ right to last two
hundred years,” the picture is unmistakably Altman—as identifiable as a
paragraph by Mailer when he’s really racing. “
“
Altman does for
“
When Altman—who is the most atmospheric of
directors—discusses what his movies are about, he makes them sound stupid, and
he’s immediately attacked in the press by people who take his statements
literally. (If pinned to the wall by publicity men, how would Joyce have
explained the “Nighttown” sequence of “Ulysses”?) The complex outline of “
The movies often try to do portraits of
artists, but their artistry must be asserted for them. When we see an actor
playing a painter and then see the paintings, we don’t feel the relation. And
even when the portrait is of a performing artist, the story is almost always of
how the artist achieves recognition rather than of what it is that has made him
an artist. Here, with Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean, we perceive what goes into
the art, and we experience what the unbalance of life and art can do to a
person. When she was a child, Barbara Jean memorized the words on a record and
earned fifty cents in a contest, and she’s been singing ever since; the artist
has developed, but the woman hasn’t. She has driven herself to the point of
having no identity except as a performer. She’s in and out of hospitals, and
her manager husband (Allen Garfield) treats her as a child, yet she’s a true
folk artist; the
“
“
Parallax
View [Richard T. Jameson] originally published in Movietone News, September 1975, also seen
here: “Writin’
it down kinda makes me feel better”: Robert Altman’s “Nashville”
Letter
from Nashville - The New York Review of Books Robert Mazzocco, July 17, 1975
Nashville
- Turner Classic Movies Lorraine
Lobianco
Look
back in anger: Robert Altman's Nashville, 20 years la Jim Ridley from The Nashville Scene, 1995
A
Nashvillian looks at Nashville / The Dissolve Noel Murray, December 3, 2013
Nashville:
America Singing Criterion essay by
Molly Haskell, December 02, 2013
Three
Reasons: Nashville See video,
December 04, 2013
Keith
Carradine on Nashville See video,
December 05, 2013
10
Things I Learned: Nashville Photo Gallery by Issa Clubb, December 12, 2013
Criterion’s
Best Picture Oscar Nominees Photo
Gallery, February 22, 2012
Nashville
(1975) - The Criterion Collection
A movie called “Nashville” -
Salon.com Ray Sawhill in an
extensive review from Salon, June 27, 2000
NASHVILLE
Jonathan Rosenbaum from Sight and
Sound, October 9, 1975
Nashville Nashville and the American Dream, by
Michael Klein from Jump Cut, 1975
Nashville
by Steven Abrahams - Jump Cut Buying Nashville, by Steven Abrahams
from Jump Cut, 1975
Nashville Altman’s Open Surface, by Jane Feuer
from Jump Cut, 1976
A
Critics' Duet on 'Nashville' | Village Voice Andrew Harris and Molly Haskell from The Village Voice, June 9, 1975
My
Favorite Movie Ever: Robert Altman's 'Nashville ... Danny Miller from Cinephiled, October 21,
2013
Nashville - Film
(Movie) Plot and Review - Publications
Lauren Rabinovitz from Film Reference
NASHVILLE
AT 35 Dennis Cozzalio from Sergio
Leone and the Infield Fly Rule
I
Don't Worry About Barbara Harris' Albuquerque in - Hill Place
Clayton
Dillard Cinespect
Nashville | Reverse Shot Leah Churner
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale, July 30, 2006
Slant
Magazine Blu-ray [Chuck Bowen]
Criterion Blu-Ray
The
Atlantic [Jason Bailey] July 4, 2013
The
Digital Fix [Gary Couzens] 25th
Anniversary
Altman's
'Nashville' - PopMatters John
Oursler
Josef Braun December
10, 2013
The Greatest Films - comprehensive
analysis of classic US film Tim Dirks
Sean
Reviews Robert Altman's Nashville [Blu-ray Review] Sean Hutchinson from Criterion Cast
Bright Lights Film Journal
:: Books: The Nashville Chronicle
Matthew Kennedy from Bright Lights Film Journal reviews Jan Stuart’s book, The
Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman’s Masterpiece, April 2001
Film
Freak Central - The Nashville Chronicles: The Making ... Bill
Chambers from Film Freak Central reviews Jan Stuart’s book
Sound
On Sight (Jeremy Carr) also seen
here: Studies
in Cinema: Robert Altman's 'Nashville'
Sound
On Sight [Justine Smith]
The
History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 1975 [Erik Beck]
The
Conversations: Nashville - Slant Magazine
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard, February 17, 2010
Nashville Sounds Ethan Alter reviews songs from the film for
High Hat, also seen here: THE HIGH HAT
| Potlatch: Nashville Sounds: Altman's ...
Is
the Music in Robert Altman's 'Nashville' Its Strength or Its ... Sam Adams from indieWIRE, December 4, 2013
Revisiting
the Strange and Wonderful Soundtrack to Robert . Pitchfork, December 9, 2013
Please
stop comparing Robert Altman's Short Cuts to ... - Slate Nathaniel Rich from Slate, January 27, 2009
Nashville (1975) | The Film Spectrum Jason Fraley
Nashville
- Reelviews Movie Reviews James
Berardinelli
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
Edward
Copeland on Film Why the film rates in his
all-time Top Ten
The DVD Journal:
Nashville Dawn Taylor, 25th
Anniversary
Home
Theater Info [Doug MacLean] 25th
Anniversary
DVD
Savant - Blu-ray [Glenn Erickson]
Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-ray.com
Region A [Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Criterion Blu-Ray
Blu-rayDefinition.com
[Brandon A. DuHamel] Criterion
Blu-Ray
DVDizzy.com
- Blu-ray [Luke Bonanno] Criterion
Blu-Ray
Movie
Metropolis - Blu-ray [Christopher Long]
Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD
Talk - Blu-ray [Stuart Galbraith IV]
Criterion Blu-Ray
James Kendrick -
QNetwork Entertainment Portal
Criterion Blu-Ray
DVD
Verdict - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan] Criterion Blu-Ray
Film
Intuition: Criterion Collection Blu-ray [Jen Johans] Criterion Blu-Ray
Robert
Altman's Nashville is no attack on the city · DVD ... Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club, Criterion Blu-Ray
Nashville
Blu-ray review | Cine Outsider
Slarek, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray
Blu-Ray
Review: Nashville | Row Three David
Brook, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray
Cinephile:
Review : Nashville (1975) Matthew
Thrift, Masters of Cinema Blu-ray
Matt
vs. the Academy [Matt Foster]
eFilmCritic.com the Ultimate Dancing Machine
David
Perry's Xiibaro Reviews: Nashville
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
An
American Playtime. Robert Altman's Nashville. | Hope ... Adam Batty from Hope Lies at 24 Frames Per Second
The
Spinning Image [Daniel Auty]
Thoughts on
Stuff Patrick
Nitrate
Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Allan Smithee]
Reel
Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Cinephilia and Beyond
Full Screenplay
Friday
Editor's Pick: Nashville (1975) - Alt Screen
Daily |
Robert Altman's NASHVILLE | Keyframe - Explore the David Hudson from Fandor
Nick Dawson interviews screenwriter Joan Tewkesbury from Filmmaker magazine, December 6, 2013
Ronee
Blakley Looks Back at Robert Altman's Masterpiece ... Tyler Coates interviews actress Ronee Blakely
from Flavorwire, December 3, 2013
Robert
Altman Robert
Altman, by Stephen Lemons from Salon, includes an interview with Altman,
August 15. 2000, also seen here: Salon Feature
"Altman's
finest makes Ready to Wear look shabby"by Geoff Pevere from The
Globe and Mail
Baltimore City Paper:
Nashville | Movie Review Heather
Joslyn
Philadelphia City Paper
[Sam Adams]
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert]
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert]
Movie
Review - Nashville - NASHVILLE - NYTimes.com Vincent Canby, June 12, 1975, also seen here:
New
York Times
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Nashville
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Death of a Salesman Cal Worthington tribute by Sam Sweet from The Paris Review,
BUFFALO BILL AND THE INDIANS, OR SITTING BULL’S HISTORY LESSON
USA
Altman's continuing
fascination with the lunatic reality underlying
VideoVista Gary Couzens
William F. Cody (Paul Newman), renowned scout and buffalo
hunter, has set up Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, including such attractions as
Annie Oakley (Geraldine Chaplin), the surest shot in the West. His old
adversary Chief Sitting Bull has also agreed to take part, but the Chief has
his own agenda...
Following his huge success with M*A*S*H, Altman worked prolifically
throughout the 1970s, given carte blanche by the studios to make films in a
wide variety of genres, most of which he set out to subvert. Although he had
his critical successes (especially
This really is a film for Altman fans, diehard western completists, and not
very many other people. There's plenty of interest, such as the work of many of
Altman's regular company of actors. Almost all of the director's 1970s'
pictures were shot in scope (Thieves Like Us is an exception) and Paul
Lohmann's photography gives the film an appropriately dusty look. With an
Altman scope film, you have to watch it at the full 2.35:1 ratio or not at all,
and Buffalo Bill And The Indians contains plenty of examples of his
trademark use of the wide format to marshal his large cast. There's also his
characteristic multilayered soundtracks, using much overlapping dialogue, which
stretched the possibilities of monophonic sound to their limits. But this is a
one-note picture, and way too long at two hours. There's probably no such thing
as a perfect movie in Altman's filmography, only more or less flawed. This is
one of his more flawed ones.
Turner Classic Movies Genevieve McGillicuddy
Buffalo Bill and the Indians was inspired by Arthur Kopit's play, Indians,
which receives a screen credit even though scenarist Alan Rudolph only used a
few lines from the original stage production. Where Kopit's play was a cynical
political comedy about the numerous injustices visited on Native Americans,
Rudolph's screenplay broadens the canvas considerably to address the whole
issue of American mythmaking.
Fresh from the success of Nashville (1975), probably the best example of
his multi-layered storytelling technique, Buffalo Bill and the Indians
was filmed on location at Stoney Indian Reserve in Alberta, Canada and features
a stunning array of talent: Paul Newman as the legendary Buffalo Bill, Joel
Grey as his press agent, Burt Lancaster as Ned Buntline, the man responsible
for inventing the legend of Buffalo Bill, Harvey Keitel as Ed, Buffalo Bill's
nephew, Geraldine Chaplin as Annie Oakley, and Shelley Duvall as the wife of
President Grover Cleveland. As portrayed by Newman, Buffalo Bill sees himself
as a total entertainer and more than willing to exploit his famous name for
fame and fortune. But during rehearsals for his show, he is dismayed to
discover that his main attraction, Chief Sitting Bull (Frank Kaquitts), doesn't
share his views. Not only does Sitting Bull refuse to participate in staged
reenactments of famous historic events (because they are misrepresentations of
the truth), but he continually challenges Bill's hero status in the show.
There is another similarity to Nashville in Buffalo Bill and the
Indians and it's exemplified by the "story within a story"
framework, which is obvious from the first scene in the film where audiences
are informed by a narrator that this is "not a show, it is a review of the
down-to-earth events that made the American frontier." As we watch an
attack on a log cabin, the violence halts abruptly when Buffalo Bill's press
agent yells, "Cease the action." The scene is revealed as a
rehearsal, thus setting the stage for a movie that plays constantly with the
notion of truth and entertainment.
Released amidst the bicentennial celebrations of 1976, Buffalo Bill and the
Indians did not enjoy the critical success of Altman's more popular films.
The revisionist history did not sit well with audiences and the fact that
United Artists did not widely promote the release on television or in print
certainly did not help it at the box office. Probably the most damaging blow to
Altman came when his producer, Dino de Laurentiis, revealed his disappointment
with the final product. De Laurentiis had been expecting a more traditional
Western with broad commercial appeal, and Altman's dialogue-heavy, politically
subversive product was not the film the producer wished to release. Altman and
De Laurentiis' working relationship disintegrated when the producer submitted
the film to the Berlin Film Festival, where it was awarded the coveted Grand
Prix. Altman angrily turned down the award, stating that the version of Buffalo
Bill and the Indians screened was one "that has been edited
drastically, [and] does not represent my work." The frustrated director
subsequently asked that "neither I nor my film be considered for any prize
or honor on the basis that it perpetrated a fraud."
The very public rift between the two men would lead to additional problems for
Altman, who already found himself on unsteady footing in
DVD Times Anthony Nield
Buffalo Bill And The
Indians Welcome
to Show Business, by
Cinepassion.org Fernando
F. Croce
Edward Copeland on Film
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
3 WOMEN A- 94
USA
Here is the last stop
for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from
the cold and the past and the old ways.
Here is where they are trying to find a new life style, trying to find
it in the only places they know to look:
the movies and the newspapers.
—Joan Didion, from the opening essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”
from Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
1968
Another one of Altman’s
difficult and enigmatic films, a mix of comic absurdity and morbid tragedy,
intentionally featuring few commercial prospects, creating a uniquely original
desert landscape where it’s hard to survive without learning how to adapt,
where women are caught in a no man’s land of macho culture that creates female
victims that don’t fit anywhere, that aren’t really appreciated or valued, even
to themselves, where they have to go through some absurd Kafkaesque
psychological metamorphosis just to be able to live with themselves. With this film, Altman completes his “Female
Subjectivity” Trilogy, coming after That
Cold Day In the Park (1969) and Images
(1972). What immediately strikes one
about this film is how it’s unlike anything else you’ve ever seen, where one
can’t help but be mesmerized by the uniqueness of such a rare work of art, like
the murals on display throughout, where the artist Bodhi Wind, now deceased
(struck dead while stepping off a curb in London), is barely known, yet the
supreme beauty of the overall artwork on display is haunting for being such an
undiscovered secret. Perhaps compounding
the overall sense of loss and devastation is learning what happened to these
artworks, which were painted specifically for this film in cracked and decaying
swimming pools that had been abandoned in the heat of the desert. After the film was completed, they were
eventually demolished to make way for new housing units, where one mourns the
loss as one would for a particularly effecting death. What’s equally interesting is that this film
was buried in the vaults somewhere, barely seen by anyone, confounding critics
at the time of its release, not released on home video for some 27 years, where
the reappearance is like a rebirth, all of which is reflective of the cyclical
themes of the film, where Altman’s movie actually preserves Bodhi Wind’s
artworks, like a time capsule, while introducing an unfathomable mystery that
goes along with the director’s own artistic imprint.
Altman’s film is about
breaking down the barriers and destroying the illusions that leave women so
powerless, believing in the hype, the false magazine brand of what a woman
should be, how she should look or dress, how she should behave, and what is
expected of her in order to be considered a success. And when her life doesn’t live up to that
idealized dream, the weight of the world falls on her shoulders, plunging into
a culturally imposed psychological abyss where she must rediscover her own
existential self-worth. Sort of a
women’s version of Waiting for Godot,
where the missing qualities in the lives of everyone seen onscreen seems to be
waiting for deliverance by some mythological entity or unknown force, as
suggested by the demonic power of the artworks, to be fixed and made whole
again, as they are such pathetic examples of miserably unhappy human beings. Using a slowly building, dreamlike narrative
that accentuates delusion and abject sadness, where characters are seemingly
trapped by cliché’s and the banal ordinariness of their lives, this is one of
the most achingly lonely films you’ll ever see.
Shot in sweltering heat out in the Southern California desert somewhere,
perhaps near Palm Springs, the film targets the evils of the banal, where
apathy seems the most despicable of all human conditions, where no one cares
about anybody else, who they are, where they’re from, what happens to them,
whether they live or die, as it’s all the same when you’re so self-absorbed
that you simply don’t give a damn.
Instead of the abnormal psychological neuroses from Images
(1972), this film features lost souls that are courageously trying to make it
through life in a way that is acceptable to them. The comic humor of the first half gives way
to a more carefully observed grimness and disillusionment by the end, where the
impact is like watching glass shattering, leaving one stunned, forced to
witness more than one can bear, and perhaps even traumatized by the unusual
turn of events. Altman fixes it so it’s
hard for the viewer to find a point of entry to this film, making it difficult
to identify with any of the characters, as they’re all so disoriented, absent
any identifiable personalities, so it’s the situation they’re in that finally
matters, where it’s all about a personal transformation, requiring a revelatory
shock of some sort to catapult one out of their mindless complacency, like the
apocalyptic effect achieved in Hitchcock’s The Birds
(1963). Certainly after the passing
years, there’s little else out there like this, making the viewer value the
uniqueness of the experience even more.
1 woman became 2
2 women became 3
3 women became 1
Whether intended or
not, this seems to be the written formula for the film, neatly written out
methodically like a recipe, offering guidelines for how to proceed. Yet due to the singular nature of filmmaking
and art, no two directors would turn out the same product, which seems to be
the fascination here, as despite our similarities, we are all uniquely
different, both in our reactions to the same thing, and our levels of
appreciation. Altman has written a birth
to death, and rebirth movie, where Shelly Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux won the
Best Actress Award at Cannes, as did Susannah York for Images
(1972), and while she’s marvelous as this chatty Cathy character who talks endlessly
in empty cliché’s to people who aren’t even listening, living her life out of
magazine advertisements that tell her what color combinations to wear, how to
decorate her apartment, what recipe’s to follow based on the amount of time
needed for preparation, viewing herself as the most popular girl in town even
as people really want nothing to do with her, it’s Sissy Spacek as Pinky Rose
that we can’t take our eyes off of. Both
performances are extensions of their earlier roles, Duvall in Nashville
(1975) and Spacek in BADLANDS (1973), but she’s so unbelievably childish, seen
early on blowing bubbles in her coke glass through a straw, seemingly without
an idea or thought in her head, an empty vessel waiting to be filled, where she
latches onto Millie, thinking she is the most wonderful person in the world,
telling her “You’re the most perfect person I ever met.” What she brings to this film is pure
innocence, surprised by everything as if she’s never seen anything before. Despite the title, the film is mostly about
the involvement of these two women who become increasingly dependent upon one
another, until later in the film they merge into something altogether different. Pinky comes into the film with no history, no
foundation, where we know nothing about her, where she appears to be a blank
slate, while Millie acts as our tour guide throughout the film, as she loves to
explain the rules and guidelines of the world as she sees it, talking to
complete strangers about her active social life as if she’s known them all her
life, where her delusions are constantly exposed, even as she can’t see
them. So while Pinky’s yearning to be
like her, attached to her like a following shadow, Millie wants everybody to
respect her and pay attention to her, but nobody else likes her or could care
less about her, which is simply heartbreaking throughout.
One constant throughout the film is water, a rare and valuable commodity in the desert, but it’s given a near mythological depiction through the constantly recurring artworks which seem to move in and out of our consciousness, like the flowing of water, accentuated by opening and closing sequences shot through a wave machine, which may symbolically reflect amniotic fluid, the initial body of water that gives warmth and life to a growing fetus. Appropriately, an early shot shows extremely old and frail people at a rehabilitation health spa being led by young girls into a heated exercise pool of mineral water, where they may as well be returning to the birth water of their origins. It is at this spa that Millie and Pinky meet, where Pinky is the newcomer that needs to be trained, where there is a pair of identical twins, Polly and Peggy (Leslie Ann and Patricia Ann Hudson) working there as well, where Pinky, who is initially fascinated beyond belief (“I wonder what it’s like to be twins…do you think they know which one they are?”), is warned, “We don’t like the twins,” a thought lingering throughout that is never explained. The twins, however, are attractive young girls that live in their own zone and aren’t the least bit helpful, having no use for anyone else, where they seem to have nothing to give, even to themselves, much like the couple running the spa, where Sierra Pecheur as Nurse Bunweil runs a tight ship, barking out orders and instructions, getting on everybody’s ass, much like Nurse Ratched from ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOOS NEST (1975). The owners don’t seem the least bit concerned by their patients, but are more suspicious of government inspectors getting a look at their financial records, trusting no one, where all that matters to them is making money, as most likely they are cooking the books. This sense of blindness is accentuated by Millie’s cheerful façade, where she pretends to be something she’s not, continually ingratiating herself to others, whether it’s neighbors or coworkers, where she doesn’t have lunch at her own job site, but goes to the hospital across the street and invents conversations with people, making herself the center of attention, which is initially darkly comic, considering no one is the least bit interested, but it’s followed by ridicule. They always seem to be whispering under their breath, talking about her, even as they ignore her. In Millie and Pinky, we have two lonely outcasts, where there’s a steady stream of meanness that flows throughout this picture, which seems somehow connected to social standing, where the most popular are easily the most dismissive of others.
Pinky moves in with
Millie at the Purple Sage Apartments, owned by a former stunt cowboy Edgar
(Robert Fortier) and his wife Willie (Janice Rule, wife of Ben Gazzara), a
mysterious pregnant woman who paints the striking and unsettling murals, while
Millie also takes Pinky along on her evening visits to Dodge City, a deserted
ghost town in a Wild West motif, featuring a dilapidated bar with an Indian
teepee, fake rattlesnake, gun range, and dirt bike track out back, also owned
by Willie and Edgar, where Willie can be seen working alone with her paints,
dressed like a gypsy. This lone bar off
the side of the highway is typical of the Southwest, featuring exaggerations
that don’t quite work, where Fortier, who is also a carpenter by trade, helped
build the Dodge City set. Millie talks
incessantly at the bar until Pinky guzzles an entire mug of beer, followed by
several loud belches, where Millie is simply bewildered, staring bullets
through her in disbelief. People that
live in the desert are more distant, living in extreme spaciousness too vast to
fill, where it offers a certain aura that the film takes advantage of. We discover the desert reminds both Millie
and Pinky of Texas, where they’re both from, apparently, and Altman uses a
brightly exaggerated color scheme that contrasts from the barren wasteland
outside. Additionally, this comments
upon their barren interior lives, where Millie proudly exclaims, “I’m known for
my dinner parties,” which consists only of dehumanized packaged, processed
food. Willie is the third woman who
barely utters a word throughout the entire picture, played like a Silent era
movie star, always conveying a certain sadness, seeing right through her
alcoholic husband who also hits on young girls, as if this is a sign of male
virility, where his credo is, “I'd rather face a thousand million savages than
one woman who’s learned how to shoot,” (all 3 women learn how to shoot by the
end), finding him a pathetic excuse for a husband, where now she can’t even
speak to him. Instead she paints these
dreamlike, surreal murals of reptilian female figures under the domination of
an enormous male monster inside empty swimming pools. In contrast, at the Purple Sage Apartments,
these same artistic paintings are seen under the bright blue color on the floor
of the swimming pool where people are continually seen lounging about grilling
hamburgers. Millie invents a romance
with Tom, her neighbor, who himself invents a cough to keep her away, where
they call her “Thoroughly Modern Millie” when she joins them decked out from
head to toe in yellow, where she is the object of snide remarks and whispered
snickers.
Supposedly coming to
Altman in a dream, where he visualized the briefest outlines of an idea, the
film is shot in an impressionistic style that Altman likens to a watercolor
that starts out as one thing, but eventually evolves into something else, a
visual idea that can grow on you, like memory recollections, or a painting with
music, where the camera is a window into this strange and mysterious world,
where the seductive nature of the mural paintings lures the audience into this
enchanted place. The anxiety ridden
musical score by Gerald Busby, who plays the Reverend in Altman’s next film A Wedding
(1978), is dissonant and atonal, perfectly reflecting the restless unease of
the characters who remain in a state of constant transition from one place or
time, where sudden actions can happen abruptly and feel disorienting. Altman loves to use glass or mirror
reflections, doubling or tripling the images, offering a window into the soul of sadness, also a view
through an aquarium, a device used later in Short Cuts
(1993), at times feeling as if we are underwater. In all likelihood an extension of Images,
Duvall’s entire performance is fraught with exposed flaws and vulnerabilities,
where she devised much of her own quirky dialogue about tuna melts and hula
lessons, made her own costumes, decorated the apartment, created her own
recipes, even did her own grocery shopping for the movie scenes, but most importantly
also wrote her own diary entries that Pinky devours first chance she gets. While Millie is filled with self-inflated
pride, following the magazine advise, taking it all very seriously, repeating
catch phrases that she thinks will make people like her, Pinky has nobody, and
is so completely lost that she begins to steal Millie’s identity, pretending to
be like her, initially wearing her clothes and claiming she hates tomatoes
after overhearing Millie express a similar dislike in order to form a closer
bond with her, eventually escalating to more, actually taking over the writing
of the diary and assuming her personality, but not until after a traumatic
event lands her in the hospital, where the hospital coma sequence is duplicated
in Short
Cuts. Even after turning on Pinky,
angrily blaming her for her own shortcomings, seeing her in a coma afterwards
strikes a nerve, where Millie’s standing up for Pinky is a way of standing up
for herself.
The film’s journey
takes a baffling turn, where afterwards Pinky becomes a version of Millie that
she could only hope to achieve, becoming very sure of herself, with a newfound
confidence and swagger, where all the guys Millie imagined she was with are
actually lining up to be with Pinky, a change of circumstances that has her
floored, seeing her turn into a mean and coldhearted person. But Millie remains her friend, even when
humiliated and treated with scorn, becoming her more timid and submissive
follower in passive disbelief, remembering that Pinky was the only one who
actually admired her. This exchange of
identities shown in an entirely different light is not altogether new, as
Altman experimented with it in Images,
superimposing the faces of Susannah York with a young 12-year old girl,
reflected together in mirrors, and it was used to wondrous effect in THE WIZARD
OF OZ (1939), where the evil Mrs. Gulch morphs into the Wicked Witch, not to
mention Dorothy’s helpers are all transformed versions of real people she
earlier encountered. But in Altman’s
hands, it’s a puzzling transformation, where Pinky has a similar dream
sequence, a stunning montage of previously seen footage appearing in a
different light, bathed in waves, giving the appearance of being underwater,
perhaps a return to the womb, where the sleeping body is immersed in an
amniotic fluid, reformulating new visions of themselves, taking what they need
from one another, where each is a mirror reflection of one another cast in a
new light. The dissonant musical score
emphasizes a sense of metamorphosis and renewal, where they are all trying to
overcome this feeling of loneliness. The
film suggests our DNA is so close to being exactly alike that we exaggerate out
personalities in order to distinguish ourselves from one another, and God
forbid we’re exactly like somebody else.
Yet even when drawing what we can from each other, everybody’s personalities
are their own, even identical twins, who have the capacity of feeling alone and
unloved. We all react differently to the
inevitability of death, or the death of a child, for instance, where humans are
never actually prepared for the force of impact, where the individualized
emotional recovery afterwards perhaps redefines who we are, as we are never
quite the same again, reconfigured into completely different human beings. This impressionistic mosaic suggests nothing
less than a rebirth completes the cycle of life, with the 3 women becoming a
single composite personality, perhaps a fuller, more completely evolved species
of women, where ultimately we all embody the same human spirit, as after all,
this is only a dream anyway, where Millie consoles Pinky at one point after a
bad dream, “Dreams can’t hurt you.”
Time
Out Geoff Andrew
One of Altman's most enigmatic and personal films, this study of three women who exchange personalities (based on a dream of Altman's) combines comedy, suspense, social comment, and Bergmanesque reverie to weird but often wonderful effect. What really holds the film together is Shelley Duvall's breathtaking performance as the vacuous, gossipy therapist who becomes mentor to the naïve Spacek after the latter moves in as her flatmate. The third woman is a mute painter (Rule), fashioning her fears and fantasies into mythic murals of male aggression and female victimisation. Although any feminist content is undercut by the advent of insanity halfway through, and the plot construction is not entirely cohesive, the film succeeds through its perky, acute portrait of ordinary people living stunted lives against a backdrop of consumer-orientated glamour fuelled by films and advertising. Often very funny, always stylish, it's a fascinating film for all its faults.
Though the popularity
of Spielberg's spell it all out hokum was in the mist of destroying Hollywood Texas California
3 Women Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
An insert provided with the DVD of Mulholland Drive offers
"David Lynch's ten clues to unlocking this thriller," directing
confused viewers to "notice appearances of the red lampshade" and
"pay particular attention to the beginning of the film." Robert
Altman's 3 Women—a tour de force of dream logic set in
Alert readers will have noticed that
I mentioned "two young women" above, whereas the film's title
specifies three. The third, Willie (Rule), a silent presence decked out in a
Stepford-wife ensemble, remains at the drama's periphery, painting gargantuan
murals dominated by reptilian nudes that function as avatars of lust and rage.
These disturbing images fascinate Mildred "Pinky" Rose (Spacek),
who's just arrived in Desert Springs from
Gazing at her namesake with equal
parts infatuation and identification, Pinky/Mildred initially comes across like
a forerunner of Jennifer Jason Leigh's covetous gal pal in Single White
Female. But Altman, who claims the scenario came to him in a dream, is
after something far more elusive than rote suspense, or even simple
transference. Ultimately, 3 Women offers something both unique and
paradoxical: a portrait of collective solipsism. (The most common criticism
leveled at the film—that the single-mindedly gregarious Millie, oblivious to
the jeers of her neighbors and secure in her tacky taste, is little more than a
misanthrope's object of ridicule—couldn't be more misguided.) Pinky, Millie and
Willie reside in quixotic, infinitely malleable bubbles of their own devising.
Or something like that. Look, I'm the critic—I have to offer some kind of analysis, lest the rent go unpaid. But that doesn't mean you have to worry about what it all means. Do yourself a favor: Surrender.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] (excerpt) also reviewing FOOL FOR LOVE
Well before he directed the 1985
movie adaptation of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love, Robert Altman had
already made trips into mythopoeic, Shepard-esque psychodrama. Both 1972's Images
and 1977's 3 Women break from his shaggy genre revisions and American
tableaux to indulge a little "you know what would be heavy?"
experimentation. The story for 3 Women actually came to Altman in a
dream, and he fills it with askew imagery, often filtered through water or
reflected in mirrors, and cloaked in gaudy shades of yellow and purple.
Sissy Spacek stars as a mousy
young woman who takes a job at a California desert health spa, latches onto
self-absorbed fashion victim Shelley Duvall, and soon literally becomes a more
confident, popular version of her hapless idol. It's a superb actors' showcase,
with Spacek's Texas meekness and Duvall's chatterbox gawkiness playing off each
other in a way that's both theatrical and real. Before it gets metaphysical, 3
Women is loaded with funny, well-observed moments like Duvall's recipe for
"Penthouse Chicken," which requires a "a can of tomato soup...
it takes a whole hour to cook, but it's worth it." Though self-consciously
arty, 3 Women is a more fluid Ingmar Bergman riff than what Woody Allen
was coming up with around the same time, mainly because Altman's emphasis on
abandoned tourist traps and singles' apartment complexes rivals his equally
neglected California Split as a vivisection of '70s West Coast banality.
The Fool For Love DVD adds an interview with Altman and a written statement in which he explains that though some people have seen Fool For Love as a comedy or a thriller, that was never his vision for it. Similarly, on the commentary track for Criterion's 3 Women DVD, Altman acknowledges the movie's pretentiousness while insisting that, flaws and all, it's a valid record of what he saw in the world at the time it was made. Both confessions explain why even Altman's misfires endure: His art is built on his own insightful observations.
The Bottom Shelf Scott von Doviak from the High Hat (excerpt)
As the story goes, 3 Women was born as a dream Altman had one night while his wife was hospitalized with a serious illness (although it’s clear that the movie was at least midwifed by Bergman’s Persona, just as Images bears a genetic resemblance to Polanski’s Repulsion). Three key elements bubbled up from the director’s subconscious: the title, the two lead actresses (Shelly Duvall and Sissy Spacek) and the desert setting. Although the story came later, it certainly has nightmarish qualities of its own.
Duvall is Millie Lammoreaux, an eldercare worker at the Desert
Springs Rehabilitation and
Pinky’s fascination with Millie becomes an unhealthy obsession once the two women become roommates. She reads Millie’s diary, tries on her clothes and generally follows the Single White Female playbook. We get a hint that something kooky and existential is going on when we learn that Pinky’s real name is Mildred — same as Millie’s. One night Millie brings their landlord Edgar (Robert Fortier) home for a roll in the hay, despite the fact that his wife Willie (Janice Rule) is pregnant. This so upsets Pinky that she jumps from the second floor balcony into the swimming pool, plunging into a coma. When she wakes, she is not the same person.
Altman has described Pinky’s transformation as “personality theft, ” but Pinky hasn’t stolen Millie’s actual identity. Rather, she has become Millie’s dream-self, the idealized version of her that only Pinky can see. The real Millie is delusional in her own right — all of her gabbing about her famous dinner parties and men constantly asking her on dates is nothing but hot air. The new Pinky, on the other hand, is as confident and popular as Millie always imagined herself to be.
Then Pinky has a dream, and before you can say Mulholland Drive, things get even stranger. Identities shift yet again, there is a possible off-screen murder, and the line between reality and fantasy is all but obliterated. The final twenty minutes of 3 Women represent some of the strangest filmmaking of Altman’s career, but the movie as a whole is something of a hybrid between Weird Altman and the director’s more celebrated style. For all the metaphysical psychodrama, it’s yet another indelible exhibit in the gallery of idiosyncratic Altman communities. From the depressing geriatric spa to the swinging singles apartment complex to the run-down Wild West saloon with its shooting range and dirt bike track, Desert Springs is a keenly observed diorama of Me Decade kitsch.
With her mustard Pinto, hideous floral print furniture and tuna casseroles, Millie would seem a perfect fit for this world, but she’s not really part of the community. She is ignored both at work and at home; the other residents of the Purple Sage apartment complex might as well be phantoms gathered around the pool. As pitiful as she may be, however, Millie is one of the most fully imagined characters in all of Altman’s work, thanks to Shelly Duvall’s empathetic performance. Just as Susannah York provided the unicorn story for Images, Duvall kept a diary in character as Millie, passages from which are ladled over the film in voice-over. She came up with many of Millie’s gibbering monologues, including her risible 70s recipes. (“Spray the Cheez Whiz on the Sociables, then put an olive on top. ”) It’s a meticulous portrait of a woman whose entire lifestyle has been cribbed from the pages of McCall’s and Good Housekeeping.
Spacek turns in an effective variation on her naïve woman-child
roles from
The murals are a recurring motif throughout the movie which, like Images, has a tendency towards overt artiness. If 3 Women is a bit too symbol-heavy and color-coded, at least this time Altman takes a more playful approach to his pretensions. For example, throughout the film Millie is predominantly seen in yellow, while Pinky favors (duh) pink. Before a failed dinner party, Millie unpacks her groceries to reveal two bottles of wine: Tickled Pink and Lemon Satin. That’s funny stuff on several levels. And then there are the twins who work at the rehab center, about whom Pinky ponders: “Do you think they know which one they are? Maybe they switch back and forth. ” Again, this is not especially profound; it’s more like junk food for thought, and the movie is loaded with it.
For a long time 3 Women was another of the lost Altman movies, unavailable on video and generally perceived as another post-Nashville failure, jumbled in with the likes of A Wedding and A Perfect Couple in the mind of Joe Cinephile. Its reputation appears to be on the upswing now that it’s available as a spiffy Criterion Collection release. As for Weird Altman, he still surfaces from time to time. Quintet certainly qualifies, but I’ve already said my piece on that subject. Eerie atmospherics pervade his mid-80s period of stage-to-screen adaptations, from the paranoid midnight-of-the-soul ambiance of Secret Honor to the chilling dust-to-dust coda of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. A penchant for magical realism is a more recent development, manifested as a tornado in Dr. T and the Women and an Angel of Death in A Prairie Home Companion. Even in twilight, it seems, Altman has a few tricks left up his sleeve.
3
Women: Dream Project Criterion essay
by David Sterritt, September 13, 2011, also seen here: Criterion
Collection film essay [David Sterritt]
3 Women (1977) - The
Criterion Collection
“It’s
time to come inside now” – An appreciation of Robert Altman’s “3 Women” Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View,
originally published in Movietone
News, August 1978
Dan Schneider on Robert
Altman's 3 Women - Cosmoetica
Analysis
of Robert Altman's film: 3 Women | Random ... Anemone from Random Observations About
Movies, Art, Literature, and Life, April 19, 2011
The
Graces and the Fates: '3 Women' (Blu-ray) | PopMatters Bill Gibron, October 11, 2011
3
Women (1977) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Pablo Kjolseth
3 WOMEN - Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale
Michigan
Quarterly Review|No Man's Land: Robert Altman's ... Mary Camille Beckman, May 27, 2014
3 Women « Angeliska Gazette
Notes
on a Slow Zoom: Robert Altman's 3 WOMEN (1977 ... C. Jerry Kutmer from Bright Lights Film
Journal, May 26, 2011
Dreams
Are What Le Cinema Is For [Ken Anderson]
also seen here under LeCinema Dreams:
3
women 1977 - Turner Classic Movies
3
Women (Robert Altman; 1977) | The Master Shot Mike Odmark
Jabberwock:
3 Women, Robert Altman's dream film
Jai Arjun Singh
Robert
Altman's '3 Women': A freaky '70s movie to love | The Mark Tompkins from The Same Cinema Every
Night, June 25, 2012
3 Women | Film
Review | Slant Magazine Eric
Henderson
3 Women | Blu-ray
Review | Slant Magazine Budd Wilkins
3 Women - The
American Society of Cinematographers
Jim Hemphill
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
A
Regrettable Moment of Sincerity Surrealism vs. Masturbation, by Adam
Lippe
Images
Journal Gary Johnson
163. 3 WOMEN (1977) « 366
Weird Movies G. Smalley
DVD
Verdict - Criterion Collection Bill
Gibron, Criterion Collection
DVD
Savant Glenn Erickson, Criterion
Collection
DVDTown
[Christopher Long] Criterion
Collection
Q
Network Film Desk [James Kendrick]
Criterion Collection
DVD
Journal DSH, Criterion Collection
Q
Network Film Desk [James Kendrick]
Criterion Collection
digitallyOBSESSED.com
[Jon Danziger] Criterion Collection
KQEK
DVD Review [Michael John Derbecker]
Blu-rayDefinition.com
- Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Criterion Collection, Blu-Ray
High-Def
Digest [Steven Cohen] Criterion
Collection, Blu-Ray
3 Women (Blu-ray) : DVD
Talk Review of the Blu-ray
Christopher McQuain, Criterion Collection, Blu-Ray
DVD
Verdict - Criterion Collection (Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas] Criterion Collection, Blu-Ray
DVDizzy.com
- Criterion Collection Blu-ray with Pictures Criterion Collection, Blu-Ray
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
3
WOMEN (Robert Altman, 1977) | Dennis Grunes
Joyless
Creatures [Jenny Jones]
Miss
Media Junkie: My Favorite Robert Altman Film Miss Media Junkie
Film-Forward.com Reymond Levy
3 Women: Retrospective -
CultureMass Adam Renkovish
3 WOMEN –
Hammer to Nail Michael Nordine
eFilmCritic
Reviews Dr. Isaksson
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
3 Women -- Roger Ebert's
Review - Ebertfest
Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey] THAT COLD
DAY IN THE PARK, IMAGES, and 3 WOMEN
"We
don't like the twins" - On Robert Altman's 3 Women (1977) Nathaniel Rich from The Film Experience
The
Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Past
Picks Online [Jimmy Gillman]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Whine-Colored
Sea short reflections
Thoughts on
Stuff Patrick
rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert] in 2004
New
York Times Vincent Canby
DVDBeaver.com
- Review [Gary W. Tooze]
3 Women - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
A WEDDING A- 93
USA
“You know, weddings are
the happiest events I could possibly dream of — and yet somehow, when they’re
over, it’s always so sad.”
—Rita Billingsley (Geraldine Chaplin)
“I like to allow for
accidents, for happy occurrences, and mistakes. That’s why I don’t plan too
carefully, and why we’re going to use two cameras and shoot 500,000 feet of
film on A Wedding. Sometimes
you don’t know yourself what’s going to work. I think a problem with some of
the younger directors, who were all but raised on film, is that their film
grammar has become too rigid. Their work is inspired more by other films than
by life.”
—Robert Altman from Roger Ebert interview June 12, 1977, The Chicago Blog: In memory of Robert Altman
A
sprawling mess of a movie that couldn’t be more fun, one of Altman’s funniest
films, where what seems like that holy day disintegrates into pure mayhem and
turns into the marriage from hell.
Altman offers no hints in the opening half hour, playing it straight
with a few minor glitches, where the pageantry of a church wedding, including
the choir of the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston, Illinois, by the way,
seems glorified by the sacred music and formal attire, as an endless parade of
family and guests are introduced, where it’s impossible for the audience to
keep track of them all, but therein lies the intrigue. By the time we identify the bride and groom,
Amy Stryker as Muffin and Desi Arnaz Jr, as Dino, and the Bishop stumbles over
their wedding vows, they seem almost like an afterthought, swallowed up by the
more scandalous affairs of others.
Altman revisits the loosely defined Nashville (1975) formula of a dozen things happening
simultaneously, only expanding the base of main characters utilized from 24 to
48, eventually creating a farce like atmosphere where events spin out of
control, not the least of which are the characters themselves who succumb to
the pressure of having to continually put on their happy faces at an elite
social gathering of high society. Adding
to the high drama is the corpse of the groom’s grandmother (Lillian Gish) in an
upstairs bedroom, who dies just seconds before the wedding party arrives at her
palatial estate, an event that is one of the worst kept secrets throughout most
of the evening.
By the time the guests
arrive, Altman can’t wait to expose them as hypocrites, scoundrels, cheats,
backstabbers, drug addicts, and hell, why not throw in very likely connected to
the mafia for good measure? By the time
we hear a painfully amateurish and neverending rendition of the song “Love Is a
Many Splendored Thing,” the kind of off-key version sung in the piano lounges
of motel conventions all across America, no one is left unscathed, including
the groom who has apparently impregnated the bride’s sister Buffy, Mia Farrow,
who doesn’t seem the least bit ashamed, while her mother Tulip (Carol Burnett)
is having the ultra dramatic slow dance of her life with late night comic joke
master Pat McCormick, something of a balding gentle giant, who is not only
putting the moves on her but declaring her to be his lifelong soul mate,
suggesting they meet for a private moment outside in the greenhouse in ten
minutes, leaving the overwhelmed Tulip in a state of flux. On the groom’s side, Vittorio Gassman is the
alleged mafia father figure who designed an exact replica of his favorite
Italian restaurant in his basement.
Easily his best scene is the unexpected arrival of his brother from
Italy, where the two of them go into an unsubtitled rage of venomous Italian
words, which of course goes on for several minutes and no one has a clue what
the hell they’re arguing about before they eventually embrace in brotherly
love. Before the night is done, Mia
Farrow is in the pants of the brother.
Where all this is
leading, no one knows, as this is simply a roller coaster ride of strange and
mysterious events, where the audience is continually caught off-guard and
challenged by the multitude of characters, which is not at all uncommon at
large wedding receptions, where people fade in and out of one’s radar with some
obviously creating more of a lasting impression than others. When the uninvited bride and groom’s best
friends arrive, Pam Dawber (Mindy from Mork
and Mindy) and the party animal Gavan O’Herlihy, both are subsequently seen
openly making out with the betrothed, as if there is some unfinished
history. The open-minded morals of the
younger generation are seemingly excused by their parents as the dalliances of
youth, while the adults are all too busy covering up their own affairs behind
closed doors. Geraldine Chaplin is the
straight-laced, can’t-veer-from-the-program party planner, the one always
announcing what the various party activities will be, but also summarily left
out of all the activities herself, apparently without a friend in the world,
leaving her lost and alone in the middle of all this “happiness.” She provides an unintended narration of the
festivities, usually blatantly ignored, treated with disdain like some of the
hired help. It’s interesting to see how
this film lays the groundwork for a later Altman work that actually highlights
the distinctive viewpoints of the upstairs and downstairs social classes in Gosford
Park (2001). This film
only begins to shed light on the class divisions, preferring instead to go for
broad comedy, where by the end, the wedding party is a train wreck waiting to
happen. For years this film was
unavailable in any format except old VHS copies, but was eventually released on
a composite DVD of 70’s films called The Robert Altman Collection.
Time Out Geoff Andrew
Altman's attempt to repeat the
magic formula of
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule
review)
Ostensibly Robert Altman's aim in this 1978 comic free-for-all
was to top his own
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing QUINTET and A PERFECT COUPLE
When Robert Altman accepted his
lifetime achievement Academy Award, he described his filmography as "one
long film… some of you have liked some of the sections, and others… anyway,
it's all right." Longtime Altman fans knew what he meant. Before staging a
comeback in the '90s with movies like The Player and Short Cuts,
Altman spent a decade in the margins, making filmed plays and TV specials,
mainly because of his spectacular flameout at the end of the '70s, when he
followed up the masterful 3 Women with a string of barely released,
critically snubbed disasters: 1978's A Wedding, 1979's Quintet
and A Perfect Couple, and 1980's H.E.A.L.T.H.
Both A Wedding and the
AWOL H.E.A.L.T.H. are honest efforts at throwing what Pauline Kael
termed "an Altman party," with a troupe of great actors filling up
cartoon balloons and throwing them at each other. Still, A Wedding and Quintet
do suffer from the arrogance vividly described in Patrick McGilligan's critical
biography Robert Altman: Jumping Off The Cliff. According to McGilligan,
in the late '70s, Altman started believing in the sheer force of his creative
genius to bring shape to the shapeless, and he began embarking on half-realized
projects while still distracted by his troubles with the previous ones. In A
Wedding, the result is a sprawling slice of life that's generally pleasant,
but without Nashville's depth and insight. And in spite of Quintet's
triumphant production design, the movie itself is sleepy and attenuated.
They're both failures of a kind, though not uninteresting ones. If all art is
just an expression of who the artist is at any given time, then these sublimely
screwed-up lesser Altmans are as much works of art as any of his masterpieces.
Boombox
Serenade [Shannon Coulter]
If you're an Altman fan and haven't yet watched one of his films while wearing headphones, you gotta try it. I watched A Wedding (1978) on my laptop while hanging out at San Francisco's Cafe Neon last night, and immediately realized how much more of that nuanced, Altman-brand dialogue I was going to catch as a result of having the soundtrack piped directly into my head.
A Wedding starts off—surprise—with a wedding ceremony. There's another, less happy event that occurs at the outset too, but I'll keep that one secret so you can Netflix this gem in peace.
One of the many great things about A Wedding is that around 40 minutes in, it gets incredibly funny. Carol Burnett contributes to this of course, and despite only having a single line, Mia Farrow is deeply funny too, but it's mostly just that Altman somehow manages to work the film up to a particular pitch at which point everything becomes completely hysterical. Prior to filming it, Altman commented to Roger Ebert that he thought it might end up being his funniest film, and he was right.
This second, intensely comic half of A Wedding is all payoff. It's ushered in by a painfully saccharine rendition of "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing"—a song that I suspect Altman hated—as sung by a warbly soprano for the couples' first dance. This ditty was originally composed for the 1955 movie of the same name, after which it became a runaway hit and won an Oscar for best song. A Wedding, it serves as the backdrop for a bunch of scandalous little plot turns that Altman reveals gradually over the course of its performance. He lets the song play out in real time so it seems punishingly long which heightens the sense of absurdity. By the end, love definitely seems a lot less splendored. It's brilliant.
"Did you choose this song?" the groom asks the braces-wearing bride, who replies that she didn't, but that she thought Jennifer Jones had nice teeth in the film.
Throughout A Wedding, characters make various references to how different love and romance are post-sexual revolution America and Altman ironically uses the ancient rite of a wedding to highlight just how much had changed. The 1955 film Love Is A Many-Splendored Thing featured adultery and a mixed-race relationship, but with predictably dire consequences tacked on at the end. The interracial relationship in A Wedding, by contrast, is portrayed as the least deviant one in the film, and the gay characters too (one a bridesmaid and one a groomsman) are shining beacons of normality and level-headedness amidst the other frantic wedding guests, each of whom is unraveling in their own highly overmedicated way. In addition to his spot-on observations about the unchecked substance abuse of the 70's, Altman also brings a more timeless human frailty into the mix and gets the proportions just right.
It's all very funny in that sophisticated, character-driven style that Altman perfected. How he managed to be so unsentimental yet affectionate toward his characters at the same time, I'll never know. As a filmmaker, he somehow pulls off being both a naturalist and a stylist too—a seemingly impossible balance—but such is the nature of genius. Shuffle this one into your queue as soon as possible and remember the headphones.
Like
Anna Karina's Sweater: Forgotten gems of the 70's: A Wedding Filmbrain
In all fairness, it's perhaps incorrect to call Robert Altman's 1978 ensemble piece 'forgotten'. A Wedding is certainly held in high regard by Altman fans, and Filmbrain knows quite a few who happily clutch to their old pan-and-scan VHS copies, as no other version is (legally) available. Still, it doesn't get screened that often, and coming on the heels of 3 Women (one of his best), it often gets relegated to lesser-Altman status. Seeing it recently on the Fox Movie Channel (letterboxed, but a poor quality print), Filmbrain is convinced that it deserves to be reconsidered (or, at the very least, released on DVD!)
The late 70's through mid-80's was an awkward period for Altman. He made some "difficult" films that left fans and critics scratching their heads (Quintet), several attempts at commercial crowd-pleasers that were, for the most part, failures (A Perfect Couple, Popeye) and a few that tried to recreate the Nashville formula -- large casts, overlapping dialog, and multiple plot threads (A Wedding, Health). Though Streamers and Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean were slightly more successful, it would be many years before Altman found himself commercially in the black again (1992's The Player). Commercial success or failure aside, some of Altman's films during this period are truly wonderful. Filmbrain has always had a soft spot for Popeye, and thinks that Secret Honor might be one of his best.
[Filmbrain just learned that Secret Honor, Altman's Nixon film (with Philip Baker Hall in a bravura solo performance) is being released on DVD by Criterion in October. This is incredible news.]
When watching A Wedding, it's almost impossible not
to compare it to
Yet even with all these gripes, A Wedding is still a fabulous way to spend two hours. The unfolding of the story is deftly handled -- for the first half hour we haven't a clue who anybody is, and working out the connections is part of the fun. The dialog is witty, and the deliberately paced (but always rising) dramatic tension builds to a satisfying crescendo before the resulting chaos at the film's end. Altman uses his trademark zooms, which allows him to film from a distance, thereby leaving the actors clueless as to whom he's focusing on -- a brilliant technique. Filmbrain hopes this gets a proper DVD release with commentary by Altman -- it would be fascinating to hear his thoughts on this film.
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: felixnoir from
Australia
I like people who approach art in new and unconventional ways. 'A Wedding'
is one of the best Altman films for me, because it goes the furthest towards
abandoning a unified structure and rational storyline, and presents a loose
ensemble of stories and moments.
A review of the time said it well for me. The film has any number of stories,
but few are presented completely. For some, you only see the beginning. In
others, it is only the middle, or the end. The camera is voyeuristic, often
seeming to stumble on fragments of things, looking through plants, people
partly out of shot.
For me, first seeing the film at the age of 22, I found it quietly hilarious
from almost the very first shot. In that early shot, two boys are unrolling a
red carpet. Because it has been sitting unused for so long, the roll has gone
flat, and this makes the boy's arm wobble as the carpet unrolls. I laughed out
loud. That is an introduction to the understated humour and fine comic irony of
the film. I think this is why the film is under-appreciated in America.
Americans seem to like to attach a flag to their humour: "Don't be
offended. This is intended as a joke." Whereas 'A Wedding' seems to have
more in common with the comedic tradition of Tati. I still think 'A Wedding' is
one of the funniest films I have ever seen.
For me, this film was years before its time. It reminds me of modern bands such
as TV on the Radio or, especially, Animal Collective. There seem to be a lot of
loose ends, unconnected bits, things that shouldn't really go together, stuff
happening in layers that go in different directions. Yet somehow it all works.
It hangs together, although perhaps the only unities are those of time and
place. And when you actually try to reproduce the effect (perform the works)
you very soon find out that the seeming artlessness conceals a level of skills
and professionalism that is actually of the highest standard - something that
has strongly impacted on my own approach to art.
William Goldman said in 'Adventures in the Screen Trade' that directors are
basically very good storytellers. But here we don't have one story at all, we
have a slice through 20th century society. A picture that is a picture, not a
picture that tells a story. This film reminds me of a statement by Vonnegut,
that he thought perhaps The Novel had corrupted the public mind, because in a
novel, there are important and major and unimportant and peripheral characters.
In this film everyone is of equal importance. For me one of the failures of
this film is Carol Burnett. That's not because she is not an excellent actress,
or very funny. But she stands out, and while just about everybody else is
playing slightly tongue-in-cheek but straight, she plays this as overt comedy.
I don't know if I agree with those commentators who say this is a blistering
satire. I don't believe it is, any more than Boccaccio or Chaucer are
blistering satires. It is much more like 'Peasant Wedding' by Bruegel, full of
picaresque characters, a canvas of muddled humanity trying to fill their days.
It is gentle, and if it turns darker as it continues, there is a great deal of
darkness in Chaucer and Boccaccio too. Indeed I wouldn't be surprised to find
that Altman had been deliberately trying to create something similar to
'Peasant Wedding' in a modern art form. The absurdist influence is also strong.
This is a European film, not an American film.
So I consider 'A Wedding' to be a finer movie than 'Nashville', and in fact one
of the great movies of the 20th c. It is more understated, less obvious,
without clear stories or points to make. In that is its greatness. It is
genuinely subversive. It is a movie that uses a quite different structure and
method than almost any other movie you have ever seen. It is a movie that lets
its characters all talk for themselves. I think 'A Wedding' is a landmark
movie, a reference point that should be part of the training of every
filmmaker. I don't think Altman ever bettered it. This, with his own company,
was his chance to do what he really wanted to do. It is one of the three or
four films that has had the strongest impact on my own life and art. After half
a century of filmgoing, I still clearly recall image after image. 'A Wedding'
still sticks out in my head as one of the high points of all that time.
JonathanRosenbaum.com » Blog
Archive » An Altman [on A WEDDING]
from Film Comment,
September/October, 1978
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Thoughts
on A Wedding (1978), directed by Robert Altman Mom Smackley from Yeti Hideout, September 5,
2010
2 or 3 Things I
Know About Altman :: Stop Smiling Magazine
Michael Joshua Rowin
EyeForFilm.co.uk Gary Duncan
The Parallax
Review [Kyle Kogan]
Altman's
folly. 48 characters at a light-comic Wedding. - Wedding ... Chris Jarmick from Epinions
Every 70s
Movie: A Wedding (1978) Peter Hanson
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] also reviewing
QUINTET and A PERFECT COUPLE
A Wedding > Overview -
AllMovie Paul Brenner
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: mockturtle from
Channel 4 Film
[capsule review]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
DVDBeaver.com
[Gregory Meshman]
QUINTET B 84
USA
In a No Exit style existential chamber drama set in a nightmarish post-apocalyptic vision of a near extinct human species living out their final days in a frozen world, the human race faces bleak prospects crossing an empty landscape of frozen ice and snow, which pales in comparison to the brutality displayed in the inhospitable city, a frozen ruins of a city where people huddle next to one another near fires lit inside closed rooms, where some may have already lost their minds, while others remain fearful of something strange or unknown that they can’t comprehend. Nothing is as it seems, as no one tells the truth anymore. All have reason to be suspicious, as killing and paranoia is everywhere, with dead bodies strewn along the streets with packs of rotweiller dogs gnawing on the remains. Within this world is a lavishly designed interior set of a palatial old-style hotel showing signs of a previous civilization that no longer exists, cut glass doors, mirrors, a ballroom chandelier overlooking wall-sized photographs of children, including black children, while now all signs of diversity are gone and what remains is an entirely white society with no children left on earth, only the last remaining adults waiting to die, like an eerie Twlight Zone episode. Two things that stand out in this film are the peculiarities of the United Nations casting, American icon Paul Newman along with a Eurocentric A-list of actors, from Swedish actress Bibi Andersson, Italian actor Vittorio Gassman, to Spanish actor Fernando Rey, a unique group that no one ever combined together before, like some outlandish Dino De Laurentis project, and also the exotic 20th century classical musical score by Tom Pierson which adds an energetically rhythmic and otherwordly quality to the film.
Bookended between
desolate opening and closing scenes out in the frozen element, Altman creates
an interior world of psychological dread and deterioration, a world of moral
void expressed through the game of Quintet, a Dungeons and Dragons board game
where the losers could lose their lives at some point where the game intersects
with their real lives. Paul Newman and
his younger, more openly curious wife, Brigitte Fossey, come in out of the cold
where they have apparently hunted down the last of the Arctic seals, forced to
retreat back into the world’s major city where the living and the dead co-exist
equally, with neither paying much attention to the other, where people
continually retreat back into their hibernating rooms, with snow and icicles
surrounding the interiors of the hallways and staircases, and people’s breath
can be seen. Shot in
Quintet Review.
Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Geoff Andrew
While certainly not one of Altman's most successful movies, this excursion into the sci-fi genre was unfairly criticised or neglected upon release. Set in a bleak landscape during a tough, inhospitable ice-age, it concerns a seal trapper (Newman) and his wife (Fossey) who wander into a strange, desolate city where they meet a group of people playing a mysterious game, for which the stakes gambled are life and death. Slow, humourless, and occasionally over-emphatic in its use of symbolism, it's nevertheless a fascinating film, which manages to work thanks to its absolute mastery of atmosphere.
Chicago Reader Ted Shen
Robert Altman's existential sci-fi drama, in which denizens of a postapocalyptic ice age are forced to participate in a deadly board game, was roundly dismissed upon its 1979 release but has since picked up a minor cult following for its unsettling and relentlessly gloomy atmosphere. The narrative is convoluted, the characters thin, and the pace appropriately glacial; burdened with opaque metaphysical dialogue and bizarre, medieval-looking costumes, actors Paul Newman, Bibi Andersson, Fernando Rey, and Vittorio Gassman seem baffled and enervated, a reaction most viewers will probably share.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing A WEDDING and A PERFECT COUPLE
The new four-DVD box set Robert
Altman Collection omits H.E.A.L.T.H.—still unavailable on home
video—in favor of a stripped-down single-disc edition of M*A*S*H, which
most Altman fans already own. One switchout, and this set could've been a real
cinephile treasure, filling in the biggest gap in the career of one of
America's trickiest and most prolific pop artists. Instead, it's just
three-fourths of the way to charting how a man who made some of the best films
of the early '70s went so wrong.
The short answer is that he
didn't go that wrong. Even a boondoggle like Quintet—a hazy Paul
Newman science-fiction vehicle about a deadly dice game played by the
inhabitants of an icy post-apocalyptic wasteland—is merely an extension of
obscure Altman dream-dramas like Images and 3 Women.
Still, A Wedding and Quintet
do suffer from the arrogance vividly described in Patrick McGilligan's critical
biography Robert Altman: Jumping Off The Cliff. According to McGilligan,
in the late '70s, Altman started believing in the sheer force of his creative
genius to bring shape to the shapeless, and he began embarking on half-realized
projects while still distracted by his troubles with the previous ones. In A
Wedding, the result is a sprawling slice of life that's generally pleasant,
but without Nashville's depth and insight. And in spite of Quintet's
triumphant production design, the movie itself is sleepy and attenuated.
They're both failures of a kind, though not uninteresting ones. If all art is
just an expression of who the artist is at any given time, then these sublimely
screwed-up lesser Altmans are as much works of art as any of his masterpieces.
Page 2: Quintet v. The Running Man Deathmatch!>> Scott von Doviak from the High Hat (excerpt)
Robert Altman’s Quintet deserves a mention here, if only because it’s so unlikely there will ever be another reason to mention it. Altman has made some of the all-time great motion pictures, including M*A*S*H and McCabe and Mrs. Miller, but as aficionados of the director know, he also has a fondness for the weed. Thus the Altman filmography is littered with projects that must have seemed like really good ideas when the auteur was baked, such as the perplexing O.C. & Stiggs (an adaption of a National Lampoon story) or this ill-considered excursion into science fiction.
To his credit, Altman managed to concoct the least appealing post-apocalyptic society ever depicted on film, which is surely some sort of achievement. Set in a future Ice Age, Quintet is so white with snow and glare, you will notice streaks of dust on your television screen that were hitherto imperceptible. To give it that extra “futuristic” edge, Altman has smeared his camera lens with enough lube to fuel a three-day orgy at Elliott Gould’s place. The remaining inhabitants of this dreary age reside in the ruins of some sort of sewage treatment plant or perhaps trendy industrial-style disco. Everything is frozen and there are bodies strewn about here and there, which doesn’t seem to bother anyone overmuch - they’re all too busy playing Quintet.
Quintet doesn’t really qualify as a sport, unless you’re one of those dweebs who petitioned the student council to let participation in the chess club count towards a varsity letter. It’s a board game of sorts, in which five players move randomly shaped pieces around a game board until a “killing order” is arranged. The winner of this portion of the game goes on to face a sixth man in the final round. (In the film’s publicity materials, Quintet is described as a “macabre form of backgammon.” Altman’s financial backers apparently rejected his initial pitch, a “grisly variation on Twister.”) The game itself doesn’t look like all that much fun, but since there’s not much else to do besides club seals or freeze to death and get eaten by dogs, everyone plays it continuously anyway.
The best players qualify for the tournament, which is a real honor, since all the losers are actually killed. If there’s a plot to Quintet (and I’m not conceding there is), it has something to do with Paul Newman assuming the identity of a dead player in order to… well, I have no idea, really. If forced to make a guess, I’ll go with “exact a terrible vengeance.” This entails Newman subjecting himself to any number of Ed Woodian speeches about the five sides of life and the five levels of the universe and the void. “The emptiness I’m speaking of is the total horror of madness.” Shit like that. In the end, Newman trudges alone into the smeary existential wasteland. I like to think he found another settlement where the inhabitants pass the time playing a morbid version of Parcheesi.
Reverse Shot [Nick Pinkerton]
For those of us who weren’t
there to watch his career unspool in first-run theaters, it’s been rather
difficult until recently to understand the full scope of Robert Altman’s life
in movies. Plenty of young American filmmakers may imitate or homage him in
whatever facile ways, but his bulldozing work ethic is little imitated
nowadays.
For those not living in the
distance of a good repertory house (and by the mid-Nineties, that included most
of us), DVD has been invaluable—California Split is regained, a
widescreen Nashville’s made that movie’s status unimpeachable for a new
generation of viewers, and I was ecstatic to see that Images, long one
of the least valued and certainly least available of the director’s great
works, now has the opportunity for reappraisal. And while I’m patiently await a
nice disc release of That Cold Day in the Park, Altman’s 1969 exercise
in sustained sexual hysteria, a stronger film than the better-known Repulsion,
the archival roll-out continues abated. And as the back catalogue giveth, so
the back catalogue taketh away—valuable time at least—which brings us to the
matter of Quintet, now available on DVD as part of 20th Century Fox’s
four-film grab-bag “Robert Altman Collection.”
Apparently the film has its
enthusiasts—in a not-bad featurette extra, Altman claims the contemporary
existence of “Quintet clubs in Minneapolis and places like that” (the
backgammon-like board game at the center of the film’s futuristic non-culture
was actually invented, with working rules, by Altman and crew), which struck me
as every bit as dubious a claim as John Boorman’s statement on the Zardoz
commentary that, even three decades after the fact, he’s feted at personal
appearances by fanboys with loaves of green bread. But as it’s a sure thing
that Advanced Dungeons and Dragons is even now being played in a thousand
American basements, I can’t sell short the longevity of such tenaciously uncool
obsessions.
A year before The Empire
Strikes Back kicked off on the ice planet Hoth, Altman and Fox rolled out
this, their own frigid sci-fi, with a bit less hoopla. We’re living in the ice
age; Paul Newman and his mate, Brigitte Fossey, heaped under piles of clothes
and looking somewhere between Flemish serfs and Eskimos, trundle alone out of the
South, headed for “the city” (in fact the disused interiors of the Expo ’67
island in Montreal). A cursory glance at the movie’s trappings (a climatically
tweaked version of Eighties post-apocalyptica, with your usual futuristic
underclass warming their hands over barrel fires) and it just doesn’t seem like
a Robert Altman movie—not that that’s such an easy thing to define. Still, I
doubt if I ever would’ve suspected it was such without the benefit of the
opening credits; it seems like the sort of movie, in content and quality, that
I might’ve seen as a kid on Cincinnati’s Star 64 channel (before it became a WB
affiliate—or maybe pre-FOX 19 WXIX) in Sunday matinee line-up, squeezed between
The Beastmaster and Krull. There are even times when the city’s
network of frost-paralyzed escalators makes it feel like The Apple’s
brave new shopping mall put into deep freeze.
What evidence exists of
artistry comes through in its atmosphere. The film is shot, more-or-less
throughout, with a lens that leaves the image foggy on all four sides, with
only an oval in the middle of the frame in crisp focus—the effect is something
like peering through a window pane rimmed with frost. Or maybe like looking in
at figures frozen under ice—which is probably more appropriate, as the window
implies warmth from within, maybe a blazing hearth. And there is so little that
seems warm in this movie: the cast seems genuinely numb in the Quebec winter,
breath rolling out in plumes; the score, by Tom Pierson, is full of shivery
plucks, little slippery flutes. The movie is very, very slow,
even—appropriately—glacial. It starts out trudging; it ends trudging. And in
between it trudges—through a particularly lugubrious mystery, past a
half-thawed romance, and into a final faceoff with a bellicose Vittorio Gassman
(the movie’s casting screams “International Investment”) that plays a bit like
the blizzard showdown at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller. But. Whiter.
And. Slower.
The revelation comes that, in
this world bereft of warmth, hope, sex, or friendship, some of the populace
have taken to an offshoot of the titular amusement (“There’s nothing left but
the game!”) that raises the stakes to the real world kill-or-be-killed arena.
Referee Fernando Rey (who gets to wear a frayed throw pillow on his head
through the film) identifies the reward of the competition as “feeling the heat
of the adrenaline rushing through your body,” uel’s sexual gourmand seems to
have lost the tang of his lineZbut even Bu readings in the
arctic, and the movie never warms up enough to vicariously pass along the
flushed thrill of assassination. Though so much of this story might suggest a
mystery/ thriller, the highs and lows have been attenuated by the slogging
tempo and all that interminable whiteness.
The more I think on it,
though, I wonder if my mistake in approaching Quintet might be in
letting those silly costumes make me place it in the context of a Sunday
afternoon movie—for, while disappointing in that context, it might’ve been just
the thing to catch in the early a.m. hours. Certainly all the mismatched
accents, that bleary lens, those long, steady zooms, the weary pace, might
reveal some dreamy, soporific element to the movie, and I can think of a dozen
worse qualities for a film to have. But the difference between Quintet
and top-drawer Altman like, say, That Cold Day in the Park, is the
difference between a great talent for ambience propping up a middling script,
and a bracing alchemy between atmosphere and material. Or, if you prefer, the
difference between a cold that’s simply freezing, and one that really
lacerates.
CULT
MOVIE REVIEW: Quintet (1979) John
Kenneth Muir
Review: Quintet
Robert C. Cumbow from Parallax View, originally published in Movietone News, December 1979
Movie
Review - Quintet - eFilmCritic Jack
Sommersby
October 2005 Filmbrain from Like Anna Karina’s Sweater
Quintet
(Robert Altman, 1979) Eric Henderson
from When Canses Were Classeled
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film
Review Richard Scheib, also seen
here: Quintet
Foster on Film -
Post-Apocalyptic
The Parallax
Review [Kyle Kogan]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Milk
Plus: A Discussion of Film Steve
Film
Freak Central - Robert Altman on DVD
Bill Chambers, also seen here: Quintet
andrew's review of Quintet (1979) Andrew Bradford from That Cow
Movie
Review - Quintet - efilmcritic Dr.
Isaksson
Quintet (1979) Graeme Clark from The Spinning Image
Fantastic Movie Musings and
Ramblings Dave Sindelar
Movie
Review - Quintet - eFilmCritic
Charles Tatum
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
DVD Talk [Stuart
Galbraith IV] Robert Altman
Collection, also reviewing MASH, A WEDDING and A PERFECT COUPLE
DVDTalk
- Paul Newman Tribute Coll. [Paul Mavis]
DVD Verdict- Paul
Newman: The Tribute Collection [Clark Douglas]
Movie
Review - Quintet - Film: Altman Offers Apocalyptic Fantasy ... Vincent Canby from The New York Times
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
A PERFECT COUPLE
USA
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing QUINTET and A WEDDING
As for A Perfect Couple, it may be the most unjustly ignored entry in the Altman catalog: a breezy L.A. romantic comedy with Paul Dooley as a flustered antique heir and Marta Heflin as a dissatisfied backup singer in a communal rock band. The style is surprisingly plain for Altman—little in the way of roaming cameras or overlapping dialogue—but the honest, hopeful sketch of how people juggle life and art is really singular, matched only by The Company.
Altman hits a note of surprising
magic here, commenting on cinematic traditions of romantic comedy even as he
updates them. The lovers (Dooley, Heflin) meet through an LA video-dating
service. He's an ageing antique dealer, driven to the bureau by his entombment
in a repressive Greek-American family; she's an aimless waif who lives and
sings in a communal rock group tyrannised by its lead singer. Music is as focal
as it was in Nashville
Ill-Informed Gadfly [Ben Nuckols]
A common thread among the many
appreciations of Robert Altman written after his death was that even when he
misfired, he was interesting. That’s true, but more and more I think there
weren’t as many misfires as he was typically blamed for. Consider one of his least-revered
titles: “A Perfect Couple,” a romantic comedy from 1979, generally considered
part of Altman’s fallow period. It’s no masterpiece, for sure; it’s draggy and,
for Altman, oddly schematic at times, but it has plenty of intelligence, charm
and verve. Interviewed for the DVD, released last year, Altman said the movie
emerged from ideas that were floating around in his “backyard” — mainly, he
wanted to film a romance between schlubby-looking, regular people. Into that he
incorporated the music of Keeping ‘Em Off the Streets, a bloated band made up
of out-of-work actors and musicians that was launched by his frequent
collaborator, Allan Nicholls, who cowrote the screenplay for “A Perfect
Couple.”
The premise is perhaps a bit too
neat: Alex Theodopoulos (Paul Dooley) and Sheila Shea (Marta Heflin) are
matched up by a primitive computer dating service, in which customers watch
videotapes of their prospective mates. Both are imprisoned by their families:
Alex is part of an old-fashioned, suffocatingly close, antique-dealing Greek
clan that adores classical music; and Sheila has her ragtag, incestuous adopted
family — the band, Keeping ‘Em Off the Streets, most of which lives together in
a sprawling downtown L.A.
“A Perfect Couple” features
nearly wall-to-wall music, contrasting classical with what could generically be
called late-70s soft rock. Keeping ‘Em Off the Streets, though, doesn’t quite
conform to that label. Its music is raucous, inclusive and enjoyably
off-the-cuff. The lyrics tend toward the silly and bombastic but have moments
of eloquence, and Altman’s skill at using songs — and the context in which they
are performed — to comment on the action is nonpareil.
It’s great to see Dooley, with
his regular-guy face and physique, as an ardent romantic lead — he really sells
it — and Heflin uses her big, soulful eyes as a window into Sheila’s
contradictory yearnings. In romantic comedies, you should always ask whether
you care if the couple gets together, and in “A Perfect Couple” the answer is a
resounding yes.
A Perfect Couple Mark
Harris from Patrick Murtha’s Diary
I finally got around to seeing this
for-many-years-as-good-as-lost Robert Altman film, and I must say, I was
extremely impressed. It is a highly unusual piece. Altman biographer Patrick
McGilligan says "There is not another movie like it in the Altman
canon," and he's not kidding; there is scarcely another movie like it in
anyone's canon. The closest I can think of is George Romero's equally
criminally underrated There's Always Vanilla,
which also deals with the arc of a romance between "ordinary" people
with no touch of
The film is conceived in terms of a number of binaries: two families, a rigidly
patriarchal Greek family and a rock music collective with its own sort of
patriarch; classical music and pop music, which join hands in the climax; a
"perfect couple" of two decidedly imperfect, non-glamorous people,
and a near-silent "imperfect couple" of two glamor-pusses, whose path
repeatedly crosses that of the perfect couple, but in ways that only the
audience perceives. (The perfect couple meets through a video dating service
that is a direct precursor to the Internet dating services of our own day; that
lends the film an oddly contemporary touch.)
The rock music collective, Keeping 'Em Off the Streets, co-formed by Altman
collaborator Allan Nicholls, actually existed and concertized a couple of
times, but failed to win a recording contract. (The movie soundtrack was
apparently preserved on Altman's own Lion's Gate label; I am conducting a
search for the record.) As others have noted, the music is quite delightful,
and rather difficult to pigeonhole, with rock, pop, jazz, and theater music
elements. There are a lot of musicians, a lot of singers, even a dog just
hanging around, in somewhat elaborate and rather magical spaces (courtesy of
master designer Leon Ericksen), and the musical numbers seem to emerge from the
ambiance. The film is very driven by the songs.
Adding to the flavor of A Perfect Couple
is a remarkably casual- positive attitude toward several gay and lesbian
characters, so much so that Vito Russo singled the film out in his book The Celluloid Closet as being
"special" for its era in its recognition of a "happy,
well-adjusted" lesbian couple as a "family."
In the lead roles, Paul Dooley is remarkably winning, and Marta Heflin has a
mysterious, somewhat withdrawn quality that suddenly announces itself
forcefully in her one solo number, "Won't Somebody Care", which is
also one of the great musical sequences in all of movies, if you ask me --
right up there with Keith Carradine's "I'm Easy" in Nashville.
The next forgotten Altman film that needs to be rehabilitated is H.E.A.L.T.H., which Helene Keyssar praises
most interestingly in her book Robert Altman's
America. I saw it only once many years ago and am eager to see it
again.
POSTSCRIPT: You can listen to the music here, but I recommend seeing the film
first. The songs are more fun to listen to once the visual context is in your
memory bank: http://www.selvan.com/pcmain.shtml
I still haven't found the soundtrack album, although, interestingly, an Italian issue of the album did show up on Ebay a while back.
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV] also reviewing A
WEDDING and QUINTET
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
DVDBeaver.com [Gregory Meshman]
H.E.A.L.T.H. B 87
aka:
HealtH
aka:
Happiness, Energy And Longevity Through Health
USA
Altman goes straight
for the jugular with this one, a carnivalesque satire on political hysteria,
another example of the director assembling order from the mass chaos on the
movie set, as there are few moments in this film where there aren’t a half a
dozen things happening at once. Set
entirely on the grounds of the upscale Don Cesar Hotel in St. Petersburg,
The end of the Carter
era represented the rise of special interest groups, self-serving organizations
taking themselves a bit too seriously, lending themselves to buffoonery and
political parody, shown dressed up as a variety of fruits and vegetables, often
seen as little more than celebrity seekers, where Altman delights in showing
just how far these groups will go for attention. Each candidate has handlers who prepare them
for the television cameras and their public appearances, while behind the
scenes are lowlife characters paid to perform all the dirty tricks. One such character is the smooth talking
opportunist James Garner, Bacall’s campaign manager who continually pulls her
out of the public’s eyes when she’s wound down, while another is Henry Gibson
in drag trying to spread some dirt on Bacall’s opponent, suggesting she is
really a he. Joining the fray is Carrol
Burnett as a Presidential emissary on health, filling in for the previous
emissary who was discovered dead. The
three are brought together by TV broadcaster Dick Cavett, playing himself as a
talk show host covering the convention, seen through a hotel window lying in
bed every night and gleefully watching his arch rival Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, who attempts to
interview the candidates while all around them are singing groups, marching
bands (The Steinettes!!), and anyone else seeking their fifteen minutes of
fame, all vying for the audience’s attention, so the mayhem and confusion on
the set is reminiscent of the burlesque era of the Marx Brothers at their most
undisciplined. Despite the confusion, there
are well written zingers in this one that fly fast and furious, but also
exaggerated caricatures, like Donald Moffat as Colonel Cody, the spitting image
of Buffalo Bill, a zillionaire who goes on a right wing rant about owning not
just the convention, but the government itself, believing everybody works for
him, “Lady, you have told me what I wanted to hear. Your are for real. That means you are no threat to anyone,”or
lengthy improvisations that seemingly come out of nowhere, like Alfre Woodard
as the black public relations director of the hotel, the only woman of sanity
in the entire film, suddenly thrust into one of Cavett’s interviews, or
Jackson’s ditzy secretary, Diane Stilwell as Willow Wertz, another typical dumb
blond, but this one has no feelings in her vagina, so she’s never had sex. But of course, neither has Lauren Bacall,
claiming she’s an 83 year old virgin!!
It’s all pretty ridiculous, but that’s the point.
Even with all the
hoopla and non-stop frenzy, somehow, despite all the staging theatrics, with
its multi-stranded plotlines, cast of thousands, and clever use of layered
dialogue, where the film is this close from turning into a full-blown musical
number, Altman actually has a handle on things just as they are on the verge of
spinning out of control. The title actually
comes from the slogan Happiness, Energy And Longevity Through Health, using a
health food convention as a stand-in for the often sleazy and underhanded
practices that occur during an election year, where lying becomes the universal
truth, so long as it’s properly packaged, where everything is an illusion, a
manipulation of words and images, as even Colonel Cody is not the right wing
zealot he would have us believe, but is instead Lauren Bacall’s crazy brother,
where the health food convention is followed by a convention of
hypnotists. Twentieth Century Fox
studios wouldn’t release this in an actual election year, finding it too
controversial, and after a series of financial setbacks refused to distribute
it altogether, so it sat on the shelf until Altman took it to colleges and film
festivals, eventually releasing it himself two years later in 1982. It has a similar history of no video or DVD
release, supposedly due to music infringements, but Altman himself wrote the
lyrics for one of the songs used, “Chick and Thin,” while another, a jingle
called “Exercise Your Right to Vote” was a theme song used in a later Altman
film, TANNER ’88 (1988). However, the
sounds of political convention music are heard wall to wall throughout this
film, like “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” “Happy Days Are Here Again,” “The
Grand Old Party,” “It’s a Grand Old Flag,” or “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy,” none
of which received musical clearance. On
June 12, 1982, President Ronald Reagan watched
the film at Camp David, where in his diary he called it “the world’s worst
movie.” Released in the same year as
Spielberg’s E.T. (1982), which became the highest grossing film in history, the
age of the director was over, as blockbusters altered the landscape by changing
the whole business of film finance. For
Altman and others, including Martin Scorsese, in the 80’s it became more
difficult than ever to finance their films.
Martin
Scorsese's Film School: The 85 Films You Need To See To ...
Health: This Altman movie came out
at the same time as King of Comedy. They were both flops, and we were
both out. The age of the director was over. E.T. was a very big
worldwide hit around then, and that changed the whole business of film finance.
1980
Chicago
Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)
This rather tired and airless 1979 satire, which Robert Altman spun off from his own Nashville and (somewhat less tired) A Wedding, plunks its many oddball characters down in a health-food convention in a Florida hotel and asks us to smirk along with the direction. The cast includes Carol Burnett, Glenda Jackson, Lauren Bacall, James Garner, Henry Gibson, Alfre Woodard, and Dick Cavett (playing himself, and clearly pleased as punch about it). 100 min.
Never released theatrically in
User reviews from imdb Author: urnotdb from United
States
Some of the acknowledged Altman "masterpieces" seem sadder to me now. Maybe it's me. Like the last reviewer, I even like this "lesser" Altman (shown recently on FMC), although I don't think he was aiming at a wide audience. Organization politics as a "microcosm" for public campaigns. Some of this satirical "docudrama" is now dated, like Dick Cavett watching the Tonight Show, but I found much of the dialog funny and insightful (e.g. "You are for real. That means you're no threat to anyone"). The story isn't "profound," but I liked it. And the performances are funny, especially Cavett (as "himself"), Lauren Bacall as an aging conservative figurehead, Glenda Jackson (who actually became a member of Parliament) as a left wing ideologue (in the opening scene lecturing someone dressed as a carrot on the sanctity of politics), and Carol Burnett as a basket case. All in the inimitable Altman style, although maybe not quite as inimitable as usual. But pretty inimitable.
User reviews from imdb Author: rngmasta from United
States
This was the very first film I was in as an actor. Robert Altman himself chose me as "The Carrot" after casting director Rick Sparks suggested me for the role. The total experience filming was nothing but positive. Mr. Altman was a delight to work with and watch him gleefully direct his cast of repertory actors. The film was "shelved" for a few years before it was finally released nationwide in limited release. His films are more for "groupies" who "get" his brand of humor, where today Christopher Guest's improvisational films featuring a "rep" group of actors seem to be more widely accepted and understood. Mr. Altman is a sincere passionate director and lets his ensemble of players breathe life into the improvisational scenes. Carol Burnett is a class act on and off the screen. Glenda Jackson equals her. Lauren Bacall was more aloof. James Garner would spend hours signing autographs on the beach for the gallery of fans in the hot sun following the long hours of shooting. He is the consummate pro. Many people may not "get" HEALTH, but it was way ahead of its time and today would be a hit with the world's political scene more controversial as this cast of characters is. P.S. I played "the carrot" in the opening and closing scenes! how's that for getting "roots" as an actor?
Like Anna Karina's Sweater FilmBrain, also seen here: Filmbrain
It's been a dream of mine for some years now to see every
feature film helmed by one of
Of the dozen or so films Altman directed between 1973 and 1983, the two that seem to get the most abuse are Quintet and Health. Even Altman apologists I've spoken with have little good to say about these two. A few months ago I caught Quintet on Fox (my review here), and it confirmed that everything I'd heard was true. Try as I might, I just couldn't find enough about the film to like, though the experience of having finally seen it made it all worthwhile.
Naturally then, I approached Health with more than a little
trepidation. After all, even Altman's greatest supporter Pauline Kael didn't
review it in the pages of The New Yorker -- not an encouraging sign.
Yet the good news is that Health is in fact a terrific film, and
while it's understandable that audiences may not have appreciated it in 1982,
it truly is worthy of reevaluation. Sure, Altman is repeating himself --
structurally and technically the film is almost identical to
A biting political satire, Altman originally intended for Heath
(aka HealtH, or H.E.A.L.T.H.) to be released
during the 1980 presidential campaign, but executives at Fox decided to shelve
the film for nearly two years. With its acronymic title (Happiness, Energy And
Longevity Through Health), Health uses the microcosm of a
health food convention as an allegory for the often sleazy and underhanded
practices that occur during an election year, while at the same time skewering
the then-burgeoning health and fitness craze. Set entirely in the
The two main candidates are Esther Brill (Lauren Bacall), a feisty eighty-three year old virgin who occasionally slips into a catatonic state, and humorless Isabella Garnell (Glenda Jackson), whose every utterance turns into a lengthy tirade. Co-screenwriter Paul Dooley plays Dr. Gil Gainey, an independent candidate who continually rails against the two-party system, and who also performs an amazing underwater stunt. Altman's star-studded cast also includes James Garner as Esther's campaign manager, Carol Burnett as an advisor to the White House, Henry Gibson as a political dirty-trickster (in drag), and Dick Cavett as himself. As good as all of them are, the real scene-stealer is Alfre Woodard (in her big screen debut) as the hotel manager who is none-too-impressed with the health nuts. Her lengthy (seemingly improvised) scene where she's interviewed by Dick Cavett is nothing short of absolute deadpan comic brilliance.
Like
The film's only drawback is that it is very much a product of its time, and some of its humor might not mean as much to a contemporary audience. (Some might not understand why Dick Cavett lying in bed watching The Tonight Show is funny.) Still, the film was an unexpected surprise, given how denigrated it was. Silly but often hysterical, Health finds Altman at his directorial best -- solid from start to finish, with virtually no filler, and great performances from the entire cast. Here's hoping that somebody at Fox unearths this treasure and gives it the release it deserves.
Robert
Altman Retrospective: HealtH (1980) « Furious Cinema Sebastian Haselbeck
Film Threat - The Bootleg
Files: Health Phil Hall from Film
Threat
Moviegoer
Diary: Health, Funny People Paul Matwychik from The Moviegoer
Where on the
Shelf Is...Health? - Movie News | JoBlo.com
Mathew Plale
Robert Altman's HealtH -
Film Forum on mubi.com film
discussion forum
The
"Health" of Robert Altman | Interviews | Roger Ebert Ebert interviews Altman,
The
New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
also seen here: ROBERT
ALTMAN'S SATIRE 'HEALTH' - NYTimes.com
and here: New
York Times
Health (film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
POPEYE
USA
With neither production companies
(
Film
Freak Central review [Bill Chambers]
The animated Popeye vanishes with
a lightning bolt at the start of Robert Altman's exhilarating Popeye,
and it's like inspiration striking a passé theory. The picture is a sustained
eureka, from the hiring of Altman, he of the improvisational twitch, to the
casting of Altman's then-favourite actress Duvall as her cartoon alter ego if
ever she had one, to the modification that spinach-happy sailor man Popeye
hates the green stuff, which off-handedly gives the film a strange, alluring
melancholy: the title character won't consume the one thing that would win him
the veneration of a girl, a town, and his long-lost father, whose memory is
preserved in a picture frame containing a slip of paper on which the orphaned Popeye
has heartbreakingly scrawled, "Me Poppy." When Popeye sings the
pivotal "I Am What I Am," one of several sensational Harry Nilsson
songs (remembering that Paul Thomas Anderson co-opted the film's "He Needs
Me" for Punch-Drunk
Love), to a crowded room, nobody's listening.
A Paramount/Disney co-production,
Popeye is at once subversive and reverential, a dichotomy that can
short-circuit the casual viewer; yet one can easily see early exposure to the
picture sparking an interest in the avant garde, and the manic energy
that Altman parlays throughout Popeye puts Richard Lester's Beatles
mockumentaries to shame. (On that note, Donald Moffat seems to be aping Wilfrid
Brambell's "very clean old man" from Lester's A Hard Day's Night
with his performance as the Tax Man of Sweethaven.) Sweethaven, a daedal wharf
erected on the island of Malta, as well as Williams' prosthetically inflated
forearms (given copious hair like Williams' own) and other borderline-grotesque
fidelities to Popeye's two-dimensional source (anthropomorphizing Wimpy
(Paul Dooley), the man who will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today,
begets a sociopath), bring to the fore Altman's phenomenal gift of mise-en-scène
(a virtue--maybe his strongest--often overshadowed by his ensemble leanings),
since he has so rarely dabbled in the fantastic.
Popeye gives Paramount
bragging rights to the two best video transfers of Altman films to date. (The
other is Nashville.)
The DVD debuts the picture in its Technovision aspect ratio for the home
audience, and the 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image is crisp and vivid,
facilitating with aplomb an appreciation of the film's intricate sets and
staging. The red of Olive Oyl's sweater is intense without smearing while grain
is never intrusive--something we're not used to writing in the context of
Altman. The film's 5.1 remix opens up the soundstage quite conventionally,
giving the Nilsson ditties a bigger berth but even more beneficially clarifying
the overlapping dialogue. Though Altman is not averse to lending his insights
to interviews or commentary tracks, the Popeye DVD is absent of
supplements.
'Popeye.' Popeye: A Barnacle of
the Dinghy of Film from Film Snobs
Altman and Robert Evans got into
fistfights on the set of this movie. Well, somebody had to get their ass kicked
over this, and for those who thought Altman couldn't get any worse than 1979's Quintet,
then Popeye is Altman's overture to The Worst Decade of Any Respected
Filmmaker in the History of Cinema. Popeye contains the worst filmed
stunts in any big budget movie, the worst songs of any musical, the worst
dialogue of any screenplay written in my lifetime, and the most bizarre idea
for a comic book adaptation ever. This is going to be difficult to cover, so
let's just start with the obvious: What the hell was Altman thinking?
As I understand the story,
Altman, feeling a need for a bit of success after the string of bombs after Nashville
That brings us to his portrayal
of the Oyl family. Altman turns the Oyls into the Oy! -ls. Yes, they're Jewish.
It's never said, but Olive's dad wears the hat, the beard, and the black
clothes. Wimpy is an Oyl cousin who spends the whole movie whining about gold
investments and trying to scam up enough cash to go to the track. The Oyl mom
can't stop going on about Olive's need to get married to a well-off man. And
then there's Olive. Robert Altman turns Olive Oyl into a Jewish-American
Princess. She spends the first half-hour of the movie bitching incessantly
about how she won't drink out of "ugly" glasses and how her family is
using her for her fiancé's money. She's a typical Altman Whiny, Bitchy
Materialistic Shrew®—hell, she makes Carolyn Burnham look like June Cleaver. So
what does Altman do? Olive shows Popeye to his room, she falls over, and Altman
gives us a humiliating crotch shot. She's so petty that in one of Shelly
Duvall's later musical numbers she pines, "He needs me!" Hell, her
rationale for marrying Bluto is, "He's large. And he's mine!" It's
embarrassing enough that Altman makes Duvall spend the whole movie moaning like
there's a hamster in her girdle, but then he humiliates her by having her throw
herself at Popeye because she wants to be his mother.
If you think turning the Oy! -ls
into Jews is bad, prepare yourself for what he does to Popeye. Popeye is the
typical Altman Class-Warrior Scamp® who can't find his Pap. He's getting no
help from those Jew Oy! -ls or the omnipresent tax man—it's like there's big
conspiracy to keep Popeye down! This being Altman, you can guess where this is going.
That's right, Poop Deck Pappy is the "Commodore" (It's listed as
"Commandant," but he's called "Commodore" several times.)
of Sweethaven who dumped little Popeye on his ass at age three so he could go
on secretly oppressing the townspeople. Bluto, it turns out, is his Tool of
Oppression. Altman turns Poop Deck Pappy into Cornelius Vanderbilt, the
railroad and shipping mogul. And in Altman's coke-blasted brain, Popeye is
an allegory for Vanderbilt's control of steamboat transportation in New York Staten Island . Poop Deck Pappy
is the oppressive capitalist using wealthy Jewish connections to raise taxes to
further separate the classes, thus making his domination of the Hudson River (Sweethaven) marketplace a virtual monopoly.
That's fucking crazy. Absolutely
fucking crazy. But that's what he did. It's the only explanation. This a year
after Altman went to Earth's Final Age to play backgammon as a critique of
American Christianity. No wonder Robert Evans was pissed. All he wanted was a
nice little kids movie with Robin Williams chewing scenery and mumbling
Popeye's muffled one-liners, and Altman's pot-fried mind is doing social
commentary. It must be that "Complex Social Milieu" Anthony Lane Gosford
Park
And it's not like the film is
even technically well done. Chairs fall apart before Popeye even hits bad guys
with them. When he throws the bad guys during a fight, they just kinda jog
across the set and roll into breakaway props. Poop Deck Pappy gets tied up by
Bluto and he doesn't even struggle. The musical numbers sound like stoned
polka. The actors don't even lip synch the numbers; Altman just plays the music
and shows us the back of the performer. Paul L. Smith (Bluto) growls his lines
like a constipated grizzly. Wimpy uses Sweet Pea to tell him the winners at the
horse races, which aren't even real horses—they're plastic horses on sticks,
like at the county fair. In an example of typical Altman Misogyny®, he keeps a
bar maiden perched in a birdcage. And poor Robin Williams grunts the whole
movie from his spleen. I just don't know what else to say. Yes, I do. Altman
has a little too much fun trapping his JAP Bitch Olive in a porthole while an
octopus tickles her crotch. Then Popeye does backflips across the water. Don't ask.
Making a movie out of the Popeye character isn't a bad idea; it's a bad idea to
hand a kids movie over to a polemistic, drugged up artist who can't clear up
his glassy eyes long enough to see that he's making a silly, cartoonish musical
into a bitter left-wing rant that nobody understands but him. And he doesn't
even film it well. Popeye makes professional wrestling look like a
Jackie Chan movie.
Slant Magazine Eric Henderson
Robert Altman's Popeye Jon Morris from the High Hat
DVD Maniacs Scooter MacRae
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Needcoffee.com - DVD Review HTQ4
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
COME BACK TO THE FIVE AND DIME, JIMMY DEAN, JIMMY DEAN A- 94
USA
Altman spent the entire
decade of the 80’s recovering from the critical failure of POPEYE (1980), a box
office bonanza that grossed nearly $50 million dollars, preferring to make
smaller more intimate films, none of which came close to generating even a million
dollars, converting a series of plays into movies starting with this one,
followed up by STREAMERS (1983), SECRET HONOR (1984), and Fool for
Love (1985). Adapted from the Ed Graczyk play, Altman
chose to use the same set from the short-lived, original Broadway stage
production, which features two identical small town “five-and-dimes” separated
by a two-way mirror, which allows simultaneous viewing of both the present and
the past, shooting the entire film in a single room. Normally one might think this would be a
disaster in the making, an exhaustive endurance of tedium, but keeping the same
Broadway cast, Altman turns this into a tour de force drama, a showcase of
acting talent that becomes searingly confessional. Set in a Woolworth’s diner in a near empty
town not far from where GIANT (1956) was filmed in
Using the old-fashioned
jukebox music of the McGuire Sisters, singing songs like “Sincerely,” this is
really one dynamo of a women’s picture, as these women delve into each other’s
habits and character flaws, literally dissecting one another onscreen in an
attempt to redefine themselves in a new and different way, not as they were,
but as they are, or can be, now. This
metamorphosis of change doesn’t come easy, as many, especially Sandy Dennis,
kick and scratch the entire way, absolutely refusing to alter her perceptions. Her near manic stubbornness is like living in
a protective bubble with the other women continually poking and prodding until
the bubble bursts. This kind of
liberating intensity is not for the squeamish, but it makes for extraordinary
theater, resembling Fassbinder or early Cassavetes, as few others make films as
blunt as this one, an ensemble work featuring dynamic performances as
dramatically powerful as any Altman film, which might surprise a few people, as
this is a hard film to see, never released on Video or DVD even after the
passing of thirty years. That situation
has been rectified somewhat, as it’s one of the feature films traveling the
country in 2011 as part of the UCLA Festival of Film Preservation. Initially shot on 16 mm, then blown up to 35
mm, again much like early Fassbinder and Cassavetes, this adds a bit of
edginess to the raw emotions on display, never looking pretty, but always
challenging the audience with the claustrophobic feel of the world closing
in. All seem to be holding dark secrets
of some kind, where slowly through the fixated probing of Black, things are not
as they seem, where people soon become unglued.
Using a brilliantly innovative set design, the film seamlessly crosses
between the 1975 present and the 1955 past, blending revelatory moments in the
present with a familiar emotional arc from the past, where each period of time
continues to shed light on the other.
Sudie Bond plays
Juanita, the widowed elderly owner of the establishment where they all used to
work when they were kids, sharing their lives and their traumas together, all
conveniently tucked away and nearly forgotten until unearthed by this
reunion. Juanita places her faith in God
and takes a hard line against sinners and trespassers. Cher, in her first meaty role, is
surprisingly comfortable in the role of Sissy, something of a sexual floozy in
high school and still amazingly candid, with a mouth that speaks her mind,
never coy or bashful, quite capable of a full frontal assault, including
godlessness. Sandy Dennis plays Mona,
the woman with the most to lose, as like Blanche DuBois, she clings to her
dreams of the past, like living in a Glass
Menagerie, as her fluttery speech and fragile state of mind appear to feed
on her own self-inflicted neuroses and delusions. The highlight of the reunion is always her
recollection of the time she visited Marfa during the filming of GIANT, when
she was chosen as an extra and miraculously spent the night with the brilliant
young actor himself, naming her own child after Jimmy Dean, the object of their
teen idol worship. Kathy Bates is
nothing less than brilliant in her role as Stella Mae, the sassy, straight
talking Southern belle who struck it rich marrying a Texas oilman, a woman with
a taste for hard liquor and easy living, who never for a second seems
satisfied. Marta Heflin is the quiet one
of the bunch, Edna Louise, a bit dimwitted, constantly reminded of that by
Stella Mae, but a friend to all, even if they barely know she’s there. Karen Black as Joanne is the mystery woman
with a role that requires unraveling the tightly wound secrets from each
person, as she has a special transparency all her own. She’s startlingly dark, an angel of gloom
that seems to hang over each of them like a dark cloud hovering over their own
guilty consciences, but she’s anything but happy about it, feeling like she’s
continually been dealt a losing hand.
She seems to be the only one paying a price for everyone else’s
delusions, as much like Edna Louise, she has become invisible.
None of these six women
would ever see themselves as feminists, yet they stubbornly cling to their own
separate beliefs, where this film is a dialogue that challenges all their
assumptions. Something of a
free-wheeling emotional slugfest, everyone gets to take their shots, but also
gets shot down by the others in this collective group therapy where no one
walks out a winner. Everyone’s
artificial façade is exposed, and none too gently, where the drunken and
pointedly judgmental tone is strangely familiar with Edward Albee’s Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), where Dennis is the link to both films.
But the Graczyk play here, while confoundingly interesting, full of bracing
moments, simply isn’t in the same league as Albee. While it has its own complexities with some
extraordinary intimate moments between women, there is simply not the same kind
of depth or realization. Instead it is a
portrait of delusion and loss of faith, where an unending sadness permeates
every inch of that room, yet in Altman’s hands it feels magical, as if our own
lives will be cleansed by their personal anguish and pain. It’s a reminder of the kind of interior
poetry that few filmmakers can master, that Altman achieves here and perhaps
again later with Sam Shepard’s Fool for
Love, another rarely seen effort.
The 80’s was a decade when Altman went smaller, peering into the bleak
and dysfunctional souls of damaged humans who spend their lives covering up
their own unbearable pain, which is usually a patchwork job that falls apart
all too easily whenever someone gets too close for comfort. Love is an elusive goal rarely if ever
reached, as people are too busy building layers of protection that hide them
from the truth about themselves. Plato
said: Beauty is the splendor of
truth—well not from the vantage point of any of these women, where the piercing
knife only makes them bleed.
Come Back to
the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy ... - Chicago Reader Dave Kehr
Dark secrets in the dust bowl, uncovered at the
20th-anniversary reunion of a small-town James Dean fan club. Robert Altman
directed this low-budget 1982 adaptation of the play he staged on Broadway, and
it's a slow, heavy, trite affair. Presumably, the outworn Albeeisms of the
material were enlivened onstage by the tricky double set Altman built, in which
the flashbacks took place in an exact mirror duplicate of the main space. But
the device is neutralized on film, where a simple dissolve can achieve the same
tense-shuffling effect. The casting--Sandy Dennis,
Come
Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean Geoff Andrew from Time Out London
Startlingly successful translation from one medium to another, with Altman turning the first of his theatrical adaptations into a cinematic tour de force. A group of women, members of a James Dean fan club, reunite in '75 to pay tribute to the death, 20 years earlier, of their hero while shooting Giant in the Texan desert nearby. Ed Graczyk's play itself is a humdrum if highly enjoyable affair, gradually proceeding from its comic observations about the way the women aren't quite friends any more to a more serious consideration of shattered dreams and saddened lives, all exposed in a gripping if familiar series of intimate revelations. But beyond the excellent performances and Altman's evident sympathy for his garrulous gathering of beautiful losers, what marks the film is the way he uses both the camera and a wall mirror (which periodically reflects us back to '55) to explore and open up his single dime-store set and the cracks in the masks of his deluded/deluding characters. Stunning stuff.
Bright Lights Film
Journal :: Little Stabs of Happiness (and Horror) Gary Morris, February 2005
In some rareified circles, Karen Black is best known as the
inspiration for the Grand Guignol nudist band The Voluptuous Horror of Karen
Black, but cinephiles treasure her for an unusually long and varied movie
career that plumbs the depths (who can forget Hell Kitten or House of
1000 Corpses?) and the heights (Five Easy Pieces, Nashville).
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean is one of Altman’s
middling works, but engaging enough in its crawl through a claustrophobic
“womanspace.” The women in question are the “Disciples of Jimmy Dean,”
gathering for a 20-year reunion in a failing Woolworth’s in a forgotten
User reviews from imdb Author: Vince-5 from
northeastern PA
Character studies don't come any better than this offbeat look at small-town
self-delusion. Robert Altman, best known for sweeping epics like Nashville, shows
us that even on a smaller physical scale he is an original, highly inventive
director. The low-budget production uses 16-millimeter photography and a single
set to create a desolate, lonely atmosphere that mirrors the characters' hidden
emotional turmoil. Although we only glimpse a tiny portion through the store
window, we get a perfect feel for the dusty isolation of dying McCarthy, Texas.
Five and Dime also contains hidden elements of symbolism that you may not
notice at first but add another layer to the brilliance of the film.
Still, as with any play, it's all about the acting. And here, the acting is
impeccable, especially that of top-billed stars Sandy Dennis, Cher, and Karen
Black. Dennis is Mona, the stubbornly (and dangerously) romantic leader of the
Disciples; Cher is Sissy, the blowsy sex symbol with a painful secret; and
Black is Joanne, a mysterious "stranger" who cracks everyone's
delusions. All three are terrific and should have received more recognition for
their roles herein. Great support is provided by the Marta Heflin, the
delightful Kathy Bates, and Sudie Bond as the shrill, bigoted owner of the
Woolworth's.
This is not a film for everyone. There is no action, by the traditional
definition. But this examination fantasy and reality, how life is and how we
would like it to be, is a haunting exercise in acting, direction, and emotional
involvement.
Come
Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982 ... Jan-Christopher Horak
from the UCLA Film & Television Archive, March 3, 2011
After the commercial success, but critical failure of Popeye (1980), Robert Altman turned away from Hollywood, selling his share in Lion’s Gate studios and directing the play by Ed Graczyk, originally staged in Columbus, Ohio, on which Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was based. Altman not only made a deal with stage producer Peter Newman to retain his original cast, but also the unique set by David Gropman, which featured two identical Texas “5¢ & 10¢’s”, separated by two-way mirrors, allowing his story to move from the present to the past and vice versa. To save costs, Altman shot the film on Super-16mm color negative, then blew up his answer print to 35mm. Rather than bank on a major studio, Altman financed the film through a television company, Viacom Enterprises, and distributed it through a small independent company, Cinecom, which opened the film in New York to critical acclaim. In fact, the film had already received a standing ovation at the Chicago Film Festival.
Starring Sandy Dennis, Cher and Karen Black, the play relates a twenty-year reunion in 1975 of a James Dean fan club, “The Disciples of James Dean.” They meet at the local hangout in a small Texas town, near where GIANT had been shot in 1955 and where the club had formed decades earlier. The waitress in the soda fountain area is the same, but the fan club members have gotten older, some successful, others beaten down by life. Each of them, as well as other female friends and neighbors relate (often in flashbacks) their dreams, aspirations and failures over the last twenty years. While all of Altman’s actresses give stellar performances, it was Cher who most surprised the critics, earning a Golden Globe nomination for her work and garnering respect as a serious actress for the first time. And given the focus on female fans—only one male appears in flashback in the film—it’s not surprising that the film should tackle themes of feminism, power in gender relations and sexuality.
With this film, UCLA Film & Television Archive begins a major project to restore Robert Altman’s legacy on film.
Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Sandcastle 5 Productions, and with thanks to Paramount Archives, from the original Super-16mm color negative, a 35mm CRI, a 35mm print, and the original ½ inch analog discreet mono D-M-E track. Laboratory services by Cineric, Technicolor, NT Picture and Sound, and Audio Mechanics. Special thanks to: Barry Allen, Kathryn Altman, Shawn Jones, Andrea Kalas, Matthew Seig, Laura Thornburg.
"Review / Movie; 'Jimmy Dean' a Comeback for Altman" Michael Blowen from The Boston Globe, also seen here: Michael Blowen
The homesick wail of a train whistle echoes through the dusty bric-a-brac of what seems to be the last five-and-dime in America. The chrome-back stools, Formica counter, penny candy, pinwheels and plastic sunglasses on plastic mannequins set the stage for “Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” – Robert Altman’s best film since “Nashville.”
Based on the failed play of the same name, the movie version comes alive under Altman’s superb style and appropriately overstated performances by the three stars and Kathy Bates. No wonder it bombed as a play, it was always a movie.
The story is a riotously funny sendup of Tennessee Williams and his particular fascination with small-town madness, dusty symbolism, moronic children, oedipal complexes and doomed dreams. The plot is so absolutely ludicrous that it makes “General Hospital” seem like social realism.
After 15 minutes of what seems to be a “serious” film about repressed desires and sordid pasts, Cher turns on the old Wurlitzer jukebox and plays the McGuire Sisters’ “Sincerely.” Suddenly the film becomes outrageously funny. Altman has let us in on his wonderfully convoluted joke. Before he’s done, he lovingly hits all the Big Themes – religion, love, friendship, violence and sex.
The action in “Jimmy Dean” all takes place in the five-and-dime. The set gives Altman, who has a tendency to let his films sprawl all over the screen, a focus. The one-room set forces Altman to concentrate on the idiosyncratic lunacy of his characters rather than wandering around searching for something to photograph as he did in films such as “Health.”
Altman is having fun again. He seems more comfortable in a desolate Woolworth’s than he did on the frozen tundra of “Quintet.” In contrast with “A Wedding,” in which Altman cynically patronized his characters, he seems to love these three women. And why not?
The actresses seem comfortable with the 60-year-old filmmaker. They risk everything for him in outrageous parodies of their own screen images. Cher pokes fun at her sexual appeal; Dennis ridicules her image as the ultimate mouseburger; and Black, who often represents sexual perversity (“The Day of the Locusts”), does her best acting since “Five Easy Pieces.”
Altman’s sympathetic camera caresses the signs that nostalgically remind us of the days when root beer was made with “natural juices,” and he seems pleased with his collection of odds and ends that resonate beyond the squeaky screen door of the five-and-dime.
Robert Altman has come back to the movies.
Forgotten
Classics of Yesteryear: Come Back to the Five and Dime ... Nathanael Hood, November 8, 2009
"A
Million-Dollar Baby in a 5-and-10-Cent Store" David Denby from The New York Magazine, November 22, 1982 (pdf)
"Truth
and Woolworth's" James Wolcott
from Texas Monthly, December
1982 (pdf)
Friday
Editor’s Pick: Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1982) Alt Blog, July 14, 2011
Random Movie Club
"Come
Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (1976)" Video
Versions: Film Adaptations of Plays on
Video, by Thomas L. Erskine, James Michael Welsh,
John C. Tibbetts (pdf)
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: jzappa from Cincinnati,
OH, United States
User reviews from imdb (Page 3) Author: tieman64 from United
Kingdom
User reviews from imdb (Page 4) Author: (citrohan@aol.com)
Come Back to the Five and
Dime, Jimmy - BAM/PFA - Film Programs
The New Yorker [Pauline Kael]
Fourth Row
Center [Jason Bailey]
Come
Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean ... Todd Kristel at Rovi from Answers.com
Cher -
Actors and Actresses - Films as Actress:, Films as Director ... Film Reference
"Box office
information for Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean" The Numbers
Robert Altman
Movie Box Office Results
Come Back to the 5 & Dime
Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean Variety
Come
Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean movie ... Alexander Blosser from The Washington Examiner
"'Back
to Five and Dime' Honors Memory of Dean" Bob Thomas from The Sumter Daily, February
12, 1983 (pdf)
"'Jimmy
Dean' has wit, poignancy"
Lloyd Paseman from The Eugene
Register-Guard, April 28, 1983 (pdf)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Movie
Review - Come Back to the Five ... - Movies - New York Times Vincent Canby,
"Cher
and Altman On Broadway"
Jennifer Allen on the Broadway stage play from New York Magazine, February 1, 1982
(pdf)
"Stage:
Robert Altman Directs Cher"
Frank Rich reviews the Broadway stage play from The New York Times,
Come
Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (film ... Wikipedia (film)
Come
Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean (play ... Wikipedia (play)
STREAMERS
USA
Chicago Reader [Dave Kehr] (capsule review)
Sure it's searing and intense, but so is a microwave oven. David Rabe's play, about a barracks room of draftees waiting to be shipped to Vietnam, is a less than honorable piece of theater, relying on physical and psychological violence to keep the audience in a constant state of anxiety and submission; Robert Altman's film is even more dubious, based on a mise-en-scene that isolates individual actors in interminable, shrieking close-up monologues. You leave the theater feeling shaken, upset, and without the slightest idea of what all the screaming was about. With Matthew Modine, Michael Wright, Mitchell Lichtenstein, and David Allen Grier (1983).
Another of Altman's gripping
demonstrations of how to transform theatre by means of composition and
close-up. As in Come Back to the 5 & Dime, he restricts his material
to a single set, this time an army barracks dormitory, where a group of young
DVDBeaver.com [Paul Haynes]
The 1980s are known
as being a dark period for Robert Altman. Having been branded uncommercial by the
New post-Star Wars, post-Jaws, post-Heaven's Gate
Surely this theme resonated with Altman, who almost defiantly does his
damnedest to turn a work of theatre into a work of cinema. For better or worse,
he does not succeed, and the result is much like the filmed plays produced by
Ely Landau's American Film Theatre. As far as filmed plays go, Streamers
is a very good one, with electrifying performances from Michael Wright and
George Dzundza, some strong performances from David Alan Grier and Guy Boyd,
and some rather mannered ones from Matthew Modine and Mitchell Lichtenstein,
the latter of whom plays a young recruit whose open homosexuality becomes a
matter of eventually explosive contention (although not in a way that's
anticipated). Rabe's play is both brilliant and flawed, and the film's virtues
and shortcomings are those of a lot of contemporary stage work: characters
often speak tangentially, but in a forced way that calls excess attention both
to the given monologue and to the lack of subtlety in the message the tangent
is intended to augment; overwrought metaphors such as the titular
"Streamers" (a song sung by military paratroopers after they realize
their chutes have failed to deploy) are both needless and needlessly reiterated
for dramatic effect; and the characters as well as their environment remain
one-dimensional in their lock-step service to the author's statement. If
Altman's work prior to and after the 1980s is built upon his unequaled gift for
creating a world that vividly exists well beyond the spectator's frame of view,
Streamers achieves the opposite. That said, the experience of watching
the film remains a potent one, largely thanks to the performances and the often
visceral psychological straightjacket that torments the young members of the
drill company. If the flawless first half of Full Metal Jacket describes
a degree of physical imprisonment on top of the emotional torture dished out by
an abusive and meticulous drill sergeant, Streamers offers the flipside,
wherein the young enlistees are shown lounging, showering, and at play, while
the drill sergeants, always drunk, stumble obliviously into and out of the
drama like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In that way, they're the most
characteristically Altmanesque characters in the film.
eFilmCritic.com (Charles Tatum)
New York Times (registration req'd) Vincent Canby
SECRET HONOR
USA
Alone in his study
late at night, Richard Milhouse Nixon ponders the pardon he's been offered for
the Watergate scandal, and contrasts his secret honour with his public shame.
Cue for raving resentment galore and perceptive insights into the politics of
power and money. Made with a student crew at the
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
In 1980, Robert Altman suffered a
giant financial flop with Popeye. This came after a decade of brilliant
artistic success in a Hollywood
He made a stunning
"comeback" in 1992 with The Player, but many of his overlooked
films from this lost period have started to come back into play, notably his
satirical TV mini-series "Tanner '88" and Secret Honor, both
recently released to DVD by the Criterion Collection.
Shot with his film class at the University of Michigan
The scenario has former United
States President Richard Milhous Nixon entering his study for the night. He
plans to tape record his thoughts, defending himself of the crimes of which he
has been accused. The film's most important props are a gun, a bottle of whisky
and the tape recorder, in addition to a piano that belonged to his mother, and
several portraits (including Henry Kissinger) to which the President speaks.
Hall makes an energetic attempt
to capture the tidal wave of despondency that Nixon might have felt, using a
Nixonian way of speaking: stammering mixed with sudden, barked curse words and
a constant failure to finish a thought or a metaphor. It's a furious
performance, full of pain and rage and power, and it put Hall on the map in
movies, leading to other memorable performances in films like Boogie Nights
and Magnolia.
Any other director might have
staged the film in front of an audience or "opened it up" by using
other characters or rooms. But Altman merely sets his roaming, unpredictable
camera in the one room. Sometimes it follows the president and sometimes not.
Altman's greatest invention is a row of surveillance monitors whose cameras are
all pointed inside the room. We can see four tiny Nixons in the black-and-white
screens, often unaware that they're being spied upon. It adds immeasurably to
the film's paranoia and tension.
Most astonishing is the
non-partisan slant that the film takes. It does not ignore Nixon and his
cabinet's shady dealings, but neither does it ignore the humanity of the man
himself. We begin to understand him -- or at least this representation of him
-- in a human way that press coverage or television speeches could never
capture.
That Cow [Andrew Bradford]
Phillip Baker Hall's makes a career performance as Richard Nixon,
rambling on in justifying his actions, his presidency, and his life. The DVD
packaging calls it a "tour-de-force", and it's hard to disagree.
Post-resignation
- one would imagine this to be a night not too far from when it was filmed in
1984 - we find Nixon, getting drunk and trying to dictate a defense for himself
in the court of popular opinion, rambling on with more tangents than anything
else. The strange thing is that the increasing incoherency of his argument is
what makes most clear his character. To call Secret Honor a character study is
about the same as saying water is wet.
Now, as a
political film, and one where we are strongly led to question its central
character, the question comes up as to how unbiased the film is. Certainly,
Robert Altman's leanings are well known, and Nixon's fall resulted in perhaps
the greatest swing of popularity in a national figure ever. Nixon comes off as
unflattering, for sure, but there is really no room for any political stance
here. It's all about desperation and self-justification, and any attempt to
tacked-on posturing would have simply felt wrong.
There's a
kind of sympathy that built for me through the piece, which I'm not sure it would
be there for everyone. I couldn't help but feel that here is a man, whose best
talents led him down possibly the worst possible path for him personally. For
what it's worth, I'm more familiar with his time as a senator, when he was best
known for his pursuit of communists in goverment. While McCarthy's efforts grew
increasingly into self-promotion Nixon was at least sincere, and learned to
distance himself from McCarthy. I'm not trying to write an apologetic here -
especially one so obviously difficult - but good-intentions-gone-awry is basis
enough to consider Nixon in this film.
It's fairly
clear this is Robert Altman early on, from his fascination with objects, the
way he lingers on something even as action and dialogue continue elsewhere. The
use of security monitors was a brilliant touch as well. Watching one person
ramble for ninety minutes is hard enough, without finding something else to
look at.
Even at
ninety minutes, some people will wonder if it can be shorter. The fact is, it
could have been longer. In its origins as a one-man play, Secret Honor had seen
more than an hour of additional material in it. Would more or less have helped?
Mainly, the film would just have been... longer or shorter. You could cut
enough tangential passages to make the film under an hour, or add more. There's
not so much a plot as a series of ups and downs, and while we build to a smart
and satisfying conclusion, the rest of the material works primarily by being
simply unrelated to where we're headed. I don't think I'd argue with a single
inclusion or exclusion, but probably many other arrangements of the material
would have worked as well.
Overall, Secret Honor is a fascinating experiment in what film can be. Certainly, it won't be for everyone's tastes, but what an opportunity to challenge your aesthetics?
Ladies and Gentlemen of the American Jury Leonard Pierce from the High Hat
Is it possible to make great art about someone you hate?
The question has haunted creators for millennia. The desire of passionate people to portray in art the lives of powerful men who they despise, but whose force of personality and will come to dominate the times in which they live, is constantly opposed by the realization that such art can often come across as doggerel or dogma. Too little sympathy for one’s nemesis, and his fictional analog will come across as a one-dimensional cartoon; too much and you leave yourself open to the suggestion that you’re really on their side after all. Some have simply chosen not to pick up the gauntlet: “I hate Reagan,” explained photographer Ansel Adams in response to persistent questions about why he had never portrayed the hugely popular president. “I can’t just ignore my feelings and take pretty pictures.”
A cursory look at Robert Altman’s filmmaking history and a
sidelong listen to his commentary for Secret Honor makes it a pretty
safe bet that “hate” isn’t too strong a word for his feelings towards Richard
Nixon. The Robert Altman who was radicalized by a filming expedition to
Curiously, Robert Altman’s most explicitly and furiously
political document didn’t start out as an attempt on his part to stick a shiv
in the looming figure of Nixon-agoniste. Its actual genesis was as,
essentially, a student film. For several years, Altman had been teaching a
class at the University of Michigan, and after seeing the stage play of Secret
Honor, he hit upon the idea of filming the one-man show, in which a
post-Watergate Richard Nixon lays bare his tarnished soul while recording the
notes for his next book, as a sort of final exam for his students. Most of the
film’s technical crew, as well as its composer and “associate director” (in
fact, the man who had directed the stage play) were U of M students and
faculty, and Altman, an auteur’s auteur with a reputation for futzing with
script and dialogue while filming, changed very little in the script. In the
audio commentary he recorded in 1992 — several years before Secret Honor
was rediscovered by maverick American film critics and elevated from confusing
write-off to forgotten masterpiece ’ Altman cites the movie as one of his
personal favorites, while disowning much of the responsibility, crediting
instead the writers and sole actor Philip Baker Hall for what we see on screen.
(Whatever the appropriate degree of credit where due, the studios had no idea
what to make of Secret Honor. Altman unsurprisingly notes that it made
no money at all, and the video release reigns as one of the all-time greats of
marketing botch-jobs: it was put out under the absurd name Lords of Treason,
and the box art features a back-shot of Nixon with a gun to his head standing
in front of a white-lace-garter-clad hooker, who curiously does not appear in
the film. Well-received in
Indeed, in some small measure, Altman seems to agree with what a number of observers have said of Secret Honor: it’s not really a Robert Altman film. Where is the sprawling cast? Where is the ambitious storyline? Where are the multiple character arcs woven subtly together? And how can you have people engaging in Altman’s patented crosstalk when there’s only one person in the whole movie? Nixon may have been an asshole, but even he can’t interrupt himself, right? (Wrong, as it turns out. One of Hall’s trademark tics in the relentlessly brilliant, riveting performance is his tendency to let Nixon’s ferocity and tireless urge to explain himself spill over and get ahead of himself, so you end up with lines like this: “When the cameras came on, I was going to drop out of the race. As a matter of fact, I had promised, uh, uh, uh, Pat that I was going to, uh — Pat, of course is my, uh — out of the race. Wife.”) For a long time, there seemed to be among critics a tendency to dismiss Secret Honor — not as a failure like Quintet or H.e.a.l.t.H., but more as a quirk, an oddity, a one-off that Altman peeled off more or less as a favor to some associates and a way to keep his students on their toes.
This view, though, ignores the specific as well as the
general situation surrounding the making of Secret Honor. First, it is
unquestionably an Altman film through and through, belying even his own claims
to the contrary. Besides his film students, Altman cared enough about the
production to bring in many of his regulars, including cinematographer Pierre
Mignot, cameraman Jean Lepine and art director Stephen Altman to work on it.
Following his sour experience with Popeye, Altman had likewise been
looking for an excuse to get away from the ’business run by accountants” and do
some work outside the
On the commentary track, Altman himself puts the lie to his minimal involvement in the film mere minutes after making the claim — he betrays his directorial prowess by talking with unfeigned interest about the challenge of making 90 minutes of a single man talking to himself visually stimulating. His careful explanations of camera placement, odd angles, static shots and objects as characters both confirm his status as a great director and prove that he was far more involved in the translation of what could have been a tedious exercise in monologue into something compelling. Watching Secret Honor for the first time, what grabs at the viewer — and rightly enough — is the then-unknown Philip Baker Hall’s titanic performance as the drunken, raging, endlessly embittered Nixon; what emerges, though, on repeat viewing, is the subtlety and skill of the direction, the fact that the eye is guided to exactly where it should be by Altman (including one terrific shot where Nixon rails against Kissinger, but without saying his name, as our view is guided slowly along the wall of portraits straight to that of the bespectacled diplomat), making it far more than a film built on one admittedly stupendous job of acting.
Robert Altman’s deep understanding of dramatics is also on display in the film itself — for example, in the way he allows Nixon to look noble in one moment (reading a particularly stirring passage from one of his books about a little boy dreaming of becoming the president) and pathetic the next (collapsed in a chair, his clothes disheveled and his posture a drunken mess, fighting back at the perceived slights of his history with a long, childish Bronx cheer). Hall is at the center of the film, inhabiting his character from the first frame and allowing his colossal rage, self-pity, resentment and shame to build up into a final astonishing explosion at the end. But Altman is on the periphery, providing a solid understanding of how this drama works and how it should be framed in order to prove effective for an audience that doesn’t have the benefit of being in the same room as Hall. It is Altman who makes sure we see little bits of business like Nixon swapping the genteel snifter of brandy for the blunt glass of whiskey, or the introduction of the pistol early on at exactly the moment our attention might otherwise drift. And it was Altman’s idea to bring in the device of the security cameras, providing a constant reminder of the confessional nature of Nixon’s ramblings, a nice illustration of his ever-present paranoia, and a means by which to refocus our attention in those moments we might tire of seeing the sole actor in the film talking to himself.
This keen sense of dramatic structure shows up in Altman’s commentary, as well. One of the selling points of the film is that, despite the creators’ personal feelings about Richard Nixon, they manage to produce a portrait of him that is, if not exactly sympathetic, at least visibly — and uncomfortably — human. (One criticism of Secret Honor that’s hard to refute is that its appeal rests pretty heavily on how much you care about Nixon, and how interested you are in the political machinations of his time and place. Here, it is Hall’s performance that proves a saving grace; it is the intensity and feeling of his acting, the shocking but utterly recognizable anger and defensiveness he brings to the role, that makes us want to keep listening even if we don’t know or care about the particulars of the story.) And yet, Altman, not without a certain level of wickedness, undercuts this at every opportunity: watching the film, he takes special care, even in those moments of greatest sympathy, even at the times where we recognize in Nixon a wounded human being who lifted himself through a horrible effort of will to the most exalted of states but never felt justified in his own house, to point out how self-serving, how deceptive, how evasive his behavior is. Altman has little to say about Philip Baker Hall’s performance (though what he says is highly complimentary), but he has a lot to say about Richard Nixon’s: he finds Nixon to be little more than a paid shill, and a bad actor for all that who, in the film, is putting on a show even though there’s no audience but himself.
So, does Robert Altman really hate Richard Nixon? The most candid the director allows himself to get is when he says that he feels more sympathy with Nixon than he does with Ronald Reagan — probably the faintest praise of the 37th president America would hear until George W. Bush got elected and people started saying that Nixon looked good by comparison. And even here, the mildness is undercut by Altman’s preceding comment that you can make anyone look sympathetic using art, even Hitler. If Altman doesn’t hate Nixon, it’s only because he doesn’t hate anybody. But he proved that you can make art about someone you hate, that you can put your feelings aside and take pretty pictures — and that behind those pretty pictures, your feelings will still be there for everyone to see.
Secret
Honor Michael Wilmington essay from
Criterion
Bright Lights Film Journal
[Tom Sutpen]
DVD Talk - Criterion
collection Bill Gibron
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
not coming to a theater near
you [Rumsey Taylor]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
digitallyOBSESSED.com
[Robert Edwards]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd) Vincent
Canby
FOOL FOR LOVE A 96
USA
If you ain't a cowboy, you ain't shit. —Eddie (Sam Shepard)
Having written award
winning plays for nearly two decades, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Buried Child in 1978, Sam Shepard never
directed any of his own plays until Fool
for Love in 1983, when he directed Ed Harris and Kathy Baker in the lead
roles of a small production in San Francisco before opening off Broadway in New
York a few months later. Robert Altman
spent the first half of the decade working in smaller budget movies outside the
Hollywood studios, choosing to film a series of modern theatrical works in a
naturalistic setting, where often the entire shoot consisted of a single set in
a solitary room. The director’s focus in
these works is more restrained due to the cramped space, where the dramatic
power of the performers unleashes itself with a flood of emotions that can
barely be contained by such a restrictive environment, giving the impression
that the characters feel straightjacketed.
Shepard seems to share this sense of confinement in his own life, as just
two years earlier on the set of FRANCES (1982) he met lead actress Jessica
Lange, effectively ending his own fifteen year marriage for this new lifelong
companion. His play Fool for Love seems to contain elements of this double life,
starring lead characters who feel both smitten and star crossed, who are
desparate for one another when absent, but miserable in each other’s
company. It was Shepard who wanted his
play filmed and also chose to star as Eddie in the lead role, a lonesome cowboy
at the end of an era, somehow out of place and out of time. Much of the movie does take place in a single
room, a seedy 1950’s roadside motel set on a lonely highway in New Mexico’s
Mojave Desert where Kim Basinger as May is hiding out trying to find her
bearings. Unlike his earlier works,
however, Altman opens up this claustrophobic confinement, allowing his
characters to inhabit the real world outside, though it’s about as desolate and
isolated as you could find filled with collectible articles of junk strewn around. While the play focuses on the explosive
energy of the tortured couple, the fools in love, as if the world could not
contain their feelings, Altman creates a more dreamlike effect, complete with
long drawn out flashback sequences narrated by intensely personal monologues,
where confoundingly the narration does not match the images we see onscreen,
causing a deeply unsettling confusion about what to believe. Some in the audience may never regain that
alienated disconnection with the material, but oddly enough neither do the
characters onscreen. Much of this movie
is simply a bewilderment.
Once Eddie finds May,
carrying a horse trailer and a few horses behind his truck, he wants her to
join him, most likely dreaming of living in the open plains near the mountains
somewhere, but May is reluctant, mindful of their cyclical pattern of
self-destructive behavior. Though she’s
obviously attracted to Eddie, who’s a natural on a horse, he’s also a disturbing
sexual presence, causing May to feel mistrustful, though mostly it seems of
herself. While Eddie is desperate to get
her back, he tries to charm his way through her defenses, where amusing humor
and sarcasm are eventually replaced by drunken rage, where through flashbacks
we soon learn the real mystery behind their dysfunctional relationship, which
strangely involves Harry Dean Stanton as the Old Man who led a double life when
he was younger, moving back and forth between families, each one not knowing
about the other, where these two are a product of his duplicity. Eddie seems to accept the fact that they are
doomed lovers, forever connected, where nobody and nothing can come in between,
as if it’s their only destiny, while May wants to make a new start, which has
Eddie disgusted at the thought, thinking she’s only deluding herself. While the two go at it, tearing each other
apart, making up, continually opening up even deeper wounds, May has a
surprise, as she needs to get ready for a date who will be arriving soon, which
has Eddie relishing the opportunity to demean and embarrass the poor slob. If ever there was theater of the
uncomfortable, this is it, as the emotional discoveries of love and abandonment
veer into the world of horror and the macabre.
The Old Man is also hanging around the periphery of the motel, living in
his trailer parked behind the motel, sitting around on chairs watching and
drinking, as if he hasn’t inflicted enough damage, yet he may be their “safe”
place, a shelter in the storm, someone they have in common, whose initial
narration feels like a wayward Greek chorus, a man who set out on a journey,
got lost and distracted, and never found his way back home, leaving it up to
these two to find their way on their own.
This remote outpost in the middle of nowhere seems to be their exile
into purgatory.
But all the introductory
emotional fireworks is just a prelude to the main event, which is the evening
arrival of the gentleman caller, Randy Quaid, just an ordinary guy genuinely
concerned about May who becomes a silent witness, like the role of a Holy
Fool. After a little physical
altercation, he is quickly offered a drink to settle things down, and over
drinks at a lonely motel bar illuminated by the neon lights shining through the
window and reflected in the mirror above the bar, each of these doomed lovers
tells their sad tale of woe to a perfect stranger, embellished with hypnotic
pacing as they backtrack into the sordid details of their tortured pasts. These eloquent monologues are fiercely
intense and highly disturbing, yet they couldn’t be told with more quiet,
purposeful understatement. Both Shepard
and Basinger, initially defined by how much she fears and is both attracted and
repelled by him, disappear from view, replaced by younger more innocent
versions of themselves onscreen, where only their voices remain connected to
who they really are. The dreamlike
quality of the flashback memories have a haunting effect, as if they’ve been
replayed in their minds hundreds of times, and whatever actually happened has
been replaced with countless variations and inventions until they barely
recognize who they are anymore. Their
entire adult life has been one long struggle to rid their minds of these
painful truths, but just seeing one another brings it all back where they’re
forced to relive the heartbreaking tragedy all over again, where only in an
alcoholic haze does the subject even surface before returning once more into
the deep recesses of their damaged souls.
These flashback sequences near the end of the film are among the most
uniquely original scenes Altman has ever filmed, and the way he continually
disconnects the visual memory from the descriptive monologues is sublimely
poetic, where the film itself becomes a surrealistic plateau of mental anguish
and existential dread, sure to repeat itself hundreds of more times, like an
infected virus spreading through the bloodstream. Shepard literally inhabits the role he wrote,
a character where every nuance matters, while Basinger’s smoldering sexuality
and pitch perfect Southern twang may be her best performance over her entire
career, rivaled only by LA CONFIDENTIAL (1997).
Also a steady stream of soulful country music marks the first half of
the film, a combination of Waylon Jennings and Sandy Rogers, who is Shepard’s
sister, who can be heard on YouTube (4:52) here: Sandy Rogers - Go Rosa. Altman’s stream-of-consciousness theme of
tortured and damaged souls was never more poetically realized than this film,
where an early scene that wordlessly expresses Basinger’s relationship to a
small girl locked out of her motel room is simply heart wrenching.
User reviews from imdb Author: runamokprods from US
Interesting, laid back version of the Shepherd play. On stage, with Ed
Harris in the lead, it was all frenetic energy and danger. Here the piece is
more moody and dreamlike. At times that works tremendously well, and it is
visually beautiful. The play has been opened up in a way that feels natural and
not forced. And the use of narration is very interesting and productively
unsettling, since the memories we see do not quite match the words we hear.
On the other hand, the slower pace makes the writing feel more melodramatic and
almost old- fashioned in its twists. And Shepherd is nowhere near as
interesting as Harris was on stage. We never feel that he is really dangerous.
He comes off more as a love-struck kid than obsessed man. And it ends with a
whimper, not a kick. Still, there are plenty of less interesting theater to
film adaptations out there.
Fool for
Love Time Out London
Sam Shepard's play
was a short, Strindbergian chamber piece, in which a semi-incestuous affair
between half-brother and sister was enacted largely by them hurling each other
off the walls of their small motel room. While maintaining the claustrophobia,
Altman's adaptation is much more leisurely in approach, allowing a good
half-hour for the arrival of Eddie (Shepard himself) at the motel in the Mojave
desert, before getting down to the hurting match between the two obsessive
would-be lovers. The play had a ghostly figure, the Old Man, who hovered in the
wings, breaking into occasional monologue to comment on the affair, in which it
was revealed that he was in fact their father. The film successfully weaves him
into the action, still standing slightly apart as a Greek chorus, but
nonetheless integrated:
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] also reviewing 3 WOMEN (excerpt)
Well before he directed the 1985
movie adaptation of Sam Shepard's play Fool For Love, Robert Altman had
already made trips into mythopoeic, Shepard-esque psychodrama.
That truthful flavor is missing
from Fool For Love, the first sample of Altman's decadelong "filmed
play" era to make it to DVD. Shepard's play is magnificently imagined from
a visual standpoint, as Altman restlessly picks over the neon-lit motel set,
staging flashbacks in the same frame as the present action. Nevertheless, the
perverse story of a randy cowboy (played by Shepard himself) and his
sister/lover Kim Basinger needs the tension of live performance for its
incest-as-metaphor diagram to pop out. Even with Randy Quaid and Harry Dean
Stanton breathing life into the supporting performances, and Basinger and
Shepard exploring the full range of sexual frustration, Fool For Love is
too removed from the real world to connect as more than a spooky,
extradimensional love story.
The Fool For Love DVD adds an interview with Altman and a written statement in which he explains that though some people have seen Fool For Love as a comedy or a thriller, that was never his vision for it. Similarly, on the commentary track for Criterion's 3 Women DVD, Altman acknowledges the movie's pretentiousness while insisting that, flaws and all, it's a valid record of what he saw in the world at the time it was made. Both confessions explain why even Altman's misfires endure: His art is built on his own insightful observations.
Original Play
Was An Awesome Ride by suebrash from
IMDb Discussion Board (Sun May 9 2010 17:23:43)
You may wonder why I would write about a play on a movie site.
You wouldn't ask if you were able to see the original production of this play
with the original cast, first produced at San Francisco's Magic Theatre, then
moved wholly intact to Circle In The Square in NYC. Raw and unforgettable to
anyone lucky enough to see it.
Ed Harris gave one of the most amazing performances in contemporary theatre
night after night as Eddie, a role written for him by Sam Shepard after they
were in "The Right Stuff". He laid the blueprint for the role just as
Brando did for Stanley in "Streetcar Named Desire", immortalized on
film. Too bad that Ed Harris didn't have the same opportunity to record his
definitive performance as Eddie. He and Kathy Baker as Mae tore it up 8 times a
week in flesh and blood right in front of you... live... so real you could feel
the sweat and the claustrophobia... the sexual and emotional pulse delivered in
spades every time. Supporting actors Dennis Ludlow and Will Marchetti were also
superb... Set, sound, lighting design all created the real/unreal motel room in
the intimate theatres the play was produced in... around 100 or so lucky enough
to see it nightly. Direction by Sam Shepard was tight and unpredictable,
largely due to Mr. Harris' over the edge performance; scary but tender as a man
desperate at all costs to get her back.... Two people trapped by their past in
a desperate embrace that hurts and feels so good, all at once.
As a theatre-goer for over 50 years, this ranks as one of the most
unforgettable plays I remember over my lifetime. I must have seen it at least
20 times, in SF and NYC. I lament that the film really does not capture the
visceral or emotional arc that I know is in the play.
Some comments express confusion about what really happens or if their obsessive
encounters will continue to go on? The truth revealed sets Eddie and Mae free
the way I see it. To me, this was clearly the ending in the way that Harris and
Baker played it. Electric.
Fool For Love : DVD
Talk Review of the DVD Video Kim
Morgan from DVD Talk, also seen here:
Sunset
Gun: Fool's Gold--'Fool For Love'
In the canon of Robert Altman's extensive oeuvre, Fool
for Love is not a film that initially stands out—even to some hard core
Altman-philes. In fact, a few even forget that the multi-faceted and always
busy American director helmed the thing—it's a Sam Shepard creation all the
way.
But not entirely. Though based on Shepard's play and starring the good-looking,
intense actor, it contains those Altman touches that mark his other
"smaller" pictures like the brilliant Three Women, Come
Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, Streamers, Secret
Honor and Vincent and Theo—all great works that show just how damn
versatile Altman is. And certainly, it is actor friendly, something consistent
with Altman—he allows them the freedom to develop their own characters with
little interruption. Wisely, he typically casts correctly, and so someone like
Kim Basinger, who in 1985 hadn't proven her mettle quite yet, gives the
strongest performance in the film. She was terrific in LA Confidential,
but if Oscar's were just—she would have been nominated for this film—as a put
upon, trailer trash babe, she's absolutely ideal.
The story has two very broken people oozing anger, confusion and of course,
heavy sexual attraction that is, in an almost satirical way, so wrong its
right. Playing classic American stereotypes (or symbols), Shepard is Eddie, a
jean clad cowboy who comes back to the love of his life May, a drop dead
gorgeous blonde who (in the words of Karl Malden in the masterful Baby Doll:
"slops around in a slip") while living in a remote Texan motel.
Obviously a modeling scout hasn't been around these parts because May is attempting
to go on with her life via a new beau—the safer Randy Quaid.
Meanwhile, milling about the motel is a drunken old man (Harry Dean Stanton)
who watches the fireworks with both relish and worry. As we'll learn, there's
more to this kook than a guy who believes Barbara Mandrel to be his wife.
Chiefly, that Harry Dean is the father of both Eddie and May, albeit through
different mothers. The incestuous bond has seriously screwed them up but also
ties them deeply in that classic Southern fiction manner a la novelist Erskine
Caldwell (Shepard HAD to have read the writer).
But the incest isn't the main batch of fireworks for Fool for Love. It's
the relationship between Eddie and May and the writing and acting delivered by
Shepard and Basinger. Without talking down to their characters, the film gives
these people bursts of violence that range from angry words (Basinger is
particularly good at letting it out) to literal, acts of brutality (for
instance, Eddy breaks down May's door when she refuses to open it—May kicks him
in the crotch immediately after kissing him). It also allows them humor within
the darkness. When May rubs her head insanely Eddy snaps (and we're not sure
why this makes us laugh) "you need an aspirin or something?" And it's
also just plain sexy—not just for the actor's outward looks of Texan
gorgeousness, but their taboo, fiery passion that manages to be both a play on
saucy paperback fiction and real life. Leave it to Altman to balance these two
elements splendidly.
Altman creates a remarkable otherworld in the dusty landscape these people
inhabit. Not only does it look like an authentic, old motel but something from
an existential void—a resting place for losers or a supernatural last stop in
life. Shot with a painterly touch, the picture ventures into a hybrid of Wim
Wenders/ David Lynchian territory that's highly provocative. Altman also
successfully fuses the past with the present in scenes with
The extras aren't plentiful but are interesting and never
play like superfluous filler. Here we have a rare interview with Altman in the
featurette Robert Altman: Art and Soul where the director talks about
the film, actors, play and just why he wanted to make it. Incredibly detailed
and proud of this project, Altman shares his feelings on how to direct actors
and how he never likes to do something he feels comfortable about which
accounts for the director's fascinating career. This is not the standard
featurette as it's actually INTELLIGENT and we learn a few extra things about
Altman. For the fan, this is a bona-fide bonus. Altman also continues his
discussion in a text feature explaining more about the film that again, isn't a
pain in the neck to read. Also on board is the film's original theatrical
trailer.
Fool for Love is a lovely oddity, a timeless character study and like other
Altman films making their way to DVD (Three Women and up next, the great
hard-to-see California Split) a picture that should be rediscovered.
Fool for Fame Portrait of the Artist: Sam Shepard and the
Anxiety of Identity, by John Blackburn from his Master’s Thesis, May
1, 1996, seen here: Portrait of the Artist:
Sam Shepard and the
Fool for Love Peter Reiher
Cashiers
De Cinema: FOOL FOR LOVE (Robert Altman, 1985)
Nick's Flick Picks [Nick
Davis]
The DVD
Journal | Quick Reviews: Fool for Love
Clarence Beaks
Epinions DVD [Stephen O.
Murray]
:
Fool for Love Peter Malone
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Cinema:
Desert Dust:FOOL FOR LOVE - TIME
Richard Corliss
Fourth Row
Center [Jason Bailey]
The
Parallax Review [Hanna Soltys]
Spirituality
& Practice [Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
fool for
love Acmi
Love and
Abandonment in the American West in Sam Shepard's "Fool ... Goldstar
Fool for Love (1985) « For
Reel Eric Fuers
Fool for
Love - cinematic threads Matthew
Lotti
User reviews from imdb Author: allyjack from
User reviews from imdb Author: Katy-13 from Olympia,
Washington
User reviews from imdb Author: craigbaker from Colorado
User reviews from imdb Author: brocksilvey from United
States
Fool for Love (1985) -
Film Review from Film4
Altman
Doesn`t Fool Around With Tempestuous `Love` Story - Chicago ... Gene Siskel
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Movie
Review - Fool For Love - SCREEN ... - Movies - New York Times Vincent Canby
Fool for Love
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Fool For Love By Sam Shepard YouTube video scenes from the play
BEYOND THERAPY
USA
Having dealt with computer dating
in the insanely neglected A Perfect Couple, Altman turns his attention
to Lonely Hearts subscribers in a film that merges the romantic merry-go-round
antics of La Ronde with the clamorous, overflowing narrative tactics of
Edward Copeland on Film A disappointed Edward Copeland
Hang me from the
highest tree/Good Lord have pity on me. At least that's how I felt after enduring what takes the title of the
absolute worst Robert Altman feature I've ever seen. Altman's 1987 screen
adaptation of Beyond Therapy is
beyond help -- wasting a talented cast that includes Jeff Goldblum, Julie
Hagerty, Christopher Guest, Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson in perhaps the worst
idea for a play-to-film transfer ever by filming playwright Christopher
Durang's equally abysmal play "Beyond Therapy" to the big screen.
Back when the great Frank Rich reviewed theater for The New York Times, he summed up many of the problems with the movie when he reviewed the Broadway transfer of the play in 1981.
"Some day, I swear, the explosive comic brilliance of Christopher Durang will erupt on Broadway. The only question is when. ... (I)t didn't happen last night, when Mr. Durang's latest play, ''Beyond Therapy,'' pretty much wilted of its own volition at the Brooks Atkinson."
Both the play and Altman's film allege to be a farce of dysfunctional Manhattanites trying to find love and themselves through personal ads and psychiatry. Goldblum plays Bruce, a bisexual looking to explore hetero life, and Hagerty plays Prudence, a woman "who hates homosexuals" but keeps going back to Bruce anyway. In the middle is Bob, Bruce's gay lover (Guest, developing the prototype for his Corky St. Clair character in Waiting for Guffman) and on the sides are Bruce and Prudence's less-than stellar therapists played by Jackson and Conti, in an awful Italian accent which his character at least admits is a put-on late in the film.
I hate to keep leaning on Rich, but his review of the play said so much that's wrong with Beyond Therapy much better than I ever could.
"It contained some hilarious
jokes, uneasily tied to a bland, dramatically amorphous romance ... Yet,
for all the hard work, the final result is unchanged. We still don't care
whether Bruce ... and Prudence ...
ever get married or not. ...
At the same time, however, the therapy gags are defeating: like too many jokes in this play, they compromise the credibility of the figures at center stage. ... Mr. Durang's jokey, throw-away rationalizations for this odd courtship provide no enlightenment.
Nor do the other lines fill in the blanks in these people; the playwright never summons up the passion for his leads that he does for their doctors. We're repeatedly told that Bruce must learn to take emotional risks, that Prudence must learn to accept people's imperfections. Both characters are apparently lonely and want children. And that's it. Otherwise, this is a colorless, if whiny, pair who keep coming together and splitting apart as aimlessly as billiard balls.
They remain empty, anonymous vessels for arbitrary one-liners.
Yet the real disappointment in ''Beyond Therapy'' is the script ...
Even though Altman pitched in with Durang for the screenplay, no evidence that it helped appears on the screen. The most positive things I can say about Beyond Therapy is that it's short. I did chuckle once when Bob blames Bruce's exploration of his straight side on seeing that movie Sunday Bloody Sunday with that "English actress" who is of course Glenda Jackson, already trapped in this movie.
This isn't my first encounter with a wretched work by Durang
-- I had the misfortune of seeing his play "Sex and Longing" on
Broadway with Sigourney Weaver and it remains the single worst Broadway
production I've ever seen. I've not seen Durang's more acclaimed works, but
based on these two, my guess is that either he peaked early or that his
reputation was overblown to begin with. The only performer to emerge unscathed
in "Sex and Longing" was the great Dana Ivey, who somehow managed a
great performance in the slop of a script she was performing, something
unfortunately none of the cast of the Beyond Therapy film were able to accomplish.
I don't know what attracted Altman to film this piece of dreck, but I do think
it's telling that it's one of the few DVDs of an Altman feature that contains
neither a commentary track by the director nor a featurette where he talks
about the film. Maybe Altman knows it's better to let this one slip away. Now
that I've seen it, I'm inclined to agree. I guess I really have been too hard
on Quintet, Ready to
Wear and Dr. T. and the Women.
Fulvue Drive-in
Nicholas Sheffo
Director Robert Altman tries to invert the Screwball Comedy with his 1987 film Beyond Therapy, but he does not quite make it. Jeff Goldblum is Bruce, who may or may not be straight, but is interested in the perpetually neurotic Prudence (Julie Haggerty. Bruce has an explicitly gay roommate in Bob (Christopher Guest, before he played this persona out) and Bruce has said he is bi-sexual. That set up immediately eliminates the male/female dichotomy that is sustained in such comedies, even though they cross each other constantly in films such as Howard Hawks’ 1938 classic Bringing Up Baby.
Glenda Jackson is here as a neurotic mother and Tom Conti is a screwy foreign lover who may also be phonier than a three dollar bill. Add the oddball and often gay characters, and this film feels like it is part of the current gay pop culture cycle, except something more intelligent than just exploitive and ignoring the AIDS epidemic. It is a surprise that this film ignores AIDS for all involved, even with Christopher Durang and Altman adapting the screenplay from Durang’s play.
Thanks to the approach to making the film, master filmmaker Altman never lets this feel like a filmed play. However, the dialogue cannot escape the feel of stage convention and the delivery by the actors cannot break this either. To the credit of all, it never feels like these people are talking at each other, but it did not feel like enough was being said. If the point was to show everyone being neurotic and not able to grasp the situation, this went a bit overboard.
Haggerty makes the least sense, sticking with the possibility of any happiness while everyone male around her is having an identity crisis. The film has been criticized for her character being limited and even sexist, but the gender politics are all over the place here, and the males do not come across any better. Altman wants to show the banality of “love” as object and a male/female relationship as impossible to negotiate. His solution and idea here in the end is a joke worthy of Billy Wilder’s Some like It Hot (1959), but not as effective.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image is not bad, but still has depth and color limits. This was the sixth of six collaborations in a row for Altman and cinematographer Pierre Mignot, wrapping up a 1980s feature film cycle as a sort of rebuilding after the odd, commercial flop Popeye (1980), which has become a cult item. Mignot would co-shoot Pret-A-Porter (Ready To Wear) in 1994 with Jean Lepine, four films later, and has not worked with him since. This is what we could consider average Altman visual vocabulary.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono shows its age, but especially when Linda Rondstat’s version of “Someone To Watch Over Me” from her then recent What’s New album. The 1983 hit was recently issued in the new DVD-Audio format, with higher definition sound than CD and in a multi-channel arrangement yet. That ages this film all the more. The song is repeated in instrumentals throughout in a comic fashion, almost feeling like a send-up of Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 hit What’s Up Doc?, though we get a Lena Horne rendition that breaks form that half-way through the film, then Yves Montand at the end credits. This does not demonstrate evolution among the characters, but makes sense as there is strong reasons throughout to think Altman was going after the Bogdanovich hit to some extent. Bogdanovich fared better recently by doing this and more effectively so in music and title graphics with the underrated The Cat’s Meow (2002, reviewed elsewhere on this site). The only extras are the original theatrical teaser and trailer.
The film lands up being ahead of its time in a way that foresees shallow trends we are currently suffering, so if it is a warning of the failure of psychology to help people and a society that in some ways became sicker, Durang and Altman were right. That they were not explicit enough might be reason to want to blame them. In the end, it is not the best Altman, but cannot simply be written off. Beyond Therapy could refer to these particular people who are too beyond such scientific means to be helped, so they may be doomed to live in a false sense of happiness, but Altman’s concerns about genre override any other intents, making for an oddly disappointing film.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
O.C. AND STIGGS
USA
Altman's one major studio picture
between Popeye and The Player was a complete misfire. As scripted
by National Lampoon's Tod Carroll and Ted Mann, it's a peculiarly
juvenile foray into teen anarchy, as the two pranksters of the title set about
harassing
The Spinning Image (Graeme Clark)
O.C. (Daniel
Jenkins) and Stiggs (Neill
Barry) are two teenagers from Phoenix, Arizona who have one goal in life:
to make trouble for the rich Schwab family headed by insurance salesman Mr
Randall Schwab (Paul
Dooley). Tonight, the last night of summer vacation, the boys wait until
the Schwabs are indoors to watch their latest advertisement on TV, then climb
over the wall of the residence and make mischief by stealing the lobsters the
family have been cooking and getting hold of the telephone. Settling down in
the lawn chair, Stiggs makes a long distance call to an African President,
Bongo, who is his personal hero and begins to tell him the story of the summer
and how successful they became...
You could tell how far director Robert
Altman's star had fallen since the seventies when the only major studio
work he could get was making a teen comedy, and of despite being based on a
National Lampoon story it didn't turn out like Animal
House or any of its imitators. No, this was immediately identifiable as an
Altman work, with a satirical look at suburbia - Altman is just as determined
to ridicule the Schwab family as his title characters are. In fact, O.C. and
Stiggs could be the teen equivalent of Hawkeye and Trapper from MASH,
but unlike that classic this effort was welcomed with disastrous reviews.
The original story was written by Tod Carroll and Ted Mann, and Mann scripted
the film verison with Donald Cantrell, although considering the director no
small amount of improvisation must have been involved. The result is a
particularly relaxed comedy, perhaps a little too relaxed to contain real belly
laughs, but there is a near-constant stream of chuckles to be had here. The
reason for O.C and Stiggs' vendetta against the Schwabs is easily missed in the
overlapping dialogue, but when they go and see their school counsellor they
inform him that the Schwabs refused to pay O.C.'s grandfather (Ray
Walston) his retirement insurance.
This means O.C. will have to leave at the end of the summer to live with his
uncle, not finish his senior year in school and put his grandfather into a
miserable rest home, which leads to a whole run of outlandish antics with the
wealthy family in question at the receiving end. For example, the nerdy son,
Randall Jr (John
Cryer), is soaked when he tries a drinking fountain that our heroes have sabotaged
with a small explosive, but they have bigger fish to fry. The spoiled daughter,
Lenore (Laura
Urstein), is about to be married, so obviously a chance like that to create
mayhem won't pass O.C. and Stiggs by.
The first thing is to buy the most obnoxious second hand car they can find, and
make it even more offensive, with a roaring engine, huge wheels and a hydraulic
system that raises the chassis: perfect for attending the wedding in. Next, an
inappropriate present, a machine gun bought from the local Vietnam War veterans
(one of whom is Dennis
Hopper as the same character he plays in Apoclaypse
Now, camera and all). However, when they reach the reception O.C. finds
possible love with guest Michelle (Cynthia
Nixon) and dances with her in a Ginger
Rogers and Fred
Astaire number, for the hell of it. This doesn't stop Randall Jr from
firing off the gun, of course. Any serious moments seem out of place, as when
one character dies, because largely the laidback humour is more successful,
wryly but precisely spoofing the supposedly respectable characters and
championing the misifts. This was barely released and gained its cult from the
rare TV showings and video tapes, but it's worth seeking out. Music by King
Sunny Ade (who is O.C.'s personal hero).
Drifting David Lowery
"O.C. and Stiggs" Glen Norton
Coffee,
coffee and more coffee. Peter
Nellhaus
Exploitation Retrospect Dan Taylor
New York Times Janet Maslin
TANNER “88” – made for TV
USA
Jack Tanner's run for the White House was throughly chronicled by cameras as the politician went from state to state and city to city stumping for votes. But if you've never heard of Tanner, don't be surprised. He was the creation of writer Gary Trudeau, of Doonesbury fame, and maverick film director Roberrt Altman. Together the pair skillfully interweave fiction with reality creating a show that accurately portrays the American political system and its weaknesses. The program, Tanner '88, originally ran for eleven episodes on HBO in 1988, and has now been released by Criterion. Just in time for the 2004 presidential race this shows comments are just as relevant today as they were a decade and a half ago.
Tanner is a liberal Democrat, an ex-senator who is running for his party's nomination for president. He's the dark horse candidate, but when an aide videotapes Jack giving a pep talk to his disheartened staff, the resulting video gives him a boost in the polls and a campaign slogan: For Real.
The show follows Tanner from quilting bees in
That is one of the main themes of the show, and the irony of Tanner's slogan, that nobody is 'for real.' As one campaign staffer puts it: "Ninety-one percent of Americans believe that this is the best place on the planet. And that gives people a sense of entitlement. The best demand the best." In other words, they don't want someone human, with faults, they want someone who is perfect.
The show constantly reminds us that contrast between image and reality is at its peak in American politics. The spin-miesters in Tanner's organization tell him that he can't be photographed carrying his own bags into a hotel. That shows that he's not capable of delegating responsibility, and the voters want that in a president. He gets lessons on how to pose with babies since Jesse Jackson is way ahead of them in baby photos. The fact that he likes to carry his own bag and doesn't feel comfortable around babies doesn't enter into it. It is all about how the public perceives him, not what he really thinks.
Watching the current election in the
The show also works as just plain entertainment. Altman and Trudeau compliment each other in an interesting way. Trudeau has always been more interesting in politics and he creates some interesting scenes and some great monologs. His familiarity with the political process is evident in many of the exchanges such as the time when Tanner's pollster explains why the campaign's polls are better than the network numbers. (Because networks just want to report a number but don't want to spend a lot of money. But the campaigns want accurate data and are willing to spend more money for larger samplings with better cross sections.) Altman on the other hand, makes the program seem real, with his almost trademark overlapping dialog and cinema-verité feel.
Altman's self described "mockumentary" shouldn't really be
compared to other movies in the genre like Spinal Tap and Best in
Show. Tanner '88 is a different creature altogether, less frivolous,
with something to say about American society. The upshot of that is that
this program isn't as humorous as other movies in the genre. Yes there
are some funny moments in each show, but there are also serious sections like
the episode where a
Though the last few episodes seemed to drag a little, the show is still an unrecognized masterpiece in American television. Amusing, informative and thought provoking, Tanner '88 is a satire of American politics that every voter should watch.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
"By the end of the campaign," recalls 1988
presidential candidate Jack Tanner, "I'd look in the mirror and say, 'Jack
who?'" If you're mouthing the same question, it's not your memory failing
you: Tanner is entirely the creation of Robert Altman and Garry Trudeau, whose
1988 miniseries chronicled the candidacy of a Democratic dark horse. Conceived
in the wake of the scandal that ended Gary Hart's presidential bid, the
11-episode series (airing Tuesdays through April) stars Michael Murphy (Nashville's
campaign flack) as a Michigan congressman whose protean beliefs don't coalesce
until well into the campaign. As a media satire, Tanner was instantly
dated, with its good-cop/bad-cop reporters and telegraphed ethical debates.
(Veronica Cartwright's bubbleheaded TV journo rivals the misogynist caricature
in Oliver Stone's Salvador -- wonder what Jane Pauley had to say about
that.) But on what was just being termed "the character issue," it's
significantly more acute. Murphy's candidate is hardly a West Wing-ian
paragon of virtue; he's so bland that his staffers have to surreptitiously videotape
a war-room tirade in order to get red meat for a campaign spot. Though Tanner
reminisces about marching for civil rights (and scoffs at a woman who asks him,
"What's Selma?"), the self-appointed "political fable" is
slippery about Tanner's beliefs, except insofar as it intimates he might not
really have any. A hardened political professional, Tanner is used to talking
about "hard choices" without making any. Though its
fourth-wall-breaking touches are little more than window dressing (See Tanner
shake Bob Dole's hand in New Hampshire! See him being ignored on the convention
floor!), fiction collides memorably with reality in the series' eighth episode,
"The Girlfriend Factor" (to air March 23), where the embattled
candidate attends a meeting of Detroit families who have lost children to gun
violence. When candidate Tanner tells the families (obviously not actors) to
"take advantage of these cameras" and tell their stories, you realize
it's not the fake TV cameras he's talking about; for half an episode, Altman
practically abandons his story and looks straight in the face of the people
government ought to help most, and most often fails. Suddenly, Tanner has a
reason to run, and it costs him his career. Recalling the day in one of the
retrospective "fireside chats" that preface each episode, Tanner (now
a university professor) recalls, "It meant that, above all else, social
justice was going to be our central message. … It also meant, of course, that
we'd lose." The assertion that belief is the enemy of political success is
not a new one, but it's delivered here with uncommon force and resonance.
More interested in how machines work than what they do,
Altman's strengths have always been more social than political, which makes Tanner
'88 something of a chimera, twisting between Altman's love of backroom
deals and moral cloudiness and Trudeau's attempt to deconstruct the political
process. (No surprise, the director wins.) Still, in a season where a crowded
field of Democratic candidates are similarly struggling to define themselves
(and unseat an incumbent Bush), its topicality is all too apparent. Watch for
Pamela Reed's tough-as-nails campaign manager, and Sex and the City's
Cynthia Nixon as Tanner's idealistic (read: Amy Carter) daughter.
not coming to a theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
Beginning
with and perhaps best indicated in M*A*S*H, Robert Altman’s canon is one
decidedly as well as structurally antithetic – at the most essential level – to
customary Hollywood filmmaking rules. This tactic of stubborn opposition and
individuality distinguishes each of his films.
Altman’s
directorial tactics have suited some materials more appropriately than others (The
Player being among his more caustic displays), and conceptually he is
perhaps no better equipped than to helm political satire – in which Altman’s
liberalism is of obvious utility. Elements of Altman’s reactionary politics are
manifested in each of his films, but it is his Tanner ’88, an eleven-episode
miniseries produced for HBO during the 1988 presidential campaign, that finds
Altman at his most satiric and volatile.
The series
is written and co-produced by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau.
Suitably, each character is equivalent, by dress and mannerisms that
sufficiently – and efficiently – relay a character’s nature, to one of
Trudeau’s pen-and-ink creations (one even resembles Doonesbury’s Duke):
T. J., an incessant and manipulative campaign manager; Deke, a cameraman
preoccupied with the opportunity to distinguish his coverage, even though he’s
routinely lodged in a pool of similarly-ambitious photographers; and Alex, the
candidate’s open-minded and obsessive daughter, who imposes her ideals upon her
father, and at one point gets him arrested (an action she observes as a sort of
validation). The series details the evolution of a campaign and is decidedly in
service to illustrate the production, mishaps, and artificiality that
suggestively distinguish high-profile American elections.
It is Trudeau’s
and Altman’s title creation, expectedly, that exhibits the critical political
stances of both. Jack Tanner, worn with knowledge and capability by Altman
regular Michael Murphy, is not a feasible candidate in many facets of his life
and ideas. At a debate with Jesse Jackson, Tanner, a single father, urgently
criticizes the minister of attributing racism to his detractors, and shortly
after this comment Tanner announces his support for the legalization of drugs.
Tanner’s aims succeed at earning the attention of many, but because of his
extreme liberalism (exemplified in most every decision he makes, such as
appointing Ralph Nader as Attorney General), as he begins to realize midway
through his campaign, his ideas may be too reactionary to elect him. Tanner’s
questionable eligibility is reflected in more subtle manners: at one point, his
campaign team addresses his lack of comfort when holding an infant. Thinking
the gesture necessary to traditional party candidates, they buy him a doll to
practice with.
Tanner ’88 is distinguished conceptually
by its documentary format. It is shot on video, much of it resembling generic
news photography – most every episode contains a scene in which Tanner is
flanked by news affiliate microphones. The ultimate trump of Tanner ’88
is its realism. Throughout the series Tanner rubs elbows with his would-be
competitors, including Bob Dole, Gary Hart, Pat Robertson (whose chance
encounter with Tanner was not staged, and who shakes the faux candidate’s hand
with a politician’s pretend familiarity), Bruce Babbit, and Kitty Dukakis.
Tanner coheres with his opposing candidates without disruption because,
essentially, he has their same intentions: to shake hands and impress others
into subscribing to his ideas.
Jack
Tanner’s campaign is founded on the slogan “For real.” He promotes his
authenticity and reliability, admits his mistakes, and even at a later point is
swayed to reconsider his agenda after visiting an urban ghetto and discovering
a child’s dead body. The fundamental caveat of Tanner ’88 is that it’s
not real, that it serves to indicate a similar artificiality in the arena it
relevantly mocks.
Reverse Shot [Karen Wilson]
"Tanner '88" Dana Stevens at Slate
"Tanner on Tanner," Robert Altman and Cynthia Nixon talk about Tanner from the Village Voice
Images Journal [James Newman]
The Criterion Contraption [Matthew Dessem]
Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]
The DVD Journal DSH
DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]
VINCENT & THEO
Netherlands Great Britain France
Scripted by Julian Mitchell, this covers much the same period (from Van Gogh's decision to paint full-time to the death of his art-dealer brother) as Minnelli's Lust for Life. Indeed, the films are not so very different. True, the focus on the brothers' close but troubled relationship not only mirrors the uneast symbiosis between art and finance, but offers through their parallel experiences a quasi-mystical dimension entirely in keeping with Vincent's art. But the film goes further than Minnelli's in its palpable - sordid, even - physicality and readiness to depict vincent's less endearing qualities. Tim Roth, superb as Vincent, veers convincingly between morose introspection and fervered intensity, while Paul Rhys' twitchy Theo lends depth to a traditionally shadowy figure. Best of all is Altman's simple, uncluttered direction, which makes sensitive use of a strong cast, Jean Lepine's evocative location photography, and Gabriel Yared's compulsive music. Nowhere does Altman sermonise about the artist's greatness; his achievement is allowed to speak for itself. If only more film-makers had such confidence and integrity.
Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]
One of Robert Altman's least heralded films, Vincent & Theo is a beautifully mounted and deeply affecting portrait of Vincent Van Gogh's turbulent relationship with his younger brother. This deliberately paced but involving film wisely avoids melodramatic clichés in its nuanced depiction of Van Gogh (Tim Roth), who's often been reduced to a "tortured genius" caricature in other films. Under Altman's naturalistic direction, Roth (Rob Roy) and co-star Paul Rhys give passionately realized performances as the title characters, whose near-symbiotic bond both sustained and tormented them. Although Altman's restrained approach to the material sometimes come across as rather bloodless—particularly in comparison to Vincente Minnelli's more emotionally charged Van Gogh biopic Lust for Life (1956)—Vincent & Theo effectively builds to a quietly devastating conclusion.
Written by British playwright/screenwriter Julian Mitchell (Wilde), the film opens with
footage of the 1987 Christie's
Meanwhile, Theo has his own burdens to bear. Ravaged by syphilis, his once-happy marriage to Joanna (Johanna ter Steege) begins to sour under the strain of both his illness and Vincent's complete breakdown. Institutionalized after slashing his ear with a razor, Vincent eventually stabilizes enough to continue painting. However, he is not "cured," as the pompous charlatan Dr. Paul Gauchet (Jean Pierre-Cassel) groundlessly proclaims to Theo. When Vincent subsequently commits suicide, Theo begins to unravel.
In the DVD featurette "Film as Fine Art," Altman reveals that Vincent & Theo was originally set up as a four-hour BBC miniseries; he and Mitchell pared it down to two and a half hours by narrowing their focus to Van Gogh's last years. But even with the idiosyncratic Altman (Nashville) at the helm, with regard to its tone and narrative tempo, there's more than a faint whiff of Masterpiece Theatre-style filmmaking to Vincent & Theo. Indeed, there's a genteel, almost clinical remove to some of the scenes that borders on static.
Yet while the film occasionally comes close to stalling, it ultimately impresses you with its perceptive depiction of the legendary Dutch painter fatally consumed by madness. Aided immeasurably by Jean Lepine's ravishing cinematography and Gabriel Yared's score, a haunting mixture of the ethereal and the discordant, Altman and his excellent cast draw you into the tragic world of Vincent and Theo. The compelling result joins Pollock, Camille Claudel, and Girl With the Pearl Earring as one of the more intelligent and realistic films about an artist in recent memory.
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
Under the hot breath of the mistral, a field of sunflowers like faceless lions dance, a thousand golden Salomes to drive the painter beyond passion to a storied madness. A glorious dazzle, they entice poor Vincent as a lover never would.
Robert Altman, so erratic in recent years, brings an artist's eye and suffering spirit to his masterly portrait of "Vincent & Theo." This lovely if deliberate film marks Altman's return to a more straightforward, but by no means expected, style. A biography that plays like fiction, it tells the story of the van Gogh brothers, stroked and brushed and globbed onto the canvas of the screen. Altman gives us art as ordered chaos, and inspiration as a merciless muse.
Directing from Julian Mitchell's lucid and moving screenplay, Altman focuses
on the symbiosis between the two brothers as well as the eternal struggle
between the artist and the audience, which by nature is attracted to the status
quo. It opens with an auction at Christie's, but the clamor of million-pound
bids for "Sunflowers" gives way to the slovenly artist's studio. Set
largely in
Roth's Vincent is wired like a lamp cord with a short, alternately buzzing with energy and lying quiet with desperation. A man in some terrible pain, whether it is epilepsy or some more exotic disorder, he struggles with the savagery of his own senses. His hair a ruffled ocher, his teeth rotten and stained from sucking on his brushes, Vincent writhes like the cypresses of his ravishing canvases. Theo, the quiet syphilitic, twitches and quivers like a hamster nervous in a cage.
The duet between Roth's Vincent and Rhys's Theo, the more controlled but no less anxious younger brother, is founded on blood, paint and obsession. By supporting Vincent, Theo vicariously participates in his brother's art and suffering. As compulsively tidy as Vincent is gross, he marries a great thick Dutch beauty, Jo Bonger (Johanna Ter Steege), but his tie with his brother supersedes even this.
Vincent can only paint and rage. He even paints the prostitutes before he and Paul Gauguin (Wladimir Yordanoff) take their pleasure in the Provencal demimonde. He dips his bread in paint and paints the face of the sleeping Gauguin, who awakes hung over from a night of sex and absinthe. The resulting argument between the two sends Vincent into a fit and he cuts off the lobe of an ear. The Provencal period ends and he enters an asylum.
Theo, now a father of one, finds a new patron for Vincent in Dr. Paul Gachet (Jean-Pierre Cassel), a hypocrite who keeps the art he has bought from the great impressionists in a vault. Gachet's daughter (Bernadette Giraud) and Vincent, grown childlike and introverted, are attracted to each other but Gachet discourages the relationship. The artist wanders off, his paints on his back, to startle crows in the fields of Auvers-sur-oise.
As seen by Altman and his director of photography, Jean Lepine, the crows become the visual brethren of the mourners at first Vincent's and then Theo's funeral. The sky disappears in a terrible blue glare and the grain shivers with the unseen menace of angry old agrarian gods. Vincent shoots himself, a sacrifice to his broken brain and the public taste of the times. And at Christie's the ultimate travesty, bidding on a ruined man's agony. Going, going, gone.
"Vincent & Theo" is more than art appreciation, it is a treasure in its own right, unframed and arcing in the projector's light.
Movieline
Magazine dvd review F.X. Feeney
Coffee,
coffee...and more coffee... Peter
Nellhaus
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jon Danziger)
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
THE PLAYER A- 93
USA
It’s just a satire on the way people behave in the movie studios. There was such a fuss started about it. People started saying, ‘Oh people are afraid you are going to do this and do this.’ So the more afraid they got, the more ideas they gave me. Looking back on this whole picture, it’s a pretty tame satire. It’s no big indictment. Things are much, much worse than this picture seems to say.
— Robert Altman
As if
coming out of a long hibernation, Altman’s extremely clever film literally
screams Hollywood headlines, making it the most talked about movie in
Tinseltown, largely because it’s such a scathing indictment of the brainless
and corrupt corporate culture that is the Hollywood movie industry itself. Altman had largely been out of favor with Hollywood
since several critically acclaimed studio films of the 70’s actually lost money
or had difficulty finding audiences despite near unanimous praise, such as McCabe
& Mrs. Miller (1971) and The
Long Goodbye (1973), made even worse by the critical and financial disaster of POPEYE
(1980), the final blow that sent the independent-minded director outside the
studios in the late 70’s and 80’s working on stage plays, television
adaptations, and his own small-budget projects.
Altman is in fine form here as he relishes the opportunity to satirize,
with a sleazy mix of truth and near slander, the same industry that spawned his
own career and do it with an insider’s view, as during the 70’s Altman himself
was at the epicenter of the movie industry, the darling child who could do no
wrong with a string of hits, while in the 80’s, the door was slammed shut and
no one would return his calls, as he was reduced to yesterday’s news and exiled
to the role of an outsider. That gave
him plenty of autobiographical ammunition to get the subversive tone just right
for this Hollywood haymaker, a poisoned pen
“fuck you” to the crassness and elitism of the movie industry, which ironically
catapulted Altman right back to the top of the A-list directors in Hollywood,
where his next film SHORT CUTS (1993) is a return to director prominence, like
in the early 70’s when Altman was able to make exactly the films he wanted to
make. While it’s hard to imagine
any other industry but Hollywood turning out a product designed to trash the
very industry that provided its existence, what’s perhaps most amazing is the movie itself
became the most requested picture for private screenings throughout the year by
the very studio executives it lambastes.
With an
extended opening tracking shot that lasts nearly 8 minutes, paying homage to
Orson Welles’ TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), known for its legendary opening shot which is
cleverly mentioned during the scene, the film ironically situates the audience
right in the heart of a Hollywood studio lot (the former site of Francis
Ford Coppola's Zoetrope Studios) where we hear Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) as a
cinema obsessed security chief tell someone how disgusted he is with the quick
MTV edits of today’s movies, “Everything now is cut, cut, cut,” how no one ever
attempts to make long tracking shots anymore like the infamous opening of TOUCH
OF EVIL that captures the essence of the film in the complexity of the opening
shot. It’s not by accident that Altman
chose this film, as it also represented a return to Hollywood
filmmaking by Welles after a near 30-year absence, an interesting parallel to
Altman’s own triumphant return after a decade-long absence. The highly complicated and perfectly
choreographed crane shot is interesting for how it weaves in and out of various
conversations and sequences, eventually eavesdropping on the business at hand
by voyeuristically peeping through windows to hear various movie ideas being
pitched, each one with a familiar ring, starring Julia Roberts or Bruce Willis,
summarized by combining ideas from one hit movie with another. The funniest, however, is listening to Buck
Henry, co-writer of THE GRADUATE (1967), suggest to a young studio executive
who wasn’t even born when the infamous film was made, that the time is right
for THE GRADUATE II, as all the principles are still alive, where Ben and
Elaine (Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross) could be living in Northern
California somewhere with an infirmed Mrs. Robinson living in a room upstairs,
conjuring up images of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? (1962). It’s here that high paid business executives
get paid mammoth salaries to listen to 50,000 pitches for movies every year,
where they have to narrow it down to the ten or twelve that the studio actually
makes each year. Their instincts to make
the right choices determine whether or not they will still have jobs afterwards. It’s a high powered business where someone is
always looking out for your office, so like politics, executives like to hold
onto their position as it provides them with unfettered power.
Enter
powerbroker Tim Robbins as Griffin Mill, a man in a slick suit who has people
at his beck and call, who is constantly in demand, but is too busy for nearly
everyone, including his bright attractive subordinate Bonnie (Cynthia
Stevenson) that he’s having an affair with, stealing her ideas and body without
giving it a second thought. Someone,
however, is sending him death threat post cards (a job Altman performed
himself, apparently with relish), a disgruntled writer supposedly upset at
being screwed by the studio (imagine that?), as Griffin Pasadena
Stylistically, the film is a cynical black comedy and is as funny and
playfully entertaining as anything Altman ever made throughout his career,
making back its money within the first month of release, where he turns the
offices of the studio, which had just been used in the Coen’s BARTON FINK
(1991), into a museum-like Hollywood studio tour, making exquisite use of old
film noir movie posters where the screaming bold print perfectly matches the
mood of the film, while there are also delightful cameos throughout from at
least 60 Hollywood stars, none of whom were in the script, but includes 12
Oscar winning actors in the cast, more than any other film in history,
including Cher, James Coburn, Louise Fletcher, Whoopi Goldberg, Joel Grey,
Anjelica Huston, Jack Lemmon, Marlee Matlin, Tim Robbins, Julia Roberts, Susan
Sarandon, and Rod Steiger, while also including Oscar winning producer-director
Sydney Pollack. Of course, the irate
writer continues to send post cards, as Griffin Hollywood
theme. Outside of the titular character,
there is little other character development, as the film centers around the
actions and behavior of a single character, who is detestable throughout,
without question, not the kind of guy that draws audience sympathy. With all the cameos, Altman does an excellent
job blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, where this is a
narcissistic culture that often can’t tell the difference, whose mindset is
thriving on surface artificiality, rarely probing under the surface, and yet
Robbins is no slouch as Griffin, little more than a con artist, fiercely
cold-blooded at one moment, deceitful throughout, where every vulnerable moment
where any feelings are exposed feels calculated by a guy that plays all the
angles. Griffin does nothing by
accident, as everything is meticulously planned, like a chess match, where his
job is to stay in the game using whatever means are available to him. Part of the film’s interest lies in the way
it explores who really runs the movie industry, questioning who is the primary
artist, the writer, the director, the actor, or the producer? Griffin
Sex, violence, and a happy ending are the Hollywood paradigm that comes
under fire, mercilessly satirized by Altman and Tolkin, lurching into American
Psycho (2000) territory, where the protagonist of the novel is truly a
murderer, but in the film he surreally fantasizes the murders, while here
Griffin is an unrepentant murderer in the novel, as he appears throughout most
of the film, but this is a director that not only knows movies, but knows how
to make movies, as the protagonist kills a writer, screws his woman, and turns
blackmail into a Hollywood script that makes millions, where it’s all part of a
grand theatrical spectacle. As part of
his master plan of deceit and betrayal, Griffin Puerto Vallarta ,
Mexico Los Angeles Griffin Hollywood Griffin Hollywood
movie must include “suspense, laughter, violence, hope, heart, nudity,
sex, and happy endings,” where Altman includes them all, mockingly delivered
with an ironic twist. Habeas Corpus finally sees the light of day in a hilarious climax, considerably
watered down from the original concept, with Julia Roberts being marched to the
gas chamber in one such interlude, before Bruce Willis, guns blazing, rescues
her at the instant before her death, where no one apparently recognizes that
the story is a rip-off of Susan Hayward starring in Robert Wise’s I WANT TO
LIVE! (1958). This is a wonderful
example of a director exploiting one-dimensional characters and an utterly
formulaic plot structure where every cliché is milked in order to make an
insightful comment on the shallowness of the industry itself. Someone had a helluva good time making this
movie, adapted by the novelist Michael Tolkin (who makes an appearance with his
brother Stephen, most likely as pitch men), a sardonic love potion to the
industry, joined by a cast of thousands, a hilarious valentine to the business
Chaplin built, that has been corrupted by the immense sums of money made to
create this illusionary world of ourselves, all in the name of
entertainment. Altman really gets this
one right, as it’s thoroughly enjoyable, even as we relish how despicable the
entire movie business has become, an industry where you can literally get away
with murder, rotten to the core, built on a foundation of lies, yet still an
audience will show up in droves to catch the next opening.
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Malcolm Maclaren]
Tim Robbins is Griffin Mill, The Player, and countless other
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer)
review [A-] also seen here: The Player - Deep Focus
Robert Altman snatched his hip credentials back from the jaws of obscurity when he released this brilliant little picture (from Michael Tolkin’s cynical little novel), about a studio executive’s murder of a movie screenwriter. Not since Sunset Boulevard (you’ve seen Sunset Boulevard, haven’t you?) has such a scathing film about Hollywood actually come from inside Hollywood. Tom Robbins is just about perfect as the title character, and he’s backed up by literally dozens of big-name stars who add authenticity to the murky soup that greases the wringer through which Altman runs the moviemaking establishment. Fred Ward, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Greta Scacchi are all fabulous to watch, and how can you not love a film which posits -- with a very nearly straight face -- dropping the screenwriter out of the moviemaking process entirely?
The Player | review,
synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
Shrewd
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
One of the greatest Hollywood-eats-itself movies, Robert Altman's The Player starts by taking all the movie formula elements and subverting them. We have murder, sex, chases, thrills and laughs, but all completely backward from the way audiences have been trained to read them. The unlikely hero -- who in most movies would be the villain -- is a movie executive named Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins). Mill begins receiving death threats from a rejected writer, and almost haphazardly guesses that it's David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio). He goes to see Kahane and winds up accidentally killing him, then covering up the crime to look like a robbery. He also begins seeing Kahane's girl, the sexy and aloof June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi) who has no interest in movies whatsoever. At the same time, studio politics begin to threaten Mill's job, and a detective (Whoopi Goldberg) begins nosing around in his life. Altman sprinkles dozens of star cameos -- many veterans of his own films -- throughout, continually calling attention to the idea of filmmaking and acting. He even opens the movie with a celebrated tracking shot that includes character talking about celebrated tracking shots. The movie is doubly sweet because it comes from a filmmaker that was once a major player himself, and subsequently became a maverick and an outsider. It's the ultimate in nose-thumbing.
In "The Player," Robert Altman's masterly, deadly funny
murder-mystery/satire of
Though Mill is on top of the heap, his eyelids quiver with impending panic. Rumors are flying around town that an executive from Fox named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is about to take over his job. And to make matters worse, some frustrated writer whose story pitch he brushed off has been sending him postcards saying things like "Your Hollywood is dead," and threatening to kill him.
What's ironic about this abuse is that, at least on the sliding moral scale Altman has set up, Mill is one of the good guys. He's known as the writer's executive; every day his office is crammed with writers pitching their ideas for "The Graduate II" or a political thriller for Bruce Willis described as " 'Ghost' meets 'The Manchurian Candidate' " or a Goldie Hawn vehicle that's kind of like "The Gods Must Be Crazy," only this time "the Coke bottle is a television actress."
Working from Michael Tolkin's adaptation of his novel, Altman is playfully
dead-on in his critique of
At times, the view is so convincing that the film almost seems like a
documentary. At premieres and lunch spots and parties, real-life stars flit by
the camera, giving very lifelike impressions of themselves as "
If nothing seems quite real, it's because Altman's searching, constantly
restless camera keeps peeling back layer after layer of artifice. The movie is
all reflections, glass, water, mirrors, screens; everything is
"framed," self-referential, even the dialogue. When Mill finally tracks
down the writer he thinks has been tormenting him, it's at a screening of
"The Bicycle Thief." And, afterward, in the karaoke bar where he and
David Kahane (Vincent D'Onofrio) have a drink, the patrons sing while images of
dreamy couples wander the beach on the monitor behind them. We're as far inside
this dizzying Looking Glass world as
For that matter, the story conference the next day is as outrageously absurd as the Mad Hatter's tea party. Levy has come on board at the studio, and his first suggestion is that the executives come up with the ideas for their movies themselves, eliminating the writers. It's easy, he says. Just pick out any story in the paper and you've got a movie -- not knowing, of course, that one of the articles is about Kahane's death. The joke about eliminating the writer is, in fact, the whole point, especially when Mill adds that if they can also figure out a way to eliminate the directors and actors, then they might really have something. Secretly, the executives despise the artists who make the movies because their so-called creativity is the one chance element in their calculations. Without the artists' meddling they might be able to hammer together a movie out of spare parts of past successes and sell it straight to the public. At best, the artists are a necessary evil.
Of course, the artist wants to kill the executive too. An executive like
Mill holds the artist's life in his hands, and perhaps no one in
The film, which begins with a single, gorgeously sustained eight-minute
camera move, is blissfully out of touch with contemporary trends in
moviemaking. Though it's loaded with references to other films, its only real
precursors are to be found in Altman's own previous work -- "
From start to finish, the film is surprising, both in style and narrative. The ensemble cast is loaded with big names in small roles. Dean Stockwell and the marvelous English actor Richard E. Grant show up as uncompromising screenwriters whose dynamite movie idea becomes a story within the story of the film; Fred Ward plays the studio's head of security, whose job it is to keep Mill's involvement in Kahane's death quiet; and, as the detectives assigned to investigate the murder, Whoopi Goldberg and country singer Lyle Lovett make a sublimely unlikely pair of buddy cops. Even director Sydney Pollack turns up, as Mill's smoothie show biz attorney.
With the consummate ease of a veteran showman, Altman keeps an awesome number of balls in the air. The picture works on every level -- as a comedy, a mystery, a romance (after Kahane's death, Mill becomes involved with his girlfriend, played by Greta Scacchi), even as a mordant essay on the revolving-door anxiety of the studio brass.
What's remarkable is how little rancor shows up in Altman's critique. Watching this fabulously enjoyable film, you get the sense that, behind every frame, the director is smiling from ear to ear. Altman loves practical jokes, and "The Player" is his craftiest prank, his jolly last laugh.
Robert
Altman's 'The Player': What Lessons Hollywood Has . Robert
Altman's 'The Player': What Lessons Hollywood Has Learned From The Showbiz
Satire, by Gary Susman from Moviephone, April 9, 2012
Hooey
for Hollywood | Movie Review | Chicago
Jonathan Rosenbaum
The Player -
Film Reference John McCarty
Self-reflection helps
Altman's Player poke fun at Hollywood ...
Chris Roberge from The Tech
The Player & Adaptation -
Cosmoetica Dan Schneider, August 10,
2003
The Player - Culture
Court Lawrence Russell
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [4/5] also seen
here: Old School Reviews [John
Nesbit] and here: John
Nesbit: MovieGeek review
Slant
Magazine Blu-ray [Chris Cabin]
Edward
Copeland on Film (Untold Stories)
April 10, 2012
Edward
Copeland on Film April 11, 2012
DVD
Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi
DVD
Verdict Mike Jackson
DVD
Talk [Jason Bailey] Blu-Ray, also
seen here: Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey]
High-Def
Digest [Joshua Zyber] Blu-Ray
DVDTOWN
- Blu-ray Edition [John J. Puccio]
DVD
Verdict (Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]
eFilmCritic.com
(M.P. Bartley) review [4/5]
Brilliant Observations
on 1173 Films [Clayton Trapp]
Mark R. Leeper review [+1 out of
-4..+4]
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
The Player |
Jonathan Rosenbaum (Capsule review)
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
"The Player," Joe Schuster’s Script Analysis
Entertainment Weekly
review [A] Owen Gleiberman
TV
Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [4/5]
BBCi
- Films Neil Smith
Austin
Chronicle (Steve Davis) review [4/5]
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4] also seen here: rogerebert.com
[Roger Ebert]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: FILM;
'The Player': What's So Funny? - New York Times
SHORT CUTS A- 94
USA
I never start with an
idea. I always see something. I start
with an image, a cigarette being put out in a jar of mustard, for instance, or
the remains, the wreckage of a dinner left on the table. Pop cans in the fireplace, that sort of thing.
And a feeling goes with that. And that feeling seems to transport me back to
that particular time and place, and the ambiance of the time. But it is the image, and the emotion that goes
with that image — that’s what’s important.
—Raymond Carver, from John Alton, Conversations with Raymond Carver, 1990
I had a lousy night, couldn’t sing for shit. It was a lousy crowd. I just hate LA. All they do is snort coke and talk.
—Tess Trainer (Annie Ross)
While Altman’s The
Long Goodbye (1973) and certainly Roman Polanski’s
The film has one of
Altman’s strongest and most memorable opening sequences, a neon pink,
candy-colored, opening credit sequence with pink helicopters flying in the
black of night sweeping over Los Angeles to spray for the medfly infestation, which
plays out like a foreign invasion that must be eradicated. Bruce Davison and Andie MacDowell play Howard
and Ann Finnegan, a news commentator and his wife who are concerned about the
toxic quality of the chemicals, from A
Small, Good Thing, yet they allow their
8-year old son Casey (Zane Cassidy) to walk to school alone in what becomes the
central thread of the film. In a
beautifully conceived single shot by cinematographer Walt Lloyd, Casey is seen
running down the sidewalks before he swings out into the street where he is hit
by a car driven by a waitress, Doreen Piggott (Lily Tomlin), who is upset by
the excessive drinking of her husband Earl (Tom Waits). When Casey is able to get up (played by the
son of a stunt double), he seems more embarrassed than hurt, refusing her
attempts to drive him home, as he was taught not to get into cars with
strangers, so instead he walks home, head down in shame, as he dreads having to
tell his parents he forget to look before entering the street. By the time his mother gets home later, as
she’s ordered him a special birthday cake at a bakery for the next day, Casey
is asleep on the couch. Rushed off to
the hospital, he lapses into a coma where he lingers in extensive care
throughout most of the film. Doreen is
completely unaware of the complications, as she drove away believing he was
fine, failing to get his name or phone number, and while the accident certainly
frightened her, she quickly forgets about him.
Lori Singer is Zoe, an overly sensitive classical cello player whose
mother is a widowed jazz vocalist, Annie Ross as Tess, the singer of weird,
offbeat songs that are quiet, highly personal and introspective, providing
emotional cues throughout the film, where she’s one of the few with her pulse
on honesty and authenticity, where the irony is she’s can’t reach or
communicate with her own daughter in real life, who’s distant and removed, and
misses her opportunity to connect when it matters the most. These jazz interludes help disseminate the
narrative mood and lend credibility to a stark emotional realism, as they
reflect moments in life when things haven’t always gone right, where in keeping
with Altman movie songs that become anthems for the modern times we live in,
she sings “I Don’t Know You” SHORT CUTS annie ross i don't
know you - YouTube (47 seconds).
Chris Penn is Jerry,
the Finnegan’s pool man, who grows increasingly frustrated throughout the film
from the occupation of his wife Lois (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a stay-at-home
phone sex operator who adlibs raunchy phone sex talk to paying customers while
she’s changing a baby’s diaper, bringing to the forefront a working woman’s
everyday predicament, while making fun of the pornography and the sex
industry. While this was not in the
Carver story (neither is the jazz vocalist), it is in the spirit of his
stories, much like Altman’s version of Raymond Chandler in The
Long Goodbye (1973), using Altman’s imagination and his trust in actors to
write their own scenes, where the conversations are supposedly verbatim from
calls Leigh heard in phone sex parlors while researching the part. Jerry and Lois are best friends with a
financially strapped couple, Bill and Honey Bush (Robert Downey Jr. and Lili
Taylor), where Bill does makeup for actors in the movie industry, but they’re
also housesitting for their more affluent black neighbors next door, almost
always seen in a shot through the purplish prism of a fish tank. Two other sets of couples are introduced at a
concert performed by Zoe, Claire and Stuart Kane (Anne Archer and Fred Ward),
where she plays a professional clown, while he remains unemployed, and Dr.
Ralph and Marian Wyman (Matthew Modine and Julianne Moore), a young doctor at
the hospital (who is taking care of Casey), while his wife is a painter of
often grotesque, larger-than-life laughing or screaming figures, where they can
be heard talking throughout the performance, gossiping about the presence of Jeopardy’s Alex Trebek in the audience,
while also arranging a dinner party together.
And finally two other couples are connected by the bed-jumping habits of
the husband, Gene Shepard (Tim Robbins), an LA motorcycle cop that’s not
against stopping women just for their phone number, and his wife Sherri
(Madeleine Stowe), who suspects her husband is into foul play, as in one scene
she literally smells it on his hands, where his latest tryst involves sleeping
with Betty Weathers (Frances McDormand), currently separated from her husband
Stormy Weathers (Peter Gallagher), one of the nighttime helicopter pilots
dropping all the chemicals, a man who refuses to accept the separation, even as
Betty can be seen teaching their young son how to repeat the words, “He is a
son-of-a-bitch.” While Robbins takes
liberties with his philandering character, seen preening before the mirror in
his uniform before heading off to work, he also masters the art of deception by
inventing classic lines about the classified nature of his work which prevents
him from being able to speak about where he spends all his time away from
home.
While worried about
Casey’s medical status, Howard’s long lost father that hasn’t been seen in 30
years suddenly shows up at the hospital, Paul (Jack Lemmon), who uses this
opportunity to try to ingratiate himself back into the family, talking to
nearly everyone involved on the case, always with a cheerful smile or positive
outlook on the day, though one of the scenes of the film is Paul describing to
his son that precise moment when his own marriage died, a bewildering
descriptive story that couldn’t make his son more uncomfortable, especially
considering what he’s going through with his own son, where the results
afterwards are positively devastating when the young boy dies, where adding to
the heartbreak, Paul can be seen leaving the hospital corridors alone, knowing
his attempts at reparations are lost, while the rest of his life will be spent
in eternal remorse and anguish. Making
matters worse, when the parents fail to pick up the birthday cake they ordered,
both parents are harassed by incessantly insulting phone calls by the baker
(Lyle Lovett). Paralleling this
harrowing storyline is the deteriorating relationship between the Kanes where
Stuart goes on a three-day fishing trip with two of his buddies, a Carver
story, So Much Water, So Close to Home,
that was adapted before in Ray Lawrence’s
superbly crafted JINDABYNE (2006), where they wander off into isolated
territory that takes a grueling hike just to get there, but as they set up
tents, one of them discovers the dead body of a naked young girl submerged in
the water. Believing it’s better not to
move the body, they continue fishing for the next couple days before finally
reporting the incident to the police when they return back home. The implications of their actions do not
reveal themselves until after Stuart returns home and makes love to his wife,
telling her about the dead body afterwards, where Claire is horrified and
simply can’t handle the blasé notion of leaving a naked woman’s body in the
water for days without calling anyone for help, continuing to fish as if
nothing had happened, where she actually can’t stand that part of her husband
for doing that. As if to add emphasis,
and a recognition of a completely separate female consciousness, the camera
zooms in on Claire’s face, expressing her shock and internalized state of anguish
in one of the longest shots of the film.
At the same time, Zoe tries to tell her mother about what happened to
Casey, the kid next door, and her response, while rehearsing with the band, is
offhandedly curt and casual, stepping right back into the song “I Don’t Know
You,” where it’s clear her own life has seen so much trouble this hardly even
registers, where you just can’t always give a damn. But for Zoe, it’s a dark and paralyzing
moment, becoming even more calamitous when she goes home and commits
suicide.
Meanwhile, after a
knock-down-drag-out marital fight between the Wymans about something that
happened years ago, one where Marian literally exposes herself in more ways
than one, confessing an infidelity to her seethingly angry husband while naked
from the waist down, there’s some question whether the truth really changes
anything between them, as the division has only widened through the years. Here resolution remains at a distance as
characters vent their frustrations in a moment of hysteria, a kind of primal
scream (like her paintings), where a heightened state of melodrama permits them
to avoid true emotional connection by making the emotions themselves the object
of attention. The dinner party that both
couples were dreading ahead of time turns into this drunken, Fellini-esque
spectacle that lasts well into the next day, where neither couple wants to go
home, as they once again dread being alone with their partner, where they were
having wildly divisive separation issues beforehand. Altman’s narrative control, as it has done
throughout his career, keeps the audience at a similar distance, where the
viewer becomes a discriminating observer of these randomly occurring
events. The movie ends with an
earthquake, a cataclysm of nature, where the film doesn’t really resolve
anything, as life goes on afterwards, much as it did before, with Annie Ross
singing over the closing credits, while a camera hovers over a map of Los Angeles,
“I’m a Prisoner of Life” Annie
Ross and the Low Note Quintet - Prisoner of Life / I'm Gonna Go Fishin' [from
Short Cuts] (4:20). What’s
particularly noticeable about Altman’s film is how ordinary the characters are,
where they are all meant to be the people next door, where the most ordinary
mundane things become the important thread that holds them together, actually
becoming the defining tissue in their lives, where economic circumstances play
into this, as people behave differently in different economic strata. Working class people live claustrophobic
lives on top of one another, where there is no space, as they rarely get a day
off or have a vacation, like a fishing trip that might only happen once a year,
while the wealthy couple lives with the entire panorama of Los Angeles visible
through the smog out their backyard, where there is an infinite amount of space
that literally consumes this couple who are suffocating in a relationship
defined by emotional distance. Coming
after the critical and financial success of The Player
(1992), a scathing satire on the Hollywood movie itself, this allowed Altman a
chance at the kind of film he wanted to make, returning to the level of power
directors had in the 70’s, after the fall of the studios, where Altman acknowledges
for that string of 8 pictures from MASH (1970)
to Nashville
(1975), he made exactly the movies he wanted to make with no outside
interference. While the 80’s were spent
filming plays by prominent dramatists, these films were intelligent adaptations
of literary works, as Altman has once again stamped his own unique vision from
contemporary literature, resurrecting his career by masterfully creating order
out of chaos, where SHORT CUTS is a brilliantly executed return to form.
Raymond Carver died all
too early, at age 50, of lung cancer in 1988, where the appeal of Carver's
stories lies in their raw, spare truthfulness, creating a series of random
occurrences not necessarily leading anywhere or culminating in a single event,
where there is no ultimate resolution or acts of redemption, as both Altman and
Carver have a dark view of the world where the banal becomes horrible and
inexplicable. Not really providing a
beginning or end, but just the middle of the stories, this film evokes a
ferocity of spirit by creating a symphonic accumulation of small things, where
these eventually are the things that matter, small details of life that seem so
absurd at times, but they make up bigger parts, where characters have a tragicomic
response to it all. A film that is all
about behavior, that can be viewed as a series of betrayals, with people
refusing to acknowledge one another as individuals, seen instead as objects
that can be abused, often fed by illusions, alcoholism, or self-doubt, leading
to a false sense of security, where underneath these isolated characters is an
erosion of trust, where relationships are deteriorating from self-interest and
personal greed. According to Altman,
“This is more complicated than either Nashville
or A
Wedding, even though it has less characters than A Wedding
because A
Wedding was all concerned about the same event, where everyone was really
related to someone else. In this film
they don’t necessarily relate to one another.”
The cellist and jazz singer are both Altman inventions, musicians that
can only truly express themselves through their artistry, as it’s an extension
of who they are, where they personify the artist pouring their heart out
through another medium, representing both Carver and Altman. The Finnegans are the kind of people where
bad things don’t happen to them, as they have a good job, a big home, an
overprotected child, where they built a kind of life structured around not
allowing anything to go wrong, and then their kid gets hit by a car, where
they’re looking for answers, bewildered and confused, asking what did they do
wrong? And, of course, there isn’t
anything they did wrong, it just happened, leading them to a place where there
are no answers. Jack Lemmon’s personal
confession is a 9-minute monologue, where Altman had to figure out a way to
make it interesting, to hold the audience, so the camera just holds a close up
on his face and lets Jack work the magic, where the real interest is the soul
of the character. You could dress it up
and try to make it more visually interesting, but truth can stand on its own
and is stronger when stripped down to its bare essentials, beautifully expressed
by Annie Ross’s unvarnished pain and anger in “To Hell with Love” annie ross-to hell with love
- YouTube (7:10).
And finally, it has
been pointed out by others, namely Robert Kolker in A Cinema of Loneliness, that the characters in SHORT CUTS suggest
an influence beyond Raymond Carver, where they seem frozen in time, ingrained
with a spirit of human despair, forced to look into the mirror at their own
self-inflicted pain, stuck in a kind of prison, much like the visual influence
of painter Edward Hopper, where his paintings, most especially Night Hawks (6,000
× 3,274 pixels), portraying people sitting in a downtown diner at
night, and one of the most recognizable paintings in American art, have been
copied by countless filmmakers, but perhaps no one “but Altman, perhaps
unconsciously, has captured, without imitation, the loss and diminishment of
personality that so many of Hopper’s paintings connote: lives negated by depression and
loneliness.” According to the writings
of Mark Strand in his book Hopper,
1994:
Within the question of how much the scenes in Hopper are influenced by an imprisoning, or at least a limiting, dark is the issue of our temporal arrangements—what do we do with time and what does time do to us?...Hopper’s people…are like characters whose parts have deserted them and now, trapped in the space of their waiting, must keep themselves company, with no clear place to go, no future.
[Hopper’s paintings] are short, isolated moments of figuration that suggest the tone of what will follow just as they carry forward the tone of what preceded them. The tone but not the content. The implication but not the evidence. They are saturated with suggestion. The more theatrical or staged they are, the more they urge us to wonder what will happen next; the more lifelike, the more they urge us to construct a narrative of what came before. They engage us when the idea of passage cannot be far from our minds…Our time with the painting must include—if we are self-aware—what the painting reveals about the nature of continuousness. Hopper’s paintings are not vacancies in a rich ongoingness. They are all that can be gleaned from a vacancy that is shaded not so much by the events of life lived as by the time before life and time after. The shadow of dark hangs over them, making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point.
Short Cuts | review,
synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Geoff Andrew
From the exhilarating opening, you know Altman's epic 'adaptation' of eight stories and a poem by Raymond Carver is going to be special. Like Nashville, it's a tragicomic kaleidoscope of numerous barely interlinked stories (plus a similarly portentous ending). Here, the focus is on couples whose relationships are, at one point or another, subjected to small, seismic shudders of doubt, disappointment or, in a few cases, disaster. A surgeon suspects his wife's fidelity; a pool-cleaner worries over his partner's phone-sex job; a waitress is racked by guilt after running down a child; a baker makes sinister phone calls to the injured boy's parents; the discovery of a corpse threatens a fishing-trip...and a marriage. The marvellous performances bear witness to Altman's iconoclastic good sense, with Tomlin, Waits, Modine, Robbins, MacDowell and the rest lending the film's mostly white, middle-class milieu an authenticity seldom found in American cinema. But the real star is Altman, whose fluid, clean camera style, free-and-easy editing, and effortless organisation of a complex narrative are quite simply the mark of a master.
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Jim Watkins]
Robert Altman invites you to spend an evening with him in
One must admire the logistical virtuosity required to sustain nine plot
threads intact for over three hours, but it is impossible not to feel that by
spreading himself so thin, by making the cuts so short, Altman detracts from
the emotional impact on an audience that is not given enough time to digest
each slice of life. Short Cuts is, basically, a very high class soap
opera. It is the quality of the acting that sets it apart: Tim Robbins, again
showing himself as
Short Cuts is possibly a failed experiment, but, at times, a very funny and a very cautionary one.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Back when he first discovered
Raymond Carver's work, Robert Altman was coming off his '80s stint as a
Hollywood pariah, and he could barely get a film made. But he recognized his
kinship with Carver, and he knew what his adaptation would look like: In his
words, he suspected he could transform Carver's lean, focused stories about
"things that just happen to people to cause their lives to take a
turn" into his own kind of film. That idea might not have occurred to
anyone else. Carver worked in miniature, zeroing in on small moments and
unexpected realizations in the lives of everyday people. Altman typically
stretches the everyday across a broad canvas, multiplying those moments until
they overlap and fill it. The match-up might not seem as compatible as Altman
first imagined, but the resulting 1993 film Short Cuts speaks for
itself. Adapting nine Carver stories and a poem—sometimes faithfully, but often
loosely—Altman finds unexpected rhymes among the lives of nearly two dozen Los
Angeles residents. The characters are united by more than just geography, even
though sometimes only those watching the movie see the connections.
A panicked mother (Andie
MacDowell) clutches her injured son in a comfortable suburban bedroom as the
camera zooms in on a glass of milk. Somewhere in a trailer park across town, a
drunken chauffeur (Tom Waits) watches a television image of milk spilling as
his wife (Lily Tomlin) informs him that she struck a child with her car on the
way home. An arrogant cop (Tim Robbins) pulls over a children's entertainer in
clown makeup (Anne Archer) and begins an obnoxious flirtation. They'll never
meet again, but as Archer wonders how her husband (Fred Ward) could keep trying
for trout after finding the body of a murdered girl, Robbins snatches a dog
from one of Ward's fishing buddies. It would be possible to watch Short Cuts
only to marvel at the ingenious structure created by Altman and co-screenwriter
Frank Barhydt, but the film unfolds so gracefully that the structure seldom
calls attention to itself. Instead, the attention falls on the characters as
they fumble toward occasional revelations that focus their lives, and as they
hurt each other in the process.
It's fitting that this
double-disc set arrives at the end of a year filled with Altman reissues. Since
its release, Altman has made many films—some great, some not—but Short Cuts
has the tone of a valediction. Without missing a beat, he shifts from black
comedy to tragedy to domestic drama to farce. It would be unfair to Carver to
say that Altman improves on his source material (which is conveniently provided
in a paperback tucked into a set that also includes deleted scenes, a
feature-length making-of documentary, and a TV profile of the author). Better
to say that he beautifully magnifies it, making a film that reveals itself as
an Altman-trademark slow reverse zoom, pulling back to find a perspective that
looks like the size of life.
At the end of the day (and at slightly more than three hours long, this
Robert Altman film feels like a day), "Short Cuts" is the movie
equivalent of a great read. It's a masterfully conducted concert of characters,
with trouble occurring in nine
To sum up the episodic, multi-plot labyrinth would be futile. Essentially, it's a modern-day angst movie, with people misunderstanding, resenting, deceiving, disappointing -- and even killing -- one another. In a work this widespread, some plots will be inevitably weaker than others. So to Matthew Modine and Andie MacDowell, I say this: Acting doesn't have to be everything in your life.
But the overall feeling is that Altman, maker of "
For maximum enjoyment, "Short Cuts" should not be compared with
the Raymond Carver short stories it claims to be adapted from. Carver's
stories, set mostly in the Northwest, are deeply sympathetic (and hopeful)
portraits of its existentially fractured characters. Altman's movie is a harsh,
almost fatalistic overview of modern-day sufferings in the less-exotic suburbs
of
In the movie's most engaging -- or striking -- stories, chauffeur Waits watches with growly resentment as customers ogle his waitress wife Tomlin; seedy cop Robbins cheats on Madeleine Stowe; Fred Ward goes fishing with buddies Buck Henry and Huey Lewis; and Leigh earns money conducting extremely graphic phone-sex calls as she changes her baby's diapers -- to the open-mouthed horror of husband Chris Penn.
After all the various plots have been introduced, developments (usually negative) cause many of them to intersect. Ward and wife Anne Archer are invited to dinner for the first time with bickering spouses Julianne Moore (who's almost constantly naked) and Modine. It turns out Robbins is having an affair with . . . well, that's for you to find out.
And without giving too much away, there's a particularly touching tragedy which casts a heart-rending pall over everything. It defines the overriding sense of contemporary despair, the way we are at the mercy of lurking calamity. The unfolding of these and other developments (scripted by Altman and Frank Barhydt) is, at times, utterly mesmerizing. You watch enrapt, as these people experience the unrelenting tragicomedy of being alive.
Although the omniscient design of "Short Cuts" is enthralling, it comes up short under close scrutiny. After adroitly introducing us to these characters, Altman dumps their unresolved lives in our laps. In fact, he has to resort to nature's awesome array of tricks to end the drama. Altman does such an impressive directorial job, it cloaks the thematic (and often mean-spirited) emptiness in the film. There's a sense of something important going on, some sort of statement about the American experience. But it's indistinct. That indistinction leads us to believe we are watching something telling and profound.
Altman, who has made a career of pulling the critics and cineastes his way, demonstrates that artistic sleight of hand once again. But even if it is trickery, "Short Cuts" is already head and shoulders above most of the competition. It's a great read.
Short
Cuts: City Symphony Criterion essay
by Michael Wilmington, November 15, 2004
Remembering
Mr. Altman criterion essay by November 23, 2006
Short Cuts (1993) - The
Criterion Collection
Life is Full of Brain Dead Fools and Emotional Cripples and Then You Die Michael Backus from the High Hat
Michael
Wood reviews 'Short Cuts' directed by Robert ... Why the
birthday party didn’t happen, by Michael Wood from The London Review of Books, March 10, 1994
We're All
Connected [SHORT CUTS] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
October 23, 1993
The
Criterion Collection Database [Jonathan Pacheco] March 1, 2007
Short Cuts,
Narrative Film and Hypertext a
thorough analysis by David Balcom, 1996
Dan Schneider on Raymond
Carver's Short Cuts - Cosmoetica
Short Cuts - Not Coming to
a Theater Near You Matt Bailey
Short Cuts - Not Coming to a
Theater Near You Rumsey Taylor
Short Cuts
(1993) | PopMatters Daniel Mudie
Cunningham
Short
Cuts: Art, Aggression and Altman | Kubrick on the ... Michael Ewins from Kubrick on the Guillotine,
March 7, 2013
Please
stop comparing Robert Altman's Short Cuts to ... - Slate Nathaniel Rich, January 27, 2009
Short
Cuts - Reelviews Movie Reviews James
Berardinelli
DVD
Talk - Criterion Bill Gibron,
Criterion Collection, 2-discs
The
QNetwork Film Desk [James Kendrick]
Criterion Collection, 2-discs
The Lumière Reader » Film » Short
Cuts (DVD) John Spry from the
Lumière Reader, Criterion Collection, 2-discs
Short
Cuts (1993) - Home Video Reviews - TCM.com
Glenn Erickson, Criterion Collection, 2-discs
DVD
Town [James Plath] Criterion
Collection, 2-discs
DVD
Verdict Patrick Bromley, Criterion
Collection, 2-discs
Epinions.com [Steven
Flores] Criterion Collection, 2-discs
epinions
Criterion DVD [Stephen O.Murray]
Criterion Collection, 2-discs
Movie
Magazine International [Monica Sullivan]
Criterion
Confessions [Jamie S. Rich] also
reviewing SECRET HONOR and TANNER ‘88
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews [Dennis Schwartz]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cine-Moi Dennis Toth
Qwipster's
Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
Robert
Altman: 'Short Cuts' - Doves and Serpents
Andy
Classic
Throwback: Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993) - The ... Andy Buckle from The Film Emporium
SHORT
CUTS (Robert Altman, 1993) | Dennis Grunes
Thoughts
on Stuff Patrick
Short Cuts
: The New Yorker Terrence Rafferty
(capsule)
Reimagining
Raymond Carver on Film - The New York Times
Robert Stewart from the New York
Times,
Bob
Altman's big Short Cuts gamble | Film | The Guardian Mike Kaplan from the Guardian, October 21, 2009
`Short
Cuts' A Tale Of Lives Intertwined - Hartford Courant Malcolm Johnson
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley] a review calling
Altman “cinema's premier misanthrope”
Oklahoma
Gazette [Preston Jones]
Austin Chronicle (Louis Black)
Robert
Altman's 'Short Cuts' Is a Blunt Attack on Women ... Kenneth Turan from The LA Times
Short Cuts Movie
Review & Film Summary (1993) | Roger ... Roger Ebert
The New York Times (Vincent Canby) also seen here: Review/Film
Festival: Short Cuts; Altman's Tumultuous ...
Short Cuts - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
PRÊT-À-PORTER B 86
aka: Ready to Wear
USA
You Irish bastard! You wouldn’t know what to do with your fucking country if we gave it back to you! —Nina Scant (Tracy Ullman)
Heavily maligned and
perhaps the messiest and most sprawling film of Altman’s career, actually
expanding upon his experimentation in A Wedding
(1978) when he doubled the number of main characters used in Nashville
(1975) from 24 to 48, while here there is an international cast of over 60,
exceeded perhaps only in Gosford
Park (2001) where there are over twenty five separate plots,
creating a wildly satiric French farce, inept murder mystery, and operatic
melodrama featuring the players behind the scenes of the haute couture French
fashion industry in Paris, where backstabbing, spying, double-crossing,
blackmail, sleeping with the enemy, and outright theft are among the events
seen constantly spinning out of control.
Previously Altman satirized the military in MASH (1970),
the music industry in Nashville,
political hypocrisy in both H.E.A.L.T.H.
(1980) and TANNER ’88 (1988), the movie industry in The Player
(1992), so here Altman uses the snobbish importance of the fashion industry as
a cynical and somewhat absurd stand-in for the world of art and entertainment,
including his own role as a filmmaker.
In 1992, Altman actually directed a new William Bolcom opera McTeague at the Lyric Opera of Chicago,
based on the original 1899 Frank Norris novel by the same name, the source
material behind Eric von Stroheim’s silent classic GREED (1923), initially
intended to run 8 to 9 hours, but reduced to only two hours by the studio, a
plight Altman himself is familiar with as he’s worked along the fringe of the
Hollywood industry. Bolcom specifically requested Altman, as he’d seen him
direct a production of Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress” in the early
80’s at the University of Michigan where Bolcom teaches. An operatic thread runs throughout this film,
especially the way the highly decorative and experimentally alluring runway
shows are presented, but as an expression of the artistic temperament behind
the scenes, this is a rather exaggerated and grotesque portrait of the
industry, though given the Altmanesque lambasting, thoroughly entertaining
throughout.
What story there is, and there’s really not much of one, seems merely an excuse
to assemble this international cast of characters, which is an interesting
blend of fiction and reality, with literally dozens of cameo appearances of
people playing themselves, where this feels like a large canvas with an
infinite amount of interconnecting possibilities, continually moving characters
on and off the screen, like a ringmaster of a circus who has to interact with
the audience while he continuously gets various acts in and out of the Big
Top. Fashion is so much about a mixture
of glamour and seduction, where the first half of the film accentuates how it’s
little more than a playground for men’s fantasies, where Olivier de la Fontaine
(Jean-Pierre Cassel) runs one of the most influential fashion houses until his
unexpected death reveals he was despised within the industry, especially by his
wife Isabella (Sophia Loren), though he was rumored to be having an affair with
his sophisticated designer Simone (Anouk Aimée), while her arrogant and overly
ambitious son Jack (Rupert Everett) feels it’s his place to step in and take
over the business. Isabella, however,
wearing ever wider-brimmed hats, starts sitting in her deceased husband’s place
on the runway, suddenly showing herself in public instead of the recluse she’s
been for years. There’s an amusing side
story of Marcello Mastroianni sneaking around corners and assuming various
disguises in search of Isabella, as the two have unfinished business from a
notorious past, and while amusing, their scenes together never really gel. As Jack is married to a gorgeous black
supermodel, Dane (Georgianna Robertson), but seems to be sleeping with her
sister Kiki (Tara Leon), male power is demonstrated by good looks and bedroom
prowess. While this power vacuum is
being filled, there’s an interesting demand for the coolest and trendiest
fashion photographer Milo (Stephen Rea), who wears dark glasses all the time and
gives an understated, nearly numbing performance, allowing the three female
fashion editors (Tracey Ullman, Sally Kellerman, and Linda Hunt) from Elle, Vogue, and Harper’s magazines (the three witches in Macbeth) to fight over his services, each of whom vies for an
exclusive contract, so he ends up blackmailing all three.
By the second half of the movie, the women regain control, even by nefarious
means, where the thread that holds everything together is the ditzy performance
of Kim Basinger as Southern belle Kitty Potter, an utterly superficial American
TV reporter from FAD-TV that continually pulls various designers, journalists,
or other insiders in front of the cameras for fluff questions, where her
charming and multilingual assistant Sophie (Chiara Mastroianni) barely utters a
word, but always seems to find various subjects for the cameras. Potter is an incessant force that may drive
viewers crazy, as she certainly exemplifies the vacuousness of the
industry. The runway numbers are each
exquisitely designed and presented, exuding a strength and confidence in the
female body, where this is the only place the sex really sizzles, literally
empowering the performers, which includes a healthy number of black female
models. When Jack undermines his own mother,
secretly selling the business right from out underneath her to a millionaire
Texas bootmaker (Lyle Lovett), as the fashion designer, Simone has her own
thoroughly imaginative recourse, sending the models down the runway without a
stitch of clothing, which is considered so avant garde, “so old, it’s true, so
true, it’s new, the oldest new look, the newest old look: the bare look,” that Kitty Potter no longer
understands what fashion means anymore, handing the microphone over to Sophie
who makes a brilliant on-the-fly assessment.
Along with The Player,
this is another look at a culture obsessed with celebrity and narcissism, with
dozens of other side stories and appearances, including Anouk Aimée and her
classy assistant Pilar, Rossy de Palma from Almodóvar films, remain the class
acts in the film, where Aimée makes a radiant and lifelike appearance while
playing the most subversive role, while Lauren Bacall also makes a touted
appearance as a colorblind American fashion designer. German singer Ute Lemper plays an 8 and a
half month pregnant supermodel that eventually turns eyes on the runway, where
a running gag throughout the movie is guessing who got her pregnant. While the film concludes with an affirmation
of women’s choice, there is something especially liberating about having
control over your own body, where it’s no accident that the older and more
mature women have a huge impact in this film, countering the fashion industry’s
love of youth, suggesting older women retain great beauty and composure, and
certainly have more personality, even if the industry itself is too blind to
recognize or appreciate it. There are
too many parallel similarities for Altman not to be talking about his own
industry.
Ready to Wear |
review, synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
One of the world's finest
film-makers, Robert Altman is also one of the most erratic, with an alarming
tendency to aim his satirical barbs at easy targets. It's no surprise, then,
that he should opt for this smug, unfocused, facile swipe at the follies of the
fashion world. Much has been made of the authentic location shooting and the
starry cast, but there's a world of difference between the carefully interwoven
vignettes and deft portraiture of
Take equal parts French farce, murder mystery, and fashion-show chic;
assemble an international cast with no fewer than 31 characters; and mix well
under the watchful, ambitious eye of director Robert Altman. The result is Ready
to Wear (formerly known as "Prêt-á-Porter"), an enjoyable and
haphazard comedy about the lives and loves of fashion designers, supermodels,
and even journalists during the coverage of an annual springtime fashion show
in
The main delight for viewers is the spectacle of the fashion shows themselves, which most people never get to see: Altman wisely chose to roll his cameras on the real thing, capturing last year's spring collections and a host of real-life celebrities on celluloid. With this stock footage as a picaresque canvas, Altman and co-writer Barbara Shulgasser integrate several different storylines behind the scenes.
When the head of the fashion council , Olivier de la Fontaine (Jean-Pierre
Cassel) is found dead in his limousine, public and private lives are thrown
into gleeful turmoil. Olivier's widow (Sophia Loren) is soon accosted by an old
lover (Marcello Mastrioanni), who happens to be a suspect in Olivier's apparent
murder. Olivier's lover (Anouk Aimée), a leading fashion designer, contends
with her rebellious son and a corporate takeover by a
Meanwhile, Altman entreats us to see how the media covers (or overexposes) the fashion show. A ubiquitous FAD-TV reporter Kitty Potter (Kim Basinger) tries to get fluffy sound bites from celebrities and designers surrounding the events. Three fashion magazine editors (Linda Hunt, Sally Kelllerman, and Tracey Ullman) covet the same sadistic, voyeuristic photographer (Stephen Rea). And two American reporters (Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts), stranded in the same hotel room without proper clothes, have a cute little fling. Except for the last storyline, most characters seem downright hostile toward their enemies, a quality that causes the collective downfall (or humiliation) of most characters by the end of the film.
Some may find Altman's style too caustic to be enjoyable. Time
magazine's Richard Corliss (in a negative review), deems the film "a hate
letter to the fashion industry." Altman's previous efforts in satirizing
the military in M*A*S*H (1970), the music industry in
But the attack on Altman isn't entirely warranted: On a superficial level, the movie is funny and enjoyable, and Altman lets himself goof off a bit. Other critics have groused about some actors having to reprise actions in the roles that they've done in the past, but it's just Altman's way of acknowledging his actors' collective status as "icons" rather than a cruel play on the actors' (and viewers') memory.
After last year's superlative Short Cuts, which I feel was unfairly shunned at the Oscar ceremony, probably because the Academy was still feeling the sting of The Player), Ready to Wear is an inferior effort. The climax of the film seems forced, and hardly any of the characters' predicaments are resolved. But if you're an Altman fan or a slave to fashion, Ready to Wear is an agreeable way to pass a couple of hours. For raw entertainment value, it probably beats Dumb and Dumber.
READY TO WEAR (Pret-A-Porter)
- Deep Focus Bryant Frazer
The first word that appears on-screen in Pret-A-Porter is 'poison.'
The word is part of a perfume ad seen through a shop window where the great
Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni is found shopping for a Christian Dior tie
in the film's opening scene. The shop, we find, is located just around the
corner from
The movie tells a number of stories that intertwine haphazardly during the
high-powered slew of
One wonders why so many great actors seem like they'd rather be anyplace else. Tim Robbins looks truly miserable in his role as an American sportswriter saddled with both Julia Roberts and the fashion week murder story. True, this could make anyone a bit morose, but Robbins (so fine in The Player) doesn't even look like he's trying, and Roberts is useless as his reluctant companion. While he opens a bottle of wine, she mugs for the camera -- oh boy, liquor! In all honesty, all of Robbins' and Roberts' scenes could have been left on the cutting-room floor, and the film's only loss would have been star power (which won't help it anyway). Stephen Rea makes a game run as the world's hottest fashion photographer, but he's hidden behind dark glasses and a hipper-than-thou veneer that doesn't allow him to have much fun with the part. Only Forest Whittaker taps the surreal spirit of the fashion circus, with his smiling, superconfident portrayal of designer Cy Bianco. Even Richard Grant seems to take his role a bit too seriously.
A little better are Linda Hunt, Sally Kellerman, and Tracey Ullman, as the influential magazine editors who travel from show to show together but vie for Rea's professional attention. Teri Garr and Danny Aiello are adequate but uninspired in minor roles, and the regal Sophia Loren is allowed to bask in the film's only moment of honest sentiment, in a showpiece bedroom scene with Mastroianni. And Kim Basinger, cast as a vacuous yet omnipresent TV reporter, has never been more irritating than she is here -- which is, admittedly, the point. But when so many great performers turn in such nonchalant performances, it's logical to assume that somewhere, a director's not directing. Whatever Altman was doing, his heart wasn't in it.
Miramax made an eleventh-hour decision earlier this month to officially change the name of this film to Ready to Wear, apparently fearful that the great unwashed would be frightened away from the multiplex by a four-syllable French term they can't pronounce. It was an ill-advised decision, not just because Ready to Wear is a terrible name for a film, but because the change smacks of their lack of confidence in the finished product. In another dubious marketing coup, Miramax has seen fit to give away the ending of the film -- a parade of models wearing the Emperor's New Clothes -- in its print ad campaign.
That's just one of the metaphors Altman offers up here. Another is the dog crap that his characters keep stepping in. Yet another is the changing wardrobe of Mastroianni, who outfits himself by sneaking into closets and stealing luggage, who we see at the end of the film decked out in leather finery and sleeping on a park bench. It's a shame to completely pan this movie, because film buffs will find a lot to enjoy, and some of what's going on is actually quite a bit of fun. But there's a problem at the core of this one. Altman wants to say that the world of fashion is illusory, that it's all a load of what Basinger finally calls "bullshit." But Pret-A-Porter itself is so overblown, so full of itself and yet so exquisitely empty, that we're left wondering whether, in his haste to expose the Emperor's New Clothes, the artist has stopped near a mirror to check his own dangerously ephemeral finery.
Robert Altman's
Pret-a-Porter - The Film Journal...Passionate and ... June Werrett
Surrender to the
Void [Steven Flores]
Review for Prêt-à-Porter (1994)
- IMDb Frank R.A. J. Maloney
Ready to Wear (1994) - Movie
Reviews by Edwin Jahiel
Pleasures
Worthy of Guilt: A Cinephile's Confession - Slant Magazine Dennis Cozzalio from 24LiesASecond, March 21,
2005
WORN
Cinema Society: Prêt-à-Porter | Worn Fashion Journal Lucie Goulet
Ready To Wear | Georgia
Straight Ken Eisner
Review for Prêt-à-Porter
(1994) - IMDb Dragan Antulov
Dressed
Up With Nowhere To Go - Newsweek and The Daily Beast David Anson from Newsweek
UTK
Daily Beacon [Randall Brown]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
Pret-A-Porter
Review (1994) - The Spinning Image
Steve Langton
eFilmCritic Reviews Slyder not mincing his outrage
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
Ready
to Wear (Pret-A-porter) - Film Calendar - The Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten
Washington Post [Rita Kempley] Rita Kempley calls it “a mess”
Tucson Weekly
[Zachary Woodruff]
Read
the New York Times Review of Ready to Wear - Movies - The ... Janet Maslin
Prêt-à-Porter
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
JAZZ ‘34
"Jazz
'34." Mostra 21
Director Robert Altman invited
twenty-one of the best contemporary jazz musicians to render interpretations of
Duke Ellington, Benny and Buster Moten, Count Basie, and Marie Lou Williams in
his latest film
Altman's musical journey included fifteen compositions and
statements from residents and musicians in
User comments from imdb Author: madsagittarian
from
JAZZ 34 is the companion film to
Although JAZZ 34 is a decidedly minor work by today's greatest living director,
it is essential to those enamoured with his impressive filmography. It remains
one of his most subtle, personal films.
It's 1934, and
It is a very risky think Robert Altman is attempting in
Altman has a very specific image of
The product of those elements is a fusion of music, mood and
plot in which the latter often gets short shrift. Altman has one of his
typically large casts to keep track of, and his shifts back and forth between
them seem to have little to do with pacing. The encounters between Seldom Seen
and Johnny are basically a series of monologues in which Belafonte's Seldom
holds forth with his captive audience on race relations, the media, his beloved
jazz music and whatever other issue happens to strike his fancy. Those speeches
are far from riveting -- once you get the point that he is "seldom seen
and often heard," Seldom's sociological observations simply serve to stall
Then, just as I was prepared to give
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
The indefatigable Robert Altman is back with a new movie
The Film Journal
(by) review ["Screwy Squirrels: Robert Altman's ___"] Adrian Martin
Kansas
City Rick Thompson from Senses of
Cinema
Film Scouts:
Robert Altman Articles and Quicktime
interviews with the director, mostly about Kansas City
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
World Socialist Web Site David Walsh
Nitrate Online
(Capsule) Carrie Gorringe
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York
Times (registration req'd)
THE
GINGERBREAD MAN
Almost as soon as hotshot
The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]
So many critics have accused John
Grisham's cookie-cutter legal novels of serving as dry-runs for inevitable
movies that it was only a matter of time before he tried his hand at
screenwriting. And Grisham can actually be absolved of the blame for the
disappointing The Gingerbread Man. He may have supplied the story, but
all accusatory fingers should be pointed at director Robert Altman, who further
drains his reputation surplus with this unoriginal and uninteresting piece of
exploitation. Altman's two previous films, Kansas City and Ready To
Wear, were disasters, and even Altman has to pay the bills, so he followed
fellow fading Oscar favorite Francis Ford Coppola into Grisham's deep South.
Give credit to Altman for radically revamping Grisham's clichés: The
Gingerbread Man is no inspirational courtroom drama, the rain-soaked,
spooky images no idealistic view of Savannah, and the uneasy, dark mood no recipe
for box-office success. But there's no overcoming the fact that the film, save
one predictable twist, is essentially yet another remake of Cape Fear,
right down to the final confrontation on a boat during a storm. Kenneth Branagh
plays (what else?) a brilliant Southern defense lawyer, who, after an ill-fated
one-night stand with the mysterious Embeth Davidtz, is stalked by her loony
father, Robert Duvall. As the suspense builds, so does an approaching
hurricane, and both plot and weather explode simultaneously. While there's
nothing new to be seen here, The Gingerbread Man is surprisingly creepy,
and the actors, including an unrecognizable Daryl Hannah and a hammy Robert
Downey Jr., do a respectable job with the material. But again it's Altman, with
his repetitive camera angles, choppy direction, and distracting, dawdling
shots, who robs this run-of-the-mill Hollywood thriller of the gloss and care
it deserves.
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
The Gingerbread Man is Robert Altman's best film in many a season,
and certainly his best genre piece since The Long Goodbye. The Gingerbread
Man is also probably the most stylish and original John Grisham story on
film. Thus, it's odd that the movie has experienced so much trouble along the
way. After Altman's original cut of the suspense film scored low with test
audiences, PolyGram took the film from the director and re-cut it, while Altman
threatened to rescind his name from the credits. But then PolyGram's edit
scored just as poorly, so the company restored Altman's original cut. Yet,
following the film's bicoastal bows back in January, PolyGram has been slow to
roll it out to the rest of the country. Additionally, there's the issue of
Grisham's authorship, The Gingerbread Man being the first story the
novelist wrote directly for the screen. Reportedly unhappy with Altman's final
take on the dialogue, Grisham had his name removed; the screenplay is now
credited to the pseudonymous Al Hayes. Be that as it may, The Gingerbread
Man probably presents Grisham's most morally ambiguous legal-eagle hero to
date. Branagh plays
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
The Gingerbread Man Mike D’Angelo
Film Journal International (Peter Henné)
Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
COOKIE’S FORTUNE
USA
Cookie's
Fortune David Denby from the New Yorker
Robert Altman, in a benevolent mood,
has made a lovely ensemble comedy from Anne Rapp's original screenplay about
the fate of an inheritance—the house and jewels left behind by one Cookie
Orcutt (Patricia Neal), a fine old lady in a small Mississippi town who misses
her dead husband so much that she refuses to spend any more time away from him.
Cookie's mad nieces (Glenn Close and Julianne Moore) rearrange the evidence of
Cookie's suicide so that it looks like a murder, allowing suspicion to fall on
the hard-drinking but amiable black man (Charles S. Dutton) who lives in
Cookie's house. But the movie is not the usual protest against racism; on the contrary,
the town works like the kind of happy, quarrelsome extended family in which
people have put up with one another's foibles for years. As these characters
bounce off one another, Altman's habitual malice doesn't disappear, exactly,
but it mellows into mischief. With Liv Tyler as a misbehaving but bighearted
girl, Chris O'Donnell as the inept young policeman who loves her, and many
other skillful performers in minor roles.
— David
Denby
The
Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]
It would be fair to give director
Robert Altman credit for capturing the unique cadences and eccentricities of
the Deep South in his new film Cookie's Fortune. Even so, the movie—with
its bumbling police officers, busybodies, and simpletons—is about as disposable
as an episode of The Dukes Of Hazzard. When Patricia Neal commits
suicide, an ensuing investigation points to her longtime friend, caretaker,
handyman, and maybe more (Charles S. Dutton), even though the entire town of
Holly Springs, Mississippi—as well as the viewer—knows he is innocent.
"Every family's got a few loose screws," says Dutton as he lounges in
his unlocked cell, drinking coffee spiked with whiskey. Cookie's Fortune
is Altman's most entertaining film since Short Cuts, and it boasts a
nice ensemble cast that includes Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Lyle Lovett, Liv
Tyler, Ned Beatty, and Chris O'Donnell, all in cotton-light roles. The film
flies off the rails in its last few scenes, pointlessly untangling a
complicated family tree and dragging on a bit too long for its own good. Still,
coming after a trio of terrible disappointments (Ready To Wear, Kansas
City, and The Gingerbread Man), Cookie's Fortune, for all its
faults, is a welcome respite. In the uneven hands of Altman, you're better off
with a flawed bit of fluff than an outright atrocity.
Philadelphia City Paper [Sam Adams]
A Southern
Gothic with the accent on Southern, Cookie's Fortune is a front-porch
story told at its own pace, a laconic, unhurried tale where the joy is in the
telling. In his 42nd year of moviemaking, Robert Altman has the assurance and
the grace to take pleasure in the details, and the confidence that the audience
will follow his lead.
With Cookie's
Fortune, Altman is proven right, but just barely. Even a front-porch story
has to have a point, and nearly half the film is gone before the plot swings
into action. We're introduced to the elderly Cookie Orcutt (Patricia Neal) and the
score of characters who make
Cookie's
Fortune spends three
quarters of an hour laying out the relationships between these characters and a
dozen others in novelistic detail, so that when
Drama she
gets, all right, as Willis is thrown in jail and a pair of outside investigators
come into quiet
Still,
it's clear that Cookie's Fortune is exactly as Altman wants it, if not
always why he wants it that way. At times, the film seems so low-pressure and
offhand it barely exists, but what Altman is offering here is flavor, not
substance. True, like the characters of
Indeed, if
there's a lesson to Cookie's Fortune, it might be "Don't overdo
it." The villain of the piece is clearly Camille, who with her
vainglorious pageants ("Salome, by Oscar Wilde and Camille
Dixon," reads the sign) and Norma Desmond glare, can't resist the chance
to elevate each plot twist into a catastrophe of global proportions. Her
opposite is the town's chief of police, played with fleshy solidity by Ned
Beatty, who tells a slackjawed Tucker that he knows Willis is innocent because,
he explains, "We fished together." In the end, the histrionic diva
pays the price for her melodramatic ways, and
Cookie's Fortune Geoffrey Macnab from Sight and Sound
Chicago
NewCityNet [Ray Pride]
Nitrate Online Sean Axmaker
World Socialist
Web Site David Walsh
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally)
Reel.com
DVD review [Tod Booth]
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)
Austin Chronicle (Steve Davis)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
DR. T AND THE WOMEN
USA Germany
Sullivan Travis
(Gere) is
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Maybe it can be traced back to
the influence of screenwriter Anne Rapp, but there's something gentle, if not
exactly nice, about Robert Altman's two most recent films, Cookie's Fortune
and the new Dr. T And The Women. Set in upscale suburban Dallas, Dr.
T stars Richard Gere as an OB/Gyn specialist with a booming practice, the
success of which can be attributed to more than just his skill. Women flock to
him not because he's handsome (though he is) and not because he sleeps with
them (he doesn't), but because he treats them with an attentiveness and respect
that borders on quiet reverence. He is, in short, the unselfconscious
embodiment of a perfect gentleman. These qualities define his private life, as
well, spent in an equally busy home in which he harbors his hard-drinking,
soon-to-be-divorced sister-in-law (Laura Dern), her girls, his own daughters
(conspiracy theorist Tara Reid and soon-to-be-married second-string Cowboys
cheerleader Kate Hudson), and wife Farrah Fawcett, all blonde, bejeweled, and
perfect. Aside from hunting expeditions with golfing buddies, Gere is
surrounded at all times by women, and he prefers it that way. But when Fawcett
suffers a breakdown in the form of a nude romp through the fountain at the
local mall (in front of the Godiva chocolate shop), life begins to fall apart
at an alarming rate. Her diagnosis with the dubious-sounding "Hestia
Complex" (caused by too much domestic perfection) causes Gere to question
much of what he's come to value, as does a new friendship with self-sufficient,
semi-retired pro golfer Helen Hunt. No one handles a large cast quite like
Altman, and here he's been given a great one, rounded out by some unlikely but
welcome supporting players (Shelley Long, Andy Richter, Janine Turner). His
assured direction, as might be predicted, keeps his ensemble from becoming
unwieldy and corrals it toward some unforgettable setpieces. If the film as a
whole isn't always quite so assured, it rarely matters. Elements of sitcoms and
soap operas float around inside Dr. T and come floating to the surface
in its weakest moments, while Lyle Lovett's generally pleasant score
occasionally emphasizes moments a bit too sharply. But Dr. T offers
little else about which to complain, even if it doesn't immediately assert
itself as one of Altman's best. A well-measured performance by Gere creates a
portrait of the ideal man for a time and place that's fast collapsing and the
perfect counterpoint for a version of femininity that, perhaps thankfully, is
fast disappearing. Gere also serves as the center for a much broader look at
gentility and its discontents, which may sound like familiar territory for
Altman, but a slight shift in attitude makes all the difference. While Cookie's
Fortune offered a villain in Glenn Close, there's not an object of contempt
in sight here, just a group of people—all portrayed with an unmistakable fondness—whose
greatest offense is a misguided sense of self-importance. Blame Altman's
newfound gentleness, or credit it. Or simply enjoy it while it continues to
yield films as richly enjoyable as this one.
I've been surprised to
read less-than-enchanted reviews of Robert Altman's buoyant new comedy, Dr.
T and the Women, a movie that shows our country's greatest living
director working with offhand virtuosity. Altman's frames are riotously alive,
and he uses every inch of the screen to accommodate a score of gorgeous
blondes: Helen Hunt, Laura Dern, Kate Hudson, Tara Reid, Farrah Fawcett,
Shelley Long, Janine Turner, Lee Grant, and almost all the female extras.
The women are in
constant orbit around Altman's protagonist, Sullivan Travis (Richard Gere), a
The critic Manny
Farber has written of the "dispersed frame" of movies of the early
'70s: Directors like Altman, he says, are striving for a
"non-solidity," a "flux-like" space that seeks to capture
"the freshness and energy of a real world within the movie's frame."
In Dr. T and the Women, Altman's rendition of a world in flux becomes
the whole comic show, and he and his screenwriter, Anne Rapp, cram the film
with visual jokes at their protagonist's expense. Dr. T has faith in his own
omniscience, but there's always some bit of bustle—some particle of energy at
the edge of the screen—that he misses entirely. He spends his days looking
inside women and fancies himself a connoisseur—not a dirty-minded one, but a
gentleman capable of infinite empathy. He preaches to his duck-hunting buddies
that they should never take a woman for granted, by which he means they should
always make her feel special. It doesn't occur to him that he takes women for
granted in far more fundamental ways. He thinks he knows them, and he doesn't.
Altman has been accused of turning women into hysterical
cartoons, but in this case I think he's simply less interested in individuals
than in what Farber would call patterns of flux. Dr. T and the Women is like a giddy ballet in which the
women whirl around a still, clueless man. A manic actor—a farceur—would have been a mistake in
this role. Gere has become a figure of fun for his Zen Buddhist proclamations,
but his religion has done wonders for his acting. Once a strident Method bore,
he's now a genius at laying back and getting in sync with the energy of a
scene. The blondes in Dr. T and the
Women make him shine. And there's an extra bit of resonance in his
casting. As the Prince Charming of Pretty
Woman (1990), Gere lent his presence to one of the most potent
anti-feminist fairy tales of the modern cinema—a film that made the fantasy of
rescuing and being rescued well-nigh irresistible. When he tries that routine
at the end of Dr. T and the
Women, he gets a rude
shock. It seems that Snow White likes her autonomy, even among the dwarfs.
Senses of Cinema (Adrian Danks)
Quiet
Bubble on "Dr. T and the Women"
PopMatters Mike Ward
Nick's Flick Picks Nick Davis
Nitrate Online (Gregory
Avery)
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
CineScene.com (Kristen Ashley)
ToxicUniverse.com (Rachel Gordon)
Review for Dr T and the Women (2000) Scott Renshaw less than impressed
hybridmagazine.com
review ditto with Anne Rapp
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
GOSFORD PARK
Great Britain USA Germany Italy
What I’m always
interested in, in films, is are there errors or mistakes? Because if you can go to every film, at least
every film I’ve made, and you say, OK, in each film there’s six really great
things in it, none of those had been planned.
Every one of those things that you would take out as the high point of
any film of mine came as something that was not scripted, not planned, and
certainly not directed by me. Because I
think that’s where you hit that truth button…I’m looking for behavior, because
what I really want to see from an actor is something I’ve never seen before, so
I can’t tell them what that is. —Robert
Altman
Arguably Altman’s last
masterwork, this is a film that personifies his talent for directing large
ensembles pieces, finding balance and moderation out of a multitude of
seemingly randomly intersecting storylines, where this is a perfect example of
the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Modeled after an old-fashioned Agatha Christie murder mystery novel, the
third most published author in history behind Shakespeare and The Bible, by the way, but also popular
British TV shows like Upstairs, Downstairs
(1971 – 75) or the mini-series Brideshead
Revisited (1981), Altman has a field day working with some of the finest
actors in England, starting apparently with Maggie Smith and Kelly
Macdonald. Set in a lavish country
estate just 45 minutes outside of London between the two World Wars, Altman
wanted the look of the grounds to resemble a 19th century English
manor, where the lingering customs of a distant Jane Austin era extend into the
present with the wealthy aristocracy inhabiting the grandeur and spacious
opulence of the enormous upstairs rooms while the cramped servant’s quarters
are below. While Altman may have been
more interested in telling the story from the servant’s point of view, with
forty some-odd characters, the rhythm of the film is established beginning with
the servants, where the camera only goes upstairs when accompanied by a servant
in the performance of their duties, which is how the audience is lured into the
meticulous precision of the customs and manners of the upstairs world, cutting
back and forth between the two worlds, where there’s continual upstairs gossip
about their hired help, and once the servants return back downstairs, they
bring with them the gossip of the upstairs world. The film is like peeping through windows where
the viewer must piece together what clues there are by the mysteries revealed
in each of the rooms, especially in a murder mystery like this where it rains
throughout until the murder is committed, at which point the sun comes out and
everything is light and cheerful. From
the opening scene, with servants standing in the rain waiting for the various
guests to arrive in their extravagant Rolls Royce cars for a weekend shooting
party, the lines of demarcation are evident, as the relationship between the upper
and lower classes is one of co-dependence, where everyone knows their place as
if it’s been set in stone, much like the customary preferential status given to
men over women, where the hierarchy downstairs is every bit as formal and rigid
as it is upstairs.
While drawing parallels
to Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME (1939), perhaps the ideal that Altman aspired
to throughout his lengthy career, this is a similar film that focuses on the
idleness of the rich, portrayed in Renoir’s film as sleepwalking into the
catastrophe of war, as it was originally conceived as a critique of the rising
tides of fascism in Europe, yet expressed as an operatic comedy of manners that
examines the privilege of European aristocracy while depicting the moral
callousness of the upper class and the way they treated their servants,
revealing an era of social protocol that faded away after World War II due to
the rise of a burgeoning middle class and with it a more equitable
society. Both films take place at a
weekend party in huge country estates with parallels right down to a murder
that takes place in their midst, featuring a fondness for guns and shooting
wild game while ruthlessly depicting a widening gulf between master and
servant, rich and poor, becoming something of a class farce between husbands
that don’t love their wives, and instead are forced to sneak down empty
corridors at night into someone else’s bedroom (often slumming into the
servant’s quarters) while pretending they are representatives of the cultural
elite. In both, what makes it all so
astonishing is the generosity expressed towards the multitude of characters,
feeling overtly humane, revealing deeply subtle and complex revelations, all
set in the meticulous detail of the times, becoming an insightful examination
of mannerisms, behavior, and social class, featuring disgruntled employees that
never smile, though most dutifully and professionally go about their business,
with some elated at the joy of serving others, while others are so proud we see
them preening in front of mirrors like peacocks. Altman uses a more precise method than
Renoir, alternating back and forth between masters and servants, where the
constantly moving camera moves fluidly from upstairs to downstairs and back
again, becoming an instrument of keen observational skills. As it was between Auguste Renoir and Jean
Renoir, father and son, it’s a meeting between the age-old customs of the 19th
century and its prolonged influence well into the 20th century,
where instead of a war between the classes, it’s more of a bitingly satiric
comment on the indiscretions taking place in their midst, where the servants
are always more observant, as they’re paid to pay attention, while the
reclusive habits of the indolent rich prevent them from noticing anything,
where they’re completely reliant upon the gossip of their servants to inform
them just what’s actually going on around them.
The insights gleaned from both films are obtained by the fabulously rich
detail of the characters, where the camera moves effortlessly back and forth
between both worlds, becoming an elegant class study of an existing culture
that has all but faded from memory.
Of unique interest here
are the technical advisors used on the film, three in particular, all in their
80’s at the time the film was made, where each began a career as English
servants in the early to mid 1930’s, the same setting as the film, including a
house butler, Richard Inch, the woman in charge of the kitchen, Ruth Mott, and
the parlor maid, Violet Little. They
each knew their jobs down to the tiniest detail, where their memories served as
resource material, recalling a condition of precise rules and exact order that
existed only in England, where one did not disobey a single rule or custom,
where it was their expertise that allowed Altman to meticulously recreate
conditions exactly as they were at the time.
Using forty speaking characters, Altman used his customary preparation
for a film in this case, where he was acutely aware of the characters, but not
the script, which went through a series of improvisations and ad-libbing on the
set, using various cameras and a large ensemble cast where no one knew when the
camera was on them or when the director would chose their scene, as every
character was miked, some 101 voices in all, so throughout the filming process,
everyone was performing their roles simultaneously. Each actor was responsible for doing their
own research in the creation of their own characters, where many of these
prominent artists hadn’t done parts this small in twenty years, where there was
no formal movie structure, no master shots, or medium or close up shots, but
Altman created a working environment where everyone understood their respective
roles, as every character had their own separate agenda, where prejudice,
snobbery, and small mindedness was the social milieu of the era, featuring
flawless editing, perfectly lit scenes sumptuously shot by Andrew Dunn, with a
seamless choreography between the upstairs world and down, all done very painterly,
often showing the servants resting out of sight from their masters on the
stairways between duties, perhaps taking a moment to smoke a cigarette, where
the images, some of the most beautifully composed shots in the film, convey the
truth of the situation. Everyone seems
to be hiding something, including regrets for some other kind of life they
might have had, but don’t, as being a servant is often a life unrealized, where
throughout the process motives become clear, as people want something they
don’t have, usually money, where in this setting, a large household of guests
for the weekend, everyone’s a suspect.
The idea for the film began with multiple discussions between Altman and Bob Balaban, an actor and producer on the film, where both are credited with the original idea, evolving from the filmed versions of TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1945, 1965), movies based upon Agatha Christie’s 1939 novel And Then There Were None, expanded by British screenwriter Julian Fellowes into a study of how the two social classes collide under one roof, where one of the guests is Balaban as Morris Weissman, an American movie producer of Charlie Chan films, where he gets the idea of a murder taking place at an old English estate during a weekend party where every invited guest becomes a suspect in a murder committed on the premises, creating a movie within a movie, where Altman’s effortless direction is a delicate collaboration between the camera and his actors, described by Altman as “planets trying to find their orbits without crashing into one another.” Oddly enough, there were no camera hogs, no notable scene stealers, as it’s instead a brilliantly acted film, where the understated tone of authenticity and believability is key throughout. Maggie Smith, known for her acerbic roles, who gets all the best one-liners, “There’s nothing more exhausting than breaking in a new maid,” is the first one of the invited guests seen, Constance Trentham (the aunt of the lady of the house), accompanied by her new maid, Mary Maceachran (Kelly Macdonald), shortened to Mary as she can’t pronounce the rest. The hosts of the party are Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon), a gruff old man seen carrying his dog at all times, the only one in the film with real money, where so many others are continually seen circling around him hoping to get some of it, and his much younger and glamorous wife, the acid tongued Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas). The guests are whisked inside while their servants, all called by their master’s names, are sent around to the servant’s entrance, where there’s a noticeable gap between rich and poor. Alan Bates plays Jennings, the house butler, the actual man in charge, while under him Eileen Atkins as Mrs. Croft runs the kitchen, while Helen Mirren as Mrs. Wilson runs the household. Of note, the two women completely avoid each other and haven’t spoke in decades, while painfully respecting each other’s exclusive domain. Right from the outset, the viewer is privy to petty resentments and suspicions, where there is little trust on the grounds, with each protecting their own position, instead what captures everyone’s attention, both upstairs and down, are secret exchanges of gossip, where these mutterings reveal the backdrop and advance the storylines.
Mary, as an inquisitive
young novice, acts as the audience’s eyes and ears, providing the details of
the narrative as she leads us through the myriad of complications in both
worlds, where she’s an inexperienced young Scottish girl new to her profession
who is nervous and shy and a bit overwhelmed by the complex set of rules and
guidelines expected from her, where she’s placed in the same room as Elsie
(Emily Watson), one of the head housemaids who quickly fills her in on how
things are run in this household. Buried
beneath the veneer of professionalism in their duties, where the downstairs
world is always seen as a flurry of constant activity, various subplots
gradually emerge from the snippets of gossip, filled with mysterious clues and
sexual innuendo. Tension is everywhere
as the camera is never still, even if barely noticeable, creating an underlying
restlessness on the premises as we visit immaculately dressed guests that seem
to be sleepwalking upstairs, a picture of lethargy as they’re seen chatting in
the red drawing room, a picture of stately elegance, while in the more
claustrophobic downstairs corridors servants are hard at work making
preparations in the kitchen, working fastidiously in the sewing and ironing
room, or polishing shoes in the boot and brushing room. The upstairs scenes are actually shot inside
the English estate while the downstairs scenes are all shot in a carefully designed
movie set, where the use of windows allows the entry of light into otherwise
darkened interior rooms. With Helen
Mirren as Mrs. Wilson, often seen barking out explicit orders, Altman uses a
Hitchcock device from Rebecca (1940)
where the sinister housekeeper Mrs. Danver (Judith Anderson) abruptly appears,
seemingly out of nowhere, where she’s not just living in the house, but
haunting it. One of the interesting
aspects of the film is how narrative histories are slowly revealed, where the
audience comes to know everyone, but only in due time, as the film has a rhythm
and pace of its own, where there’s an intimate familiarity in the conversations
between the masters and their own servants, who often play the observational
role, as they are always on hand in the event they’re needed, often
eavesdropping into each other’s affairs.
Altman creates plenty of family scandals, the subject of much of the
gossip, where lives are threatened by the stinginess of McCordle, who is easily
the crudest and least caring person in the entire film, giving people plenty of
reasons to do him harm, as everyone universally hates him.
Some of the family
struggle to keep up appearances even as their financial interests are failing,
where McCordle’s overly pampered daughter Isobel, Camilla Rutherford, still
living at home, wants to marry a man beneath her stature, Rupert (Laurence
Fox), but is upset her father refuses to advance him any money. Sir William has threatened to cut off the
lifelong allowance to Constance, seemingly because he can, but nothing matches
his ability to make a man squirm, as he does with his son-on-law Lt. Commander
Anthony Meredith (Tom Hollander), married to Lady Sylvia’s sister Lavinia
(Natasha Wightman), perhaps the only couple that actually love each other,
where McCordle relishes the idea of sadistically backing out of an important
business deal at the last minute (selling boots to barefoot Nigerians), leaving
Meredith to flounder and ultimately fail on his own. Perhaps most cynical is Freddie Nesbitt
(James Wilby) who purposefully married into family wealth with the ordinary
looking “plain Jane,” Mabel (Claudie Blakley), not exactly a looker, only to be
supremely disappointed when he finds out she didn’t have that much money after
all, becoming the object of his neverending verbal abuse. She literally shines in the film, however,
becoming the center of attention when the handsome pianist asks her to sit with
him. Altman cleverly introduces a thread
of reality, where Jeremy Northam plays Ivor Novello, known for his portrayal in
Hitchcock’s silent film The Lodger
(1927), who attempted a remake of the same film as a talkie, but it failed
miserably, the subject of discussion among the wealthy class who would never be
caught dead seeing a motion picture, viewing the entertainment business with
scorn, considering it beneath their noble heritage. In some of the most intriguing stretches of
the film, Novello, who was not just a matinee idol but also a songwriter, is
called upon to provide entertainment, where he sits at the piano (with Mabel)
and sings about a half dozen songs of his own compositions, offering
delightfully witty commentary on such a unique social setting, where even his
music is mocked for actually having clever lyrics with some profound level of
depth instead of the lighthearted background entertainment they expected, where
for their tastes he goes on too long, eventually becoming an interesting
lead-in to the murder. The servants, on
the other hand, are seen standing in the dark corridors of the adjoining rooms
listening in, illuminated by just the barest trace of light, star struck and
literally in awe of Novello, giddily catching a glimpse of a celebrity they
could only read about in the papers, occasionally breaking out into dance. Northam is simply exquisite in the role,
which has a gay subtext, where especially beautiful is the song “The Land of
Might-Have-Been,” Gosford
Park 24. The Land of Might-Have-Been - YouTube (4:21), the lament of gay
existence, as Novello was a closeted gay, where many of the male servants are
seen bickering over their desire to dress and serve him. Bob Balaban’s Morris Weissman is an
out-of-place American, whose rude manners trying to close his Hollywood movie
deal over a long distance telephone call echoes throughout the rooms,
reminiscent of the omnipresent cellphone interruptions of today, but he
interestingly brings along his own valet, Henry Denton (Ryan Philippe with a
Scottish accent, viewed as overly cocky by the other servants), where it’s
hinted he is Weissman’s gay lover, something that was presumably not outwardly
permitted, despite all the moral indiscretions taking place behind closed
doors.
After seeing Clive Owen
in CROUPIER (1998), Altman knew he wanted to work with him, playing Robert
Parks, a man with few words, who keeps to himself, seemingly with his own
agenda, where he’s the servant to Lady Sylvia’s brother, the taciturn and sour
looking Lord Stockbridge (Charles Dance) and his wife Louisa (Geraldine
Somerville), sharing a room with Henry Denton, who is always on the prowl, seen
indiscreetly entering the room of Lady Sylvia on occasion. Parks turns into Mary’s best friend, perhaps
due to his smooth, James Bond-like good looks, his overt intelligence, and
level of discreetness. The scene of the
film, however, is not the murder scene, which has all the appropriate build-up,
complete with clues leading up to the murder, but takes place at the dinner
party where Lady Sylvia takes offense at her husband’s behavior in dismissing
others, suggesting he’s not interested in a living soul other than himself,
where her display of viciousness in front of guests is stunning, going too far
for Elsie, the head maid, who cuts her off, speaking up to defend McCordle, but
stops herself in mid sentence, offering a petrified look, as all eyes are
suddenly upon her in a state of utter shock, as a servant’s indiscretion of
this magnitude is grounds for instant termination, a devastating moment where
she’s seen running away in shame, knowing the implications, where it also
reveals Elsie had been sleeping with the man of the house, which is a revelation
to the audience, while confirming Lady Sylvia’s suspicions. The aftermath of the murder opens up some of
the darkest and longest kept secrets, where the inept investigator Thompson
(William Fry) ignores every clue unearthed by his conscientious underling,
Constable Dexter (Ron Webster), who keeps digging up a string of damaging
evidence.
Much like a Charlie Chan movie, the police inspector
never solves anything, as it’s always Charlie Chan that uncovers the mysteries,
so it is with Mary who sniffs out what actually matters, becoming the real
sleuth on the case, with Altman providing an open window into matters of status
and class, where the film continues to provide revelations to the audience that
remain concealed to the other characters in the film who for the most part
remain clueless, where the murder changes nothing, barely causing a ripple in
their lives, as people aren’t going to break their habits and routines, “Why do
we spend our lives living through them?” where life goes on as normal, showing
an unshakeable faith in the rules of the
game. The film is a mystery in name
only, as it’s really an examination of a class system teetering on the edge of
extinction, as the British Empire is about to unravel, and with it Britain’s
loss as a world power. Perhaps because
of this, characters cling to their roles, with the lords of the manor
expressing a feeble inability to care for themselves, while the servants are
equally stuck in what’s left of this pitiful pecking order.
According to Altman:
This time, 1932, is toward the end of this kind of servitude. These people went into service, stayed all their lives, and it was hard work. Their families were often thrilled to be rid of them. It meant there were only three in a bed, not four. If their daughter became a maid, they knew she would be taken care of and fed. People in service often worked in only one or two households most of their lives. But World War II was a turning point. After it, young girls were able to have jobs other than maids.
Gosford Park | review,
synopsis, book tickets ... - Time Out
Altman's unexpected venture into Agatha Christie territory works a treat. The setting is an English country house, the year 1932, and the many and varied heirs to the McCordle family inheritance congregate for the weekend to bag pheasants, ruffle some feathers, and suck up to the old man (Gambon). Each has a maid or a valet in tow. Upstairs, everyone knows his or her place, and social proprieties are strictly observed. Downstairs, as above, so below, where the visiting servants are even known by their masters' names. Yet behind this orderly facade resentments fester, and when McCordle is found dead over his brandy, there's no shortage of suspects. We all know that Altman can throw a party, but it's a pleasant surprise how much respect he's accorded Julian Fellowes' witty, intricate screenplay, from an idea by Altman himself and actor/producer Balaban. The family relationships could be a bit clearer, but the danger that the audience might get swamped by the several dozen speaking parts is circumvented by a glittering, instantly recognisable cast, plus a couple of tour guides: first, Balaban's droll Hollywood producer, researching the mysteries of British etiquette for his next B-movie; then Kelly Macdonald's novice personal maid, getting pointers from her splendidly barbed mistress (Smith) and from a 'seen it all before' domestic (Watson). Altman has such fun satirising the affectations and casual cruelties of the class system, it's almost a shame when he finally gets down to plot machinations - whodunit is the least of it.
Edinburgh
U Film Society [Sarah Artt]
On the surface,
The McCordle family and their weekend guests are all mired in affairs and shady business deals. They beg the family patriach, Sir William, for money and worry about wearing the same colour dress at dinner. They are horsey and snobbish. All except Ivor the movie star, his producer Mr. Wiseman, and the former glove factory heiress Mabel. Downstairs, there is the rivalry of the cook Mrs. Croft and housekeeper Mrs. Wilson, Elsie the opinionated upstairs maid, and the various grooms and maids of the guests. Like a reverse costume drama, in which staff are often invisible, this film tells its story predominantly through the lives of the servants who make a country manor habitable, rather than the aristocrats who own it. As the murder investigation unfolds, so do the secrets: genteel poverty, illegitimacy, adultery, alcoholism, unrequited love. The class structure is so deeply embedded in this film that when one of the guests masquerades as a valet, it is the servants, not the guests, who are offended.
As is the case with many murder mysteries, virtually everyone has a motive
for wanting to kill the victim, and the murderer turns out to be someone
unexpected, someone almost invisible, with a motive that rivals a tragedy by
Aeschylus or Shakespeare.
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias] also seen here: Gosford Park · DVD
Review · The A.V. Club
Only a
foolhardy iconoclast like Robert Altman would have the gall to tinker with a
vaunted masterpiece like Jean Renoir's The Rules Of The Game, a
supremely elegant and withering comedy of manners that's a perennial runner-up
to Citizen Kane on greatest-of-all-time surveys. Add to the stunt a
presumed mismatch of sensibilities—Renoir is admired for his humanism, Altman
narrowly and unfairly criticized for his misanthropy—and Gosford Park
would seem to be a calamity fit only for rubberneckers. But if Altman felt any
trepidation about reconfiguring Renoir's episodic study of the French
bourgeoisie for pre-WWII Britain, he doesn't let it seep into the finished
product, his most confident and accomplished work in nearly a decade. Always a
master at orchestrating large ensembles into communities bound by dense
personal connections and social codes, Altman is a natural for class comedy,
where his multiple microphones can catch all the sinister, discreetly whispered
parlor talk. With apologies to Agatha Christie, he introduces Gosford Park
with prophetic shots of knives and bottles of poison, but most of the venom is
already on the tongues of the two dozen residents and visitors convening for a
weekend pheasant hunt. As seen through the quietly observant eyes of Kelly
Macdonald, the new maid hired to tend to fussy matron Maggie Smith, the estate
personifies the country's rigid class system, with the pampered aristocrats
"above stairs" and the common help below. When Macdonald arrives, she
finds that her fellow servants are having a hard time staying deferential to
their masters, a lazy and contemptuous lot whose boredom has curdled into
vicious double-speak and petty backstabbing. Hosted by a widely hated
industrialist (Michael Gambon) and his idle, amorous wife (Kristin Scott
Thomas), the shooting party extends to immediate family and relatives, most
notably a dashing movie star (Jeremy Northam) and his producer (Bob Balaban),
who's considering a London setting for his next Charlie Chan serial. Tensions
seethe on the lower floor, as Macdonald gets involved in the complicated lives
of the head maid (Emily Watson) and numerous housekeepers and footmen, played
by an impressive cast that includes Helen Mirren, Alan Bates, Derek Jacobi,
Richard E. Grant, and Clive Owen. Proving that Altman can wring miracles out of
even the direst performers, Ryan Phillippe steals scenes as the producer's
raffish valet, who arouses suspicion with his arrogant attitude and
questionable Scottish accent. Proving as sharp and nimble as ever in his
mid-70s, Altman keeps the crowded estate buzzing with activity, yet he never
gets lost in the clamor, casually zooming in on small but telling details about
the many characters. Lively and unsparing throughout, but especially during its
variation on Renoir's famous rabbit-hunting sequence, Gosford Park
deepens unexpectedly when a murder jostles up old secrets and the two floors
intermingle more than they let on. Much as Altman enjoys cutting the class
system to ribbons, his jagged humanism, plain as day yet often curiously
overlooked, proves worthy of Renoir.
Slate
[David Edelstein] also seen
here: Robert
Altman's new masterpiece. - Slate
Set in England between the World Wars, Robert Altman's Gosford Park (USA Films) is a satirical drawing-room whodunnit that is ultimately about the misery and in some cases tragedy of servants who lived to attend to aristocrats—employers who never questioned an unjust social order or their own immorality. It makes you think: "What shallow, oblivious, casually destructive people. How fitting that such a world proved unsustainable." Of course, it also makes you think: "What a sumptuous way to live. How comforting a world in which everyone knew his or her place." If you're like me, you finally reconcile these two lines of thought by concluding: "What a director." Is there anyone but Altman who could have pulled off such an effervescent mix of satire, affection, and devastating rebuke? And attracted such an ensemble? And let everyone work at this high level? And kept the action in perfect focus? And made it all so damned entertaining?
It's time to own up to my convictions: I await a new movie by Altman as I would a new ballet by Balanchine, a new symphony by Mahler, a new novel by Dickens. There is no modern director whose frames are so uninsistently alive and whose sympathies are so gracefully distributed. It wasn't always this way. After a flurry of masterpieces in the early '70s, the Altman of the late '70s and '80s often let his counterculture ire get the best of him, taking too-easy potshots at the characters in Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), A Wedding (1978), H.E.A.L.T.H. (1979), and many other films. It's possible that his mocking instincts will get the better of him, again: He's a volatile fellow. But in Gosford Park, his contempt for these upper-class monsters is kept in check by his awe for these marvelous British actors, who were encouraged on the set to improvise freely. The upshot isn't neutrality—Altman is never neutral. It's lively curiosity—a kind of buoyant raptness. If nothing else, he doesn't know what these people will do or say next. He's always poised for delight.
So are we, from the first rainy frames, in which Mary Macreachran (Kelly MacDonald), the new lady's maid of the Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith), is drenched for the sake of helping her employer open a flask. They're on their way to a hunting party at the manor of old Sir William McCordle (Michael Gambon) and his sleek, insouciant wife, Lady Sylvia (Kristin Scott Thomas); it's more or less through Mary's eyes that we're introduced to this orderly (but tremulous) universe. The way Altman cuts between the upstairs and the downstairs—keeping his chattering classes in constant motion—is meant to disorient. It's all indirection, sometimes mischievous misdirection: You have to work to get your bearings, map out the relationships, separate the salient from the inconsequential—all while Altman and screenwriter Julian Fellowes are winking at you with sundry motives for murder, red herrings, and pointed shots of knives and poison bottles.
Upstairs among the lords, ladies, countesses, and honorable
muck-a-mucks are lassitude, ennui, and a surprising amount of financial anxiety
(Those Suez schemes didn't always pan out.) Downstairs, where the visiting
servants are addressed by the names of their employers by the butler (Alan
Bates), head housekeeper (Helen Mirren), and head cook (Eileen Atkins), a
different kind of social order reigns. The boundaries are fixed but porous: The
most loving relationship in the film might be between Sir William and his
mistress, the head housemaid (Emily Watson), and Lady Sylvia fixes a visiting
valet (Ryan Phillippe) with unembarrassed lust. Everything is in motion: Up and
down corridors the characters go, past doors that open a crack or close
abruptly, past clockwork chores or furtive, half-glimpsed trysts. And while
Altman and Fellowes are setting us up for a murder, a visiting
The exhilaration is slow to build. It doesn't come from any one thing but from countless crosscurrents, tiny bits of color that fill out the portrait: a fleeting subversive smirk of first footman Richard E. Grant; the Hollywood dreams of second footman Jeremy Swift; the moist, lap-dog attentiveness of Gambon's valet, Derek Jacobi; the stiff, saturnine (inebriated?) imperiousness of Bates' white-browed butler. Slinky, enigmatic visiting valet Clive Owen gives off sinister vibes, like a romantic Boris Karloff. While the matinee idol Ivor Novello (Jeremy Northam) plays and sings for the guests (and the discreetly star-struck servants), Smith's countess bemoans his vulgarity: Does she resent him for being a showman or because he's gay (something only hinted at here)? She's an awful snob, yet the great actress suggests something frightened and vulnerable beneath her ostentatious sense of entitlement.
I could go hoarse singing the praises of this cast, of MacDonald's plaintive befuddlement and Watson's heartbreaking (but so sexy) mixture of jadedness and hope. I wanted even more of the lovely Camilla Rutherford as Sir William's discombobulated daughter; of Claudie Blakley as the plain, mistreated wife of a debt-ridden hanger-on (James Wilby); of Atkins' sour and cryptic head cook, whose anti-pathetic relationship with Mirren's Mrs. Wilson is the key downstairs subtext. Mirren has won—and will win—all kinds of awards for this role, for the very good reason that her wrenching final scene makes sense of every disapproving glance and tight inflection that has preceded it. No superlatives of mine can do her justice: You must see this performance.
You say
Bright Lights Film
Journal :: Gosford Park Alan
Vanneman, April 2002
A Touch of
Class [GOSFORD PARK] | Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 18, 2002
Class analysis and
feeling mean a great deal - World ...
David Walsh from The World Socialist Web Site
Gosford
Park (Best of the 21st Century?) | Wonders in the Dar Joel Bocko from Wonders in the Dark, October
12, 2010
GOSFORD
PARK (Robert Altman, 2001) | Dennis Grunes
Classville
: The New Yorker David Denby review
from The New Yorker, January 14,
2002, also seen here: Clive
Owen - Gosford Park, New Yorker review - Murphsplace
Gosford
Park (2001) – A Look at the Tension and ... - Reverie Gosford
Park (2001) – A Look at the Tension and Interdependence between Socio-Economic Classes,
by Synian from Reverie, June 10, 2013
“Gosford Park” - Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek, also seen here: Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
The ghosts of “Gosford
Park” - Salon.com Steven Johnson,
January 24, 2002
Images
Movie Journal Alexander Ives
To
the Manor Born | Village Voice
Dennis Lim, also seen here: The
Village Voice [Dennis Lim]
Gosford Park (2001) |
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Gosford Park |
Film Review | Slant Magazine Ed
Gonzalez
Film
Monthly.com – Gosford Park (2001)
Parama Chaudhury
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
The
History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture - 2001 [Erik Beck]
Dreams
Are What Le Cinema Is For...[Ken Anderson]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Altman:
a maverick life Jennie Kermode from
Eye for Film
The
Steve Pulaski Message Board [Steve Pulaski]
Gosford Park Review |
CultureVulture - CultureVulture.net
Arthur Lazere
A
Patented Directorial Dexterity Shapes Altman's New ... Andrew Sarris from The New York Observer
JamesBowman.net |
Gosford Park
Epinions.com
[Chris Jarmick] (Spoiler-Free)
Gosford
Park | Cinema Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Raphael Pour-Hashemi
DVD
Journal D.K. Holm, Collector’s
Edition
GOSFORD PARK - DVD
review - DVDTown.com Eddie Feng,
Collector’s Edition
Gosford
Park: Collector's Edition : DVD Talk Review of the ... Aaron Beierle, Collector’s Edition
dOc DVD Review:
Gosford Park (2001) - digitallyOBSESSED!
Jon Danziger, Collector’s Edition
Gosford Park - QNetwork
Entertainment Portal James Kendrick,
Collector’s Edition
DVD
Verdict Michael Stailey, Collector’s
Edition
DVD
Movie Guide Colin Jacobson,
Collector’s Edition
Needcoffee.com
- DVD Review Cosette, Collector’s
Edition
Home
Theater Info DVD Review Doug
MacLean, Collector’s Edition
Every
Robert Altman Movie: Gosford Park (2001)
Wilbert Takken
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
Mixed
Reviews - Gosford Park - reviewed by Jill Cozzi
Review for Gosford Park
(2001) - IMDb Dennis Schwartz:
"Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
Gosford
Park (2001) . Movie reviews by Dr. Edwin Jahiel.
Gosford Park - Movie
Martyr Jeremy Heilman
Gosford Park |
Neil Young's Film Lounge - Jigsaw Lounge
Decent
Films Guide - Faith on film Steven
D. Greydanus
GOSFORD
PARK - Ruthless Reviews Plexico
Gingrich
Matt
vs. the Academy [Matt Foster]
Starving Writer
» Gosford Park Tom Morgan
GOSFORD
PARK - Film Journal International
Erica Abeel
Gosford Park
review - Plume Noire Laura Tiffany
Dan Heller's Movie
Review of "Gosford Park"
Joe Morgenstern
- Wall Street Journal Joe
Morgenstern
hybridmagazine.com
:: indie counter-culture daily, no secret ... Priti Ubhayakar
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Whine-Colored
Sea short reflections
Gerald Peary -
interviews - Robert Altman December,
2001
Gosford
Park Altman - Indiewire Ryan
Mottesheard interview from indieWIRE, December 18, 2001
Gosford Park -
Conversation with Robert Altman - Nitrate ... Dan Lybarger interview from Nitrate Online,
February 1, 2002
BBCi
- Films (DVD review) Almar
Haflidason
Gosford
Park | Variety Todd McCarthy
Guardian/Observer
The
Japan Times [Giovanni Fazio]
Washington
Post [Desson Howe]
Washington
Post [Stephen Hunter]
Gosford
Park - Boston Phoenix Steve Vineberg
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Baltimore City Paper:
Gosford Park | Movie Review Eric
Allen Hatch
Review
of Gosford Park - JSOnline.com
Michael
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Altman's
'Gosford Park' one of his best in years - Seattle Post . Sean Axmaker
Whodunit?
Who cares? / How it's done is more fun in Altman's Carla Meyer from The San Francisco Chronicle, also seen here: San
Francisco Chronicle [Carla Meyer]
New York Times
(registration req'd) Stephen Holden,
also seen here: New
York Times, included with a series of reviews here: Alan Bates Film Archive:
"Gosford Park"
Gosford Park - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
Gosford Park: Information from
Answers.com
THE COMPANY B+ 91
USA
Fictionalized,
unpretentious, documentary-style look at
Even more than in impressionist
gems such as California Split and
JUST AS YOU’RE never going to get along with Twiglets if you don’t already like Marmite, Robert Altman’s The Company is not going to tempt the palate of those who don’t already have an appetite for modern ballet or at least a curiosity about the latest work from this veteran maverick.
The film attempts to condense the blisters, sprains, tears
and giant foam dinosaur costumes that make up a season in
Ultimately the point of the film, like that of the ballet company, is performance. Altman dedicates an unexpectedly large proportion of the film’s running time to gruelling rehearsals, bleeding feet and the transient glory of the final stage performance. And the dance sequences are largely superb, particularly an electrifying piece of choreography at the start of the film called Tensile Involvement.
If the snippets of conversation we catch from the dancers, and their unresolved personal crises sound banal, that’s because in this harsh world the dancers are far less important than the dance. Certainly the film is full of ballet film clichés: tendons snap like dry twigs, dancers subsist on cigarettes and coffee, senior ballerinas throw anxious, tearful diva fits. But while in other pictures such events might form the narrative backbone, here Altman simply brushes them aside. As long as the ballet company machine rolls onwards and produces its elite and exquisite art, the individual dancers are for the most part interchangeable.
While perhaps unrewarding as a conventional story, it’s
probably the most honest film yet made about the world of dance, and it’s
certainly the one that comes closest to capturing its ephemeral magic.
Loretta ‘Ry’ Ryan (Neve Campbell) is an ambitious young dancer at
Well, that’s how a nervous publicist might attempt to “sell” The Company. And such a synopsis wouldn’t be factually inaccurate: all of these things do actually happen on screen. But they do so more or less en passant, in parenthesis – conveyed in the most offhand manner. Anyone expecting a conventional dramatic ‘story’ from this film will end up with much less – or, rather, much more – than they’d bargained for.
Because The Company is about as far from standard-issue Hollywood storytelling as it’s possible to get. The script may be by Barbara Turner (from a story by Turner and Campbell), but, as we’re reminded with almost every frame, this is very much a Robert Altman movie. And what a joy it is to see the 79-year-old maestro in such brilliant, relaxed form.
Then again, one is reminded of the famous cinema-queue scene from Annie
Hall, in which a dull academic is overheard loudly showing off to his
companion. “Saw the new Fellini last week. Not one of his best. Lacks a
... cohesive structure.” Substitute Altman for Fellini, and the comment
fits The Company quite well. It isn’t up there with, say,
Though less universally accessible than Altman’s last picture - surprise arthouse hit Gosford Park (which earned him a Best Director nomination at the Oscars), The Company is a more rewarding, organic, original sort of work - with a character all of its own. Grace notes abound, and Altman fans will revel in the many different versions of ‘My Funny Valentine’ which lace the soundtrack (cf ‘The Long Goodbye’ in The Long Goodbye) – though Altman-haters will no doubt find plenty to set their teeth on edge. Even they will concede, however, that the film is often very funny, with McDowell excellent value value in his numerous brief appearances as the autocratic “Mr A.” It doesn’t matter one bit that his character, who at one point receives the Columbus Medal for Italian-American achievement, neither looks or sounds like any such thing - if anything, he resembles the venerable ballet legend Merce Cunningham.
McDowell feigns interest in the proceedings very convincingly – as does Altman himself, whose camerawork (in tandem with cinematographer Andrew Dunn and editor Geraldine Peroni) nimbly captures a wide range of dance performances, both old-school and modern. These include a showstoppingly graceful ‘rope’ routine by Julie Patterson to the accompaniment of a haunting Julee Cruise number (a nod, perhaps, to David Lynch, whom Altman seemed to be getting along with very well when they sat together at the 2002 Oscars). By this point the film has cast such a spell that it doesn’t much matter that the climactic ‘Blue Snake’ (which looks like out-takes from New Order’s ‘True Faith’ video) is more likely to provoke guffaws than gasps of admiration.
In fact, it comes as some surprise to find that ‘Blue Snake’ is a real (1985)
ballet by a genuine, acclaimed choreographer, Robert Desrosiers, who appears as
himself. Many viewers will no doubt have suspected that the pretentious
Desrosiers and his daft (though very colourful) ballet are satirical inventions
of Altman and Turner. Then again, Altman can be such a deliciously, acidly
misanthropic film-maker you wouldn’t put it past him to have included ‘Blue
Snake’ with the main goal of presenting modern dance in the worst possible
light.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Robert Altman's beautiful The Company
was conceived as a vanity project "by" (not necessarily
"for") Neve Campbell, who trained with the National Ballet School of
Canada for several years before breaking out in
Like
Mike Leigh's Topsy-Turvy, The Company allows Altman to
vicariously discuss the way he makes films. Malcolm McDowell's crusty Alberto
Antonelli is in many ways the director's doppelganger. As head of the ballet
company, Alberto knows exactly what he wants to see but doesn't necessarily get
in the way of the creative process—there's certainly room for improvisation as
long as the movement on stage (and screen) feels and looks organic. Which is
why the film's opening sequence is so ravishing and embodies the purity of
Altman's aesthetic vision. Over the film's credits, a voice asks the spectator
to shut off his or her phone. (If cellphone-packers reach for their pockets,
the film has already done its job.) Altman then relishes a simple but
thoroughly modern dance piece untainted by noise or montage.
When
the choreographer of the "Blue Snake" explains the elaborate nature
of the production, Alberto states, "You don't understand the financial
situation." Altman, like Alberto, is money-conscious, and it's a testament
to his powers as a filmmaker that he can make a film as profound as The
Company on a shoestring budget. During a rehearsal of one performance
piece, someone makes a reference to "the footwork being too fast." Every
dance number in
Early
in the film, Altman observes the older Harriet (Barbara Robertson) practicing
by herself inside a rehearsal studio. Altman's glorious long shot of the white,
untainted room situates Robertson to the right side of the frame. As soon as a
group of students enter the room, the woman leaves through a side door.
Altman's profound understanding of widescreen evokes the woman's freedom, and
the use of close-up emphasizes her sudden agitation. For the rest of the film,
she's pushed out of rooms or obscured by faces and bodies while standing in the
background plane of the film's frame. There's an overwhelming sense here that
the "new" is pushing aside the "old." (Parallel this
infringement with the way Paul Thomas Anderson has tried to replace Altman in
recent years.)
The Company is about
the creative process, but it's also about weathering it. Injury is a recurring
metaphor in the film, and the way characters respond to pain says a lot about
them as people. A character tears her Achilles tendon not long after her
wedding. Altman shoots the scene from above, summoning the girl's obvious
devastation right before she yells for someone to call her husband. When Ry
(Campbell) injures herself during the final performance of "Blue
Snake," the reaction (personally and aesthetically) is completely
different. Altman's matter-of-fact observation complements Ry's refusal to let
her professional disappointment bleed into her personal life. If the show can't
go on, then love can.
The Company is a
film of many erotic displacements; indeed, love is its own seductive dance.
Instead of stressing her injury, Ry wallows in the comfort of her girlish love
for the handsome cook played by James Franco. I can't think of a more erotic
sequence in recent movie history than the sight of Franco peeking out at
"What's
good for you is good for the company," says Alberto at one point. (Imagine
the implications of the reverse: "What's good for the company is good for
you.") Altman recognizes an element of dance in everything, and his love
for movement makes for a fascinating empowerment ritual. Ry is a bourgeoning
diva and Josh (Franco) is a cook. If there's a class struggle being set up
here, it's one that Altman is quick to dismantle. When Josh makes an omelette
for Ry, Altman lingers as much on Franco's obliques as he does on the tomatoes
he seductively slices into. Just as dance is her performance, food is his. It's
a pantomime that speaks for his love for her, and its one that can also be read
just in their hand gestures to each other. It's a shame that people may not
connect with The Company. Unlike most films, Altman's latest masterpiece
is a picture worth a thousand movements.
Film Comment Julien Lapointe
The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette)
PopMatters Michael Healey
hybridmagazine.com
review Nathan Baran
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
The Village Voice
[Michael Atkinson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The
Great Swifty Speaketh! Swifty
Stumbles into the World of Altman
"The Company." Armond White from the New York Press
The Lumière Reader David Levinson
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
eFilmCritic.com (Elaine Perrone)
Film Journal International (David Noh)
ToxicUniverse.com (Dan Callahan)
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
DVD Times Bex
Whine-Colored
Sea short reflections
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews not feeling the love
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION B+ 91
USA
I don’t do eulogies
Garrison Keillor wrote the screenplay for a nostalgic look back at the age
of radio, and like THE LAST WALTZ, this is the last broadcast before the
building, Keillor’s real-life radio home, St.
Paul
From the opening moment, a darkened landscape of a radio tower under
starlight and the Northern Lights, the film is shot entirely in St. Paul , Minnesota FARGO Minnesota
Lily Tomlin and Merryl Streep are singing sisters, with suicide obsessed Lindsay Lohan as Streep’s morose teenage daughter, initially seen telling family stories in the backstage makeup room, their faces reflected through several mirrors, but the improvisational recollections of the sisters recall an era of the telling of tall tales, when stories were told to children sitting on their parent’s lap, as memories are embellished with a bit of humor and exaggeration, but also a large dose of heartfelt affection. One of the better scenes is a brief moment just before they go on stage live when Streep reminds Keillor of their all-too-brief romance, a moment which is later reincarnated during a live duct tape commercial where they have somehow lost the script, Keillor rambles on about the wonders of duct tape, which turns surrealistic when Tomlin joins the fray, with hilarious sound effects provided by radio legend Tom Keith, which Streep then turns into an accident about to happen emotional bloodbath, her pointed and personalized relationship-oriented comments directed at Keillor are met with his typical stoic passivity, like meeting a brick wall. This works wonders as he moves effortlessly into the next song while she silently fumes and paces back and forth, lost somewhere in the background. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are both brilliant as singing cowboys just in off the range, as they pay homage to lost souls and bad jokes.
Just for a bit of atmosphere, Kevin Kline plays a film noir narrating security guard in a suit with a penchant for pouring liquor into his coffee, while Virginia Madsen roams the premises unfettered as a mysterious angel whose mission is to escort the dead to heaven. Her gentle presence makes her feel like one of the gang, while Tommie Lee Jones plays the born again Christian Texas millionaire who bought out the controlling rights to the show and is the voice for shutting down. All of this plays out beautifully, mixing casual backstage frivolity with live onstage footage, and is a joyous celebration of family and friends, who somehow have a knack for living through the hard times but coming out smelling like a rose. Only Lohan, the bubbly extrovert, seems out of place with this brilliantly understated cast of players who, through Altman’s expert direction, always remain under control, finding the right pace and the perfect rhythm to balance Keillor’s Mark Twain-like world, where let’s face it, he’s a man who can tell a yarn, as if life is just a series of ever-connected personal life stories.
"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,
Old time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying."
--Robert
Herrick (1591-1674) "To the Virgins
to Make Much of Time"
The Lumière Reader Tim Wong
Praise
needn’t be justified for one of America’s finest filmmakers, whose passing last
month brought to the fore an oeuvre of enduring relevance, brilliance and
importance: McCabe & Mrs Miller, Nashville, 3 Women, and Tanner
’88 ranking among the utmost of my Robert Altman favourites. In A
Prairie Home Companion, Altman’s final fling is at once a tribute to the
lush medium of radio, and posthumously, a premonition of the end of an era.
That the film’s unfolding performance – the last ever broadcast of a beloved
musical radio show – is watched over by a guardian angel, that the spectre of
death lingers throughout, that eulogies are discussed, an old legend dies, and
strains of classic Altman seep through its pores – makes for an uncanny and
entirely appropriate endnote. It is a work of humour, of indelible charm; a
remembrance of things past; a plea to continue on. It’ll make you pine for
Altman long after. But if A Prairie Home Companion positively draws the
curtain on a 50-year career, it also signs off the great director with a hushed
modesty. Poignantly, when Lindsay Lohan’s character asks Garrison Keillor “You
don’t want to be remembered?” following the death of a fellow musician they
ought to publicize on-air, he replies: “I don’t want them to be told to
remember me.” That’s Bob’s humility as an artist right there. And we won’t
easily forget.
Lake
Wobegone Ungone Shauna
McKenna from the High Hat
“
If you live in Minnesota, you may or not be a fan of
Keillor’s 37-year-old variety show, a tribute to the golden era of radio
broadcasting and the last guardian of grain belt Americana. Many don’t listen
regularly. But the show beats like a beacon across the country, and if you’re
like me, and you left Minnesota when it was time to do what you ardently hoped
would be great things, you found yourself falling into its schedule like a
pulse; you tuned your life to it. We’re lucky, I guess, us
So I know the show pretty well. A Prairie Home Companion,
the film, opens on the double delight of the real Mickey’s sidecar diner graced
by Guy Noir (played here by Kevin Kline), the gumshoe character misplaced in
genial
And because I know the show well, and because I’m a
Minnesotan, I was primed for the political dissidence. You think A Prairie
Home Companion is all about Powdermilk Biscuits and the Chatterbox Cafe and
bee-bop-a-ru-bop-a rhubarb pie? You weren’t listening to the show when Keillor
mourned the growing dominance of
I kid you the fuck not.
So let me assure you that it’s no accident that in the movie,
Tommy Lee Jones’ character “The Axeman” comes from
“Sometimes they’d just as soon kill you as look at you, those good people,” mutters chanteuse Yolanda Johnson, ignored and unheard by her daughter, Lola.
Lola. Whither Lola? The only performance I found lacking, Lindsay Lohan’s Lola can’t see the show or its actors as more than a quaint bunch catering to their own set, relics who inexplicably keep going. In the epilogue scene at Mickey’s Diner, her ultimate failure to come through for everything her mother represents is a bit insulting, and has me defending those my age and younger by pointing at those unbelievable mutual fund commercials targeting a generation of self-proclaimed rebels; at the Disney version of the Rolling Stones at last year’s Superbowl. You want to start pointing fingers? You’re going to have to do a little better than “kids these days,” because the happy plunge into ignorance has nothing to do with generational entropy.
This is one of Altman’s best. The swoony pans of the camera
while clusters of characters talked through and over each other, the held
breaths for a close-up here or there (a bereft Sue Scott watching the fictional
ensemble take the stage for the last time was my favorite), the rambling
digressions of real life without the monotony of real time. And Keillor served
his fans well, though I missed the closing monologue from
Here’s where
But here’s a little secret, brought to you by our friends at Powdermilk Biscuits: a lonely soul finds her station. She finds home.
Angels
of death: A Prairie Home Companion and All That Jazz (Odienator) The House Next Door
You
know, for film Jason Jackowski
The Village
Voice [Rob Nelson]
Scott Foundas' feature on Robert Altman from the LA
Weekly, also see Ella Taylor's: review
of the film, A Prairie Home Companion
Reverse Shot [Michael
Koresky]
Bright Lights Film Journal Dan Callahan
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
CultureCartel.com
(Chris Barsanti) review [3.5/5]
Bright Lights Film Journal Page Laws
Chicago
Reader: Movie Reviews J.R. Jones
stylusmagazine.com (Josh Timmermann)
Film Journal International (Rex Roberts)
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
World Socialist
Web Site David Walsh
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Washington Post (Desson Thomson)
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
Álvarez, Mercedes
EL CIELO GIRA
aka: The Sky Turns
Spain (115 mi)
2004
El cielo gira by Miguel Marías from Rouge
Álvarez, Santiago
HANOI, TUESDAY 13TH (Hanoi, Martes 13)
Cuba (38 mi)
1967
User comments from imdb Author: Michael Coy
(michael.coy@virgin.net) from London, England
In December 1967 a Cuban film crew led by Santiago Alvarez
the veteran polemicist travelled to
The film is communist propaganda. If you are likely to be upset by a sympathetic
review of a Cuban documentary praising the North Vietnamese war effort, then
please don't read any further. If, on the other hand, you can take a
dispassionate view of a piece of cinematic art, then be my guest...
Colour is used only in the introductory section on the history of
Then we move to black and white for a satirical biography of Lyndon Johnson. A
caption tells us of Johnson's birth in 1908, and in a sequence of rapid cuts we
are shown archive film of various animals energing from wombs, interspersed
with volcanos spewing out magma. Johnson becomes president and the film
concentrates on the anti-war protests which dogged his public appearances. His
limousine and security men are splashed with paint, and students are manhandled
by police. Still photos of Johnson are presented in a satirical montage, aiming
to make Johnson look weary and disheartened.
The bulk of the documentary is wordless, allowing the images to speak for
themselves. It is accompanied by a truly marvellous musical score.
Now the credits appear, and film gets properly started. A wide, slow river has
little rowboats on it and the peasant occupants are catching big, beautiful
fish. The music at this point is languid and dreamy, consisting purely of flute
and piano. Shoals of fish are being landed in large nets, much as must have
happened here for thousands of years. These people are in total harmony with
nature.
The scene moves to a 'people's restaurant'. Steaming white rice is spun in
peddle-powered devices rather like potter's wheels and simple nourishing dishes
are served up by waitresses who have an innocent, unselfconscious beauty.
The rice crop is being planted in the paddies. This age-old work is shown to be
hard but wholesome and natural. Water buffalo are the only labour-saving
gadgets. Only one thing mars the timeless quality of the scene - the farmers
carry rifles slung over their shoulders as they work.
Suddenly, the peace is fragmented by the appearance of American warplanes. The
jets are harsh intruders, their aluminium fuselages glittering unnaturally and
the ear-splitting screech of their engines filling the air. We see the field
workers go into their battle drill, firing their rifles into the air.
And then calm returns. The hideous American things have gone. The workers are
leaving the paddies now, having completed a satisfying day's toil. A young
mother pauses to wash the mud from her shins before gathering her brood of
children and heading home.
One of the people's slogans is, "We transform our hatred into
energy." The young women bustle enthusiastically, building air-raid
shelters, bearing yokes and carrying mud bricks to strengthen a levee. The rice
crop is held in common, and a village has spread its rice on the
winnowing-floor like a great carpet of food. Everywhere, people are working.
Children weave bamboo mats with great seriousness. Railroads are laid with
nothing but human muscle to accomplish the job.
Suddenly the scene shifts to downtown
Then the bombs begin to fall. Confused images of a city under attack include
the strenuous anti-aircraft fire thrown up by the defenders, and the eyes of
anxious children.
After the raid come the harrowing pictures of devastation. We see dazed,
grieving women, children with severe wounds, homes flattened and statues of
ancient gods in ruins.
"They're Coming To Take Me Away", a popular American comic song of
the period, is played to sinister ironic effect over still photos and movie
images of downed US aircrew being paraded in disgrace as POW's. It closes with
makeshift GI graves, each dead man's M16 stuck in the dirt as a crude memorial,
with his helmet sitting atop.
The film ends with calm columns of NVA recruits entraining for the war zone.
There are no draft-dodgers and no protesters, just a long snaking line of young
volunteers, seemingly happy to be defending their homeland.
Verdict - an intelligent, powerful and frequently beautiful anti-American
polemic.
LBJ
Cuba (18 mi)
1968
Santiago
Alvarez: LBJ Derek Malcolm from the Guardian
If I was asked to
recommend the perfect short to be studied by young film-makers, it would
probably be the 18-minute LBJ. For the more impatient, it could be the
six-minute Now. For those who need more, it might be either the 25-minute 79
Springs or the 38-minute Hanoi
Alvarez, a committed
son of Castro's revolution and a natural successor to the great Russian Dziga
Vertov, would be classed as a documentarist if he hadn't always denied this.
Instead, he called himself a "news pamphleteer" who, like Vertov, had
to react to events as fast as possible since "he who hits first hits
twice".
His methodology as a
socialist was to attempt to use images as powerfully as they are used in the
west to sell goods: "The advertisements of capitalism are, in fact, much
better than the product," he claimed. "The Jesuits were their
precursors. Remember that saying about giving them a child? Remember too the
famous old-style Coca-Cola bottle? Why do you think it was designed like that?
Feel it and you will find out. It is in the shape of a woman wearing the long
dresses of teatime. When a woman has a good body, we say in Cuba
All the films I have
mentioned are astonishing in their use of the image, often superbly underlined
by music. For instance, Now - made in 1965 - uses a song by Lena Horne that was
banned in America
LBJ, made in 1968, is
a bitter satire about President Johnson, one of Alvarez's favourite targets; it
has three sections, which correspond to Johnson's initials. L is for Martin
Luther King, B is for Bobby Kennedy and J is for Jack Kennedy. Alvarez
implicates Johnson in all three assassinations, portraying his presidency as
the culmination of a history of socio-political corruption. Clips from Hollywood movies and a cartoon of Johnson as the all-American
cowboy reinforce this view.
Hanoi
Alvarez's polemic
looks naive today, when it is fashionable to counterbalance aggressive argument
with so-called objective truth. Revolutionaries are out of style. But the point
about Alvarez is not just his emotional commitment, which in itself is often
surprisingly moving as well as effective: it is his amazing skill as a
film-maker that hits the nerve-ends. "Give me two photographs, a moviola
and some music and I'll make you a film," he once said. He was true to his
word. Working quickly and with equipment film-makers would now reject as
totally inadequate, he made a series of films in the 60s and early 70s that
have yet to be beaten either as propaganda, as newsreels or as pieces of
brilliantly improvised cinema. Why have we forgotten him?
79 SPRINGS (79
primaveras)
aka: 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh
Cuba (25 mi)
1969
User comments from imdb Author: Daniel
Yates from Montreal, Canada
Taken by itself, "79 Springtimes", by Santiago
Alvarez, is a brilliant film. Dynamic and clear in it's intentions, it is a
concise biography/eulogy of Ho Chi Minh, the leader of
The film itself, as I mentioned before, is great. It takes a radical,
experimental format, but uses the experimentation in ways that do not confuse
us. The first image we see is a time lapse shot of a flower blooming. This
dissolves in to a special effects shot of bombs dropping on the Vietnamese
countryside. With this we are launched into Ho Chi Minh's life story. In 25
minutes, we learn more about Ho Chi Minh than we could ever learn in any
American published history book. Among many events, we see Ho Chi Minh as a
young member of the French Communist Party, we see him fighting off the
Japanese during World War II, and most hauntingly, we see his funeral, attended
by thousands. Aside from the events of Ho Chi Minh's life, we also see events
from an/or related to the Vietnam War. We see student protests in the States,
footage of battle, and horrifying imagery of Vietnamese being tortured and/or
killed by American troops.
Alvarez keeps the film going at a hypnotic pace. There is no voice over, only
the occasional title to show us what events in Ho Chi Minh's life we are being
shown. The student demonstrations and war footage however, need no explanation.
As I mentioned before, the style is experimental. Scenes like the student
demonstrations are told primarily through still photographs. Towards the end,
when we see battle footage, it is distorted not only visually (the image is
made to look as if it is breaking, burning, and flickering), but aurally as
well. The sound is an almost deafening collage of gunfire, explosions, and
general noise. The music as well is used in a radical fashion. During the
footage of Ho Chi Minh's funeral, we hear a brief section of Iron Butterfly's
17-minute song, "Inna Gadda Da Vida." This lends the funeral a
surreal quality as we watch people look at Ho Chi Minh's corpse, while a
dissonant organ blares on the soundtrack.
Alvarez doesn't use these techniques just to be fancy, however. He wisely
believes that films on revolutionary subject matters should themselves'
revolutionize the way films are seen and experienced. He doesn't want us to
passively sit back and relax as the film plays, but become actively involved in
the film. So, the still photos of the students help us see more clearly the
contents of the frame. We can concentrate on the students' faces, seeing their
anguish, pain, and hope. We can also see better how the police oppress them. Without
camera movement, we are not distracted. However, with the war footage, we are
meant to be distracted. Alvarez wants us to feel the confusion and chaos of
battle, and he is successful in doing so. Likewise, he is successful in making
us feel a bizarre sense of confusion during Ho Chi Minh's funeral. Were we to
simply see footage of the funeral, with a dry commentary explaining what the
people felt, we wouldn't be able to truly feel the confusion and angst they
must have felt upon losing their beloved leader. The Iron Butterfly music gives
us that feeling of disorientation.
All this helps to make 79 Springtimes not only a successful biography of Ho Chi
Minh, but a good historical document of the feverish atmosphere of the time.
But there was one thing that was left out of the film that has only recently
begun to bother me. I've always known that the V.C. subjected the captured
American troops to unspeakable torture. However in more recent years, I came to
believe, through more left-wing sources, that Ho Chi Minh was not involved in
ordering the tortures; that the V.C. acted independently of Ho Chi Minh's
knowledge. A few weeks before re-seeing this film however, I saw a documentary
on PBS that interviewed former Vietnam P.O.W's. The documentary itself was
blindly patriotic and sentimental, and clearly stated that Ho Chi Minh ordered
the tortures. Normally I would have dismissed this as propaganda, but one thing
one of the soldiers said disturbed me.
The former soldier said that the tortures were only committed before Ho Chi
Minh died. After his death, the treatment of the soldiers got much better. Was
it simply a coincidence? Was the man lying? Or did Ho Chi Minh really order
these disgusting tortures? Don't get me wrong, I will always feel that the war in
Senses of Cinema Travis Wilkerson
(19-minute version)
As the director of the Cuban newsreel, Santiago Alvarez was asked to travel
to
It wasn't his first journey to that country during the war against the
Americans. He had witnessed and filmed the first bombings of
I asked Napoles, “But when do you believe
Nor was it his second journey to that country during the war against the Americans. He had been granted rare access to the Vietnamese leader himself. As always, Napoles stood alongside him. Years later, he described the meeting held in the modest hut that Ho Chi Minh still occupied. And he recalled the outcome of the interview, also filmed by a Vietnamese journalist operating an obsolete Soviet camera. The noise of the camera had ruined the synchronous sound recording of the discussion. “I'll never forgive that man," he told us. He remembers that Ho Chi Minh told them beautiful and inspiring things. "But all you can hear are the noises of that awful camera.”
During their flight to
Even Alvarez, the inveterate opponent of Yanqui machinations, was unprepared for the punishment he saw meted against the north's capital city. What witnesses feared, history later confirmed: the American aggression would only be halted once the mutinous colony had been bombed to the very precipice of irretrievable ruin. Decades later, on the occasion of an altogether different American intervention, Alexander Cockburn would declare it concisely: “New war, old lesson. Don't fuck with U.S. Imperialism.”
By the time Alvarez completed 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh, his shock at the savagery of the Americans had converted itself fully to rage. This is the true significance of the most famous sequence in the film, where images of the war move from the object of violence to its literal subject, as Alvarez brutalizes the strips of film themselves. This should not be confused with an ironic post-modern trope. He said, “My style is the style of hatred for Imperialism,” and for a dozen astonishing minutes he illustrates in precise cinematic language the full expressive dimensions of this style. Decades later it seems obvious that this sequence resides at the very epicenter of his creative achievements.
Elsewhere I wrote, addressing his films in general:
What is striking, even today, is the manner with which they successfully balance goals that we tend to regard as irreconcilable. They are at once highly experimental, yet completely accessible. They were produced by a state-financed collective, yet register an unmistakably personal vision. They were produced without regard to posterity, yet they reverberate with a timeless vitality. They used every means at their disposal. Frequently, this meant they were made with next to nothing at all.
To this I would amend an almost unbelievable observation: 79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh, was the single most radical document of Alvarez's most radical period. Even now, one is stunned by the ferocity of its visual onslaught, as well as the absolute freedom of its narrative organization. Deploying a battery of highly experimental tactics, it endures as a masterpiece of personal cinema. Yet it also represented an official state response to the death of Ho Chi Minh. A response that the commissioning regime found entirely satisfying. In the span of the history of cinema, can a single analogue to this be found?
Alvarez always insisted, “The revolution made me a
filmmaker.” Which is doubtless true. By war's end, he had returned to film in
It is
Alvart, Christian
BANKLADY
(Die Banklady) B 86
A German Bonnie
and Clyde (1967) story, a movie based on the real life of Gisela Werler (Nadezhda Brennicke), who went on a bank robbing spree during
the 60’s in Hamburg, Germany, committing a total of 19 robberies with her taxi
driving partner Hermann Wittorff (Charly Hübner), becoming known as the bank
lady, Germany’s first woman bank robber.
Having grown up in poverty, having to work after completing elementary
school to help support her family, still living with her parents after 30,
caring for her ailing father, she worked in a carpet factory, though in the
film it’s a wallpaper factory, always seen under the watchful eye of her line
boss, the ever flirtatious Henny Reents as Fanny, always dressed like it’s
1920’s Berlin. Fanny’s colorfully
seductive outfits are a marked contrast to the drab clothes worn by the factory
workers, where it’s easy to see how Gisela might have dreamed often of
having a different life. When she meets
Hermann, he looks surprisingly similar to a young Stanley Kubrick (Guia do Cinéfilo para Stanley
Kubrick), but he promises a new and different life, often living a life of
complete decadence, seen spending time in underworld brothels with as many
girls as he can, not exactly the normal life of a taxi driver. Gisela becomes infatuated with his double
life as a part time bank robber, pleading with him to come along on his bank
heists. Bank clerks are so startled to
see a woman robbing banks, that they continually ogle her shape and legs, and
that’s all they can talk about with the police and press afterwards, becoming
larger than life and thoroughly stylized in the newspapers as a sexy,
gun-toting bank robber who remains calmly polite when asking for cash, even
offering pleasant thank you’s afterwards.
The thrill of the crime
has a seductive allure, and her suddenly instant fame brings her life new
meaning. Because she’s been such a meek
introvert and her life so economically deprived, she becomes addicted to the
thrill and utter fascination of power and money, while also developing a
passionate desire for Hermann, unable to keep her hands off of him, but he
continually keeps his private life private, unable to fully commit to a life
with her, though together they dream of robbing enough banks that they can live
forever on the island of Capri.
Simultaneously, the Hamburg police are attempting to modernize the
force, adding a new Inspector Fischer (Ken Duken), whose presence irritates the
police commissioner, thinking he is not needed, as he believes in solving
crimes the old fashion way. As a result,
the banks are slow to adjust to the robberies, and fail to make the recommended
security measures, where alarms and cameras are only installed in a small
number of selected banks. As a result,
the notorious outlaws continually target smaller banks that remain less
efficient, allowing them to stay one step ahead of the Inspector, even though
their getaway car is a VW bug. So it’s
not the police, but their own deluded confidence that they can get away with
anything that leads to their ultimate undoing, as they become intoxicated both
with each other, drawing ever closer, and with the rush of power that leaves
them feeling invincible. Over time, they
grow more daring, eventually becoming reckless, needing to spend more romantic
time together, which of course costs money.
Gisela is also furious
when she follows Hermann home one night and realizes he has a wife and family,
placing more pressure on him to break free, also to try bigger and more
lucrative banks. Almost as a way of
exuding her power, she even dresses as the banklady, wig and all, at her own
office Christmas party, which not only turns heads, but also has coworkers
turning her into the police for high priced rewards. A visit from the Inspector, however, produces
nothing, allowing them to continue pulling off heists one after another,
capturing the imagination of the nation who are living vicariously through
them. Brennicke is excellent in the
role, able to exude plenty of emotion with just her face, where her performance
won her the Best Actress Award at the Chicago Film festival, “for a captivating
performance that transformed a working class girl into a daring, intriguing
bank robber.” The stylish film is also a
stark contrast for the director, Christian Alvart, whose strict Christian
upbringing led to a childhood where he was rarely allowed to watch television
or see films. But like these film
subjects, once he got his initial thrill behind a film camera, he developed a love and fascination for what he had been denied all his
life, so making this film is a somewhat autobiographical journey into forbidden
territory. The operatic final scene is
sensational, a chaotic, let loose, way over-the-top moment, where the song that
plays into the final credits is simply enthralling, sounding like a German
Shirley Bassey, where in real life the couple married while serving out their
sentences in prison, where he received thirteen and a half years in prison,
while she received a reduced sentence of nine and a half years as they believed
she acted out of love for her boyfriend.
german
films: Film Info: BANKLADY
Based on the true story of
Gisela Werler is 30, single, works in a wallpaper factory, and lives with her
parents in modest circumstances. A humdrum middle-class life, no different than
that of countless other young women in
Though stylized as a sexy, gun-toting robber queen with bags full of money,
Gisela always remains polite and avoids bloodshed. One step behind her is
Inspector Fischer, who is relentlessly pursuing the pair. The main danger to
Gisela and Hermann, however, is their passionate love affair, which makes them
reckless. Throwing caution to the winds, they rob one of the most well-guarded
banks in the
Perfectly blending an authentic cops-and-robbers drama and love story, BANKLADY
features a fascinating character who attempts to break out of the narrow, gray
world of 1960s Germany and becomes a symbol both of social provocation and of
the changing view of the sexes.
Christian Alvart was born in Jugenheim and began at an early age to
develop a fascination with, and love for, cinema and television. From 1991 to
1997 he worked at the X-Tro film magazine. In 1999 he wrote, produced and
directed his debut film CURIOSITY & THE CAT, for which he obtained a
nomination for the Max Ophüls Award. He subsequently developed scripts for the
TV series DER PUMA and WOLFFS REVIER, and served as director, author and
co-producer of the multiple award-winning film ANTIBODIES. Alvart also directed
the
Christian Alvart
| VeryBadGirls Count M
Alverson, Rick
NEW JERUSALEM C 73
USA (94 mi)
2011 Official site
And I
saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there
was no more sea.
And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned
for her husband.
—Revelations, Chapter 21, Verses 1 and 2
Shot, edited, produced,
and cowritten by the director, Rick Alverson certainly has his imprint all over
this movie, which suggests this is precisely the story he chose to tell, which
is certainly part of the problem, as it’s difficult to find a personal place of
entry for this film, which is likely meant as a fairly benign, non-confrontational,
and mainstream avenue of introducing Christianity into the storyline of an
indie film. But the story relies so
completely upon Christian beliefs, where one’s salvation depends upon accepting
Jesus Christ as one’s savior, without which one presumably goes to Hell. With those clear cut, black and white
options, there’s little wiggle room for the rest of us sinners. To its credit, the film is naturalistic and
completely unpretentious, but there’s little human drama to speak of unless one
accepts the Christian challenge. Without
the guidance of Christian faith, say Buddhists, Jews, Muslims, or atheists, for
example, it’s just a lot of talk that seems to corner people into boxed
communities of perception, which is a shared understanding so long as you live
within that box. For viewers outside the
box, however, one finds little interest in the road to redemption offered by
this movie, as so little is expressed “outside” the Christian vernacular. Will Oldham as Ike, a likeable evangelical
Christian without a hint of self-consciousness, seems to specialize in these
buddy movies, playing an aging hippie in OLD JOY (2006), something of a road
trip through the Oregon Cascades that may as well be a psychological reflection
upon two character’s own tattered interior lives. Here he is friends with Sean (Colm O’Leary),
both working at a used tire shop in Richmond, Virginia, where they spend nearly
all day every day in one another’s company, where Ike preaches the gospel in his
ordinary life, observing prayer before meals, trying to emulate the teachings
of Christ, and more to the point, talking about leading a good life all the
time, where he’s constantly on Sean’s case, as if it’s his personal
responsibility to make sure he‘s saved and gets to heaven.
While Ike is open and
always upbeat, chirping about what a beautiful day it is, Sean is just the
opposite, a tense, isolated and moody guy who tends to have psychological
meltdown episodes where he needs to be alone until they pass, where he is
overcome by sadness and a wrenching despair.
While Ike is carefree and always talkative, saying the first thing that
comes out of his head, Sean’s intensity is kept under wraps, as he befriends
Ike and tries to appreciate his values even if he doesn’t share them
himself. The background of both
individuals is never revealed, other than Sean’s from Ireland and spent a year
in Afghanistan with the National Guard supplying the troops with what they
needed, so we mostly have only the present to deal with, where Ike brings Sean
to his Biblical revival meetings and even home to his father, where father and
son sing a spiritual together after dinner.
Since Ike is the talkative one, he’s always setting the agenda, keeping
his buddy on the right track, while Sean tends to hold everything inside,
trying to be polite, rarely expressing his real feelings. Nothing of real consequence happens, where
there’s really nothing to hold the audience’s attention. The dialogue between the two characters is
slight and mostly insignificant, never really offering much insight into the
human condition, which can get aggravating after awhile, as these are two
uninteresting guys many in the audience wouldn’t spend any time with by
choice. We’d bolt at the first chance
and find someone more inclined to just live their lives instead of preaching
about it all the time, always guided by a moral path of his own chosen belief,
suggesting other people’s lives must also be guided by this same righteous
path. While it takes Sean until nearly
the finale to figure it out, the audience cools to Ike early on, where if truth
be told, we were waiting to see if he would lose it and start firing automatic
weapons indiscriminately at randon passerbys because the way of the righteous
had been violated in some significant way.
As is, this is simply not a very engaging drama, where neither character
holds that much interest, but spiritual uncertainty finally feels like an
escape from the evangelical chokehold.
NewCity
Chicago Ray Pride
The spare, affecting “New Jerusalem” (2011),
writer-director-editor-photographer Rick Alverson’s second feature to be
released in Chicago after hostility-fest “The Comedy,” is that rare attempt to
seriously reflect on the evangelical, proselytizing personality. Will Oldham,
whose career as an actor began as a teen preacher in John Sayles’ “Matewan”
(1987), plays the Christian who befriends and attempts to shelter and succor a
broken Irish immigrant (Colm O’Leary) just returned from Afghanistan who works
alongside him in a gone-to-seed tire repair shop. A utopia described in the
Book of Revelation, the “new Jerusalem” may be far from the reality of their
daily routine, yet Alverson’s accomplishment lies in engaging with their
desire, their need, to find something to validate their legitimate shreds of
hope. Oldham brings the same convincing tenacity to his character as in Kelly
Reichardt’s “Old Joy” (2006). 94m.
Village Voice
Sherilyn Connelly
Rick Alverson's New Jerusalem (which he made before The Comedy) had its North American premiere at South by Southwest, and in many ways, it fulfills the stereotype of the festival film: low-budget, contemplative, semi-improvised, and challenging to viewers who don't like having to fill in the blanks. While New Jerusalem's rigid formalism will surely be off-putting to some, there's beauty to be found in the film's sheen of placid grime. The nominal narrative tells of tire-shop employee Ike (Will Oldham, also known as Bonnie "Prince" Billy), an Evangelical Christian hoping to save the soul of his co-worker Sean (Colm O'Leary), an Irishman quietly troubled by his recent National Guard service in Afghanistan. Shot in Richmond, Virginia, the film is also a study of textures, with many lingering shots of shadows, reflections, heat distortions, and especially the greasy, masculine milieu of the tire shop and its constant rumble of traffic. Oldham and O'Leary's characters remain ciphers, often on the verge of revealing who they truly are but never quite getting there, not even when O'Leary seems to be breaking out his shell toward the end—indeed, Alverson ends New Jerusalem just as the third act seems to be beginning. He offers no revelations, and you're on your own.
Screen Daily Mark
Adams
A delicately observed film about relationships and vulnerability between
two very different men, New Jerusalem has the right kind of
quirky and thoughtful qualities that could well appeal to ambitious indie
distributors. The film had its world premiere at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
The film also has the right indie music credentials – it is directed by musician R. Alverson from band Spokane, and stars singer Will Oldham (aka Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, singer with the Palace Brothers and who featured in Kelly Reichardt’s 2006 film Old Joy) – to appeal to marketeers savvy to its cross-over potential and likely indie media interest.
It is a meditative movie, based on observation and gently constructed dialogue, as the two men, both of whom work in a tyre centre mull over their lives.
Irish immigrant Sean (Colm O’Leary, who also co-scripted) is new in the small town, having served as a mechanic with the military in Afghanistan. He builds up an unlikely friendship with local boy Ike (Oldham, sporting a bald head and small fair moustache) who struggles to understand Sean’s worldview, but is generous in his interest in helping him fit into the local community.
Ike, an evangelical Christian who always wears the same bible studies baseball cap, takes Sean to his church and encourages him to embrace his more clear-cit religious sense of the world. The film largely involves their conversations – and silent pauses – at their work and at a local diner.
Sean is grudgingly won over by Ike’s good nature and the friendly spirit of the people he meets, but he remains a solitary figure (there are plenty of shots of him jogging alone along the street) whose only real companion is an increasingly ill cat.
New Jerusalem is a sparse and nicely observed film, impressively performed by Colm O’Leary and Will Oldham, with a gentle humour and a real sense of compassion for its lead characters who are simply looking for a sense of reassurance in confused times.
Slant
Magazine [Kalvin Henely]
Before he turned to filmmaking, writer-director Rick Alverson used to front the indie band Spokane, who've been described as the "secular, post-rock version of Low," and New Jerusalem, a small drama that pits a man of faith against a man of doubt, feels closely related to that band's hushed aesthetic. For every line of dialogue there seems to be twice the amount of moody silence, which often occurs while Sean (Colm O'Leary), an Irish immigrant who's just returned from service in Kandahar, suffers through existential bouts of anxiety and dread. Ike (Will Oldham), a steadfast Christian who works with Sean at a tire shop in Virginia, tries to steer the aimless vet into the direction of God's kingdom, where, as Ike says without a hint of self-consciousness, you don't have to walk because the Bible provides you with a Humvee.
If The Comedy works, it's not so much because Alverson made his nearly sociopathic protagonist human to us, but because the story is played straight enough that Tim Heidecker's hipster clown antics become jokes more uncomfortable and troubling than funny. With New Jerusalem, Alverson seems to be reaching for something a little more sincere, but no matter how barely perceptible it is, and no matter what he preemptively declared in interviews about treating his characters equally, there's still the creeping sense that beneath everything lies a hint of insincerity. Though Oldham plays Ike straight, some of his dialogue is absurd, such as the favorable equation of the most fuel-inefficient vehicle to the Bible. And he's clearly made to seem a tad stupid and racist: He willfully ignores Sean's black neighbor, despite the fact that this man approaches him very politely several times to find out why he's wandering around near his property, and refers to a coworker simply as "The Mexican." Perhaps Alverson, an admitted atheist, couldn't hold back some of his disdain for a character he fundamentally disagrees with (see the way he celebrates this disrespect in the church-set scene from The Comedy).
Unlike the soul-searching characters from Old Joy, which also stars Oldham, Ike and Sean always feel as if they've fallen out of the sky just for the film's setup. And by contrasting their beliefs, through which the characters are entirely defined, Alverson, unlike Reichardt, doesn't really offer any profound insights about either character. Despite Ike hammily trying to convert Sean to Christianity (he even washes Sean's feet in a bowl of water), he ultimately remains who he is. And Ike, who isn't offered much of a challenge by Sean, goes on believing his way is the right way. While one could see this as perhaps mirroring the larger divide happening across America, New Jerusalem, a film that uses its lack of story and character development without an interesting effect, ultimately feels too inconsequential for such an interpretation.
Hammer to Nail
Michael Ryan
New Jerusalem |
College Movie Review Katie Scott
NEW
JERUSALEM Facets Multi Media
New
Jerusalem: Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter John DeFore
The
New York Times - New Jerusalem Neil
Genzlinger
Amalric, Matthieu
ON TOUR (Tournée) C+ 77
France (111 mi)
2010
What a pathetic piece
of crap this turned out to be, which is partially the point, I suppose,
exposing with a mixture of straight documentary style and B-movie glee the
circus-like inside world of a traveling American strippers burlesque review
touring the port cities of France, supposedly working their way to Paris, which
is their real destination from the outset.
The film is loosely based on Cassavetes’ film THE KILLING OF A CHINESE
BOOKIE (1976), where director and co-writer Mathieu Amalric takes the place of
Ben Gazzara as the show’s promoter in
The problem with this
film is it’s not really about anything, where one would guess it’s supposed to
be about life on the road and the actual messiness of living, capturing the
behind-the-scenes charm and intelligence of the girls, where they’re amazingly
independent minded, each one a self-made act working on their own in the States
where they develop and are in charge of their own solo routines, brought
together as a group where they are continually captured goofing around in front
of the camera, or chatting on busses or trains or in hotel rooms, where they
develop a comfortable support network for each other, while also capturing the
hectic difficulty of coordinating all their activities together at the same
time that all the flare ups and petty jealousies are occuring and a whole host
of other things that continually go wrong.
But that’s not enough to make a film.
It’s a copy cat style that has been done better by others because there
was a story or a character that mattered.
These girls could be the greatest strippers in the world, but the
audience must be asking themselves so what?
Why should they matter in our lives?
And the obvious answer is: they
don’t. You can sit around and wait for a
moment of profound complexity, but you won’t find it in this film, where the
existential air of despair exists all on the surface.
The little aside where
Amalric ditches the girls and takes a trip on his own to Paris to try to find a
theater for the girls begins well enough, with perhaps the one scene in the
movie that does generate a sense of spontaneity, where Amalric casually flirts
with an equally flirtateous gas station cashier tucked safely behind glass
windows, but the rest of the trip is really down-in-the-dumps pathetic, where
the slimeball shows his true colors and is met with a hostile reception, where
the storyline then lays a couple of bratty children on him to make matters even
more degrading. Watching this, it all
felt so ridiculous, as the spotlight on Amalric felt overly indulgent, like his
sewer rat routine (how much farther can he sink?) is all an act and a huge
waste of time as he's incapable of being taken seriously. The tone of the film is aggressively loud and
obnoxious, perhaps France’s view of Americans, where Amalric keeps asking hotel
managers to please turn the music down in lobbies, but then he amps it back up
again every night for the burlesque shows, where there’s a certain charm to
some of the girls and their routines, especially the girl inside the balloon,
which reflects a degree of body acceptance and sexual liberation that’s hard to
express in their own prudish country, but overall it’s a sad state of affairs
if this is meant to be a tribute to John Cassavetes, who, at least in my eyes,
was an original.
CIFF 2010: The First Seven Ben Sachs from Cine-File
Mathieu
Amalric’s third feature as director, and the first to reach the U.S., is a
loving tribute to the work of John Cassavetes–not just THE KILLING OF CHINESE
BOOKIE (with which it has the most obvious parallels), but his entire
filmography of messy, seemingly improvised testaments to human complexity. The
premise has a washed-up TV producer (Amalric: frumpy, mustachioed, and lovably
scuzzy) managing a troupe of American burlesque dancers as they tour the French
hinterlands, but the true subject is the vicissitudes lurking beneath
entertainment: all the thwarted desires, in short, that popular entertainment
proposes to soothe. As a director, Amalric is just as drawn to documentary-like
reaction shots of the backstage action as to whatever’s happening on stage, and
he’s equally enamored of performers bickering in a dressing room as what they
do when they put on a show. The film has a gorgeously haphazard rhythm: Like
Cassavetes, Amalric is after the start-and-stop pace of life as it’s lived; but
like Cassavetes, he’s such an accomplished actor that he presents real life as
the ultimate performance piece. The cast includes several burlesque dancers
apparently playing themselves (The opening credits introduce all of them by
their stage names), and part of the thrill of the movie is seeing how the
experienced actors modify their own style to suit them. The behavior is
uniformly natural but self-protecting: Overall, the film shapes the viewer’s
voyeuristic impulses into a humanistic sympathy. Watching ON TOUR, it’s easy to
see why so many major filmmakers (Arnaud Desplechin, Olivier Assayas, Alain
Resnais, Andre Techine, Steven Spielberg) have wanted to work with Amalric: His
excitable eyes and movements suggest a restless intelligence constantly
responding to the world around him. Here, the viewer is treated to an entire
film from his perspective, and a treat it is. What’s most surprising about ON
TOUR is that it doesn’t change its pace as it nears its conclusion: No matter
what challenges face the characters, the world around them is forever bustling;
the resolution (to the extent that film offers any) doesn’t propose to change
that. (2010, 107 min, 35mm)
Time Out Online
(Dave Calhoun) review [2/5]
‘Tournée’ (‘On Tour’) is the first of 19 films competing for
the Palme d’or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’s also the third feature
to be directed by French actor Mathieu
Amalric, probably best known for his turn as one of Bond’s nememises in
‘Quantum of Solace’ but more importantly a fine performer in films for the
likes of Julian Schnabel (‘The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly’), Arnaud
Desplachin (‘Kings and Queen’) and Alain Resnais (‘Wild Grass’).
‘Tournée’ walks and talks like an actor’s film. It’s the story of a spivvy
Parisian theatre producer, played by Amalric, who returns to
Judging by their ease on stage and their stage names (Dirty Martini, Roky
Roulette, Kitten on the Keys), these burlesque ladies are the real deal, and
there’s a lot of warmth – and breasts and tattoos – to their performances, even
if they sometimes come across awkwardly as non-professionals and there’s a
jarring sense of improvisation in much of the film.
Amalric is a frenetic, conflicted presence and just charming enough, but the
writing (he co-wrote the script, taking as loose inspiration a Colette short
story about music halls) and his acting are never convincing enough to make you
believe his predicament as a man torn between his past and present and
increasingly ill at ease with his place in life.
The best scenes are of the burlesque girls themselves, strutting their stuff in
port towns like
Plume
Noire review Moland Fengkov
For his fourth
directorial venture, actor/director Mathieu Amalric immerses himself in the
milieu of the New Burlesque, filming the chronicle of an aborted tour. It is
the story of a fallen French producer hoping to return to the front of the
stage with a stripper show, imported from the
With a tight-waisted blazer and pimp style moustaches, Mathieu Amalric does not
give himself the best role with this arrogant and cynical character, desperate
to do anything to climb back to the top. Masochist, he accepts being punched in
the face all along the film and is moving in his capitulation. Imposing their
voluptuous curves, and their outsized physique, the sublime Mimi Le Meaux
Kitten On The Keys, and Dirty Martini (stars of the New Burlesque in the
From beginning to end, Mathieu Amalric is moved by these performers dragged
from hotels to provincial theaters. And under the loving eye of the camera, he
magnifies them, while revealing them. This is one of the achievements of On
Tour: the idea that to expose oneself emotionally costs more than to undress on
stage. Between discretion and disclosure, the film follows its nomadic
itinerary. Oscillating between drama and comedy, funny scenes and edgy despair,
On Tour makes this behind the scenes look material for a good feminist film,
free of any voyeuristic fascination.
Cannes '10: Day
One Mike D’Angelo at
Apart from Robin Hood, the only film to screen for the
press so far is On Tour, the
fourth feature directed by French actor Mathieu Amalric. (He’s probably best
known in the
Amalric has clearly learned a lot working with such masters of glancing emotion as Arnaud Desplechin and Olivier Assayas, and there are a number of individual scenes in On Tour so arresting and exquisite that they could easily veer off into potentially terrific movies of their own. (My favorite is an impromptu flirtation with a gas station cashier that generates more electricity in two or three minutes than Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett manage in more than two hours.) Trouble is, Amalric is so detail-oriented that the big picture tends to escape him, even as he beats “we are fam-i-lee” into the dirt. The film stretches itself thinner and thinner as it goes along, and doesn’t seem to conclude so much as surrender; after a while, it starts to seem as entertainingly flashy as the women’s routines—fizzy, empty calories. Part of the problem may be that Amalric hired real-life burlesque performers (with names like Dirty Martini and Kitten On The Keys) to essentially play themselves, which they do superlatively well onstage but rather ineptly offstage — even their weariest, most casual dialogue gets projected to the very last row, undermining Amalric’s hectic but low-key naturalism. There are people who can be relaxed in front of a movie camera and people who can pull an endless feather boa out of their ass, but apparently there are precious few people who can do both.
May Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
CIFF 2010: On Tour (Tournée, 2010) Marilyn Ferdinand from Ferdy on Films
On
Tour (Tournée) Jonathan Romney at
RopeofSilicon
(Brad Brevet) review [B-]
The
House Next Door [Matt Noller]
Cannes 2010. An Actor-Director and
His Women: "Tournée" (Mathieu Amalric, France) Daniel Kasman from The Auteurs,
Tournee (On
Tour)--Cannes Film Fest 2010 Patrick
Z. McGavin at
Cannes 2010. An Actor-Director and
His Women: "Tournée" (Mathieu Amalric, France) Daniel Kasman at
Cannes
2010 – Competition/France Fabien
Lemercier at
Charles Ealy Austin Movie
Blog at
Cannes Movie Review:
Tournee (On Tour) (2010) Brad Bevet
at
Guy Lodge In Contention at
Guy Lodge announces FIPRESCI winners at Cannes from In
Contention, May 22, 2010
Cannes 2010. Mathieu Amalric's
"On Tour" David Hudson
from The Auteurs,
The
Emotional Toll of Putting on the Show
Dennis Lim interview with the director from The New York Times,
Variety
(Jordan Mintzer) review
The
Times of London review Wendy Ide,
‘Tournée’:
Burlesque on Tour and Broken Dreams
Joan Dupont from The New York
Times,
Amateau, Rod
THE GARBAGE PAIL KIDS MOVIE
USA (97 mi)
1987
Slant Magazine [Eric Henderson]
The Topps series of Garbage Pail
Kids™ baseball cards irreverently lampooned the ever-popular line of Cabbage
Patch Kids dolls, a brand whose major selling point was the ability for their
kid-"parents" to name (and thereby individualize) their own lettuce-head
goomba via the blank birth certificate included in the package. This despite
the fact they were mass-produced, featured skin tones that only seemed to span
the distance between creamy beige and café au lait, and ultimately represented
one of the most depressing demonstrations of how mass media can indoctrinate a
pre-sold consumerist event. Out of every 10 kids that found a Cabbage Patch
doll under their Christmas tree, all but one were only asking out of their
sense of schoolyard duty. It was the same adults who were thrilled at the sight
of their kids reenacting the lifecycle sans sexuality who organized movements
to ban Garbage Pail trading from schools across the country.
Which is why The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, indisputably bargain-basement
aside from the casting of Mackenzie Astin (who was then basically the biggest
star in the universe thanks to The Facts of Life), still yields the
amusing spectacle of opportunistic anarchy-peddling passing for ham-fisted
social satire. Whether or not director Rod Amateau (Amateur?) was intentionally
smuggling subtext into the project to prevent himself from capping off each
miserable evening in his backlot trailer with a shot of hydrochloric acid, the
film's plot comes off as a playpen Das Kapital—one where the urban
proletariat wets their pants and uses snot to fix their 8" transistor TVs.
Astin plays an essentially orphaned boy coming into his economic puberty; in
short, he knows the only way he can attract the attention of the frizzy-haired
DIY-clothing designer Tangerine is through offering her freebies from the
antiques store he works at, beads and medals she can use as accoutrements for
her Mall Militia duds. (Tangerine was played by Katie Barberi, now of
telenovela fame but who was dating Astin at the time—he had bank, bitch!)
Tangerine's beefy-dangerous street gang, headed by Juice (oh, I get it!) but
given muscle by the dyke Blythe (more fishnet-restrained thigh than had ever
been seen in PG films before or since), provide the efficient model for how
lower-class uprisings rely on brute force and are often aimed at other
competing lower-class sects. Tangerine's dreams of making it as a top designer
in New York or Hollywood will only be fulfilled with the approval of the
amassed bourgeoisie at her fashion show (from the look of it, staged in the
loading docks of a Montgomery Ward) and the labor provided by the Garbage Pail
Kids themselves—or at least the seven selected from hundreds of cards, in order
to save the visual effects artists a few bucks on their paper maché midget
costumes—who "offer" their skills behind (stolen) sewing machines in
exchange for name-brand junk food (as always, the working class's most
attainable status symbol) and the promise that Astin will help them rescue the
rest of their Pail race from the State Home for the Ugly. As subtle as a
whoopee cushion, the symbolic institution lays bare Amateau's satirical
ambitions and shatters the film's delicate balance…especially considering that
once Astin and the Kids destroy Tangerine's show to reclaim their products, the
other Pail Kids are concurrently being thrown into a garbage truck, crushed,
and carted away to the junkyard.
Wait! What?! The rest of the Garbage Pail Kids are crushed in a garbage
truck at the bequest of The State?! I imagine parents sitting in the
audience with their naughty children (who used their Cabbage Patch dolls
as driveway obstructions for their Big Wheel obstacle courses) and feeling
ruefully double-crassed. At least until the long-awaited money shot from
Valerie Vomit sent their kids into paroxysms of choking laughter and alleviated
any concerns about having to field questions of the
Amelio, Gianni
THE KEYS TO THE
HOUSE
Italy France
Germany (105 mi) 2004
The closest kin to Gianni Amelio's
heartbreaking The Keys to the House may be Patrice Chéreau's Son Frère. The word
"kin" is crucial here, because both films are about the nature of
family ties. Unlike garbage like Rain Man and The Sea Inside, films that
allow big stars to mug for the camera (and Oscar gold), these no-bullshit
creations don't set out to illicit tears with cheap sentiment but honestly
explore the way disease stands in the way of people trying to love each other.
Though not as ponderous as Aleksandr Sokurov's Father and Son, Keys to the
House similarly feels as if its being telegraphed from a cosmic fugue
state, and means to get (and stay) beneath the skin. Indeed, one of the film's
wonders is how Amelio's oblique compositions, sound cues, and everyone's hushed
whispers and silent pauses create a mood of suspended animation meant to evoke
the frustration of familial detachment. Inside a purgatory-like train station,
a man negotiates the return of a mentally handicapped child to his biological
father, with whom the boy travels to a
Raging Bull [Mike Lorefice]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
The Village Voice
[Leslie Camhi]
New York Times (registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
Amenábar, Alejandro
Alejandro Amenabar Horror Director’s Profile
THESIS (Tesis)
Nitrate Online (capsule) Eddie Cockrell
You’ll have to search a bit for
this one, but the effort will be worth it. Winner of a Goya (the Spanish Oscar)
for Best New Actor (Fele Martinez) and the Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film
in Silver from the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film, Thesis
stars Ana Torrent as a student who investigates a series of strange crimes at
her university and discovers a conspiracy that traffics in snuff filmmaking.
Director Alejandro Amenabar’s tangibly European psychological thriller has
often been compared to the work of Hitchcock, and it’d be fair to throw a bit
of Roman Polanski in the mix as well. Vastly better than that strange Nicolas Cage
movie 8mm at exploring the seamier side of moviemaking and possessed of
an audacious, finely calibrated black humor, Thesis heralds the arrival
of an exciting new talent in Amenabar and is indicative of the kind of bold
genre filmmaking currently emerging from Spain.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray,
also seen here: Kinocite
When Joel Schumacher made 8mm, with Nicolas Cage, in 1998, it was considered controversial. A thriller about snuff movies cut the boundaries of decency so fine that audiences turned away. Maybe they did so because it wasn't any good.
Alejandro Amenabar's debut, written when
he was a student, came out two years before 8mm and won a stack of Goya Awards
in
Angela (Ana Torrent) is researching
audiovisual violence at the
This is the start of something
frightening. Angela's life is in danger. She can't trust anyone, not even
Chema. Amenabar's script is as clever as it is taut. He controls the fear,
twisting this way and that, never putting a foot wrong. For a first movie, Tesis
has an astounding confidence. The performances of Torrent and
Amenabar directed, wrote the screenplay
and composed the score. A year later, he would make Open
Your Eyes, which Cameron
Crowe has resurrected as Vanilla Sky,
with Tom Cruise. In 2001, he directed, wrote the screenplay and composed the
score for The
Others. He is the most exciting new talent working in
Working from the premise that we all crane our necks around as we pass by car wrecks and murder scenes, simultaneously fascinated and horrified by the carnage they may reveal, Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenábar's debut feature, Thesis (Tesis), investigates the lore of the snuff film.
A strong antidote to proudly desensitized tripe like 8mm, Thesis has a sensibility that barely exists in current American film. It begins from the premise that a man could actually be shocked to death by the trauma of viewing a brutal, videotaped murder. The unfortunate viewer is a university professor who had been asked to procure graphic images for Angela (Ana Torrent), a curious student working on a thesis on violence in audiovisual media. The tape winds up in Angela's hands, and suddenly she's The Woman Who Knew Too Much as nefarious types converge.
Amenabar, whose masterful follow-up, Abre los Ojos (Open Your Eyes), would take even more glee in leading and then inverting audience expectations, is already in his element with this low-budget feature. His directorial style is deceptively spare, forcing identification with the smart, pretty, but frail heroine, who isn't sure from moment to moment whom she most suspects. Is it the creepy guy with the heavy-metal sensibilities and the video fixation? Is it the cute guy who carries around the incriminating camcorder?
OK, little of what happens in the narrative actually withstands strict scrutiny. That's not the point. But the unlikely yarn is handled with aplomb, although Amenabar miscalculates by stretching it to the 121-minute mark. Following a lengthy, scary set piece that takes place in a hidden tunnel alongside the university's audiovisual archive, Thesis stumbles with a banal sequence involving jealousy, sex and Eurodisco, and then struggles to once again work up a head of steam. However, the movie works hard at character development, resists the urge to go for the gross-out, and maintains thematic consistency. And it is worth sticking around for the final reels -- Amenabar has a knack for adding resonance to a twist ending. Plus, you gotta love a movie in which the appearance of a Sony logo invariably symbolizes menace and depravity.
The DVD from Tanelorn Films is letterboxed at about 1.65:1, with
non-removable subtitles that seem to have been electronically burned into a
video master. The image is adequate, although it seems to have been taken from
a tape source, including the occasional video dropout and a sound flub in the
second half of the film. Better source materials certainly exist. A comparison
to the trailer found on Sogepaq's excellent Abres Los Ojos disc shows
that the Region 1 image is trimmed slightly on the right and across the bottom.
(The aspect ratio of the Region 1 disc measures at 1.65:1, while the trailer on
the Region 2 disc is closer to 1.70:1.) The picture on the
Kinoeye [Matt Hills] Whose
"postmodern" horror?
Kinoeye [Neil Jackson] The
cultural construction of snuff
Kinoeye [Marguerite La Caze] The
violence of the spectacle
VideoVista Gary
Couzens
Horror View Red Velvet Kitchen
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)
DVDBeaver Gary W.
Tooze
OPEN YOUR EYES (Abre Los Ojos)
You might think
seeing is believing, but tell that to Amenábar, writer/director of this
dazzling thriller, which toys with our perceptions to exquisitely torturous
effect. Initially, it appears that playboy César (Noriega) has it all: money,
looks, girls. One night at a party, however, eager to escape jealous Nuria
(Nimri), he strikes up a conversation with Sofía (Cruz), and soon realises he's
in love. After one chaste evening together, it all goes wrong: Nuria is waiting
outside, offers a lift, then deliberately drives off the road. She's killed,
but he survives with a face so horribly disfigured he needs a mask. His hopes
of getting back together with Sofía seem slim, especially since he's now facing
a possible murder charge. Will this nightmare never end? Actually, it's only
just beginning, as Amenábar adds layers of information overload, altering the
picture from noir-ish poser to latter-day Beauty and the Beast,
and eventually to head spinning sci-fi mode. What holds us through the
revelations are the sheer chutzpah with which Amenábar and his cast deliver
them, the emotional imperative of the material and the fascinating way it
touches on concepts of interior/exterior worth, personal responsibility and
phenomenology. This is so smart, mischievous and stylish, you'll instantly want
to see it again.
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Winner of seven Goya
Awards (Spanish Oscars), this sophomore feature by Amenábar is a deeply complex
psychological mind warp of a film that begs to be viewed more than once, if
only to unpeel the multiple layers of meaning that drench every scene like the
webbing surrounding an arachnid's lunchtime fix. To say that this is a
"thriller" hardly does Amenábar or his cast justice; Open Your Eyes
is a brilliant puzzlebox caught on celluloid, beautiful to look at but
difficult to figure out. Amenábar combines elements of science fiction, horror,
and German Expressionism with the more traditional elements of a love story and
Hitchcockian "wrong man" turns, and then somehow manages to make it
all fit into a skewed sort of logic. You may not get it at first, but the
effort is well worth it when you do. Noriega plays César, a wealthy young
If Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch had collaborated on a
project, the result might have been something like Open Your Eyes.
Kubrick’s most common themes -- imaginary worlds, sexual and social obsessions,
distrust of emotion, human depravity, and a journey towards freedom and
self-knowledge -- present themselves here. Lynch’s usual themes -- dreams and
illusion vs. reality, persuasion, fear, self-submission, murder, and curiosity
-- also sprinkle themselves into this movie’s stirring, complex recipe.
From the moment the movie opens, it’s unclear of what is real and what is not.
We meet a handsome, young, successful businessman named César (Eduardo
Noriega), who drives expensive cars, resides in a classy residence, and enjoys
an endless supply of beautiful women.
But his latest female bed-buddy, Nuria (Najwa Nimri), gets a little too close
for César’s comfort. When she invades his birthday party, César uses his best
friend’s gorgeous romantic interest, Sofia (Penélope Cruz), as a means to rid
himself of her.
The following morning, César finds Nuria waiting in her car outside his
apartment. She admits to following him, but somehow manages to coax him into
her vehicle. In a jealous rage, Nuria accuses Cesar of using her for casual
sex, and drives the speeding car into a brick wall.
Nuria dies, but César manages to survive the wreck. With his face now horribly
disfigured, César wears a mask to conceal his newly grotesque features. He also
finds himself locked up in a prison, where he faces murder charges.
It’s here where the David Lynch seeds truly sprout, as the movie questions
César’s perception of reality with a series of mind-boggling plot twists. While
Kubrick’s films draw the viewer to a conclusion, David Lynch’s do not. He
usually leaves room for individual interpretation with an ending that spins in
many different directions. It might sound impossible, but Open Your Eyes
satisfies both styles.
Yet Open Your Eyes lacks a certain style. Much like some of Kubrick’s
work, Spanish director Alejandro Amenábar creates an effective atmosphere but
never connects with the audience. While César’s social life is obvious, the
film never develops his thoughts or emotions. Consequently, the psychological
and romantic aspects fail.
The movie should dive into César’s mind, exploring his distraught vision of
reality -- but it only goes skin deep. Speaking of skin, César’s disfigured
face should play a large part in the story. Yet, the film never explains why
César is so concerned with his appearance. We never understand his vanity; it's
another subplot that goes nowhere.
That’s not to say Open Your Eyes does not develop César. It unravels the
character through the circumstances; his actions justify his thoughts. Still,
if the film had examined the character from the inside out, we might have
identified with him better.
Perhaps the filmmakers chose not to identify all aspects of the character for
good reason. Maybe Amenábar left César’s mind empty purposefully, so that the
audience would fill the vacant space with their own thoughts and emotions.
That’s exactly what happened with me. By the end, I was asking myself what I
would do if I were in César’s shoes.
Kubrick and Lynch often force the audience to open their eyes and fill in the
blanks. Alejandro Amenábar’s movie is a reflection of their work in a pond of
his own.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Open Your Eyes (1997) Paul Julian Smith, March 2000
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Ferdy
on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
culturevulture.net Arthur Lazere, also here: culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Plume Noire Fred
Thom
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Beyond Hollywood Nix
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
Kamera.co.uk Monika
Maurer
New York
Times (registration req'd) Lawrence
van Gelder
THE OTHERS
USA Spain France
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "no
FX" (7/10)
Ghostly chiller The Others is
something of a phantom itself, a wispy visitor from a bygone era. It’s the kind
of classy supernatural drama the BBC used to show in the 70s, late in the
evening during the Christmas holidays. More specifically, it’s also a
deliberate tribute to The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation of Henry James’
Turn of the Screw: both feature a pair of creepy children being looked
after by a chilly blonde (Deborah Kerr back then, Kidman now) in an isolated
mansion which seems to be haunted.
But while The Innocents maintained its careful, Jamesian ambiguity right to the very end – the film, like the book, works just the same whether the phantoms are real or only in the mind of Kerr’s nervy governess – The Others is more of a skilfully-constructed puzzle, to which there is one definite answer. Many viewers will work this out for themselves long before Almenabar ‘reveals’ his hand, and the film’s unexpected smash status in the US can be explained by the fact that it’s “rigged” to encourage a second viewing, in which the early clues become more apparent.
While there’s something inherently cheap and unsatisfactory about films and stories which pivot on one spectacular twist, The Others has rather more substance than most. There may not be anything cutting-edge about Almenabar’s directorial approach, but this material suits his careful, measured style - the skilful manipulation of sound and silence, light and dark. It’s notable that he employs no special effects whatsoever, while his script’s running subtext of Catholic theology is a welcome, intriguingly exotic addition to the standard ghost-story formula. He crafts an old-school star vehicle for Kidman, shot and lit to look eerily like Catherine Deneuve, but, more unexpectedly, it’s also a showcase for the unsuspected “proper acting” skills of octogenarian TV comic Sykes.
The Village Voice [Amy Taubin]
There are horror movies like The
Silence of the Lambs or Alien that make you scream, clutch your
date, or cover your eyes. Less typical is the film that draws you in so subtly
you're almost unaware of being frightened until you feel the hair on the back
of your neck suddenly rise. Jack Clayton's The Innocents (adapted from
Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, the mother of all modern ghost
stories) produces that kind of atavistic fear response. So too does Alejandro
Amenábar's The Others, which parallels The Innocents' premise of
a woman desperately trying to save the two children in her care from the
hellhounds that have invaded their house.
High-strung and devoutly
religious, Grace (a blond Nicole Kidman, looking like a more attenuated Grace
Kelly) lives in a huge Victorian house on the Isle of Jersey with her daughter
and son. World War II is nearing its end, and although Grace's husband has been
reported as missing in action, she refuses to accept that he's not coming home.
Because the children are afflicted with a mysterious allergy to light, Grace
spends most of her time frantically racing from room to room, closing doors and
curtains against the sun, only to find that someone has carelessly opened them
again. Are the peculiarly condescending new servants to blame? Or, as her
daughter claims, are there strangers living secretly among them?
Beneath the supernatural
goings-on is an au courant tale of motherhood, madness, and religious
repression. While occasionally using the children as foils, Amenábar filters
most of the narrative through Grace's perception. From beginning to end, Grace
exists in a state of barely suppressed hysteria punctuated by moments of abject
terror, all of which Kidman registers with extreme delicacy. We've seen her
play this kind of trapped character before—most notably in The Portrait of a
Lady—but not with such sustained, unnerved intensity. This is one scary
movie, not because we see ghosts or monsters, but because Kidman makes us feel
her fear as our own.
The Others is what The Haunting and The Sixth Sense should have been — efficient, engaging, and, above all, scary. Having already tackled slasher thrillers and surreal suspense with Thesis and Open Your Eyes, Spanish writer/director Alejandro Amenábar turns his sights on an older form of horror — the ghost story. The resulting film is not only one of the scarier films in memory, but recalls the classic tales of terror from Roman Polanski, Val Lewton, and England's Hammer studios.
The year is 1945. The Second World War has ended at long last, but
upper-class British housewife Grace (Nicole Kidman)
isn't celebrating. She's spent the last few years under German occupation in
As bad as they are, things soon get worse for Grace. After a trio of new servants (Elaine Cassidy, Finnoula Flanagan, and Eric Sykes) almost magically turn up on her doorstep, uninvited, strange occurrences begin to bring chaos into Grace's orderly existence. She begins to hear things — footsteps, laughter, music — in locked rooms she knows to be empty. Her children begin to have visions of a young boy, his pianist father, and a freaky-looking old woman with blank, misty eyes. And then there's the matter of those gravestones that have been conveniently covered up in her front yard....
All this stress weighs heavily on poor Grace's brow, causing her stiff Victorian façade to crumble faster than Star Wars fans' optimism after the announcement of Episode II: Attack of the Clones' title. Since the apparitions themselves remain hidden until the harrowing final minutes, it's never clear whether or not the ghosts actually exist or are merely cackling, door-slamming, piano-playing figments of Grace's imagination.
This trip into the bowels of psychological terror wouldn't be possible without Kidman's solid performance as the mentally cracked Grace. Like Catherine Deneuve in Repulsion or Mia Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, Kidman is a portal through which the audience travels into a twisted universe. Amenábar's ratiocinative use of eerie silences and cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe's ominous shadow-play subtly ratchet up audience anxiety, until viewers will be wondering if their own minds are playing tricks on them or if someone slipped peyote into their popcorn.
Like that of the underrated What Lies Beneath, it's The Others' subtlety that makes it such an unnerving experience. But whereas Robert Zemeckis' film veered off-course with an overblown conclusion, Amenábar keeps his film on the understated track to hysteria station. There's no corn-syrup gore, no cheesy effects, no ghost-faced killers, no shaky hand-held camera, no guy in a hockey mask stabbing girls in lingerie. The Others is about fear, pure and simple. And although the story may feel slow in parts, particularly when a certain blast from the past reappears, the tension never subsides, gently creeping closer until you can feel the person sitting next to you trembling in their seat. Or is that you?
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
"The Others," a
tantalizing spine-tingler starring Nicole Kidman, indulges in all sorts of
cobwebbed conventions – corridors that creak, shutters that bang and things
that go bump – but don't be fooled into thinking you're safe from the
machinations of the gifted Spanish filmmaker Alejandro Amenabar.
Like "The Sixth Sense,"
Amenabar's haunting melodrama comes with a twist that would make Linda Blair's
head spin. At the same time, his tone and technique have more in common with
Gothic fare like Alfred Hitchcock's "Rebecca," andhis story echoes
Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw."
The tension mounts gradually.
There are not spectral effects, so viewers must face their fear of the unknown,
use their imagination. Amenabar works on the assumption that there is nothing
scarier than what you see out of the corner of your eye, and he is aided
enormously by Javier Aguirresarobe, the man behind the stalking camera.
And then there is Kidman's
elegant and edgy portrait of Grace, a high-strung, devoutly religious young
woman battling depression, guilt and a host of other woes at the end of World
War II. Grace, along with her two children (James Bentley and Alakina Mann), is
holed up in a moldering Victorian mansion on the fogbound isle of Jersey . Despite the gloomy weather, the heavy curtains
are precautionary because the kids are deathly allergic to sunlight. At least
that's what Grace says.
Looking through the mists, a
stranger might mistake the building itself for an apparition surrounded by
skeletal trees. Then again the servants who suddenly appear at Grace's door are
not outsiders at all and clearly feel very comfortable.
The matronly housekeeper
(Fionnula Flanagan) and her two companions (Eric Sykes and Elaine Cassidy)
claim to have spent the happiest years of their lives on the estate way back
when.
If Grace were capable of joy, she
might regard the trio's arrival as a happy coincidence. After all, they are
looking for work and the house's regular servants have run away without even
stopping to collect their wages. Though Grace's odd story and detached manner
would seemingly scare off even the most desperate job-seekers, these three are
another matter. They clearly have an agenda that has nothing to do with
polishing the silver or trimming the hedges.
Still, they aren't the only
ominous presences. According to the kids, the house is haunted by a little boy
and his father, a concert pianist. Grace attributes the story to her children's
morbid imagination, which she has seeded with biblical tales of hellfire and
damnation. Well, she may not believe in ghosts, but they set out to change her
mind. And soon she, too, begins to sense that there are intruders at large.
Amenabar, who makes his American
film debut with "The Others," loves to fool with reality, as he did
in his mind-boggling last outing, "Open Your Eyes." "The
Others," however, is a more sophisticated and coherently written film that
works whether perceived as a ghost story, a psychodrama or an existential
debate.
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Dread Again Nick James from Sight and Sound, November 2001
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs, also seen here: Nitrate Online (Cynthia
Fuchs) and here: Philadelphia City Paper (Cindy Fuchs)
A
beautiful mind(fuck): Hollywood structures of identity Jonathan Eig on movies like The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Usual
Suspects, Waking Life, A Beautiful Mind, Fight Club, Memento, Mulholland Drive,
and Donnie Darko, from Jump Cut,
Summer 2003
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Gary Mairs
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Goatdog's Movies (Michael W. Phillips, Jr.)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film
Review Richard Scheib
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Rashemi
The Horror Review
[Egregious Gurnow]
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
The
Flick Filosopher's take MaryAnn
Johanson
Eccentric Cinema Rod Barnett
CultureCartel.com (David Abrams)
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
Fangoria Michael
Gingold
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
The Cavalcade Of
Schlock [Brian J Wright]
Q Network Film Desk (James Kendrick)
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
Film Monthly (Michael Julianelle)
Austin Chronicle (Marc Savlov)
Los Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THE SEA INSIDE (Mar adentro)
Exclaim! [Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
The director of The Others returns with this alternately
moving and questionable wade into the euthanasia debate. The subject is the
long battle of quadriplegic Ramon Sampedro (Javier Bardem) to legally end his
life; despite a generally upbeat attitude (and the virtual nimbus that the
filmmakers place around his head), his time is spent preparing the legal fight,
writing poetry about his predicament and dealing with family members both
supportive and unsupportive.
The argument itself is pretty cogent, with eye-opening refutations of the
anti-euthanasia position and some ambiguous interplay between Ramon, a lawyer
(Belen Rueda) and a hanger-on/quasi-love interest (Lola Duenas) who’s trying to
stop him. The film is very gung-ho for Ramon’s struggle and Amenabar marshals
all of his aesthetic skills to make that struggle as wrenching as possible. But
he does his job a little too well.
The film is so shamelessly manipulative in its sweeping camera movements and
glycerin-teared movie-star faces that it doesn’t give you room to think about
the issue. It doesn’t trust its argument enough to let you make your own
decisions and gives you an emotional enema so that you can’t help but rally to
the cause.
But though I started to resent the beatific Bardem and his saintly glow, I have
to admit the film forced me to think in those few moments that I could gather
my thoughts. A hard movie to respect but one that’s sure to inspire lively
debate.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Angus Wolfe Murray
These are dangerous waters and
Alejandro Amenabar navigates without charts. What might have been a one-sided
political argument, washed with tears and oozing sentimentality, is a human
story, all the better for its basis in truth.
This is a film about love and
death.
Is love selfish? Is death even
more selfish? Has anyone the right to make demands on another? Is freedom cruel
and liberty a lie? Is religion hollow and this life the one and only?
The poet and writer Ramon
Sampedro (Javier Bardem) became a quadriplegic after breaking his neck in a
swimming accident 28 years ago. He lies in an upstairs room in his brother's
farmhouse in Spain
The film is resonant with the
sound of laughter. Ramon's dry, dark humour mocks those who pity and protect
him. When sympathy comes to visit, he barbs his language. A desire for death is
logical, right? "You learn to cry with a smile," he says.
Dependent upon others, what can
he do but play word games and test the limits of those who care for him?
Surprisingly, there is a strong
sexual undercurrent. The beautiful lawyer (Belen Rueda), who has given up her
time to help him fight his case, finds her emotions compromised. The factory
worker (Lola Duenas) with two kids, who loses her job and starts coming round
"to make you want to live," exposes her vulnerability. His brother's
wife (Mabel Rivera), who has nursed him from the start, feels jealous and
possessive.
Bardem's performance is
astonishing, not so much in his ability to mimic a wasted body, but by
capturing the essence of a lively intelligence. Amenabar, whose previous films
(Open Your Eyes, The Others) display a flair for storytelling, is so precise
with detail and yet in the scenes of magic realism, when Ramon imagines himself
capable of physical expression, remains true to the dream, never imposing
emotional hooks to catch the audience.
In the end, the sea is calm and
the hardest part is letting go. If love is a gift, it should be given.
Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea
Inside recounts the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a quadriplegic who
petitioned the Spanish courts to take his own life—an uphill battle in this
country (even in Oregon soon, if the Bush administration gets its way) but
especially quixotic in a staunchly Catholic one. In the film, Sampedro has
lived for more than two decades—since his catastrophic swimming accident—in a
bed in a room in his brother's home. Now he is forced to make the case for his death
not only to the courts, but to the Spanish public (via invasive TV interviews),
his family, his dishy lawyer (Belén Rueda), and a needy, unmarried young mother
(Lola Dueñas) who has found a kind of spiritual renewal in his friendship.
(Ramón is the only man she knows who is unlikely to screw her and then
high-tail it out of there.)
Is Amenábar too fluid for his own
good? Abre los Ojos and The Others were evocative works, each
with an original syntax and in a style that was perfectly calibrated to its subject.
But I wonder if The Sea Inside doesn't move too slickly to do justice to
its bedridden protagonist's anguish. It features fantasy flights over hills,
through lush forests, to the sea for which Ramón longs. Those Steadicam
sequences are extraordinarily beautiful, even scored with the overfamiliar
"Nessun Dorma"—they do justice not only to Sampedro's inner life but
also to similar passages in works like The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
But they're not balanced by scenes more rooted in Ramón's grueling
paralysis—scenes in which we feel cruelly confined to see and hear what he does
and nothing more.
More troublesome is the
philosophical patness. Little weight is given to the opponents of euthanasia,
among them a quadriplegic priest who's the butt of a near-farcical set piece.
(His wheelchair can't make it up the stairs to Ramón's room, so the debate is
conducted through intermediaries in a perverse game of telephone.) The movie's
case is clinched by the fate of Ramón's lawyer, who has a degenerative disease.
She is persuaded—against her better instincts—to live with her illness and ends
up a smiling zombie. The Sea Inside doesn't touch on my own worry about
judicially sanctioned euthanasia: that it will cause people with incapacitating
conditions to feel pressured to take their own lives. Even saintly caregivers
have periods of exasperation: Why not spare them their toil and end it all? And
what about families who aren't so saintly, who come right out and urge suicide?
An individual might—might—have a moral right to take his or her own life, but
shouldn't the legal hurdles be left in place?
As the woman who wants to follow
our hero but has a harder time leaving her life, Belén Rueda has the
showstopping supporting role, but it was Lola Dueñas' Rosa who touched me with
her tremulous fixation on Ramón. As for Bardem: How can I do him justice? He is
normally the most robustly physical of actors, with a plummy voice and an
insolent sensuality. To see him immobile, ashen, his hair gone, de-bodyized:
It's agonizing. And the horror is reinforced by flashbacks showing the young
Ramón (Bardem, too, and never fitter) in a swimsuit—like a reckless Greek god,
poised on a cliff above the water that will prove his unmaking. Even more
difficult to bear is the voice: Bardem doesn't use his sublime lower register.
He comes to the ends of sentences and can't find the air, and you can see the
pain and anger in his eyes as he takes another breath from his oxygen hose, a
hated appendage. When you see Richard Dreyfus as a quadriplegic in Whose
Life Is It Anyway? the tragedy doesn't hit you with such immediacy: Dreyfus
is always a talking head. But with Bardem you feel your body hum in sympathy.
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AGORA
Amenabar’s
“Agora” Rings Hollow Despite Visual Shock and Awe Eric Kohn at
Alejandro Amenabar’s “Agora”
contains a dense plot littered with historical details of Egyptian society
during the Roman Empire , but none of them can
save the movie from having the fleeting qualities of a high school science
class.
The story mainly revolves around
the research of astronomer Hypathia (Rachel Weisz), whose constant struggle to
understand the Earth’s place in the universe continually clashes with the
religious upheaval taking place throughout the city of Alexandria
Amenabar, the director of
visually memorable features such as “The Others” and “The Sea Inside” clearly
aimed to make an old school epic of Cecil B. Demille proportions, and ended up
with a hollow reflection of one. It’s worth noting that “Agora” looks
fantastic, with magnificent virtual camera movements that swoop down from space
to a large scale replica of Alexandria
The underdeveloped characters are
worsened by a number of distractingly histrionic performances. Weisz, doing the
best she can with the stagey dialogue, gives the only halfway decent
performance. The other actors, all male, apparently operate in the modes of
gape or smirk and little else, resulting in a frustrating, incredibly tedious
narrative with no believable relationships. A central element involving
Hypathia’s potential romantic interest in her well-intentioned slave, Davus
(Max Minghella), seems like it was lifted from an ancestral spin-off of “Dawson
“Agora” occasionally hints at the
interesting material embedded in its central conceits, but never manages to
enliven it. Hypathia’s process of discovery has zero sense of awe, since we
know where she’s heading all along. Like Ang Lee’s “Taking Woodstock,” “Agora”
relies on overt references to the period rather than focusing on letting it
come together on its own terms. When Hypathia falls into the hands of angry
zealots near the end of the movie, one of her captors makes an observation that
could be equally leveled at the entire production. “Look!” he shouts. “She’s
not reacting!” Relying on the bland conventions of the sword and sandals genre,
Amenabar has nothing new to say about the ancient drama in question. He’s less
inclined to create an interpretation of the era than simply a bland recreation
of it.
Agora
Mike Goodridge at Cannes from
Screendaily
Christianity
gets a bad rap in Alejandro Amenabar’s Agora, a historical epic in which
the early church is shown violently oppressing other faiths, science and women
in its bid for political power. An enormously ambitious attempt to recreate the
conflicts of 4th century Alexandria, many of which are still raging today, Agora
ultimately fails to hang together narratively and does not engage on the same
grand emotional level as the sword and sandal epics of old – Quo Vadis?
Ben-Hur et al – which it is clearly trying to reinvent.
It’s a bold
story to tell at a time when the Catholic Church still has the power to rally
its propaganda machine against negative onscreen representations. However
Amenabar falls into some easy traps of the genre. Like Oliver Stone with Alexander
in 2004, he falters with accents, and the choice to lead with upper-crust
English here - alongside a smorgasbord of European - lends a faintly ridiculous
whiff to much of the dialogue. An unconsummated love triangle generates much
chest-heaving and longing looks but little passion, while the focus on early
scientific thought is a little too dense and might prove a turn-off for wider
audiences.
The
undoubted spectacle and bloody massacres in the film should raise some interest
in the teenage male demographic, but youngsters are not the core audience and
in any case would not have the staying power for its 141 minute running time.
Upscale adults might be more intrigued by the prospect of a film which is
intelligent in design, if flawed in execution. International audiences which
responded more favourably to Alexander, Troy and 300 could be
more receptive to Agora than domestic.
The film
rests on the shoulders of Rachel Weisz, an undoubtedly talented actress but one
with a distinctly contemporary edge that feels out of place here. She plays
Hypatia, a brilliant astronomer living within the rarefied walls of the
legendary Library of Alexandria who teaches both pagans and Christians theories
of the sun and the stars and where earth fits into the universe.
The story
starts in 369AD as tensions in the city market area (“agora”) between
polytheistic Pagans and Jesus-worshipping Christians have reached new highs.
The director of the library Theon (Lonsdale) is hoping to hand over control to
his daughter Hypatia, but the religious leaders of the city are reluctant to
let a woman take over in such a volatile religious climate.
Indeed it is
the religious leaders who incite an attack on the Christians as they gather in
the agora to hurl abuse at the pagan gods. The massacre leaves many Christians
dead but the pagans underestimate the Christian numbers, they are overcome and
barricade themselves into the library compound.
Hypatia is
among those trapped inside with her pupil Orestes (Isaac) and slave Davus
(Minghella) both of whom are in love with her. But the three are torn apart
when the openly Christian Roman emperor Valentinian decrees that the pagans
must surrender the Library to the Christians, who proceed to sack it. Davus,
who has been inspired by the tenets of Christianity, stays behind with the
Christians, leaving Hypatia and Orestes to flee.
If this were
1951, Amenabar could have inserted an intermission at this point in the story
since he then moves the plot forward several years. Orestes is now the prefect
of the region and a Christian convert, Hypatia lives in Alexandria unhampered
in her astronomical research and Davus has joined the Christian city militia
the Parabalani.
But more
trouble is ahead. Under the tyrannical leadership of the bishop Cyril (Sammy
Samir), the Christians start to wage war on the Jewish population of
Alexandria, stoning them during a music performance on the Sabbath and
launching a full-scale massacre after the Jews retaliate.
Meanwhile
Hypatia, who is close to making a breakthrough in her theories about the
universe, is the next target for the Christians as Cyril has her declared
unclean and a sorceress, causing the Prefect and the Parabalanus to choose
between their church and the woman they love.
The film’s
production design and sets are top-notch and Amenabar seems pleased with his
recreation, displaying his lavish cityscapes repeatedly. The characters are not
so well-drawn, however.
Hypatia has
a vicious temper tantrum with Davus which is wildly out of character, while
Davus’ inner conflict is muddily written to say the least. Minghella and Isaac
both display ample charisma, although there’s no disguising the fact that Weisz
is centre stage.
Perhaps, as Alexander
and Troy proved, contemporary filmgoers are unable to accept their movie
stars in togas as they were 50 years ago. 300 told its tale in a
sufficiently-stylised manner to avoid too much ridicule, while Mel Gibson has
the best idea of all, using a dead language to play out his drama in The Passion
Of The Christ.
Todd
Brown Twitch
David Bourgeois at Cannes from
Movieline, May 17, 2009
Agora David
Hudson at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 17, 2009
Natasha Senjanovic at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17, 2009
Hollywood Reporter Interview by Steven Zeitchik with Amenabar, May 17,
2009
Todd McCarthy at Cannes from Variety, May 18, 2009
At
Cannes: Alejandro Amenabar's provocative new historical thriller The Big Picture, Patrick Goldstein interview with Amenabar from The LA Times, May 17, 2009
Ameur-Zaïmeche, Rabah
BLED NUMBER ONE B+ 90
aka:
Back Home
A rather extraordinary
window into life in
Kamel
and his brother decide to buy some beer, which is a huge undertaking, as they
have to sneak into the town outskirts to buy it. Later that evening, when the brother runs
into a gang of young men from a neighboring village, they tie him up and
threaten to cut out his tongue for being drunk, where a large knife and a tire
iron are continually poked in his face by a group of religious reformers. When the brother is let go, he and his
friends organize a roadblock in an attempt to protect him by keeping outsiders
from entering their town. Meanwhile, the
husband returns for his wife and son, but once they’re out of town, he leaves
her stranded on the side of the road and takes the son away with him. After walking all the way home on foot, her
brother brutally beats her, claiming she is bringing shame upon the family. After that, people in town talk about her as
if she’s crazy, leaving her more isolated than ever as even her own family
disowns her, where everyone senses she doesn’t belong there. At the road block, Kamel attacks his brother
for brutalizing their sister, but the brother’s friends protect him and blame
Kamel for his inappropriate conduct.
What becomes apparent is we are witness to a closed, old-fashioned
society that doesn’t allow problems to exist, that has no place for them, and
blames the person and/or victim for having them instead of the person who
inflicted the problems in the first place.
The religious solution, to run around the mosque seven times and to have
ocean waves wash upon her face, is nothing less than an antiquated joke.
But
it deteriorates further. After Louisa
travels to her husband’s home to retrieve her son, she is informed they have
gone away and never wish to see her again.
When she contemplates jumping off a bridge, a whole host of men stop her
and bring her to a mental hospital which is filled with women who have been
left by their husbands, whose therapy seems to indicate there is no recourse
unless their husbands will take them back.
Being abandoned is considered their mental illness. In a stunning sequence, Louisa sings an
extremely slow sensuous rendition of Billie Holiday’s song “Don’t Explain,”
accompanied first only by an upright bass, followed by an electric piano, where
the audience turns out to be people from the mental hospital. Her beauty and eloquence are unmistakable,
yet in this backwards village, she will likely languish there until she
dies. Had she been given the opportunity
to sing in Paris, she’d be lavished with praise and given first class
accommodations to any hotel of her choice.
That’s the way of the world. By
the end of the film, Kamel himself is making exit plans out of the country, and
sits on a hillside listening to his friend (Rudolphe Burger) play an incendiary
electric guitar that rocks over the end credits in a Hendrix-like cascade of
free form.
Festival of New French
Cinema Charles Coleman from Facets
Bled Number One
is a slice-of-life film that speaks volumes about the conditions of life in
today's
Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche has simply invented a whole new way of
filming, right in front of our eyes."
-Les Cahiers du Cinéma
WINNER Award of the Youth
User comments from imdb Author: slobir from France
Even if the cinema is discovered more than a century ago, the director of
this film shots today in a, so to say, genuine style (we could say à la
Lumière), that is disregarding any authorial input, getting rid of any drama
rules, collapsing the dialogs and then just standing discreetly in front of
(apparently) «nothing happens». A very acute authenticity rises then, in this
non-interventionist way of filming which provide some beautiful portraits (in
gros-plan) and a collection of «bricks» of pure (inner) time. The movie is
supposed to be charming and original in giving us all freedom to see these
bricks together in a virtual composition. But this is a little bit too virtual
even if I appreciate this particular way of being «cool» by letting the story
to tell (or to lose) itself. A story about
Bled
Number One Olivier Barlet from
Africutures, July 31, 2007
After Wesh wesh, ça me regarde! (2002) in which he, as an insider, offers a different viewpoint on the deprived estates, Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche goes to the bled, his native village in the far east of Africa, and there finds a way to broaden and remarkably elevate his vision of cinema. Neither sociological nor pure fiction, its apparent roughness may be disconcerting but it is eminently worth seeing because it in fact leads to a new understanding, beyond clichés and projections.
Like in his previous film, Ameur-Zaïmeche films on video and plays Kamel, deported from France when he comes out of prison. At first, he has the physical casualness of his perception of things. He is quite happy to share the village's rhythm, where time passes differently, from having tea on the terrace to the zerda ritual where an ox is sacrificed in front of the assembled community and the meat divided in equal shares on a carpet of olive branches.
But, echoeing the blood that flows during the zerda, his cousin Bouzid's life is also violently threatened by young fundamentalists who find him blind drunk. Intolerance radically shapes his native society. Bouzid beats his sister Louisa because she humiliates her family by leaving her husband. Road blocks are erected on the approaches to the village to control the comings and goings. Patriarchy wields its devastating influence and each dominates the other.
Those bodies under duress are what Ameur-Zaïmeche finds interesting. He focuses more and more on their rifts that ultimately lead to an overflow of boundless lunacy. In the asylum where Louisa is shut away, women sing that the real lunatics are outside. But his conclusion is not necessarily damning. Kamel is no-one's victim, not France's nor Algeria's - he is simply someone who wants to find his roots but runs aground, like the rusted liners on the shore. His exile is a deafening guitar whose wild electric echoes fail to produce a harmony. He wishes he could bathe with the women without giving it a second thought, without having to pit himself against the men. He dreams of an Algerian land that would accept his femininity so he could stop seeing only the dark side of things. For that, he makes a tense and subtle film, quivering with desire for possibilities that are not yet for on the horizon.
Hollywood Reporter
Bernard Besserglik
CANNES -- The word bled in
"Bled Number One," the title of Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche's follow-up to
his well-regarded debut "Wesh-Wesh" (What's Going On?) in 2001,
translates roughly as Hicksville. Which is precisely where Kamel ends up after
being deported from France to Algeria, the land of his fathers, after doing
time for robbery.
Bled is a finely observed slice of life shot in a low-key semi-documentary
style. The latest in a run of French-made movies dealing with Franco-Algerian
cross-currents, it speaks volumes about the conditions of life in today's
Algeria and should play well in festivals and in the Arabic-speaking world. It
opens June 7 in France.
Ameur-Zaimeche, as Kamel, plays the male lead as he did in "Wesh"
whose protagonist also is a young Franco-Algerian recently released from
prison. But where the earlier film deals with inner-city issues in France, Bled
takes a cold-eyed look at life on the other side of the water.
Back in the small coastal town where the rest of his family still lives,
Kamel-la-France, as he is promptly dubbed, finds that he is not the only
returnee. His sister Louisa (Meriem Serbah) has been thrown out by her husband
on the grounds that she has shown an interest in jazz singing. His brother
Bouzid (Abel Jafri) shows little sympathy for his sister's plight. On the
contrary, he accuses her of bringing shame on the family and beats her up.
Kamel enjoys his celebrity status to begin with but this soon palls and he
fades from the scene to a large extent as Ameur-Zaimeche focuses on Louisa's
efforts to cope with her repudiation. The director is clearly more interested
in accumulating the fine detail of daily life than in building strong story
lines. Nevertheless, he maintains a firm hold on the narrative and the viewer's
attention.
The nearest he comes to drama is in the intervention of the local gang of
Islamic hardliners. A game of dominos -- this is as exciting as it gets in
downtown Bled -- is broken up by the ringleader who denounces the players for
engaging in such an outrageously un-Islamic activity. Then Bouzid, having
bought a few bottles of beer for home consumption, is captured by the gang
while crossing a field, trussed up like the heifer we have just seen
slaughtered a few scenes earlier, and threatened with having his throat cut
unless he mends his ways.
Ameur-Zaimeche's direction is unfussy, favoring a quietly reflective mood with
slow fades and several long takes of exteriors in dying light. He is never
judgmental, but it's clear where his sympathies lie: In the conflict between
tradition and modernity, at least in this corner of the Arab-Islamic world, the
latter has a lot of catching up to do. The situation of women who have acquired
Western tastes -- like Louisa who, in the hospital where she has been taken
after an abortive suicide attempt, sweetly sings the Billie Holiday classic
"Don't Explain" -- is particularly delicate.
By the end, Kamel, too, is looking for the exit. "I can't stand it any
more. I've got to get out of here," he tells Bouzid. He inquires about the
prospects in neighboring Tunisia, assuming he can get himself smuggled across
the border. Little better, Bouzid replies. There is more than a hint of
melancholy in Ameur-Zaimeche's conclusion in which Kamel listens to a friend
playing a blues guitar on a hillside at sunset.
ADHEN (Le Dernier Maquis)
Adhen
(Le Dernier Maquis) Howard Feinstein
at Cannes
Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche has addressed the schizoid
nature of the clash of French and Algerian cultures before, most notably in the
lovely Bled Number One, set in a small Algerian village. In Adhen,
traditional religion comes up against contemporary capital in a factory that
makes red pallets and repairs trucks in a depressing industrial zone just
outside
Ameur-Zaimeche
always acts in his own films, and here he plays factory owner, Mao, who builds
a mosque for his workers, emphasising the link between labour and devotion to
Allah. The men argue over who should be imam, but in terms of any significant
narrative disruption, their debate is but a blip. Only in the final section of
the film, after Mao announces that he is closing the business on account of
financial losses, does the plot pick up some steam. The spiritually-oriented
labourers, threatened with loss of jobs, decide to organise and become
uncharacteristically violent. "They'll let us build mosques but they won't
let us unionise," says a mechanic. A nice touch here is the revelation of
a split between sub-Saharan Africans, so grateful for employment that they
refuse to strike, and the activist Maghreb Arabs, more inclined to resist what
they consider exploitation.
The
director attempts to add some spice to the story line with a couple of shocking
scenes that are more disgusting than effective. One involves the botched
self-circumcision of a naïve imam wannabe; the other is a prolonged sequence
about a trapped rodent. Both feel tacked on, as if Ameur-Zaimeche himself felt
the film was too boring.
The
film-maker does have a good eye: the various ways in which the pallets are
stacked make for some interesting geometric compositions, and the ultimate,
nocturnal scene is stunning. He also has a good ear: Ambient sounds, such as
the drone of passing planes, give much-needed texture to the enterprise.
The
title is the name of a character with a beautiful voice who chants in the
factory's mosque. Maquis is a scrub of Mediterranean shrubs, supposedly used on
occasion for hiding.
Amirkulov, Ardak
THE FALL OF OTRAR (Gibel Otrara) B 89
Russia Kazakhstan (176 mi)
1991
The
Fall of Otrar | Chicago Reader J.R.
Jones
Shot in 1990, as Kazakhstan was asserting its independence, this
brutal historical epic by Ardak Amirkulov charts political intrigue among the
Kipchaks, a confederation of tribes on the steppes of central Asia, before they
were overrun by Genghis Khan. At 165 minutes this is a pretty long haul, and
the shifting alliances mapped out in the dark and claustrophobic first part can
be difficult to follow; the payoff comes in the second part, which opens out
into dramatic locations and bloody battle as the Mongols lay siege to Otrar.
The film's respectful treatment of Islam was welcomed in Kazakhstan as a celebration
of national identity, though Amirkulov's attitude may be more ambivalent: as
Genghis Khan prepares to execute the governor of Otrar, he points out two holy
men whose marginal religious differences have allowed him to divide and
conquer. In Kazakh, Chinese, and Mongolian with subtitles.
User reviews from imdb Author: Vlad B. from United
States
An amalgam of influences ranging from "Ivan the Terrible"
(gloom-filled court intrigues) to "Andrei Rublev" (horses and grisly
executions) to "Conan the Barbarian" (exotic sex scene), with quite a
lot of Kurosawa (an array of Toshiro Mifune character types from the various
stages of his career) thrown in as well - making a unique whole. Inexplicably
shot on both color and black and white stock with little transitional logic. At
times threatening to lapse into incoherence, but never quite abandoning the
audience. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Amirkulov must have been
enjoying almost total artistic freedom: as evidenced by the near-constant
violence, a good deal of nudity, and plenty of religious discussion, no
censorship of any kind has been imposed by the state.
Amazingly enough, this is an altogether compelling, thought-provoking and even
historically accurate (more so than "Gladiatior", at any rate)
picture. Some background in Ghengis Khan's 13th century conquests does help
understand the proceedings, but is not necessary. If anything, do the research
after the film (like I did) and see it again (like I hopefully will if it's
ever released in a digital format). Given the very limited budget of the
filmmakers, some of what they achieved here is truly impressive (and surely
more authentic and heartfelt than any latest computer-generated imagery).
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman] (Page 2)
The Fall of Otrar, directed by Ardak Amirkulov from a
script by Alexei Guerman and Svetlana Karmalita (who also produced), is an
even more convoluted expression of national identity. Produced in Kazakhstan
just as the Soviet Union was falling apart, the movie evidently broke a
Soviet-era taboo on dramatizing Muslim history in evoking a 13th-century
universe of visceral cruelty and inexplicable intrigue.
The movie's dense, complicated script has the same oblique quality as Guerman's
own films—My Friend Ivan Lapshin and Khrustaliov, My Car!—although
the spectacle suggests the tradition of Japanese samurai epics and the
spaghetti westerns that followed. The nominal hero (a role that could have been
written for Toshiro Mifune) is a lone Kipchak warrior scout who
calls himself "Allah's Arrow" and, after seven years working for Genghis
Khan, returns home to warn his people of the impending storm.
Shot in tinted black-and-white with occasional bursts of color, The Fall of
Otrar is a movie of long, fluid takes and fabulous set design. The dramatis
personae are wildly multicultural. Otrar, the capital of the pre-Kazakh
Kipchaks, is an international crossroads—with all manner of Arabs, Chinese,
Persians, and Slavs preparing (or not) for imminent Mongol invasion. Like George W. Bush, the Kipchak shah is obsessed with
attacking Baghdad—and thus oblivious to the threat from the east.
Enigmatic from the get-go, The Fall of Otrar builds to a series of
spectacular battle scenes, but the mood is never less than sardonic. After the
sack of Otrar, the victorious Genghis Khan mocks the religious schisms that
prevented his Muslim foes from uniting against him. With the defeated Kipchak
general chained at his feet, the "Wind of God" holds forth on his
place in history. Overhead, meanwhile, a heedless bird caws and shits.
User reviews from imdb Author: J K from Chicago, IL
The Fall of Otrar is a vivid and surprisingly historically accurate account
of events in the 13th century which foreshadowed events of worldwide
significance. It is unfortunate that most people in the West are unfamiliar
with these events and thus miss the significance of the setting and the drama.
No one in the West who has any sense of history has to be reminded of the
significance of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon with his legions. Perhaps a
bit of historical background will help viewers appreciate this film more.
In the early part of the 13th century, having consolidated the Mongol tribes,
Chinggis Khan (popularly but less accurately spelled as Genghis Khan) began his
first overtures to the western domains by sending a caravan of several hundred
camels carrying great quantities of silk, silver, gold, and other goods to the
realm of Khwarizm, whose Shah Mohammed was the greatest power between the
Indian subcontinent and Baghdad. The Shah's mother was not Persian but from the
Central Asian Turkic Kanglis tribe, which supplied the Shah with his cavalry
and provided the primary basis for his power. The Shah and the Caliph of
Baghdad were involved in various intrigues against each other and jockeying for
supreme influence over the Islamic peoples and lands. When the caravan stopped
in the border town of Otrar located along the Silk Road, the local governor
could not help himself and killed the merchants and seized all the valuables.
When Chinggis Khan sent an ambassador to the Shah with a polite request to
right this wrong, the Shah, not yet knowing that he was dealing with the future
world conqueror, killed the ambassador and burned the beards of his military
escorts. The Mongols considered ambassadors inviolable, and an attack on
Chinggis Khan's ambassador was tantamount to an attack on the Great Khan
himself. This triggered the Great Khan to summon all of his troops and to lead
the first Mongol campaign to the western regions outside of their traditional
lands, an onslaught which did not stop until the Caliph of Baghdad was trampled
under Mongol hoofs, the Russians utterly defeated, innumerable other foes
vanquished, and Mongols consolidated under their rule virtually all of the
lands of Asia and Europe from the China Sea to gates of Vienna, creating the
greatest land-based empire in history. This Pax Mongolica made possible Marco
Polo's subsequent journey to China. Thus, Otrar was the first stop and the calm
before this ferocious storm - a storm which perhaps could have been averted -
or at least postponed - had the governor not been so greedy, or if Shah
Mohammed had righted the wrong.
Having been an avid student of Central Asian history, I was delighted to see a
dramatization of this event of world historical significance done not by
Hollywood but by a filmmaker whose land has been a central part of this
history. The film is amazingly accurate in its portrayal of many minutiae,
including the manner of capture of the Otrar governor and his punishment
(Chiggis Khan had given strict orders that the governor of Otrar be captured
and brought back alive to Mongolia), Chinggis Khan's ecumenical toleration of
Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, his own reliance on the advice of a Taoist
master whom he had sent out from China to his war camp to advise him on matters
of the spirit, and his pronouncements including the Mongol chiding of Muslims
about the need to face Mecca to pray as "didn't they know that God is
everywhere?"
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Movies
| THE FALL OF OTRAR/GIBEL OTRARA - Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
New York Times
(registration req'd) Dave Kehr
Amrohi, Kamal
PAKEEZAH
aka:
Pure Heart
This popular
musical suggests that, at its best, the much-scorned commercial product of
'Hollywood-Bombay' is equally extraordinary in its own way. A byzantine story
(of star-crossed lovers) that proceeds fitfully through the fabulous logic of
dreams; luscious colour-scope photography, and a febrile camera craning and tracking
restlessly through fairytale locations and sets; and never even a single screen
kiss, but instead some of the most brazenly erotic songs and dances you'll ever
see on film.
Turner Classic Movies Roger Fristoe
Considered by some the greatest Bollywood film ever
produced, Pakeezah (Pure Heart 1971) tells the story of a North
Indian courtesan who dies of sorrow after being rejected by her husband’s
family; and of her grown daughter who, years later, threatens to repeat her
mother’s sad history. Over 10 years in the making, the movie is a cinematic
tribute by the director Kamal Amrohi to its star, his actress wife, Meena
Kumari, who takes on the dual role of both mother and daughter. Kumari, a
tragedienne with a lyrical voice, was plagued by alcoholism and died shortly
after Pakeezah was completed.
Pakeezah was a huge commercial success in both
Kumari had previously acted under her husband’s direction in Daera
(1953). Amrohi, who died in 1993, directed only two other films, Mahal
(1949) and Razia Sultan (1982). His struggle to complete Pakeezah
was complicated in part by his wife’s illness and also because of financial
difficulties. When the film was at last completed and had its premiere in
February 1972, Kumari sat proudly beside her husband, then tearfully accepted
compliments on her bravura performance.
Kamal
Amrohi: Pakeezah Derek Malcolm from
the Guardian
The notion that the Indian
commercial cinema, which still churns out more films per year than Hollywood India
It certainly wasn't in the
post-war decades, which produced a whole series of film-makers, stars,
musicians and playback singers worthy of anyone's attention. Among these
directors was the Muslim Kamal Amrohi, whose Pakeezah qualifies as one of the
most extraordinary musical melodramas ever made - "poetry, fantasy and
nostalgia rolled into one on an epic scale", as one Indian critic has
said. Amrohi was a writer and poet in Urdu and Hindi as well as a director, but
only made four films. Pakeezah was his third and had been planned years before
it could be made as a starring vehicle for Amrohi himself and his third wife,
Meena Kumari, the famous Hindi tragedienne.
Production finally started in
1964 but when the couple separated it was postponed indefinitely halfway
through. Fortunately, Amrohi finally persuaded a by then somewhat raddled and
alcoholic but still beautiful Kumari to complete it in the early 70s.
Set in Muslim Lucknow at the turn
of the century, its central character is a courtesan and dancer who dreams of
leaving her life behind but gets rejected by her man’s family as unmarriageable
and dies giving birth in a graveyard. Her daughter (also played by Kumari)
grows up in her mother's profession, desired by men for everything but a
respectable marriage, and is even prevented from seeing her father. She then
falls for a mysterious stranger who turns out to be her father's nephew. When
the marriage is forbidden, she is forced to dance at her lover's arranged
wedding. There, her father at last recognises her, claims her as his child, and
she's able to marry. The feel-good ending doesn't quite undermine what has gone
before - which is a wonderful, if sometimes unwitting, lesson in the hypocrisy
of the time towards women.
If there is nothing special about
the plot, the way it is accomplished is often astounding. Amrohi, who also
wrote the script and some of the lyrics, saturates the screen not only with
some amazing colour photography but with a swirling romanticism that somehow
never tips over into the laughable. It's primarily in the songs that the
uncensored inner meanings of Indian films reside. Pakeezah, often shown in its
shorter, but not better, version is a case in point. Each song illustrates
either the implicit tragedy of the story or the hopes of those in it bound by
tradition but striving for a fairer world.
Other Indian popular films may be
subtler but few have quite the force and romantic conviction of Amrohi's. He
never struck gold again, and nor did Kumari, whose last film this was. But gold
Pakeezah definitely is.
rediff.com Dinesh Raheja
upperstall.com - Classic films
Channel 4 Film
TV Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide
Meena Kumari filmography
Manas: Culture, Indian Cinema
Anders, Allison
BORDER RADIO
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule
review)
Not connected with the nonfiction
book of the same title, this is a low-budget, black-and-white independent
feature (1987) written and directed by three UCLA film-school graduates
(Allison Anders, Dean Lent, and Kurt Voss) about the rock scene in Los Angeles.
After cutting a new album, a rock star named Jeff Bailey (Chris D.) steals some
money owed to him and heads for his trailer in Ensenada
DVD Talk [Jamie S. Rich]
also seen here: Criterion Confessions
The 1980s was a wayward decade for a lot of people, but for punk rockers in particular, it was definitely not the best of times.
Punk was spawned from the boredom of the late 1970s, but it didn't take long for it to go mainstream. By the mid-'80s, the movement had been assimilated by popular culture and many of its icons had traded in their bad boy ways for a much shinier Yankee dollar. This left those who wanted to maintain the original vision of the genre in a bit of a wasteland: too out of date to matter, too stubborn to just fade away.
The 1987 independent feature Border Radio sits itself down smack in the middle of this conundrum. Made itself with a punk rock spirit, it was shot on 16mm black-and-white film over several years with a trio of student directors at its helm. The screenplay was written in tandem by the filmmakers--Allison Anders (Gas Food Lodging), Dean Lent (now a cinematographer), and Kurt Voss (Down and Out With the Dolls)--but in the spirit of true collaboration, it was fleshed out on set, with the cast improvising new scenarios. The result is something loose, ragged, and short, like a punk song on film; the downside is, like a lot of punk, it's a little shallow, stuck on one note for the duration.
Shot in
When Jeff and Dean were at the end of their rope, they teamed up with
obnoxious hanger-on Chris (Chris Shearer, Grace of My Heart) to rob a
nightclub who they felt had exploited them (how punk rock is that?). As Border
Radio begins, some thugs from the club have come looking for their money,
and so Jeff hightails it down to
Border Radio bears the influence of Jim Jarmusch. It goes for the same kind of meandering ordinariness that was the hallmark of early Jarmusch classics like Stranger than Paradise. This is a difficult conceit to manufacture, however, you have to have a special eye for it. Either none of the three directors were cut out for this kind of storytelling or there were too many cooks in this kitchen, and so no real direction could be found. Border Radio is all over the place. It has traces of road pictures, crime movies, faux documentary, and kitchen-sink drama, but it never settles on one element long enough to give the movie any cohesion. At one point, John Doe even declares that he's in a western, and there truly is the whiff of the outlaw lingering around the production, but when it comes down to it, Border Radio plays it a little too safe to truly stand apart.
So, the sum of all these parts is that Border Radio is an interesting curio of its time. While some of the participants went on to greater cinematic glory--Anders has made some good pictures, and John Doe has been excellent in quite a large number of character roles--Border Radio is merely the entryway at the edge of that glory, and it comes off as such.
by Chris Morris Where Punk Lived, Criterion essay
Turner Classic Movies Richard Harland Smith
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
Projections Jon
digitallyOBSESSED!
[Rich Rosell]
GAS, FOOD LODGING
Nora (Adams)
waits tables and scrapes by, single-handedly raising two teenage daughters in a
clapped-out trailer. Romance seems as scarce as rain in her New Mexico
backwater: Nora and elder daughter Trudi (Skye) know what it means to be left
high and dry, and even young Shade (Balk) suffers rejection at the hands of
dreamy Darius (Leitch). But hopes of love die hard, and there's escapism to be
found at the local Spanish fleapit. Shade decides to go father-hunting, but an
attempt at match-making and the hunt for her long-absent dad (Brolin) yield
decidedly mixed results. Far from gloomy fare, this debut from an American
independent offers humour, wry observation and sympathetic characterisation.
Without patronising her characters, writer-director Anders captures the
frustrations of both generations, and the concluding optimistic note isn't
forced. Delightfully oddball and strangely sane.
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Generally, people go to the movies to escape from reality. Gas Food Lodging provides this escape by mirroring life so perfectly that the audience feels like they're watching real people in real situations rather than actors in a film. The dialogue, actions, and movements are as genuine as can be found in any motion picture.
This is director Allison Anders' first feature, and she readily admits that much of the story is culled from her own experiences (even though the screenplay is based on a novel by Richard Peck). In Gas Food Lodging, she wanted to present the difficulties of being a single mother in a setting where the economic climate is bleak. It's a scenario that many will be able to relate to on a personal level.
The plot is effective in its simplicity, and there is enough quiet intensity to keep it from becoming stagnant. Gas Food Lodging follows about a year in the life of a three-female household (mother and two teenage daughters). There are numerous subtle touches which underscore Anders' aptitude with the material and her cast. The messages in Gas Food Lodging, all of which deal with consequences, are presented obliquely.
This film is highlighted by several noteworthy performances. Ione Skye (of Say Anything) takes on the less-than-glamorous role of Trudi, an affection-starved girl who believes that using her body is the only way to get men to like her. As believable as Skye's performance is, she's upstaged by the younger Fairuza Balk (as Shade), with her wonderfully expressive wide eyes. Brooke Adams and James Brolin round out the cast as Nora and John, the divorced parents of the two girls.
Gas Food Lodging deals with issues, but its strength lies in the
characters that struggle at the heart of the story. Anders has made this film
far from the glitz of
In Laramie , N.M.
This arid wasteland is the
perfect setting for Anders's brand of desolate, low-key poetry. The characters
in this impressive debut feature are ordinary folks, working people and plain
enough, but of that complicated modern variety that cannot be called simple.
All three of Anders's women are
suffering in varying degrees over the departure of the father (James Brolin,
who makes a brief but heartbreaking appearance late in the film). And all three
are struggling to define themselves -- to understand their strengths, their
relationships and their places in the world. For Trudi, the one-horseness of Laramie
Trudi is the movie's squeakiest
wheel. When she comes home late, as usual, after parking with a high school
hotshot who has heard about her reputation, she and her mother violently lock
horns, tearing and clawing at one another emotionally in one of the most brutal
mother-daughter confrontations ever seen in an American movie. Shade, who is at
the confusing moment of her own sexual awakening, thinks that all Nora needs is
a good man to sweep her off her feet, but Nora is far too self-sufficient and
realistic to expect the clanking armor of a rescuing white knight. She is
lonely, though, and when the hammering she hears early one morning turns out to
be a good-natured (and blatantly flirtatious) satellite dish salesman, she
can't help but respond. He may have gotten her out of bed, but at least he made
her laugh.
These small pleasures are about
the only ones Anders allows. There's no fudging here about the special bonds
between mother and daughter. It's a hard road that Nora faces, and Anders,
who's based the story on firsthand experience as both single mother and child
of a single mother, isn't sentimental about Nora's predicament. Her world isn't
built on dreams; it's a world of trade-offs and settling for what you can get.
When Trudi, who's given a sullen petulance by Skye, becomes pregnant by a
visiting rock hound, Nora assumes her daughter will have an abortion, hoping
perhaps that Trudi can avoid some of the mistakes she had made.
There's no resolution here, and
not much in the way of action. Instead, Anders gives us a collection of keenly
shaped observations and found moments, like the one in which Shade and her new
Mexican American boyfriend stage an impromptu modern dance in the living room
with the boy's deaf mother. It's the singularity of these moments and the
vitality and resilience of these characters that make "Gas Food
Lodging" stand out. The movie Anders has made is about survivors, not
about heroines. It's a great movie about making do.
Not Coming to a Theater Near
You [Beth Gilligan]
CultureCartel.com (Rachel Gordon)
Women's
Studies, University of Maryland [Linda Lopez McAlister]
digitallyOBSESSED!
[Jeff Ulmer]
All Movie
Guide [Andrea LeVasseur]
Austin
Chronicle [Steve Davis]
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Janet Maslin
MI VIDA LOCA
"Mi Vida Loca," Allison Anders's brilliant study of girl gangs in
It's hard not to envy these vibrant Latinas their cool solidarity. The
streets here aren't merely mean; they're sun-drunk and buzzing with life. According
to the popular
Structurally, the picture is a series of fragments, with the narration passed like a baton in a relay race from one character to another. If the film has a main character, it's Sad Girl, and with the three-dot tattoo in the corner of one eye -- they look like tiny teardrops -- she lives up to her name as the gang's melancholy nexus. Sad Girl (Angel Aviles) and Mousie (Seidy Lopez) have been the tightest of friends since childhood. They have watched each other's backs and gone through all the ordeals of growing up together. At first, it looks as if nothing could come between these inseparable soul mates; then Mousie meets Ernesto (Jacob Vargas), a smooth-talking young tough from the neighborhood who romances her and gets her pregnant.
After Mousie has her baby, she becomes so absorbed by her new role as a mother that she doesn't have time for anyone -- not even Ernesto. While she and her daughter trade Eskimo kisses, Ernesto begins to feel lonely and starts putting the moves on Sad Girl.
Like Mousie, Sad Girl has Ernesto's baby too, sparking a bitter feud that dominates the movie's narrative. But though the rivalry between Sad Girl and Mousie gives the material a dramatic spine, Anders is less interested in plot than in the black curve of a character's eyeliner or the trajectory of a well-hurled insult. Her characters exist in revelatory flashes. There's La Blue Eyes (Magali Avarado), a proper girl who studies instead of hanging out but ends up falling for the neighborhood Lothario (Jesse Borrego). And Giggles (Marlo Marron) freaks out her friends after she gets out of jail with her talk of becoming -- of all things -- a computer programmer.
Anders's zigzagging story line allows her to follow side roads that result in beautiful digressions of the sort you wouldn't find in a more conventional film. The best of these is an exquisite scene in which a young gangbanger named Little Sleepy (Gabriel Gonzalez) goes for advice to his older namesake, Big Sleepy (Julian Reyes), who receives the boy with an indulgent deference.
While this free-form approach allows Anders to exploit her extraordinary powers of observation, it occasionally breaks the film's rhythms and disrupts its momentum. Though the picture doesn't build from scene to scene, that doesn't matter: Each segment on its own is richly detailed and vivid.
What matters is the way these homegirls banter and pull together their lives. Working from her own script, Anders has something like perfect pitch for the secret codes between these sisters, and she brushes aside the customary hysteria about life in the 'hood.
In one extraordinary scene, Sad Girl is approached in the park by an old friend who's so strung out on drugs that he's barely recognizable. Instead of flashing a knife or hitting her up for money, he asks her if maybe she might talk to him from time to time. Granted, it's not the stuff of headlines, but just maybe it's the stuff of life.
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Caryn James)
GRACE OF MY HEART
Film Intuition Jen Johans
Illeana Douglas turns in an amazing performance in this
woefully underrated musical epic from Allison Anders as a young
singer/songwriter who leaves her life of wealth, privilege and lady-like
obedience for
Albuquerque Alibi [Karla Esquivel]
Allison
Anders (Gas Food and Lodging, Mi Vida Loca) is possibly one
of the best female filmmakers of our time. She aptly has made it in
Grace of My Heart, Anders' latest film, stays true to her
style. The film is an epic journey of one woman's drive to literally find her
voice in the male-dominated music industry of the '60s and early '70s. Grace
centers on Edna Buxton (Illeanna Douglas), who wins a singing contest and
goes to
On her way to the top, Denise
struggles through various relationships with the men in her life. She marries a
music critic/wannabe songwriter (Eric
Stoltz) only to find that he is draining all of her creative energy. She
ends up a single mother in pursuit of other dead-end relationships. She has a
brief affair with a married DJ (Bruce Davidson) and babysits what is supposed
to be Brian Wilson (Matt Dillon) of the Beach Boys. As the men in her life fall
apart, we see how astutely the women remain calm.
Grace of My Heart has some very strong points. The tempo of
the film feels soft and comfortable. Nothing ever jumps out for shock value.
Even the tragedies are dealt with using a certain finesse. When Matt
Dillon's surfer-boy character takes his last walk into the ocean, the scene
is edited with visions of Denise joyously watching her friend's band play at a
club. It's a nice paradox--salty and sensuous. The film does, however, tend to
drag to its bittersweet ending. Fortunately, the acting remains a strong focal
point throughout. Illeana
Douglas gives the film the strength and grace it needs, while John Tuturro
should definitely be nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar (or at least a
Best Original Hairdo award). If only they had lost Matt
Dillon. I can't for the life of me figure out why in every movie he still
looks like he stepped off the set of
Denise Waverly is a woman's woman.
I'm sure many women, regardless of position, can relate to the need to stick
out in a man's world. They can relate to the struggle of being a single mother
and having relationships go awry. Grace of My Heart is a meditative
film. It's almost like looking back on a scrapbook and wondering how you
could've worn this or acted like that. Though the film isn't autobiographical,
it's easy to perhaps see a lot of Allison Anders' life in the film.
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Movie Magazine
International [Monica Sullivan]
DVD Verdict Dean Roddey
PopcornQ
Review Lawrence Chua
Edinburgh U Film
Society [Geof Jarvis]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Los Angeles Times (Jack Mathews)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York
Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
SUGAR TOWN
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Loosely
inspired by Carole King's life, indie stalwart Allison Anders' underrated Grace
Of My Heart chronicled a talented songwriter's anonymous role in the Brill
Building, an efficient factory that churned out girl-pop hits in the '50s and
'60s. Her follow-up, Sugar Town, also tells a parallel history of rock
'n' roll, but in contrast, its cadre of L.A. burnouts and wannabes are cast
adrift, disconnected from the music industry. In a fit of inspiration, Anders
and co-writer/director Kurt Voss wrote the film in less than a week, which
probably accounts for both its invigorating creative urgency and its serious
third-act problems. Ambitious, knowing, and often savagely funny, Sugar Town
surveys the fringes of the rock scene, centering on a "supergroup" of
'80s leftovers trying to post a comeback. In a brilliant piece of casting,
Anders and Voss convinced real-life '80s leftovers—Duran Duran's John Taylor,
Power Station's Michael Des Barres, and Spandau Ballet's Martin Kemp—to star,
and their authenticity and humble self-deprecation are a consistent pleasure.
The film splinters, Short Cuts-style, into numerous subplots: Taylor and
wife Rosanna Arquette, the heroine of Z-grade slasher movies with titles such
as Bury Your Bones In My Garage, discover he has an illegitimate son;
aging roadie John Doe reluctantly goes on tour to support his growing family
and junkie brother; and aspiring songstress Jade Gordon ruthlessly exploits
everyone she meets on her way to the top, including emotionally unstable
production designer Ally Sheedy. Anders and Voss create more than a dozen vivid
characters, but they're not so adept at tying up all the loose ends. Sugar
Town suffers from a plodding, obligatory conclusion, but not before offering
a witty, sympathetic glimpse at a group of rock stars coping with passing fame
and real adult responsibility.
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Cross some Robert Altman with a
little bit of All About Eve and you end up with a brew that tastes
something like
Philadelphia City
Paper review by Sam Adams
culturevulture.net Gary Mairs, also seen here: culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti
Plume-Noire.com
Film Review Fred Thom
Film Journal International (Shirley Sealy)
The Boston Phoenix Peter Keough
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Janet Maslin
THINGS BEHIND THE SUN
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Since
emerging as part of the early-'90s indie-film boom with Gas Food Lodging,
a sharply realized character study drawing on her experiences as a single
mother, Allison Anders' career has been dominated by her passions for rock 'n'
roll and intensely personal filmmaking. Those two strands meet with
frustratingly uneven results in Things Behind The Sun, a low-budget
drama that uses the rock-world milieu of Anders' Grace Of My Heart and Sugar
Town as the setting for a semi-autobiographical look at the devastating
aftershocks of rape. Shot on digital video (and so ugly that the film could
double as a propaganda piece about the dangers of digital filmmaking), Sun
stars Kim Dickens as a Florida singer who attempts to bury her pain as a rape
survivor under a cloud of booze, casual sex, and self-destructive behavior.
Alerted that a Dickens song about rape is shooting up the college-rock charts,
editor Gabriel Mann pushes his magazine to run a story about her, and when he
insists that he knows who raped her—information unknown to the police—he's sent
to get that story. When he arrives in Florida, it becomes clear that his
involvement with Dickens and her decades-old rape goes well beyond curiosity
and professional duty, and as Mann and Dickens fall into an uneasy flirtation,
each is forced to wrestle with the event that defined them both. Clearly a
labor of love for everyone involved, Things Behind The Sun nevertheless
gets off to an awful start, hampered by ham-fisted exposition, clumsy dialogue,
unsightly cinematography, and acting so stiff that the film begins to feel like
a socially conscious Movie Of The Week hijacked by the Porn Film Players.
Thankfully, Sun improves as it goes along, as Anders wisely shifts the
focus to Dickens, whose mixture of childlike vulnerability and drunken bravado
rivals Jennifer Jason Leigh's raw, electrifying performance in Georgia.
Also on board is the terrific Don Cheadle, who invests the seemingly thankless
role of Dickens' manager, protector, and long-suffering semi-boyfriend with
pathos and gravity. Despite their best efforts, Sun never fully recovers
from its excruciating beginning, although the fact that it rebounds at all is a
testament to Anders' conviction and Dickens' remarkable lead performance.
filmcritic.com peeks Behind the Sun Rachel Gordon
Allison Anders not
only has enough balls to revisit one of the worst experiences of her life in Things
Behind the Sun, but she travels through emotional territory normally
unheard of in films based on rape -- namely a male character who is a victim
and a perpetrator at the same time.
As a woman, it is always difficult to watch a movie involving rape. When filmed
realistically, as Things is, it’s impossible to distance yourself from
the onscreen pain. And when a film is not constructed with realism the result
is anger from shoddy storytelling, or with a filmmaker failing miserably to
grasp the emotional honesty in a situation they can’t understand.
Owen (Gabriel Mann) works for a music magazine. A colleague wants to do a story
on Sherry (Kim Dickens), whose music has become popular on campuses after
building a following through the
Sherry doesn’t appear as a victimized angel like other women have in films
about rape. She makes herself easily available for sex, especially after
alcoholically anesthetizing herself, despite the efforts of her well-meaning
boyfriend Chuck (Don Cheadle). She treats her fellow band members like peons.
And for some reason, once a year, keeps passing out drunk in front of a house
she can no longer recognize.
There is a fascinating emotional struggle as Owen attempts to help Sherry
remember the details of her worst experience, supposedly for her sake but also
to purge himself of the guilt that still doesn’t allow him to achieve orgasm.
After all, it is Sherry that initially influenced his appreciation for music,
and hence his adult life. It’s understandable that he would feel as if he owes
her some peace. Unfortunately, he cannot define what will give her that calm,
so this assistance is also pushed away.
Sherry’s turnaround to work for a healthy life is a bit forced, possibly
because after showing one self-destructive scene after another this change
seems so quick. By the same token, you need her to find some inner strength, or
the film becomes depressingly unwatchable.
This is a hard film to watch, and yet it adheres to a perspective important for
both men and women to see. It’s not a story of good versus evil, though it's
based on a horrible crime. Films like The
Accused are powerful in that they
comment on the short-term effects of rape -- namely the immediate needs of the
victim. What sets Things Behind the Sun apart from such predecessors is
that it takes these stories one step further, to the severe aftermath of living
with these memories years later.
culturevulture.net Phil Freeman, also seen here: culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti
Things Behind
The Sun Gerald Peary
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Andersen, Thomas
RED HOLLYWOOD B 89
USA (118 mi)
1996, re-edited 2013 co-director: Noël Burch
Whatever he tries to
do is wrong. Because it has to be wrong. Because the situation is such that
whatever you do is wrong. All films about crime are about capitalism, because
capitalism is about crime. I mean, quote-unquote, morally speaking. At least
that's what I used to think. Now I'm convinced.
—Abraham Polonsky, speaking about his film Force of Evil (1948), from Red Hollywood, 1995.
After all, politics is
justified only by success, although the only battles worth fighting are the
ones for lost causes.
—Abraham Polonsky, Red Hollywood, 1995.
Thom Andersen is
interestingly a Chicagoan who attended Berkeley in the early 60’s before
attending the USC Film School, becoming a film programmer at the LA Film Forum,
the maker of a few experimental documentary films, comprised primarily of found
images and video clips, while now he teaches film theory and history at the
California Institute of the Arts. Andersen
is perhaps best known for his highly acclaimed film documentary Los
Angeles Plays Itself (2003), a video essay that explores the way the city of Los
Angeles has been presented in the movies, consisting entirely of clips from
other films. But he’s also known for his
1985 essay Red Hollywood, which
documents, among other things, actor John Garfield’s involvement with the
political left and the Hollywood blacklist.
It’s out of that essay that he discovered two blacklisted Hollywood
directors still living in Europe, John Berry and Cy Endfield, both former
employees of Orson Welles and both named as subversives before the HUAC
committee. Berry served time in prison
in 1947 for defying the committee, before ironically directing the short
documentary that denounces McCarthyism,
THE HOLLYWOOD TEN (1950), currently available on Criterion, while decades later
he directed one of the first mainstream black films, CLAUDINE (1974), while
Endfield drew the committee’s interest with his harrowing indictment of mob
rule in THE SOUND OF FURY (1950), which the committee labeled “un-American.” Based on their extensive knowledge of the
era, and the assistance of Noël Burch who was living in France, Andersen
expanded his essay into a book published in France, Les communistes de
Hollywood: autre chose que des martyrs (The
Hollywood Communists — Something Other Than Martyrs). This collective effort led to the film,
another insightful essay, restored and re-edited seventeen years later in 2013,
documenting the influence of communists and political leftists, mostly actors,
screenwriters, or directors in the 30’s and 40’s until the House Committee on
Un-American Activities in the postwar 40’s and early 50’s took a particular
interest in rooting out communism from the movie industry, forcing people to
name names and smear reputations, eventually creating a Hollywood blacklisting that prevented certain individuals from working in the
motion picture business for over a decade.
Using clips from 53
films, where with just a few exceptions, most all are unfamiliar and have not
dented the cultural landscape. What’s
immediately interesting is the mainstream Hollywood format in nearly all of
them, where what’s unusual is the attempt to place any social content into the
storyline. Seen in hindsight, the impact
is negligible, hardly worth the fuss, as social content since the Vietnam War
era of the 60’s has routinely been infused into quality films, where it takes
an academic scrutiny like this to even uncover similarities between these
earlier films. Narrated by Billy
Woodberry, the film is divided into seven sections—myths, war, class, sexes,
hate, crime, and death—analyzing the impact in each area, with the directors
laying out their objective, “The victims of the Hollywood blacklist have been
canonized as martyrs, but their film work in Hollywood is still largely
denigrated or ignored. Red
Hollywood considers this work to demonstrate how the communists of
Hollywood were sometimes able to express their ideas in the films they wrote
and directed.” Much like Douglas Sirk in
the 50’s, these artists were largely operating under the surface, as with a few
exceptions, they were implementing complex ideas into ordinary mainstream films
that felt standard in every other sense.
Historically, one must recall that leftist ideas and the influence of
the Communist Party in America were outgrowths of the Great Depression,
resulting in one of the great class struggles in our nation’s history. As is pointed out here, “In the 30’s, class
solidarity was still an ideal. The
homeless were not yet the excluded,” where in that era the idea of helping
others in need was commonplace and ingrained into the fabric of society. Similarly, speaking about communism and the
Russian revolution was not altogether frowned upon, as historically it was
still a work in progress, where even Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is based upon
his own personal experience joining the communist partisans fighting against
the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, and shortly afterwards Russia
became our World War II ally fighting against fascism in Nazi Germany. It was only after the war that communism
became a dirty word, as by then Stalin had all but disregarded any pretense of
a worker’s revolution, becoming a totalitarian police state exterminating
millions of Russians while sending others to the gulags of Siberia.
America experienced its
own Cold War policy here at home by portraying about 150 people in the
entertainment business as communists or anti-American subversives, creating a
decade-long blacklist, including the infamous Hollywood
Ten, where the humor of the day was Billy Wilder’s famous quip, “Of the
ten, two had talent, the others were just unfriendly.” Thankfully, this films gets under the surface
to explore who these men really are, as some are interviewed, where they have a
chance to explain what their agenda was in the making of these films, and
mostly it was simply to raise the level of awareness about social issues that
had not yet been explored. While
communist screenwriter John Howard Lawson is seen defying the HUAC inquiry in
1947, Henry Fonda is seen in a similar moral quandary about the Spanish civil
war in a film written by Lawson, BLOCKADE (1938). Ayn Rand testifies before the committee as an
expert on Russian history and culture, where she alleges all the smiling faces
in SONG OF RUSSIA (1943) are an outrage, as nobody smiles in Russia (this is
her expertise, really), especially on their way to work in the fields. Actually the film does bear a simplistic
similarity to Disney movies, specifically SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN DWARFS
(1937) and the song “Whistle While You Work.”
Former communist screenwriter Paul Jarrico explains the idea behind the
film was essentially American war propaganda, since it put our wartime ally in
a good light, a postwar reconstruction observation that “we’re all in this
together.” Another communist
screenwriter, Ring Lardner Jr, one of the Hollywood
Ten, (one of the two with talent, apparently), co-wrote the breezy comedy
WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942), featuring Katherine Hepburn in full feminist mode,
where she’s so skilled at simultaneously balancing various social functions and
events, that she’s seen as the international woman of the year, that is until
Spencer Tracy, with just a scowl or a frown, expresses Lardner’s
dissatisfaction at how she’s so continually busy and impressively on the move
that she doesn’t have time left to be a woman anymore. While many of the clips are hilarious, such
as how Russian women behind the Iron Curtain are portrayed as so tough and
invincible that men cower in their presence, but then we see a short written by
Albert Maltz (another one of the Hollywood
Ten) with Frank Sinatra in 1945 conveying a postwar message of religious
tolerance to a bunch of bullying kids by singing to them “The House I Live In,
That’s America to Me,” The
House I live in with Frank Sinatra - YouTube (10:16, though the sequence
starts at 2:45), a theme echoed later in this film with Paul Robeson singing
the same song over the closing credits.
There are some
revelations here, where we learn that fellow communist screenwriters Samuel
Ornitz and Robert Tasker helped write HELL’S HIGHWAY (1932), considered the
only Hollywood film of the 30’s to treat a strike sympathetically. Perhaps the most impressive example of
blacklisted artists working together is the film Salt of
the Earth (1954), based on an actual 1950 miner’s strike, revealing the
prejudice against the Mexican-American workers who fought to obtain wage parity
with the Anglo workers in the same jobs, considered years ahead if its time as
an indictment of both racism and sexism, as it was the miner’s wives that
eventually took to the picket lines. Written,
directed, and produced by members of the original Hollywood
Ten, financed in part by the actual union involved, it was called communist
propaganda by The Hollywood Reporter and
was investigated by the FBI. The film
was voted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry in
1992. The subject of crime offered many
of the best quotes, where heard in the narration over a clip of THE ASPHALT
JUNGLE (1950), “The crime movie had often been a privileged genre for social commentary,
from both left and right. The right
portrayed crime as a symptom of social disintegration, the left presented it as
a form of capitalist accumulation.”
Former communist Abraham Polonsky, director of Force of
Evil (1948), a masterpiece of the film noir genre, humorously suggests “All
films about crime are about capitalism, because capitalism is about crime. I mean, quote-unquote, morally speaking. At least that’s what I used to think. Now I’m convinced.” The film starred John Garfield, an actor
synonymous with gritty, hard-nosed, and working-class characters, having grown
up in poverty in the streets of New York during the Depression. And while his wife was a communist, there’s
no indication Garfield was ever a member, nonetheless the HUAC committee
hounded Garfield to his death, as after his original testimony, he learned they
were reviewing his testimony for possible perjury charges, where he died of a
heart attack, allegedly aggravated by the stress of the blacklisting, at the
age of 39. This followed the news of
fellow actor, Canada Lee, as both were part of Lee Strasberg’s New York Group Theatre and were named by director
Elia Kazan as Communist Party members in his testimony before the committee,
with both actors dying shortly after being added to the blacklist. Despite its good intentions, even after viewing
the film we know just as little about many of the featured artists, as the
focus is entirely upon their work, and not the artists themselves. As a result, the anti-Semitic current running
against many of these men during their lifetimes is omitted from the film. Nonetheless, it is uniquely interesting to
find evidence of such progressive thought from little known movies of the 30’s
and 40’s.
Thom Andersen and Noël Burch:
Red Hollywood - Redcat
Remastered and re-edited 17 years after its original
release, Thom Andersen and Noël Burch’s insightful essay film Red Hollywood
(1996/2013, digital video, 114 min.) still offers a radically different
perspective on a key period in the history of American cinema. “The victims of
the Hollywood blacklist have been canonized as martyrs, but their film work in
Hollywood is still largely denigrated or ignored,” Andersen and Burch noted in
1996. “Red Hollywood considers this work to demonstrate how the Communists
of Hollywood were sometimes able to express their ideas in the films they wrote
and directed.” The work draws on extensive original research, interviews with
blacklisted artists, and clips from 53 films that span numerous genres and
raise questions about war, race relations, class solidarity, women’s labor and
the studio system itself.
Chicago
Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule review)
A highly illuminating, groundbreaking, and entertaining video documentary by Thom Andersen and Noel Burch about the film work of Hollywood communists—mainly writers, directors, and actors—using commentaries, interviews, and a good many film clips (1995). Many of the clips come from films of the 30s, 40s, and 50s that have received virtually no attention before; this video offers new ways of looking at these films—and also at Hollywood movies in general. Contrary to the received wisdom, many victims of the Hollywood blacklist worked a lot of political and social content into their studio assignments, and the beliefs of these party members and fellow travelers were far from uniform or monolithic. If you've ever wondered about things such as novelist Nathanael West's work as a screenwriter or what communists had to say for and against Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust, this provocative investigation has plenty to impart.
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
One of the most original figures in American independent cinema, Thom Andersen—subject of a four-day retro at Anthology Film Archives—is a non-academic academic whose film practice is rooted in the '60s avant-garde and whose three features are closer to essays than documentaries and as much manifestos as they are found-footage assemblages. The hour-long Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974) succeeds in making Muybridge, the 19th-line century inventor of animated animal motion studies, seem like a '70s serial photographer or structural filmmaker—complete with a quote from Chairman Mao. Last year's Los Angeles Plays Itself, the number one documentary on the Voice film critics’ poll, analyzes the way that Los Angeles has been represented in the movies, and has been described by Andersen as a “city symphony in reverse."
Andersen's middle and least-known documentary is another structuralist inquiry into movie-land history. Red Hollywood, made in 1995 in collaboration with theorist-historian Noël Burch, makes a significant (and entertaining) contribution to the saga of the blacklist by taking allegations of the House Un-American Activities Committee at their word. Treating the movies written or directed by Hollywood leftists as ideological constructs, Andersen and Burch go looking for evidence of progressive politics; presenting clips from little-known movies of the '30s and '40s (and annotating those clips with the recollections of surviving blacklistees), they find it.
The
Committee for the First Amendment: Huston vs. the HUAC Icebox Movies, August 9, 2010
Huston later talks about how his Committee had to clear its
own name, since obviously such a group could not be opposed to the HUAC without
itself being suspected of Communism. Among others, Huston's group included
Bogart and Bacall, as well as Edward G. Robinson, Burt Lancaster, Gene Kelly
and Judy Garland. But eventually, the heat got too strong--particularly for the
actors involved in the group. I highly doubt the public could have cared what
the filmmakers thought of the HUAC hearings, but actors were another matter:
audiences pay to see movies because of the actors. They usually care about what
the actors think in real life. So, eventually, Bogart and Bacall were so stung
by the criticism that they had to quit. They had to pack up their bags and go
home. Huston was left to fight it alone, with his fellow filmmaking artists.
Among those filmmaking artists was Billy Wilder. My favorite of the stories
Huston tells during this chapter of his book is the story of him and Wilder
banding together and standing up for their beliefs, when nobody else would:
People were required to take oaths of allegiance in order to keep their
jobs. This seemed to me both childish and insulting as well as an extremely
dangerous precedent. Obviously, any Communist would take the oath immediately.
At a general meeting of the Screen Directors Guild a Machiavellian character
named Leo McCarey--an Irish director of sophisticated comedy--proposed that the
question of whether to take the oath or not be decided by a show of hands,
rather than by secret ballot, so that no one would dare oppose it. I looked on
in amazement as everyone in the room except Billy Wilder and me raised their
hands in an affirmative vote. Even Willy Wyler, who was sitting out of my
sight, went along. Billy was sitting next to me, and he took his cue from my
action. When the negative vote was called for, I raised my hand, and Billy
hesitantly followed suit. I doubt if he knew why, but he could tell he was in
deep trouble from the muted roar that followed. I am sure it was one of the
bravest things that Billy, as a naturalized German, had ever done. There were
150 to 200 directors at this meeting, and here Billy and I sat alone with our
hands raised in protest against the loyalty oath. I felt like turning over the
table over on that bunch of assholes! It was a long time before I attended
another Guild meeting, and when I did, it was a different story.
During the inevitable Q&A after a Northwest Film Forum screening of the 1996 documentary, “Red Hollywood,” with one of the two documentarians, Thom Andersen, in attendance, an audience member, perhaps equally inevitably, objected to the documentary’s very existence.
“Red Hollywood” examines the work of those screenwriters and directors who were blacklisted during the late 1940s and early 1950s. These artists, Andersen and Noel Burch contend, are increasingly portrayed as mere victims of the blacklist, when, as Andersen said in his brief introduction to the film, “They had done something ... working within the confines of the Hollywood system.”
That’s what bothered this audience member, a Jewish woman in her sixties. She thought that that something was accusatory; that the doc made a hero out of Joe McCarthy.
“Why would you think that?” Andersen responded matter-of-factly. “What, in the documentary, would make you think that?”
She admitted there was nothing in there per se. Her objection was more of the “Why give ammunition to the opposition?” variety. She asked, “Why make the documentary in the first place?”
Andersen, in his 70s now, with unruly white hair, is a quiet, contemplative, occasionally apologetic man. He thought, viewing the doc again, that parts could’ve been cut. (I agree.) He admitted, yes, maybe they should’ve talked about the anti-Semitic undertones of the blacklist. But in his response to this question, he wasn’t apologetic. Why did he make the doc? He alluded to the last scene we see: Abraham Polonksy reading, charmingly, from his script to “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here” (1969), the first film he directed, or got credit for directing, after decades on the blacklist. It’s a scene between the hunted Indian, Willie Boy (Robert Blake), and a woman, Lola (Katherine Ross):
Lola: Willie, are you going to kill them?
Willie Boy: If I have to.
Lola: What do you mean, “If you have to?”
Willie Boy: I mean if they keep comin’.
Lola: But they’re white, Willie. They’ll shoot forever.
Willie Boy: How long is that? Less than you think.
Lola: It’s crazy, Willie! You can’t win. You can’t beat them, Willie,
ever.
Willie Boy: Maybe... maybe. But they’ll know I was here.
That’s why he made the doc, Andersen said. So people will know they were there.
Great response.
My response to the woman’s concerns, her fear that the doc was right-wing, was essentially: “You’re kidding.” Because my response to Andersen’s contention that the doc shows the political propaganda of the Hollywood communists is essentially: “That’s it?”
There’s just not much there there.
Sure, we see the upbeat, smiling tractor lessons of “Song of Russia” (1943), co-written by Paul Jarrico, who, in 1950, was named before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), before which he himself refused to testify; but the movie was essentially American war propaganda, since it put our wartime ally in a good light.
Yes, we see “Mission to Moscow” (1943), made at the behest of FDR, and co-written by Howard Koch, who was blacklisted by Red Channels in the 1950s. Koch’s other credits include such communist propaganda as “The Sea Hawk” (1940), “Sergeant York” (1941) and “Casablanca” (1942).
Sure, we get scenes where female factory workers pool their resources to rent one fancy place rather than four crappy ones (“Tender Comrade” (1943), by Dalton Trumbo and Edward Dmytryk, two of the Hollywood 10), and, yes, we get scenes that mock business (“We Who Are Young” (1940), written by Trumbo), or show female independence (“I Can Get It For You Wholesale,” from 1951, co-written by Abraham Polonsky), but there’s nothing inherently communist or socialist about any of it. If anything, the tepidity of these scenes demonstrates how overwhelmingly conservative Hollywood in the studio era was—and, I would argue, remains.
No, the real propaganda, the propaganda so powerful we don’t recognize it as propaganda, isn’t from the left at all. It’s this: love leads to marriage which leads to a happy ending; good and evil are absolute and obvious; and the best way for a lone man to achieve justice, for himself or others, is through the use of violence. These are the main messages we’ve been getting from Hollywood for the past 100 years. They are, for all the attacks on Hollywood from the right, essentially conservative messages.
The bigger problem with “Red Hollywood,” though, is structural. If the intention of the documentarians is to restore artistic integrity to the artists by owning up to their political viewpoints, why not focus on those artists? Give us sections on Lardner, Trumbo, Polonksy, and Lawson. Make it clear which films they worked on, and what, if anything, could be read into these films, and what, if anything, got cut. Give us a sense of their lives in Hollywood. Give us a sense of the strength of the left in 1930s Hollywood, and of the strength of socialism among 1930s Jewish communities, and how anti-Semitic all the 1940s and 1950s red-baiting ultimately was.
Instead, the movie is divided into sections, WAR, CLASS, SEX, HATE, CRIME, which is less illuminating than confusing. It causes us to veer between the early 1930s and early 1950s, vastly different periods in American culture. The writers and directors—who they are and what they believed—are mere afterthoughts in this process.
I liked Polonsky and “Willie Boy” but I might’ve ended the doc with “Salt of the Earth,” a 1954 film, written, directed and produced by blacklisted artists, which showed, for the first time in any film, a strike from the worker’s point of view. As interesting to me as the film itself, which is available for streaming online, is the critical reaction from Bowsley Crowther, the generally conservative movie reviewer for The New York Times. After delineating the troubled people behind the production, and the troubled production itself, he wrote:
In the light of this agitated history, it is somewhat surprising to find that "Salt of the Earth" is, in substance, simply a strong pro-labor film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the Mexican-Americans with whom it deals ...
The real dramatic crux of the picture is the stern and bitter conflict within the membership of the union. It is the issue of whether the women shall have equality of expression and of strike participation with the men. And it is along this line of contention that Michael Wilson's tautly muscled script develops considerable personal drama, raw emotion and power.
Even let loose outside the studio system, these blacklisted writers, directors and producers, commie bastards all, simply wanted to tell a good story.
Redirecting
the Canon | Jonathan Rosenbaum
August 9, 1996
Red
Hollywood: Seminal Film Essay of 1995 Restored | Emanuel Levy
The
unquiet memory of the Hollywood Blacklist, review by Clay ... Clay Steinman from Jump Cut, Fall 2012, also
seen here in the notes without photos: Unquiet
memory of Hollywood blacklist, text version - Jump Cut
The anti-communist
purge of the American film industry - World ... David Walsh from The World Socialist Web
Site, February 4, 2009
Hollywood on
Trial: a timely reminder - World Socialist Web Site Charles Bogle, December 10, 2009
The
ASC: Thom Andersen: “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Part One ... John’s
Bailiwick Blog
UN-AMERICAN “Un-American Hollywood, Politics and Film in
the Blacklist Era” edited by Frank Krutnik, Steve Neale, Brian Neve, and Peter
Stanfield (369 pages in its entirety, pdf version)
The
Hollywood Left: Aesthetics and Politics - New Left Review Paul Buhle from The New Left Review, July/August, 1995, (pdf format, page 1 only)
Review
Essay'Red Hollywood' Brian Neve
essay, August 2, 2010 (pdf format, page 1 only)
Thom Andersen and Noël Burch's
Red Hollywood - Light Industry
The
Left Front in Film: Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art ...
notcoming.com |
An Interview with Thom Andersen Evan
Kindley interview of Thom Andersen, November 16, 2009
The
Reality of Film; Thom Anderson on "Los Angeles Plays Itself ... Steve Erickson interview with Thom Andersen
from indieWIRE, July 27, 2004
New
York Times Stephen Holden
Thom Andersen - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Hollywood blacklist -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Hollywood Ten -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF A 95
USA
This is the city, Los
Angeles, California. They make movies here.
I live here. Sometimes I think
that gives me the right to complain about the way it’s been treated in movies.
—Thom Andersen, film narration by Encke King
Consisting entirely of
clips used from more than two hundred films, where one website lists them all, List of movies mentioned in Los Angeles
Plays Itself (in order of appearance), with an accompanying narration,
Andersen is quick to credit film editor Yoo Seung-Hyun for her
“research/text/production,” forming a stream-of-conscious video mosaic
humorously explaining how “the most photographed city in the world” could be so
utterly misrepresented. Originally
intended to be a lecture shown to his students at the California Institute of
the Arts where he has taught film and videomaking since 1987, Anderson grew
frustrated by the perpetual lies and distortions expressed by Hollywood studio
pictures about the history of the city, but the overall length and meticulous
detail of movie clips makes this more of a historical document, a time capsule
that in essence freezes in our imaginations countless distorted images of the
city, gleefully pointed out in detail by the narrator, Encke King, becoming an
essay on film itself and how it mythologizes what it sees. Divided into three sections, “The City as
Backdrop,” “The City as Character,” and “The City as Subject,” with an
intermission somewhere in between, the bombardment of early clips is quite
simply hilarious, something of a sensory explosion of Hollywood cinema mixing
the familiar with the completely obscure, from classics to B-movies, where
Andersen’s voice of reason loves to assert “silly geography makes for silly
movies,” identifying a chase scene in Sylvester Stallone’s COBRA (1986) where
the chase jumps from the Venice Canals to the Los Angeles harbor 30 miles
away. Movies never bother to explain
these minor impossibilities, but instead create an overall story built upon the
viewer’s supposition that it doesn’t know any better. Because Andersen lives in Los Angeles, and
knows better, he proceeds to debunk the myths, becoming a laceratingly
sarcastic piece of vitriol by the end lambasting against the need for movies to
continually force-feed a big lie rather than address simple and more meaningful
truths that exist for ordinary people.
Lacking that, Andersen is quite right in suggesting how movies “betray
my city,” but the blunt force of the director’s passionate emphasis and the
rarity of the film clips themselves make this a film whose value will only
increase over time.
From an outsider’s
view, Los Angeles is one big cliché, a sprawling city built in the desert,
spread out over such an extensive geographical reach that the public transit
system is all but non-existent, where everyone needs a car, creating a
continuously clogged inter-connecting freeway system that is choked and
suffocated by the damning presence of too many cars, where the toxic effects of
seemingly immovable smog asphyxiates everyone’s lungs…but the sun shines every
day! Certainly of
interest is perennial New Yorker Woody Allen’s take on the city, claiming the
only thing good he had to say about Los Angeles was that you could turn right
on a red light. Offering bits of
insight and wisdom from film to film, certainly part of the fun in viewing this
film is whole-heartedly disagreeing with Andersen’s assertions. For every bit of insight he offers, claiming
he loved watching the TV show Dragnet (1951 – 59) because it was the closest thing in America to
Ozu and Bresson with its spare minimalism, or making the intriguing claim about
American independent film legend John Cassavetes, that “His comedies face
up to tragedy and reject it,” which certainly opens up one’s perspective to
call any of his films “comedies,” but after teasing us with this provocative
idea, he then buries his premise with what feels like a callous afterthought,
“For Cassavetes, happiness was the only truth.
So he drank himself to death.” Actually Cassavetes in films like Faces
(1968), Minnie
and Moskowitz (1971), A
Woman Under the Influence (1974), The
Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Love
Streams (1984), was one of the few filmmakers whose
integration of real Los Angeles locations, including shooting films in his own
home, add to the authenticity of his films, where Robert Altman in The
Long Goodbye (1973) and Short Cuts
(1993) follows in his footsteps. Robert Aldrich’s classic film noir
fatalism was never more beautifully expressed than his use of Los Angeles in Kiss Me
Deadly (1955), where Detective Mike Hammer has an actual city address,
visiting places at their real locations, where the contrast between this grim,
real-life authenticity only heightens the final dreamlike qualities of the
apocalyptic ending, perhaps making it an even more horrifying experience
because the audience all along can identify with an essential core reality in
the film.
One of the ideas
posited by the director comes from his provocative statement, “As a rule,
reality is richer than our imaginations,” suggesting some of the more
celebrated films about the city, including CHINATOWN (1974), Blade
Runner (1982), and L.A. CONFIDENTIAL (1997), are cynical, overly fatalistic
views that contribute to a myth of impenetrability, where viewers often confuse
this alternate Hollywood reality for the real thing, using it as a basis of
historical fact. One the other hand,
some of the more eye-opening images uncovered by Andersen are the movies set in
and around the run-down and dilapidated downtown Bunker Hill neighborhood, a now demolished slum with
its irregularly shaped streets, steep angular slope of the Angels Flight tramway,
shabby rooming houses and Victorian-era mansions memorialized by pulp writers
such as Raymond Chandler. The discovery
of Kent Mackenzie’s The
Exiles (1961), a time capsule portrait of the Bunker Hill district in the
50’s, is a revelation, chronicling a day in the life of hard-living and
hard-drinking native American Indians who have left the reservation to seek
non-existent opportunities in the city, causing Andersen to exclaim, “Better
than any other movie, it shows that there was once a city here, before they
tore it down and built a simulacrum.”
It’s here that the director finds the beating heart of city residents
eking out a living, later supported by black independent filmmakers like Billy
Woodberry’s BLESS THEIR LITTLE HEARTS (1984) or Charles Burnett’s KILLER OF
SHEEP (1979) that focus on working-class black families living in South Central
Los Angeles living from paycheck to paycheck which comes across as near
documentary truth without an ounce of artifice about life or the black
experience. It is here that the natural
artistic expression of realism provides more depth and complexity than the more
heralded and critically acclaimed, yet melodramatically overblown Hollywood
versions that exaggerate and distort the truth, and for that they make tons
more money, where the Hollywood business model may as well be a metaphor for
capitalism, where the more outrageously exaggerated the myth, the more money
the movie brings in.
Omitted from the film as well as throughout
the first century of Hollywood filmmaking is the city’s own often violent
history, once a part of Indian territory before being claimed by the Spanish
empire, becoming part of Mexican territory until the Mexican–American War, where the entire
American southwest was ceded to America in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in
1848. Railroads helped the population
swell to over 100,000 by 1900, placing pressure on the city’s water supply, but
the completion of the politically controversial Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, spearheaded by
William Mulholland, assured that water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains could
be delivered to the city of Los Angeles, even if it was at the expense of
agricultural farmers in the valleys in between who were using the water at the
time. By 1910 there were already ten
Hollywood movie companies operating in the city. Within a decade 80% of the world’s film
industry was concentrated in Los
Angeles
“If the world really is falling down around
us, can’t we at least try and understand what started its collapse?” Citing a continual barrage of destruction
brought down upon the city with a host of Hollywood disaster movies, or endless
signs hastily posted along street corners to direct wayward cast and crew
members to the locations of a daily movie shoot, Andersen offers sharp
observations about the undervalued modern architecture, often used as a symbol
of vice and corruption, or as props for destruction in disaster movies. Coining the phrase “high tourism” for tourist
art directors like Antonioni’s Zabriskie
Point (1970) or Jacques Demy’s MODEL SHOP (1969), Europeans that may as
well be strangers in a strange land, filming the city as if seeing it for the
first time, or “low tourism” which offers a cynical, one-dimensional view of
the city, like John Boorman’s POINT BLANK (1967), where Andersen claims “People
who hate Los Angeles love POINT BLANK.”
While gazing at The
Hollywood Sign that sits atop the Hollywood Hills, Andersen informs us the
film title actually originates with Fred Halsted’s “gay porn masterpiece” L.A.
PLAYS ITSELF (1972), though this Los Angeles native director wouldn’t be caught
dead using the abbreviation. Finally the
director suggests there are films that defeat the myths about the city, where
tension remains between using Los
Angeles
Aaron Greenberg (excerpt) from DOC Films program guide:
Los Angeles Hollywood
But things are much different
than the movies would have one believe.
Yes, the city sprawls, hundreds of square miles across vastly different
geographies – ocean, mountains, plains, hills, reservoirs. Yes, people drive – and often long distances
from faraway suburbs to downtown, in hopes of deferring the exorbitant real
estate costs. And yet the Los Angeles Los Angeles Los Angeles
By this point, the tourist can make as “authentic” a
And yet what
Films cannot battle each other. Movies, fiction or nonfiction, do not have
purchase on truth. “The Angeleno
Subjectivity” sounds suspicious only because
Los
Angeles Plays Itself - Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
This brilliant and often hilarious video essay (2003) by Thom Andersen (Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer) assembles clips from 191 movies set in Los Angeles, juxtaposing their fantasies with the real city as seen by a loyal and well-informed native. That might sound like a slender premise for 169 minutes, but after five viewings I still feel I've only scratched the surface of this epic meditation. Andersen focuses on the city's people and architecture, but his wisecracking discourse is broad enough to encompass a wealth of local folklore, a bittersweet tribute to car culture, a critical history of mass transit in southern California, and a song of nostalgia for lost neighborhoods and lifestyles. Absorbing and revelatory, this is film criticism of the highest order.
Time Out
A treat for both film fans and Los Angeles-ologists, Thom Andersen’s compendious polemic on the various inflictions and infractions that Hollywood (the motion-picture industry) has visited upon its host city posits itself as ‘a city symphony in reverse’ – a collage of documentary insights trawled from the world of features. Andersen’s beady sweep spans Laurel and Hardy and Maya Deren, ‘Chinatown’ and ‘Blade Runner’, ‘Death Wish 4’ and the 1958 Native American drama ‘The Exiles’ – over 200 films are quoted in all, offering both illustration and refuge when Andersen’s orneriness threatens to overwhelm his crisp perspicuity. (The style recalls his fellow Angelino Mike Davis’s literary excavations of the city.) ‘The architectural trophy-house is the modern equivalent of the black hat or the moustache,’ he observers of Hollywood’s ‘war against modern architecture’; and of the movies’ appetite for destruction: ‘Whenever the legitimacy of authority is questioned, Hollywood responds by coming up with disaster movies’ – a reminder of how foolish and pathetic we are. Fascinating.
Los Angeles Plays
Itself Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
A near-perfect essay film in the Lopate-approved sense of
the term. Andersen stakes out a specific topic and offers his trenchant,
sardonic personal ruminations on that topic. The piece itself is wonderful,
largely due to Andersen's easy erudition and the texture of his
commentary. Even when I disagree with his readings of particular films
(he misses Chinatown's critique of white male xenophobia) or when he
takes the occasional cheap shot (at the expense of Joan Didion or the movie Xanadu),
Andersen forces me to rethink my positions from a new angle. And, in
deference to Andersen's critics, there are momentary infuriations here, such as
his quasi-fetishization of obscure pictures only he seems to know. But
beyond all the specifics, what's really thrilling about this project is its
commitment to re-examining the history of cinema as an accidental registration
of physical history, the shifting terrain of southern
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Ostensibly named after a notorious gay porn film entitled L.A. Plays Itself (where the
systematic degradation of the city was paralleled through increasingly violent
sexual encounters), Los Angeles Plays
Itself is a thoughtful and sublimely articulate stream of
consciousness piece that explores Hollywood's historical neutering,
mythification, and suppression of Los Angeles' native cultural identity in its
attempts to transform and assimilate the city as a convenient, large-scale
studio set for the motion picture industry. Written by Los Angeles native and
affirmed cineaste Andersen and narrated by Encke King, the film demystifies the
popular misconception and fallacy of the city's economic dependence on the
movie industry - a trivialization the he associates with the city's referential
abbreviation to L.A. within the context of Hollywood insider truncation -
through historically de-contextualized (and often, implicitly sinister)
architecture and landmarks, depictions of racial and cultural homogeneity, and
the perceptional distortion of his beloved native town as an epicenter for
moral corruption (in such noir-toned films as Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, Roman
Polanski's Chinatown,
and Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential),
desolation (in post-apocalyptic films like John Carpenter's Escape from New York
and Ridley Scott's Bladerunner),
and decadent excess (William Friedkin's To
Live and Die in L.A. and Mick Jackson's L.A. Story). Drawing provocative
social implications in the bureaucratic decision to curtail development of the
public mass transportation system in favor of automobile ownership and the
construction of freeways, Andersen traces the development of an indigenous -
and consequently, more representationally Los Angeles - cinema presented by
groundbreaking early independent features, like Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles on the plight and
subculture of Mexican-Americans and Charles Burnett's seminal,
semi-autobiographical film Killer of
Sheep on a working class African-American family, to create a
perceptive, passionate, and unabashedly humanist meditation on social and
cultural identity, privilege, race, and inclusion.
Los Angeles Plays Itself Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
On the back of two successful screenings at the London Film Festival in
October, Los Angeles Plays Itself has been booked in for a two week run
at the capital's
But Los Angeles Plays Itself really is one of a kind, stitching together dozens of extracts from other films to provide a social and economic history of the city. Andersen covers many established 'classics' - Chinatown, Heat, LA Confidential, Blade Runner, The Long Goodbye, Point Blank - but brings to each the fiercely intelligent eye of a resident who is intensely proud of his adopted city. And his range is impressively democratic: Oscar-nominated titles jostle for space alongside obscure straight-to-video entries like A Passion To Kill and Dead Homiez which earn their place by providing particular shots of particular areas in the sprawling megalopolis.
But there's a third category of excerpts which provides the real meat for Andersen's polemics: underground movies like Haile Gerima's Bush Mama, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles and Billy Woodberry's Bless Their Little Hearts - all of which depict locales (like the much-missed Bunker Hill) and harsh struggles undreamt of by the well-heeled denizens of Hollywood. Andersen's political analysis is incisive and persuasive, but Los Angeles Plays Itself is no dry academic exercise: his "idiosyncratic panorama" functions on many levels, not least as a riotously entertaining - and frequently hilarious - journey through this "fabulous city" and the myriad celluloid fables it has spawned.
Los Angeles
Plays Itself | Reverse Shot Andrew
Tracy
“This is the City,” intones the narrator in the opening frames of Los Angeles Plays Itself. “I live here. Sometimes I think that gives me the right to complain about the way it’s been treated in movies.” The voice, once removed, is that of Thom Andersen, and his self-aware possessiveness towards his native city will set the tone for the film. With its three hours nearly all comprised of clips from other people’s work and selections from the public record, Los Angeles Plays Itself, while impressively comprehensive, never pretends to be empirical in its approach. Eccentric, standoffish, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of some moments of truly searing insight, Andersen’s consistently entertaining essay film takes its doggedly prosaic tack about as close as it can come to poetic revelation, aided in no small part by the very haziness of its title subject. “Los Angeles is where reality and representation get muddled,” Andersen comments early on, and while the chief aim of his film is to restore reality to its rightful place above the myths and lies that have been spread atop it in a century of moving images, he also concedes that locating that reality is very much dependent upon one’s personal representation. Make no mistake: Los Angeles Plays Itself is Andersen’s vision of the city, as distinctive as that of any of the filmmakers he champions or denigrates. What gives his vision integrity is his ability to lift the screens of a thousand fictions and find the pulsing beat of life that those fictions so often hide. Praising Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles (1961), Andersen comments that “better than any other movie, it shows that there was once a city here, before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.” By linking those on- and off-screen simulacrums together under the lens of his focused, lucid anger, Andersen, to paraphrase Oscar Levant’s famous dictum on Hollywood, strips the phony imaginings of Los Angeles away to find the real imagination underneath.
The method is a simple one: to appropriate the narratives of representation and build a counter-narrative of reality from their materials. Dividing his film into three umbrella sections—“The City as Backdrop,” “The City as Character,” and “The City as Subject”—Andersen traces Los Angeles’s onscreen evolution from the anonymous to the distinctive, and the distortions, misrepresentations, and cultural violence that followed every step of the way. Urging the viewer to reawaken “conscious spectatorship” from the uncritical acceptance usually thrust upon one by the machinery of narrative filmmaking, Andersen plumbs the unconscious of the films themselves: their unthinking recording of the city which most have treated as a useful prop at best, the inadvertent, epic-length documentary record of Los Angeles contained in the innumerable films which have made it the “most-filmed city in the world.” In his voluminous assortment of clips—everything from classic Hollywood staples to experimental cinema, from sci-fi flicks, action films, and straight-to-video erotic thrillers to European art films and even some poetic pornography—Andersen charts the use and misuse of Los Angeles landmarks (the Bradbury Building, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Ennis House, Union Station), the mingled fascination and scorn heaped upon the city’s famously eclectic architecture, the decades-long, caught-on-film disintegration of regions like Bunker Hill or the once-thriving downtown, and the intriguing hints that Los Angeles may have been far more comfortably racially integrated in the first half of the century than today.
That this literalist corrective never becomes pedantic is a testament not only to the wit and spryness of Andersen’s commentary but to the far more pressing project underlying his condemnation of geographical distortion. While Andersen’s contention that “silly geography makes for silly movies” may be debatable, his call for fidelity to the real goes deeper than just the crankish defensiveness of a native. In the fragmented and distorted Los Angeles as seen through the cracked prism of Hollywood (and beyond), Andersen locates more profound betrayals—a willful ignorance of a century of civic strife, racial clashes, and economic exploitation, a covert war on the city’s historical and cultural heritage, an unconditional support for the agents of oppressive authority—ingrained in cinematic storytelling even as they are enacted in life. Andersen’s trenchant comments on the politics of disaster films (“they define the real sources of authority. . . we must depend on professionals and experts to save us from ourselves”), the derision accorded to Los Angeles’s greatest modernist architecture (frequently used as an implicit symbol of vice and corruption, or as props for destruction in the films of the great vulgarist Joel Silver), and the “secret histories” of films like Chinatown (1974) and L.A Confidential (1997), which rewrite events of public record as cynical conspiracy myths, “proof” of the public’s helplessness in the face of powerful private interests, casts his urging for conscious spectatorship into the realm of activism.
What galvanizes Andersen is how the narrative and cultural mythmaking endemic to the cinema has the effect of reducing the scope of the real, not just its surface details but the imaginative potential inherent within it. Andersen’s bugbears—the “secret history” films, the casual destruction visited upon the city by Hollywood action flicks, the cynical one-dimensionality of those whom Andersen terms “low tourists”, such as John Boorman (“People who hate Los Angeles love Point Blank [1967]”), Woody Allen, and the expatriate writer David Thomson, the liberal pieties of Lawrence Kasdan’s Grand Canyon (1991) and the moneyed insularity of Steve Martin’s L.A. Story (1991)—all share a mutual reductiveness: they’re dead ends, refusals to engage with the life beneath the urban sprawl, and as such failures of artistic imagination. When Andersen details the history of the defeat of public housing in the Fifties, of the starving of the public transportation system, of the growing segregation between white and black, rich and poor, he does not disdain the cinema’s ability to address these issues. Rather, he implies that for the movies to ignore the glaring truths of class barriers, racial animosities, and capitalist greed, especially in a medium that is so manifestly able to make those truths immediate and affecting, is tantamount to condoning them.
“If the world really is falling down around us, can’t we at least try and understand what started its collapse?” asks Andersen as his film reaches its powerful conclusion. Respect for reality is a respect for art’s place within that reality, and shutting out the former shuts in the latter. Just as the movies mirror the complacencies and depredations of those who control the city’s power and wealth, so Andersen sees the movies as a way to combat those same attitudes, to restore dignity to a city which houses millions and to give faces and voices back to those who have had them stolen. In such disparate sources as the “high tourism” of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), Jacques Demy’s Model Shop (1969), and Jacques Deray’s The Outside Man (1973), the geographical unity of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and H.B. Halicki’s Gone in 60 Seconds (1974), the “sublime dystopia” of Blade Runner (1982), the pastoral fantasy and gritty reality of his film’s namesake, Fred Halsted’s “gay porn masterpiece” L.A. Plays Itself (1972), and the everyday madness and romantic idealism of John Cassavetes (“His films face up to tragedy and reject it. . . for Cassavetes, happiness was the only truth. So he drank himself to death”), Andersen finds ample reason for hope—the only useful kind of hope, that which purges us of our illusions and makes us see ourselves with unremitting clarity. Nowhere is that hope more evident than in the true underdog heroes of Los Angeles Plays Itself, independent films like The Exiles, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Haile Gerima’s Bush Mama (1979), and Billy Woodberry’s Bless Their Little Hearts (1984), films which absorb the social realities of the city’s life and project it back as transfigured art. Like the films it champions, Los Angeles Plays Itself functions as an act of reclamation—giving back the freedom not just to see the City as it is, but to imagine it as it could be.
LOS ANGELES PLAYS ITSELF -
Austin Film Society Chale Nafus
L.A.
Existential | Jonathan Rosenbaum
October 1, 2004
Los Angeles in Theory
and Practice - Bright Lights Film ...
Madison Brookshire from Bright Lights Film Journal, May 2010
The
Man Who Wrote Too Much [Lee Teasdale]
ReFramed
No. 7: Thom Andersen's 'Los Angeles Plays Itself Calium Marsh and Jordan Cronk from Pop
Matters
Collateral Damage: Los Angeles Continues
Playing Itself ... Thomas Andersen from Cinema
Scope, October 2006
Keynote:
Los Angeles Plays Itself / The Dissolve
Matt Singer
The
Welcome Return of Los Angeles Plays Itself
Calium Marsh from The Village Voice,
January 1, 2014
Los Angeles
Plays Itself - Not Coming to a Theater Near You Jennuy Jediny
Sound
on Sight Zach Lewis
eFilmCritic
Reviews Chris Parry
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The
Village Voice [Benjamin Strong]
Los
Angeles Plays Itself - Nonfics
Robert Greene
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
CineScene
[Howard Schumann] also seen
here: Talking
Pictures UK [Howard Schumann]
OffOffOff
-- The Guide to Alternative New York
Joshua Tanzer
Film
Journal International [Doris Toumarkine]
Slant
Magazine Blu-ray [Jake Cole]
Georgia
Straight [Mark Harris]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
White
City Cinema [Michael Smith] Listed
as #7 Film of the year in 2014
Los Angeles Plays Itself
- BAM/PFA - Film Programs Judy Bloch
Los
Angeles Plays Itself Andrea LeVasseur
from Rovi All Movie Guide
An Interview
With Thom Andersen - Reverse Shot
Summer 2004
'Los
Angeles Plays Itself' A Decade Later | Variety
BBCi
- Films Jamie Russell
San
Francisco Chronicle [John McMurtrie]
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
New
York Times A.O. Scott
Los Angeles Plays
Itself - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anderson,
Laurie
HEART
OF A DOG A- 94
USA (75 mi)
2015
I walk accompanied by
ghosts.
I walk accompanied by ghosts.
My father with his diamond eyes
His voice life size.
He says follow me. Follow me.
And I come sliding where I've been hiding
Out of the heart of a child.
Meet me by the lake. Meet me by the lake.
I'll be there. I'll be there.
If only I had the time. To tell you how I climbed
Out of the darkness. Out of my mind.
And I come sliding where I've been hiding
Out of the heart of a child.
Sunrise comes across the mountains.
Sunrise comes across the day.
Sunsets sit across the lakeside.
Sunsets across the Pyrenees.
Out of the heart of a child.
Out of the heart of a child.
Out of the heart of a child.
Meet me by the lake. Meet me by the lake.
I walk accompanied by ghosts.
The Lake, by Laurie Anderson, The Lake - YouTube (5:39), 2010
Laurie Anderson covers
a lot of territory in this personal meditation on life and death, initially commissioned
by Swiss Arte TV as a “philosophy of life” project, beautifully exploring the
process of grief through intimate experiences that she shares. And while initially conceived as a short film
eulogy in memory of her beloved rat terrier dog Lolabelle, who died in 2011,
this is essentially a poetic visual essay expanded to include the death of her
mother, fellow artist Gordon Matta-Clark, and husband Lou Reed who also died
while she was making the film, who is never mentioned, and only seen in a fleeting
shot near the end, where their constant presence has a way of turning this into
a story inhabited by ghosts that provides continuous illumination into our
existing world, citing David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King that suggests “Every love story is a ghost
story,” becoming a feature-length film delivered several years late and at four
times the length that it was originally supposed to be. What’s distinctive about this effort is the
often inventive and amusing way Anderson chooses to do this, where it is as
much about the art of storytelling and the joy of living. Unlike other attempts on similar themes, like
Gaspar Noé’s ENTER THE VOID (2009), this material isn’t bogged down by
conventions or form, but remains elevated throughout by an artist’s often
euphoric sensibility, where the director conjures up the spirit of film
essayist Chris Marker or Agnès Varda with her own Midwestern sounding narration
that quite honestly recalls the voice of Gena
Rowlands, who was born in Madison, Wisconsin. (Interestingly, Rowlands is her mother’s
maiden name.) An honest,
autobiographical appraisal of her own life, one of the guiding inspirations of
the film is attributed to a quote from Søren Kierkegaard, “Life can only be
understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
While only 75-minutes
long, it’s an extremely dense and impactive experience filled with childhood
memories, video diaries, reflections on the post 9/11 surveillance culture, and
reincarnation, sprinkled throughout by quotes from Anderson’s personal Zen
Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche and The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, along with tributes to various artists who have
inspired her. Anderson grew up in Glen
Ellyn, Illinois, attending Glenbard West High School, majoring in art history
at Barnard College while earning her master’s in sculpture from Columbia
University, becoming a composer and musician, mostly playing violin and
keyboards, and once worked as an art critic for Artforum magazine (also McDonald’s and on an Amish farm) before
embarking on a career in the 60’s as an avant-garde performance artist, quickly
finding her place in the experimental art scene of SoHo in the 1970’s, becoming
a pioneer in electronic music. Composing
the musical soundtracks to Jonathan Demme’s SOMETHING WILD (1986) and Spalding
Gray films SWIMMING TO CAMBODIA (1987) and MONSTER IN A BOX (1992), while also
adding additional music to BEFORE NIGHT FALLS (2000), Anderson has only
directed one other feature-length movie, HOME OF THE BRAVE (1986), a filmed
performance of one of her musical tours.
While her audio/visual work has appeared in major museums in America and
Europe, where she is considered a groundbreaking leader in the use of technology
in the arts, she has released a half dozen albums and also written six
books. In 2002, in something of an
oddity, she was announced as NASA’s first artist in residence, out of which
developed a solo performance entitled “The End of the Moon,” Laurie Anderson - The end of
the moon ... - YouTube (8:31), that toured internationally through 2006,
which suggests Anderson’s art reaches for the mysteries of the cosmos.
Except for a trip to California, all of this film was shot within a few blocks
of Anderson’s artist and musician’s studio in southern SoHo on the far western
reaches of Canal Street overlooking the Hudson River in Lower Manhattan, bleak
building facades and empty streets as seen through surveillance footage after
the 9/11 attack, while today there are Trump Tower skyscrapers on each side of
her low-lying building with plenty of trees nearby. The film opens with a dream about giving
birth to a dog, where the bond between them is profoundly intimate, displaying
an almost maternalistic attachment, beautifully expressed by Anderson’s own
monochrome ink drawings, followed shortly thereafter by the death of her
mother, where she remembers in great detail her last words, as she was literally
saying goodbye to animals that she imagined seeing on the ceiling, which may as
well have been her eight children huddled by the side of her hospital bed. According to Anderson, her mother, on some
level, was trying to give a speech, like going up to a microphone and saying
“Thank you, all of you, thanks for coming.”
One of the most extraordinary revelations is the acknowledgment how
difficult this was for Anderson, as she never loved her mother, so she wasn’t
sure what to say in the final moments.
But she didn’t have to worry about it, as her mother spoke for everyone
in the room, literally creating a new language to fit the occasion. Similarly, in order to prepare her for this
moment, her Buddhist teacher Rinpoche suggested she try to think of a moment
when she was truly loved by her mother, and isolate that moment, becoming a
memory frozen in time that will live forever.
Lolabelle is the
featured character, returned to throughout the film, as Anderson took her
everywhere, and can be seen in a 2003 Charlie Rose interview with the artist
and her husband, Laurie
Anderson & Lou Reed Interviewed by Charlie Rose ... Pt. 1 YouTube
(13:40). Leading a remarkable life,
recounting how her pet mastered the ability to feel empathy, a unique quality
that many humans lack, unfortunately, while Anderson has also taught her
various skills, like how to finger-paint with her paws, make sculptures with
the help of a trainer, or play the electric piano. Not only could she play piano on cue in front
of a camera, but Anderson brought her to various public fundraisers where she
amazingly performed in front of large audiences, developing a kind of
free-form, Thelonious Monk style of percussive riffs. When her pet started going blind not long
before her death, she decided to move her to a more comfortable
environment, Green Gulch | San Francisco Zen Center,
a Buddhist retreat located near Muir Beach hugging the shoreline 16 miles north
of San Francisco, where it was Anderson’s idea to test Lolabelle’s ability to
comprehend as many as 50 vocabulary words.
While walking her along the beach every day, often extended to all day
events, Anderson describes herself as a “sky-worshipper,” where looking to the
vastness of the sky tends to have a calming influence, but on this occasion she
discovered a circling hawk that dive-bombed her dog, turning away at the last
minute when it apparently realized Lolabelle was not a rabbit. This brought to mind the similar idea of
airborne predators that struck on 9/11, a thought that is never far from the
mind of such a quintessentially New York artist, recalling the presence of so
many armed troops suddenly stationed just outside her home throughout Lower
Manhattan, where Lolabelle comes from the same breed of dogs that Homeland
Security trains.
One of the more unique
sections is Anderson’s rendering of the Bardo, a transitionary state between
death and rebirth, according to The
Tibetan Book of the Dead, shown in expressionist paintings, near abstract
imagery, and Anderson’s own remarkable score.
This epitomizes what Anderson is trying to do, expressing her own
ruminations on the afterlife, describing the fragility of every moment, inviting
the viewers into an imaginative use of variously textured visual effects,
employing animation, 8mm home movie clips, distorted or altered imagery, text
on the screen, newly shot footage, and such an inventive use of music, like the
Kronos Quartet, Kronos
Quartet — Flow (Laurie Anderson) [LIVE] - YouTube (3:18), all given shape
by the weight of her own personal narration, developing such a stimulating and
fluid work, as if conjured up from the depths of her own consciousness. “You should try to practice how to feel sad
without actually being sad,” suggests her teacher Rinpoche as we see snow fall
gently in the woods and ice-skaters moving in slow motion on a frozen lake, as
Anderson remembers her days skating on that lake in Glen Ellyn, recalling a
haunting childhood memory, shown in faded and cracked photographs, when she was
pushing two younger identical twin brothers in a stroller across the ice when
suddenly the weight of the stroller fell through a cracked opening, where both
children were instantly underwater. All
she could think about was the trouble she’d be in with her mother if she lost
her brothers, so she dove into the frozen water, searching through the muck to
retrieve one, placing him safely on the ice before diving after the other
brother as well, running home with both of them tucked under each arm, where
her mother’s response was “I didn’t know you were such an exceptional
diver.” The death of her mother awoke
these strange and conflicted feelings of fear, a sense of urgency, and regret,
but also that one moment when she was truly loved by her mother. It’s an amazing incident, remarkably
portrayed, and beautifully incorporated into an impressionistic film collage
that delves into the depths of the human spirit. With a flicker of his lost soul, Lou Reed’s
“Turning Time Around” Lou
Reed - Turning time around (2000) - YouTube (5:48) plays fittingly over the
end credits.
Laurie
Anderson | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian
At heart, I'm an anthropologist. I try to jump out of my skin. I normally see the world as an artist first, second as a New Yorker and third as a woman.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle Cubr
Musician, and now director, Laurie Anderson's documentary HEART OF A DOG is a highly avant-garde work about her dog (Lolabelle, a rat terrier) and about life. It is told through a series of short stories, ranging from how she came to own Lolabelle, to adventures taken with her dog, and to the dog's artistic training. She interlaces real-life footage (often taken using handheld devices such as her iPhone) with reenactments of her own experiences or Lolabelle's. These segments each muse on the nature of life, what it is to be alive, and on the philosophical. One of the film's strongest aspects is Anderson's ability to craft analogies that bridge the gap between a singular being's life and the lives of people in general. The most beautiful example of this is a comparison between the fear her dog feels when two hawks attempt to hunt her while they're on a walk and the attack's of September 11—there's never been a reason to fear an attack from the air before. The film's other great strength is Anderson's well-composed soundtrack. Her sharply edited and, at times, psychedelic imagery juxtaposes neatly with the melancholy sounds she produces. The film is greatly inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead and Anderson mentions her dog going into a bardo for forty-nine days after she dies, entering a state of mental dissolving that occurs when the body passes while the mind still lingers, according to the text. Lolabelle is Anderson's spirit animal. In her later years, she was trained to perform music and to create paintings and is the furry embodiment of her owner. HEART OF A DOG is a bold, adventurous documentary that ponders deep questions and is unlike anything you’ve seen.
TIFF
2015 | Heart of a Dog (Laurie Anderson, US)—TIFF Docs Boris Nelepo from Cinema Scope
After being approached by Arte three years ago, renowned musician Laurie Anderson started developing a personal film essay in memory of her beloved rat terrier Lolabelle, who died in 2011. Though the pet had gone blind not long before death, Anderson still managed to teach her painting, sculpture, and music. Initially conceived as a eulogistic short, the film ballooned into a 75-minute feature as the story of one pooch yielded meditations on mortality generously sprinkled with quotes from Anderson’s personal Buddhist teacher and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Alongside two other deaths, one of a mother and one of a friend, Heart of a Dog implicitly deals with and is haunted by a third loss, as Anderson’s late husband, the great Lou Reed, makes a cameo appearance and lends his song “Turning Time Around” for the final scene. Providing succinct commentary on the post-9/11 changes in the American political landscape, the movie offhandedly name-checks Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and David Foster Wallace, who have guided Anderson through the process of mourning, by her own admission.
Out of reverence for Laurie Anderson and respect for the confessional tenor she chose, I should probably leave the reader with this smattering of trivia lest I stand accused of unnecessary cynicism. However, it must be said that Heart of a Dog would have been a noticeably superior movie if Anderson’s voiceover had soundtracked a black screen rather than some nondescript visuals more appropriate for use as a Windows screensaver. The film speaks of all things being interrelated—of religious experiences and how the world works and what grief feels like. And yet all these roads lead nowhere as Anderson settles for vapid platitudes (the very same charges held against Malick’s movies, despite their formal perfection), and the author’s mourning of Lolabelle remains the sole emotion ringing true. In a sense, Heart of a Dog is the reverse of Joaquim Pinto’s What Now? Remind Me (2014), a fascinating and unforgettable In Memoriam that blows away devotees of Portuguese cinema and the uninitiated alike. In the case of Heart of a Dog, the only importance is attached to the name of artist who signed this film.
Janina Ciezadlo : Telluride
Journal Merely Circulating
It is hard to write about the conversation in the Telluride Courhouse
between Laurie Anderson and Peter Sellars because it was so amazing. Anderson
was at Telluride with a very personal film, Heart of A Dog,
which I did not like while I was watching it, but which reverberated with
wisdom the next day. While some of the film, and it might be a matter of taste
and philosophical prejudices, since the film is not narrative, did not appeal
to me, the lyrical qualities of Anderson’s voice predominate. The film
considers several things: among them three deaths shortly after 9/11, so still
in the sphere of the tenor of those events. Her rat terrier, with whom she
seemed to have been very attached dies, and so does her mother and so does Lou
Reed, but she never actually mentions her husband and there is only one
fleeting shot of him in the film, so you get the sense that she is displacing
much of her grief and concern onto the dog. In the discussion she did mention
that the film was made in connection with three deaths, and she tells Phillip
Lopate in an interview: “Of course I am talking about Lou.” When the question
came up again in the Courthouse, she referred to their relationship as a
“creature,” made out of both of them. In one of the more interesting stories in
the mix, Anderson recounts how the dog developed empathy.
One of the central looped images of the film had to do with her skating on a
lake here in Glen Ellyn, where she grew up. In the voice-over she tells us she
is reluctant to visit her dying mother because she did not like her very much.
She visits a priest, who tells her to think of a moment in which she was loved.
She is able to remember an amazing incident in which she was pushing her young
brothers in a stroller, over the ice, and they fell in and she dove twice and
rescued them. She describes the entire incident in the film. When she got home
with the twin brothers under her arm her mother said something about what a
great swimmer and diver she was to be able to rescue her brothers. Anderson felt
that she was negligent in letting the stroller fall through the ice in the
first place, so she considers her mother’s positive spin on the incident an act
of love. It was a riveting story, and the wisdom of looking for a moment in
which one has been loved is another beautiful appearance of reconciliation, a
theme threaded, like gold, through the festival. In Anderson’s film this story
is part of the dream-like loops and layers of her style and floats by in a rich
lyrical, but very serious, stream of images and voice-over. Anderson’s talk
brought to mind three other contemporary stories. One about a child falling
through the ice appears in the Kieslowski’s Decalogue, in
Audiard's Rust and Bone the child is saved, and
a story about a child taking care of a sibling, who actually does drown, is an
important part of Alexandra Fuller’s Memoirs.
In addition to all of her other talents, Anderson is a more than competent
visual artist whose drawings are reminiscent of the work of Sue Coe and Kiki
Smith, artists who are, like Anderson, interested in “inter-species
communication.”
Heart of a Dog’s cinematic storytelling in loops and images
demonstrates the difference between a humanistic model of subjectivity: stories
as the province of the person and the more corporate stories, products which
wrap up nicely and can be sold. Wallace Stevens has a phrase: “the poem of the
mind in the act of finding,” which describes the film.
The rapport between Anderson and Sellars was uplifting. To be in the
presence of two powerful, spiritual artists who have had important life-long
careers, who were able to convey so much wisdom and vitality was a rare and
joyous experience. People who have attended the festival know that while many
people go off to see films that have acquired some ephemeral buzz that they can
after all see in the multi-plex later on, the heart and mind of the festival is
in these conversations in the Courthouse. Sellars was wearing a flowered shirt,
several strings of beads and had an amazing haircut, which came to a sort of
peak. Anderson is small, dressed casually and exuded a sense of generosity,
intelligence and seemed at ease with things, in a way that the strivers around
one will probably never achieve. I am looking forward to sending the recording
of this enlightening conversation to my favorite interdisciplinary
artists in Chicago. Anderson was generous with her life- lessons: one thing she
and Sellars agreed on was the important ability to understand that what people
were saying was not what they were saying on the surface.
She threw out three life principles: don’t be afraid of anyone, get a good
bullshit detector and learn how to use it and to be tender. For people
who do not know Sellars, I had the experience of seeing his Doctor Atomic here,
in Chicago, at the Lyric Opera. He, like Anderson, has been able to
successfully breach the divide between high and low art, staging at 22 Mozart’s
Don Giovanni in the style of a Blaxploitation movie. (Rupert Christiansen the
Guardian 24 Feb 2015).
Laurie
Anderson Was Asked For Her Philosophy of Life, So ... Jordan Hoffman from Vanity Fair, October 21, 2015
“Search through memory,” Laurie Anderson jokingly instructs in mock sci-fi voice. It’s in reaction to my confession (and frustration) as an “only-human” interviewer. As a longtime fan of this polymath artist/entertainer—discovering her music via Peter Gabriel’s album So and her performance work on PBS’s Alive from Off Center, then following her albums, theater, and visual art to places like BAM, MASS MoCA, and other capitalized institutions—I had a slew of brilliant prepared questions. They were, naturally, still lying on my kitchen table as I sat with Anderson in the soundproofed recording room in her Canal Street studio. And, as it happens, a “search through memory” is exactly what her latest project, the essay film Heart of a Dog, is all about.
Memories are literally strewn throughout Anderson’s sizable workspace, which she bashfully describes as “a bit of a warren.” Her late husband, Lou Reed, immortalized its proximity to traffic noise in the peppy 1996 number “Hooky Wooky,” and it’s Reed’s framed Grammy Hall of Fame certificate for “Walk on the Wild Side” sitting amidst a pile of ephemera that I catch at eye level when I crouch down to the floor. I’m down there because, upon entering, it isn’t the singer/violinist/storyteller/filmmaker who first greets me, or the many unnamed extras floating about the pad (like the red-bearded dude sautéing broccoli), but the yippy border terrier Little Will, an extremely personable and friendly pooch.
Little Will doesn’t know it, but his predecessor, Lolabelle, is the reason he’s sniffing my pant leg right now. The death of Lollabelle, a rat terrier adopted and loved by Anderson, is what forms the spine of Heart of a Dog, a remarkable, experimental movie out now in some cities prior to its HBO broadcast in January. The French-German production company Arte contacted Anderson, asking her for a film on her “philosophy of life.”
“I don’t have one,” Anderson told them. “And If I did, I wouldn’t make it into a film and make you watch it.” Persistent, an exec countered, “I saw some of those stories about your dog. Why don’t you do that?” And thus this remarkably sweet, sad, trenchant gem about mortality and memory came about.
“This is a film about stories and how you tell them,” Anderson explains. “When someone says, ‘Who are you?,’ you have a couple stories that fall out from your childhood. They’re short, because it’s not like somebody says, ‘Tell me about your childhood in a shrink way.’ They’re meant to just be a postage stamp.”
The personal stories that emerge in Heart of a Dog got there via different paths. The recurring description of her mother’s death is a variant from her stage production Delusion, but a climactic chapter came from dumb luck. One of Anderson’s brothers asked her to transfer a box of old movies, and after unsuccessful attempts to shirk it off, she found images that reminded her of a key incident from childhood.
“‘Guys, remember when I almost drowned you?’” she asked her younger twin siblings. “‘I found the lake, all this stuff, all these pictures.’ They said, ‘You’re not going to put that in the movie are you?,’ and I said, ‘Do you mind?’”
Other stories that float by include time spent as a child in the hospital after a spinal injury, and realizing that her usual, determined boasts (“I knew I’d walk again, despite what they said”) were masking reality’s actual horror. “You know that story you’re telling?” Anderson asks herself. “Here’s how it really [was]. You were really afraid, and these kids are dying all around you and they’re screaming. Remember how that sounded? Here’s how it sounded.”
Heart of a Dog’s credits include a thank you to legendary film essayist Chris Marker. (“He had ‘O Superman’ on his answering machine for 20 years!” she tells me with a grin.) Anderson, whose only previous feature-length movie was the 1986 concert film Home of the Brave, is certainly working in a similar vein here. But Marker was a legendary cat person. “I don’t know about cats. They’re up on the refrigerator,” Anderson shrugs. “I chose dogs for the empathy,” she continues, gliding into the low, smooth storytelling voice I’ve been listening to on records for decades. “Dogs love us, but mostly because we invented cars. For the speed and to stick their heads out, for the wind in their ears.”
Anderson’s musings and observations all stem from this dog’s-eye view, which roams from New York City to California cliffs and into the great beyond. The end of Lolabelle’s life leads Heart of a Dog into an exploration of death, both from a Western and Eastern route. “The American medical approach is, ‘Try not to feel anything. No pain. We’ll just knock you over the head with a brick. Put you out.’ To me, that’s robbery. To me, that robs a person or an animal of an experience of their death.”
The search of her film leads to a striking conclusion, which she repeats to me: “Try to practice how to feel sad without being sad.”
Though the name of her husband, Lou Reed, is not mentioned once, anyone who knows that they were partners for over 20 years before he died in October 2013 will recognize that this film is part of her grieving process.
“It’s not biographical. It’s not autobiographical,” she states, though she is quick to add, “Of course, it is, because I have my home movies in there.”
So how many of the memories in Heart of a Dog are manufactured?
“Here’s the thing,” she adds. “Most people design their personalities. You’re an architect of yourself. A lot of people say, ‘That’s not true. I inherited the whole thing and I’m just as crabby as my mother,’ and all of that’s true, but you have some opportunities to tweak. So tweak.”
Looks like that initial request for a philosophy of life got answered after all.
HEART
OF A DOG: Laurie Anderson's Essay-Poem ...
Emanuel Levy
Telluride
Review: Laurie Anderson's 'Heart Of A Dog' | The ... Gary Garrison from The Playlist
Telluride
Review: Laurie Anderson's Lovely 'Heart of a Do ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
V15
Review of "Heart of a Dog" by Laurie Anderson Patrycja Rup from Nisimazine
IONCINEMA.com
[Jordan M. Smith]
The
Film Stage [Rory O'Connor]
Telluride
2015 Review: 'Heart of a Dog' is Doggone Deep ... Fred Topel from Crave Online
TIFF
Film Review: Heart of a Dog | Consequence of Sound Sarah Kurchak
Daily
| Venice, Telluride + Toronto 2015 | Laurie Anderson's ... David Hudson
The
Fantastical Story of Laurie Anderson and Lolabelle ... David D’Arcy interview from The Guardian, October 29, 2015
Laurie
Anderson on 'Heart of a Dog' and why she's stayed ... Matt Prigge interview from Metro US, October 23, 2015
Laurie
Anderson Tells Phillip Lopate How She Finished Her ... Phillip Lopate interview from indieWIRE,
October 10, 2015
Lou
Reed remembered in widow's "Heart of a Dog" - Yahoo ... Kelly Velasquez interview from Yahoo News, September 9, 2015
'Heart
of a Dog': Telluride Review - The Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
Telluride
Film Review: 'Heart of a Dog' - Variety
'Heart
of a Dog' finds Laurie Anderson being approachable ... Matt Prigge from Metro US
Heart
of a Dog Laurie Anderson - Los Angeles Times Steven Zeitchik
“Blood
of My Blood,” “Heart of a Dog,” “11 Minutes” - Roger ... Glenn Kenny from The Ebert Site
At
Venice Festival, the Wisdom of Lunatics, the Wildness of ... The New
York Times
Heart of a
Dog (2015 film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anderson, Lindsay
Film
Reference Marie Saeli
In a 1958 essay titled "Get
out and Push," Lindsay Anderson expressed his approach to working in the
cinema. The way Anderson Anderson
In This Sporting Life, Anderson
Frank Machin is aware of his
limitations but does not know how to change; he lacks direction. He tries to
make others responsible for his happiness: Margaret Hammond, the rugby team,
and even the elites of society who populate the world of Mr. and Mrs. Weaver,
owners of the rugby team. Machin constantly attempts to break into the
established system, seemingly unaware that it is this same system which
controls and restrains him.
Mick Travis, the protagonist of Anderson
Film technique in If. . .
also serves to reveal the narrative theme of the division of the self. The
chapter headings physically divide the film into rigidly ordered sections,
reflecting the separation of intellect and imagination encouraged by the nature
of the tradition of College House. These chapter headings, along with the
alternation between black and white and color film, function as distancing
devices, making the viewer more aware of the medium.
A narrative technique Anderson
In O Lucky Man!, the
thematic sequel to If. . . , the medium of film itself becomes one of
the narrative themes, and self-reflexive film techniques serve to reveal not
only the narrative theme of self-definition, but also the process of
filmmaking. The titles used in O Lucky Man! announce the different
sections of the film but do not impose order; on the contrary, their abrupt
appearance and brevity tend to interrupt the order of the narrative. It is as
if the medium of film itself breaks through to remind the viewer of its
existence. Indeed the medium, specifically the energy the medium generates, is
one of the themes of O Lucky Man! The process of creation in the medium
far exceeds anything Mick accomplishes in the narrative until the two meet in
the final sequence.
Mick Travis, the character,
confronts Lindsay Anderson, the director, at an audition for the film O
Lucky Man! Mick obediently projects the different emotions Anderson Anderson
Britannia Hospital Anderson Britannia
Hospital
Glory! Glory!, a Home Box Office production, is somewhat of a
synthesis of Anderson
The film techniques Anderson
The theme of personal
responsibility for self-definition is clearly seen in the character of Ruth.
She struggles throughout the film with the idea of who she wants to be and with
the identities others want to impose on her. She reaches a key point in her
personal progression when she admits that she has always needed some kind of
crutch—sex, drugs, God. Not long after realizing that she has been looking
outside herself for an identity, Ruth reveals that she finally understands God.
In essence, she has created her own god, her own mythology. Ruth remains within
the system, but for the first time actually believes in what she is "selling"
because she has defined for herself the "authority" and the basis for
the system.
Anderson Anderson
All-Movie Guide more bio from Bruce Eder
Screen Online
Biography from BFI Screen Online
TCMDB extenseive profile from Turner Movie Classics
Anderson, Lindsay They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
The
Guardian: The Lost Prophet (2005)
Jonathan Coe May 28, 2005
Lindsay Anderson Memorial Foundation
Telegraph's Top 21 British Directors of All Time
100 Best British Films as compiled by the BBC
Wakefield Express
(1952) Christophe Dupin from Screen Online
In the same way as he did with O Dreamland (1954) in the
first Free Cinema programme, Lindsay Anderson took advantage of the Free Cinema
3 programme to show another of his short films which had been sitting on a
shelf unseen for several years. Wakefield Express was commissioned in
1952 by the eponymous newspaper to celebrate its 100th anniversary. Originally
intended to be a film showing how the paper was printed, in
The film follows the local reporters as they travel around the area in search of newsworthy events: the local rugby tea, a school concert, a constituency political meeting, the launching of a ship and the unveiling of a war memorial among others. Although it was made four years before the advent of Free Cinema, Wakefield Express can be seen as a transition between Anderson's early 'industrial films' like Meet the Pioneers (1948) and his Free Cinema contributions, especially in the way in which he shows his interest in ordinary life and people, and expresses his own point of view as a filmmaker. In the words of the programme note, "there is nothing of the impartiality of the 'general survey' about the film's approach. Its perceptive, humanist outlook brings enough concern to the communal activities to view them, in turn, with affection and irony, exasperation and respect."
DVD Times Anthony Nield
O DREAMLAND
Great Britain (13 mi)
1956
O Dreamland (1956) Christophe Dupin
from Screen Online
Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland was made in 1953,
around the same time as
Once completed, the film was shelved, with little
prospect of ever being shown. As
This is one of the most personal of the Free Cinema
films. A 12-minute tour of the
The lack of commentary was a characteristic of the Free Cinema films, as was the absence of live sound. This was initially forced on the filmmakers by the costs involved in synchronised sound, but the financial constraints freed Anderson and his colleagues to be creative and to use sound in expressive ways: a feature of O Dreamland's soundtrack is the recurring laughter of the mechanical dummies, which takes on a sinister, mocking tone.
The effect of O Dreamland is summed-up by Gavin Lambert in his article on Free Cinema:
"Everything is ugly... It is almost too much. The nightmare is redeemed by the point of view, which, for all the unsparing candid camerawork and the harsh, inelegant photography, is emphatically humane. Pity, sadness, even poetry is infused into this drearily tawdry, aimlessly hungry world."
DVD Times Anthony Nield
THURSDAY’S CHILDREN
The New York Times (Walter Goodman) (excerpt)
THERE may be a more moving film in town than ''Thursday's Children,'' but don't count on it. Lindsay Anderson's 1953 documentary runs only 21 minutes, every one of which produces a lump in the throat or a leap of the heart.
Mr. Anderson and Guy Brenton take us to the
The teachers are patient and efficient, the children eager, apparently aware that when they touch a teacher's face as she utters a sound, they are on their way to being able to talk to each other. ''Speech is coming,'' says the narrator, Richard Burton, and we root for the kids as they struggle to learn a word by remembering what it feels like when they say it. And when, finally, the word is spoken, it is not always recognizable. Thursday's child, says the nursery rhyme, has ''far to go.'' Watching these bright-eyed girls and boys burst from their silence into games and stories, your own eyes are likely to grow a little moist.
This fine documentary, which won an Academy Award, is one of
three on the current Film Forum 1 program by Mr. Anderson, better known for his
features ''This Sporting Life,'' ''If'' and ''O Lucky Man!'' It is followed by
''The Singing Lesson,'' a diverting look at a student recital at the
EVERY DAY EXCEPT CHRISTMAS
Every Day Except
Christmas (1957) Christophe Dupin from Screen Online
1956 proved to be a crucial year in Lindsay Anderson's career. Not only did he initiate the first Free Cinema screening, but he also wrote one of his most passionate theoretical pieces, "Stand Up! Stand Up!" (Sight and Sound, Autumn 1956), and he started the production of his new film, Every Day Except Christmas.
The new project was made possible because his Free
Cinema accomplice Karel Reisz was working for the Ford company. Reisz had
accepted the job on condition that he would be allowed to produce a series of
non-advertising documentaries. He invited
A very rough treatment was written, but most of the film
was improvised on the spot. The material shot over 4 weeks - either through the
night or from dawn to lunchtime - was so abundant that
Every Day was the centrepiece of the third Free
Cinema programme at the National Film Theatre in May 1957. Reviews of the film
were almost unanimous in their praise. It went on to win the Grand Prix at the
Venice Festival of Shorts and Documentaries later that year. Yet it was
The film evokes what
Every Day Except Christmas was one of the most ambitious of all Free Cinema films, and remains probably the best representative of the movement in retrospectives around the world today.
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The New York Times (Walter Goodman)
MARCH TO ALDERMASTON
March to Aldermaston
(1959) Patrick Russell from Screen Online
1958's Easter march to Aldermaston enjoys landmark status in the annals of peaceful protest. Its filmed record is similarly recalled as a milestone for campaigning documentary.
CND emerged from Aldermaston as a campaign uniting disparate wings of the political left with otherwise apolitical concerned citizens. Echoing this, the volunteers responsible for the film, under the Film and Television Committee for Nuclear Disarmament, united different sectors of their industry: from lab technicians processing footage for free, to Contemporary Films, which handled its distribution. The involvement of Free Cinema practitioners Lindsay Anderson and Karel Reisz is noteworthy, but this is not a Free Cinema film. Equally important were the contributions of contemporaries outside that movement (such as the Committee's Secretary Derrick Knight, and Stephen Peet) and others (like Wolfgang Suschitzky) with roots in the older Documentary Movement.
Credited only to the Committee, March to Aldermaston
demands appreciation as the product of selfless collaboration. By most
accounts, however,
Precisely because it deserves recognition as a sincere
attempt to advance its cause through documentary, it deserves the respect of
being asked tough questions. It echoes the weaknesses, as much as the
strengths, of the disarmament movement. Politically, CND influenced only the
Labour Party - mainly to Labour's electoral detriment. It soon caused damaging
divisions within the party and, as late as 1983, Aldermaston veteran Michael
Foot's landslide defeat was widely blamed on Labour's anti-nuclear platform.
The film, too, fails to mount a convincing case for unilateral disarmament (its
best shot is the claim that
THIS SPORTING LIFE
Chicago Reader (Dave Kehr)
Lindsay Anderson's debut film (1963, 129 min.) is probably the best crafted of the British "kitchen sink" movies and features a memorable if somewhat theatrical performance by Richard Harris as a rugby star who can't handle success. With Rachel Roberts, Colin Blakely, and Arthur Lowe.
A reminder that something really
was stirring in those days of the British New Wave before it frittered itself
away. There's a touch of the cloth-cap poseur about the way this adaptation of
David Storey's novel flaunts pubs, tenements and North Country accents, but
also real intelligence in its use of rugby league football as a sidelong
metaphor for the rat race, and real passion behind its tormented affair between
Harris' inarticulately demanding miner/footballer and his dowdily
uncomprehending landlady (Roberts), which ultimately acquires the authentic
ring of amour fou.
This Sporting Life
(1963) Phil Wickham from Screen Online
This Sporting Life (1963) is the film which signalled the end of the British 'new wave'. While its methods and style remained influential, its box office failure meant that producers were unwilling to invest their money in more gritty, realist topics. It was felt that audiences wanted escapism again.
It's easy to see why This Sporting Life wasn't a
commercial success. Unlike the short and punchy earlier new wave films, it is
over two hours long. Where Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (d. Karel
Reisz, 1960) or A Taste of Honey (d. Tony Richardson, 1961) deal with
difficult issues and paint a gritty picture of
This is not to say that the film is in any way a failure. Indeed after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning it is probably the most regarded new wave film with current critics. It is perhaps the most unflinching look at the misery of the human condition that British film culture has ever contrived. At times the pace, expressionistic aesthetic and obsession with emotional trauma seem more like the Swedish films of Ingmar Bergman than anything to do with British social realism.
Lindsay Anderson said at the time the film should not be
seen as " a
Frank grips Maurice's hand and tells him "I can give love" as he maintains that Margaret is the one thing that makes him feel wanted. The tragedy is that his emotions are so misplaced. Margaret feels unable to give love at all and certainly not to someone like Frank, who cannot articulate his feelings other than by force. Sport is used as a symbol to provide a contrast to Frank's emotional pain - as the team's hard man he takes a pride in inflicting physical pain on his opponents. On the field he has power and is in control; away from the scrum he has none. Weaver and his wife treat him as a piece of meat and he has neither the sensitivity nor intelligence to help Margaret overcome her unhappiness. At the end, after Margaret's death his greatest fears are confirmed; battered by an opposing player, covered in mud, he really is "just a great ape on a football field".
The film's critical reputation is stronger now perhaps
because
Turner Classic Movies Bret Wood
Film Court: This
Sporting Life Lawrence Russell
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)
THE WHITE BUS
aka:
Red, White, and Zero
Originally designed to be part of a feature called Red, White and Zero,
a planned reunion of three 'Free Cinema' directors. When Karel Reisz' Morgan,
A Suitable Case for Treatment turned into a feature, Lindsay Anderson and
Tony Richardson were joined by Peter Brook, but their three contributions were
never released together, and only Anderson's has stood the test of time.
Shelagh Delaney's script takes an impassive young girl (Healey) out of her
suicidal
User comments from imdb Author (handyhannah5@hotmail.com)
This film had a big impact on me. Saw first saw it on BBC2 in the 70's as
part of a Anderson Retro. Originally based on Delaney's book Red, White &
Zero it was a three director/stories feature film. Although the other two parts
were never finished. That's why the film doesn't have titles.
The reason why I loved this film was because I grew up in a slum clearance area
of
I recently got another chance to see it and loved it. The story follows a girl
who is fed up with working in
For Delaney it's like Charlie Bubbles - dealing with leaving your home town and
looking at the effect it has on you. For
IF…
Great Britain
I
saw this film several times when it was released in the late 60's, about the
same time as Kubrick's 2001, and was one of our favorite films in my
late teens, particularly the contrast between this amazingly intense,
repressive boarding school atmosphere where inflicting superiority and
punishment was the key, remarkable and revolting at the same time, and then
Malcolm McDowell cuts out with a girl on his motorcycle, rides through some
countryside, and arrives at a tiny hamburger joint that just happens to have a
jukebox that plays the Sanctus section by the Missa Luba Congolese
Catholic choir, which I still find unforgettable, leading to a quite memorable
feline choreographed roll on the floor with the girl, purring and scratching
each other's eyes out, the boys revolting against everybody and everything, including
each other, leading to the rather futile nihilist ending, which reminds me of
quite a few of the modern day cult mentalities. Interesting use of professional and
non-professional actors, also memorable was the use of black & white in a
color film for the scene of the Rubens-like nurse who walked naked through the
empty living chambers thinking about the boys...a terrific film about
adolescence and the insanity all those testosterone hormones cause in young
lads such as we...
A modern classic in which
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
An English public school for boys is the setting for petty domination by the old over the young, and the strong over the weak, as the teachers and prefects humiliate and torment their charges in increasingly brutal fashion. But three defiant students, headed by the sardonic Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) are determined to fight the system at all costs.
The cruelty of young people to one another always serves to
amplify unhealthy power relations in the adult world. To this end,
This being a film of the 60s, the theme of rebellion is treated with an in-your-face boldness that is almost unthinkable today. But in comparison to some of the more self-indulgent experiments of that decade, If.... actually seems restrained, and even a bit intellectual in its dry, rather distanced approach to its subject. At its best, the picture lets us glimpse the face of injustice without trying to tell us how to feel about it, and despite the film's limitations, the bitter satire still packs a considerable punch.
BBC: If... Jamie Russell
Although it openly lifts the plot and symbolism of Jean Vigo's 1933 "Zero de Conduit", a film that was considered so incendiary that the French authorities banned it until 1945, "If..." is a true British classic.
Taking
Malcolm McDowell heads the cast as Mick, a teenage schoolboy who leads his classmates in a revolution against the stifling conformism of his boarding school. Facing up to the bullying prefects and the incompetent teachers, Mick and his crusaders attempt to destroy the stagnant system of petty viciousness and an out-dated belief in the importance of the institution over the individual.
The film's greatness lies in its surreal take on these events. As the schoolyard revolution slowly kicks into gear, the film itself begins to disintegrate. The photography switches restlessly between colour and sepia, and the narrative becomes increasingly elliptical as reality and fantasy merge.
The years may have robbed it of some of its power, but "If..." still deserves the reputation as one of the best films to have come from these shores, a subversive, anti-authoritarian masterpiece that stands alongside Godard's "Weekend" and Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel" as a blistering attack on the morality and values of the middle class. To rework that famous Parisian cry of 1968: "Under the schoolyard, the beach!"
if.... Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York
Originally released mere months after the turbulent events of May 1968 (the
student uprising in
None of which is to imply that if....
comes across as a dry sociological treatise. Indeed, the film is probably
best remembered as the galvanizing screen debut of Malcolm McDowell, who's
given one of the most memorable visual introductions in movie history:
penetrating blue eyes peering intently from a narrow window formed by the hat
perched atop his head and the scarf wrapped around his nose, mouth and jaw.
McDowell has never demonstrated much range—presumably that's why his career as
a leading man proved so short-lived—but in his youth he cornered the market on
fiery insolence, and his Michael Travis makes for a noxiously compelling
antihero, something of a dry run for the more overtly antisocial character he'd
play three years later in Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.
Moody and allusive, if.... never quite achieves the delicate insight
of Fred Schepisi's similar (but now mostly forgotten) The Devil's Playground
(1976), and Anderson's control sometimes falters—occasional stabs at surrealism
are downright clumsy, and the picture switches intermittently from color to
black-and-white to no discernible thematic purpose. (Rumor has it that
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Soup Dreams Bryony Dixon and Christophe Dupin from Sight and Sound, March 2001
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film
Review Richard Scheib
The Village Voice
[Elliott Stein]
All Movie
Guide [Rebecca Flint Marx]
Guardian/Observer Peter Bradshaw and Philip French
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Vincent Canby
O LUCKY MAN!
Great Britain USA
O Lucky
Man! Don Druker from the Reader
The gradations of sham and corruption
and the quirky contours of modern society, as revealed in the epic wanderings
of Lindsay Anderson's modern Candide/Everyman (Malcolm McDowell). Mick Travers
(now Travis), the vicious public
school of If
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Bradford Film Festival
O Lucky Man! obtained
a rare big-screen outing at the 2006 Bradford Film Festival, when shown as part
of the
David Sherwin's script introduces Travis as a kind of capitalist Candide,
wide-eyed and sunnily optimistic in his devotion to the entrepreneurial spirit.
Covering large swathes of
Director Anderson explicitly presents O
Lucky Man! as a sprawling state-of-the-nation polemic: his vision
is of
Except that would be a decidedly lengthy evening at the pictures, O Lucky Man! clocking in at the
best part of three hours thanks to the bagginess of its much-rewritten
screenplay and
In another ploy to unify this ungainly material (and also, perhaps, skimp on
the budget) Anderson gives many of the supporting actors several roles each -
including Rachel Roberts (sensual), Mona Washbourne, Arthur Lowe (impressive)
and Dandy Nicholls, the latter particularly memorable as an unflappable
tea-lady who interrupts a drolly Kafkaesque interrogation/torture sequence. Even
But what really holds the picture together is
eFilmCritic John Linton Roberson
filmsgraded.com
[Brian Koller]
The Helen Mirren Appreciation Society
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
THE WHALES OF AUGUST
Time Out
Anderson's version of David Berry's
play opens with a sepia-tinted Steenburgen joyfully watching the spouters of
the title, before fast- forwarding into the future. Sixty years later, Libby
(Davis) and Sarah (Gish) are still on the island where they spent the summers
with their husbands who, like the leviathans themselves, have long since gone.
Libby, who is blind, treats her sister with disdain, but allows her to brush
her long ivory hair. When Sarah invites the exiled Russian charmer Mr Maranov
(Price) to dinner, Libby expresses her disapproval by refusing to permit Joshua
(Carey) to install a picture window. Sarah's patience begins to run
out...Nothing much happens in this curious chamber piece - the pair of
crumblies chinwag with their blowsy friend Tisha (Sothern); Mr Maranov catches
a fish; Sarah pegs out the washing - but the dragonish Ms Davis is in fine
form, and Ms Gish is as captivating as ever. A gentle interlacing of memory,
comedy and pathos, this is a golden opportunity to enjoy, if not whale music,
then the probable swansong of two giants of cinema.
The
Whales of August Jonathan Rosenbaum
from the Reader
The ages of the five
principal actors in Lindsay Anderson's feature--Lillian Gish, Bette Davis,
Vincent Price, Ann Sothern, and Harry Carey Jr.--added up to just under four
centuries, and this fact alone tended to tower over all the other particulars
in this film. Adapted by David Berry from his own slender play about growing
old gracefully, the film is set on an island off the coast of Maine Davis
MovieFreak
[Howard Schumann]
Lindsay Anderson's The
Whales of August stars silent film legend Lillian Gish, in her 95th
year, and Bette Davis, 79, as widowed sisters, one warm and supportive, the
other cold and cantankerous, who have been coming to a small cottage on the
Maine seacoast for sixty years. Every August, they watch the journey of the
whales passing in the nearby waters together but the sense is that this may be
their last summer together. Knowing that their time is limited, the siblings
attempt to resolve long-standing differences but face many obstacles. The
Whales of August takes place during the course of a single day and the
camera stays mostly inside the house except to follow the sisters on occasional
walks to the ocean. It all sounds static but there is a great deal of emotion
churning beneath the surface.
Libby (Davis
Also featured is Ann
Sothern as Trish, a friend and neighbor who is close to convincing Sarah to
leave Libby's care to her daughter until she remembers how Libby supported her
when her own husband died. Sarah draws every ounce of emotion from a lovely
scene in which she celebrates her 46th wedding anniversary by having
an imaginary conversation with Philip, her long deceased husband.
"Forty-six years, Phillip", she tells him. "Forty-six red roses;
forty-six white. White for truth--red for passion. That's what you always said
- passion and truth; that's all we need. I wish you were here, Phillip."
Another moving sequence is when Libby brushes her face with a lock of her
husband's hair while sitting alone in her bedroom.
I had heard that The Whales of
August was little more than a vehicle for two aging stars to sing their swan
song; however, I found the screenplay by David Berry to gracefully complement the
performances with an emotional honesty that captures the truth of the
characters. Not a great deal happens in The Whales of August but that is often
true of life. It is a gentle and civilized character study that lets us know it
is never too late to bury long-standing grievances and open a picture window to
possibility. It may be elegant and old fashioned in its style but it has a
grace and beauty that is timeless.
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
With incomparable grace and gumption, Lillian Gish and Bette Davis rise above the tenuous material set before them in "The Whales of August," a fusty and unfocused play adaptation that provides a setting and little else for the grand dames. The climaxes and crises of this mannered, grandmotherly drama are as elusive as the whales themselves.
Playwright David Berry adapts his own work, the becalmed story of
interdependent sisters who are wearing on each other's nerves after 30 years
together in coastal
Sarah cares for her disabled sister with devotion and patience, brushing Libby's thick, white hair as though it were a young girl's. Gish's lovely portrayal is sweet-natured instead of saintly, tolerant instead of tyrannized. She's tough under all those "yes, dears" that soothe her sister's gloomy moods. It's a pleasure just to watch her putter in her rose garden, or chat with her husband's portrait, yellowing in its filigree.
Libby, who supports Sarah, taunts her for her industriousness, so Sarah is tempted when an old friend (Ann Sothern) and a gallant e'migre' (Vincent Price) propose alternatives that threaten the sisters' arrangement. They seem to have arrived from the wings. Even though director Lindsay Anderson wants to open up the play for the screen, we sense entrances, stage directions. And though he adds scenic exteriors, moonshine and sea foam, there's no escaping the focus inside Sarah's house.
Anderson, a British social satirist, has succeeded in the past on both stage and screen. With his background in both, it is all the more disappointing that he has failed here. But like many another adapter he does not translate the piece, but transplants it.
Whales of August, The (1987) Manavendra K. Thakur
Apollo Movie Guide [Ryan
Cracknell]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Anderson,
Paul Thomas
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies
From the debut of his short film
"Coffee and Cigarettes" at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival, Paul
Thomas Anderson was on a trajectory to success. An ambitious featurette that
focused on five characters interacting in a Las Vegas
The son of TV host and voice
actor Ernie Anderson (perhaps best remembered as the announcer on the
long-running ABC series "The Love Boat"), Anderson Studio City , California Anderson Boston Emerson College New York University Southern California , he found
employment in various production capacities on independent films as well as TV
programming (including a stint on the short-lived syndicated "Quiz Kid
Challenge" in 1990).
While working as a production
assistant on a PBS special on political correctness, he met character actor
Philip Baker Hall and promised to write something for him. The result was the
character of Sydney, one of the coffee shop denizens in 1992's "Cigarettes
and Coffee". After the short screened at Sundance, Anderson Sydney Las Vegas Sydney Cannes
The fight over the control of
"Hard Eight/Sydney" left the writer-director with a somewhat dim view
of the Hollywood suits. ("It was the most
painful experience I've ever gone through," Anderson Southern California
youth named Eddie Adams (rapper-turned-thespian Mark Wahlberg) who happened to
blessed with a large physical endowment. Working under surrogate father Jack
Horner (played by Burt Reynolds) and co-starring with the maternal Amber Waves
(Julianne Moore), Adams re-christens himself
Dirk Diggler and enjoys fame within the industry yet descends into a personal
maelstrom fueled by drugs. Extremely well-acted (both Reynolds and Moore
snagged supporting Oscar nominations) and well-written (Anderson Anderson
Anticipation rode high as to how Anderson Anderson Anderson January 23, 2000 ), Stephen
Hunter deconstructed the religious imagery and undertones to the film, calling
it "a God-mad chunk of pure American magic realism" and "a
meditation on the intricacy of whimsical patterns". Like Julio Medem's
"Lovers of the Arctic Circle "
(1998), "Magnolia" owed much of the thrust of its plot to odd
coincidences. (Anderson Anderson
Anderson Anderson Anderson
All-Movie Guide bio from Rebecca Flint Marx
TITLE | MovieMaker Magazine brief bio from June 25, 2007
God of
Filmmaking Paul Thomas Anderson
Paul
Thomas Anderson: Tracking Through a Fantastical Reality André
Crous from Senses of Cinema
Anderson, Paul
Thomas They Shoot Pictures, Don’t
They
Interview:
Paul Thomas Anderson Josh Modell
from the Onion, January 2, 2008
100 Essential Directors (Pop Matters)
Ranked 21st on The Guardian's 2004 List of the World's 40 Best
Directors
Ranked 16th on Film
Comment's list of the 25 Best Directors of the Decade (2000-2009)
501 Movie Directors: A Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest
Filmmakers
HARD EIGHT
aka:
USA
Sidney (Hall) - old, well-kept - approaches a roadside café.
John (Reilly) - young, down-and-out - is slumped in front of the joint.
Flipside Movie Emporium:
Hard Eight Michael Scrutchin
Paul Thomas Anderson's debut feature, Hard Eight, was dumped into a
limited release by its distributor just seven months before his sophomore
effort, Boogie Nights, would overshadow it completely. The film rivals Punch-Drunk Love
as
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Henrik Sylow]
On the audio commentary, Paul Thomas
Anderson explains, that all you need, to get a film started, is coffee and
cigarettes. What few know is, that this perhaps is one of the most important
statements from a director in the last 35 years, as Godard's rule ("All
you need is a girl and a gun") had been overused: With this simple
statement, Paul Thomas Anderson, not only is honest in giving away his secret
to how he gets the ideas spinning, but also steps out of the shadow of the
past. Paul Thomas Anderson may fake it, as he did go to filmschool, but he
still thinks that you can't learn people to make film by putting them into a
classroom for four years: As he says on the audio commentary of "Boogie
Nights": "I learned more from listening to the audio commentary of
the Criterion Laserdisc of "Bad Day at Black Rock", than I did in
four years of filmschool."
Paul Thomas Anderson wrote "Hard Eight", or "Sydney
Flying
Dutchman: Hard Eight - Film Comment Richard T. Jameson from Film
Comment, March/April 1997
Black screen; the sound of a truck starting. Fade in on a drab morning, the parking lot of a roadside diner, and the truck itself, a long freighter that hauls itself into, across, and out of a Super-35 frame that, for one satisfying instant, it perfectly fills. As the engine roar recedes, a trenchcoated back looms in frame right, pauses a beat, then approaches the diner, camera following at elbow level. There is a young man seated on the ground near the diner entrance, head bowed, legs drawn up to his chest, like a fetus that has learned to sit up. The man in the trenchcoat stops and speaks to him—an older man's voice: “Want a cup of coffee? Want a cigarette?” The young man takes his time looking up, as if he'd been somewhere else, and had already accepted that in that place he would never be spoken to again. He can see the man who's standing over him; except for a blurred reflection in the nearby door, we still haven't.
Gaston Monescu once observed that beginnings are always difficult. With movies, just the opposite is often true. The audience is eager to be caught up in something—a story, a vision, a mood—or they wouldn't be there. It's child's play to turn on the engine; riding out the trip is hard. Hard Eight, Paul Thomas Anderson's feature debut, has a classical beaut of a beginning. The better, rarer news is that, having confidently taken the wheel, Anderson never loses his grip or his way. Like its opening shot, Hard Eight keeps us wanting to see more, and is equally satisfying in the ways that it does and doesn't permit that to happen.
We get to put a face on the older man soon enough. It stares at us in closeup from the other side of a booth in the diner as he, Sydney (Philip Baker Hall), and the young man, John (John C. Reilly), exchange names and then get their conversational footing. John, looking back in closeup, is apprehensive, puzzled, sullenly combative. Sydney advises, “Never ignore a man's courtesy,” and draws him out enough to learn that he's broke and in need of $6,000 with which to bury his mother. He tried to win the money in Las Vegas. Sydney hints that he knows something about that sort of thing, and asks John what he would do if he had $50. John considers: “Eat?” And how long could he live on $50? Sydney answers his own question: “I would bet not long.” “You would bet?” John answers, pissed, feeling patronized. And the camera, which has mostly considered the men in separate closeups, now resumes its vassal-like posture somewhere behind Sydney, then curves forward to frame him in profile as he rises, gathers up the check for the coffee, and reiterates his offer of a ride back to Vegas, $50, and a lesson in what to do with it. The small voluptuousness of the visual punctuation is appropriate: Sydney is in fact placing his bet, on John.
I'd like to call Hard Eight the most engrossing neo-noir since Pulp Fiction, but that would probably just buy trouble for it. Although its cast includes Samuel L. Jackson as a hooligan with philosophical pretensions, Anderson's film doesn't aspire to the ecstatic riffs and grand-guignol black comedy of Tarantino's, and its keynote action is drawing on a cigarette rather than drawing a gun. But Anderson shares the T man's respect for conversation, and the conviction that the right actor making the right lines his own can be inexhaustibly thrilling. He also understands, and knows how to exploit, the pull of the unknown: the undisclosed motive, the suspected but unrevealed connection between people, places, times, events—the gap deliberately overleapt so that a narrative equivalent of negative space holds the dramatis personae in their orbits and energizes every second of their doing and not-doing.
The greatest pull is exerted by the character Sydney. The film begins with his enigmatic entry and continues to be fascinated by his identity and agenda long after John has stopped wondering. He's not, as the younger man speculates, a guy with a St. Francis complex or a fag cruising for a pickup. Conditioned by decades of noir plots, we watch the early scenes anticipating that he is recruiting John for some ultimate fall-guy role. What he does instead is to make good on his offer, taking John to Vegas and, in effect, enabling him. Following Sydney's periodic instructions (after each of which the older man fades into the distance), John runs his stake up to $2,000, a line of credit, and a comp'ed room in the hotel. Syd drops by the room to say goodbye and ask, “So John, what are you going to do?” And John, whose life had been stalled before Syd's cues to action, realizes he's still at a loss to what his next action should be. (How long can you live on $2,000?) Syd says he's going downstairs to gamble. “Can I watch?” John asks quietly. Okay. Fade out, and a title card: RENO, NEVADA—TWO YEARS LATER.
This is the first, but won't be the last, disorienting lurch in the scenario. Two years later, Syd and John are some kind of team. Syd gambles; John—we don't know what John does. Both have caught the eye of Clementine (Gwyneth Paltrow), a cocktail waitress in a casino bar who recognizes Sydney's air of centered authority—”Captain,” she calls him—and finds John and his puppy-dog allegiance to Syd “cute.” She's a hooker on the side, and in a double bind: getting caught would lose her her waitressing job, but failing to respond to the customers' flirtations would get her fired, too. As with John at the beginning, Syd sits her down for coffee and a sharing of confidences. (At the end of the diner scene with Syd and John, the camera had lingered to frame the now-empty booth, the window beyond with its oddly auspicious view of a highway on the Western horizon, and the two coffee cups and ashtray—as if this were a secular altar where some rite had just taken place. The same sort of Bressonian attention to cups and plates attends the Syd/Clementine confab.) Clementine, too, is ostensibly going somewhere, saving up to open a beauty salon, yet within a moment of that declaration is asking Syd—but really herself—”Why the fuck would I open a beauty salon?” Syd takes her back to his suite but, as with John, doesn't fuck her.
A pattern has emerged. Syd, a man of indeterminate past who acknowledges a grown son and daughter whose whereabouts he no longer knows, has parented two sweet, dumb castaways. (Reilly and Paltrow are both superb at catching the precise blend of naïveté and fecklessness in their characters: each is just smart enough to know what they need to lie about, and desperate enough to believe the lies until the lies die gasping for fresh inspiration.) But this situation, once established, is jeopardized the moment the newly made couple get out of his sight. We'll leave the specifics unstated for now—their disclosure in the film is, of course, as mesmerizingly tortuous in coming as the alteration is abrupt—but it is enough to say that violence, extortion, and the prospect of ugly death figure largely in the mix. We are also surprised, at the eleventh hour, to be proffered a motive for Sydney's adoption of John. By this time, such a revelation—which a conventional noir would have sprung in the second reel—constitutes as much of a shock and disorientation as the film's well-judged lacunae. Indeed, so absolute is our acceptance that Syd is what he is and does what he does, period, that we even doubt what we've been told. It changes everything. It changes nothing.
Anderson's eye (abetted by cinematographer Robert Elswit) is impeccably assured, resolutely avoiding all the garish clichés of Vegas-Reno stories, maintaining a modest, direct clarity in its coverage of the characters' passages, and deploying a supple Steadicam in the interests of fluidity and alertness rather than self-serving display. One moment is exemplary: At the end of Syd and Clementine's late-night talk, an eruption of sudden, ineffectual anger at a nearby table interrupts them. The camera pans slightly left of Clementine, racks focus onto the unknown night folk, then refocuses on Clementine as she makes a what-was-that-all-about face. We never know what that was all about. These things just happen, is all. There are stories all over the place.
Hard Eight wouldn't be the compelling story it is without Philip Baker Hall as its center of gravity and values. Anderson wrote the script with Baker in mind, and it's about time somebody did. Thirteen years ago, Hall, preeminently a man of the theater, gave a harrowing, profane performance in Robert Altman's one-man show about Richard Nixon in San Clemente exile, Secret Honor. Unthinkably, he was allowed to slip back into effective anonymity (his best role of the past decade was a “Seinfeld” appearance as a Javert-like tracer of unreturned library books). His Sydney is a tone-perfect triumph, every bit the tour de force Nixon was, but even more challenging because stripped of psychotic bravura and historical context. In one of only two moments of violence, he leans over to deliver an expertly efficient, tactically necessary chop to a man's neck, without breaking stride or his running dialogue. From hotel room to casino to restaurant booth to his car, he makes his Nevada rounds like a Flying Dutchman without an opera; just to watch him walk among the gaming tables, his gait even, impertubable, is one of the privileged moments of the cinema. May we not have to wait thirteen years for the next Philip Baker Hall film.
Hard Eight Mike D’Angelo
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Austin
Chronicle [Russell Smith]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York
Times (registration req'd) Stephen
Holden
BOOGIE NIGHTS
USA
Anderson's second feature - a
dazzling, highly confident, atmospherically original and refreshingly
non-prurient take on the LA porn movie community - may not be a '90s Citizen
Kane, as some claim, but in terms of sweep, ambition and precocious
cinematic competence, it heralds the arrival of a new talent. Charting the rise
and fall of well-endowed teenage ingénu Dirk Diggler (Wahlberg), from
dishwasher to subcultural skinflick superstar, and back to washed-out junkie,
the film is less a cautionary tale than a freewheeling, talent-showcasing
homage to the glitter, tack and kitsch excesses of the drug-fuelled late '70s
and the hangover '80s. The sense of homage/pastiche goes further still: if the
rambling ensemble construction derives from
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Henrik Sylow]
Following up on his
superb but overlooked first film, "Hard Eight", Paul Thomas Anderson
takes us on into the adult film making and a journey thru time from the late
seventies to the nineties, following not only the industry and its transition
from film to video, from story to gonzo, but also the ups and downs of the
people involved. Based on the career and life of porn legend John Holmes, Paul
Thomas Anderson loves his characters and does little to hide their weaknesses,
but never exploits them: These are not perverts, these are normal people who
just happens to make porn for a living.
In only one year since he made "Hard Eight", Paul Thomas Anderson has
taken seven league steps as a director: He has developed so much confidence,
that he uses images freely on his canvas. He knows every way to swing a brush
and he shows it. "Boogie Nights" is so full of technical bravura,
that it almost is showing off. Long complicated tracking shots involving
different actors and dialogue, fancy editing and amazing compositions makes him
look more confident and savvy than directors with decades on their back. In
fact, Paul Thomas Anderson does little to hide that he is ripping off
compositions from everyone: It is very visible and on the audio commentary he
even points out where he stole the scene from. But being a master filmmaker
does not guarantee that the story is good: But it is. With almost casual ease,
Paul Thomas Anderson weaves the lives of four main characters and a handful of
supporting characters into each other, always paying attention to each and
everyone of them, allowing them all to be in the center. In short, "Boogie
Nights" is so full of confidence, technical wizardry and directorial
skill, that Paul Thomas Anderson nailed his name down and became a keeper. He
was a master at 26, now he is 27 and can play ball with the greatest.
Paul Thomas Anderson was 26 when he directed Boogie Nights, the same
age as Orson Welles when Citizen Kane came out. What was that Welles
quote about cinema being the greatest train set a boy ever had? Whatever it
was, it certainly applies to
Potential viewers who may be scared away from BOOGIE NIGHTS by its subject matter, take note: you're not likely to find a more potent morality tale anywhere this year. The milieu may be the pornography industry of the late 1970s and early 1980s, but those with prurient interest need not apply. BOOGIE NIGHTS is that rare example of riveting film-making which also instructs, so unobtrusively you almost can't tell you're being instructed. Never has the self-delusional narcissism of the "Me Decade" been portrayed with such an eye to the repercussions. This is the story not just of an endless party, but of the harrowing morning after the party finally does end.
Writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson opens his narrative in 1977, swooping through a San Fernando Valley disco as he introduces his principle characters: adult film director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds); his leading lady Amber Waves (Julianne Moore); perpetually skating ingenue Rollergirl (Heather Graham); black leading man Buck Swope (Don Cheadle) and a 17-year-old busboy named Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg). Horner sees something in the young man -- not the least of which is his spectacular male endowment -- which encourages him to bring Eddie into his film-making family. Re-christened Dirk Diggler, the new stud on the block becomes an instant sensation in the industry headlining the erotic adventures of private eye Brock Landers.
And just as instantly, he gets caught up in the glitter and
glory of the 70s in
That is exactly what happens as BOOGIE NIGHTS blasts into the
80s with a literal bang.
The most talked-about moment in BOOGIE NIGHTS will probably be the final shot, in which Wahlberg finally displays the equipment (prosthetically-enhanced, if you must know) which has been the subject of so much discussion through the rest of the film. It would be easy to consider that moment gratuitious, but it would be just as inappropriate as thinking of BOOGIE NIGHTS just as a movie about the porno business. In effect, the whole film is about the ultimate "dick thing," a group of people who simply can't see the world beyond what's going on between their legs. Dirk's pep talk to his own genitalia undercuts the seemingly idyllic conclusion which precedes it -- it turns out he hasn't really learned much of anything. Viewers, on the other hand, have a chance to learn more than they might expect from BOOGIE NIGHTS...for instance, that sometimes a sex film isn't just a sex film.
BOOGIE
NIGHTS Will the Real Dirk Diggler Please Stand Up? by Peter Lehman from Jump Cut, December 1998
Boogie Nights Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
Nitrate Online Eddie Cockrell
Nick's Flick Picks (Full
Review) Nick Davis
Crazy for Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz)
Boogie Nights Mike D’Angelo
digitallyOBSESSED
[Dale Dobson]
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
DVD Verdict
[Harold Gervais] - double disc set
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
World Socialist Web
Site Emanuele Saccarelli
The
Ideology of Family in P.T. Anderson's Boogie Nights and Magnolia by Greg Poduska of Cinesthesia
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York
Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
MAGNOLIA A 99
USA
"I have a feeling, one of those gut feelings,
that I'll make pretty good movies the rest of my life. And maybe I'll make some
clunkers, maybe I'll make some winners, but I guess the way that I really feel
is that Magnolia is, for better or worse, the best movie I'll ever make." —Paul Thomas
Anderson
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
For
his follow-up to Boogie Nights—a sweeping, multi-character chronicle of
several crucial years in the adult-film industry that was equal parts daring,
funny, and touching—writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has decided to get
really ambitious. Re-enlisting much of his Boogie Nights cast (with some
notable additions), Anderson has turned his attention to one eventful day in
Los Angeles that finds a handful of diverse, seemingly unconnected characters
reaching crisis points as their lives intersect. Among them: Jason Robards as a
cancer victim whose imminent demise is greeted with decidedly different
reactions from his younger wife (Julianne Moore) and saintly caretaker (Philip
Seymour Hoffman), Tom Cruise as a misogynist motivational speaker, John C.
Reilly as an earnest and lonely cop, Philip Baker Hall as a TV game-show host
attempting to reconcile with his coke-abusing daughter (Melora Walters),
William H. Macy as a troubled former boy genius, and Jeremy Blackman as his
young heir apparent. It's a potentially unwieldy undertaking, and at times Magnolia
feels unwieldy. Anderson once again merges Altman's scope with Scorsese's
stylistic adventurousness, and early on it's not clear he knows what he's
doing, and that he might simply have thrown every story he felt like telling
into one movie whether it make sense to do so or not. He does, he didn't, and
by the end, everything makes sense, Anderson having slowly revealed the web of
chance and coincidence that binds his characters together. It's a melancholy,
meditative wonder—even when it breaks its mood for a climax straight out of
either Ripley's Believe It Or Not! or The Bible—that's probably the
least immediately pleasing of Anderson's three films. But it's also his
richest, deepest, and most rewarding, a film impossible to forget and difficult
to shake, filled with memorable characters and driven by a sadly hopeful sense
of humanity. As bright as Anderson's future looks (three films, each a
distinct, unqualified success), this might be the one for which he's
remembered.
Magnolia — Inside Movies Since 1920 - Boxoffice.com Christine James from Box Office Magazine
Carl Jung defined synchronicity
as being "a meaningful coincidence of two or more events, where something
other than the probability of chance is involved" and, more succinctly,
"an effect without a cause." "Magnolia" is bookended with
references to amazing coincidences, with a narrator musing that some
connections are meaningful, others pure chance. Though the parallels between
this film's numerous characters range from uncanny to unnoticeable, making the
synchronicity element merely a convenient segueway device that only sometimes
pans out, the cause justifies the effect, so to speak.
As in his brilliantly incisive
"Boogie Nights," Anderson Southern California day is worse than usual after an
unexpected visit from her loathed father, Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall), who
tries to tell her, while dodging screamed epithets, that he's dying of cancer.
Despite his terminal illness, he continues on with the quiz show he's hosted
for decades, which is about to set a world record thanks to the reigning champ,
child genius Stanley Spector (Jeremy Blackman), who's smart enough to know that
he's just a meal ticket to his father and a freakshow to the general public.
Donnie Smith (William H. Macy), former golden boy of the same quiz show some 30
years earlier, watches Stanley
All performances are flawless,
and the masterful fluidity with which writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson puts
down one strand to pick up another is as artful as his heartbreakingly dead-on
insight into the human condition.
Reel.com [Tor Thorsen]
Paul Thomas
Anderson is undoubtedly one of the most talented filmmakers working today.
He has an ear for dialogue. He has an eye for cinematography. He has dramatic
vision. However, his latest film proves that
After an amusing but unrelated prologue about bizarre "accidents of
chance,"
Unfortunately, Magnolia's remaining 150 minutes never recapture the
energy of its rapid-fire opening. As Robert Altman
did in Short Cuts,
Despite these shortcomings,
However, the real standout of Magnolia's cast is Tom Cruise, as the swaggering, testosterone-steeped Mackey. Constantly bellowing his mantra "Respect the c*ck!" Cruise turns what could've been a caricature of manliness into the Zen master of sleaze, teaching lessons like "How to Turn Your 'Friend' into a Sperm Receptacle" and "How to Fake You're a Nice Guy" with impassioned conviction. It's the performance of a lifetime, though will likely be too foul-mouthed to win over the Academy.
Magnolia features many more scenes of inspired humor and unflinching
realism. Sadly, these brilliant moments are too often lost in the film's
narrative jumble. Had
The film, in my opinion, explicitly refers to Exodus 8:2 ( obvious "8"s and "2"s throughout the film ), so, at some level, I think the raining of the frogs should be read in that context. In the Biblical story, God tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and demand the release of the enslaved Jews. Should Pharaoh refuse, God threatens a series of plagues including, of course, a plague of frogs.
All the characters in Magnolia are enslaved, not by Pharaoh,
but by their pasts, by circumstances, by loneliness, by resentment, by hatred,
by shame, by guilt... When we first meet them, they're trapped, unredeemed, and
desperately longing for some release.
Quote at the end of the film:
"Like it says in the Book, we may be through with the past, but the
past ain't through with us." By the way, my new favourite quote!...definitely
going in the next book...
Over the course of the film, some of the characters are redeemed...others are
not. Included among the doubles and doppelgangers that populate this film (two
wives, two children, two child geniuses, two saviors, and at least one angel),
we're presented with two patriarchs, Earl Partridge and Jimmy Gator, who's past
and present mirror one another's. Both have committed nearly unforgivable sins
against their children and families. Both are dying of cancer. Both are forced
to confront the meaning of their lives and the pain they've caused...and both
recognize that they've committed horrible acts against those they love, acts
which for so long have prevented them from experiencing and sharing love. As
death approaches, both men seek redemption.
From his deathbed and through eyes hollowed by the ravages of his disease, Earl
Partridge faces his past and acknowledges the pain he caused his family and, in
particular, his son. He reaches out to him, admits his transgressions and seeks
his forgiveness. His damaged son overcomes his own deeply-felt resentment to
connect with his father, if only to watch him die just as he watched his mother
die so many years before - but not before he overcomes the hatred that for so
long has informed his entire existence as he breaks down at his father's
bedside.
Conversely, Jimmy Gator cannot bring himself to admit what he's done to his
daughter and his family - not even to himself. He tries, vainly, to connect
with his daughter, to impress upon her that he is a dying man, to seek some
solace in her comfort...but he cannot face the extraordinary damage he's
inflicted upon her, he cannot own up to it, he cannot seek forgiveness for it.
When we last see him, he is left unredeemed, enslaved by his past, his wife and
daughter now completely lost to him, doomed to meet death as a lonely and
unloved man.
As
I think it would be a mistake to overanalyze this film ( you mean like I'm
doin' ?? ). It exists well within the realm of the emotional and quite apart
from the analytical. It's not something to be solved cerebrally, but rather
something to be experienced at a gut level. The metaphors inform our feelings
about the characters and coincidences cause their fates to criss-cross, but
these are like leitmotifs in music, emotional cues and analogies that tie one
person to another and amplify our emotional reactions by playing on similar
themes, desires and sorrows, as
At one pivotal point in MAGNOLIA -- one of several pivotal
points in Paul Thomas Anderson's epic of human connection and disconnection --
a woman sits alone in her apartment, singing along to a song. At first it seems
she's singing along to her stereo, until
That sequence in MAGNOLIA is one of the year's best pieces of
film-making, and I could name a dozen more moments from the film that will be
sticking in my memory. If
When
There's sure to be much talk about
Act Passively, Pass Actively Essay on the film by Jill Stauffer, from
h2so4 magazine
Magnolia Syd Field
AboutFilm Dana Knowles
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Singing In The Rain Mark Olsen from Sight
and Sound, March 2000
Sight and Sound Leslie Dick
Stuart
Klawans, The Nation first review
Stuart
Klawans, The Nation another extended
review a month later
Flipside Movie Emporium Gauti Fridriksson
PopMatters Todd Ramlow
another review of
Magnolia by Cynthia Fuchs PopMatters
Interview
with Paul Thomas Anderson director of Magnolia Cynthia Fuchs of Pop Matters
Philadelphia City Paper
review by Cindy Fuchs
Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson
reverse shot :
online : spring 2004 Stacy Meichtry from Reverse Shot
MAGNOLIA Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
Kinocite Robert Hayward
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Kevin Clemons)
Freaknolia Freaknolia, on Magnolia and Frequency, by
Chris Fujiwara from Hermenaut, May 10, 2000
Deep Focus (Bryant Frazer) the “not feeling the love” section
Magnolia Mike D’Angelo
Film Journal International (Eric Monder)
Movie
Review - Magnolia - eFilmCritic Rob
Gonsalves
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
World Socialist Web
Site Peter Mazelis
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE C+ 78
USA
Essentially an unremittingly arty
update of those Jerry Lewis-style romantic comedies where a geeky beast-figure
(here, Sandler's nerdy salesman) is improbably courted by a cute, uncommonly
understanding beauty (Watson, friend of one of the hero's seven bossy sisters).
In this case, the protagonist's feral characteristics extend to a physically
ferocious volatile temper, thus allowing him to prove his manhood by taking on
a phone-sex blackmailing outfit led by Hoffman (the best thing in the movie
despite scant screentime). The film looks good and has its funny moments, but
too often one senses
CINE-FILE: Cine-List -
Cine-File.info Ignatiy
Vishnevetsky
Praising a big film is easy. It's enveloping, cushioning in its self-importance. Praising a small film, a movie that doesn't necessarily want to be praised, means taking a plunge. For example: PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE is Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest work. This little 95-minute movie, made between two projects intended to be "epic" (MAGNOLIA and THERE WILL BE BLOOD) comes across as more epic than either—a struggle that's almost comically ordinary instead of one maximized for "meaning." It's also his most beautiful musical without being a musical; it could be a ballet, a little operetta, or a children's symphony. Plunger salesman Adam Sandler, wandering through a world of Andreas Gursky colors in a blue suit, alternately pursues and is pursued by Emily Watson, a friend of his overbearing sister. It's a romance that's not so much about finding love as being able to outrun the world for long enough to let that love become something.
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Henrik Sylow]
During the press
conference in
To Paul Thomas Anderson, it was impossible to follow up on
"Magnolia". It was the most complex narrative he ever had written and
in structure an advancement to both "Boogie Nights" and "Hard
Eight". He felt trapped, he felt that he had reached a dead end, he felt
stereotyped by the press as "the boy wonder who makes complex collective
narratives". So in order to get away from the stereotype, to get some
artistic creativity and freedom, Paul Thomas Anderson destroyed the path he was
walking and made himself a new one with the help of friend Adam Sandler. Adam
and Paul were close friends and had for some time been discussing a project
together. Especially Adam Sandler would like to do serious acting and the
timing was perfect for Paul Thomas Anderson.
Where the three former films all had fancy montages, he devised the
mise-en-scene with cinematographer Robert Elswit to be deep compositions,
attacking the integrity of the frame and the conventions of space. Using a
special stock that is very sensitive to light, Elswit shot most of the film
underexposed to give shadows more room to play. The cinematography and special
composition in "Punch Drunk Love" is nothing less than stunning: And
possible some of the most original and best cinematography to come out of
The story is deceptive simple. Barry is sociophob and suffers from a few other
emotional disorders as well, which he tries to keep at bay, when not being
harassed by his seven sisters. One day he meets
Once again, Paul Thomas Anderson demonstrates what great director he is. Alone
that he manages to keep Sandler under control should say it all, but it is far
more interesting to look at how wonderful he makes Emily Watson appear. Also
the sequences where he uses overlapping dialogue are so free and natural. He
was rightfully awarded for his efforts in
Boogie Nights and Magnolia are two of the most thrillingly audacious American films of the nineties. Punch-Drunk Love is, nevertheless, a quantum leap forward in every respect – watching it blaze across the screen, you get some idea how those Parisians might have felt back in 1895 when the Lumiere brothers turned on their projector for the first time. The art-form has been redefined, and nothing will ever be quite the same again.
This is, to say the very least, not an easy film to describe, though
strictly speaking it is “an Adam Sandler comedy” – he’s Barry Egan, a hapless,
somewhat dweeby loner who runs a small business selling sink-plungers in
suburban Los Angeles. Emotionally stunted and prone to fits of depression and
violence, Barry stumbles into a romance with
All this may sound like a recipe for some kind of desperately ‘zany’
weirdness – and in lesser hands that’s probably what might have resulted. But
Click here for the Press Notes
of the film
Click here for an interview with
Emily Watson who stars in the film
Click here for an interview with
Paul Thomas Anderson, director of the film
Click here to find out more about After Eden,
the rock band featured in the movie.
The Film Journal (Peter Tonguette)
BFI | Sight & Sound |
California Sweet David Thomson from Sight
and Sound, February 2003
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
The Film Journal (Sarah Crawford)
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)
PUNCH-DRUNK LOVE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Flipside Movie Emporium
[Rob Vaux]
Reverse Shot [Tom J.
Carlisle] comparing the film to LAST
LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE
hybridmagazine.com R.T. Rholes
The Film Journal (Rick Curnutte)
stylusmagazine.com (Matthew Weiner)
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
DVD Times Barry Woodcock
Erik
Childress (Chicago Film Critics Association/Online Film Critics Society)
digitallyObsessed!
DVD Review Dan Heaton
Film Monthly (Mike Julianelle)
Nitrate Online [Gregory
Avery]
World Socialist
Web Site [David Walsh]
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Washington
Post [Ann Hornaday]
New York Magazine (Peter Rainer)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THERE WILL BE BLOOD A 96
A big, sprawling
epic movie that works as a treatise on capitalism and ambition, on the
compulsive drive to make money, where eventually greed becomes the singular
driving force, there’s an emotional disconnection from this film that remains
hard to describe, that may be due to a screen full of despicable characters,
but there’s a palpable force pushing us away from them throughout this film,
perhaps the feeling is one of inherent dislike and distrust. These are not characters we can easily put
our arms around and embrace. Like John
Wayne’s crude frontiersman Ethan Edwards in THE SEARCHERS (1956), this is as
raw and ugly a portrait of the personification of evil as American filmgoers
have seen for quite some time, an example of one of the seven deadly sins exhibited
through rapacious land and money-grabbing. Similar to Terence Malick changing the overall
tone of James Jones’s popular war novel The
Thin Red Line, actually
rewriting the entire dialogue to become an ensemble piece of interior voices,
Anderson remains faithful to the first half of Upton Sinclair’s 1927
novel Oil, a cautionary capitalist
warning about the perils of greed published just before the historic stock
market crash, but invents a new second half, avoiding any overt political
reference while matching an overwhelmingly political tone from the original book to reflect the
amoralism of the Bush years, the idea of wealth being the power shield behind which
unmentionable crimes are committed. Anderson
While the film
defies categorization by writing an epic, near 3-hour film without a single
likeable character, there are other major artistic contributions, as it’s
beautifully shot in ‘Scope by Robert Elswit, capturing the stark emptiness of
the endless Texas landscapes near Marfa, the identical location of GIANT
(1956), also featuring a dazzlingly inventive soundtrack from Radiohead member
Jonny Greenwood, much of which has a pulsating rhythmic drive of unsettled
psychological anxiety. From the outset,
Daniel Day Lewis seems to have forged a pact with what lies underground, a
Mephistophelian deal with the devil where he will pay any terrible price in
order to take freely whatever he wants from beneath the earth. Like a grizzled prospector from THE TREASURE
OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), the film opens with a man working alone in a
darkened mine, chipping away at what he hopes will be silver. After a dynamite blast reveals his treasure,
he slips on a fragile wooden step and falls down into the shaft, breaking his
leg. He’s fortunate to get away so
easily, as he crawls into town and stakes his claim. Barely noticeable, what’s interesting here is
that for the first 15 minutes or so, the story has been advanced without a
single word being spoken. Set during a
time period of 1898 to 1927, this film is set to coincide with the era of
silent films, so the beginning is an interesting homage to the period, while
also reflecting a monetary and industrial shift from mining silver to crude
oil, which becomes the new gold standard out West. When Daniel Day Lewis finally opens his mouth
and introduces himself, one can’t help but think of Mick Jagger’s words to “Sympathy
for the Devil”:
Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.I've been around for long, long years I've stolen many a man's soul and faith.I was around when Jesus Christ had His moments of doubt and pain.I made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate.Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name, but what's puzzling you, is the nature of my game. Lewis may as well be a similar charlatan, ingratiatingly introducing
himself as an oil man and a family man, a man that can be trusted, but he’s a
snake oil salesman introducing himself as Daniel Plainview, a name that has a
multitude of metaphoric ramifications—all of them misleading, but the most
interesting is the name of Daniel, taken from the book in the Old Testament which means “Judged by
God.” At his side is a young boy he
calls his son, H.W. Plainview (Dillon Freasier) but he’s simply a child who’s
father died in a mining accident that Plainview decided to raise as his own —another
falsehood. Yet initially, there’s a good
deal of sympathy for this Plainview character, as he’s obviously worked hard
and sacrificed in order to put himself in a position where he can stand in
front of a community of dirt poor California farmers and ask for the oil rights
to their land, expecting to get it, and he does. He comes off as a sound businessman whose
shrewdness is being in the right place at the right time. Yet he’s still floundering, an oilman who’s
used to as many disappointments as successes, who understands perfectly well
how a calculated risk can be exploited by others for profit. Then Paul Dano introduces himself as Paul,
the name of one of the Apostles, the only one who never met Jesus, yet he was
the one who witnessed the vision of His resurrection, so perhaps wields greater
influence in Christian theology. For a
small finder’s fee of $500 dollars, Paul introduces Daniel to the area just
outside his father’s barren goat farm where oil is literally spilling out onto
the land. What happens next is history. Daniel Plainview becomes a very rich
man. By 1910, the state of California California
Paul Dano has a dual role, as he also plays Eli, a name that means “the
highest” in Yiddish, which is a stunning eye-opener, as he is the identical
twin brother of Paul, a young man who has the calling, who weasels a deal out
of Plainview to build him a church, with the promise of more money to
follow. Eli wishes to bless his oil
wells so that neighbors might associate him with the prominent signs of
economic revitalization, but is rudely shunned by Plainview, who comes to one
of his services which is threadbare country fundamentalism forecasting the doom
of Revelations, where he witnesses a
religious exorcism, calling it “one hell of a show.” But unfortunate accidents seem to go hand in
hand with success, accidents that Eli preaches are the wrath of God, believing
they could have been prevented if more of the workers came to receive his
services instead of spending their spare time drinking and carousing. This clearly gets under Plainview Plainview
Plainview ruthlessly sends his son away in an angry act of deceit,
believing his disability is unacceptable out in the open plains where he
refuses to become a laughing stock or allow others to exploit his son’s
condition as a sign of weakness. In
time, Plainview
Anderson titillates the
audience throughout with this feeling of enormity, this epic feel
that something big is happening, which is intentionally meant to
offset the director's intent to focus more and more on the internalized dynamic
of the Plainview character, continually making the film smaller and smaller as
the character grows more and more despicable.
Daniel Day Lewis saves his best for last, as by the end, he is an
abomination, as merciless a creature as ever walked the face of the earth, a
hideous mutation of THE GREAT DICTATOR (1940)
who thinks money gives him the right to be above the law, that the
rest of the world can go to hell, that he can do anything to anyone for any
reason that pleases him. The final scene
is very much in the Stanley Kubrick manner, as all bets are off, Day Lewis
is finally free of any and all restraint, and he turns into Jack Nicholson
in THE SHINING (1980), only much much worse, as he's a rich and powerful man,
so he can get away with anything. With
drool literally spilling from his mouth, man regresses to the Stone Age where
once he crosses the line of lawlessness and criminality and gets away with it,
what's to stop him from developing an unquenchable thirst for blood and
power? The final sequence only
punctuates what
Zero for
Conduct: There Will Be Blood Michael Atkinson
It's Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood that's the shock to the system, an adaptation of Upton Sinclair that sheds everything I’ve always felt self-infatuated and annoying about Anderson’s films (never-say-when sophomoricism, pointless epic-ness, aimless traveling shots, excessive quirk), and comes at the turn-of-the-century oil-prospecting morality tale with a stunning sense of grandeur (every image has an iconic feel), a bewitching respect for actors and viewers (you’ll find no other recent American film so full of multi-character set-piece shots), a disorienting soundtrack that keeps you on the balls of your feet (by Jonny Greenwood), and Daniel Day-Lewis, making good on the small but entertaining bet he lost, via caricature and cheese, in Gangs of New York. Also, this is a film of uneasy textures and elisions; like Punch-Drunk Love, what we witness sometimes seems to evoke things we didn’t, and the filmmaker has no interest in spelling things out for us, but instead lets us stew and grapple with the mysteries of history. The best new American film of the year, and in the nick of time.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Candace Wirt
Paul Thomas Anderson's THERE WILL BE BLOOD portrays the breakneck rise of capitalism in the American West at the dawn of the deadly twentieth century. In 1898, Anderson's antihero Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) finds gold in New Mexico's desert, and just four years later, he begins to drill for oil, becoming wealthy early in his career. Plainview moves on to Little Boston, California, where he will next strike millions in black gold. He also meets an unconventional competitor Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who tries his damnedest to sabotage Plainview's further acquisition of oil. Although Eli is a preacher, Plainview soon recognizes that he is "a false prophet" and, in fact, a capitalist at heart. Eli deftly uses "his song and dance and superstition" to steal money, but in the end, it does not save him from Plainview's wrath nor the stock market crash of 1929. In contrast, Plainview does not deny that he is a liar, thief, and murderer. In a rare moment, he tells his supposed half-brother Henry (Kevin J. O'Connor) who he is: "I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people...There are times when I look at people, and I see nothing worth liking. I want to earn enough money to get away from everyone...I see the worst in people, Henry. I don't need to look past seeing them to get all I need. I've built up my hatreds over the years, little by little. To have you here gives me a second breath. I can't keep doing this on my own with these, um, people." Plainview drowns himself in money, preferring it to religion as his "opium." He cannot face himself nor his reflection in a capitalist world built upon the principle of greed. Yet, Plainview and Eli are also mysteries to us. They often converse as strains of an ideology at war with itself rather than human beings. Each man is a subject of capital to such an extent that it overcomes and replaces his humanity. Toward the middle of this great American film, capital steals the scene when Plainview's oil derrick catches on fire in Little Boston. In an awesome instantiation of hell that simultaneously appears real and surreal, the ever-zealous capitalist Plainview asks his worker, "What are you so miserable about?" He just struck it rich.
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Boogie Nights announced Paul Thomas Anderson's arrival
as a precociously, ferociously gifted prodigy intent on beating his heroes
(Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese, Hal Ashby, Quentin Tarantino) at their own
game. Anderson's often-brilliant follow-up, Magnolia, sometimes
sagged under the weight of its ambition, while the oddball romantic comedy Punch
Drunk Love was a compelling but unmistakably minor film. Yet Anderson's
previous work just feels like a warm-up for There Will Be Blood, a
stunningly powerful epic that fully realizes Boogie Nights' abundant
promise, yet feels nothing like it. It's what Scorsese's Gangs Of New
York should have been.
Freely adapted
from the Upton Sinclair novel Oil!, the film casts Daniel
Day Lewis as a rapacious oilman perennially accompanied by his son Dillon
Freasier, a moppet who puts a benevolent, angelic face on his dad's ruthless
business dealings. Day Lewis is accustomed to making a killing in business, so
when a charismatic preacher (Paul Dano) gets in the way of his plans, their
conflict quickly escalates into a vicious personal war. Day-Lewis seems intent
on showing Dano that when it comes to raining vengeance and fury on his
enemies, the Old Testament God has nothing on an oilman with a grudge.
Day Lewis goes
through much of the film as a man tethered to the world solely through the
bonds of family, as represented by his son and a mysterious long-lost brother
whose surprise appearance raises more questions than it answers. As these ties
rupture, he begins to lose touch with his faltering humanity. The man becomes a
monster, a force as volcanic and unpredictable as a raging oil gusher. Blood
is a fascinating anomaly—a rip-roaring two-fisted epic concerned almost
exclusively with the tormented psyche and spiritual death of a single man.
Driven by Jonny Greenwood's pummeling, intense score, it's a vision of the
monstrousness of capitalism divorced from morality, a favorite Sinclair theme.
As Blood's focus grows tighter and Day Lewis' theatrical villainy grows
more unhinged, the film becomes a darkly funny vision of hell in human form. As
long as money retains the power to poison men's souls, Anderson's
uncompromising masterpiece will continue to resonate as a harrowing
cautionary warning to a country with oil pumping through its veins, clouding
its judgment and coarsening its soul.
FlickFilosopher.com [MaryAnn Johanson]
There are only so many kinds of stories that can be told -- only six, some say, and Shakespeare told ’em all best anyway. And there are only so many different ways of telling those tales on film (if anyone has put a number to it, I’m not aware of it). So there’s a reason why it seems like we keep seeing the same movies over and over again: we are. Which is why when a movie like There Will Be Blood comes along, it is so deep-down thrilling in a way that’s both visceral and intellectual: It feels like it has reinvented cinema. It feels like nothing you’ve ever seen before. It feels, in a world so jaded by the sense that there is nothing new under the sun, like something new under the sun.
Which is weird, in its own way, because it’s very obvious that one must say, Well, Blood has an old-fashioned kind of ambiance to it, one reminiscent of maybe Gone with the Wind and 1950s epics like Giant and probably even Citizen Kane, in many ways. But even those movies, I think, wanted to suck you into their melodramas, wanted you to get lost in their stories and not think about whether they were Art or not. Blood, for all its roots in the entire history of cinema, from silent film onward, is like a new discovery, and it took me till now -- I saw the film weeks ago -- to figure out why. It’s this:
There Will Be Blood slaps you in the face. It’s Joe Pesci in GoodFellas raging, “Do I amuse you? Do I entertain you?” in that way that suggests that it could not give two figs what you think of it. It says, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, sitting there in the theater?” Blood is not contemptuous of you -- it just doesn’t care what you think about it. It is not there for you, for your amusement, for your entertainment. It is there for itself. It is a found object that might well have sprung in its entirety out of the subatomic froth of the universe. In the superbly philosophical vernacular of the moment that encompasses all the randomness of the world into a whaddaya-gonna-do shrug, it is what it is.
And that is what’s so thrilling about it. Movies
pander to their audiences, give them what they want, even when they’re not
obvious about it: the indie that avoids a sentimental happy ending because it’s
trying to be “real” for a smart audience does that as much as a
bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping studio film aimed at everyone and their
grandmother. Not Blood. Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson -- who’s
made hard-to-like, easy-to-love movies from Boogie
Nights to Magnolia
to Punch-Drunk
Love -- starts out here with a painful pinch that makes you sit up and
take notice, and by the time he’s done with you (not that he even cares that
you’re watching), he has bludgeoned you to death with his story. A simple
story, really, but one that goes where it needs to because its characters are
driving it -- there is no sense that these are fake people directed by the
needs of narrative.
This is all based on the novel Oil! by Upton Sinclair, and it is, of course,
very much a fictional story that runs on the rules of fiction --
It’s as if Anderson and Day-Lewis are reminding us that this is all a shadow play of fakery and making us forget that at the same time. It works perfectly well with the overarching story of Blood as a mythology of oil, a fairy tale for the industrial age -- it’s the story of human endeavor in the 20th century, really, ambition and avarice driving out all other thought, with tragedy inextricably intertwined with the mucky crude and the divisiveness of modern life that separates families and makes new families out of circumstance, and with the clash of the hardness of business with the inflexibility of that other defining paradigm: religious faith and the controlling power of the preacher. Paul Dano (the silent teenage son in Little Miss Sunshine) is breathtaking as the man of the cloth who butts heads over decades with Plainview -- frankly, I would never have imagined casting an actor as young as Dano (who’s only in his early 20s) in this role, but he is potent and brusque and more than a match for Day-Lewis, underplaying what could have been a big, brash character and, ironically, making him all the more unforgettable the smaller and the quieter he gets.
This is one of those movies that may well vex casual moviegoers: it’s actively unpleasant, in many ways, and not in any way that allows vindication at its end by vanquishing a bad guy and letting hope shine again. But that’s why we critics are praising it: not because we’re deliberately trying to be obscure and elitist and cool and superior, but because we see a lot more movies than you do, and we’re hungry for originality and daring. And we see that here, like we haven’t seen it in a long time.
The House Next Door [Ryland Walker Knight]
“Do your duty
towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind. If you will
comply with my conditions, I will leave them and you at peace; but if you
refuse, I will glut the maw of death until it be satiated with the blood of
your remaining friends.”
— Frankenstein’s
beast —
The horror that is
Paul
Thomas Anderson’s fifth feature, There Will Be Blood,
is not simply an amplified feeling of distress but distress itself: a seething
perpetual pressure, unremitting, brutal, always on the brink of eruption. Yet
the threat (or the promise) of the film’s title is a mere hint of the lurking,
bubbling terror within. More pointedly, the title —
written in a skuzzy, white, printing press Old English across the width of the
film’s opening black screen — is the film’s first trigger pulled to wring its
audience anxious and uneasy for a terse, dire, cunning two hours and forty
minutes. Flipping Punch-Drunk Love
on its ear, There Will Be Blood’s operatic score (composed, by
Radiohead’s Johnny
Greenwood, of dissonant string arrangements and odd percussive
rhythms aping Kubrick’s favored Penderecki
and Ligeti)
amplifies the tension of the film not for a flow of delirious hilarity but for
a knotting of orchestrated discomfort. This film denies the release laughter
allows. This film will beat you down, bury you under its weight. But your
beating will be beautiful.
Looking at the delicious palate and the Southwestern
landscape of There Will Be Blood, one might think of Terrence Malick’s Days
of Heaven, but Anderson’s doom is hardly lush, if grand. If the
two films share anything, it would be that their similar elision of plot, per
se, brings affect to the fore and amplifies the different films’ respective
resonances. This is to say, it’s a superficial, fruitless comparison — unless
we pay attention to how the differences between the two films, and their
approaches, might illuminate the current work at hand. Thus: We do not
encounter an Eden to be spoiled but a harsh land already tainted, always
ravaged. The earth does not yield grains but oil, a dead and combustible
liquid. The goal is not to harvest (wheat, people, beauty) but to accumulate
(goods, people, money). There Will Be Blood would be similar to Days
of Heaven only if you replaced the sunburnt fields for baked earth, kept
the camera rooted to dolly tracks and tripods, eschewed the voice-over to favor
silence amidst a baroque score, eliminated the love triangle to foreground
familial bonds, shifted the narrative focus to the Sam Shepard magnate
exclusively, lent his work derricks in lieu of tractors, characterized him like
Nicholson’s self-abnegating monster Jack Torrance in The Shining,
and cast the ever-brooding and always-simmering Daniel Day-Lewis in that
lead role. The lead role here is Daniel Plainview, and
his menacing drive through this film is perhaps nothing more than an obtuse
march towards death, a grave finale underground.
At the turn of the 20th century, in the arid,
pre-pipeline-irrigation Southern California, Daniel Plainview builds a fortune
digging into the earth — at first for rocks (gold or silver), then for oil
(which, later in the film, he dubs gold). Calling a Daniel Day-Lewis
performance intense, or lived-in, or visceral, at this point in his career seems
redundant, however apt. Better to say his Daniel Plainview works in a cramped
space, always playing his cards close, as if he, especially, knows all too well
he is a constant liability to explode. In a film this occupied with surfaces,
and their potential to be ruptured (in or out), Daniel’s face becomes the
ultimate site of will-it-blow tension as it/he appears in almost every scene.
His performance is built from how he regulates what he allows to emerge, what
he will use (of himself, as an actor in these encounters) to render a contract,
or a person, or the material world itself, into a reality of his design (in his
words: in his “image”). Daniel thinks — as a self-made, wealthy and expert “oil
man” — that he can master his world, or, at least, he might be capable of
isolating himself within it, away from, as he says, “these…people.”
The problem is the world is full of people. And plenty of
people challenge Daniel, including the unctuous evangelical Eli (Paul Dano
continues to prove himself a talented, if foul, young actor). The conflict over
the role of Eli’s church (say faith) in Daniel’s new digging site at Little
Boston (say modernity’s commerce), and, in turn, the role of the money
generated by Daniel’s derricks in Eli’s congregational renovations, provides
the film with something approaching an existential either/or. However, faith
here is a sham, a performance. Eli is, at bottom, no different than Daniel.
Each man seeks funds for his own self worth far more than for either of their
respective institutions (a family, a church). It’s the methods that vary.
Daniel suppresses his voice, for the most part, unless provoked to action; Eli
exploits the explosive power of the word, his sermons routinely devolving into
histrionic exorcisms. Yet the word, while prominent, is not a privileged
element of this film’s aggressive soundscape. Score often dominates voices,
voices distort past the point of recognition, splinters and flints whip and
crackle in precision, oil bubbles and derricks rumble incessantly, crescendos
teeter on cacophony, a character goes deaf.
Not
to denigrate the brilliance of Punch-Drunk Love,
a film that continues to marvel and tickle the soul, but, with each new film,
Paul Thomas Anderson continues the trend of his filmography by taking all he
learned from his previous work and amplifying it — especially film’s
relationship to sound, and to opera. The threat of There Will Be Blood
comes down to how the film gluts the maw of the ear with the sounds of the
world. The world is always making a sound, even in silence, and with his two
most recent pictures, Anderson has begun to exploit both how sound colors
images and how images color sound; how sound itself is an affect. Made much
more explicit in Punch-Drunk Love (its score's chief instrument is the
organ, the film thrusts a harmonium at Adam Sandler’s Barry Egan, interrupting
his story, just as do Emily Watson’s Lena and the Jeremy Blake scopitones),
the operatic intertwining of There Will Be Blood pushes its sound design
forward stronger than its predecessor, somehow, although Robert
Elswitt’s photography and Greenwood’s score serve one another
equally to wrench the audience taut.
Anderson’s first three pictures proved he
knew who to steal from (the 1970s Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese) and how to
make films that were very alive, and exciting, if not all that interesting, or
rich only in flashes. Now he has made two features in a row that explode the
possibilities of those earlier pictures into fully formed films: masterful
works that understand the film language as well as (or better than?) Scorsese,
and even some Altman. It should come as no surprise that the final credit on
screen in There Will Be Blood is a dedication to Anderson’s mentor and
one-time boss, Robert Altman, for it is a film that could not have been made
were it not for McCabe & Mrs. Miller, or 3 Women; nor without
Days of Heaven, nor The Shining, nor, especially, Anderson’s own Punch-Drunk
Love. Yet it is a distinctive work. As much as it inherits from its
antecedents, it bears Anderson’s signature throughout. There’s the father-son
melodrama, the stately and gliding camerawork, the fear of people, and even a
few discomfiting wink-jokes at the audience. Most of all, though, there’s
Daniel Day-Lewis, covered in crude oil, raising his arms like a conductor to
signal the explosion to begin. It’s terrifying, invigorating, phenomenal. I
fear I’ve said too much already.
By Tom Charity Cinema
Scope
In the beginning there is
darkness. And, in the darkness, a man with a pickaxe claws at the earth as if
he’s looking for the way back in. He grunts from such heavy labour, but keeps
digging, driven.
Anderson Greenwood Anderson
Or beneath it.
The year is 1898, and our
solitary miner (Daniel Day-Lewis) is about to make his first strike. The silver
he discovers—as he falls, breaking his leg—doesn’t make him wealthy overnight,
but lays the foundation for his subsequent fortunes. He scratches his name on
the claim stake after he’s dragged himself into town: Daniel Plainview.
This will prove a recurring
pattern, though Plainview
Intriguingly, Anderson Marfa , Texas
By 1902, Plainview
It’s only when Anderson Anderson Anderson
More than one review has pointed
out how There Will Be Blood breaks from the cacophonous societies PTA
has navigated in the past, with their familial ensemble casts and constant
jiving. It’s dedicated to Robert Altman, but this is the least “Altmanesque” of
Anderson US
Of course, audacity is its own signature, and Anderson Anderson
And so we can say this silent
treatment evokes the historical period; it distinguishes the story’s first nine
years from what follows, so that it might be read as a prologue; it prefigures
the fate of Daniel’s adopted son, H.W., who will lose his hearing when caught
too close to a gusher; and it introduces Daniel through his deeds, not his
words: this is a man of considerable enterprise and self-reliance.
When the words finally come, they
flow, as Plainview
Already Plainview Plainview
He’s an oilman; that much is
true. But he’ll swindle as best he may. “What Church do you belong to?” asks
Paul Sunday, the runaway who leads him to the Promised Land of Little Boston.
“I…I enjoy all faiths,” Daniel stammers. “I like them all.” When he sets up
shop, his office stands at one end of town, with Paul’s brother Eli Sunday’s
Church of the Third Revelation the other. These are the first permanent
constructions this side of the station, the twin pillars of a burgeoning tent
city: business and religion. Plainview talks piously, but capitalism is his
faith; still, he’s astonished when he ventures in and sees Eli’s evangelical
preaching (a bravura one-take turn by Paul Dano).
Despite that flurry of agitation
(and it’s a recurring note in the score), if There Will Be Blood is a
horror movie, it’s under the surface. Yes, there will be blood,
eventually, but it’s more a biographical drama, a rags-to-riches story, and
even a dynastic fable. Anderson Plainview Eureka Plainview
Greed consumes Daniel, it festers
in his emptiness and pride. This self-made man knows no women, it seems, but
recognizes three kin: first is H.W. (Dillon Freasier), the son who is not his
blood, but who brings out the warmest feeling in Daniel, until the accident.
Then there’s Henry (Kevin J. O’Connor), the brother who is not his blood, but
who Daniel embraces in a moment of weaknesses, and opens up to like no other.
“Are you are an angry man? Are you envious? I have a competition in me,” he
confides. “I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.” It’s the movie’s
most honest and revealing speech, and such a naked confession of misanthropy
that it will seal the imposter’s fate.
And then there’s Eli, the
preacher who addresses his most reluctant congregant as “Brother Daniel.” Plainview
The Village
Voice [J. Hoberman]
There
Will Be Blood (2007) Bryant Frazer
from Deep Focus
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
FilmJerk.com (Brian Orndorf) also here:
OhmyNews
[Brian Orndorf]
TIME Magazine (Richard Schickel)
culturevulture.net, Choices for the Cognoscenti Harry Chotiner
Ruthless Reviews Matt Cale
CultureCartel.com (Chris Barsanti)
New York Magazine (David Edelstein)
Bright
Lights After Dark: There Will Be Blood - Missing Links C. Jerry Kutner
Screen International David D’Arcy
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)
eFilmCritic.com (Dan Lybarger)
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Twitch
[Michael Guillen] also seen
here: Cross-published on The Evening Class.
Rounding
up the There Will Be Blood haters - and then what shall we do with them? Kevin B. Lee from Shooting Down Pictures
Thanks
for the Use of the Hall: I Am Not Convinced That P. T. ... Dan Sallitt
not coming to a theater near you (Jenny Jediny)
Cinema Signals (Jules Brenner)
Film Journal International (Lewis Beale)
Spoutblog Karina reviews
the 17-minute preview that played at Telluride
How
Paul Thomas Anderson Sets Himself Apart
Dennis Lim from Slate
Manhattan
Movie Magazine Marlow Stern
The director and cast of There Will Be Blood talk to Marlow
Stern. interviews by Marlow Stern
from Manhattan Movie Magazine
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
NightsAndWeekends.com
[Kristin Dreyer Kramer]
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Zack Haddad
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
THE MASTER C+ 79
USA (137 mi)
2012 Official site
Might be a rock'n'
roll adict prancing on the stage
Might have money and drugs at your commands, women in a cage
You may be a business man or some high degree thief
They may call you Doctor or they may call you Chief.
But you're gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You're gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you're gonna have to serve somebody.
—“Gotta Serve Somebody,” by Bob Dylan, 1979 Bob Dylan- Gotta serve somebody.wmv
YouTube (5:26)
While the production
design of this film offers an extreme clarity rarely seen in movies, the first
film in 15 years shot on 65 mm for a 70 mm theatrical projection (good luck
finding a theater capable of screening it in that format, also shown in XD
theaters), giving it a phenomenally bright and gorgeous look onscreen, this doesn’t
make up for the emotional disconnect with the film itself, where the
mysteriously vague aspects of Anderson’s storyline plunge us over the deep end
into unchartered territory, where much of this feels like a long and empty road
going nowhere. Very similar to his
recent film There
Will Be Blood (2007), both have the feeling of an epic work, yet both defy
categorization without a single likeable character in either movie, and in this
film nothing of any real significance happens.
Instead it’s a highly atmospheric character examination of Freddie Quell
(a more emaciated Joaquin Phoenix), a down-on-his-luck sailor from WW II who
bounces around after the war, receiving inadequate and insufficient psychiatric
help from the Navy for the post traumatic stress, becoming a drifter, never
really fitting in anywhere. Making
matters worse, he has a talent for putting together hazardous chemicals, like
paint thinner, Lysol, gasoline, or photo developing fluid while making his own
homemade alcohol, becoming instantly hooked, subject to huge mood swings
including violent tendencies, stumbling around drunk most of the time. While the opening sequence on the beach
features naked male torsos that might recall BEAU TRAVAIL (1999), with
beautifully unsettling, often percussive music from Radiohead guitarist Jonny
Greenwood, Freddie’s near masturbatory obsession with sex suggests he lives in
something of a fantasy world, becoming attached and sexually enthralled with a
sand castle carving of a female anatomy.
His social dysfunction is reminiscent of Shohei Imamura’s THE
PORNOGRAPHERS (1966), where one character, in hedonistic pursuit of a perfect
mate, discovers a wood-carved doll of a voluptuous woman. He becomes so enraptured with her that nothing
else matters, becoming more and more detached from his life, lost and alone on
a small boat, carving his doll, oblivious and adrift. This perfectly describes Freddie’s aloof
frame of mind, a loner completely cut off from the rest of the world, where
booze and sex are the only things that matter.
While There
Will Be Blood captures the stark
emptiness of the endless Texas landscapes, this film explores the cavernous
depravity of the human soul. Beautifully
set in 1950, this is a period piece with 50’s jukebox songs that features a
shift from war-time mentality to the rise of consumerism, where Freddie gets a
job working as a photographer doing family portraits in a department store, but
his mind turns it into a Felliniesque surreal landscape where in one of the
better scenes, he finds sexual solace with Martha the Salesgirl (Amy Ferguson),
where it’s hard to tell if this is really happening or if it only exists in his
mind—such is his disconnection from reality.
Eventually run out of the store and perhaps out of town, we see him
fleeing across an open field after someone falls ill from drinking his homemade
brew, wandering the streets endlessly through the night, finally staggering
onto a docked ship where music can be heard and a festive party is taking place
on deck. He awakes in the morning as a
Chaplinesque stowaway aboard the ship already at sea, immediately interviewed
by the captain, Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a somewhat reclusive
and philosophically mysterious gentleman who takes to him immediately, seeing
something there in his inherent waywardness that perhaps only he could help,
taking him under his wing, even allowing him to live with his family. Told in a stream-of-conscious style, we lose
all sense of time, where subsequent events between them are connected as if by
memory or recollection, linking together vignettes throughout the film as brief
moments in time. Freddie is drawn into
his world during an intensely personal psychoanalytic interview session known
as processing, where Dodd discovers many of Freddie’s hidden secrets, the kinds
of things he hides from the rest of the world, like the kind of dysfunctional
family he came from and who it is he’s really running from, which turns out to
be a 16-year old girl named Doris (seen only in flashback), a kind of virginal
image of perfection, though he has to be twice her age. While the audience learns of Freddie’s
tortured past, no such background information is ever revealed about Dodd, a
charismatic figure considered by his critics as something of a charlatan, but
who sees himself as a visionary healer, where patients (hopefully rich ones
with generous pocketbooks) continually undergo processing, often with startling
results.
Loosely inspired by the
sham ideology of L. Ron Hubbard’s secret indoctrinating methods of Scientology
and John Huston’s war documentary LET THERE BE LIGHT (1946) following
traumatized soldiers seeking treatment after the war, the film seems to sink
into the dark abyss of Freddie’s doldrums, where despite punishing sessions
with Dodd, aka the Master, often demonstrating his unorthodox techniques
publicly in front of small groups of curious onlookers, Freddie never seems to
make much progress as he appears incapable of self-reflection or total
surrender, but nonetheless remains a zealous believer in the cause, often
pummeling non-believers into submission for having the audacity to question or
doubt. Much of the film seems to be
about manipulation and power, where one reason Dodd may like having Freddie
around is he represents weakness, exactly the kind of passivity he’s searching
for in his followers. The group secretly
records all their therapy sessions for reasons that are never revealed, but
interestingly much of the dominant power behind the scenes comes from Dodd’s
wife (Amy Adams), a Lady Macbeth figure who skillfully guides his actions, where
he’s the figurehead, the monkey on a leash, a public charmer who rakes in the
cash while behind the scenes she exudes ruthless power. The trick is to goad people in, to make them
comfortable with the idea that for centuries people have been lulled asleep and
need to be woken up, where Dodd is the trigger and stimulus to a kind of human
rebirth, where they must learn to take control over their lives, of course, by
abandoning all resistance and sacrificing their own individuality and free
will. There are outlandishly bizarre
scenes in this movie, like a fantasy sequence of women stripping completely
naked while Dodd sings a bawdy old English ballad, or another when Dodd quietly
sings an a cappella rendition of “Slow Boat to China” to a somewhat bewildered
Freddie, who never seems to understand his place in the world or this
organization. There’s another amusing
dream sequence in an immense movie theater with Freddie as the sole customer
lying asleep draped over several chairs as the audience hears the onscreen
voice of Casper the Friendly Ghost, also
a moment when both are arrested and placed in adjoining cells, where their
reactions couldn’t be more opposite, one in a virulent rage while the other
impassively remains in a Zen calm. While
the look of the film is dazzling, seen in an XD theater using a superbright
projector, the film feels as spectacularly empty as the Death Valley desert
sequence, an exercise where Freddie on a motorcycle rushes headlong towards an
invisible wall out there in the distant horizon, hoping somehow he can break
through at breakneck speed rushing towards a fictitious goal that never
exist. With both leads exuding various
forms of ego driven madness throughout, there’s barely a hint of personal
identification and scant human drama to hold our interest.
Paul
Thomas Anderson's The Master is a thinly veiled story of L. Ron Hubbard JR Jones from The Reader
A self-destructive loner (Joaquin Phoenix), discharged from the navy after serving in the Pacific in World War II, flounders back in the States before coming under the wing of a charismatic religious leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) transparently based on L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology. This challenging, psychologically fraught drama is Paul Thomas Anderson's first feature since the commanding There Will Be Blood (2007), and like that movie it chronicles a contest of wills between an older man and a younger one, as the troubled, sexually obsessed, and often violent young disciple tries to fit in with the flock that's already gathered around the master. This time, however, the clashing social forces aren't religion and capitalism but, in keeping with the era, community and personal freedom—including the freedom to fail miserably at life. The stellar cast includes Amy Adams, Laura Dern, and Jesse Plemons.
Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Rob Christopher
Warning: Paul Thomas Anderson isn't going to answer your questions. And his movie will be exceedingly elegant in its refusal to answer your questions, of which you'll have many, and for which you'll either love him or despise him. It might be the most important lesson he ever learned from Robert Altman: how crucial it is to touch viewers on an "unconscious basis to where they sense something rather than intellectually know or agree to something." To further quote Altman from Hasti Sardishti's piece : "If they come there and sit in front of their sets or in the theater, and they don't go halfway with you, and don't take the material in front of them and process it through their own history, it's meaningless. If they do they might not have any idea what that was about, but they feel it was right and they know it that fits." Everything in THE MASTER, from its graceful camera movements to the occasional, frightening bursts of violence, fits. The cinematography of Mihai Malaimare Jr. is the most stunningly evocative portrayal of 50's America this side of FAR FROM HEAVEN; every image feels freshly washed, particularly in the 70mm print that played at the Music Box earlier this year (and which will hopefully make an encore soon). The performances are riveting too. Philip Seymour Hoffman is so mesmerizing that he could easily walk away with the movie, but he's matched by the rest of the cast. Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quell is a combustible mix of Brando-style mumbling and volcanic violence. He actually feels dangerous. While Amy Adams, as Dodd's tenacious and manipulative wife, is chillingly perfect. You get the sense that without her ruthless encouragement, Dodd might simply smother himself with his own words. Behind it all is Anderson's Zen-like refusal to hit all the usual plot points or tidy up his characters' messy lives. In fact, the movie's "happy" ending is actually disorienting; just as Dodd keeps his followers off balance, Anderson remains firmly ambivalent to the end. Who's ready to see it again?
The
Master Mike D’Angelo from The Nashville Scene, also seen
here: Nashville
Scene [Mike D'Angelo]
Nobody could possibly mistake The Master for a small, unassuming, run-of-the-mill movie. Granted, every film written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood) is a major event — he's the closest analog to Kubrick we have at the moment, emerging every three to five years to confound expectations with something truly singular. Even his Adam Sandler movie was unprecedented.
But The Master is being treated as something extra-special. Anderson shot it in 70mm, an almost quixotic gesture given that good ol' 35mm is currently experiencing its death rattle. He chose to precede its official world premiere at the Venice Film Festival with a series of surprise engagements around the country, in one case springing it on an unsuspecting L.A. audience following a repertory screening of The Shining. Early rumors that the film was about Scientology were followed by emphatic denials that it's about Scientology, which of course only fanned the fires of curiosity and anticipation. Hell, the very title demands obeisance. In the face of all this hoopla, would we even recognize dramaturgical skimpiness if we saw it?
The Master's narrative presents an epic battle of wills that's ripe for interpretation. We're first introduced to an alcoholic, sexually frustrated Navy vet, Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix), who still seems very much at sea in the years immediately following WWII. One night in 1950, Freddie staggers blindly onto a yacht owned by one Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the figurehead of a suspiciously familiar self-improvement program called The Cause. Dodd instantly takes a shine to Freddie, and does his best to indoctrinate him; Freddie, for his part, seems genuinely grateful for the attention and fellowship but instinctively rebellious regarding The Cause's methods, which straddle the thin line between Freudian analysis and the most sadistic variety of acting-school exercises.
Tempers flare. Dodd's no-nonsense wife (Amy Adams) insists that Freddie is a destructive influence. Freddie decides to look up a girl he'd been sweet on and then abandoned just before the war broke out. The two men take turns riding a motorcycle on salt flats, with the objective being to pick a point in the far distance and head for it at top speed. There's a rift, and then an attempt at mending the rift, and then a retraction of the attempt, followed by a cappella singing. And if those last few sentences don't seem to be building to anything, ding ding ding.
Which is not to say that the film is devoid of meaning — and certainly not to imply that it's anything but fascinating. Phoenix, in his first role following the elaborate multi-year stunt that culminated in I'm Still Here, gives a mesmerizingly unstable performance, coming as close to pure id as anyone since Brando; he's ideally matched by Hoffman, who transforms pedantic condescension into something that resembles a soft caress. There's a stunning shot late in the film of Freddie and Dodd in adjacent prison cells, with half the frame consumed by animal frenzy and the other half devoted to implacable stillness.
Anderson deftly suggests that these two men represent opposing faces of the national postwar character, with Freddie as stubborn, reckless individualism and Dodd as subtly Machiavellian conformity. The director also deftly suggests an unspoken, unrealized homoerotic bond underlying their contentious and codependent relationship. He deftly suggests that The Cause (which is indeed clearly inspired by Scientology) began as a sincere stab at practical philosophy, then opportunistically metamorphosed into something far less savory. He also deftly suggests that all of our grandiose ambitions can ultimately be reduced to our desire to get laid.
The problem with The Master is that it's all deft suggestion. Anderson is a born filmmaker, but as a writer, he's exasperatingly vague. His crafty modus operandi involves introducing various thematic signifiers and then declining to tackle the actual themes. All of his films suffer to some extent from this noncommittal approach, but the void is usually more expertly disguised than it is here. By the middle of the second hour, you can almost feel the resistance as various elements fail to coalesce. The final scene between Freddie and Dodd, in particular, plays like a magnificent evasion tactic — what happens is unexpected, and rich with innuendo, and perhaps even oddly moving. But it's in no way a culmination, much less a resolution.
By contrast, other recent films like Meek's Cutoff and Certified Copy end in ways that are open or ambiguous but that nonetheless seem inevitable. Anderson's genius is for the transcendent eruption: a drug deal gone bad set to an awesome '80s mixtape; a climactic rain of frogs; "I drink your milkshake," etc. The Master is the most subdued, contemplative film he's made to date, and it leaves him exposed.
THE MASTER Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Paul Thomas Anderson made his first three films in three years. Since then, the gaps in his filmography have grown increasingly large. It’s been five years since his last film, “There Will Be Blood,” and his current one, “The Master.”
There’s less and less room in American cinema for the kind of adult-oriented filmmaking Anderson favors. Robert Altman seems to be Anderson’s biggest influence, but after the ‘70s, Altman himself was out of favor with the studios; his best ‘80s film, “Secret Honor,” was made in collaboration with a college class. By Hollywood standards, Anderson’s budgets are relatively low, but he’s not making the kind of films with five-figure budgets that could be partially raised on Kickstarter.
Much of the buzz around “The Master” has revolved around the similarities between the Cause, a quasi-psychoanalytic organization founded by Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and the early days of Scientology. I was more struck by the ways in which Anderson has started to repeat himself. He comes very close to recycling imagery from his 2002 comedy “Punch-Drunk Love,” except that there’s nothing funny about the anger and violence expressed in “The Master.”
When “The Master” begins, Freddie (Joaquin Phoenix) is serving in the Navy in the final days of World War II. An alcoholic prone to violence, he drifts through a string of jobs after his release from the military. He first meets Lancaster when they get into a fight while Freddie tries to take the older man’s photo. After Freddie gets in trouble for concocting a toxic brew of booze, he takes refuge on Lancaster’s boat and becomes part of Lancaster’s crew, participating in the Cause and living in his house.
This is the first film in which Phoenix is really convincing as a middle-aged man. Here, his looks are in the process of fading, and he seems about ten years older than his actual age. The quasi-documentary “I’m Still Here,” in which he played himself as a perpetually stoned, talent-free rapper wanna-be, showed he has little vanity. “The Master” confirms it, but it also reveals a raw intensity new to Phoenix’s work. His voice sounds like it was squeezed out of his vocal cords by force.
Although Anderson cast actresses as talented as Laura Dern and Amy Adams, he didn’t give them much to do. “The Master” is a guys’ movie. While there are no gay characters, unlike Anderson’s “Boogie Nights,” there’s a greater homoerotic charge between Freddie and Lancaster than I’ve ever felt between two men in an Anderson film. The Cause gives them an instant intimacy, as Lancaster gets to ask Freddie about his sex life. However, their relationship remains unequal — one of master and servant or, at worst, owner and unruly pet. Lancaster manipulates Freddie and, in the end, Freddie uses what he learns to manipulate women.
Rebelling against an all-digital future, Anderson shot “The Master” in 65mm. It will be shown in that format in several theaters around the city. (The only other recent film shot in 65mm is Ron Fricke’s documentary “Samsara,” and the Landmark Sunshine is showing that on digital video, albeit with very high quality projection.) Anderson says he wanted to capture the look of ‘40s and ‘50s Hollywood cinema.
“The Master” is no retro pastiche, however. At first, it seems to be aiming for something akin to “Mad Men” or Todd Haynes’ “Far From Heaven” — capturing the past with all the knowledge and freedom of the present. Haynes made a film that Douglas Sirk might have if he’d been able to openly depict gayness. The opening lines of “The Master” are about STDs, and the film is frank — to the point of being crude — about sex in ways that no Hollywood film made in the ‘50s could have been. All the same, that’s not its real agenda.
“The Master” is centered on a number of set pieces between Lancaster and Freddie. In one, Lancaster asks Freddie a series of embarrassing questions while ordering him not to blink. In another, Freddie demolishes a jail cell while Lancaster, confined to the next cell, urges him to calm down. These scenes are among the most powerful I’ve seen this year. Unfortunately, they suck all the oxygen out of the rest of the film.
When Freddie’s not in a rage, “The Master” suffers. It also doesn’t benefit from seeming like a partial reprise of “Punch-Drunk Love,” where Adam Sandler’s character dealt with many of the same issues. Anderson got a great performance out of Sandler, something I never dreamed possible, and he gets one out of Phoenix here. But for all the passion mustered by Phoenix, the final third of “The Master” grinds to a halt. The Cause purports to offer visions of past lives, but it can’t offer a satisfying ending.
The
Master in 70mm at the Music Box - Time Out Chicago A.A. Dowd
Cinephilia is alive and well.
That was the first thought that crossed my mind when I arrived at the Music Box last night for the not-so-secret 70mm screening of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. It was a little after 8:30pm, with well over an hour until the event was scheduled to begin, and a healthy line had already formed outside the entrance. A half-hour later, the mass of eager ticket-holders had expanded outward, stretching around the block onto Grace. Hopeful, ticketless men walked the perimeter, some carrying signs, pleading for the opportunity to buy a spare off anyone scalping. At a glance, one might confuse the scene for the pre-show gathering outside a rock concert.
The excitement was palpable, and understandable. This was only the second public screening of The Master; the first was a surprise premiere in Santa Monica, where Anderson presented the film in 70mm—the format he shot it in and the one he prefers it to be seen in. There was doubt for a while as to whether Chicago would get the opportunity to experience the movie that way. Time Out Chicago Film editor Ben Kenigsberg's post had alerted Anderson's team to the Music Box's 70mm projection capabilities, but theater programmer Brian Andreotti was quick to report that the Weinstein Company was not offering them the film for a first run.
So it was a pleasant surprise when the Music Box announced on Wednesday night that it would be hosting a 70mm screening of The Master, with proceeds benefiting the nonprofit Film Foundation. Within two hours of going online, all tickets to the event had been snatched up.
Anderson was in attendance at the sold-out screening, though he kept a very low profile, leaving introductory remarks to Music Box general manager Dave Jennings. "We're working on bringing it back in 70mm," Jennings told the audience. "Probably sometime this winter." As to whether the untrained eye would be able to glean the merits of the wide-gauge format, Jennings was blunt: "If you can't see the difference, you're not looking at the screen."
He wasn't kidding: From the film's first shot of waves crashing in a spectacularly blue ocean, the benefits of 70mm are blindingly obvious. In terms of color and clarity, nothing compares; regardless of what one thought of The Master—a weird, transfixing study in sickness and devotion—there was no denying the retina-tickling pleasures of this enhanced viewing experience.
The film begins the same way Anderson's last movie did: with its main character chopping away to the atonal clicks and hums of a Jonny Greenwood score. In There Will Be Blood, the relentless swing of a pickax marked Daniel Plainview as a man of almost inhuman determination. No such easy conclusions can be drawn about Freddie Sutton (Joaquin Phoenix), first seen shirtless on a beach, burying his blade in a coconut. A Navy veteran, Freddie has just returned from the second World War. His mind is clearly not all together, though flashbacks suggest some of his issues may predate his time in the service. Is The Master a film about what war does to a functional mind, or is it a film about the way the military—among other strictly controlled organizations—attracts already dysfunctional minds?
Phoenix plays Freddie as a volatile enigma; it's a great, boldly physical performance, with the actor lurching about like a child caught in an adult's skin. Drifting aimlessly through his post-war years, Freddie eventually stumbles aboard the docked ship of budding spiritual leader Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman)—though that name isn't used until about halfway through the film, as many of the characters simply (and creepily) refer to him as "Master." The two bond over a homemade cocktail Freddie devises from paint thinner and other questionably consumable chemicals. "Is it poison?" the older man asks. "Not if you drink it right!" replies the younger man.
The relationship between these two figures becomes the dramatic crux of the film, with Freddie developing a vicious, doglike loyalty to his new Master, even as those in Lancaster's inner circle (including his true-believer of a wife, played by Amy Adams) begin to fear and distrust the young vet. Visually and sonically, Anderson is still operating in the disorienting, vaguely menacing mode of There Will Be Blood. Yet The Master feels closer in spirit to his misfit romance Punch-Drunk Love, thanks largely to the empathy he expresses for his disturbed protagonist. (There's also a kind of repetitive initiation ritual Phoenix performs that brings to mind the panicky, pacing-through-the-store sequence in Love.)
And we can say at last that, yes, the film is at least tangentially about Scientology. Lancaster's religion—dubbed simply "The Cause"—is built around a similar mythology of ancient past lives and spiritual rehabilitation. Prospective believers submit to "processing," instead of auditing, but the collision of therapy and faith is essentially the same. (In the film's most instantly iconic scene, Freddie sits down for his first session with Lancaster, who finds his new companion ideally suited to these cathartic head games.) Dates and other details further confirm the Scientology parallels, but it would be a mistake to think of The Master as a thinly disguised history of the movement or an L. Ron Hubbard biopic. Like Blood, this is an eccentric character study that plays out against a historical backdrop.
It's also quite easily the strangest and most esoteric picture Anderson has ever made—and frankly too much to unpack and digest in one viewing. I echo the sentiments of my Chicago critic peers, many of whom stumbled out of the screening in a daze and reported on Twitter that further reflection would be needed. (The A.V. Club's Scott Tobias may have put it best when he wrote that the movie is "comically resistant to insta-reaction.") Of course, one looks forward to seeing a visionary work like this again and again—not just to unravel its secrets, but also simply to bask in its aesthetic wonders. I feel privileged to have seen it in all its wide-gauge glory. Let's hope more Chicagoans get to do so in the near future.
‘An
Intimate Epic of Irrational Need’
Geoffrey O’Brien from The New York
Review of Books
Notebook
Reviews: Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" on - Mubi Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Film of the week: The Master
Nick Pinkerton from Sight & Sound, November 2012, also
seen here: Film
of the week: The Master | BFI
Iain
Stasukevich 4-page essay from American Cinematographer magazine,
November 2012
Paul
Thomas Anderson's “The Master” Review : The New Yorker Anthony Lane
Acidemic
Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]
White City
Cinema [Michael Smith]
Not Coming to a Theater Near
You [Adam Balz]
Atlantic
Wire [Richard Lawson]
The
Master Loses Control of Its Flock - The New York Observer Rex Reed
Rex Reed, waht r u doin -
Film Forum on mubi.com reader
comments on Rex Reed’s review
The American
Spectator : The Master James Bowman,
also seen here: JamesBowman.net |
The Master
'The
Master' Is a Portrait of Pain | PopMatters
Jesse Hasseneger
The
Atlantic [Christopher Orr]
Dazzling
Drama About, and by, a 'Master' - Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
The
House Next Door [Jamie Dunn]
Paste
Magazine [Jeremy Mathews]
The
Playlist [Charlie Schmidilin]
DVDTalk.com -
theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
'The
Master': Filling A Void By Finding A Family : NPR David Edelstein
The Science Fiction,
Horror and Fantasy Film Review [Richard Scheib]
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Nigel Andrews The Financial Times
Eye
for Film [Anne-Katrin Titze]
The
Master Critics - The Master Reviews Are Wrong - Esquire Stephen Marche
REVIEW:
Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman In 'The Master ... Alison Willmore from Movieline
Adam Woodward Little
White Lies
The
House Next Door [Tom Stempel]
Surrender
to the Void-[Steven Flores]
Considering Film
[Christopher Bruno]
DVD Talk - Blu-ray
[Randy Miller III]
Scientology
Watchers: A Message from Tony Ortega - The Village ... Tony Ortega from The Village Voice
Global Comment [Mark
Farnsworth]
A Regrettable Moment of
Sincerity [Adam Lippe]
FILM
REVIEW: The Master - The Buzz - CBC
Eli Glasner from CBC News
theartsdesk.com [Karen
Krizanovich]
Phil on Film
[Philip Concannon]
Master,
The (2012) - Reelviews Movie Reviews
James Berardinelli
Boxoffice Magazine
[Sara Maria Vizcarrondo]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
Film Reviews, Interviews, Festival
Coverage ... - Jigsaw Lounge Neil
Young, also seen here: Neil
Young
Sound
On Sight Simon Howell
Combustible
Celluloid Jeffrey M. Anderson
The
House Next Door [R. Kurt Osenlund]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
The
London Film Review [Elisa Scubla]
The
Stop Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
Paul
Thomas Anderson Screens 20 Minutes Of Deleted And Extended Scenes From ‘The
Master’ Germain Lussier from
SlashFilm
Early
Review: Paul Thomas Anderson' s ' The Master' Is Visually ... Beth Hanna from Thompson on Hollywood
DAILY | THE
MASTER in the U.K. – Keyframe - Explore the world of ... David Hudson has all the links from Fandor
Paul
Thomas Anderson, The Master's Master - Page ... - Village Voice Scott Foundas interview with the director,
September 5, 2012
Kevin
Jagernauth Video interview on October
25, 2012 in Melbourne, posted on the indieWIRE Playlist
Paul
Thomas Anderson interview - The Master - Time Out Film Dave Calhoun interview from Time Out London, November 6, 2012
Adam
Woodward interview from Little White
Lies, November 19, 2012
The Master | review,
synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun
The
Master – a masterclass in film | Film | The Guardian J. Hoberman from The Guardian, November 2, 2012
The
Master – review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Rachel Cooke The Observer, November 3, 2012
Jonathan Romney The Independent, November 4,. 2012
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Critic
Review for The Master on washingtonpost.com
Ann Hornaday
The Cleveland
Movie Blog [Bob Ignizio]
The
Master doesn't offer any answers - - Movies - Minneapolis - City ... Karina Longworth from The Minneapolis City Pages
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Oregon Herald
[Oktay Ege Kozak]
San
Francisco Examiner [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
San
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Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
The
Master - Movies - The New York Times
A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
The Master (2012
film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
INHERENT VICE B- 81
USA (148 mi)
2014 Official
site
He is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man
and yet an unusual man. He must be, to
use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor…He is a relatively poor man, or
he would not be a detective at all. He
is a common man, or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not
know his job. He will take no man’s
money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate
revenge. He is a lonely man and his
pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw
him. . . . The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would
be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.
—Raymond Chandler essay, The Simple Art of Murder, 1944
Stoner silliness? Is that enough for most movie audiences
today? David Gordon Green made a slip
into these kinds of lame, air-headed pot movies with mixed results, as he
discovered an entirely new mainstream audience that was willing to pay for the
laughs while alienating his hard corps art film admirers who had been with him
since the beginning. Green, who created
the prototype of American indie films with George
Washington (2000) and ALL THE REAL GIRLS (2003) has returned to his roots
of late, but not until after making a cash killing in Hollywood with the
commercially successful PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (2008). Enter Paul Thomas Anderson, a heralded
American director of some repute who has dazzled audiences with the likes of
MAGNOLIA (1999) and There
Will Be Blood (2007), but has also disappointed many of his own followers
with the rambling vacuousness of The Master
(2012), a film that plunges over the edge into nothing of real significance,
where there’s barely a hint of human drama holding our attention, yet it’s
filmed in an epic style. INHERENT VICE
is a $20 – 30 million dollar picture (including an expensive awards campaign)
that has generated less than $8 million dollars at the box office and garnered
only two Oscar nominations, for writer/director Anderson in the Best Adapted
Screenplay and also Best Costume Design.
All of
The free wheeling,
drug-oriented style of the movie, which features more onscreen pot smoking
since the Cheech & Chong movies of the 70’s and 80’s,
but the zany irreverence expressed throughout is closer to John Carpenter’s Big
Trouble in Little China (1986), where the wisecracking and always quotable
Kurt Russell is replaced by the counterculture world of residential pothead
Joaquin Phoenix, the constantly high, smart aleck private investigator Larry
“Doc” Sportello living in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County in the
1970’s, where he seems defined by the expression, “What I lack in al-titude,
I make up for in at-titude.”
Immersed in a world where he’s the center of a 40’s style, hard-boiled
detective story, it feels like most of the film is taking place in the
pot-induced fantasies of his head, where the wish fulfillment aspect is
everpresent, as Doc is constantly in demand, for some reason, even by
startlingly attractive ladies, through his inability to take anything seriously
and his perpetual disinterest in the lives of others seems to define his warped
aura of self-obsession and delusion.
Nonetheless, certainly part of the fun is just getting to know the
Southern California landscape, where just the list of the character’s names
feels like they could easily have been stolen from a Fu Manchu
B-movie, and indeed the Chinese underworld, as expressed by a vast and
secretive organization known as the Golden Fang, figures prominently here,
where their reach spreads everywhere, into every dark corner of the film. When Doc attempts to warn someone that “This
is the Golden Fang you’re about to rip off here, man,” he’s startled by the
dismissive nature of the reply, “That’s according to your own delusional
system.” What’s real and what isn’t?—it
hardly matters in this sprawling universe of pop culture references, where Doc
is a healthy mix of “The Dude” from the Coen brothers’ The
Big Lebowski (1998) and Elliot Gould’s reinvented “Marlowe” from Raymond
Chandler’s The
Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Altman’s subversive 70’s update of the
conventional 40’s film noir. Anderson’s
drug-fueled detective story features psychedelic music and the grainy
cinematography of Robert Elswit, who has shot every one of Anderson’s films,
luring the audience into the near wordless, atmospheric mood with the
extraordinary opening mix of CAN - Vitamin C - YouTube
(3:32) and Can-Soup (Full
Song) - YouTube (9:21).
Both hilarious and at times confounding, the
film takes place in the fictional setting of Gordita Beach, a stand-in for Manhattan Beach, where Pynchon most
likely lived in the late 60’s and early 70’s, lying on the south end of the Santa
Monica Bay. In 1970, Nixon’s in the
White House, Ronald Reagan is Governor of California, while Charles Manson and
his Helter Skelter cult of stoned-out groupies are about to go on trial for
their hideous exhibition of mass murder.
Whatever lingering hopes might be left over from the peace and love
generation of the 60’s have been brutally repressed by a crush of demonstrations,
the arrests, killings, and near extinction of the Black Panther Party, a
prolonged war overseas in Vietnam, and the prevalence of a law and order police
state in Los Angeles. While the plot
machinations are ridiculously circuitous, keeping the audience wondering just
who Doc is working for, as he continues to get hired even while still working
his previous cases, where the intertwining activity is simply off the charts
and too much to keep up with, taking a page out of THE BIG SLEEP (1946),
notorious for offering one of the most incomprehensible plots, as Doc just gets
deeper and deeper into some big shit. It
all begins with the arrival of an ex-girlfriend Shasta (Katherine Waterston), Inherent Vice - 'Shasta Fay' [HD
(1:07), currently having an affair with a high profile real estate developer
Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), mostly seen on stupid-as-hell ads shown
continuously on TV. Word has it that
Mickey’s British wife Sloane Wolfmann (Serena Scott Thomas) is having an affair
of her own with international playboy-of-the-month Riggs Warbling (Andrew
Simpson), where both have designs of scamming Mickey out of his money by having
him committed to a mental asylum.
Meanwhile, local Black Nationalist Tariq Kahl (Michael Kenneth Williams)
wants to hire Doc to recover money owed to him by one of Mickey’s white
supremacist bodyguards, Glen Charlock (Christopher Allen Nelson), in some
unfinished business that goes back when both were in prison together. When Mickey goes missing (along with Shasta)
and Charlock ends up dead, his body laying next to Doc who wakes up after being
knocked out cold, that makes him the principal suspect on the case, where he
has to explain himself to Lieutenant Detective Christian F. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen
(Josh Brolin), described by the narrator as “SAG member, John Wayne walk, flat
top of Flintstone proportions and that evil, little shit-twinkle in his eye that
says Civil Rights Violations,” Doc’s right-wing, conservative counterpart on
the LAPD, Inherent Vice
"what's exactly the beef here" scene - YouTube (1:05), the man
chiefly responsible for some serious police harassment, bad vibes and a cloud
of paranoia hovering over Doc wherever he goes.
And if this was not enough, Doc is hired yet again by Hope Harlington
(Jena Malone), a former heroin addict who wants her husband back, Coy (Owen
Wilson), a sax player who feigned his death to avoid insurmountable debts, where
a mysterious payment received “after” his death leads her to believe he is
still alive.
At two and a half hours, the screwball
comedy of stoner noir is an unending labyrinth of joint smoking, wrong turns,
near misses, and dumfounding jokes and visual gags, but as long as the film is
heading somewhere, following the neverending myriad of clues, an open-minded
audience is willing to play along.
Perhaps the most peculiar variation from the novel is the use of a side
character as the narrator, Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), who barely figures in the
story, but always seems to be around Doc’s residence on the beach, like an
alternate consciousness that makes sure he’s all right. Not only does she appear to have an all-knowing
and omniscient eye, but a direct line to the author as well, as she continually
speaks his voice. While it sounds like a
kind of updated hipster slang from Raymond Chandler, it’s curious that Doc and
Elliot Gould as Marlowe both end up peeking into the private grounds of an
upscale sanitarium in search of their missing men. Both detectives make their best attempts to
solve the unraveling mystery, but even with insider help from the District
Attorney’s office from an old flame Penny Kimball (Reese Witherspoon), Inherent Vice I wanted to see
if you were free for dinner scene (47 seconds), it all remains wrapped in a
mystery, where there’s no nice and tidy conclusion, which makes it a lengthy
journey for little to no payoff. The
entire film feels like a lead-up to a signature event, always leading to this
expected crescendo, after which it’s mostly a let down. Shasta returns from out of the fog and
somehow rekindles whatever’s left of their distant love affair. While it’s blown up into giant-sized close
ups, the tone of the entire film changes, as does the seriousness of the music,
becoming overly symphonic and dramatically downbeat, while up until then the
music had been nothing but playful and enjoyable. By the time it winds down, however, there’s
an overall impression that nothing throughout the entire film has been learned
or taken seriously, as if that is emblematic of the stoner experience, where
it’s not the destination but the journey that matters. (“What a long, strange
trip it’s been.”) For many that will be
enough, kind of an updated and reinvented version of Easy Rider
(1969) and Two-Lane
Blacktop (1971), counterculture films that took us to the end of the road
and left us there. Defining films for a
morally divided generation, both were significant as drifter road movies that
expressed a general aimlessness of the times, where the music was the message,
and they were powerful indictments of a fed-up dissatisfaction with the broken
dreams of 60’s aspirations, the corruption of moral authority, and the
co-opting of the American Dream. INHERENT
VICE is an adrenaline-laced, sarcastic sneer at a mixed up society of
diametrically opposed values that is on the verge of losing its bearings and
visibly crumbling to its feet, within a few years of actually kicking out a
President, turning into a long, wayward adventure that meanders through the
heart of recognizable cultural signposts and ends in a listless waft of smoke,
becoming a drifting love story that doesn’t really matter at all, as the
audience doesn’t care about the love angle or any of the sketchy and mostly undeveloped
characters, where a Paul Thomas Anderson film once again makes a grand entrance
with a fancy build-up before fading into the nothingness of The Master,
where many may feel let down by the existential pointlessness of it all.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - CINE-FILE Chicago Kyle A. Westphal
No bones about it: INHERENT VICE is one divisive movie. Going by the annotated ballots of anonymous Academy Awards voters published last week in The Hollywood Reporter, INHERENT VICE was the worst movie of the year, or maybe just the most arrogant: an object of grand-standing, head-scratching mediocrity, like some chuckling, elitist finger poking you in the cornea. Meanwhile, VICE's champions have largely described it as a laugh-a-minute ride, the best head picture since HEAD, prophesying an imminent critical rehabilitation along the casual light-up lines of THE BIG LEBOWSKI. Uh-huh. I admire the acid sunshine optimism of the VICE Squad, but the thing that makes this movie distinctive is its melancholy, earnest and earned. Set in the fictional enclave of Gordita Beach, INHERENT VICE excavates a historicized ennui that's disarmingly real, namely the morning-after realization that the '60s were only a mirage, or perhaps a conspiratorial diversion. Say it ain't so, Country Joe. As Joanna Newsom's Sortilège speculates in a late voice-over, "Was it possible that at every gathering, concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, freak-in, here up north, back east, wherever, some dark crews had been busy all along reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday?" That hippie shit could be tolerated up to a point--until Straight America asserted its natural will to power. But VICE isn't quite a nostalgic wail for freakdom's last stand--it's a memory-film of a finer, more obtuse pedigree. Like Terence Davies' DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES, it's essentially a speculative conjecture about the shape of the world just prior to its author's birth. (Writer-director Anderson was born in 1970, the unrecoverable, present-tense moment of VICE.) How did we get here?, this movie fruitlessly, savagely asks, knowing full well that the answer might kill us. We move through a druggy stupor, characters coming and going, plotlines maddeningly opaque, nearly every shot a dawdling close-up. It's a total conjuring, a séance with spirits not yet dead.
In
Review Online [Chris Mello]
Many consider Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice to be a minor work for him; the New York Times’ review dubbed it “Pynchon Lite,” for instance. Choosing a seriocomic yarn about a perpetually weed-affected private dick as the source material for his seventh feature might have seemed like similarly trivial territory for Paul Thomas Anderson after There Will Be Blood and The Master, two grim films about corrupt, powerful men. But "minor" ultimately means little with these artistic giants in their respective fields. Inherent Vice seems like breezy, insignificant fare on the surface, but the film's red-eyed ramble achieves the same thematic ends as his more carefully structured dramas. This time, however, Anderson’s ruined subject isn’t simply a man, but a crumbling generational utopia.
The hazy intrigue begins when an old flame, Shasta Fey Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), suddenly shows up in Larry “Doc” Sportello’s (Joaquin Phoenix) home asking the private eye for some help. She’s caught up in something involving a Jewish real-estate developer, his wife, her lover and a whole bunch of neo-Nazis—friends of the family. Said developer, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts), then disappears, and Shasta—who had been carrying on an affair with him when she met up with Doc—along with him. So Doc’s on the case, stumbling in his own pot-induced stupor onto new leads at every turn. Naturally, it turns out that the case is bigger than it at first seems, and that everything is connected…maybe. Among other things Doc discovers, there’s a whole lot of Chinese heroin involved and a cult of dentists linked to that.
It's a lot to take in, but in the end the plot details matter less than the underlying social vision it outlines. It's the end of the tumultuous 1960s—1970 Los Angeles, to be exact—and by now, the hippie movement has been co-opted by industry, and all the supposed subversion behind their calls for peace and love was merely a hiding ground for more violent, hateful types. Like an early client of Doc’s, Tariq Khalil (Michael K. Williams), tellingly notes, Tariq's black-power prison group and the Aryan Nation essentially share similar views on the U.S. government. And speaking of the feds, they’ve infiltrated all the movements, feeding off the crashed and hopeless dopers in order to turn them into special agents. The government, the hippies, the Nazis, the doctors, the rehab clinics: everything’s a cult. If this film is a high, then its a paranoid one. We even see Doc standing in front of a white board drawing lines from one case to the next, out of his mind connecting the disparate dots. That image represents the experience of watching Inherent Vice in miniature: the disorienting experience of trying to piece together information you can hardly grasp before Doc, and by extension Anderson himself, moves on to the next major revelation, the next comic set-piece.
The most obvious point of comparison in Anderson’s filmography is Boogie Nights, with its shift from the high-rolling porn industry '70s to the crash of the '80s. In Inherent Vice, though, Anderson skips over the good times entirely, going straight for the comedy of despair, suggesting that the '70s were themselves a bad hangover from the free-love '60s. Anderson technically hasn't tackled the '60s, but his last two features explored other periods of American history that engendered feelings of disillusionment. Doc could be seen as an extension of The Master's Freddie Quell: a lost figure searching for an ideology. Instead of grasping onto the mumbo-jumbo offered by a Lancaster Dodd father-figure type, however, Doc tries to find his own way, not so much looking for the answers to life's big questions as simply trying to figure out what the hell is going on around him. If anything, Anderson's Los Angeles is full of Dodd-like figures, forming a wall of ideological power. Our hero is too stoned to be susceptible to their wiles, but his meddling presence is as accusatory of corrupted power as the downfall of Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood and perhaps even more direct in its constant interrogation.
Above all else, though, Inherent Vice is simply a blast to watch, with a great supporting cast (especially Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen, the hippie-hating detective, and Joanna Newsom as Sortilege, Doc’s friend, sometime hallucination and narrating conscience) wandering in and out of the picture and Anderson always ready to pull out of mostly sustained mediums and close shots for a punch line in a long shot. And then there’s Joaquin Phoenix at the center of this stoned screwball maelstrom, giving us a rare look at his comedic chops, his timing always perfectly too slow (most memorably when he takes two seconds to look at a picture of a heroin-ruined child before screaming in terror). Inherent Vice is an almost structureless film with nearly perfectly constructed comedy hiding a darker, deeper underbelly the way the L.A. sun and pot smoke filling the frame obscure the dreaded come-down that’s happening all around.
“Inherent
Vice” Review - The New Yorker
Anthony Lane
The new Paul Thomas Anderson film, “Inherent Vice,” comes from the 2009 novel of that name, by Thomas Pynchon. The adaptation alone deserves an award for valor. Nobody has ever turned a Pynchon book into a movie before, for the same reason that nobody has managed to cram the New York Philharmonic into a Ford Focus. If you really have a mind to write a screenplay based on “Gravity’s Rainbow” (1973), go right ahead, but be warned: you won’t have a mind by the end of it. So, what possessed Anderson to approach “Inherent Vice”?
Well, of all Pynchon’s novels, it may be the most gag-infested. It also maintains his high standard of social indignation, taunting “that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all”—ouch!—and making you wonder, as always, how a doomsayer of his stripe should have proved such good company for so long. Above all, “Inherent Vice” brings us Pynchon the plotter at his tightest. True, that’s not saying much, but at least you can tease out noodles of story line here and there. In the soup, from the start, is Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a private investigator living in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County. He is visited by an ex-girlfriend named Shasta Fay Hepworth (Katherine Waterston), who is now entwined with a hot-shot property developer, Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts). Mickey has an English wife, and she has a lover, too, and together they are making plans for Mickey. So says Shasta, who then disappears, as does Mickey, by which time Doc has been knocked out cold, at the Chick Planet massage parlor. He wakes up beside a corpse: one of Mickey’s bodyguards. In a separate subplot—which turns out, naturally, not to be separate at all—Doc is hired by Hope Harlingen (Jena Malone), a former junkie with false choppers, to find her husband, Coy (Owen Wilson), missing and presumed not dead.
If that reminds you of chewed-over Chandler, you’re not wrong, and one of the fables on which “Inherent Vice” ruminates is “The Long Goodbye,” and the loping, unflustered movie that Robert Altman made of it, in 1973, with Elliott Gould as Marlowe. He, too, was looking for a vanished man with an English spouse, on the verge of the Pacific, and his search, like Doc’s, involved poking around a sanatorium for the mentally vexed, but what lent the puzzle its loose charm was the fact that Marlowe could only just be bothered to solve it, as opposed to staying home with his cat. At least there was a solution; to the ardent Pynchonite, however, making sense of any mystery makes no sense at all. The nailing of one crime will simply reveal another, deeper one, and then another, and so on, until you arrive at the vision of a society that is already cracked and crazed. Does Anderson stay loyal to that vision for two and a half hours? Absolutely. Will his audience be overjoyed to realize, around the ninety-minute mark, just how little of “Inherent Vice” is going to be wrapped up nice and neat? Hmm.
What we get is shards, some more glittering than others. Take, for instance, the Golden Fang. Doc is told to beware of it by Jade (Hong Chau), who is working at Chick Planet when he first bumps into her, and who then crops up at random junctures, like a hitchhiker. But what does the Golden Fang refer to? Doc’s attorney, a marine lawyer named Sauncho Smilax (Benicio del Toro), claims that it’s a boat, which was formerly charted by anti-Communist subversives. (Anything, to Pynchon, can be soaked in political history: a person, a vessel, a brand of food.) The Golden Fang is also tapped as a heroin cartel, housed in a high-rise that looks like a golden fang. There Doc finds Dr. Blatnoyd (Martin Short), a coke snorter in damson velvet, and Japonica Fenway (Sasha Pieterse), a teen-age runaway whom Doc once tracked down and delivered to her parents—enough, we gather, to make her run away again. (“American life,” the movie informs us, “was something to be escaped from.”) Later, Doc inquires whether puncture marks found on the throat of a murder victim might have been inflicted by fangs, and proposes that the wounds be checked for gold traces. Nothing, in other words, is out of bounds; everything, to the right kind of imagination, is a clue.
What does that imagination feed on? Easy: paranoia and marijuana, both freely available—indeed, interchangeable—in 1970, when “Inherent Vice” is set. In those days, the film suggests, you could be present and correct and yet seem freakily AWOL, with your body in the room but your spirit out of town, the result being that everyone, not just Doc, becomes a private dick of sorts, constantly cross-checking on other people’s existence. (One stoner, who is meant to be deceased, remarks of old friends, “Even when I was alive, they didn’t know it was me.”) As Doc, Joaquin Phoenix is so befogged with weed that he seems to gust along inside his own personal weather system, although he’s impressively out-doped by Owen Wilson, with his narrow-eyed, inward stare, not to mention those long and lazy vowels. Meanwhile, from the pack of speakers shuffling through the book, the one that Anderson, in his wittiest move, picks to provide the voice-over for the film is Sortilège (Joanna Newsom), an astrologer who hangs out at the beach. Believe me, narrators do not come more unreliable than that.
What Anderson does not do is stuff “Inherent Vice” with wads of period detail. It’s much quieter on the senses than “American Hustle,” say, and, for a major studio production, it’s amazingly low on establishing shots. The opening minutes, dispensing with larger views, plant us squarely in Phoenix’s face, and a lot of the action unfolds in his darting gaze. Closeups carry the burden of seventies whimsy (I fast became obsessed with Doc’s telephone, as green as a scoop of mint chocolate chip), whereas the background clutter is relatively spare. We get a glimpse of a hula hoop, but only for a second, through a doorway. Of course, there are images that crackle and pop; the toffee-brown suit that Doc wears to Wolfmann’s house could have been tailored in another galaxy, while his muttonchops are of a bushiness not witnessed on the male cheek since the mid-Victorian age, when Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin started neglecting their razors. By and large, though, Anderson doesn’t treat the era as a funny foreign land. He wants it to drift toward our own time, hinting—and this is true to Pynchon—that the befuddlement of ordinary folk has hardly changed while “the ancient forces of greed and fear” have, if anything, tightened their clutch upon our lives.
One of the chief clutchers is Bigfoot, otherwise known as Detective Christian Bjornsen, who is on the Wolfmann case. That puts him on a collision course with Doc, and the two men are both foes and uneasy compadres. Their haircuts set the tone: the cop’s frightening flattop, right-angled at the back, versus Doc’s pathetic attempt at an Afro—a snaky mop that makes him look like Medusa getting out of the shower. Bigfoot is played, or, rather, supercharged, by Josh Brolin, and he all but commandeers “Inherent Vice,” releasing a stab of energy amid the haze of hippies. Whether shouting for Swedish pancakes in a Japanese diner (a very Pynchon-flavored snack) or bowing to the stern demands of his wife (whose head is severed by the top of the frame, like that of the maid in “Tom and Jerry”), Bigfoot remains at the business end of the comedy. Indeed, anyone who prizes the book for its treasure chest of jokes will be gratified by how many of them survive onscreen, including the advice dished out by the waitress at a seafood restaurant, as she takes orders for drinks (“You’re going to want to get good and fucked up before this meal”). I was only sorry that Anderson couldn’t find room for the Christian surfer, who knows exactly what “walking on water” entails, and who claims to have once purchased a fragment of the True Board.
“Inherent Vice” is not only the first Pynchon movie; it could also, I suspect, turn out to be the last. Either way, it is the best and the most exasperating that we’ll ever have. It reaches out to his ineffable sadness, and almost gets there. I am as suckered as the next guy by the sight of two lovers running through the rain, in flashback, to the dolorous strains of Neil Young, as Shasta and Doc do in the film. When it comes to climate, though, I still prefer what Pynchon calls “a pure sunset of the colors steel takes on as it heats to glowing,” “smogswept mesa-tops above the boulevards,” or “the wind raging in the concrete geometry.” As a lyricist of California light, Pynchon is rivalled only by Richard Diebenkorn, who spent some twenty years painting his “Ocean Park” series in Santa Monica, and I doubt whether any director—dead or alive, Altman or Anderson—could really conjure a style to match the long surge of a Pynchon sentence as it rolls inexhaustibly onward. That is why one of the strongest scenes in the film of “Inherent Vice” finds Anderson striking a sharply different note; a sexual encounter, which feels goofy and even playful on the page, becomes a difficult fugue of confession, aggression, and pain, rounded off with a line that makes you wince—“It doesn’t mean we’re back together.” Paul Thomas Anderson has done Thomas Pynchon proud, but, at moments like this, you want him to leave the writer’s orbit and follow his own strange star.
Sight
& Sound [Nick Pinkerton]
February 2015
Acidemic
Journal of Film and Media [Erich Kuersten]
Ferdy
on Films [Roderick Heath]
Little
White Lies [David Jenkins]
Inherent
Vice? - Slate Dana Stevens
Paul
Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice Looks Like a ... - Slate Sharan Shetty from Slate, September 29, 2014
Film
Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
World
Socialist Web Site [David Walsh]
Angeliki
Coconi's Unsung Films [Hannah McHaffie]
Review
- 'Inherent Vice' Can't Overcome Flaws - Forbes Mark Hughes, December 16, 2014
"Soft-boiled:
Pynchon's stoned detective"
Louis Menand book review from The
New Yorker, August 3, 2009
Pynchon lights up - Salon.com Laura Miller book review, July 31, 2009
"Another
Doorway to the Paranoid Pynchon Dimension" Michiko Kakutani book review from The New York Times, 2009
"Pynchon's Coast:
Inherent Vice and the Twilight of the Spatially Specific" Bill Millard book review from College Hill Review, 2009
"Inherent Vice
– Pynchon for the Masses" Dan
Geddes book review from The Satirist,
January 2010
Call It
Capitalism - London Review of Books
Thomas Jones book review of Gravity’s
Rainbow from The London Review
of Books, September 10, 2009
Pynchon
and comics | The Walrus Blog Sean
Rogers, August 12, 2009
Paul
Thomas Anderson Reclaims His Loose, Wiggy Side in ... Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice
Seongyong's
Private Place [Seongyong Cho]
Erik
Lundegaard [Erik Lundegaard]
Can't
Stop the Movies [Andrew Hathaway]
Surrender
to the Void [Steven Flores]
DVDTalk.com
- theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Cinema365
[Carlos deVillalvilla]
'Inherent
Vice' Review: A Hell of a Ride, But You're ... - Pajiba Vivian Kane
INFLUX
Magazine [Kristina Aiad-Toss]
Inherent
Vice (2014) - Reelviews Movie Reviews
James Berardinelli
Grolsch
Film Works [Sophia Satchell Baeza]
monsters
and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Review: INHERENT
VICE, Say Hello To The ... - Twitch
Dustin Chang
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Owen Van Spall]
Daily
| NYFF 2014 | Paul Thomas Anderson's INHERENT ... David Hudson from Fandor
Paul
Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice Described As The ... Kristy Puchko from Cinema Blend, Aprilo 15,
2014
Top
100 Films of the Decade, pt. 4 (#25 – #1): A Contest ... #15 by Michael Glover Smith from White City
Cinema
Listen:
The Full 'Inherent Vice' Soundtrack Featuring Rad ... Rodrigo Perez from The Playlist
Thomas
Pynchon Inherent Vice cameo: “Reclusive” author ... Forrest Wickman from Slate
How
Can You Recognize Thomas Pynchon In INHERENT ... Devin Faraci from Badass Digest
Paul
Thomas Anderson takes on 'Inherent Vice' - LA Times Mark Olsen interviews the director, October
30, 2014
Hollywood
Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
Inherent
Vice review – Thomas Pynchon's stoner mystery runs out of puff Mark Kermode from The Guardian
The
10 best films of 2014: No 3 – Inherent Vice
Xan Brooks from The Guardian,
December 10, 2014
What Inherent Vice tells us about modern America Alan Yuhas from The Guardian, December 14, 2013
Inherent
Vice prompts cinema walk-outs Alice
Vincent from The Telegraph
JapanCinema.net
[Marcello Milteer]
Examiner.com
[Jana J. Monji] also seen here: Pasadena
Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Huffington
Post [Brandon Judell] also seen here: CultureCatch.com
[Brandon Judell]
'Inherent
Vice' movie review - Washington Post
Ann Hornaday
Charleston
City Paper [T. B. Meek]
The
Cleveland Movie Blog [Pamela Zoslov]
Austin
Chronicle [Josh Kupecki]
Oregon
Herald [Oktay Ege Kozak]
Review
Inherent Vice - Los Angeles Times
Betsy Sharkey
Inherent Vice -
Roger Ebert Matt Zoller Seitz
New
York Times [Manohla Dargis]
"Pynchon’s
Cameo, and Other Surrealities"
Logan Hill from The New York
Times, September 26, 2014
Anderson, Sini
THE PUNK SINGER B+ 91
USA (80 mi)
2013
BECAUSE we girls want
to create mediums that speak to US. We
are tired of boy band after boy band, boy zine after boy zine, boy punk after
boy punk after boy… BECAUSE we need to talk to each other. Communication/inclusion is the key. We will never know if we don’t break the code
of silence… BECAUSE in every form of media we see us/myself slapped,
decapitated, laughed at, objectified, raped, trivialized, pushed, ignored,
stereotyped, kicked, scorned, molested, silenced, invalidated, knifed, shot, choked
and killed. BECAUSE a safe space needs
to be created for girls where we can open our eyes and reach out to each other
without being threatened by this sexist society and our day to day bullshit.
We want and need to
encourage and be encouraged in the face of all our own insecurities, in the
face of beergutboyrock that tells us we can't play our instruments, in the face
of 'authorities' who say our band/zines/etc are the worst... Because we don't
wanna assimilate to some else's (boy) standards of what art is... Because we
are unwilling to falter under claims that we are reactionary 'reverse sexists'
AND NOT THE TRUEPUNKROCKSOULCRUSADERS THAT WE KNOW WE we real are... Because I
believe with my wholeheartmindbody that girls constitute a revolutionary soul force
that can, and will change the world for real.
—Riot Grrl Manifesto (excerpts), early-90's
Girls to the front.
Boys to the back. Back, back. All boys be cool for once in your lives.
—Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kills
An exhilarating, all-in
look at Kathleen Hanna and the early stages of girl power in punk music in the
early 90’s, where Hanna’s earliest musical interests were unleashed through
fanzines, homemade booklets with creative artworks celebrating particular music
acts and the power of expression.
Eventually she got the attention of one of her underground heroes, Kathy
Acker, the writer of Blood and Guts in
High School, one of the original underground, mixed-media feminist
publications that challenged social taboos, giving voice to subjects that were
largely silenced or severely limited by mainstream media, such as rape,
abortion, incest, pornography, and domestic violence. Acker believed in challenging the
male-centric power structures by continually giving voice to this restricted
territory, by taking ownership of these issues.
An art student at Evergreen State College from Olympia, Washington,
Hannah was angry from the dismissive media coverage of Anita Hill’s sexual
harassment claims against a sitting (for life) Supreme Court justice, the Tailhook
scandal, the William Kennedy Smith trial, and an article in Time magazine that asked if feminism was dead, all happening at a
time when she was trying to process the rape and murder of her roommate. In 1991 Hannah entered Slam poetry festivals
where she’d wail at the top of her lungs “I am your worst nightmare come to
life. I’m a girl that won’t shut up,”
stomping onstage and shouting “I’m going to tell EVERYONE!” It was Acker who told her that nobody comes
to Slam fests but other performers, that “if you want to be heard, start a
band,” which couldn’t have been better advice, as her screaming angry defiance
onstage perfectly fit the profile of a punk rock lead singer, where she
literally fused feminism with punk rock.
Gathering around her best friends, girls she could trust, they quickly
formed Bikini Kill, where her badass onstage performance was inspiring to other
young girls, where she’d scrawl “slut” in lipstick across her stomach, adopt a
Valley Girl accent, dance aggressively and stomp around the stage in underwear
or a miniskirt, while bringing girls in the audience to the front and sending
boys to the back, where most importantly she was defining herself on her own
terms.
The band actively
sought to create a physical safe space for women at shows, making this a policy
of bringing them to the front at their performances, where they could even sit
onstage, as this was the boy era of mosh pits and crowd surfing, which could
get excessively physical, intimidating and often injuring girls who came
anywhere near, developing a Riot Grrl Manifesto, “We are angry at a society
that tells us Girl = Dumb, Girl = Bad, Girl = Weak,” a revolutionary call to
action refusing to assimilate to male standards that was published in a Bikini
Kill fanzine in 1991, which showed early on she was a force to be reckoned
with. “I’m so sorry if I’m alienating
some of you/Your whole fucking culture alienates me," sings Hanna in
"White Boy" Bikini
Kill - White Boy - YouTube (2:15), a song that still resonates with a fury,
as some twenty years later the music industry continues to generate rape
culture lyrics and imagery, while a subject the newscasts still routinely omit
is the prevalence of rape in the military, where according to Kirby Dick’s
eye-opening film The
Invisible War (2012), more than 20% of currently serving female veterans
will be sexually assaulted, while less than 3% of the identified rapists will
ever be convicted. It’s enough to make
anyone angry, and from 1991 – 1999 it was a glorious era for Riot grrls, where
Hanna insisted “I’m not going to sit around and be peace and love with
somebody’s boot around my neck,” berating men in the audience from the
microphone for behaving like jerks, literally daring other young girls to
follow. She was sexy, she was angry, and
she was defiant as she strutted the stage with a supreme confidence,
proclaiming “We want a revolution!” One
of the best pieces of archival footage shows Hannah as a full-throttled
frontwoman for
While there’s really
not a negative word heard anywhere in this picture, becoming something of a
love fest, the mostly female cast of supporting voices includes Hanna’s Riot
grrl sisters-in-arms Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker, Joan Jett, Kim Gordon,
and several music and culture critics, including Ann Powers and Jennifer
Baumgardner. While the unadulterated
praise is unanimous, it also appears genuine, which is the prevailing theme
throughout, without which this would be just another ordinary profile. Hannah is credited with coming up with the
title of Nirvana’s 1991 rock anthem “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” spray painting
it on Kurt Cobain’s wall, which he reinterpreted with a revolutionary meaning
for an apathetic generation. Hole’s
Courtney Love, Cobain’s eventual wife, sucker-punched Hannah backstage during
Sonic Youth’s performance at Lollapalooza in the summer of 1995. Hannah filed charges against Love, who
remembered nothing as she was high on drugs at the time, and prevailed in
court, challenging Love to “a feminist debate at the university of her
choice.” Hannah dropped out of sight in
2005, officially retiring from the music industry, where many felt she
abandoned the very issues she was advocating.
But the film reveals a mysterious illness sidelined her literally for
years before it was finally diagnosed as late stage Lyme disease in 2010,
causing chronic neurological symptoms, an illness that can be managed, but
often gets worse before it gets better.
Her resilience has been impressive, as this debilitating illness has
taken nearly a decade out of her life, where half that time the worst part was
living with the fear of not knowing what was causing her to be so sick. But Hannah is a woman who has pushed personal
crusades into worldwide movements, who has fought to overcome antifeminist
ignorance in the mainstream press, where early in her career she had to stage a
complete press blackout due to negative depictions that belittled and distorted
her activism, refusing to allow the media afterwards to frame her message
targeting bullied teen girls and young women.
Hannah is seen as surprisingly intelligent, introspective, and tough,
where her impact is perhaps most felt with similarly smart middle class white
girls, but her message of empowerment has grown since the Riot Grrl days,
broadening her field of vision to include battered women, rape victims, gays,
lesbians, and the transgendered. Her
influence has spread to
Chicago Reader JR
Jones
Loaded with catchy tunes and catchier ideas, this
documentary profiles the fearless feminist rocker Kathleen Hanna, who swam
against the current of 90s punk machismo with her Washington-state band Bikini
Kill and her influential fanzine Riot Grrrl. Director Sini Anderson
draws on numerous archival interviews with Hanna as well as her own, and the
singer is articulate and introspective enough to counter all the adoring
comments from her bandmates and musical colleagues (Joan Jett, Kim Gordon of
Sonic Youth, Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney). After Bikini Kill split up in
1997, Hanna returned with the more dance-oriented Le Tigre before mysteriously
retiring from music in 2005, and this last development allows Anderson to peel
away from the entertainment world to great effect. Like Julien Temple's Joe
Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007), the movie succeeds as a punk
chronicle by focusing on a true believer who was lionized by many but who
turned out to be only human.
THE
PUNK SINGER Facets Multi Media
"That girl she holds her head up so high, I think I wanna be her best friend, yeah." So go the lyrics to Bikini Kill's "Rebel Girl." Kathleen Hanna, lead singer of punk band Bikini Kill and dance-punk trio Le Tigre, was a pivotal figure in the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s. Through the use of extensive archival footage as well as intimate interviews, The Punk Singer recounts Hanna's ascension into the forefront of musical and cultural awareness, her role as a feminist activist for a new generation of women, and her sudden retreat from public limelight.
Among the many interviewed in the film are Joan Jett, Le Tigre's Johanna Fateman and JD Samson, Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, Sleater-Kinney's Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, and Hanna's husband (and Beastie Boy) Adam Horowitz. Two decades later, Hanna is still ripping down barriers of music and gender and art, still proudly saying "Stay out of my way!"
TimeOut Chicago Amy
Plitt
In 2010, two decades after riot grrrl became an explosive cultural force, interest in the movement surged thanks to two books (Sara Marcus’s Girls to the Front and Marisa Meltzer’s Girl Power), and the news that NYU’s Fales Library was collecting zines and other documents for a riot-grrrl archive. But at the same time, unbeknownst to most people, Kathleen Hanna—the former Bikini Kill frontwoman often credited as the movement’s driving force—was in the midst of a nightmarish fight with late-stage Lyme disease, which limited her ability to work and appear in public.
Throughout that period, filmmaker Sini Anderson was there, chronicling Hanna’s life (and her bad days) for The Punk Singer, an engrossing new documentary about the icon. The director doesn’t shy away from showing the illness’s toll—at one point, Hanna is hooked up to a long-term catheter—but the film’s larger focus in on Hanna’s legacy as an artist, musician and feminist firebrand. Anderson draws on extensive interviews with the performer, who is remarkably candid about her abusive upbringing, her medical struggles and the torment she faced as the public face of a movement.
Anderson also includes archival footage and interviews with women like Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon and fellow riot grrrls Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein (formerly of Sleater-Kinney) that reveal how Hanna’s ideas and influence permeated not just the punk scene (her exhortation of “Girls to the front!,” to young women in aggressive mosh pits, was nothing short of revolutionary), but also female culture at large. Hanna’s husband, Adam Horovitz of the Beastie Boys, also appears, providing tender remembrances of the couple’s burgeoning relationship. Although the film was completed too early to document Hanna’s return to music—her new band, the Julie Ruin, released an album in September and has been touring—it still offers a poignant, intimate portrait of a larger-than-life personality—one whose singular voice is still sorely needed in music, culture and, well, everywhere.
Village
Voice [Amy Nicholson] also seen
here: Bikini
Kill Story The Punk Singer Compels Us to Ask if Feminism is ...
The age of the riot grrrls entered like a screaming woman and exited like a cooing teen. The woman was Kathleen Hanna, the Bikini Kill frontwoman who kicked boys out of her mosh pits and insisted, "I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck." The teen was Britney Spears, who famously invited her baby to hit her one more time. And the eight years between their eras — 1991 to 1999 — were a glorious time in modern music history for girls who rallied behind Hanna as she dared them to start a revolution.
Still, Hanna and Spears had a few things in common: kiddie barrettes, baby tees, little girl skirts. But as Sini Anderson, director of the Dr. Martens-stomping doc The Punk Singer, points out, third-wave feminists like Hanna dressed like children to reclaim their youth from a male-dominated culture that sexualized them when they were too young to fight back. Alas, poor Spears was shoved into schoolgirl kilts by adults, who then pushed her into pop culture to soothe and sugarcoat a decade of anger.
It's been more than 20 years since Hanna and friends launched Bikini Kill in Olympia, Washington. Hanna was an art student and performer who was trying to process the attempted rape and murder of her roommate, plus a terribly ordinary terrible childhood: a handsy father who called her a fool for trying to sing; a mother who deliberately dropped her during a trust fall. (Laughs Hanna, bitterly, "She said, 'Don't trust anyone, not even your own mother.'") Around her, the media was fumbling the chance to speak out against sexual harassment with Anita Hill, Tailhook, and the William Kennedy Smith trial. If Hanna couldn't trust anyone, then she certainly couldn't trust anyone to say what needed saying. She'd have to say it herself.
"I'm so sorry if I'm alienating some of you/Your whole fucking culture alienates me," belted Hanna in "White Boy." What's still striking isn't just the lyrics — it's Hanna's entire presence. Anderson had access to reels of Bikini Kill concerts, and even better than hearing talking heads like Joan Jett and Kim Gordon gush about her influence is simply watching Hanna perform. On stage, she veered from blunt — say, scrawling "slut" on her stomach — to boldly feminine. Instead of shunning girly things, she pirouetted, danced the pony, and adopted a Valley Girl accent, every choice establishing that she was a woman on her own terms. She not only convinced a generation of girls you could be badass in a dress, she even convinced Kurt Cobain.
For younger viewers who might not have been alive in 1991, Anderson dutifully explains that the dress-wearing Cobain, a buddy of Hanna's, would later release a song called "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that detonated MTV hair bands and their non-killing bikini girls. Hanna also gave him the title, spray-painting "Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit" on the wall of his house. (He fell in love with the phrase before he learned it was a deodorant joke.) Anderson even explains what a fanzine was, though I wish she'd said, "You know, like a Tumblr on paper."
One of the best revelations in The Punk Singer is when Hanna realizes that her early songs were aimed at the wrong target. As in the lyrics above, she'd been singing to men instead of the women who looked to her as a role model. Her next projects, the solo bedroom record Julie Ruin and the popular pop act Le Tigre, wouldn't make that mistake. But the later biographical details in the doc — half-jokingly kicking herself for falling in love with Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, who once rapped that girls should do his laundry; her battle with Lyme disease — ultimately seem less important than the larger movement Hanna represented.
I worshipped the riot grrrls when I was a girl. Like Hanna, they owned every inch of their bodies. In high school, I cheered as The Muffs' Kim Shattuck crushed a beer can on a heckler's head while wearing a dynamite pair of thigh-highs. But watching this old footage in 2013 is a test of cultural cognitive dissonance. There's Hanna wearing a sexy onesie that Miley Cyrus would love to borrow. Why are we applauding one girl and booing another? How did Hanna make flashing her thong underwear look like a political statement rather than just more man-pleasing marketing?
It's impossible to watch The Punk Singer and not ask if feminism is dead. That's a fair starting question. But a better one is what if it isn't — what if we've just stopped recognizing it? We've blurred the lines between aggressive, sexually aggressive, and sexual so much that today's young stars can't tell where they stand, especially when they've been so thoroughly media-trained that they aren't used to standing on their own. And if you're watching The Punk Singer and pitting today's girls against the grrrls, you're proving Hanna's point that we can't let two women share our attention without thrusting them into a catfight. What if the most punk rock, pro-feminist thing you can do is stick up for Miley Cyrus? I'd like to think we could all join hands, blast a mash-up of "Rebel Girl" and "Party in the USA," and dance to that.
13
Reasons Every Feminist Needs To Watch “The Punk Singer” Ariane Lang from Buzzfeed
The Punk Singer starts with singer Kathleen Hanna performing at a spoken word event in 1991 — she says, then shouts, “I am your worst nightmare come to life / I’m a girl you can’t shut up.” It ends with Hanna saying she’s fine with people who aren’t feminists or who don’t believe that her illness — late-stage Lyme disease — exists, but as she states, in the final sentence of the film, “They should have to stay out of my way.” Out Nov. 29 in select theaters and on VOD, the film is a portrait of the grrrl who wrote the Riot Grrrl Manifesto.
“It’s important to me to tell the stories of especially feminist artists while they’re still making work,” said the film’s director, Sini Anderson, in a phone interview. “Female portraits of female artists mid-career.”
Hanna herself saw it a different way: She explained that she agreed to do the documentary because “I thought I was going to die.” After years of sickness, she was diagnosed during filming. “I was preparing to be a statue and be gone,” she said.
Watching the movie, there are some highly questionable links drawn between first- and third-wave feminism and the struggle for racial equality; there are also, notably, few brown faces, which Hanna linked to a problem with Riot Grrrl itself.
“There were a lot of non-productive discussions of race and class as Riot Grrrl was winding down,” she said, describing rooms full of “white girls pointing fingers.”
“That was sort of its demise.”
Still, it’s arresting to see Hanna and the grrrls do all the talking.
“I hope it inspires people, like, even if they totally dislike it, to make something,” Hanna said.
So, even if you totally dislike it, here are 13 reasons you should watch The Punk Singer:
1. The documentary was made by an almost all-women crew, and there’s only one cisgender man interviewed in its 80-minute run.
“It was totally intentional,” said the director, Sini Anderson. “I try to work with as many other women as I can.”
In the photo, Anderson speaks to Tavi Gevinson (left), one of the women interviewed in the film.
2. “Girls to the front” was an actual Bikini Kill policy. The band actively sought to create a physical safe space for women at shows.
As part of this policy, you can see Hanna telling boys “back. Back.” Also, “All boys be cool for once in your lives.”
3. Hanna lets her guard down.
“By the nature of how personal it is, and how vulnerable she allows herself to be,” Anderson said, the film “helps people, especially women, feel less alone.”
4. As part of that, you see her struggling with late-stage Lyme disease.
She talks at length about how she didn’t want to ask for help or acknowledge that she was really sick. As someone puts it in the documentary, Hanna didn’t ask for help because Hanna is “supposed to be the helper,” which is something women know about.
Anderson, who coincidentally was also diagnosed with late-stage Lyme disease while making the film, asked Hanna to film herself during a treatment, when neurological issues flare up (speech delays being the most noticeable on film). Or, as Anderson put it, “I asked if she would be willing [to film herself].” The answer could have been “no,” everyone, and that would have been OK, too. #feminism
5. Hanna lets her awkward little girl show.
We’ve all been there.
6. Anderson is a queer filmmaker, and queers get a voice in the movie.
Such as Lynn Breedlove (above), a transgender musician and writer.
Anderson, whose work has mostly focused on the queer community, said, “I think that what Kathleen Hanna does with her art and with her feminism is queer.”
“That’s a very kind thing to say,” Hanna said when she was informed of Anderson’s statement. “I hope that the work that I make is queer-friendly — I know that’s way overused.” She said she sees herself as “challenging binaries of all kinds.”
7. Hanna’s “Riot Grrrl Manifesto” is somewhat vague at times, but it’s a vagueness to live by.
“Because we need to acknowledge that our blood is being spilt; that right now a girl is being raped or battered and it might be me or you or your mom or the girl you sat next to on the bus last Tuesday, and she might be dead by the time you finish reading this. I am not making this up.”
No, you are not making this up.
8. Hanna articulates the fear of being honest as a woman.
At the end of the film, Hanna is talking somewhat indirectly about the various ways she’s been abused. “I wouldn’t want to tell anybody the whole entire story because it sounded crazy,” she says to the camera. “It sounded just, like, too big of a can of worms. Like, who would believe me? And then I was like, other women would believe me.”
9. Then, after all that talk, Hanna doesn’t ever really specify what happened to her. And that’s her choice.
10. Joan Jett is in it, and Joan Jett is a goddess.
11. Hanna and Adam “Ad-Rock” Horovitz have a really sweet relationship, and selfies are only the beginning.
The two of them worked together to write a speech for the VMAs about the sexual assaults that occurred at Woodstock ‘99. Using the VMAs to raise awareness of sexual assault? What?!
The whole speech is not in the movie, but you can watch it here (the speech starts at 2:50). In the movie, you do hear the VMAs crowd shocked into silence. “It definitely sucked the party out of the room,” Howovitz says in the documentary.
12. As Anderson said, “All the things that we were fighting for back then are not fixed.”
Hanna said people don’t find her threatening anymore because Bikini Kill is a thing of the past. “There’s nothing threatening about a statue,” she said. Nonetheless, she’s survived and she’s still making music; her new band, The Julie Ruin, released an album in September.
13. There’s dancing. A lot of it.
I guess this is not strictly a feminist reason to see something.
Sight
& Sound [Sophie Mayer] June 2014
Why
the Academy Should See The Punk Singer, Riot Grrls & A Pussy Riot Alert Quendrith Johnson from Film Festivals
Movie
Review - 'The Punk Singer' - Silent For Years, A Riot Grrrl ... Ella Taylor from NPR
“The
Punk Singer”: Kathleen Hanna's riotous life - Salon.com Andrew O’Hehir
notcoming.com | The Punk
Singer Victoria Large
The
Punk Singer: A Film About Kathleen Hanna / The Dissolve Noel Murray
DVDTalk.com
- theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Movie
Mezzanine [Jesse Knight]
Badass
Digest [Meredith Borders]
BeyondHollywood.com
[Brent McKnight]
Electric
Sheep [Lisa Williams]
Little
White Lies [Sophie Monks Kaufman]
The
Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Jennie Kermode]
Film
School Rejects [Scott Beggs]
Film
Festival Traveler [Nora Lee Mandel]
Kathleen
Hanna Moves Forward With the Julie Ruin
Maura Johnston interviews Hanna from Rolling
Stone magazine, September 4, 2013
Director interview
Karen Kammerle from Tribeca Film, November 26, 2013
Kathleen
Hanna on 'The Punk Singer': 'I Didn't Want Men to Validate ... Katie Van Syckle interviews Hanna from Rolling Stone magazine, November 27,
2013
Kathleen
Hanna on the film that's inspired her for decades ... Sam Adams interviews Hanna from The Dissolve,
De4cember 3, 2013
The
Hollywood Reporter [John DeFore]
Washington Post
Stephanie Merry
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
RogerEbert.com Marsha McCreadie
New
York Times [Nicolas Rapold]
The Punk Singer -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anderson, Wes
Wes Anderson Martin Scorsese from Esquire,
A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, I watched a film called Bottle Rocket. I knew nothing about it, and the movie really took me by surprise. Here was a picture without a trace of cynicism, that obviously grew out of its director's affection for his characters in particular and for people in general. A rarity. And the central idea of the film is so delicate, so human: A group of young guys think that their lives have to be filled with risk and danger in order to be real. They don't know that it's okay simply to be who they are.
Wes Anderson, at age thirty, has
a very special kind of talent: He knows how to convey the simple joys and
interactions between people so well and with such richness. This kind of
sensibility is rare in movies. Leo McCarey, the director of
Martin Scorsese is, well, Martin Scorsese.
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies
Texas University of Texas Anderson
Anderson
Anderson Anderson
Anderson
All-Movie
Guide bio from Michael Hastings
The Rushmore Academy: The Films of Wes
Anderson a comprehensive collection
of thoughts and articles on all things Anderson
The
Suicide of Genius: Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson in Life and Art Will Lasky from 24LiesASecond, February 21,
2008
Matt Zoller Seitz The Substance of Style, a 5-part video
essay from Moving Image Source, May 17, 2012
Joseph Jon Lanthier The Royal Tenenbaums and The Magnificent
Ambersons: Wes, Welles and Literary Cinema, from The L-Magazine, May 17, 2012
Anderson, Wes They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Salon Interview by Chris Lee,
Film
Monthly Interview
National
Geographic Interview (2004) by
Michael Benoist,
Ranked 29th on The
Guardian's 2004
List of the World's 40 Best Directors
BOTTLE ROCKET
USA
Bottle Rocket Bruce Diones from the New Yorker
Wes Anderson's début
film, about three argumentative friends who get together for some petty
robberies, meanders pleasantly, like a road movie, with a seventies-style,
anything-goes offhandedness that whisks the audience through the rough spots.
But though a sweet spirit informs its characters' larcenous actions, the movie
never really sets off any fireworks. Owen C. Wilson (who co-wrote the script
with
Mike D'Angelo
My respect for Columbia Pictures is growing. First, they pick up Robert Rodriguez' insanely low-budget El Mariachi; now, they're distributing this rather unusual comedy, shot and acted with a devil-may-care attitude that's more or less the antithesis of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking. Bottle Rocket certainly looks professional, but its narrative rhythms are completely unpredictable; this is one of few studio pictures during which I generally had no idea on earth what might happen next. Much of the comedy derives from the editing as much as it does from the dialogue or performances (both of which are excellent, particularly co-writer Owen C. Wilson's work as thickheaded Dignan). The characters are a refreshing change from the Bill/Ted/Wayne/Garth stereotype -- endearingly childlike yet somehow still completely three-dimensional. And get this: no pop culture references! Hallelujah. Actual movie stars James Caan and Lumi Cavazos (Like Water for Chocolate) are given little to do, and the third act is a bit of a mess, but it's still an engaging, often hilarious ride.
eFilmCritic.com (Dennis Swennumson)
“Bottle Rocket”, Wes Anderson’s first movie, definitely has its flaws. It starts out well, loses its pacing through the middle and pulls through in the end. It stars both Luke and Owen Wilson in their debut roles, as two best friends trying to establish themselves as professional criminals. It’s interesting to see the beginnings of Anderson’s offbeat comedic style in this film, the deadest of dead-pan that really took shape and became more distinguishable with his next two films, “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.” It’s unfortunate that “Bottle Rocket” didn’t achieve the cult status that it’s worthy of, it’s a movie with mainstream-alienating qualities that fans of oddball cinema would love; it just never found enough of a following. Looking at the film eight years later, it’s a film that shows the promise of an immensely talented filmmaker.
The film opens with Anthony Adams (Luke Wilson) attempting an
escape at an asylum. He has the sheets knotted together and hanging out of the
window, his buddy Dignan signaling that it’s all clear. Dignan (Owen Wilson)
has detailed the escape, not realizing that the clinic is minimum security and
that people can pretty much leave when they want. The next scene shows the
first glimpse of Anderson’s humor, Dignan shows Anthony a notebook with a
75-year plan of their new life as criminals. Without any real direction,
Anthony figures he’ll take the shot.
The duo enlists the help of Bob (Robert Musgrave) as their wheelman, a position
he gets because he’s the only of the guys with his own car. They plan a series
of “practice” heists and robberies. This includes a few house break-ins, where
afterwards they give each other their compliments and constructive criticisms.
The payoff comes when we find out why they left certain valuables behind.
Another hilariously bland heist comes when they knock over a bookstore and Anthony
and Dignan prove themselves to be the two least intimidating robbers in the
country. Eventually they become involved with Dignan’s criminal idol Mr. Henry,
played by James Caan, and find themselves involved in a heist that they aren’t
qualified for.
Some of the funniest moments in the movie come with simple exchanges between
the characters. Though his fragility is likable, Anthony takes the third degree
from his little sister on a school playground. He explains to her that he was
sent away for exhaustion, “You’ve never worked a day in your life, how could
you be exhausted,” she responds. The fact that the only authority figure in his
life is in the fourth grade is funny, and truly pathetic. The script’s best
lines are reserved for Dignan, and for an actor who can sometimes be incredibly
unlikable, Owen Wilson proves himself to be a talented comedic actor. His best
scene comes when the last heist begins to unravel, his panic and outlandish
ideas beginning to blend together.
A hopeless romance is one of the trademark plot elements found in Anderson’s
films. There was the attraction that both Max Fischer and Herman Blume held for
Miss Cross in “Rushmore” and the devotion of Richie Tenenbaum to his adopted
sister Margot in 2001’s “The Royal Tenenbaums.” In both films these
relationships were filled with sadness, Max unable to comprehend the many
problems a large age difference posed and causing a divorce for Herman. The
relationship between Richie and Margot was a lot more serious, it included a
suicide attempt. But the relationships always seem to work out one way or
another in both films, the conditions may not be completely ideal but they are
clearly better off. In “Bottle Rocket” Anthony falls in love with a motel room
maid named Inez (Lumi Cavazos) who works at the motel the crew is hiding out in
while things blow over. Their end result is probably the most typical and
optimistic portrayal of love we’ll ever see in one of Wes Anderson’s films.
For most, it’s the relationship between Inez and Anthony that drags “Bottle
Rocket” into the mud. It’s the middle of the movie and the audience wants to
see more of what has come before, funny incidents of botched heists. The claims
that this entire segment drags the movie and proves that it would have worked
better as a short are legitimate. But in hindsight it’s just Anderson and
Wilson honing their narrative skills.
Kevin Smith’s “Clerks”, Robert Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi,” Richard Linklater’s “Slacker” and of course Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” were all landmark 90’s movies, and they all set high standards for each director’s second film. To a lesser extent, “Bottle Rocket” goes into that same category, it was another product of Sundance that went under the radar, but it showed great potential. Potential that Wes Anderson has more than fulfilled and hopefully continues with his upcoming “The Life Aquatic.”
not coming to a
theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
also reviewing RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
ToxicUniverse.com (Tony Pellum)
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York
Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
DVDBeaver.com
- Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
RUSHMORE
USA
His grades are so poor he risks being thrown out of school, but
Max Fischer (Schwartzman) isn't about to let a academic performance cramp his
career at Rushmore Academy. He's editor of the student paper, president of the
chess, astronomy, German and French clubs, captain of the fencing and debate
teams, and the creative force of the Max Fischer Players. Then there's his
unreciprocated passion for Miss Cross (Williams), the new first grade teacher.
With the help of his industrialist friend Mr Blume (Murray), Max reckons he can
win her heart by constructing an aquarium on the school baseball field. This is
a peculiar, poignant comedy, with an outstanding character turn from Murray,
but what are we to make of this character, Max, in his beret, braces and
blazer? He's part Ferris Bueller, part Jay Gatsby. His class affectations are
just that (dad is actually a barber), yet his romantic yearning edges towards
psychosis. Bemusing.
Rushmore may be the funny high school movie for
people who can't abide funny high school movies. Teenager Jason Schwartzman is
uncannily credible in the bespectacled persona of Max Fischer, an
underachieving overachiever whose priorities are purely extracurricular. Max is
attending the prestigious
Max's attempts to settle down and devote himself to his studies are to no avail. In a digression triggered by a note found scribbled in a library book, Max's attention is dominated by a pretty schoolteacher, Rosemary Cross. I was going to say that he was smitten by Miss Cross, but it's to Rushmore's great credit that teenage lust isn't expressed in valentine terms. Rather, it's skewed toward irrationality and backed by a killer soundtrack of rock tunes from the late 60s and early 70s (The Kinks, The Who, Cat Stevens). Even though it's hard not to identify with him, we're given enough information about the way Max operates (he becomes mentor to a younger boy as a way of getting close to the kid's voluptuous mother) to interpret his interest in Rosemary as slightly predatory and a little unbalanced.
Interest becomes obsession, and Max winds up doing great harm to what's left of his academic career by embarking on ever more complicated overtures toward Rosemary's good graces. Matters become more complicated when Herman Blume, a local steel magnate whose sons attend Rushmore befriends Max but then falls for Miss Cross himself. Max's campaign shifts from wooing Rosemary to making life miserable for Herman, with unpredictable results.
The first half of the film is quick-moving, with a rapid-fire editing style
and lots of laugh-out-loud moments careening out of left field. The second half
slows down a little bit, transforming into a more carefully observed
coming-of-age story punctuated by weird stylistic tricks. Director Wes
Anderson's style is refreshingly free of the easy hipness that characterizes
too much work from young filmmakers operating in Tarantino mode. What's more important,
it makes sense. When
All in all, Rushmore is a balancing act between understatement and overstatement, and sometimes I think its flights of fancy work to its detriment. I would have preferred, for instance, that Max's magnum opus be a little more clever and credible than the explosive Vietnam epic that he winds up presenting in the high school gymnasium. Much more effective than the over-the-top humor are the film's subtler moments, driven by dialogue and character. The relationship between Max and Miss Cross is both strange and sweet -- she's drawn to his edgy personality, but strives to short-circuit his gawky sexual interest in her. And Bill Murray's quietly comic performance, variously tinged with self-assurance, desperation and regret, is more than a stunt.
But what matters most is that Max Fischer really is depicted as an insufferable little prick. He's a stubborn geek with a tenuous grip on his life. At his worst, he's both stubborn and hurtful, alienating the people closest to him. For all that, it's impossible not to like him -- and there's the film's triumph. If you've ever looked back on your own adolescence and winced, even a little, you'll understand where Rushmore's coming from.
Wes Anderson has the kind of comic sensibility that keeps you watching just so you can see where he goes next. His debut feature BOTTLE ROCKET married bone-dry wit to good-natured character study in a tale of would-be thieves whose inbred suburban politesse limits the effectiveness of their crime spree. Though the humor was often absurd, Anderson and his co-writer Owen Wilson never sacrificed character for the sake of an easy joke. You got the feeling that they had a genuine affection for their creations, that they respected the grandiose lengths to which they took their dreams even as they chuckled at the results.
It's that same sensibility that makes RUSHMORE such a quirky delight -- it's a uniquely oddball comedy that's still about people. One of those people is Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman), a 15-year-old student at the prestigious Rushmore Academy whose several dozen extracurricular activities don't quite make up for his complete disinterest in academics. His latest extracurricular interest is Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), a first-grade teacher at Rushmore with whom Max is instantly smitten. In an attempt to win her affections, Max enlists the aid of his friend Herman Blume (Bill Murray), a millionaire industrialist, to build an aquarium at the school in Miss Cross's honor. Unfortunately, Max soon finds Blume turned from ally to competitor for the fair lady's heart, beginning a strange war between the two.
It would have been easy enough for
There's plenty immature about Herman Blume as well, imbued with an aura of pure defeat by Bill Murray. Unhappy with his wife and sadistic teenage twins, Blume longs for the simpler troubles of youth. His betrayal of Max to begin his own romance with Miss Cross could have made him a villain; instead, his behavior indicates a man returning to typically childish inconsiderate acts like stealing his best friend's girlfriend. Though the destructive salvos exchanged by Max and Blume are wonderfully funny, they're also ridiculous because of the players involved: a kid working desperately to be an adult, and an adult working desperately to be a kid.
With a foundation in those two marvelous characters, RUSHMORE
is free to let its comedy swoop from the sublime (Max appearing in the darkened
back seat of Blume's car like a double-crossed mafioso, cigarette glowing
ominously) to the ridiculous (Max's stage re-creation of
There's no other movie that plays like Rushmore does. I am most drawn to the movie because of its singular tone. It could be described as "playful melancholy"--outwardly funny and absurd, but sad and bittersweet underneath, with a pulse of hope beating more insistently as it concludes. This tone is conveyed in every facet of the film: the acting, the direction (by which I mean the montage and frame composition), the screenplay, cinematography, and music. It's a tone that recreates the contrary feelings of adolescence: teetering invincibility, boundless optimism and ambition dogged by defeat, and the swoon of discovering yourself in unguarded moments. The film celebrates being sadder but wiser, the hallmark of coming of age.
Rushmore's protagonist, Max Fischer, is a child who thinks he's an adult. In the course of the film, he's expelled from the womb of his surrogate mother, his school Rushmore, and weans himself of the narcissism that accompanies a teenage know-it-all. Max doesn't have a real mother; his mother is Rushmore, and he clings to her because the school provides him with an identity. Coming-of-age is the process of obtaining a discrete identity not wedded to one's parents, peers, or school. Max's ties to his school are exceptionally strong. He's involved in every extracurricular club imaginable (my favorite is the Bombardment Society), and when asked what his "secret" is, he replies, "I think you just gotta find something you love to do, and then do it for the rest of your life. For me, it's going to Rushmore." Excepting the last line, this is the contention of the entire film--that there are things in life worth having a passion for, and the meaning we derive from life is a product of these passions. Writers Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson's genius was to level the playing field for Max. Instead of pitting Max the teenager against a syndicate of stodgy adults, the universe of Rushmore is a world where the young and old are on equal footing. Though at times this strains reality, it's no less real than the countless films we've seen where generational solidarity is accepted as the norm, and characters are assumed to think a certain way because they were born in a certain year. Max is thus able to befriend Rushmore alum Herman Blume (played gracefully by Bill Murray in a performance that is worthy of Buster Keaton), conduct pow-wows with the school's dean, and attempt to romance 1st-grade teacher Miss Cross (Olivia Williams). It is Miss Cross, however, who balks at the evaporated distance between child and adult. Or, I should more accurately say, it is Miss Cross who perceives that a fundamental distance still exists. She rightly sees Herman and Max as the same--little children in adult disguises. It's only when Max finally discovers himself in a moment of unguarded revelation that he's able to break free from his downward spiral and help himself and his friend Herman.
That moment of revelation is my favorite scene in the movie. It occurs after a series of increasingly pathetic attempts by Max to win back Miss Cross. Max has taken a first step toward growing up by reconciling with his protégé Dirk, and is outside flying a kite with him. Suddenly, a buzzing remote-control airplane interrupts his flying, and Max becomes aware of another person sharing the airspace. It is the Korean girl Margaret Yang (a more adorable character has never existed), who has been following Max like a puppy dog since he came to her school. She expresses her exasperation with Max's refusal to acknowledge her existence, and Max is suddenly struck with guilt and recognition of his immaturity. In a moment that never fails to catch my throat, Max asks Dirk to take dictation, "Candidates for the Kite Flying club...Margaret Yang."
Max is out of his slump, but he's not the old Max. He's a restitutive person
who finds a passion in helping others as much as himself. He makes amends with
the school bully by offering him a role in his new play (it turns out the bully
had always wanted to be in Max's plays). More significantly, he gives up the
war over Miss Cross, enabling Herman and her to start anew. This is symbolized
in the choice of Max's final play, a Vietnam-set production called "Heaven
and Hell." Herman's world-weariness is attributed partly to having been
"in the shit" in
That song is just one of many beautifully employed songs in the film. As The Faces' chorus of "I wish that I knew what I know now, when I was younger" sounds over the final scenes, it imparts the playfully melancholic tone I described earlier. The soundtrack consists largely of British Invasion bands from the late 60s and early 70s. The music is youthful--at times angrily arrogant, and other times idealistic and sweet--but because it comes from an older generation it reinforces the meshing of teen and adult onscreen. It's the words from the adult generation's teen years commenting wryly on the all-too-familiar events before them. As the movie's tone darkens and then lifts, so does the music. Max's turnaround is accompanied by John Lennon's lovely "Oh, Yoko," a song whose evocation of passion for a subject that gives you life-sustaining force is, in a nutshell, what makes Rushmore so great.
-David
Kehr Criterion essay
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Rushmore (1998) Richard Kelly synopsis and review from Sight and Sound, September 1999
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Bill Murray: In Cold Blood Richard Kelly from Sight and Sound, August 1999
Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
RUSHMORE Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Nitrate Online Elias Savada
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Rushmore Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
AboutFilm a less enthused Carlo Cavagna
Philadelphia City Paper Cynthia Fuchs
Rushmore zunguzungu, January 24, 2008
not coming to a
theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
also reviewing BOTTLE ROCKET and THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New
York Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS
Wittier, a lot more enjoyable and
infinitely richer than the year's major Oscar contenders, this is clearly a
blood brother to
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Perhaps the most effectively
realized American comedy of the '90s, 1998's Rushmore catapulted
director Wes Anderson to the forefront of what was briefly known as the
"new sincerity" movement, along with partner Owen Wilson and fellow
wunderkind Paul Thomas Anderson. Each draws heavily on the French New Wave and
the work of directors like Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, while eschewing
ironic distance and treating their outsider protagonists with affection and
warmth. P.T. Anderson followed his magnificent 1997 breakthrough Boogie
Nights with 1999's Magnolia, a star-studded, messy, overreaching,
ultimately compelling ensemble drama in the vein of ambitious masterpieces like
Hannah And Her Sisters and Short Cuts. Two years later, Wes
Anderson returns with his own star-studded, messy, overreaching, ultimately
compelling ensemble comedy-drama, The Royal Tenenbaums, a film that
resembles Magnolia nearly as much as it does Rushmore. Just as Magnolia
seemed designed for people who loved Boogie Nights but somehow felt that
it wasn't long or ambitious enough, Tenenbaums is the work of an artist
who appreciates his own stylistic voice even more than his most ardent fans
could. Painting on a huge, delicately wrought canvas, the film casts a
wonderful Gene Hackman as the patriarch of a large, dysfunctional clan of
eccentric geniuses bearing a resemblance to J.D. Salinger's Glass family, right
down to its Irish-Jewish heritage. Broke and tumbling rapidly down the social
ladder, Hackman attempts to reconcile with his estranged family, in the process
running roughshod over the delicate egos of his three grown children: tormented
former tennis star Luke Wilson, resentful business maven and widowed father Ben
Stiller, and sullen, secretive Gwyneth Paltrow. Hackman's separated wife Anjelica
Huston, meanwhile, attempts to marry tweedy business partner Danny Glover over
Hackman's unsubtle objections, while Paltrow cheats on her Oliver Sacks-like
husband (Bill Murray) with sweetly drug-addled Western writer Owen Wilson, much
to the chagrin of love-struck Luke Wilson. Like Rushmore, The Royal
Tenenbaums is often hysterically funny, but with a prominent undercurrent
of death, sadness, and loss. Ultimately, Anderson seems intent on making his
latest film not just good or even great, but a flat-out, career-defining
masterpiece. If he and Wilson love their actors, characters, and ideas too much
to reign themselves in, they at least overreach in the service of one of the
year's warmest, funniest films.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
In his first three films -- 'Bottle
Rocket,' 'Rushmore,' and now 'The Royal Tenenbaums' -- Wes Anderson has created
a distinct and consistent world. The lackadaisical suburban thieves of 'Bottle
Rocket' might've gone to Rushmore Academy as kids, and Max Fischer as a
pre-pubescent playwright might've put his work in competition with the equally
precocious Margot Tenenbaum's plays.
There's a buzz of strangeness about
Anderson's world; in its way, it's as alien to us -- and as precisely rendered
-- as the Middle-earth of The Fellowship of the Ring. This world has its
own look and sound, with morosely defiant oldies on the soundtrack underlining
the characters' malaise or passion.
Anderson loves overachievers and underachievers -- particularly people who
manage to be both at once -- and he's got three of them here: the
aforementioned Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow), the adopted daughter of the clan, who
peaked early as a playwright and now sulks in her tub for hours; Chas Tenenbaum
(Ben Stiller), a prodigious financial whiz overprotective of his two sons since
the death of his wife; and Richie Tenenbaum (Luke Wilson), a former tennis
champ who had a meltdown on the court and thinks he's in love with Margot, but
that's okay, since "we're not related by blood." Slippery ethics, but
since patriarch Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) took every opportunity to remind
everyone of Margot's adopted status when introducing her, who can blame Richie?
Royal, the sort of affable bastard right up Hackman's alley, has been estranged
from his wife Etheline (Anjelica Huston) and children for years; one day he
slinks back into the picture with the news that he's dying. Giving himself six
weeks to put things right between himself and his kids, Royal sets up a
hospital room in his former house, followed in rapid succession by Chas,
Richie, and Margot, who all move back into their old bedrooms, confronted daily
with the surroundings of their childhood greatness. Hanging around for good
measure is Richie's friend Eli Cash (Owen Wilson, who for the third time
cowrote the script with Anderson), who "always wanted to be a Tenenbaum"
but has settled for being a drug-addled novelist; he zones out during a TV
interview, and he defends the failure of his first book with the standard
artist's line that it was too archaic for most people to understand.
Tenenbaums unfolds like a storybook tale, but this is Anderson's most
loosely plotted endeavor yet. Like Rushmore, it's not so much about its
story as about the moods and moments the story makes possible. Here, for
instance, is Margot's rumpled neurologist husband Raleigh St. Clair (Bill
Murray, swathed in a foam of beard) tapping sadly on a window to get her
attention. Or family financial advisor Henry Sherman (Danny Glover) moving in
tentatively to kiss Etheline, while she grins girlishly in anticipation,
unearthing old feelings of desire and being desired just as she'd unearthed a
human skeleton a few minutes before. Or a confrontation between Chas and Royal
in a closet, surrounded by shelves weighed down with ancient board games,
underlining the childishness of both men. Or the way all printed material we
see in the movie is in the same blocky all-caps Futura font used for the title
on the poster art, even the "walk/don't walk" signs and the logos on
hospital gowns -- in this universe text is purely utilitarian, and the book
covers we see are usually good for a laugh. Or the predictably eclectic
soundtrack, wherein the Velvet Underground and the Ramones rub elbows with Mark
Mothersbaugh's otherworldly bells and organs and the beautifully apt use of
"Christmas Time Is Here" from A Charlie Brown Christmas (I
have to love a director so obsessed with Peanuts that he made Max
Fischer's dad a barber, just like Charlie Brown's dad). Or Robert Yeoman's
pristine, rigidly symmetrical widescreen compositions, which give the
characters ample space to mope in solitude -- vast dead air on either side of
them, and vertically squashed; the horizontal proscenium of the movie becomes
an oppressive character in itself.
Sound like a downer? Not really -- or not if you're attuned to Anderson's
method of keeping heartbreak at a slight remove. For him, the small moment
takes care of the large emotions, and we project the rest. Ben Stiller gives a
rather antagonistic performance with the tiniest bits of shading (his reading
of a key line near the end brings his character nicely into focus); Gwyneth
Paltrow stares at everything as if from beyond the grave, a blonde goth
princess who never looks so pained as when she can't help smiling at something.
The movie doesn't overflow with false personality; character is in the design,
like the lonely-looking yellow tent in the middle of a vast room. Richie sleeps
in the tent, listening to the Rolling Stones on the same breed of chunky gray
record player we all remember from grade school. Now and then a "dalmatian
mouse" -- Chas's invention -- scampers into the frame, as if blotted with
memories, or symbolic of memories blotted out. Why, we might ask, did
Royal emphasize Margot's adopted status at every opportunity? Why was he
ejected from his home (the movie never says)? Is Richie's affection for Margot
a case of like-father-like-son? Underneath the film's ornate but terse facade
might be a churning tangle of backstories barely hinted at.
Gene Hackman presides over all this like a dissipated King Lear, only he
doesn't demand expressions of love from his three children; he'll make do with
expressions of non-hatred. The Royal Tenenbaums extends or plays with
themes explored in Rushmore: in both, a father looks quizzically at
offspring he can't imagine he could have sired, and a protagonist is an
immature liar and often dislikable, but somehow, despite himself, lovable. Tenenbaums
can also be considered a loose sequel to Rushmore, in that the three
past-their-prime wunderkinder could be Max Fischer fifteen years on.
If you didn't float happily in the
world of 'Rushmore,' this movie's mix of quirky humor and deadpan anguish won't
do it for you (I noted a number of walkouts at the screening I attended).
Anderson specializes in gentle bipolar comedy-tragedies: 'Tenenbaums' may be the
most depressive movie ever to be painted in shades of red, yellow, and pink.
-Kent
Jones Criterion essay
Senses of Cinema (Maximilian Le Cain)
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
James
Berardinelli's ReelViews
Nitrate Online [Cynthia
Fuchs]
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Family Album Jonathan Romney for Sight and Sound, March 2002
click here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
For an interview with Wes Anderson click
here
For an interview with Owen Wilson click
here
The Royal
Tenenbaums (Criterion Collection)
Raphael Pour-Hashemi from DVD Times
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)
Images Movie
Journal David Gurevich
About.com: The
Royal Tenenbaums Ivana Redwine
Popkorn Junkie:
The Royal Tenenbaums Billy Ray
TheWorldJournal.com:
The Royal Tenenbaums Giancarlo De
Lisi
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
PopMatters Lucas Hilderbran
Nitrate Online [Gregory
Avery]
ToxicUniverse.com (Jody Beth Rosen)
Film Journal International (Erica Abeel)
hybridmagazine.com Jennifer Prestigiacomo
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
not coming to a
theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
also reviewing BOTTLE ROCKET and RUSHMORE
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU B- 80
USA
Off-beat, and somewhat disappointing, emotionally empty story of the life of Zissou, a very down-beat and weary Bill Murray, who plays an aging, eccentric filmmaker/oceanographer whose best years are behind him, who drinks and smokes weed, hits on his female crew members, breaks every known rule, and is in nearly every conceivable way a fairly despicable human being. However, in this film, he also acts as a gun-toting superhero in a wetsuit who nearly single-handedly saves his crew against pirates. After losing his lifelong traveling companion to a giant shark, the captain sets out to find and destroy that shark, no matter the costs. Along the way, we discover a bland thirty-year old who may be his son (Owen Wilson), a German deck hand who worships Zissou like a wannabe son (William Dafoe), a pregnant ship reporter who stumbles into the story (Cate Blanchett), the real brains behind the operation and the woman with all the balls (Angelica Huston), her former husband and Team Zissou's comic nemesis (Jeff Goldblum), a topless page girl who is the first to lead a mutiny (Robyn Cohen), free interns from the University of Northern Alaska, a pair of wired dolphin scouts that have never discovered anything, and a cast of slackers and derelicts who become his crew on this weird journey. While the colorful underwater sequences were gorgeously inventive, where the menacing shark becomes a glowfish, there was too little of that. Instead, the engine behind this film was the interweaving music of David Bowie, sung in Portuguese by one of the shiphands, who was always sitting strumming a guitar when something significant happened, singing a different David Bowie song each time, such as “Ground Control to Major Tom” in another language which was very, very funny. Overall, however, the film was too disjointed and emotionally aloof to work.
The most peculiar
entry, or perhaps just the laziest, in David Thomson’s ‘New Biographical Dictionary
of Film’ is for Wes Anderson, and reads in full: ‘Watch this space. What does
that mean? That he might be something one day.’
Suffused with lush yet faded primary colours like a 30-year-old Kodak snap and
spiced with Henry Selick’s stop-motion animations and a starry (if often idle)
cast of supporting players, ‘The Life Aquatic’ is a beautifully appointed but
airless dollhouse-by-the-sea, populated by wistful figurines in their matching
little red caps and Team Zissou Adidas, and scored to Seu Jorge’s deckside
acoustic renditions of Bowie songs in Portuguese. The movie pokes along in a
manner at once listless and affable, like a series of semi-improvised outtakes
that didn’t quite gel. And yet the director magically conjures emotional
dividends in the film’s invigorating last moments, which wordlessly celebrate
an underrated and truly Andersonian virtue: solidarity.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Aging never quite suits the
characters in the comedies of Wes Anderson, the reigning auteur of arrested
development: They're either too precocious for youth, like Jason Schwartzman in
Rushmore, or too old for their youthful precociousness, like the
Tenenbaum children in The Royal Tenenbaums. And once they're past middle
age, like Gene Hackman in Tenenbaums or Bill Murray in Rushmore
and the new The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, life's disappointments
have grown so numerous and profound that they don't even bother to shave
anymore. With The Life Aquatic, a mopey meta-comedy about growing old
and making movies, the 35-year-old Anderson suggests the melancholia of
directors twice his age, though he's a mere four films into a bright and
promising career. There's always been an undercurrent of sadness in Anderson's
work, but never has it been more pronounced, and never has it served as such a
heavy anchor to the delicate, whimsical hijinks on the surface. Like its weary
hero, the film sometimes seems sapped of energy, even defeated, in spite of
moments as vibrant and magical as any movie this year.
Still the boy with the snappiest
model train set on the block, Anderson casts Murray as a long-in-the-tooth
Jacques Cousteau surrogate who still manages his devoted crew on an antiquated
ship that looks like a scrupulously designed Barbie Dream House. Less devoted
to science than to show, Murray and the rest of Team Zissou—including his wife
Anjelica Huston, German deckmate Willem Dafoe, bond-company stooge Bud Cort,
free interns from the University Of Northern Alaska, and a guy who sings David
Bowie tunes in Portuguese, among others—have fallen on hard times, as audiences
for their documentaries have dwindled. After a "jaguar shark" kills
his right-hand man on an expedition, Murray and his men take to the seas in
search of revenge, though financiers balk at the mission. The production gets
kick-started when Owen Wilson, who may or may not be Murray's grown son, offers
his inheritance money, but their adventures meet many obstacles, all noted in
painful detail by accompanying journalist Cate Blanchett.
With its story about a filmmaker nearing the end of his creative life, plagued by middling reviews, wary backers, and the threat of mutiny from the crew, The Life Aquatic seems odd coming from the most acclaimed young comedic director of his generation. But Anderson has a strong emo streak, which surfaces in Murray's broken relationships—with his wife, who was once married to his arch-nemesis (Jeff Goldblum); with his would-be son, whom he never knew; with Dafoe, who worships him like a spurned lapdog; and with Blanchett, who resists his tired advances. For a movie so consumed by colorful and frivolous touches, The Life Aquatic breathes a heavy sigh of resignation, though the beautiful ending goes a long way toward justifying all that navel-gazing. Mostly, the film delights with its scrupulous minor details: The pastel animated sea life, the onboard dolphin "scouts" that have never lived up to their billing, and the hilariously second-rate action sequences, which look like they were staged by Rushmore's Max Fischer Players. Even when caught in a rut, Anderson's obsessive vision still yields many exhilarating surprises.
eFilmCritic.com (Rob Gonsalves)
Wes Anderson creates a highly
stylized and peculiar world, which either works for you or it doesn't. It works
for me beautifully, and 'The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou' deserves to take
its place with 'Bottle Rocket' (1996), 'Rushmore' (1998), and 'The Royal
Tenenbaums' (2001) as a half-jocular, half-melancholy portrait of dreamers and
losers.
As Anderson's career has grown
and he's been allowed more money to play with, his onscreen universe has gotten
more lovingly, obsessively detailed; his movies seem to unfold in some
alternate universe where Futura Bold is the dominant font and an exotic,
nonexistent fish like the "rhinestone bluefin" is so taken for
granted by the characters it's used as bait.
By now, a Wes Anderson movie without Bill Murray (who has graced Anderson
Owen Wilson turns up as Ned, a Kentucky Murray
As always, Anderson
The problem, as with Wes Anderson's other films, is how to sell it to the
masses (especially The Life Aquatic, which at $50 million is Anderson Murray Murray Anderson
'The Life Aquatic' is an odd,
entrancing creature that of course got overlooked at the crowded holiday
multiplex and at awards ceremonies, but its appeal, I think, will be more
timeless than that.
The Life
Fascistic David Nordstrom from the
High Hat
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Lesser Spotted Fish And Other Stories... Kevin Conroy Scott speaks with the director
for Sight and Sound, March 2005
Slant Magazine
[Jeremiah Kipp]
The Life Aquatic might not be Wes Anderson's best film. But it
is his greatest. Todd Van
der Werff from Vox, March 26, 2017
Pirates, Bowie, and
Bill Murray Mike D’Angelo from Esquire
The Life Aquatic
with Steve Zissou Michael Sicinski
from the Academic Hack
The
Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Neil
Young from Jigsaw Lounge
ToxicUniverse.com (Lee Chase IV)
indieWIRE
[Michael Koresky] with responses
from Karen Wilson and Michael Joshua Rowin
DVD Times Matt Day
Images Journal Gary Johnson
The Life
Aquatic Henry Sheehan
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Milk
Plus: A Discussion of Film
phyrephox
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
The Village Voice
[Michael Atkinson]
filmcritic.com (Chris Barsanti)
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Erasing Clouds Dave Heaton
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally)
not coming to a theater near
you [Rumsey Taylor]
Guardian
Article (2005) Suzie Mackenzie from
the Guardian
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THE DARJEELING LIMITED
By Edward
Crouse The
“Look at these assholes,” a
dissolute industrialist murmurs about some village children crossing a raging
river in India
The assholes of the movie, sort
of, are the three Whitman brothers—CEO Francis, Peter, and writer Jack (Owen
Wilson, Adrian Brody, and Jason Schwartzman)—who haven’t spoken in the year
since their father’s funeral. These block(ed)heads spend most of the movie (the
second part anyway) squirming in ever-mouldier familial compartments.
Commencing a self-declared “spiritual journey” with a round robin of
over-the-counter downers, each makes a stab at getting out of his own mind. The
dissociation gives Anderson
The Darjeeling Limited is the sum of its saddened splits, be they
familial, romantic, filmic. If the gods of commerce don’t force a change, the
movie will stay broken up into two parts, the first a 13-minute prologue in France Venice
On the raw side of the cleft, the
short movement serves up a bad reunion with a sort-of-ex-lover (Natalie
Portman), tracing the fetishes of one brother (Schwartzman) in his hotel cell
hell and keeping a viewer on their toes, wondering, what if anything will
travel with this young recluse to Darjeeling Anderson Paris
On the feature side of the split
is a fairly original emotional conception, buoyed by dusty music. (The
Darjeeling Limited starts with a blast of archival
tabla-sitar—mood-whirring stuff from filmmakers who have really nothing more to
do with Anderson’s tactics— Satayjit Ray and James Ivory—and yielding to The
Kinks, a sensitive band borne in deranged, sometimes shrill, brotherly
hate-love. Let someone else finish that term paper on musical tropes in Anderson Tibet
Still reeling from the (barely
mentioned) scars of their upbringing and a near-fatal crash, the eldest
imagines that the other two need an injection of wonder, awe and ooga-booga.
Having a lost or absent parent (the motif of the last four Anderson Darjeeling
Darjeeling Anderson Wilson Anderson
All in all, the movie presents a
pretty strange cobbling, full of cracked ideas: failing at mourning, planning
to have a plan, waiting to experience an experience. At one point,
Huston—eyelinered, fetchingly shorn, and the only real adult in the movie—nails
the impossibility of their journey, which when it’s all said and done is a stab
at talking to the past. “You talking to me?” she says, tougher than Travis
Bickle. No, they’re talking to the ex-her—they might as well try ringing up
their late father. Clapping his head between grandiosity and intimacy, Anderson India
The
Darjeeling Limited Michael Sicinski
from the Academic Hack
FANTASTIC MR. FOX B 87
USA Great Britain
(87 mi) 2009
Boggis and Bunce and Bean
One fat, one short, one lean
These horrible crooks
So different in looks
Were none the less equally mean.
A warm and fuzzy
version of a Roald Dahl children’s story featuring cute, clever, irreverent
humor, witty dialogue, but not really a fully developed story, altered from the
book somewhat by Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach, who rearrange the time
periods of the events and add a slightly more complex family structure with
dialogue that reeks of nonchalance, remaining humorously understated
throughout. George Clooney literally
gets to preen like a peacock as the smart aleck Mr. Fox who thinks he has to
live up to his reputation as being cleverer than the rest. Part
of the appeal, of course, is his recklessness and magnetic charm, with a
whimsical, yet self-conscious, heavy-on-the-existentialist slant. Tired of living in a hole, which makes
him feel poor, Mr. Fox opts for a penthouse suite in the most dangerous
neighborhood for his species, a mammoth tree overlooking the immense farms of
three of the meanest farmers in the territory, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean. While in the throes of early love, Mr. and
Mrs. Fox used to go on stealth missions together stealing food right out from
under the farmer’s eyes, and later in life he sneaks out of the house with the
aid of a friend, brilliantly realized with the animals outsmarting all the
latest surveillance security equipment, sliding up and over any obstacle in
their path while remaining undetected.
These missions are among the most delightful sequences in the film, as
the cunning deviousness on display is simply hilarious. Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep), however, tries to
get him to change his pattern of stealing birds and chickens from farmers, as it’s
likely to get him killed one day. Sure
enough, on one eventful night, he gets his tail shot off, a permanent reminder
of the serious consequences in his line of work. But his reputation for success has left the
farmer’s fuming, so they set out with their shotguns to keep him in their sights,
which causes Mr. Fox to burrow deeper under the ground to stay out of harm’s
way. When the farmers bring in
excavation equipment to demolish what used to be their home, this is the last
straw, as the farmers lay siege to the hole’s opening, preventing the Fox
family and their neighbors from obtaining food.
In the book, this is
when they tunnel into each of the three farms and develop a pipeline of food
while living like kings underground while the frustrated farmers sit around
like ice fishermen for some resemblance of life from below. In the movie version, it gets more dastardly,
as the farmers kidnap and cage one of the nephews of Mr. Fox believing it is
his own son, demanding Mr. Fox himself in a trade. Initially thinking this is his only choice,
to fess up and stop hurting his friends and family by his own clever but
sometimes miscalculating manner, Mr. Fox instead develops another master plan
sending everyone into action like a war maneuver, where they burrow their way
into a neighboring department store where they have all the food and supplies
they could ever dream of. But they still
have to rescue the kidnapped fox, which takes a few minor miracles, but this is
animated, so you can make anything you want happen. After a series of action sequences showing
family members one by one willing to risk their lives for the kid fox, it’s
left for Mr. Fox to assume his responsibilities in the ultimate showdown
against the farmer’s infamous protector rat.
Cue the Sergio Leone music.
Always amusing, with a good ear for character and dialogue, it’s mostly
about making fools of the nasty farmers while the animal kingdom delights in
outfoxing them and having a wonderful time.
Clooney especially relishes his role, while Willem Defoe, fresh off his
stint in the deliriously downbeat ANTICHRIST (2009), is terrific as the lazily
psychotic rat, who in a wicked Southern drawl speaks a variation of derogatory
Beat ghetto slang. While it’s delightful
and pleasant throughout, with chapter headings that grace the screen or clever
little details like uttering the word cuss each time profanity should be
spoken, it’s reminiscent of some of the Wallace and Gromit sagas due to the
simplicity of the animation and the wit on display. It’s a rather slight work, however, not
nearly in the same league as an earlier animated release CORALINE (2009), both
using the same old fashioned, stop-motion animation, but while upbeat and
cheerful, there’s nothing particularly lasting about the experience other than
having a good time while you’re watching.
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3.5/4]
Wes Anderson should have made an animated film a long time ago. As his live-action films grow more interior and decorated and precious, it only makes sense to do away with flesh altogether. The leap turns out to be a good one as Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach adapt Roald Dahl's 1970 book, but with a generous helping of Anderson's quirky wit and a few other personal touches. George Clooney provides the voice of Mr. Fox, who longs to be a thief but writes a newspaper column to satisfy his wife (voiced by Meryl Streep). They have a peculiar son, Ash (voiced by Jason Schwartzman), whose displacement in the world is only magnified by the arrival of cousin Kristofferson (voiced by Wes's brother Eric Anderson), a soft-spoken, confident, natural athlete. Mr. Fox decides to make one more big haul before quitting stealing for good; he is going to hit the three nearby farms owned by three wealthy and nasty farmers, Boggis (voiced by Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (voiced by Hugo Guinness) and Bean (voiced by Michael Gambon). Unfortunately, in doing so, he starts a war with the farmers, endangering his own life as well as those of his family and friends (and his tail). Anderson employs traditional stop-motion animation, combined with his trademark, gorgeously detailed, wide, static shots, and though the effect isn't groundbreaking, it's refreshingly charming and funny instead (the technique doesn't call attention to itself, but rather serves the story). Best of all is the unique, offbeat language spoken by all the characters, each savoring the rhythm of their words. But no one savors more than Clooney, who really sinks his teeth into his role. As with all of Dahl's work, this one can get pretty dark, and parents should take children at their own risk. Bill Murray co-stars as a Badger lawyer, Willem Dafoe plays a guard rat, and Owen Wilson is the coach of a ridiculously complicated fox sport.
Time
Out New York (Keith Uhlich) review [3/6]
Wes Anderson’s stop-motion-animated Roald Dahl adaptation is one for the auteurist in us all: Newspaper-columnist-cum-chicken-stealer Mr. Fox (Clooney) dresses like his director, drives his family bonkers like Royal Tenenbaum and even has a Steve Zissou–esque epiphany courtesy of a “Black Power!” fist-raising wolf. The overall sensation is of an artist repeating himself, scaling down his obsessions to empty-vessel miniature—at last, Anderson has made a film that is nothing but a succession of autumn-gold shoebox dioramas.
It’s unfortunate that the result is so unaffecting, especially in light of all the things the director does right. There’s plenty here to thrill animation buffs, and Anderson’s most inspired choice was to record the majority of the actors in scene-appropriate locations (barns, fields, basements), which minimizes the studio-miked disconnect between voices and characters that hampers a good many animated films. Coupled with the often caressingly extreme close-ups of these singular puppet creations—it’s wonderful how the animals’ fur quivers slightly in each frame—there’s never any doubt that we’re in the presence of a precisely conceived world.
And that’s the problem. There’s usually a hand-of-God meticulousness to Anderson’s work, but something inexplicably soulful almost always manages to intrude. It’s this aspect that elevates the best of his films, like the section in his underrated India picture, The Darjeeling Limited, in which the brothers stumble upon a drowning village boy and are forced to deal with something horribly outside their comfort zone. There’s no such quality in Fantastic Mr. Fox, which is all hermetically hollow gestures and poses. “That’s what I do,” says Mr. F. when asked about his trademark whistle-and-tooth-clicking salute. All Anderson does is slavishly further the brand.
Movie review: After the
fox! The 'Fantastic Mr. Fox'
Lindsay Bryant from The Palo Alto
Daily News
It dabbles in delight, wrangles the retched, tackles both life and death, and has a whack at purpose and morality. Roald Dahl's original 18-chapter story was start-to-finish spot-on, and so is director Wes Anderson's wickedly wise film adaptation of "Fantastic Mr. Fox." Anderson keeps Dahl's voice in its best form — that loveable, dry British humor — as he snuggles into a new niche.
The niche — Pixar, who? Imax 3-D, what? — is "text-mation." You heard it here first; texture plus stop-motion animation is where Wes Anderson needs to stay. And the creative team behind it needs to crank out more film magic and as soon as possible. Visually, "Fantastic Mr. Fox" is the nearest to real-life as animation can get, from the cotton-ball clouds of dust to the plastic, greasy points of fox hair moving in the breeze, to fabrics of corduroy, polyester, ribbed-cotton and felt.
It's quite brilliant visually; but not to be outdone by what you see is what you hear in the hour-and-a-half movie. A cast of seasoned actors bring to life the Barbie-sized creatures, including George Clooney as Mr. Fox, Meryl Streep as Mrs. Fox, Bill Murray as Mr. Fox's lawyer Badger and Willem Dafoe as nemesis Rat. Even Anderson sneaks in, as Weasel.
Anderson did well-enough with "Darjeeling Limited" and "The Royal Tennenbaums," but produces his best piece of work with "Fox." The script keeps the nuances of Dahl — droll, sharp and flip — and adds in Anderson's cheeky humor on usually very serious subjects, like death and failure.
Mr. Fox and Mrs. Fox are just plugging along, raising undersized preteen Ash (voice of Jason Schwartzman), who wants only be known as an "athlete." His terry-cloth cape and wild attempts at saving the day provide the cutest and most intelligent moments in the movie that surrounds Mr. Fox's attempt to outsmart the town's three freakish and foul farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean. The angry farmers are fed up with Mr. Fox stealing their chickens, geese and hard cider, and plot to dig the Fox family out of their home. Mr. Fox has a plot of his own, which lends itself to discussions, both saucy and not, about how every creature fits into this life.
"Why a fox?" Mr. Fox asks his slightly dense and dizzy friend Kylie, the opossum (voice of Wally Wolodarsky), "Why not a horse, or a beetle, or a bald eagle? I'm saying this more as, like, existentialism, you know? Who am I?"
"I don't know what you're talking about, but it sounds illegal," Kylie replies.
And so goes the story, right in line with Dahl's teachings on life — always truthful and with the theme that children have a unique understanding of the world, one that adults tend to forget as they grow older.
Life's an adventure. And for Anderson's take on Dahl, it's a fantastic adventure.
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev
Sandhu
It doesn’t seem so long ago that Wes Anderson was widely touted as one of the brightest and most distinctive of a generation of new American film makers that also included Spike Jonze, Alexander Payne and David O. Russell. The sob-streaked humour and super-stylised visuals of movies such as Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums were seen as catnip for a younger generation of cinephiles.
However, his most recent works, The Life Aquatic and The Darjeeling Limited, showed worrying signs of fatigue: charm had given way to arch whimsy; the inventiveness of old had curdled into mannerism and melancholia.
Only the most optimistic of souls or the most hardcore Anderson fanboy could have held out much hope when it was announced he was planning to put Roald Dahl’s 1970 novel Fantastic Mr Fox on the screen. An American (even one renowned for his Anglophile tendencies) getting his manicured nails on such a beloved English book (even though Dahl was born in Wales to Norwegian parents)? The idea was perplexing.
So, even bearing in mind the stop-motion sequences in The Life Aquatic, was the news that the film was going to be a full-length animation. Then there were stories coming from the set that the animators were unhappy with Anderson communicating with them by email. The film had all the makings of a train wreck.
It’s a huge surprise, then, but a very pleasing one, to be able to announce that Anderson’s adaptation is not just a return to form, but a bold and for the most part highly successful leap into relatively uncharted waters. He’s retained enough core elements of the original story not to disappoint Dahl-lovers, but fused and intermixed them with his trademark attention to colour, fashion and moodscapes in a manner that in no ways feels like a compromise, but rather a happy and seamless marriage of artistic outlooks.
When, at the end of the film, its hero leaps up victoriously from his subterranean incarceration, rescuing victory from the jaws of defeat, it could almost be Anderson himself rescuing, at least for now, what seemed like his rapidly tanking career.
Mr Fox, a suave and elegantly decked-out creature (voiced, in a cute piece of casting, by George Clooney), used to be a chicken-stealing rapscallion, a furry pirate of private farmland. He used to pride himself on his ability to outwit the estate-owners whose holdings he trespassed and wrecked.
After a decade of best-behaviour and leading a quiet family life with his wife (Meryl Streep), their son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) and his seemingly-permanent house-guest nephew Kristofferson (Eric Anderson), he finds himself drawn to his old poultry-thieving ways. As a result, he has three malicious farmers — Boggis, Bunce and the formidable Bean (the latter voiced by Michael Gambon) — dead-set on smoking him out of his lair and wiping him out.
The film, which I fully expect Taliban film critics to interpret as a veiled critique of Western efforts to track down and exterminate enemy insurgents, works as a series of siege narratives with Anderson, his screenwriting partner Noah (The Squid and the Whale) Baumbach, and a team of art modellers coming up with a series of exquisitely realised tunnels, burrows and catacombs through which the foxes retreat and circulate as they try to escape all the machines and explosives the 3Bs can throw at them.
One gorgeous shot, set in the waterfall of a flint mine, in which slivers of dappled and multiply refracted light fall on Mr Fox’s face, deserves to be printed and displayed at the National Portrait Gallery.
The film is full of beauty, bathing the action in attractive oranges, browns and yellows that recall the colour scheme in The Darjeeling Limited but minus its finicky, fastidious, look-at-me tiresomeness. And the clothes - cord jackets, knitwear, balaclavas for robbing warehouses in — all of them worn by gamine, borderline heroin-chic figures, deserve to have a fashion range constructed around them. Mr Fox is so dashing that he’s liable to start a craze for strap-on tails.
The stop-motion animation is similarly retro-tinged. Not for Anderson the clean, anything-goes digital sheen of Pixar; instead, he has opted for a more handmade, almost wheezy look that is steeped in the early 1970s, evoking the plaintive work of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, the quiet geniuses responsible for Bagpuss and The Clangers, and, in a delightful scene in which the foxes devour food with frenzied, squawking energy, the cat in the 'Charley Says’ public information films.
It wouldn’t be an Anderson film — or a Baumbach film for that matter — if it didn’t seethe with dysfunction and malaise. Many of the characters seem to be afflicted by mild forms of Aspergers’ Syndrome or depression. A typical exchange involves the neurotic Ash asking, “Do you think I’m an athlete?” “What’s the subtext here?” his father replies. Later, Mr Fox can be heard musing: “Who am I? I’m saying this more like existentialism.”
Such therapist lingo will pass over the heads of younger viewers, who will rejoice instead in the briskly-handled action scenes. People of all ages, however, will likely warm to Willem Dafoe’s ghetto-talking, finger-snapping, striped-jumpered rodent who elicits the film’s best line when Mrs Fox rebuffs his advances with a tart: “Am I being flirted with by a psychotic rat?”
Looked at in belligerent terms, it’s possible to regard as Fantastic Mr Fox as little more than an entertaining soufflé replete with a roll-call of Anderson’s go-to regulars (Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, Bill Murray), musical in-jokes (Jarvis Cocker shows up as a bluegrass singer), and over-used verbal gags (when characters swear they say the word “cuss”).
This is an adaptation of a book by Dahl though, not Kafka (hmm - an Anderson reworking of The Trial might be something). Only an idiot would expect profound insights. What we do get, though, is a dazzlingly imaginative and poetically inflected comic caper that offers the tantalizing possibility that Anderson’s best work, far from being a distant memory, is still to come.
PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
Salon
(Stephanie Zacharek) review
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review
The
Village Voice [Scott Foundas]
DVDTalk.com -
Theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
n:zone
[D.Elias] Debbie Lynn Elias
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Slant Magazine
review Nick Schager
The Independent Critic
[Richard Propes]
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [A] also seen
here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf] and here: DVD Talk
Mark
Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
filmcritic.com
(Chris Barsanti) review [4.5/5]
The Onion A.V.
Club review [B] Tasha Robinson
Cinema
Blend review Katie Rich
Film
School Rejects [Robert Levin]
The
Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Eye for Film (Anton
Bitel) review [4/5]
Screen
International (Fionnuala Halligan) review
The Land of Eric
(Eric D. Snider) review [A-]
Film.com
(Laremy Legel) review [A]
CHUD.com
(Devin Faraci) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Erik Childress) review [3/5]
Little
White Lies [Matt Bochenski]
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [5/5]
Confessions
of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Screenjabber review Holly Williams
Film
Review: Fantastic Mr. Fox Ethan
Alter from Film Journal
Critic's
Notebook [Sarah Manvel]
New
York Daily News (Elizabeth Weitzman) review [4/5]
The
Cinema Source (Ryan Hamelin) review [A]
One Guy's Opinion
(Frank Swietek) review [A-]
Film Freak
Central review Walter Chaw
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
Bina007
Movie Reviews [Roman Hederer]
Bina007
Movie Reviews [Caterina Benincasa]
CineSnob.net (Kiko
Martinez) review [A-]
ViewLondon
(Matthew Turner) review [4/5]
Christian Science
Monitor (Peter Rainer) review
Shadows on the Wall
(Rich Cline) review
The
Hollywood Reporter review Sheri
Linden
Entertainment Weekly
review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Channel
4 Film [Ali Catterall]
Variety
(Todd McCarthy) review
Time Out
London (Dave Calhoun) review [4/6]
also: Read
an interview with Anderson here
The
Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review [4/5]
The
Independent (Geoffrey Macnab) review [3/5]
Independent.co.uk
[Nicholas Barber]
The
Irish Times review [4/5] Donald
Clarke
Austin
Chronicle review [4/5] Kimberley
Jones
San
Francisco Chronicle (Amy Biancolli) review [3/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The New
York Times (A.O. Scott) review
Roald Dahl - The Official Web Site
Dahl, Roald a fan site
Roald Dahl Books and Writer’s biography
Fantastic
Mr Fox Book Review book review by
Steve Mar from Shvoong
Roald Dahl - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
MOONRISE KINGDOM A 96
USA (94 mi)
2012 Official site
A candidate for the
most delightful and thoroughly enjoyable film of the year, much of which feels
autobiographical and is curiously fascinating from the opening few shots,
showing a doll’s house view of a comfortable old home (a converted lighthouse),
with various inhabitants seemingly occupying each individual room, with kids
keeping separate from the parents, Bill Murray and Frances McDormand, who are
themselves seen in separate rooms, the camera quickly moving from room to room
in an inquisitive fashion, where one can only marvel at the meticulous
detail. Each shot is perfectly composed and color coordinated, which
continues throughout the entire picture, shot on 16 mm by cinematographer
Robert D. Yeoman in what is surely one of the most gorgeously composed films
seen in awhile. In addition, what is immediately noticeable is how
perfectly edited each shot is, all in tempo with the music, which is the
narrator’s version of Leonard Bernstein playing Benjamin Britten’s “The Young
Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack
01. The Young Person's Guide To .. YouTube (3:24). This highly
structured musical piece provides a leitmotif for the film, continually
interjecting itself throughout, adding variations on a theme, which becomes the
working narrative for the film, a simple children’s story accompanied by
changing variations in music. Set in 1965, supposedly simpler times, on
the fictional New Penzance Island off the coast of New England, with blown up
maps provided for the audience’s assistance, Anderson has really outdone
himself here in providing such a layered texture, as his two 12-year old leads,
escaped Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and local girl Suzy Bishop
(Kara Hayward) run away together, becoming a child’s version of BADLANDS (1973)
constantly seen and experienced through the eyes of the kids, featuring outlaw
children on the run from their parents, a Scout Master, and the law. The
moral reverberations resound through the ears of the highly impressionable and
active imaginations of other kids, most all of whom think Sam is so different
he must be mentally deranged.
Accordingly, Sam leaves
a note for his Scout Master (Edward Norton, wonderfully buttoned-down and
straight-laced) resigning from the Khaki Scouts, claiming none of the other
scouts liked him much anyway, placing a poster over the hole in his tent where
he escapes, in an obvious nod to THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION (1994). His
escape is all part of an elaborate plan that has been carefully choreographed
with Suzy ahead of time, mostly by correspondence through the U.S. Mail
agreeing to meet at a designated spot and then hike into secret oblivion,
hoping no one will ever find them. What’s apparent is that both kids are
viewed as troublesome because they’re the smartest kids around, immune to
typical conformity measures used by authority figures to make kids act alike,
making them both outcasts where they’re easily drawn to one another. The
two are a marvel of casting, as they’re probably smarter than the adults around
them as well, making them undeniably appealing characters for their beguiling
ingenuity, where Sam shows a surprising outdoorsman scouting aptitude for
taking care of Suzy in the wild. Interestingly, they meet backstage at
the town church during a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Noye's Fludde, Moonrise
Kingdom Soundtrack 18. Noye's Fludde, Op.59 - Noye, take thy wife anone
YouTube (2:13) which includes a children's chorus of colorfully costumed
animals and birds, where Sam is immediately drawn to Suzy’s bird outfit, that
and the fact she isn’t smiling gleefully like the others. Actually all
the children in the film exhibit plenty of individual flair and personality,
adding a bit of theatrical showmanship and are in perfect synch with Anderson’s
idealized child fable, made even more clever by Suzy’s habits of reading her
favorite books at night out loud for Sam, amusingly putting him to sleep
initially, but later sustaining his interest completely, where the stories
within the story are always wonderfully inventive and near revelatory.
Elfish narrator Bob Balaban shows up intermittently in unexpected places,
always absurdly dressed, reinforcing the element of a magical realism and
whimsy.
Adding a level of
seriousness (and complete lack of sentimentality) is Sam’s back story where
he’s an orphan, having lost his parents early on and grown up in an orphanage,
pictured in flashbacks from the 50’s as all boys with wild hair in jeans and
white tee-shirts standing around working on cars while Sam remains in his bed
reading, the subject of constant humiliation and torment. When the local
police (Bruce Willis) contact his parents to report him missing, they don’t want
him back, finding him too much trouble, thinking he’s a bad influence on their
other children, whereupon social services is contacted, Tilda Swinton in her
matching blue uniform and cap, exhibiting the pious and rigid attitude of the
highly repressed, Christian women who founded the social work movement
providing charity while administering the church's mission to the poor.
Listening to her, Sam’s chances for the future are doomed, as adding charges of
a runaway to his record will only mandate intense psychological testing,
perhaps even electric shock therapy. While this may sound outrageous, and
hearing it from the emotionally severe Swinton it most certainly is, what
reverberates throughout the minds of all the kids is what an utterly barbaric
experience that must be, and while none of them particularly like Sam much,
they don’t hate him enough to wish that upon him.
So this turns into an
utterly enchanting children’s story about wild adventures in the woods,
featuring the obligatory love song (in French, of course) Françoise Hardy - Le Temps de
l'Amour - YouTube (2:26), and the dysfunctional and often irrelevant
parents searching for them, lavishly decorated in Britten’s Shakespearean Midsummer Night’s Dream subtext, Moonrise Kingdom Soundtrack
09. A Midsummer Night's Dream ... YouTube (3:05), thoroughly enhanced by
the use of children’s songs and a children’s chorus, cleverly intermixed with a
little playful Hank Williams, which beautifully accentuates the children’s
fairy tale aspect of the film, heard here by Alexandre Desplat’s “A Veiled
Mist” Moonrise Kingdom
Soundtrack 06. The Heroic Weather-Conditions ... YouTube (3:18). Life on this quiet island is not like
anyplace else and couldn’t be more intimate, becoming a journey of isolated
adolescence and first love teen romance given a strangely magisterial beauty
all its own, where Anderson’s intoxicating artistry works its own magic.
Because the ages of the kids are so young, this film is unlike anything else in
Anderson’s career, where the usual mocking, smart-assed tone is transcended by
tenderness and the actual intelligence and compelling wit of the lead
characters, where their chemistry is a refreshing portrait of understatement,
suggesting the world must find a place for kids who are different, who due to
no fault of their own just happen to be smarter (and perhaps geekier) than
other kids and adults around them, where Anderson’s emotional deadpan and comic
caricature finally have a purposeful release, becoming a wonderfully inventive
children’s theater.
The trouble with being young and in love is that no one else
can properly appreciate that intensity and, naturally, the singular urge
develops to only want to be with each other. This ephemeral feeling is captured
with a trademark blend of deadpan humour and storybook charm in Wes Anderson's
latest, Moonrise Kingdom.
It's a typical triumph of meticulous design for Anderson (Rushmore, The
Royal Tenenbaums), as here he's crafted yet another unique world with its
own cast of colourful characters and understated emotional resonance lurking
beneath the beautifully symmetrical surface.
Sam (Jared Gilman) is an orphan Khaki Scout who surreptitiously escapes one
night thinking he will not be missed. Scoutmaster Ward (a delightfully
dedicated and upbeat Edward Norton) contacts the authorities, which on the
small New England island consists almost exclusively of the sullen Captain
Sharp (Bruce Willis).
Sam unites with Suzy (Kara Hayward), which launches a flashback to their fated
first meeting and subsequent twee courtship by correspondence that culminates
in their plan to escape together. Suzy's parents, brilliantly portrayed by
Frances McDormand and Bill Murray, are both lawyers in the midst of falling out
of amour and Captain Sharp enters the picture at the right time to ignite a
half-hearted love triangle.
When Sam and Suzy eventually make camp on an idyllic beach and share a sandy
first kiss, the film begins to blossom, allowing their affections to unfold
with disarming tenderness and a sweet sense of nostalgia. Even after they're
discovered, and Sam faces the cruel prospect of "juvenile refuge,"
they launch a whimsical escape plan, aided by Cousin Ben (Jason Schwartzman, in
hilarious form) as a large storm ominously prepares to descend.
As always, a plot description only describes so much of the brilliance of
Anderson's work. Like first loves, his films are never so much about the
specifics as they are about feeling. While some lament the fact that he
continues to work within the same rigid style, he keeps churning out sublimely
tragicomic tales of fractured families and tormented youth.
What we are now all-too-eager to dismiss as redundant we once would have
commended as visionary.
Moonrise
Kingdom Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun at Cannes,
also seen here: Dave Calhoun
Straightaway you know you’re in a film by Wes Anderson. ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ opens with the camera gracefully panning sideways through the cross-section of a suburban home in 1960s New England, stopping occasionally, like a train pulling into station after station, to spy on members the family. We may as well be peering into a retro doll’s house – and we are the kids about to play with the toys inside.
But if some of Anderson’s films, especially his last live-action work, ‘The Darjeeling Limited ’, have felt too heavy on the furnishings and light on feelings, this one is so much more free, fresh and soulful. Some things are familiar: it’s droll, cultured and comic. It wears its own uniform and plays its own tunes. Yet it also benefits from a heavy dose of youthful chaos.
Maybe ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ gets its lightness from being a simple, heartwarming romance, a rousing, us-against-the-world tale of a pair of 12 year olds who arrange to meet at dawn and march into the wilderness as outlaws. He’s Sam (Jared Gilman), a terrifically serious, bespectacled young man from a foster home who disappears from Scout camp, leaving a resignation letter for the leader (Edward Norton). She’s Suzy (Kara Hayward), the fiercely independent eldest daughter of the family we’ve spied on. Her mum and dad (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) are eccentric lawyers: he walks about the house brandishing his pot belly; she uses a loudhailer to call the kids to dinner. When Sam and Suzy disappear, the entire town (and a bunch of armed Scouts) come looking.
There’s a snappy momentum to ‘Moonrise Kingdom’. Anderson strikes a smart balance between creating a rarefied world and making us feel for his adolescent heroes: a stolen kiss on the beach between the two kids is magical and romantic. This is an American story but it has an unmistakeable French flavour to it. The 1960s setting, the kids on the run and the wild plotting (a bit too wild in the final third), all give it a nouvelle vague feel. It’s an American ‘Pierrot le Fou’ refashioned in retrospect with Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo as pre-teens. It also reminded me of Richard Ayoade’s recent ‘Submarine’, while Anderson himself has spoken of the influence of Ken Loach’s ‘Kes’ and ‘Black Jack’. That reference isn’t so easy to spot – maybe it’s there in the genuine concern for these kids’ feelings and their discovery of a whole new world in nature.
This is an adult film, really, of course, with all the pleasures of seeing Bruce Willis as a soft-hearted local cop; briefly encountering Tilda Swinton as a uniformed care worker called Social Services; lapping up the ample Hank Williams on the soundtrack; and squirming at a school production of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Noye’s Fludde’. But you can imagine ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ turning young kids on to cinema; it’s so full of a joyous love for the medium and smart without being clever-clever. Its childishness, sense of innocence and eye for fun all make it a very easy film to love.
Review:
Moonrise Kingdom - Film Comment Kristin M. Jones from Film
Comment, May 16, 2012
“What kind of bird are you?” A 12-year-old boy in a scout uniform asks a 12-year-old beauty decked in mysterious black feathers. That’s the beginning of the piercing love story at the heart of Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, shown in flashback after the two have hatched a plan to run away together. A recording of Benjamin Britten’s sparkling The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra: Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Purcell, a composition meant to introduce children to the various musical instruments, serves brilliantly as a musical expression of how each character has a colorful role in the landscape and community.
The paint-tube-pure hues of Moonrise Kingdom evoke picture books but also reinforce subtle connections between the characters, who live on an island called New Penzance off the New England coast, in the summer of 1965. Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) is a troubled gamine whose dresses recall vintage Anna Karina. Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) is a bullied foster child and member of a Khaki Scouts troupe led by the endearing Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton). Classical music reflects the sweetness of Sam and Suzy’s affair, while Hank Williams ballads signal the call of the wilderness as well as the sadder relationships of adults such as Suzy’s parents, Mr. Bishop (Bill Murray) and Mrs. Bishop (Frances McDormand), and the police chief Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis).
When they run away, Suzy brings a kitten, a suitcase full of books about girls who have adventures, and a treasured pair of binoculars. Sam wears his dead mother’s pearl brooch, pinned to his uniform. Shadows seem to follow them, especially at moments when Moonrise Kingdom evokes darker movies. The armed Khaki Scouts who chase them through the woods are reminiscent of Lord of the Flies, and scenes set in a cove where they pitch camp under cliffs, a spot they dub “Moonrise Kingdom,” recall Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo on the Riviera in Pierrot le Fou. But Suzy and Sam remain safe, as if they are children protected by a spell in a fairy tale.
Suzy shows Sam a book she found at home on “the very troubled child,” and he responds callously, but after she retreats into their tent he apologizes: “I’m sorry—I’m on your side.” They kiss with sublime awkwardness and dance in their underwear to Françoise Hardy songs. After their idyll is interrupted, one of Suzy’s little brothers calls her a traitor to the family. “God, I wanna be,” she says. When she and Sam escape a second time, they are passionately committed—and headed into a storm.
Moonrise Kingdom has a spontaneity and yearning that lend an easy comic rhythm, as when Sam reaches out to touch the trunk of child dressed like an elephant, or a girl in a chicken costume is glimpsed brushing her teeth. The film is almost unfailingly funny, but it also has a rapt quality, as if we are viewing the events through Suzy’s binoculars or reading the story under the covers by a flashlight.
Key to its magic is the candlelit production of Britten’s opera about Noah’s ark, Noye’s Fludde, which the town is putting on in the wonderfully named Church of St. Jack. Sam first encounters Suzy there while she is costumed as the raven Noah sends off to find dry land, and the film’s giddy denouement unfolds during an actual storm when the community has taken refuge in the church, which stands in for the ark. Children clad as paired animals—in vivid costumes inspired by Camille Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals—echo the movie’s emphasis on love, friendship, and imagination. Like The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and like Moonrise Kingdom itself, Noye’s Fludde celebrates beauty in a variety of forms and how it all can come together in a wondrous whole.
Paste
Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
After seven features, a Wes Anderson production is unmistakable: white, upper-middle-class dysfunctional families deadpanning wry dialogue amid meticulous mise-en-scène to an eclectic soundtrack. Also: exquisite, often centered, shot compositions; uninterrupted lateral tracking camerawork through dollhouse-like sets; and inserts of quasi-obscure cultural objects. The auteur’s calculated quality persists in his latest film as well, but where his past work can come off as chilly and detached, Moonrise Kingdom exudes a warmth and innocence generated by the earnest adolescent romance at its core.
The year is 1965, and the sleepy New England island of New Penzance is stirred to action when Khaki Scout Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and local resident Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) run away together. Sam is gone by the time we arrive, so all the expository characterization we learn is from what others say about him: His fellow Scouts dislike him, and his foster parents don’t want him back. By the time we catch up with him, he certainly looks the part of an “emotionally disturbed” orphan: slight of frame with heavy black glasses, a coonskin cap and a shadow on his upper lip, his uniform plastered with merit badges, both official and homemade. He’s a boy yet and can’t always get his mouth around Anderson’s signature wit.
But Sam is full of surprises: He’s a quite skilled outdoorsman, and when he reunites with the mod girl with whom he’s been exchanging letters for a year, he matter-of-factly hands her a bouquet of wildflowers and begins imparting survival tips. There’s no indication that he considers her out of his league, nor does he express any skepticism at what she’s brought along: a suitcase of stolen library books, a record player and a kitten. Likewise, Suzy is an unexpected rebel with a volatile streak that upsets the balance among her lawyer parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) and three little brothers.
Meanwhile, the authorities have been galvanized: hangdog Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) and plucky, if outwitted, Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) deputize the rest of Troop 55 to comb a wilderness as detailed as any Anderson set for the missing couple, and the severe Social Services (Tilda Swinton) is on her way to collect Sam.
Delightfully, Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola avoid clichés at every opportunity. The forces that would typically work to tear Sam and Suzy apart instead rally behind them, perhaps infected by the conviction of their love, which never wavers, even in argument: “I love you, but you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
As always on an Anderson film, there’s much to be charmed by: The one-time lighthouse in which the Bishops reside. The various activities at Camp Ivanhoe, including mechanized latrines and a tree house perched high on a branchless trunk. Binoculars that bestow their wearer with special powers. An elaborate production of Noah’s Ark at the historic Trinity Church, where George Washington was a parishioner, complete with felt animal costumes reminiscent of Fantastic Mr. Fox. A soundtrack that juxtaposes Benjamin Britten and Hank Williams.
Moonrise Kingdom is whimsical and, yes, precious, but it is so in the very best sense of the word.
DVDTalk.com -
theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
In just about all of Wes Anderson's films, childhood has somehow chafed against the harsh disappointments of the adult world. Even when only dealing with youngsters in flashback or even memory, the bruised grown-ups are haunted by the failures of their elders to live up to their expectations. There is always a yearning to return to a simpler time, no matter how ill-fated the journey. One can't help but remember the sadness of Margot Tenenbaum going to the ice cream parlor with her neglectful father. It's too late to make up for missed opportunities.
It's fitting, then, that with his latest, Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson would embrace a childhood fantasy for real, creating two characters who try to live the lives they imagine their parents, teachers, and other elders are squandering. It's a magical endeavor, one that is full of both the wonder of youth and its inherent heartbreak. Moonrise Kingdom is a movie packed with impossibilities, but also riddled with the pragmatism that only comes from an artist whose innocence has been dashed on the rocks of adulthood.
Newcomers Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman star as Suzy and Sam, two tweens living in a remote seaside town in New England in 1965. Suzy is the daughter of married lawyers (Billy Murray and Frances McDormand), and she's cursed with three younger brothers and emotional outbursts that sometimes turn to violence. Sam is a newly orphaned Khaki Scout who never seems to fit in with the other kids. He and Suzy met due to happenstance and immediately struck up a correspondence. In their letters, they planned to run away together and live by the ocean. This is, ostensibly, where Moonrise Kingdom's story begins.
The front portion of the film involves this escape and the efforts to find them. Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton) enlists local lawman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis) to try to find the boy. Sharp also has a connection with Suzy's mother, adding an urgency, as well as a palpable tension, to the hunt. While life in civilization falls apart, Suzy and Sam set up an idealized existence far away from it. She has come armed with a portable record player and her favorite books; he has finally found a use for his knowledge of camping and nature. They trade secrets, frolic in the sand, and even share a first kiss. It's like The Blue Lagoon, but without all the skeevy leering.
The perfection ends when the kids are found. The lovebirds and those in charge of looking after them have to face the reality of the situation. Social Services (represented by Tilda Swinton) is coming for Sam, and both children's exposed unhappiness really exposes the unhappiness of everyone around them. Yet, this being a Wes Anderson movie, Sam and Suzy and the other kids caught up in this aren't so quick to give up. More daring adventures are to be had!
There is a delicacy to Wes Anderson's films that causes detractors to dismiss him as a one-note phenomenon and misguided supporters to insist he slavishly maintain whatever ideals and aesthetics they are convinced define him. The former may see Moonrise Kingdom as a creative retreat put into motion by the drubbing members of the latter gave the auteur following 2007's The Darjeeling Limited. Neither side is right, nor are they wrong, but they both fail to see that the true beauty of Wes Anderson's films is that they are all of one piece. Unlike probably any other filmmaker working today, Anderson labors in an extremely personal space, and he is incapable of expressing himself outside of it. He has the things he likes, and he has a way he likes to show them. This is why the director can do a stop-motion animated film like The Fantastic Mr. Fox and have it still look like he created it. This is not a bad thing. We could use more artists like him who stand steadfast and don't let their vision be ground up by the great machine. If this means more movies about little girls in cute dresses carrying suitcases, the boys who obsess over them, and the parents that just don't understand, all set in some otherworldly zone where every prop is glued together by nostalgia and pretention, then so be it! I'm on board!
Every frame of Moonrise Kingdom is carefully planned. Robert D. Yeoman's camera is placed just so, and the actors--who are uniformly excellent--are positioned in front of it in an exact way. The things they carry with them and the clothes they wear are tailored to fit Anderson's storybook world, and logic and reality bend to conform to his boundless imagination. There is an almost Saturday morning cartoon conception of physics at work in Moonrise Kingdom. Whatever little Sam has maybe seen Daffy Duck survive, he can survive, too. At the same time, Sam and Suzy are at an age where complicated things are being deconstructed. The movie opens and closes with a recording made to teach children the many facets of classical music. Likewise, Sam meets Suzy by peering backstage at a musical production of Noah's Ark, at once exposing the illusion of theater and the embellishment of myth. If Suzy can dress as a raven and sing as one on stage, then why not also put on a grown-up's uniform and pass beyond the veil of youth?
Anderson's ensemble is wonderfully balanced between established professionals and unseasoned child actors. The big names--in addition to those already mentioned, we also get brief appearances from Harvey Keitel and Bob Balaban--adjust perfectly to Anderson's unique approach, dropping their usual technique for something far more simple. This choice fits the thematic thrust of Moonrise Kingdom, because for all the nuance the big folks lack, the little guys more than make up for it. Kara Hayward and Jared Gilman have an unaffected chemistry. There is a baldness to their performance that more polished actors would have to labor to unlearn. This dichotomy is like the two dominant, yet opposing, elements of the film's soundtrack: it's the flourish of classical music vs. the raw heartbreak of a Hank Williams ballad. It's not really either/or: it's about being able to cope with both.
In all honesty, it's hard to exactly get at the magic of Moonrise Kingdom. You might as well try to grab the moon itself when it appears above the horizon. You know it's a real thing out there, you know it's a solid mass, but to reach for it is to emphasize just how far away it really is. You splash your hand in the water and destroy the image. So it is with Moonrise Kingdom. You just kind of have to accept the indefinable and the irrational and let it be. The same way you did when you heard a fantastic story as a kid, holding your breath and trusting the storyteller to get you where he or she is going.
Matt Zoller Seitz
The Substance of Style, a 5-part video essay from Moving Image Source, May 17, 2012
Joseph Jon Lanthier The Royal Tenenbaums and The Magnificent
Ambersons: Wes, Welles and Literary Cinema, from The L-Magazine, May 17, 2012
Moonrise Kingdom
| Film | Movie Review | The A.V. Club
Scott Tobias
Drew McWeeny at
Cannes from Hit Fix, May 16, 2012
James Rocchi at
Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 16, 2012
Wes
Anderson's Larger-Than-Life Moonrise Kingdom ... - Village Voice Karina Longworth
REVIEW:
Moonrise Kingdom — Attractive and ... - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Moonrise
Kingdom Dana Stevens at Slate, May
24, 2012
Simon Abrams at
Cannes from indieWIRE Press Play, May 16, 2012
'Moonrise
Kingdom': A Return to the Wonderful ... - The Atlantic Wire Richard Lawson
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
the
m0vie blog [Darren Mooney]
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
FILM
REVIEW: Moonrise Kingdom - The Buzz - CBC
Eli Glasner
NPR.org » A Wes Anderson 'Kingdom' Full
Of Beautiful Imagery David Edelstein
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Moonrise
Kingdom Tom Grierson at Cannes from
Screendaily
Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 16, 2012
Post Sarkozy
Cannes 1 - filmjourney . org Robert
Koehler at Cannes from Filmjourney
Cannes
Review: 'Moonrise Kingdom' Boasts ... - Film School Rejects Sumon Gallagher at Cannes, May 16, 2012
Moonrise
Kingdom Review: You Remind Me of a Poem I Can't - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
Moonrise
Kingdom - Reelviews Movie Reviews
James Berardinelli from Reel Views
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Talking Pictures
[Howard Schumann]
Film
Review Online [James Dawson]
The American
Spectator : Moonrise Kingdom James
Bowman
theartsdesk.com [Emma
Simmonds]
The Independent Critic
[Richard Propes]
JEsther
Entertainment [Don Simpson]
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Jessica Delfanti]
Moonrise
Kingdom Review - CinemaBlend.com
Katey Rich
Mark
Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Cinemablographer
[Patrick Mullen]
Boxoffice
Magazine [Pete Hammond]
Cannes
'12, Day One: Wes Anderson kicks off the festival in enchanting form Mike D’Angelo at Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May 17, 2012
Budd Wilkins at
Cannes from The House Next Door, May 16, 2012
Richard Corliss at
Cannes from Time Magazine, May 16,
2012
'Moonrise Kingdom' At Cannes: Early Reviews for Wes Anderson's
Newest Film Christopher Rosen at
Cannes from The Huffington Post, May
16, 2012
Michal Oleszczyk at
Cannes from Hammer to Nail
Living in
Cinema [Craig Kennedy]
Moviefreak.com
[Sara Michelle Fetters]
Monsters
and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Moonrise Kingdom
: DVD Talk Review of the Theatrical
Tyler Foster
Moonrise
Kingdom Movie Review | Film School Rejects
Rob Hunter
Moonrise
Kingdom Movie Review | Shockya.com
Rudie Obias
From
Disability, High Comedy - The Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Combustible
Celluloid Review - Moonrise Kingdom (2012), Wes ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
MovieMartyr.com -
Moonrise Kingdom - Movie Martyr
Jeremy Heilman
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Linc Leifeste]
Screenjabber.com [Doug
Cooper]
Guy Lodge at Cannes
from HitFix
Pete Hammond at Box
office Magazine
Alex Billington at
Cannes from First Showing
David Jenkins at Cannes from Little White Lies
Jada Yuan The
Vulture from New York Magazine
Wes
Anderson's “Moonrise Kingdom” Review : The New Yorker Anrthony Lane (capsule review)
The Stop
Button [Andrew Wickliffe]
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Wes Anderson’s MOONRISE KINGDOM » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 17,
2012
Eugene Hernandez
interview at Cannes from Film
Comment, May 16, 2012
Gregg Kilday Cannes
interview at Cannes from The Hollywood
Reporter, May 16, 2012
Kev
Geoghegan BBC News interview at Cannes, May 16, 2012
Anne Thompson also
includes 3 Slate Video interviews from Thompson on Hollywood, May 16, 2012
'I
don't think any of us are normal people'
Francesca Babb interview at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2012
The
World According to Wes Jacob
Weisberg interview from Slate, May 25, 2012
Wes
Anderson interview - Moonrise Kingdom - Time Out Film Cath Clarke interview at Cannes, May 2012, also seen here: Wes
Anderson interview
Dennis Lim Cannes
interview with The New York Times,
May 2012
Todd McCarthy at
Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter,
May 16, 2012
Cannes
2012: Eclectic 'Moonrise Kingdom' Cast All Smiles on Opening Night Stuart Kemp jokes with the stars at Cannes
from The Hollywood Reporter, May 17,
2012
Peter
Debruge at Cannes from Variety,
May 17, 2012
Ben Kenigsberg Time Out Chicago
Peter Bradshaw at
Cannes from The Guardian, May 16,
2012
David Gritten at
Cannes from The London Telegraph, May
16, 2012
Tim Walker at Cannes
from The Independent, May 16, 2012
Moonrise
Kingdom – review | Film | The Observer
Philip French from The Observer,
May 26, 2012
Moonrise
Kingdom: Out of the mouths of babes - The Globe and Mail Rick Groen
Auteur's
style shines in 'Moonrise Kingdom' - BostonHerald.com James Verniere
Review:
Moonrise Kingdom - Reviews - Boston Phoenix
Peter Keough
Critic
Review for Moonrise Kingdom on washingtonpost.com Ann Hornaday
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Michael Phillips at
Cannes from The Chicago Tribune, May
16, 2012
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Wes
Anderson's 'Moonrise Kingdom,' With ... - The New York Times Manohla Dargis
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL B- 82
USA Germany (99 mi)
2014 Official
site
Despite a coming attractions trailer to die
for, where the sheer tone of subversive humor looks like mandatory viewing, and
despite all the accolades this film has been receiving, it is not one of the better
Wes Anderson films. While the film
espouses to be a rollicking thrill ride through the behind-the-scenes,
Kafkaesque inner workings of the Eastern Bloc, rivaling the plot twists and
cherished thrills of any Agatha Christie novel, what’s lacking, unfortunately,
is a connection to any of the characters, generating a dull thud in the
viewer’s heads suggesting none of the sheer daffiness of the story makes any
difference in our lives whatsoever, but instead feels like an over-caffeinated,
completely invented, cartoonish world of lunacy and adolescent silliness on
display. Yet we’re led to believe this
film is so clever, as the rambling narrative offers a continual diversion into
another dreamlike world, where we feel immersed into an Arabian Nights fantasy set behind the Iron Curtain during the
height of the Cold War, where the film features a gala of stars where all of
this offers such amazing potential that the film never comes to realize, as so
much of it lies flat on the screen.
While it’s a well decorated screen, given an overly sweet, confectionary
sugar look where an attraction to baking goods is essential to appreciating the
film’s many side plots, but it just gets too carried away with its own
indulgent excess, as if this is a whimsical, lighthearted delight, but so many
of the comic bits feel overly contrived and repetitive in tone, where it’s so
caught up in a dry parody of sophisticated wit that it forgets the magic of
whimsical fun. Some will have a good
time with this film, but it’s an acquired taste and not for everyone. Unlike 2012
Top Ten Films of the Year: #3 Moonrise Kingdom, arguably Anderson’s most
delightful and thoroughly enjoyable film, one that reaches artistic heights
because the essential story being told actually matters, where two highly
intelligent pre-teen kids in love make a run for it, escaping the hum drum
conformity that waits for them at home, where the kids lead a more charming
life, feeling highly autobiographical and supremely tender, using the
sophisticated interplay of the music of Benjamin Britten to add a theatrical
flourish. THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL is a
return to the smart-assed, mocking tone of Anderson where he remains aloof from
the audience.
It’s not for lack of
trying, as the effort given by Ralph Fiennes as hotel manager Gustave H. is
exemplary, one of his finer performances, as is the previously unheralded Tony
Revolori as Zero, his Lobby Boy, where the mischief these two get themselves
into comprises the heart of the story.
Many of the secondary characters, however, barely generate a pulse,
despite the exaggerated, over-the-top nature of their creation. Even the opening falls flat, as there’s a slowly
developing, somewhat boring modern era prelude that leads to a flashback
sequence that generates all the interest, becoming a story (the present) within
a story (the near past) within a story (the far past), where Fiennes
immediately finds the right tone, becoming the center of attention, but so many
of the rest feel like stock characters.
The meticulously designed sets feel like zany fun, but the execution of
much of the material leaves something to be desired. A tribute to troubled Austrian writer Stefan
Zweig, a pacifist and anti-nationalist during the rise of Hitler, Anderson
draws upon his 1942 memoir The World of Yesterday that he wrote escaping the Nazi’s in exile
during the war shortly before his suicide, a practically unknown writer
in America today, yet in the 20’s and 30’s he was the most translated European
writer.
The
hospital train in which I was returning arrived in Budapest in the early morning
hours. I drove at once to a hotel to get some sleep; my only seat in the train
had been my bag. Tired as I was, I slept until about eleven and then quickly
got up to get my breakfast. I had gone only a few paces when I had to rub my
eyes to make sure that I was not dreaming…. Budapest was as beautiful and
carefree as ever before. Women in white dresses walked arm in arm with officers
who suddenly appeared to me to be officers of quite a different army than that
I had seen only yesterday and the day before yesterday…. I saw how they bought
bunches of violets and gallantly tendered them to their ladies, saw spotless
automobiles with smoothly shaved and spotlessly dressed gentlemen ride through
the streets. And all this but eight or nine hours away from the front by
express train. But by what right could one judge these people? Was it not the
most natural thing that, living, they sought to enjoy their lives?—that because
of the very feeling that everything was being threatened, that they had
gathered together all that was to be gathered, the few fine clothes, the last
good hours!
Here
it jumped out at me, naked, towering and unashamed, the lie of the war! No, it
was not the promenaders, the careless, the carefree, who were to blame, but
those alone who drove the war on with their words. But we too were guilty if we
did not do our part against them.
Transporting us to the illustrious era of the Grand Budapest Hotel, the
most glorious vacation spot in the fictional Republic of Zubrowka, the film
attempts to recreate the luxurious aristocratic splendor on display before that
polite, civilized world was destroyed by war, even as the building still stands
today nestled among the mountainous beauty of the peaks dotting the landscape,
quiet and empty now, completely harmless, an old decaying structure that is a
wondrous relic of the past that stands as a metaphor for a society on the verge
of collapse. In the era when Gustave H.
runs the hotel, he represents the essence of civilized manner and high level
service, where everyone’s needs are catered to and taken care of, where his job
is to make it as smooth and effortless as possible. His Lobby Boy is an apprentice still learning
the trade from the master, teaching him to understand what a guest wants, and
then getting it to them before they can even think of it themselves. His secret is wearing a scent called Eau de
Panache cologne, turning him into a ladykiller, where female guests of all ages
are his specialty, offering the most intimately personalized services of the
house. When one of his wealthiest guests
dies unexpectedly, Tilda Swinton as Madame
Céline Villeneuve Desgoffe und Taxis,
her extraordinarily wealthy and extended family is shocked to see she left her
most prized painting to none other than Gustave H, causing a scandalous
outrage, where her maliciously foul-minded son (Adrien Brody) and his heinously
depraved hit man (Willem Dafoe) are determined to get the painting back, using
a series of threats and intimidation tactics, which include detestable passport
challenges of his precious Lobby Boy, a man in exile who unfortunately travels
with flimsy travel documents, where Gustave H. is even thrown into prison.
Perhaps it comes as no surprise that Gustave H. adapts miraculously to
prison life, where he’s at his best while serving the needs of others, but all
that matters now is making an escape.
Borrowing liberally from all the prison escape movies, this has to be
the most difficult and convoluted escape route ever devised, turning what
should be a suspenseful event into a tedious exercise of extending a joke far
too long, as whatever original cleverness there was is eventually overwritten
to the point of exhaustion. The rest of
the film is basically a chase movie filled with murders and double crosses,
remaining out of reach from Dafoe’s deadly assassin who is a miraculous master
of disguises, where the sinister threat of fascism on the rise is expressed as
a Zubrowkan political movement involving
black jackboots and leather trench coats, where they may as well be Blue Meanies out to destroy the candy-colored
beauty of Gustave H’s pastel dreamscape.
Much of this does recall Guy Madden’s hypnotic use of surrealism and
color, also a kind of slapstick hit-or-miss the way the story develops, but
mostly the film deals with a superficial world of illusion, where all the
eloquent manner and artificial extravagance simply disappears, where the war
saps the life blood out of the hotel and everything it stands for. After a slow start, it’s eventually told in a
frantic pace with a zest for enthusiasm and crazy screwball antics, where
what’s perhaps most surprising is on the surface, the movie is all comedy and
light, lost in a chaotic confusion of narrative overkill, but under the surface
the film just isn’t that funny, instead feeling surprisingly somber and dull,
where there’s no emotional connection to any of the characters, where the sheer
dependence on such extreme artificiality suggests little of this will even
matter afterwards. Had there been no
dedication to Stefan Zweig, the underlying tale of tragedy and doom
about the destruction of what was once a genteel and civilized Europe might
have loomed even further under the surface, but as is, it’s a confusing mix of
nostalgia, comic farce, overdecorated production design, and a strange and
peculiar fascination with the past, where memory can be a bewildering
embellishment.
The Grand
Budapest Hotel | review, synopsis ... - Time Out Dave Calhoun
While other filmmakers get their hands dirty in kitchen sinks, Wes Anderson surely slips his into luxury cashmere mittens. His films overflow with intricate detail and make no pretence of existing in a world other than their own, just-about-earthbound parallel universe. So the five-star premises of his energetic new comedy ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ – a wedding-cake-like, pastel-coloured establishment situated somewhere in 1930s Mitteleuropa and peopled by eccentrics and lunatics – feel like business as usual. What’s different, though, is that the film’s shaggy-dog, sort-of-whodunit yarn offers laughs and energy that make this Anderson’s most fun film since ‘Rushmore’.
Where ‘Moonrise Kingdom’ had heart, ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ has pace and a winning manic streak. It also gives Ralph Fiennes a rare comic role as Monsieur Gustave, a concierge who wavers brilliantly between thug and gentleman aesthete. From Gustave’s mouth pours a head-spinning cocktail of politeness and filth as he becomes embroiled in the murder investigation and inheritance tussles that follow the death of one of his most loyal guests, the elderly Madame D (Tilda Swinton, barely recognisable beneath a carapace of make-up). At Gustave’s side is his loyal apprentice, Zero Moustafa (newcomer Tony Revolori with a drawn-on pencil moustache), who decades later (now played by F Murray Abraham) recounts events over dinner to a writer played by Jude Law.
The rest of Anderson’s cast is sprawling and starry. Blink and you might miss Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Jason Schwartzman and others in tiny roles. A bruising Adrien Brody and a Rottweiler-like Willem Dafoe represent a violent new European order – one of them is kitted out all in black, no less. In its own indirect and loopy fashion, is this Anderson’s most political film? It tips its hat to 1930s history in the way Hitchcock tipped his viewfinder to the same decade’s current affairs with ‘The Lady Vanishes’ (both films share a hotel, a train and an old woman at the centre of a mischievous mystery).
Like the ship of ‘The Life Aquatic’ or the townhouse of ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’, ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel’ comes with its own ready-made theatre and uniformed cast. From here, Anderson breaks out with verve on to trains, ski runs and cobbled streets to spin a wickedly funny tale that celebrates the final glory days of a dying world order. It’s all given a bombastic lift by an Alexandre Desplat score which crescendos in organs and drums. Full of Anderson’s visual signatures – cameras that swerve, quick zooms, speedy montages – it’s familiar in style, refreshing in tone and one of Anderson’s very best films.
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
Writer/director Wes Anderson delivers a luxury film
experience in the shape of The Grand Budapest Hotel, a feast for the
eyes with a ritzy, glitzy cast and touches of comedy gold courtesy of Ralph
Fiennes. Surprisingly, the erstwhile English Patient is a hoot as
Gustave, the effete concierge who caters to the every whim of the rich and
fabulous in a fictional Alpine state in the turbulent 1930s.
Tilda Swinton looks like the Bride of Frankenstein after a few too many
lightning strikes as Madam D, the super-rich matriarch who enjoys certain
'under the counter' services at The Budapest. Clearly, Gustave is devoted to
making sure his customers leave satisfied, but he is something of an enigma too
and his ethics come under closer scrutiny when Madame D is found murdered.
Death, decadence and the rise of fascism create a slightly dark edge to the
fairy-tale ambience, which is effected with miniature mountain sets that look
like cake and icing. But at its very essence, this is a sugar rush of comic
vignettes. The scene of Gustave's arrest plays like a Monty Python
sketch (The Ministry of Silly Runs) with Edward Norton as the bewildered
policeman.
Anderson takes his usual episodic approach, telling the story through the
sympathetic eyes of Gustave's Arabian lobby boy and protégé Zero Moustafa
(newcomer Tony Revolori) whose older incarnation (F Murray Abraham) discloses
it to Jude Law's nosy hotel guest many decades (and political revolutions) later.
Revolori is easily out-shined by star names in eye-catching
roles. Prominent among them is Adrien Brody as Madame D's ruthless son Dmitri,
who contests the will that leaves a priceless painting to Gustave. He employs
the silent but deadly Jopling (a motorcycling Willem Dafoe) to hush up anyone
who disagrees and that's bad news for Jeff Goldblum's lawyer (and his
unsuspecting cat) along with Matthew Amalric as the butler who saw something.
The bond between Zero and Gustave is, ostensibly, the heart of the film, but
Revolori can only play his part as the comedy straight man while Fiennes preens
and pontificates to hilarious and endearing effect. Zero's later romance with a
patisserie baker (Saorise Ronan) better serves Gustave's story which takes in a
prison spell and an audacious escape plot. It's a bulky narrative, but Anderson
keeps the action moving at a brisk pace and the punch-lines come and thick and
fast, too, with Fiennes ticking them off like a Swiss Watch of comedy timing.
Unusually, the wilder the story gets, the funnier and more enchanting it is.
And unlike Anderson's recent run of films (Moonrise Kingdom, The
Darjeeling Limited and The Life Aquatic) he doesn't try too hard
to yank on the heartstrings, instead celebrating the art of spinning a good
yarn. The result is a rich tapestry that'll whisk you away to another world
completely - one you'll want to come back to.
The
House Next Door [John Semley]
At their worst, Wes Anderson's films are mere showpieces. They're meticulously stage-managed, lavishly appointed cross-sectional dollhouses erected as staging grounds for their director's rarely not enervating quirks and obvious opportunities for Hollywood A-listers to recharge their thespian cache. (The idea that Anderson is an "actor's director"—as if there's another kind?—has always smacked bogus, given that to perform in a Wes Anderson movie is generally to perform in a self-consciously stilted, nouveau-Victorian, drained, and affectless pantomime that would play as totally unchallenging were it not so observably different.) And in the best cases, Anderson squares his paisley trick-bag of Godardian compositions and book of vintage carpet samples with a congruent thematic meaning. In 2011's excellent Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson's incurable nostalgia was a nostalgia for the lost summers of childhood. Here, in The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is either his best film or his best film since his last film, it's the waning of historical memory, of the past slipping irretrievably beyond some distant horizon.
The film nests stories within stories, its structure approximating the complexity of Anderson's latest living dollhouse (that is, the titular hotel, nestled in the peaks of the imaginary Republic of Zubrowka, accessible only via animated Alpine lift). It opens in the present, on a young reader opening a book, The Grand Budapest Hotel, then shifts to a few decades earlier, with its author (Tom Wilkinson) explaining that everything contained therein is true. It then shifts, further back, to the mid 1960s, where that same author (now played by Jude Law) putts around the halfway-derelict Grand Budapest, happening across its itinerant owner, M. Moustafa (F. Murray Abraham). Then again, Anderson cracks open another narrative layer, Matryoshka-like, with Moustafa narrating the story of the Grand Budapest Hotel (that is, the story of The Grand Budapest Hotel) and the legendary concierge, M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), who oversaw the most persnickety details of the hotel's operations during the peak of its grandeur (roughly, the years spanning the Great War and the Second World War).
That story, despite its ostensible complexity, is the stuff of an old Murder, She Wrote episode. M. Gustave finds himself in a textbook imbroglio after one of his many aging lovers, Madame D. (Tilda Swinton, garishly aged to resemble a shellacked soft-serve cone), bequeaths him with an invaluable painting of a pink-cheeked boy holding an apple, much to the consternation of her quick-tempered son, Dmitri (Adrian Brody, wrapped in clingy leather like a proto-fascist hopeful waiting to be tapped for the big leagues). (Even nastier: Willem Dafoe's knuckle-cracking man-at-hand, whose ruthless thuggery intimates something of a greater, more consuming doom.) Framed for the murder of Madame D., M. Gustave ends up in prison, setting up a lengthy escape plot that owes as much to the precision of Bresson's A Man Escaped and Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen as it does to the madcap ladder-comedy of Buster Keaton. In his cartoonish quest to clear his name, M. Gustave is aided by his "Lobby Boy" and diligent protégé, the young Zero Mustafa (newcomer Tony Revolori).
The Grand Budapest Hotel bears all the markers of a Wes Anderson work, from the gaudy-chic period textures to the clever staging; upon realizing his under arrest for murder, M. Gustave bolts out of the frame as Anderson holds on the bumbling, Benny Hill-ish tableau. The film finds its gravity in its interwar setting, and in the process of revealing its story (within a story, within a story, narrators losing credibility all the way down), Anderson knowingly erodes the facts of interwar Europe. A state police force shaking down a passenger train for suspicious visas is decked out with "66" insignias that suggest the 88 regalia of neo-Nazis. Later, an army rallying under a demonstrably SS-ish zig-zag logo turn the Grand Budapest into a hoity-toity barracks. A Soviet-styled newspaper early in the film calls itself The Daily Fact. There's talk of blitzes. And wars. And statelessness. Of troubles and trouble brewing.
The Grand Budapest Hotel is a film about history that avoids it entirely. Not out of cowardice or lack of nerve, but because the head-on acknowledgement of Europe's long 20th century is quite simply too painful, too gauche. With subtlety and studied nuance, Anderson evokes a time where the sort of high-flown civility prized by M. Gustave and, to a lesser extent, all the attentive staffers of the Grand Budapest was being devoured by an insatiable, cannibalistic barbarism. So in place of a direct attack, Anderson flanks the issue, subbing in these not-so-coded references to Hitler, to Stalin, to Mussolini's blackshirts. Even the character names are ciphers. Standing in place of verity is Anderson's comic hyper-reality, which mattes over the battered textures of history like dust hanging on curtains in an old hotel.
It's not all pratfalls though. And when the film's jokey façade is ruptured by violence and, even moreover, by melancholy, it's more affecting than anything Anderson's drummed up to date. (It's hard to believe that this is the same filmmaker who once thought it was totally okay to resolve The Life Aquatic's wispy thematic threads about parental diligence and responsibility by staging a climatic, stop-motion Sigur Rós music video.) It's in Fiennes's performance as M. Gustave, his Andersonian affectless ruptured by real pathos and frustration, that The Grand Budapest grounds itself. When he tells Zero that his sexual proclivities trend toward the hotel's older, more sophisticated clientele ("cheap cuts," he uncharitably calls them), it's obvious that this a man obsessed with an age he knows is waning into the dim, as if he can literally fuck the residue of civility out of some old dowager and shore himself with it.
Early, M. Moustafa likewise expresses his fondness for the rundown Grand Budapest, admiring it as a "ruin." But in a way it always was: a totem to notions of civilization and refinement that have disappeared—a second-hand whisper of a better, more honest world, a story of a story of a story.
Film
of the Week: The Grand Budapest Hotel - Film Comment Jonathan Romney
from Film Comment, March 12, 2014
If you were ever irritated by Wes Anderson’s tendency to make the world resemble a doll’s house, The Grand Budapest Hotel will really get under your skin. Last month at the Berlin Film Festival, the miniature model of the titular establishment, used in the film—a pink-and-white wedding-cake palace—was placed on display in the lobby of the Hotel Adlon. A hotel within a hotel—you can hardly get more Andersonian. Then there’s one of the posters: people often object to Anderson using actors as mere puppets, and here the film’s stars are reduced even further to a mere cartoon of dramatis personae—17 actors rendered in stylized head-and-shoulders likenesses, like cigarette cards.
In a favorable review of The Grand Budapest Hotel in The Hollywood Reporter, Todd McCarthy suggests that Anderson’s approach “may well seem off-putting and weird to the general public.” That seems not to be the case: Anderson’s film took $800,000 domestically in its opening weekend, screening at only four theaters, making it his most successful opening to date; it also earned £1.53 million on its U.K. opening. The great wager that Anderson makes and wins in The Grand Budapest Hotel is that a piece of film art can be extremely refined, artificed, and calibrated virtually to the point of being mechanical—yet can still accommodate emotional content, even if that content communicates itself on a rather indirect, rarefied level. The Grand Budapest Hotel is an extremely funny film, though the humor may have you chuckling mutedly, one eyebrow arched, rather than guffawing. It’s also a very sad film, charged with a nostalgic melancholy that is part of its very structure. This is a film about the past, the disappearance of societies and times, and the fragility of memory, all addressed within the context of the modern history of an imaginary European nation.
The film starts, appropriately, in a graveyard: a title announces that we’re in Zubrowka, “on the furthest eastern borders of the European continent—once the seat of an empire.” A young girl in a beret, greatcoat, and punk T-shirt enters the cemetery and gazes at a monument to “Our National Treasure”—a bronze bust of a man, on the plinth of which admirers have hung hotel keys in tribute. She is reading a copy of this man’s novel The Grand Budapest Hotel, and we cut to the unnamed Author (Tom Wilkinson) narrating his story to camera in 1985. He recounts how, years before, his young self (Jude Law) had stayed at the once legendary and luxurious spa hotel, which had already fallen into Soviet-era decrepitude (both incarnations magnificently designed by Adam Stockhausen): the foyer, soon to be seen in its former cathedral-like vastness, has been boxed in with a false ceiling, the erstwhile purple and scarlet splendor replaced by functional, tawdry green and orange; what once was marble is now Bakelite. In the hotel’s crumbling baths, the young author meets the hotel’s mysterious elderly proprietor, Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham)—and it’s his narration over dinner that evokes the hotel’s last days of glory in the early Thirties.
The film, in chapters, recounts the apprenticeship of young Zero (Tony Revolori), then an eager lobby boy, to the effortlessly soigné, flamboyantly cynical, yet impeccably charismatic Gustave H., who is not only the most accomplished of concierges but a beloved gigolo to the aged grandes dames who frequent the establishment. At the heart of the film, then, is a picaresque bildungsroman, but Anderson takes his time in getting to that heart, taking us through four levels of narration before we reach the central story, which therefore has the status of a half-remembered dream, or of a tall tale improvised on the spot.
This structure is an example of Anderson’s perennial passion for frames, boxes, and other distancing devices (The Royal Tenenbaums was similarly presented as the film of an apocryphal novel). The Grand Budapest Hotel begins with a process that effectively unwraps the gift box of Anderson’s confection, layer by layer, until we get to the bejeweled goodie within. In fact, the film is the inverse of the hotel itself: where that stately establishment is all glitter and grandeur on the outside, with some squalor and mundanity within (Gustave’s own quarters are cramped, monastic), the story’s “wrapping” is as plain as it can be, taking us from the drabness of modern Zubrowka, to the glum nadir of the hotel’s decline, finally to the dreamlike splendor of old. The film is like a diamond wrapped in an old newspaper, covered in a further layer of plain brown paper, then in a plastic supermarket bag.
As we know, Anderson has a thing about partitioning: look at the complex geometry of the homes in The Royal Tenenbaums (02) and Moonrise Kingdom (12), or the Mondrian-like division into rectangles of the train compartments in The Darjeeling Limited (07). Here too everything is about boxes and enclosures, and their eventual opening (even the leather coat worn by Willem Dafoe’s murderous goon reveals a secret pocket). The hotel is mirrored in other hyper-organized spaces: the museum where Jeff Goldblum’s Deputy Kovacs meets his end; the dark, crypt-like interiors of the chateau of Tilda Swinton’s ancient dowager (it’s filled, at the reading of her will, by hordes of black-clad grotesques à la Charles Addams: this is the closest Anderson has come to making a Tim Burton film); and the prison from which Gustave makes an escape that’s orchestrated magnificently as a chaotic but mechanical comic fugue. All these spaces are prisons in their way, not least the hotel: what are its guests if not inmates, its liveried staff if not wardens?
In this universe, everything comes in boxes, figuratively and literally: the interior of a train sleeping car is as neatly “gridded” as the front page of the local newspaper. The world is even filled literally with boxes, the bright pink packages from Mendl’s Patisserie; when Zero and his beloved (Saoirse Ronan) fall through the roof of a Mendl’s truck, they find themselves in a box full of boxes. (In his preface to Matt Zoller Seitz’s book The Wes Anderson Collection, novelist Michael Chabon compares Anderson’s mania with framing to that of artist Joseph Cornell: a “magic” method for capturing the fragments of a lost, perhaps imagined world).
It seemed that Anderson’s mania for hyper-detailed geometric perfection had gone as far as it could in Moonrise Kingdom; after that, surely he’d have to loosen up. But no—in The Grand Budapest Hotel, he’s gone further, embraced his fetish with absolute exuberance, and made his most explicit and unashamed celebration of artifice to date. Not everyone, as Todd McCarthy says, will like it. And that’s a point that the film concedes with some wit: this is partly a story about people “not getting it,” not realizing that they’re living in a fragile fake utopia that’s about to evaporate. (The film’s belated belle époque is not a utopia for all: for the hotel patrons, yes, but not for servants like the immigrant Zero, who has come from a brutal background, his village razed to the ground in a war.) And this is a story about people not realizing the value of what lies around them. The plot is built around the pursuit of a supposedly priceless and magnificent painting, Boy with Apple by one Johannes van Hoytl. All the other paintings in the room, Gustave opines, are worthless junk—but that junk includes an apocryphal, and very raunchy, Egon Schiele canvas that meets a bad end, lost to history in the flash of one character’s temper.
If The Grand Budapest Hotel turns to be Anderson’s most popular film, it will also be the point at which non-admirers declare most vociferously that they have had enough. In the Financial Times, Nigel Andrews complained that the film was about as nourishing as a crate of Fabergé eggs: “not a sustaining calorie, narrative or dramatic, in sight.” Kyle Buchanan on Vulture complained that the director’s and DP Robert Yeoman’s increasing obsession with rectilinear blocking (“Wes Anderson characters have lost the ability to walk in diagonal lines”) makes “[Anderson’s] movie world . . . flatter than ever.” The harshest critique comes from David Thomson in The New Republic, who sees The Grand Budapest Hotel as “a rococo dead end, a ferment of decoration, unwitting complacency and ignorance.” Not the least of his complaints is that Anderson credits the film as inspired by the writings of Austrian author Stefan Zweig (1881-1942), which seems to have offended him as presumptuous in the same way that some of us thought it was cheeky for Lars von Trier to dedicate his Antichrist to Tarkovsky.
Thomson accuses Anderson of “indifference to the depth of experience that preoccupied Zweig,” and perhaps he has a point insofar as The Grand Budapest Hotel seems only tenuously connected to Zweig’s writing. The filmmaker has said that he was inspired partly by the hotel setting of Zweig’s story “The Post Office Girl,” and by the device of the level-by-level approach to a narrative core, a method hardly peculiar to Zweig. Personally, I feel that an overall flavor of Zweig is simply one layer of resemblance in the film: that the theme of servitude in old Europe’s service industry is far more reminiscent of Bohumil Hrabal’s 1971 novel I Served the King of England (filmed in 2006 by Jiri Menzel). I also get strong bouquets of another Austrian writer, Joseph Roth (notably, his end-of-empire novel The Radetzky March), of Hergé’s Tintin adventure King Ottokar’s Sceptre, plus Josef Lada’s illustrations to The Good Soldier Svejk. Then there is another avowed influence of Anderson’s, the cycle of Thirties and Forties Hollywood films about a half-imagined, half-remembered Europe created by émigré directors: Wilder, Sternberg, Mamoulian et al.
Thomson delivers a crushingly harsh verdict on Anderson’s film: “It relates to the atmosphere and texture of Stefan Zweig like an achingly sweet pastry on a tin plate at Auschwitz-Birkenau.” There’s a long, complex debate to be had on the question of whether it is appropriate or adequate to view the horrors of modern history through a lens of humor or indeed whimsy—a debate that would have to span from To Be or Not to Be and The Great Dictator to their echo in the Zig-Zag militia in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
If you take a moralizing view, then yes, it could be considered unforgivably trivializing both of European history and of Zweig’s own experience to portray Nazi-like figures as cartoons, eight decades after Lubitsch’s and Chaplin’s films. But The Grand Budapest Hotel is, in any case, about something other than good people and snarling baddies, for its heroes are deeply flawed and deluded. Gustave is vain, arrogant, supercilious, venal, and a liar, not least to himself: he vows never to part with the precious painting he has inherited from his dead mistress, then almost, in the same breath, makes plans to sell it and escape to luxury. The film ends with elderly Zero paying homage to his mentor as the last bastion of civilization in a world increasingly becoming barbaric—although Anderson’s tabletop-model Europe, with its miniature mock-Nazis, is hardly as brutal as the real 20th century. But Anderson is only too aware of the place of fantasy in his picture, as the older Zero remarks of Gustave: “To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he even entered it. But I must say, he maintained the illusion with grace.”
Anderson’s “world of yesterday” (to use the title of Zweig’s memoir) has not merely vanished—it never really existed. It’s a gorgeous, fastidious reconstruction of a dream, and that glittery chimera contains its own material and moral rot, its own deep sadness and horror (look how many characters die in the film, and how horribly). It may have been superfluous for Anderson to flag up his homage to Zweig in the credits, but it’s honest of him. To find him wanting in comparison to that writer’s seriousness and depth of feeling is beside the point. The nostalgia for a lost world that never was is more acute in The Grand Budapest Hotel than in any of Anderson’s films, and it’s the flippancy of the whole enterprise, the dandyish panache so resembling Gustave’s, that makes the superficiality so poetic—or if you like, so paradoxically deep. It is a film that maintains its illusion with grace—and ruefully unmasks that illusion every bit as gracefully.
Stefan
Zweig, Wes Anderson, and a Longing for the Past Richard Brody from The New Yorker, March 14, 2014
The Grand
Budapest Hotel from Wes Anderson - World ... Joanne Laurier from The World Socialist Web
Site, March 25, 2014
I'm
Trying to Love Wes Anderson, That Miniaturist Puppet-Master Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice, March 5, 2014
Grand
Budapest Hotel - New Republic David
Thomson
The
Tormented Life of Stefan Zweig : The New Yorker Leo Carey, August 27, 2012
“The
Grand Budapest Hotel”: Wes Anderson's bittersweet historic Andrew O’Hehir
'The
Grand Budapest Hotel' Review: Journey Into ... - Pajiba Daniel Carlson
THE
GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL Review - Badass Digest
David Ehrlich
ErikLundegaard.com
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Budapest Hotel / The Dissolve Scott
Tobias
Checking
into The Grand Budapest Hotel / The Dissolve A conversation with Keith Phipps, Nathan
Rabin, and Tasha Robinson, March 10, 2014
Berlin
Review: Wes Anderson's 'The Grand Budapest Hotel ... Jessica Kiang from The Playlist
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Grand Budapest Hotel is Wes Anderson's most mature ...
Wes
Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel: A Marzipan Monstrosity Stephanie Zacharek from The Village Voice,
also seen here: Wes
Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel: A Marzipan ...
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The Grand Budapest
Hotel - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andersson,
Roy
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Swedish
absurdist Roy Andersson's mortifying sensibility, found in almost crystalline
form in Songs From the Second Floor (2000), can leave a haunting crease
in your memory. A series of tableaux as perspectivally extravagant as they are
thoroughly dehumanized, Songs is a masterpiece of brooding
orchestration, but it's only the third feature Andersson's made in 30 years.
He's been otherwise busy as a director of commercials, which constitute this
retro's first evening—plus two shorts, the first of which, Something
Happened (1987), is a large, scary dissertation on AIDS often resembling
Arbus portraits come to hesitant life. Similarly, the Kafkaesque World of
Glory (1991) begins with one of the most chilling three-minute shots in the
history of movies. The second feature, Giliap (1975), is a portentous
romance that signals the evolution of Andersson's point of view, making his
first, A Swedish Love Story (1970), a refreshing alternative. Set in the
gauziest summer imaginable, it's one of the era's great films about
adolescence, as two blond teens circle each other despite the adult world
self-decimating around them. Andersson's long takes are gorgeous, and the hope
hadn't yet drained away.
SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR (Sånger från
andra våningen) A- 93
Sweden France Denmark Norway Germany
A savage take on greed in a godless society, despair wins out over glamour
For the first 20 minutes or so this slice of Nordic surrealism - a blend of millennial metaphorical allegory and bizarre black comedy - looks set to become some sort of hilarious masterpiece, before the novelty begins to wear off and the lack of a strong narrative thread takes its toll. That said, its very loosely connected vignettes - largely centred on elderly office, workers and their families coping with redundancy, inept magicians, bad hospitals and unending traffic jams - are visually striking, frequently fertile in their dark, deadpan inventiveness, and now and then truly evocative of apocalyptic insanity. A genuinely fascinating oddity, though its echoes of late Buñuel and Aki Kaurismäki provoke comparisons from which Andersson's film inevitably suffers.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
The turn of the millennium
brought no shortage of apocalyptic visions, fueled by the common anxiety that
the 21st century put humanity on borrowed time, portending an era's end more
than a new beginning. But before the Earth falls to dust, most doomsayers at
least offer a morsel of redemption or salvation to the faithful, one last
chance for people to rescue their souls from the great abyss. There's no such
opportunity in Swedish director Roy Andersson's spectacularly mordant black
comedy Songs From The Second Floor, which takes place in a world so
bleak, spirit-crushing, and godless that its death isn't even worth mourning.
Pasty-faced businessmen and women shuffle to their destination in a zombie
parade while flagellating each other with ropes, a bright little girl gets
shoved off a cliff in a pointless ritual sacrifice, and "the road"
not only leads to nowhere, but charts a path for a traffic jam stretching into
the horizon. Channeling Ingmar Bergman by way of Terry Gilliam's Brazil,
the film's deadpan vignettes offer comedy as the last gesture in the face of
oblivion, a defiant "Ha!" to break God's silence and momentarily
leaven the mood. Noted mainly for his innovative commercials, Andersson shoots
in static, deep-focus compositions that owe more to painting than cinema, with
some shots so obsessively detailed that they took several days just to set up.
Since a conventional narrative would likely limit its scope, Songs From The
Second Floor doesn't have much of a story, instead unfolding in a series of
astonishing tableaux, sequenced roughly in tone from bad to worse. The hero,
such as he is, is middle-aged, hollow-eyed sad-sack Lars Nordh, who
deliberately burns down his own furniture store for the insurance money. (When
the adjusters arrive, he tries to pass off a pile of ash as a Chippendale
sofa.) Now out of work, he's further tormented by son Tommy Johansson, whose
mirthless poetry landed him in a mental hospital and a friend who committed
suicide just to get out of debt. Other random urbanites fare just as poorly,
including a magician (Lucio Vucina) who saws into a volunteer for his
"magic box" trick and a desperate salesman who turns to hawking
crucifixes as a last resort. With merciless economy, the latter gag slays two venerable
institutions, capitalism and religion, in one swift blow: Not only have
religious icons been commodified, Andersson implies, but they're not worth a
dime on the open market. ("How can you make money on a crucified
loser?" the salesman bitterly complains.) Andersson's breathtaking
cynicism could never be taken seriously as drama, but comedy has always fed
lustily on discontent, which allows his grim ironies to take root in even the
most barren soil. Though the laughs in Songs From The Second Floor tend
to stick in the throat, they're also cathartic and oddly comforting, because
the world outside the movie theater is bound to look cheerier than the one on
the screen.
Ingmar Bergman once called Roy Andersson the world’s best director of
commercials. The statement is almost too weird to wrap your mind around; one
wonders, to begin with, where the director of The Seventh Seal might
have run across a commercial – does he watch TV? What? Game shows? Sex
and the City? – and how it is that he’s familiar enough with the form to
know and compare directors. As it happens, the very weirdness of the statement
embodies perfectly the timbre of Andersson’s 2002 comedy Songs from the
Second Floor. From the dizzying commercial pinnacle to which he’s ascended,
Andersson has a unique perspective on the world below. And the view from up
there is weird indeed.
In Andersson’s world, normal human phenomena take on the inscrutability of the
surreal. When a magician accepts a volunteer from the audience, for instance,
we expect the volunteer to not actually get sawn in half; Andersson asks us to
drop that expectation. Traffic jams, in the real world, have limited durations
and a determinable cause; in Songs from the Second Floor, they stretch
on through the night and no one knows why. Work produces income, but in
Andersson’s film no one can afford to work anymore, and the man who
holds the explanatory memo – a very complicated, problematic memo – has lost
it, and it can’t be redone.
The plot of Songs from the Second Floor defies explanation just as
surely as its traffic jam, and even an outline is useless. The theme of
the film pertains to the millennial end of the world, as evidenced in the fall
of industry and the disintegration of the social fabric in the nameless
Scandinavian city in which the action unfolds, and the huge cast of characters
includes sundry pasty-faced businessmen, a senile millionaire who controls a
majority of his country’s real estate and who is prone to returning greetings
with a Nazi salute, a young man driven mad by poetry, the hapless magician, a
salesman hawking statues of Jesus, and many more. Andersson brings their
stories together loosely, building to a crescendo in which the country’s
industrialists flee en masse, self-flagellants take to the streets, business
leaders resort to magic to restore the economy, and the dead return from their
graves.
Matching the serenely wigged-out content is Andersson’s inimitable style. Songs
from the Second Floor is told in a series of 50-odd tableaux, recorded in
long takes by a static camera, a kind of mise-en-scène taken to rational
limits and beyond. Andersson holds these scenes for uncomfortable durations
while virtually unpredictable events unfold within the frame. In one scene at a
mental hospital, for instance, a father bemoans his son’s condition to a doctor
in a white coat who is making notes; before long another doctor appears in the
hallway and reclaims his coat and notebook from what turns out to have been a
patient all along. (“There was a wallet in here,” the doctor says upon
examining the coat, but it turns out he has his wallet after all.) In another,
a board meeting descends into chaos when one of the businessmen present
observes that the building across the street is moving; the resulting jam of
hysterical CEOs and vice-presidents at the doorway is resolved only when one
person present calmly asserts to the others that the door opens in, not out.
Songs from the Second Floor is a unique (and sadly overlooked) document
of the surreal at work within the confines of modern society. Its new DVD
release, from New Yorker Films, includes illuminating commentary from
Andersson, a few worthwhile deleted scenes, and technical information about the
shoot that only serves to deepen the mystery of the mesmerizing and hilarious
final product.
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The
most highly acclaimed Swedish art film in recent memory, Roy Andersson's
supremely crafted, millennium-pegged Songs From the Second Floor harks
back to the glory days of Scando-spiritual anguish, but with a difference. This
is slapstick Ingmar Bergman—wacky yet depressing, like the performance of
onetime Bergman stalwart Max Von Sydow in Minority Report. "How can
you make money with a crucified loser?" a would-be merchant of religious
paraphernalia asks the movie's nominal protagonist, Kalle, a furniture merchant
who has just torched his store.
How indeed? Grimly
fastidious, if not overweeningly perfectionist, Songs From the Second Floor
took a Kubrickian four years to complete. Partially self-financed, it's the
59-year-old Andersson's first feature since 1976. (In the interim, he became
something of an international cult figure for his elaborate television
commercials—described by Bergman, no less, as the best in the world.) Every
aspect of Songs From the Second Floor bespeaks precision and control.
Andersson uses a wide-angle lens and eschews close-ups; he favors one-shot
scenes and only once in the entire movie does he move his camera.
Bathed in a cool bluish
light, these mainly studio-shot compositions evoke a generic, emptied-out city
inhabited by a variety of pasty failures, overweight burghers, and middle-aged
cranks, some in modified clown-face. Every one of Andersson's (nonprofessional)
actors has been selected for their physical type—Lars Nordh, who plays Kalle,
was discovered shopping at Ikea. All objects feel similarly imported into the
frame. The action is accompanied by stately hurdy-gurdy music and has a
carousel trajectory. The narrative, evidently constructed by Andersson scene by
scene, typically follows a few characters for a few shots, moves on, and
eventually circles back.
Despite some deadpan,
Jacques Tati-like orchestration and occasional sight gags, there's no real
pleasure in the game—Songs From the Second Floor is more absurd than
funny. A portly old stage magician clumsily saws into someone's stomach—then,
in the next shot, pokes his puzzled head in on the hospital corridor where his
subject lies groaning. Much of it is simply nasty. The camera stares
impassively down an endless office corridor as a just-fired employee grovels in
vain. (Outside, a crowd watches in silence as, across the street, a foreign
messenger is gratuitously stabbed by a gang of youths.)
The hapless arsonist
Kalle, whose sooty face suggests a perpetual Ash Wednesday, meanwhile makes the
rounds of his own particular pilgrim's progress. He visits the mental hospital
to rant at his now catatonic son, a former poet, or installs himself amid the
wreckage of his burned-out store, halfheartedly attempting to flummox the
insurance inspector. Not that the authorities care—it's the apocalypse, after
all. On the street, a noisy procession of flagellants in business suits wend
their way through the doomsday traffic.
As the movie progresses
and the 20th century approaches its end, the tableaux grow increasingly
metaphoric. A few scenes feature a toothless, wild-eyed former army general
kept restrained in a hospital crib and caught perched on the bedpan as
uniformed well-wishers arrive for his 100th birthday celebration. The general,
who extends his best wishes to Hermann Göring, is scarcely the only signifier
of human frailty. Wandering through a railway station, where a passenger has
slipped and fallen, lying on the platform with his arm stuck in a train door,
Kalle encounters the walking dead—a suicide from whom he borrowed money (that
he conveniently no longer has to repay), as well as a boy hanged by the Germans
during World War II.
Searching for God, or
at least simple Christian virtue, in a wasteland of exploitation, Songs From
the Second Floor strives for some absolute image of despair—and fails. The
movie's big scene could have been swiped from Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery":
An impassive crowd of costumed religious honchos, civil dignitaries, and
industrial titans attempts to ward off the end of the world (or at least world
capitalism) with an elaborate ritual execution. Afterward they gather together
at the Grand Hotel to glumly mull it over: "We have sacrificed the bloom
of youth—what more can we do?" (Perhaps the filmmaker feels the same way.)
Bergman, whose end-of-the-world film Shame similarly traffics in mass
humiliation, knew when to move in for the kill.
Easier to respect than enthuse over, Andersson's rigorous personal vision is not only distanced but distancing. Songs From the Second Floor opens with an epigraph from the early-20th-century Peruvian Communist poet César Vallejo: "Beloved be the one who sits down." This line, repeated several times throughout the movie, could be addressed to the spectator—perhaps in sarcasm more than pity.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Songs from the Second Floor ... Michael
Bracewell from Sight and Sound, March
2001
not coming to a theater near you (Leo Goldsmith)
Kamera.co.uk Yoram
Allon
Roy Andersson Interview Film in Context
PopMatters Elbert Ventura
DVD Verdict Dan Mancini
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil
Young) : "Tarkovsky lite"
Looking Closer (Jeffrey Overstreet)
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
The SF, Horror and
Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Songs from the
Second Floor Gerald Peary
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
DVDBeaver.com
- Review [Gary W. Tooze]
YOU, THE LIVING (Du Levande) B+ 91
Be pleased then, you the living, in your
delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe’s ice-cold wave will lick your escaping
foot.
—Goethe
Perhaps
only Kaurismäki parallels this weird world. From the opening shot, this film has the same artfully
composed, washed out greenish gray color palette, shot by Gustav Danielsson,
and uses the same method of tying together seemingly unrelated short sketches
that were so effectively used in his earlier film, SONGS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR
(2000). Most are humorous, some of them
insanely funny, especially the court sequence leading to the execution where the offended party sits and eats
popcorn, probably the best sequence in the film, or every scene
that has that whining, bitching, and constantly complaining fat lady, the
perpetually unhappy woman who sees no end to her neverending misery, who gloats
in the wretchedness of the universe, claiming nobody cares about her, telling
her biker boyfriend (and his dog) to get the hell away from her, but “maybe
later, I’ll stop by.” Some of the early
scenes are among the funniest, as they completely take us by surprise, where
the timing and deadpan acting are superb, such as a slowly developing sequence
that culminates with a feeble old man with a walker oblivious to the fact that
he’s dragging a dog (that looks like a sock puppet) on his back, helplessly
tied to his walker, supposedly in agonizing discomfort as the old man slowly
makes his way down the street. But many
sketches are not so memorable, and as an entire whole, the set pieces are not
as spectacular as SONGS, nor do they all fit together thematically as
well. Instead it’s a crazy picture of a
bleak life in the universe, where the always uptempo jazz music is a contrast
to the dull uniformity and lack of personal identity that saps the human
spirit, that deadens our ability to resist some of the more outrageous
government-out-of-control impositions.
Many sequences repeat
themselves with slight variations, such as the last call for alcohol
announcement with a ring from his bell by the bartender, where the nearly empty
bar suddenly fills to near capacity proportions, where one solitary young girl
keeps reappearing, eventually having a scene all to herself, where she falls in
love with her favorite guitarist, where their privacy suddenly swells to
unheard of heights of celebrity popularity.
Mostly the sketches honor the absurdity of living, such as the naked 300
pound Valkyrie in a war helmet who moans incessantly while screwing a skinny
little old man who complains bitterly about the sharp downturn in his personal
finances. Uniquely amusing, using
brilliant comic timing, this is exaggerated, over the top, occasionally grotesque
or morbid humor. You get the feeling the
cast must have had a blast making this picture, where after every completed
take, they would be ushered over to that bar where giant steins of beer would
be waiting for them, where overhead a banner would read: Hey if this is Norway, Denmark, France,
Germany, and Sweden, then I want to go!
Dogs, dreams and
all things brass crop up around every pallid corner in You, the Living,
a surreal twist on human life in all its depressing glory from Swedish writer
and director Roy Andersson. A series of nutty vignettes – all of which may or
may not have something to do with the bass drummer and tuba player of the
Louisiana Brass Band – uncovers the lighter side of neuroses and finds
anxieties in everyday communication. The long, artfully composed shots and the
spare dialogue mean You, the Living feels a little like a chain of comic
sketches, but the catastrophic weather, fascist imagery, unwavering irony and
impossibly wan faces ensure that the greasy, filthy core beneath never remains
hidden for too long.
As austere, ingenious, hilarious and miserable as the Swedish director's 2000 wonder Songs From the Second Floor, Roy Andersson's fourth feature includes a more romantic and hopeful strain of emotions than was previously palpable in his gloriously dyspeptic take on the human condition. Named after a phrase by Goethe, You, The Living is comprised of stark, mordantly funny vignettes that portray people who are desperate for others to acknowledge them yet are blind to anyone's pain but their own. A brass band, a house on a train and a failed magic trick all figure prominently in a movie that confirms Andersson's status as one of world cinema's true originals.
Screengrab Mike D’Angelo
Asked to name the most
singular, sui generis movie of the last decade or so, I'd probably plump for
Roy Andersson's Songs from the Second Floor, a series of apocalyptic tableaux
shot on massive, forced-perspective studio sets. The winner of a Special Jury
Prize at
review: Du levande (You,
the Living) (Cannes 2007) Boyd van
Hoeij from European-Films
The dreams and nightmares of today’s society come to
tragicomic life in Roy Andersson’s Du levande (You, the Living), which is part
of the Un certain regard section here at the Cannes Film Festival. The dark yet
at turns hilarious take on the state of man in the 21st century is again a very
successful look at the desperate mess of modern life. Like his previous
The characters in Andersson’s films are not so much
protagonists as they are recognisable faces in his typical tableaux vivants,
always filmed with a stationary camera and an unerring eye for detail. In one
of the film’s first vignettes, Mia, a sturdy woman sitting on a park bench,
laments that no one understands her, not even her lover or her dog. To
underline the point, she breaks out in song, which raises the eyebrows of a
passer-by peeping through the trees.
Loneliness and cruelty come closely linked in Andersson’s worldview, and Mia is
later seen at her mother’s, who is preparing dinner. After stating that she is
happy to be there, she calls her mother a sadist for serving non-alcoholic beer
with such a nice dinner. “With all the misery in the world, how can we not get
drunk?” she laments.
A man stuck in traffic recounts the viewers a terrible nightmare he had in
which he attended a family dinner of a family that was not his. The party ended
with the man being strapped to an electrical chair as the family (still not
his) looks on, nibbling on popcorn in anticipation of the execution.
Thankfully, he is only stuck in traffic in real life.
Filmed in washed-out pastels and slightly hazy interiors, the film creates its
own parallel and slightly askew worldview much like Andersson’s previous film
(and the films from Aki Kaurismäki from neighbouring
Du levande runs just too long to be
fully engaging throughout and has one particular sequence involving a
university professor and his money-hungry son that simply does not work. A
hopeful storyline involving a young girl in love with a rock guitarist is
played just right, however, finding the right balance between hope fulfilment
and humour. Unfortunately for her, she was just dreaming.
Light
Without Mercy: YOU, THE LIVING | Keyframe ... - Fandor Adrian Martin, August 19, 2014
Everything’s
Funnier With Weltanschauung J.R.
Jones from The Reader, August 20,
2009
You, the Living (Roy
Andersson, 2007) Ignatiy
Vishnevetsky at Mubi, August 2, 2009
Cutting
Room Reviews [Yaseen-Ali Yusufali]
Screen International Jonathan Romney
You, the Living Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
You, the Living
(2007) Ferdy on Films
A PIGEON SAT ON A BRANCH
REFLECTING ON EXISTENCE (En duva satt på en gren och funderade på
tillvaron) B+ 90
Sweden Germany
Norway France (101 mi)
2014
The final installment
of Roy Andersson’s “trilogy about being a human being,” coming after SONGS FROM
THE SECOND FLOOR (2000) and YOU, THE LIVING (2007), turning this into a nearly
two decade long experimental view of human existence, as seen with a modernist
sensibility accentuating the absurdity of human behavior. Perhaps only
ERASERHEAD (1977) displays this level of surrealistic artistic sensibility,
where what’s showing up onscreen could only come out of the heads of such completely
original artists, where no one else displays their level of assuredness. While SONGS created the most explosive
impact, literally something we had never seen before, each successive venture
has been singularly unique artistically, but less effective overall, as we are
treading on familiar territory. Not sure
Andersson had a trilogy in mind when he began this project, but his initial
success came from making such successful, award-winning commercials, directing
over 400 of them, which is how he’s financed his features, though in 1975, he
took a 25-year break from directing feature films. When SONGS was released, the film world sat
up and noticed, as it seemed to come out of nowhere, like a long absent comet
that suddenly blazes across the sky.
With meticulously designed sets, Andersson took seven years to complete
his next film to his exact specifications, and another seven more to finalize
the trilogy, where Andersson’s style, according to a 2009 MOMA exhibit of his
work, MoMA |
Filmmaker in Focus: Roy Andersson, is “stationary
shots characterized by brilliantly conceived tableaux, yet an essential
humanity and focus on the daily lives of working-class people.” Without ever utilizing lead characters, his
primary focus is establishing a precise look with washed out color, creating a
ghoulish and often unworldly mood, using deadpan humor, exaggerated, heavily
stylized acting that lampoons Swedish culture, which includes a fondness for
fat people, the elderly, and people so skeletal that there is barely any flesh
on their bones, their faces painted chalky white to resemble walking corpses. Filmed in long shots where the camera never
moves, Andersson’s sketches are like paintings that come to life, offering
bleak social criticism through a heightened tone of overly morose absurdity and
a lacerating surrealism. Much like
ERASERHEAD’s signature song from the radiator, “In heaven, everything is fine,”
the standard mantra heard throughout the final chapter are recurring cellphone phone
conversations, “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine.” Judging from what we see onscreen, however,
the world is a turbulent place with a prevalence of misery and death always
hovering nearby. Much like the short
stories of Chekhov, conventional action has been replaced by a theater of mood
and atmosphere, where instrinsic to the satirical tone established in each
sequence is a fully realized, more profound underlying drama of realism.
The first Andersson
feature to be filmed in digital, much of what transpires takes place in
Gothenburg, opening with a series of cleverly ironic death scenes that display
exaggerated morbid humor, where a man on a cruise ship remains dead on the
floor immediately after ordering a sandwich and a beer, with ship officials
hovering over him, and while his inert body remains the focus of the frame, the
waitress is forced to ask the surrounding diners if any would care for a free
meal. One elderly customer expresses an
interest in the beer, nearly stepping over the body to retrieve it. Accentuating the ridiculousness of the human
condition, we are introduced to a hapless pair of traveling salesmen, Jonathan
(Holger Andersson) and Sam (Nils Westblom), two dour and humorless men who have
come to collect their share of the earnings from the sale of their products in
a small shop, discussing the inventory of specific novelty items, like rubber
masks or plastic vampire teeth, with the saleswoman behind the counter. But when they ask for money, she steps behind
the door to ask her unseen husband what to do, telling them to come back in a
few days, a tactic they refuse, as they’ve sent them repeated notices and it’s
now time to pay up. When it becomes
evident they mean business, the door finally opens a sliver and we catch a glimpse
of the man in the back still dressed in his robe, lying on the sofa, as if
watching TV, where we hear his screaming cries yelling at the top of his lungs,
“We have no money!” as the men are seen repossessing what few items remain in
the shop. It’s hard to decide where to
place one’s sympathies, as each side is equally pathetic, but it does
illustrate how close to the edge many people exist. Andersson borrows the music from the end of
Buñuel’s VIRIDIANA (1961), a barebones Rockabilly rock ‘n’ roll song called
“Shimmy Doll,” Ashley
Beaumont - Shimmy Doll - YouTube (2:00), where customers in a contemporary
bar are playing it on the jukebox, when two soldiers dressed in 17th century
army uniforms open the bar doors and stand guard, announcing the arrival of
Swedish King Charles XII (Viktor Gyllenberg), a particularly militaristic
figure known for his bloodthirsty aggression who reigned from 1697 to 1718,
entering on his horse, ordering all the women out of the bar, attacking them
with whips, having his men assault another man who he identifies as “a sneaky Russian,”
chasing him down the street, whipping him all the way, expressing the pent-up
furor and rage of men marching off to war to invade Russia. Later on we see the remains of a ragtag group
of walking wounded, tattered and beaten, retreating from battle, where the
exact same circumstance plays out with the men standing guard at the door
before the announcement of the King, whose horse is pulled into the bar with
the King lying over the saddle. His men
pull him off into a chair, as it’s announced he needs to use the toilet. One of his men checks the security of the facilities,
only to return with the humiliating announcement that the King will have to
wait, as the toilet is currently occupied.
Somehow all the previous fire and brimstone is gone, as instead the King
must languish in his own private torment.
The title was inspired
by the 16th century painting The Hunters in the Snow by Pieter
Bruegel the Elder, a rural wintertime scene where the birds perched in the
branches of the tree in the foreground have a panoramic view overlooking all,
where Andersson imagines what they might be thinking about the actions and
strange mannerisms of humans. Winner of
the Golden Lion for Best Film at Venice, where the competition included Birdman
or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Black
Souls (Anime Nere), and Manglehorn,
where it’s easy to see how Andersson’s cryptic vision could stand out. Two scenes are perhaps most significant, one
is a euphoric musical centerpiece sequence in a beer hall known as Limping
Lotta’s in Gothenburg, where the bar hostess yells in the ear of an elderly
customer asking if he’d like another drink, which of course he does, once
awakened to the reality, where she announces he’s been drinking every night in
the same establishment for 60 years.
“That’s a lot of shots,” someone suggests. The scene suddenly shifts to the same man
sitting in the same bar in 1943, where Lotta and her entire customer base break
out into song, A
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence clip - Limping Lotta YouTube
(2:58), creating a delightful piece of living musical theater that continually
builds in intensity, becoming a ravishing Brechtian spectacle of proper beer
hall decorum, where everyone can get a shot of liquor in exchange for a
kiss. This is as intensely exciting as
the film becomes, drawing the audience into the social implications of a small
moment in history. The other has darker
and much more tragic implications, which is immediately evident to viewers, as
the sweeping historical context stands out in a film that otherwise contains
small comically absurd vignettes, so there’s a growing awareness as this
sequence proceeds. Black slaves tied together
by ropes and chains are herded by Colonial-era British soldiers into a giant
cylinder drum made by Boliden (a Swedish mining company sued and determined
responsible for toxic poisoning in Chile in the 1980’s from tons of melted
copper residue left behind on waste dumps where children routinely played) with
what appears to be musical airholes.
Once locked in, the cylinder turns over a burning fire, like a
rotisserie, as the slaves are literally roasted alive, yet break out into song,
where screams are mysteriously transformed into a kind of mournful music, where
an upper class establishment nearby of elderly rich dressed in formal evening
wear opens the doors leading to a terrace view to observe the evening’s
sinister entertainment as a hostess fills their glasses with champagne. It’s a diabolical metaphor
for the horrors inflicted by European colonialism where the viewers literally
can’t believe their eyes. Overall, each
of the 39 filmed vignettes is elegantly defined by the easily understood
simplicity on display, where there is little to no action, but the power of
suggestion from each sequence builds up over time, creating a kind of skewed
and imbalanced universe where humans are known to roam. While dramatically inert, much of this is
compacted into cleverly designed tiny packages that are visually inspired and
simply unforgettable.
Ambrož Pivk
International Cinephile Society
Ending the festival on a very high note, I was unfamiliar with Andersson’s previous work but was drawn in right from the beginning. Built on a series of only partially connected but thematically coherent vignettes, Andersson creates a subtle, touching examination of an ordinary person’s experience of existence, never touching the subject explicitly philosophically but rather letting the audience transform themselves into the characters’ situations. The film still has a beautifully constructed arc, starting with a number of excellent comedic scenes and funny recurring motifs (phone conversations always going “I’m glad to hear you’re doing well”) that gradually feel less and less funny until the film ends with a sense of melancholy and bitterness. The twist that it makes to arrive to that point is pretty brilliant, with almost identical scenes triggering a polar response due to a slight change in tone and the difference in context.
In a way, it’s a calmer, meditative version of Holy Motors. It grabs you in a similar way, with intrigue rather than exposition and takes you on a roller coaster of emotions and unanswered questions. Like Holy Motors, it contains a euphoric musical centerpiece sequence that could have easily felt out of context if done incorrectly, but this way, it feels perfect. The film carefully leaves blanks for each viewer to fill in, which makes it an intensely personal experience. It’s a grand cinematic achievement with astonishing mise-en-scène in its generally very long sequences as well as warm, rich cinematography. It’s absurd, it’s real, it’s surprising, it’s oh so emotional. The Golden Lion was absolutely deserved.
Celluloid Liberation Front
Cinema Scope
A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence is Roy Andersson’s third installment in his trilogy of films “about being a human being.” Regrettably, said trilogy has been on a downward trajectory from the original brilliance of Songs from the Second Floor through the less impressive but still enjoyable You, the Living and now ends, with Pigeon, on a decidedly less inspired note. Andersson’s trademark visual complexion is still here: listless beiges and stone-washed blues graced with a dispiritingly unearthly pallour. What is missing, unfortunately, is his deliciously dry humour. In outline, the absurdist charge of Anderson’s earlier work is still present here, but we can’t really feel the glacial warmth of his affectionate misanthropy. Pigeon feels like Andersson doing a diligent impression of himself: it’s a play without a playwright, a scream without a sound. Even the most inspired moments are burdened by the weight of worn-out contrivances, still brilliant but without that enlivening spark; e.g., the torture blues machine, a giant metallic cylinder fitted out with gramophone horns and then filled with chained slaves by colonial soldiers. When flames start warming the cylinder up, a beautiful wailing sound start coming out of the infernal machine, while a zombie-like crowd of diners stares in awe from a distance—the same distance the director has travelled between his inventive first installment and this disappointing epilogue.
While you might not guess as much from the parodically long title, A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence also has its mind on man’s inhumanity to man and the fact that there’s no escaping the past. Other than being shot on digital (and not for the better), Roy Andersson’s first new feature in seven years does not exactly stake out new ground: its long-take, wide-screen tableaus are populated with his usual dumpy, woebegone figures of fun, most of them made up to look as pale as corpses and walking as elegantly as zombies. The episodes are like elaborations on single-panel newspaper comics: a dying hospital patient clutches her handbag to the frustration of her adult children; a king and his entourage inexplicably appear at a modern-day bar, where his highness takes a shining to a young man.
Andersson’s deadpan humor has always cut both ways in his pictures of habit-ridden humans: bovine, potentially harmless, but capable of causing great suffering. Here he restages the devastating truck-gassing scene of his 1991 short World of Glory with a thoroughly off-putting scene of murder for show: British colonial soldiers lead Africans into a giant cask-like contraption that cooks them and channels their moans through trumpets. But in the day-to-day scenes, “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine” becomes the film’s hopeless refrain, heard whenever someone takes a phone call (even when it’s scientist stepping away from a monkey awaiting open-skull experimentation). Andersson remains fascinated by the violence of history lurking beneath the present, whether explicitly or not, and by the politeness that’s spread like a whitewash over civilization. But his punch-line tendencies have a way of making these ideas feel sentimental; the accumulation of orchestrated scenes dilute his film’s impact this time round. As for his two interminably recurring characters here—a pair of sad-sack traveling salesmen who purvey goofy novelty masks that no one wants—I prefer Dave Foley and Kevin McDonald’s “Nobody likes us” duo from The Kids in the Hall.
A
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (Roy ... Jason Anderson from Cinema Scope
Filmmakers have a variety of reasons for enlisting non-professionals for their casts, but often what they seek is a rude, unvarnished vitality that actors can only simulate. Roy Andersson, however, works hard to dull any such spark from his chosen performers. First among his favoured tactics is the makeup that leaves their faces looking pasty, pallid, and largely free of flesh tones. While slightly more colourful, the typical wardrobe selections are unflattering and ill-fitting: business attire for the men, Mennonite casual for the women. Whatever their gender, their gestures and movements betray little evidence of grace even when the characters perform in a dance studio, like one of the many clusters of unhappy folk in A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence.
No matter what the circumstances at hand—which in the new film range from a desultory museum tour to the humiliating retreat of King Charles XII and his forces after their defeat in Russia circa 1709—Andersson’s sleepwalkers struggle to produce any kind of reaction. Typically imprisoned in the middle distance of Andersson’s shots, they are impassive to the point of seeming frozen, their facial features locked in expressions of helpless stupefaction. One can imagine Andersson approaching an actor after a take on a Stockholm soundstage—whose temperature is carefully maintained at four degrees Celsius, as recommended for safe food storage—and quietly imploring, “Can we try that again, except with a little less hope?”
Of all the miserable people in Andersson’s Golden Lion winner, the two novelty-item salesmen who provide the film’s hardiest throughline may be the most forlorn. Jonathan (Holger Andersson) arguably has it the worst of the pair since he’s forever trying on the cheap vampire teeth and hideous “Uncle One-Tooth” mask that the team feebly hawks to a variety of uninterested clients. His shoulders slouching ever lower with each appearance, he eventually gets to assume a more natural position when he spends one of his last scenes head down on a desk in the facility where he and partner Sam (Nils Westblom) are presumably biding their time until death’s release. Not that there’s any dignity in succumbing to the inevitable, judging by the events in an unrelated scene, where a man’s sudden demise on a ship cafeteria floor prompts the staff to implore someone, anyone, to claim his lunch since it’s already been paid for and cannot be returned.
That A Pigeon… still qualifies as one of the year’s most richly amusing and deftly orchestrated films will be no surprise to Andersson’s loyalists. However, the coarsening of the director’s tactics as he hammers away at his favourite notes once again may leave them feeling more of the despondency they see in their on-screen surrogates. The film closes what Andersson has taken to calling his “trilogy about being a human being.” Though the phrase certainly has elements of his mordant humour, it’s also symptomatic of a weakness for over-ambition and overstatement that mars the final entry more than its predecessors. The fact that it’s the least fragmentary and most easily parsed of the three also goes a long way towards explaining why it’s the one that has netted the biggest prize. Compared with the slow disintegration of everything you know and hold dear in 2000’s Songs from the Second Floor (which is grim yet fastidious enough to evoke Time of the Wolf as directed by Jacques Tati) or 2007’s more eagerly phantasmagorical You, the Living (which almost concedes the existence of joy even if it can only live in our dreams), A Pigeon… drives a harder, straighter path to its big ideas, which is both a strength and a liability.
Indeed, however much it shares with the others in the trilogy or the vast array of reference points that Andersson has cited—e.g., Bruegel the Elder, the Neue Sachlichkeit art movement of ’20s Germany, Homer’s Odyssey, Peruvian modernist poet César Vallejo—A Pigeon… may be closest in form and sensibility to his own short film World of Glory (1991). That was the first full demonstration of his mature style and his moment of re-entry into the cinema world after the largely disastrous reception of Giliap (1975) and his far more successful spell directing ads. Several scenes in A Pigeon… seem to bear a direct relationship to World of Glory, most prominently a horrific sequence of African slaves being herded by colonial-era soldiers into a monstrous steampunk musical contraption and then roasted for the entertainment of a wealthy audience.
Nothing in Andersson’s work has been so assaultive as the first scene of the earlier short, in which Holocaust imagery does the work of the latter’s bleakly absurdist refashioning of European colonialism. In the first case, a mass of similarly helpless naked people was shunted and sealed into the back of a truck whose one airhole is then hooked up to a hose leading from the exhaust pipe before being driven away. Played by Klas Gösta Olsson in the already requisite makeup, World of Glory’s unnamed narrator and central figure is among the crowd of gaunt onlookers, though as the truck drives in circles with its suffocating cargo in the back, he looks back toward the camera every so often with a forlorn expression as if to say, “This really is awful, isn’t it? Makes you think.” To be fair, the actual contents of his direct address to viewers in the remainder of World of Glory’s 14 minutes are not as firmly on the nose as some of the lines in A Pigeon…, which can unfortunately shift away from Andersson’s preferred voice for his characters—the flat, featureless vocabulary favoured by emotionally repressed Northern European bureaucrats with shades of Beckett, Monty Python, and one of SCTV’s Ingmar Bergman parodies—and sound rather more like thesis statements about the unmitigated shittiness of things.
“I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine” is the refrain that is most often repeated in A Pigeon… It’s an emblem of the kind of blandly non-committal, vaguely positive talk that Andersson’s characters try their best to employ, mostly since they’re not allowed the release afforded by primal therapy or party drugs. While happiness exists only as a fantasy in You, the Living—most memorably in the young woman’s dream of post-nuptial bliss in an apartment that’s incongruously situated on a moving train—here it can only be part of a romanticized past. More specifically, it’s confined to the ’40s-vintage beer hall known as Limping Lotta’s Bar, where the titular hostess leads a sing-along before gamely dispensing kisses to each and every soldier there.
This brilliant long-take sequence is one of A Pigeon…’s showstoppers. Its impact is matched by the two entrances for King Charles XII in an inexplicably present-day bar that is roughly commandeered by his officers. Like the lovers-on-the-train sequence in You, the Living, these segments elicit a feeling of awe: who else but Andersson could mount scenes that are so logistically daunting and so unabashedly idiosyncratic? Though A Pigeon… is the first Andersson film to be shot digitally, he continues to rely on practical, in-camera effects. To watch all of the king’s soldiers and horses march past the bar’s front windows—and then stumble and hobble back in the other direction after the Russians do their worst—is to witness the crackpot apotheosis of the dearest principles of Hegel, Bazin, and Buster Keaton.
And yet as we continue to track the downward trajectory of the salesmen and other sad sacks, the film falls prey to strategies that seem laborious rather than admirably labour-intensive. Another gruesome sight gag, this time involving the agony of a lab monkey, possesses an anger that feels too brazen for the trilogy’s fussy, fusty universe. Other lamentations sound like just that, and are cried out in voices that belong in our world rather than the more ascetic and aesthetically purified one that Andersson has so carefully devised. Such lapses convey a degree of restlessness, as if he were chafing at the limitations of the deadpan brand he worked so hard to establish. But there’s a hectoring quality to them, too, as if he regarded his viewers to be as dense and unfeeling as the people who fill his frames. Finally we are left to conclude that our reward for meeting the challenges of being human are so pathetically meagre, we’re wise to snatch a dead man’s lunch whenever given the opportunity. Since it apparently comes with a full pint of beer, it could be a worse deal.
Film
of the Week: A Pigeon Sat on a Branch... - Film Comment Jonathan Romney, June 3, 2015
It’s a common tactic, when defending filmmakers who stick doggedly to the same thematic or stylistic ground, to invoke Samuel Beckett. Yes, some artists repeat themselves; Beckett did it all the time, and no one ever saw that as a flaw. I’ve certainly made that case in the past with regard to Swedish filmmaker Roy Andersson, but in some ways Andersson is more Beckettian than Beckett. In reality, the Irish master practiced far more variation than he’s often given credit for: to put it bluntly, a character in one of his plays may be embedded in soil up to the neck, or reduced to a mouth suspended in darkness, or dissolved down to a pure disembodied effect of language.
That’s a lot more variation than we’ve seen from Andersson in the last 25 years. His new film, Venice Golden Lion winner A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, substantially revisits the themes, style, and look of his last feature, You, The Living (07), which was itself a consolidation of his revelatory Songs From the Second Floor (00). That film in turn had expanded the possibilities discovered in Andersson’s 1991 short World of Glory and a whole series of comically black vignettes that earned him a reputation as the most eccentric and consistent auteur working in commercials. (In fact, Songs marked a radical break from the more conventional tenor of Andersson’s first two features, although his 1970 debut A Swedish Love Story is a tender piece of glowing pastoral, well worth tracking down).
It’s perhaps stating the obvious that Andersson is the most Beckettian director working today (although Béla Tarr arguably outdid him in The Turin Horse). He’s Beckettian in his stark, obsessive repetition; in the creation of skeletal fictions played out in spaces that are more of the imagination than of the real world that they ostensibly mimic in trompe l’oeil style; in the sense of human activity and motivation being boiled down to a handful of automatized tics; and in the way that his characters “can’t go on”… but go on anyway. Each of the films in the trilogy inaugurated by Songs seems like a despairing end chapter in an apocalyptic human comedy, a dreadful and decisive full stop (Songs actually ends with a Day of Judgment scenario, as the dead rise up in their masses) and yet there’s always more to be said, always another grim laugh to be squeezed out of the bleak farce that Andersson sees in the human condition.
And he does indeed squeeze out the jokes, no matter how dark. Andersson is more adept at walking the thin line between comedy and despair, lugubriousness and mirth, than anyone except Aki Kaurismäki. Mind you, Kaurismäki, old softie that he is, has found it ever harder to conceal his tenderness for people and their quirks—whereas Andersson, though indisputably a humanist, clearly finds us all a lot harder to love.
Here’s an example of how icy Andersson’s humor can be: in a section near the end of Pigeon, prefaced by the title “Homo Sapiens,” a woman in a science lab chats idly away on the phone, occasionally uttering the phrase that is a mantra throughout the film: “I’m happy to hear you’re doing fine.” This may be a meaningless social nicety, or she may indeed be taking pleasure in a friend’s good fortune (although some social commentators have argued that a capacity to genuinely relish others’ success is something we’re really not hard-wired for).
Either way, the humanity the woman apparently shows here is countered by her ability to entirely ignore what’s happening at screen left: a captive monkey, spread-eagled in some monstrous restraining device, electrodes wired to its skull, contorting its face in a rictus of teeth-bared agony as electric charges are administered. Although the horror is intensely distanced (the tableau composition of the fixed shot, the glum little waltz that plays almost subliminally throughout), the distancing itself makes the scene all the more horrible, and all the more horribly comic, to an almost unbearable degree. What’s unbearable is the very fact that we can recognize this scene as a joke, as black comedy, rather than as pure horror. That we can watch it at all says something fairly damning about us—there’s something to muse on when you’re downloading The Human Centipede 3.
Andersson’s fastidious mise en scène—his huge, elaborate sets are mostly constructed on the sound stages of his own Studio 24 in Stockholm—encourage that distanciation, suspending his vignettes of the human condition like dead matter in preserving jelly: the color scheme of everything, whether clothes, faces, or décor, is glaucous, subaquatic, necrotized (in a Sight & Sound review of Songs, Michael Bracewell memorably referred to “the colors of cold veal, sour milk and sweating mildew”). Andersson’s people, played by actors recruited in the street, are usually—although not always—grotesque and abject, whether obese and ungainly or emaciated and decrepit. This flesh-and-blood cartoonery is Fellini-esque in a familiar sense, and many of his players resemble Nordic equivalents of Duane Hanson sculptures brought to life, but the model Andersson prefers to invoke in interviews is George Grosz and the other artists of the German Neue Sachlichkeit movement.
Some of Andersson’s people still have a semblance of lively energy about them, as if blood still flows in their veins, and there are arguably more of these characters in Pigeon than in the two previous episodes. Most, however, look as if they’re on the verge of death (indeed, some are and expire to comically grim effect) or carry themselves as if already dead. The opening shot of Pigeon shows visitors at a singularly shoddy museum in which the titular pigeon is on display, stuffed in a vitrine; a dinosaur skeleton looms from the next hall; who’s to say that these preserved beasts are any less alive than the humans who glumly observe them?
Grimly enjoyable as ever, though somewhat less flamboyantly spectacular than its predecessors, Pigeon offers the usual collection of vignettes, some stand-alone, others narratively connected, and a few prefaced by announcements of their theme. At the start, we get three “encounters with death,” as a caption puts it, the funniest asking the question: if a man dies having already paid for his cafeteria lunch, what then happens to his meal? (Answer: one man welcomes the offer of a free beer, but there are no takers for the shrimp sandwich.)
There’s arguably more of a narrative thread in this film than in the other two chapters. It involves two glum salesmen, Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holger Andersson), half-heartedly trying to shift a line of joyless amusement items: a set of vampire teeth, a bag that emits hysterical cackling (“a classic”), and a Nosferatu-like fright mask (“Uncle One-Tooth”) that makes you feel you may as well give up laughter altogether as too damn depressing. This duo just want to help people have a good time, they constantly declare—but no one is remotely having one, them least of all. Jonathan in particular is ever more despairing and exhausted, his characteristic utterance a feeble “Ouwww…” sound. At one point, the duo find themselves in a bar which is suddenly invaded by the army of Sweden’s 17th-century King Charles XII, on its way to being soundly defeated by the Russians. This single-take scene is a brilliant feat of choreographed anachronism lasting just under 11 minutes, and involving the only camera move (a barely perceptible pan right) that I spotted in the film. Few directors could have tackled something this loopily unexpected (it’s akin to the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition in Monty Python), yet played it so surreally straight, and with such poise. Another unlikely touch: playing in the bar at the start is the rockabilly number “Shimmy Doll” by Ashley Beaumont The 18th—exactly the type of boisterous but slightly sad Fifties obscurity you’d expect to turn up in a Kaurismäki movie but, in fact, it featured in Buñuel’s Viridiana, and Andersson is presumably using it with homage in mind.
Andersson occasionally offers moments of joy or at least respite, although they’re fragile: two lovers canoodle on a (relatively) sunny beach, while their dog looks on; two young girls blow bubbles on a tiny balcony that looks as if it’s about to snap off from the apartment block it’s attached to. And there’s a wonderful flashback, showing a cellar bar as it was in 1943. The seductive owner “Limping Lotte” doles out shot glasses in exchange for kisses; as servicemen line up to pay the price of a drink, she swoons rapturously in their embraces, the entire company meanwhile singing the bar’s theme song, to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.” It’s a wonderful uplifting moment, an oasis of joy and everyday eroticism; it’s only undercut by a return to the bar today and an ancient, deaf customer, who’s presumably remembering or imagining the place’s better days (what’s more, the same tune is later heard as the melody of the Swedish Army’s march to defeat).
We’re all redeemed, then—so it would seem—by our capacity to find joy even in the midst of desperation. Yet that itself is partly what worries Andersson—our hunger for entertainment at all costs. Late in the film we get a horrible insight into what having a “good time” might actually mean. Immediately after the monkey scene comes another nightmare tableau. English-speaking soldiers in pith helmets herd black captives into an enormous brass drum; fire is started, the heated drum revolves, and the screams of those trapped inside are converted, through trumpets, into an eerie parody of heavenly music. A cutaway then reveals this grisly spectacle as an entertainment laid on for an audience of ancient spectators in evening dress. Then Jonathan, who’s been serving the spectators drinks, narrates the dream he’s just had, all the more horrible for his complicity. He’s none too happy about what’s involved in the business of entertainment, and neither, it seems, is Andersson. Perhaps it’s in the very essence of some people having a “good time” that others will have a very bad time: the logic of Roman circuses, or torture porn. As Jonathan weeps over his predicament, Sam wearily explains to the warden of the glum hostel where they live: “He’s being a little philosophical.”
This is perhaps as close as Andersson comes to making an explicit statement—although the more dreamlike and enigmatic his scenarios are, the more effective they are, while some of the more overt depictions of inhumanity, both here and in the other films, are a little too direct to really be philosophically incisive. He does end Pigeon, however, on a sublime note of ambivalence. People stand in the street waiting for their bus. “And then it’s Wednesday again,” announces the proprietor of a nearby bike shop, apropos of nothing. “But it felt like Thursday,” a man responds, his certainties suddenly shattered. Still, it’s a blessing: the man has one extra day to live. It’s also a curse: the man has one extra day to live. How you read Andersson’s take on existence depends on your own predisposition to melancholy—whether your Beckettian glass of Guinness is half-full or half-empty.
A
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24, 2015
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Andersson interview: ‘I’m trying to show what it’s like to be human’ Jonna Dagliden interview from The Guardian, August 28, 2014
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A
Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence - Wikipedia
Angel, Hélène
SKIN OF MAN, HEART OF BEAST (Peau
d'homme coeur de bête) A 95
France (98 mi)
1999
A wonderfully unique
and complex way of telling a dark story through the innocent eyes of two
children, a film that reveals their inner beauty and love contrasted against
the almost maniac delirium of their dad and his 2 brothers, the infamous Pujols
brothers. The film opens with a
multicolored lamp that twirls round and round revealing gorgeous colors, while
an older 12 year old sister tells her younger 5 year old sister frightening
stories, in her continuing narrative, she begins to add real life family
members that only spoil the sister’s peace and harmony, mixing dream images of
fright and terror to actual real-life occurrences, particularly the strange
goings on of the 3 brothers whose father long ago committed suicide. A strange, silent brother returns after a 15
year absence, with no real explanation, his older brother, Serge Riaboukine,
has enough problems of his own, not the least of which is his own explosive
temper, which is really the emotional engine that carries this film. In a starkly beautiful scene, the absent
brother is introduced to the community at large as the older brother joins what
seems like the entire town in a chorus of an old school song to honor their old
schoolteacher who is about to move to a retirement home. The younger sister silently brings him into
this multitude of momentary harmony, which all but disappears by the end of the
film, as the director carefully crafts edgy characters and slowly unravels the
simmering tensions, the unresolved feelings, and the element of violence and
fear that creep out of the shadows into the light of day, the subject matter is
difficult, yet throughout it all, these charming sisters maintain a sense of
sanity and decency in a decrepit world by creating a whole other alternative
world where love still prevails, which leads to a climactic ending that I found
simply fabulous.
The originality of this
film is striking. I found it to be an
emotional powerhouse, reminding me of the power and emotional devastation of
the Japanese film, EUREKA, whose strength lies largely in silence, and also
PARIS, TEXAS, the Wim Wenders film featuring a truly peculiar Harry Dean
Stanton, who I believe was the model for the absent brother. This film features elements of both and is a
wonderful example of why I love films.
There was nothing ahead of time that led me to believe I would even like
this film, no critics choice, no buzz from viewers, this was simply an awesome
film experience.
Mike D’Angelo from Time Out New York (link lost):
Testosterone might as well be
battery acid in the deceptively bucolic world of Hélène Angel's Skin of Man,
Heart of Beast, an exceedingly grim fairy tale set among the verdant hills
of southern France. "Who's that sleeping in my bed?" exclaims Alex
(Cervo), the youngest of the film's three troubled brothers—though it's the
eldest, Franky (Riaboukine), with his stocky frame and lumbering walk, who most
closely resembles a bear. Goldilocks turns out to be the family's middle
brother, affectionately known as
Beautifully directed and convincingly acted, Skin of Man clearly aims to catalog the deleterious effects of male violence on the female psyche. In the film's powerful, splatterific centerpiece, Franky's two young daughters, Christelle (Virginie Guinand) and Aurelie (Cathy Hinderchild), spin a macabre yarn (acted out onscreen) in which Coco slaughters the children and serves them to his unsuspecting relatives for dinner—a memorably vivid encapsulation of the movie's deeply pessimistic theme. Angel's approach elsewhere, however, is considerably less rigorous. Only a handful of scenes are depicted from the girls' point of view, which makes the cathartic conclusion feel like something of an afterthought. (I should also confess my personal aversion to the sight of sensitive French souls expressing their repressed tension by screaming into the void—see Humanité.) And while Angel adroitly juxtaposes the diverse ways in which these men cope with their family's legacy of violence (their father committed suicide after returning from the war in Algeria), a subplot involving Alex's cryptic position as an enforcer for a local gangster beggars credulity. Nonetheless, an impressive debut; let's hope Angel's next project, starring Daniel Auteuil, doesn't take three years to secure a U.S. release.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
The Village Voice
[Leslie Camhi]
filmcritic.com
[Athan Bezaitis]
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Robert Edwards)
Guardian/Observer
review Peter Bradshaw
New York Times
(registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Angelopoulos,
Theo
Angelopoulos, Theo from World Cinema
He practiced law briefly, after graduating from
the
All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan
Though he may not be well known amongst the general populace
of American moviegoers, filmmaker, screenwriter and producer Theo Angelopoulos
is one of the premiere contemporary directors in his native
from Film Critic Michael Wilmington:
Angelopoulos studied both law in Greece France
He’s directed two of the most profoundly beautiful films of
our time, the 1975 film THE TRAVELING PLAYERS and the 1988 film LANDSCAPE IN
THE MIST, yet they’re little known, little seen. His voice in unique, even in Greece Cannes
Greece
Voyages and
Landscapes of Theo Angelopoulos Irene Stathi, also here:
Musicolog Page
Born in
He began to make films at around 1965, an attempt at a full-length feature film entitled THE FORMINX STORY which he never completed after a disagreement with the producers and then a short film BROADCAST and in 1970 his first full-length feature film RECONSTRUCTION.
Since then his films have participated in countless
international festivals and have won numerous awards that have established his
reputation as one of the most influential directors in contemporary cinema.
Theo Angelopoulos is a strange, solitary and uniquely modern
filmmaker. Originally part of the so-called "
This film director, whose Greekness has at times been doubted, has a deep and
mystic relation with
Starting from a pre-existent geographical reality,
Angelopoulos produced a new one which entered the realm of fantasy. To this
concept of his we owe scenes like the one in which the actors chase a chicken
in the absolute whiteness of a snowy background in The Travelling Players; or
the make-believe football game and the boat voyage of left-wingers in The
Hunters; or the bride trying to catch a bird flying in the festive hall in The Beekeeper;
and the Greek-Albanian border and the bus in Eternity and a Day. In spite of
all this, even if on the outside his films are voyages in
The "long pauses", a characteristic that dates
back to The Broadcast, developed into a stylistic rule that peaked in terms of
Angelopoulos's aesthetic sense in 1975's The Travelling Players. In this film,
with transportation and mythology as vehicles, Angelopoulos made a journey into
the recent history of
The work of Angelopoulos is a work in progress. His films do
not end in a definitive sense. He recycles and recreates his materials and his
themes. His self-referentialism reveals his conviction that things do not
change; only seasons change and the way we look at them. In this spirit he
entered the 80s where great changes were in the offing. The end of the
collective dream and the fall of the ideologies, which Angelopoulos treats in
Alexander the Great, postpones any immediate contemplation of history. He uses
the certainty of the medium he knows so well, to encompass his personal dream
and lets background history burden and torture his disillusioned heroes. The
change of theme does not necessarily imply a change of technique with
Angelopoulos. He remains faithful to his style and to his options. He continues
to lure us to the familiar and fluid places and times of his mythology, and he
will continue to move events outside their frame. His signature, more poetic
than ever, but steadily incompatible with current trends, will not for a single
moment prove retrogressive.
Angelopoulos is one of the few
creative artist who manage to capture the pulse of life and of events, bear
unerring witness to his times and be in advance of his times. In The Suspended
Step of the Stork and in Ulysses' Gaze he showed how art can look farther than
politics. The collapse of the socialist dream, the estrangement from life and
the loss of values - burning problems of the times, were his main themes in
recent years. The political instability which shook the Balkans where, instead
of inspiration and vision, people suffered exile, refugee camps and insecurity,
led Angelopoulos to a more and more esoteric cinema. The countries lying
between borders belong to the realm of a dream, situated on the other side of
lastingness and on the same side as its dissolution. Perhaps the tongue has
lost its ability to define this cross-border zone, but the lens of Angelopoulos
has perceived it, since he can always aim at the centre of the jewel of
perdition, to stir up inertia and to envision a new utopia.
Film
Reference Michel Ciment, updated by
Tina Gianoulis
Theodoros Angelopoulos's
considerable achievements in cinema during the 1970s and 1980s have made him
not only the most important Greek filmmaker to date, but one of the truly
creative and original artists of his time. In 1970 he convinced producer George
Papalios to finance his first film, Anaparastassi. The story follows the
pattern of a crime tale à la James Cain. A Greek peasant is killed by his wife
and her lover on his return from Germany
Angelopoulos's trilogy of Days
of 36, The Travelling Players, and The Hunters can be seen as an
exploration of contemporary Greek history. If his style shows some
influences—particularly Jancsó's one reel-one take methodology and Antonioni's
slow, meditative mood—Angelopoulos has nevertheless created an authentic epic
cinema akin to Brecht's theatre in which aesthetic emotion is counterbalanced
by a reflexive approach that questions the surfaces of reality. The audience is
not allowed to identify with a central character, nor to follow a dramatic
development, nor given a reassuring morality. The director boldly goes from the
present to the past within the same shot, and in The Hunters broadens
his investigation by including the fantasies of his characters. The sweep of a
movie like Travelling Players, which includes songs and dances, is
breathtaking. Its tale of an actors group circulating through Greece
Angelopoulos's masterpiece was
preceded by the haunting Days of '36. This political thriller about a
murder in a prison proved a prelude to events of national importance. It is the
director's most radical use of off-screen space and off-screen sound, of the
dialectic between the seen and the unseen. With its closed doors, whispering
voices in corridors, and silhouettes running to and fro, it evokes the mystery
that surrounds the exercise of power.
Angelopoulos's fifth film, Alexander
the Great, breaks new ground: it deals with myth and develops the
exploration of the popular unconscious already present in Travelling Players
and The Hunters. At the turn of the twentieth century, a bandit is seen
as the reincarnation of the Macedonian king. He kidnaps some English residents
in Greece Greece
Ulysses' Gaze is exclusively preoccupied with the problems of
historical reconstruction and personal remembrance. The film, co-scripted by
the legendary European screenwriter Tonino Guerra, carries out a nostalgic
reconstruction of peaceful and colorful ethnic cohabitation at the Balkan
crossroads between Orient and Occident. The narrative of the film breaks away
from the linear not only timewise, but also spatially, providing an ultimately
subjective account of a personal experience of history and regionality.
In Ulysses' Gaze,
Angelopoulus created the prefect cinematic language that allowed him to talk of
an individual experience of history as superseding time and space. The
remarkable use of elaborately manipulated long shots enables the narrative to
include complex and magnificent subtleties. The mostly hand-held camera of
cameraman Yorgos Arvanitis moves very slowly and is often positioned in such a
way that it reveals actions taking place in different semantic layers of the
screen space. The events lose their objectivity and are constructed through the
gaze of the onlooking protagonist. Older historical interpretations intersect
with the perceived significance of newer ones.
In 1995, Angelopoulos was one of
forty international directors asked to participate in Lumière and Company,
a celebration of one hundred years of filmmaking with the camera invented by
the Lumière brothers. For this novelty film, each director was asked to create
a film in three takes, a maximum of fifty two seconds in length. Though the
film was largely forgettable, the inclusion of Angelopoulos among the forty
representative filmmakers clearly shows his status in international film.
His 1998 film, Eternity and a
Day, marked a departure in tone from much of his earlier work. Less harsh
and more accessible than his earlier films, Eternity and a Day is the
story of an old and ill Greek writer who finds meaning in the last days of his
life by helping a homeless Albanian child. A poetic film with dense and
haunting imagery, it juxtaposes youth and age, national identity and language,
patriotism and ethnic hatred to create an intensely human look at the meaning
of life and its unlikely sources.
Theo Angelopoulos
Internet Library
Master Greek filmmaker
featured in MFA retrospective
Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors Acquarello
TCMDB profile from Turner Classic Movies
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
Theo Angelopoulos from They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS (O thiasos)
Greece
Jonathan Romney from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Since the early 1970’s, Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has
tirelessly explored a landscape that has largely remained unseen in cinema. His
subject is
The members of the troupe themselves, reincarnate figures from the Oresteia – Aegisthus (Vangelis Kazan) is a Nazi collaborator, Orestes (Petros Zarkadis) a communist partisan, Agamemnon (Stratos Pachis) the troupe’s betrayed leader. They are less characters, conventionally speaking, than archetypes or even ghosts. The troupe, with its dead members brought back to life, make a phantasmal reappearance in Angelopoulos’s 1988 film Landscape in the Mist. Time and space in the film have much the same uncertain quality that character does. A single shot can drift seamlessly from one period to another, and the film begins with the players standing together in 1952, to end with an almost identical grouping in 1939.
Angelopoulos is one of cinema’s great landscape artists, a specialist in those moments where space – a beach, a town square, a mountainside – turns into the stage for a vast dramatic panorama. But he is also a filmmaker of motion, who makes films about travel – on trains, cars, buses, on foot, and above all in the imagination. Claiming Orson Welles and Kenji Mizoguchi as his primary influences, Angelopoulos is known – together with his long-time cameraman Giorgos Arvanitis – as a specialist of flowing, precisely choreographed long takes. The Travelling Players is a prime example of that, a four-hour film containing only eighty shots. In the most distinctive of these, the camera and the actors move in such way that time and space seem to turn inside out, to achieve a Möbius-strip elasticity.
Angelopoulos is a masterful director of crowd movements and set pieces: a characteristic shot that recurs throughout The Travelling Players has a group of figures walking through a town and emerging, as the camera tracks through the streets, in another year, perhaps crossing the path of another, larger grouping. His films suggest a theory of history as a sort of parade – at once funeral procession and political demonstration, continually crossing its own tracks, changing its direction and ideological colors. In The Travelling Players, movement itself becomes a formidably acute and supple tool for historical analysis.
Made, incredibly, under the noses
of the military police during the Colonels' regime, Angelopoulos' film
examines, with a passionate radicalism, the labyrinth of Greek politics around
that country's agonising civil war. This is done through the eyes of a troupe
of actors, whose pastoral folk drama Golfo the Shepherdess is
continually interrupted as they become unwitting spectators of the political
events that ultimately polarise them. This slow, complex, four-hour film will
obviously provide problems for people raised on machine-gun cutting techniques.
Editing is very restrained, and some takes last up to five minutes, but the
stately pace of the film soon becomes compulsive; and the shabby provincial
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Though one of the major figures
in contemporary world cinema, Greek director Theo Angelopoulos has yet to gain
critical favor across the Atlantic, where his latest Cannes triumphs, 1995's Ulysses'
Gaze and 1998's Eternity And A Day, have met with a chilly
reception. Many complain about his insistently deliberate style: A typical
Angelopoulos shot can last for nearly five minutes, as he studies a carefully
composed tableau with creeping, glacial camera movements. Adjusting to his
somnolent approach rewards the patient, but it's only half the challenge posed
by The Travelling Players, a four-hour political epic that's impossible
to fully comprehend without being well-versed in both modern Greek history and
Aeschylus' Oresteia tragedies. Made in 1975, under the watchful eye of a
right-wing military dictatorship, Angelopoulos' defiantly subversive film
follows a nomadic acting troupe that bears witness to a country ravaged by
civil war. Their failed attempts to stage a harmless folk pastoral lead to
sober reflection on their personal histories, each profoundly affected by
Greece's numerous conflicts and divisions from 1936 to 1952. For Leftist
sympathizer Angelopoulos, the shift from Nazi Occupation to field marshal
Marcel Papagos' prevailing dictatorship was virtually indistinguishable, just
one oppressive model replacing another. His firm grasp of politics and
theater—and how their tragedies are bound throughout history—gives The
Travelling Players enormous thematic complexity and relevance, however
difficult it is to understand at times. But even the most clueless outsider can
still soak in the magisterial beauty of Angelopoulos' images, which mournfully
depict corroded buildings and emptied streets while celebrating the country's
enduring natural beauty.
Theo
Angelopoulos: The Travelling Players
Derek Malcolm’s Century of Film from the Guardian
The Travelling Players A Modern Greek Masterpiece, by Susan
Tarr and Hans Proppe from Jump Cut
Nick's Flick Picks (Full Review) Nicholas K. Davis
The
Travelling Players Peter Reiher
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Full Alert Film Review Dennis Schwarz
The New York Times (Richard Eder)
DVDBeaver.com [Arvid]
VOYAGE TO CYTHERA (Taxidi sta Kythira)
Greece
A film-maker,
Alexandros (Brogi), auditions a succession of old men who speak the line, 'It's
me, it's me.' Tiring of the task, he goes to a café and sees his perfect actor,
a lavender-seller. Alexandros follows the man to
Angelopoulos' Gaze Bill Mousoulis from Senses of Cinema
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The New York Times (Richard Bernstein)
THE BEEKEEPER (O melissokomos)
Channel 4 Film
Angelopoulos'
existential road odyssey has retired schoolmaster Mastroianni leave his wife
and set out on the road with his beehives, picking up a young hitchhiker on the
way. Nothing much happens, and no small credit is due to Mastroianni's powerful
but restrained central character who has long given up on life to wait for
death. His encounters on the road and his relationship with the hitchhiker at
first seem, like his character, inconsequential, but after a long journey they
ultimately mount up to a moving portrayal of a man who doesn't say much, but
whom we know better than most other protagonists.
Strictly Film School Acquarello
The Beekeeper opens to a static shot of an extended dinner table festively covered with a white tablecloth and ornamented with rose petals that is sitting empty at the center of the courtyard in the rain, as the sound of Spyros' (Marcello Mastroianni) affectionate voice is heard recounting to his young daughter the natural selection process of bees that culminates in the majestic queen's dance. The guests have retreated indoors for what is revealed to be the wedding reception of Spyros' daughter - now a grown woman - in the family home. From the onset, the middle-aged schoolteacher's profound disconnection is immediately palpable as he shares a prolonged, uncomfortable silence with his wife (Jenny Roussea) while picking up shards of broken glass from an overturned tray of wine glasses. Dispirited by his inevitable separation from his beloved daughter, Spyros separates from his wife and embarks on his forefathers' traditional vocation of apiculture. Traveling southward with his bees on an instinctual springtime migration, Spyros encounters a young hitchhiker (Nadia Mourouzi) who, abandoned on a rural truck stop, insinuates herself on the resigned and acquiescent Spyros through intermittent points on his indeterminate journey. Estranged from an unfamiliar modern world where his generation has become a historically incidental relic, Spyros attempts to reconnect with humanity through the promiscuous and rootless young woman and, in the process, retreats further into the solitude of his dying avocation.
The Beekeeper is a haunting, compassionate, and profoundly melancholic portrait of isolation, dislocation, estrangement, and obsolescence. Using episodically contrasting imagery of union and separation, Theo Angelopoulos provides a sustained visual metaphor for the film's pervasive themes of fracture and disintegration: the assembly of family members for a formal wedding photograph that is followed by their individual departure from the family home, first by the daughter and her new husband, then the wife and son, and finally, Spyros; the opening sequence of the extended dinner table that is representationally shown in fragmented form through repeated shots of empty bistro tables as Spyros re-encounters the hitchhiker; the image of shattered wine glasses that is repeated in Spyros' impulsive crashing of his vehicle into a restaurant plate window in order to reunite with the young woman; the organized matrix of apiculture boxes during transit that is subsequently shown as individual containers randomly scattered along a hillside open field (that provides visual continuity with the overlooking houses of a distant village). Achieving a visual dichotomy that is both patternistic and deconstructive, the film serves as an indelible chronicle of the destruction of tradition and family, the cultural erosion of contemporary Greek society, and the desolation of the human soul.
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
"The Beekeeper," a bleak and turgid 1986 film by the estimable Greek director Theo Angelopoulos, wastes Marcello Mastroianni in its title role. Mr. Mastroianni appears as a solemn, uncommunicative schoolteacher who retires from his job, leaves his wife and newly married daughter, and embarks on a lonely bee-tending journey of seemingly epic proportions.
Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, he
travels through
The light in Spyros's new life is meant to be the Girl (Nadia Mourouzi), a vixenish hitchhiker who becomes attached to him along the road. Presented as an innocent of sorts (though played by an actress who looks a lot older and worldlier than her character should), this Girl begs Spyros to let her share his humble hotel room. Once installed there, she preens tirelessly but fails to get his attention, which leads her to go out, pick up a young man and have sex with him in the twin bed right beside Spyros's.
Spyros says nothing, but he later leaves town and does not see the Girl until several other quiet, dolorous episodes have gone by. When they meet again, she looks coquettishly baffled. "Was it something I did?" she wants to know.
Mr. Mastroianni, giving what can best be described as a performance of great patience, can do nothing to improve an exchange like that one. He maintains much the same lost, unhappy expression even when finally pounced upon by the Girl in an empty movie theater (a scene all too fraught with symbolic import) or attacked by his own bees.
LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST (Topio stin
omichli)
Greece France Italy
Adrian Martin from 1001
FILMS YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
In the opening shot of Theo Angelopoulos’s Landscape in the Mist, a small boy, Alexandre (Michalis Zeke), and his pre-teen sister, Voula (Tania Palaiologou), emerge from the darkness and approach a spot near the camera. They stop. The camera slowly begins to circle them. She: “Are you afraid?” He: “No, I’m not.” Suddenly they break away and walk, faster this time, toward a train station that we can now see in the distance.
This one-minute take is stunning, and sets the pattern for much of what is to follow. People and vehicles doggedly sticking to their paths, oblivious to all else, sometimes pausing, sometimes changing speed, barren or dark landscapes with a single stark, prominent feature; harsh natural sound replaced, as a scene empties out, with Eleni Karaindrou’s intense music. And, above all, Giorgos Arvenitis’s camera circling, advancing, and withdrawing at a rhythm and with an intent always distinct from the action, always inscribing the curiosity, passion, wisdom, and pathos of Angelopoulos’s gaze.
Such patterns give figure and form to the deliberately slim
and open-ended plot events; The children run away from home and attempt to
reach
Almost nothing ever connects in these unnamed spaces and
places between
A small boy and his pubescent sister leave home in search of their missing father (said to be in Germany), and cross paths with various characters perhaps intended to evoke a nation in crisis; an uncle unwilling to take charge of the infant vagrants, a brute trucker, a luckless troupe of itinerant actors whose explorations of Greek history are no longer in demand. The one person to offer help is the troupe's roadie Orestes, whose own solitude, enhanced by imminent army service, prompts him to play father to the resolute waifs. A sombre, even disturbing road movie, this is no glossy Greek travelogue; endless train journeys and walks along wintry roads lead througha succession of dingy waiting-rooms, grey towns, muddy laybys, and mountains scarred by industry. But the children's slow, dreamlike odyssey also gives rise to surreal, startling epiphanies: wedding celebrants in the snow, a massive Godlike hand rising from the sea to soar over a city. If the overall tone is bleak in its portayal of betrayals, loneliness and disillusionment, Angelopoulos' assured control of mood, Giorgos Arvanitis' superb camerawork, and the kids' glowing performances provide ample pleasures.
LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST - TOPIO STIN OMICHLI Theo Angelopoulos
In a working-class suburb of
Edinburgh U Film Society [Spiros Gangas]
Road movies are not a novelty in Angelopoulos' cimema. From his universally
acclaimed The Travelling Players to The Bee-Keeper, his characters have always been engaged
in endless journeys in mainland
Two kids search for their father whom they've never met. Travelling north in
rural
The bleak and desolate atmosphere of the film leaves the kids exposed in a
landscape of misty images, captured beautifully by Arvanitis' excellent
photography. A dying horse on the snow juxtaposed with a marital celebration, a
gigantic hand emerging from the sea, and an old man playing sad tunes on his
violin construct an impressive but often disturbing imagery. Angelopoulos'
treatment of rape, where by seeing nothing you "see" everything, is
the most sensitive refrence to the issue I've ever encountered on the screen,
rendering a comparison with pathetic films such as The
Accused or
Landscape in the Mist, overtly influenced by Antonioni's filmaking , may not be a masterpiece but it's a film which works well on all levels, with gleaming performances by the two kids. Having received the Golden Lion Prize at the Venice Film Festival, it's undoubtedly Angelopoulos' best film since The Travelling Players.
Landscape in
the Mist? Vicky Tsaconas from Senses
of Cinema
Not Coming to a Theater Near
You [Ian Johnston]
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Slant Magazine
[Fernando F. Croce]
Strictly
Film School Acquarello
New
York Times (registration required) Stephen
Holden
THE SUSPENDED STEP OF THE STORK (To
meteoro vima tou pelargou)
THE SUSPENDED STEP STEP OF
THE STORK - TO METEORO VIMA TOU PELARGOU
Theo Angelopoulos
While working on a story in the border area, a young
reporter discovers a divided town bisected by a river which is also the
national frontier. He observes a surreal wedding in which the bride and her
family stand on one shore and the groom and his relatives on the other. The
town, a remote ghost town, almost forgotten at the end of the world, has been
named "waiting room" by the locals because most of its inhabitants are
refugees from different countries many of whom have crossed the border
illegally at some time or other, and are now waiting for their turn to leave
and start life anew "somewhere else". In the course of his
investigation he also comes upon an aging, reclusive refugee, who lives there
cultivating a field. But the young reporter believes he is a famous Greek
politician who disappeared years before, leaving behind him many unanswered
questions. The man's identity is never resolved but the hapless refugees and
divided village allow the reporter to understand his despair over the human
condition. Theo Angelopoulos weaves yet another poetical allegory on the great
open questions of our turbulent age. The film is very contemporary in its
treatment of borders, refugees and a changing world since the fall of communism
in
Somewhere on the Greek-Albanian border Alexandre (Gregory Karr) is shooting a documentary about a group of immigrants willing to enter the European Union. Without legal papers or savings the men are desperately trying to survive. But there are hardly any jobs.
While shooting with his camera Alexandre sees a man who reminds him about a famous Greek politician (Marcello Mastroianni, La Dolce Vita) who has been missing for years. Convinced that he has found what no one else has been able to see Alexandre contacts the Greek politician's widow (Jeanne Moreau, Elevator to the Gallows). Unsure what to make of Alexandre's discovery the widow arrives at the border town where the first snow has already fallen.
A gritty tale about a group of people forgotten by the Greek
authorities in no-man's land To
Μετέωρο βήμα
του πελαργού
a.k.a The Suspended Step of the
Stork (1991) leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
What Theo Angelopoulos shows in The Suspended Step of the Stork certainly looks like something that can be discovered only in Greek history annals. A town which does not exist on official maps, built by immigrants, and ruled by the army certainly sounds like something more appropriate for a third-world country. Yet, it exists right where democracy was born!!
In a typical for Angelopoulos manner The Suspended Step of the Stork follows a few "major" stories – the fate of the missing Greek politician, Alexandre discovering an undergounrd society hidden inside his own country, the widow's struggle to find peace. Yet, these are all fragments of a much bigger and serious tale about human beings' inability to act humane.
Not surprisingly The
Suspended Step of the Stork is also a film full of heavy symbolism.
In fact, I do not know how easy to decipher some of the scenes in this film
would be for those of you who have little knowledge of
Finally the superb cast Angelopoulos has gathered for this film is hardly even noticeable. Yes, Mastroianni, Moreau, and Karr are all impressive as the characters they play yet they often step back leaving the Greek director to follow a different route. As a result The Suspended Step of the Stork quickly falls into the favored by Angelopoulos, evoking meditation, groove where images not characters are the focus of attention.
The New York Times (Caryn James)
ULYSSES’ GAZE (To vlemma tou Odyssea)
Greece Italy France
ULYSSES' GAZE - TO VLEMA
TOU ODYSSEA Theo Angelopoulos
A man (Harvey Keitel) travels across the Balkans of the '90s,
the Balkans of discord, fanaticism and war. It is a journey echoing the myth of
Ulysses (Odysseus), a quest leading the hero from
When film-maker A...
(Keitel) returns, after 35 years in the
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Long and heavily symbolic, with no desire to tell its story in a realistic style, Ulysses' Gaze is the very definition of a difficult film. Harvey Keitel plays a director who, after years of making films in America, returns to his homeland of Greece. From there, he sets out in search of three undeveloped reels of film made in 1905 by the first Greek filmmakers. Keitel's journey, which has some parallels with that of Homer's hero, takes him through several parts of Eastern Europe, concluding in the hollow shell of war-ravaged Sarajevo. Director Theo Angelopoulos loads his beautifully shot film with striking imagery, and, though Ulysses' Gaze moves less than propulsively, he pulls off the difficult task of not only making Keitel's search seem meaningful in itself, but making it seem an appropriate metaphor for the attempt to bring sense to a long century filled with personal, artistic, and historical upheaval. After stirring up interest at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival, Ulysses' Gaze took a long time to make it to America, thanks largely to the present distaste for all but the most instantly appealing foreign films. It's well worth seeing now that it has.
Ulysses Gaze Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos -- subject of a Pacific
Cinòmath¦que retrospective in 1991 -- is one of contemporary cinema's great
masters; his formally rigorous, visually assured, hauntingly beautiful work
ranks with the sublime cinema of Bresson, Antonioni, Tarkovsky, Jancso and Mizoguchi,
and he is "one of the dozen or so directors in the world whose every work
is an event for international film critics and astute audiences" (Dimitri
Eipides, Toronto I.F.F.). The award-winning Ulysses' Gaze -- part
celebration of cinema's centenary, part meditation on the Bosnian conflict --
is Angelopoulos's latest, and has never before screened in
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Anyone unfamiliar to Theo Angelopoulos'
work could start chronologically, or they can simply skip to his Landscape
in the Mist and leave it at that. 1995's Ulysses' Gaze is
considerably more evocative than the Greek director's fatuous Eternity and
the Day though it's nonetheless laughably pretentious. This tediously paced
epic traces a country's political upheavals and one man's misplaced
nationalism. "A" (a clueless Harvey Keitel) must find three lost
reels of films produced by two brother-filmmakers in 1905 and located somewhere
in the Balkans. Ulysses' Gaze is mindful of the protagonist's staunch
need to capture and liberate a myth. Angelopoulos' signature elliptical
flourishes are on full display here. During the film's opening scene,
"A" discusses the Manakis Brothers' works with a former assistant of
the two men. Are they occupying the same space or have "A" and the
old man met at a bridge that spans the space and time continuum, Angelopoulos
seems to ask. There are many such elegiac moments in Ulysses' Gaze but
all feel calculated and beleaguered by their own weight. In one of the film's
most haunting sequences, an army of soldiers butts heads with a pack of
townsfolk carrying umbrella. Their confrontation creates a wall between
"A" and a lone female wanderer. There is no doubt that we are in the
presence of greatness, but Angelopoulos' compositions are so calculated they
leave no room for spontaneity. (Curiously, Angelopoulos made a stink at
Senses of Cinema (Anne Rutherford)
Ulysses´
Gaze links to interviews and
reviews from the Angelopoulos Library
A Balkan Odyssey of Epic
Proportions Paul D. Goetz
Ulysses´ Gaze William P. Coleman, 20.6.1998
Ulysses'
Gaze :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews
Roger Ebert found it a “numbing
bore”
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
ETERNITY AND A DAY (Mia aioniotita kai
mia mera) A 97
Greece France Italy Germany
This film is said to be a compilation of characters and ideas from three
earlier films, including the illegitimate children from LANDSCAPE IN THE MIST,
people wander through life and relive their lives through memories in the epic
Brechtian journey that is the central metaphor of THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS, and
the way the past implicates the present in ULYSSES’ GAZE, aided in the script
by Tonino Guerra, haunting music by Eleni Karaindrou, cinematography by Giorgos
Arvantis and Andreas Sinani, his images soar, his handling of space, movement,
and time are always compelling, his shifts from past to present are hauntingly
beautiful. The film is somber,
meditative, and visually magnificent.
The story centers on a Greek poet, Alexander (Bruno Ganz), ruminating on
his past, now seriously ill from a mysterious illness that causes him great
pain. He leaves his beautiful coastal
home in Thessalonika to enter a hospital, but before he gets there, he begins
to reflect on people and things that held significance in his life – Anna, his
long dead wife, in a superb performance by Isabelle Renauld, and his writing. He inadvertently saves the life of a young
boy, an Albanian refugee who is threatened with disconnection from his own
family and heritage from Albania Greece
There are many memorable images from this film, as when Alexander tries to
return the boy to his grandmother in Albania, where the boy recounts his
harrowing journey “out” of Albania as Alexander contemplates taking him back
in. As they arrive on the Albanian
border, there is a pan of the empty snow in the mist, where there is a giant
barbed wire wall, like a concentration camp, with armed tower guards. The flag of Albania Albania
There is also an interesting bus ride near the end with Alexander and the boy, who is about to embark on another journey on a ship, but has a few hours before boarding. There is swirling music that grows louder as three yellow-jacketed cyclists drive by. Outside the window, the sign reads “All Souls Stop.” There are night lights on a boat going by. When a group of passengers get off the bus, they immediately start a demonstration, while two students and a man with an Albanian flag get on. There is a romantic interlude between the male and female students, until she gets off the bus. He runs after her as she throws him a bouquet of flowers. A group of musicians get on the bus. What starts out as three of them playing swells to a full orchestra. The windows are foggy as the bus driver announces “Conservatory Stop.” The musicians get out, while an old poet dressed in black gets on wearing a top hat and a tux, spouting words like “the dawn’s last dewy morning star, the perfection of that cloudless day, how long does tomorrow last? Tell me, life is sweet, life is sweet,” before getting off at the next stop. The bus us back where it started. The two get off under a lone street light as the three yellow-jacketed cyclists whiz by. After Alexander tearfully leaves the boy at the dock, waiting until his ship pulls away, he drives onto a busy street and pulls up to a light and just sits there. The only sound is the wipers on his car going back and forth. Other cars are forced to drive around his car, which continues to sit, unmoved. We see it still sitting there the next morning. One might say he has reached a moment of impasse. It has finally stopped raining and he pulls away through a red light.
Theo Angelopoulos:
“I remember when I saw Dreyer’s ORDET. I was delirious for three days. I was in shock, as if I were sick, but happily sick...How can such perfection exist?”
A dying author (Ganz) prepares to leave his beloved family home by the sea, and settle things with his daughter; his feelings of despair are interrupted, complicated and finally, to some extent, banished by memories of happier times with his wife (Renauld) and by an encounter with a young Albanian orphan. Angelopoulos' film, a deserving winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes '98, is a characteristically elegant, eloquent and idiosyncratic meditation on the relationships between personal and political histories, and between life and art. More intimate than, say, The Travelling Players or Ulysses' Gaze, the film nevertheless reaches out, as its long, fluid takes escort us through space and time, to universal themes and broader topicalities, effortlessly fending off charges of hermetic aestheticism.
Let’s get the cheap shot out of the way first: the title of Theo
Angelopoulos’ Eternity and a Day is an understatement. A stultifying,
foot-dragging rumination on impending mortality, the film is filled with shots
that give you ample time to appreciate their beauty, which is considerable but
not considerable enough. Perhaps there are those whose hunger for movies about
inexplicable friendships between old men and little boys has not yet been
quenched; if you are one, run to see Bruno Ganz play a dying poet who bonds
with a young Albanian refugee during a day of wandering around
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
No other director working today
polarizes continental opinion like Greek auteur Theo Angelopoulos, an
acknowledged master in Europe whose work is somehow diminished in its trip
across the Atlantic, where critics tend to bristle at its languorous pacing and
arty portent. His latest, the frequently astonishing Eternity And A Day,
won the 1998 Palme D'Or by unanimous consent, but its tepid reception
here—where many have glibly used the title for an inane bon mot—does a
disservice to the affecting late-period reverie on history and mortality. In a
role originally intended for the late Marcello Mastroianni, Bruno Ganz plays
the director's surrogate, a revered author who discovers he's terminally ill
and spends his last days wandering the Greek countryside, observing the world
with a poetic detachment that recalls Ganz's angel in Wings Of Desire.
Longing to resolve his feelings on personal and national history, he revisits a
bittersweet seaside afternoon with his long-dead wife (Isabelle Renauld) and
encounters an 18th-century poet whose unfinished work he intends to complete.
His metaphysical journey, which is unmistakably similar to Victor Sjöström's in
Wild Strawberries, is interrupted by a young Albanian refugee (Achileas
Skevis) he rescues from a black-market adoption ring. Eternity And A Day
occasionally lapses into navel-gazing ennui, and Ganz's reluctant kinship with
the adorable moppet courts cliché, but Angelopoulos strings together so many
haunting, exquisitely choreographed sequences that even his worst ideas are
emotionally resonant. His painterly eye and long, creeping camera movements
produce some unforgettable moments, including a stunning tableau of darkened
figures hanging like moths on the Albanian border and a joyous courtyard
wedding processional captured in one shot. Angelopoulos' deep austerity seems
out of step with the times, a fact that may account for his characters' exiled
state, but his artistry still has the power to overwhelm.
Eternity
and a Day links to interviews and
reviews from the Angelopoulos Library
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
Nitrate Online David Luty
Moving Pictures (Ron
Holloway)
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Eternity and a Day (1998) John Mount from Sight
and Sound, June 1999
ETERNITY AND A DAY Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Mike D'Angelo, The Man Who
Viewed Too Much
Eternity
and a Day Acquarello from Strictly
Film School
Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert from Reverse Hot writes for
indieWIRE
Stuart Klawans,
The Nation a man who occasionally
walks out of Angelopoulos films
Austin
Chronicle [Russell Smith]
New York
Times (registration req'd) Janet
Maslin
DVDBeaver.com
- Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
TRILOGY:
THE WEEPING MEADOW (Trilogia: To livadi pou dakryzei) A 96
Greece Germany France Italy
A poetic depiction
of the dilemma facing refugees, who are cut off from their own roots, then
despised in their new lands. From the
comfort of our own vantage points, it’s all too easy to overlook just how many
families have been decimated and torn apart by this ever-increasing human
condition. Actually, it’s a sign of our
times. Of all the Angelopoulos films
I’ve seen, this was the easiest to comprehend, perhaps the most
traditional. Typical of his style, this
film has a sweeping visual command that produces some of the most memorable
imagery of this or any other year. With
Angelopoulos, the story many times remains hidden under the surface, shrouded
in total obscurity, and is usually secondary to the immensity of the artistic
mood and atmosphere, usually steeped in melancholy. But here, the film
leads with dramatic moral themes of shame, regret, and loss, accentuated by war
and the plight of refugees who are seen leaving their homeland, losing
connections with their family, having to start over again, openly vying for
labor freedoms or cultural tolerance, which in the case of Greek history was
immediately suppressed by military force and a civil war. So even after the devastation of WWII,
citizens continued to be rounded up and imprisoned or shot. The consequences
of these historically relevant actions are the emotional rivers through which
this film flows, mostly following the misfortunes of one woman, first in 1919
as a three-year-old refugee from Russia who has lost her entire family, until
the end of the Greek civil war in 1949, complete with tragedies anew.
The opening shot lasts several minutes and
while it eventually picks somebody out of the crowd, it emphasizes the
collective over the individual.
Similarly, the amazing first image of the town where Angelopoulos keeps
the camera far enough back to see a whole town, with everybody going about his
business while the central character arrives, unknown to everybody else but us,
of course. It's mesmerizing and hypnotic and convincingly creates a world of
its own. Again, the visual mastery is the most dominant aspect of the film,
shot completely in somber grays and blacks, in rain or snow, always in
darkness, as there isn’t an ounce of sunlight anywhere in this picture,
featuring plenty of umbrellas and hats in a land where it is constantly raining,
with extraordinary footage of water.
There are multiple scenes on the water’s shores where humans appear
small and isolated, boats rowing in unison bearing black funeral banners, a
makeshift town that is overcome by a flood, with inhabitants streaming out in
boats, and by the end, a ship that travels to America, a place of perceived
safety and freedom. Travel is a constant
theme - always there are incessant images of different modes of travel. One sees trains, hears the sound of ships,
sees boats, birds in flight, horse-drawn buggies, or people constantly walking,
sometimes carrying luggage, as people are always leaving one place behind,
forced to pursue new directions. Music
is a constant source of renewal. It is
the musicians who suggest new political freedoms, who meet in an abandoned
building keeping their culture alive, and they act as the voice of the
poets. There is a recurring image of
white sheets fluttering in the breeze, a community of white sheets down the
street from where people live. This
image symbolizes forgetfulness, oblivion, a place where family members,
memories, or pieces of history are quite literally forgotten. Music provides the nourishment of hope. There’s a wonderful scene of widows in black
dancing around a nighttime bonfire carrying religious icons in their hands, or
another of musicians gathering among the white sheets, forming a line along the
shoreline. This film utilizes powerful sensations and climaxes in a scene of
heart-rending anguish.
The Weeping Meadow Not so, says Michael Sicinski from the
Academic Hack
Having seen previous Angelopoulos features only on video,
I wanted to give his style the chance to work on me on the big screen. Sadly,
this latest feature is a hollow compendium of gestures, themes, and
compositional habits derived from the director's prior filmography. If someone
set out to parody an Angelopoulos film, they might arrive at something close to
this. On an thematic level, I take no pleasure in pointing out the fact that
with this summary work, Angelopoulos proves conclusively that he's been making
exactly the same film for nearly 25 years. The disaster that is 20th century
Greek history, like the horrors of World War II or
BFI | Sight & Sound |
Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (2004) Nick Roddick, January 2005
In 1919, Greek refugees from
Odessa arrive in Greece, among them Spyros; his wife, Danae (Thalia Argyriou);
their son; and a younger orphan girl called Eleni. They are given land beside a
river and build a village. Some years later, Spyros is prospering but Eleni,
who has become pregnant by Spyros’ son, returns after a secret birth. Her twin
babies, Yorgis and Yannis, have been adopted. When Danae dies shortly
afterwards, Spyros becomes obsessed with Eleni and a marriage is arranged. But
Eleni flees the ceremony with Spyros’ son and, with the help of travelling
musicians led by violinist Nikos, they flee to Thessaloniki.
Pursued by a vengeful Spyros,
they later move to the musicians’ hang-out. Spyros’ son proves to be a gifted
accordionist, but Nikos and his group find it hard to get work. Eleni and
Spyros’ son, meanwhile, are reunited with Yorgis and Yannis. In 1936, aligning
themselves with the Popular Front, the musicians play at a dance. Spyros
appears once more, but dies of a heart attack.
The Popular Front is crushed, the
fascists begin to take control, Nikos is killed and Spyros’ son accepts an
offer from another band leader to tour America. Alone with her sons, Eleni is
arrested for political reasons and spends the war years in jail. Freed in 1946,
she learns that Spyros’ son, who joined the army to get US citizenship and so
be able to send for his family, died in the final days of the war in the
Pacific. Taken in by fellow villagers ashamed by how they once treated her,
Eleni learns that her two sons, fighting on different sides in the civil war,
are both dead. In 1949, finding Yorgis’ body in her childhood home, now a ruin
in the submerged village, Eleni gives in to her grief.
Review
History has usually provided
little more than script fodder for the cinema - an exciting background against
which the heroics of a Pearl Harbor or a Saving Private Ryan
can be played out. All the more reason, then, to celebrate the fact that
veteran Greek director Theo Angelopoulos is embarking on a major new trilogy,
destined to chart the history of his country from the early years of the last
century to the present. Its first part, The Weeping Meadow, gives
us not the recent Angelopoulos of Eternity and a Day (1998), where events are
refracted through the experience of a single individual, but a return to the
vast, sweeping tableaux of Days of 36 (1972) and The
Travelling Players (1975), in which there is no room for individual
destiny, let alone heroics.
Angelopoulos has denied that he
is a pessimist, preferring the word ‘melancholy’. But there is little here to
counter the notion of an implacable history crushing all in its path and
leaving the individual with, at best, the possibility of adjusting to forces
beyond his or her control. True, The Trilogy is to have an
individual as chief protagonist - and a woman at that, the first in an
Angelopoulos film since Reconstruction (1970). But his choice of a
name for her all but denies individuation: Eleni, from the root of the Greek
word for Greece.
Orphaned by the Bolshevik
revolution, Eleni is exiled from her new home as a result of her passion for
the son of the house (echoes of Oedipus Rex), then cast adrift in
an uncertain world which slowly but surely robs her of her lover, her children
and her purpose in life. We are in a world similar to that of Greek tragedy
here, where a single fault sets in motion a chain of events to which the
central character can only react. Indeed, one of the most impressive things
about The Weeping Meadow is how it superimposes the structures of
classical tragedy on to the history of modern Greece. All the major events in
the story - the flight from Odessa, childbirth, the experiences of Elini’s
lover in the New World, the war, the deaths of her sons - are narrated rather
than shown.
What we dwell on, in long,
multi-layered plans-séquences masterfully filmed by Andreas
Sinanos, are the moments in between, where life is lived, history having passed
through and left its mark. The colour palette is almost entirely browns and
greens. When red does make a brief appearance - in the women’s dresses at the
Popular Front dance - it disappears almost immediately. And, on the flotilla of
boats crossing the lake that recalls Days of 36, the flags are no
longer red but black, in mourning. Red makes one more brief - and equally
significant - appearance in the film’s single most striking image: as blood
staining the ground beneath the tree from which the bodies of a flock of sheep
have been hung. Similarly, while the violinist Nikos and his musicians recall
the travelling players of the director’s earlier masterpiece, the group in this
film has no cohesion, no future, no hope. And water - a key element in
Angelopoulos’ films - is everywhere: falling from the constantly leaden skies,
separating the refugees from the (unseen) metropolitan Greeks in the opening
sequence, bearing home a coffin, flooding the village - and, of course,
carrying Elini’s lover away to the New World where, Angelopoulos says, the
trilogy will end.
At a time when such work is hard
to finance, let us hope that the money will be forthcoming for parts two and
three. With Satyajit Ray and Kurosawa dead and Jancso marginalised, there is
quite simply no one else still doing this kind of work. The Weeping
Meadow is not a film for everybody - but who says films have to be? Curiously
dismissed as a ‘minor work’ when it debuted in Berlin in February, it is, in
the original sense of the word, a masterpiece - that is to say, not necessarily
‘a great film’ (though I suspect it will come to be regarded as that), but the
work of a master absolutely sure about what he wants to do, and fully capable
of achieving it.
What is the diffierence between “The Traveling Players,” Theo Angelopoulos’s most famous movie, released in 1975, and his latest effort, “The Weeping Meadow”? Well, the former takes its time—four hours or so—whereas the latter zips by in a natty, practically hectic two hours and forty-three minutes. Also, “The Traveling Players” guided us through modern Greek history from 1939 to 1952, in the company of itinerant actors, whereas now, in a complete change of tack, Angelopoulos uses wandering musicians as his chorus, and the chronological frame extends from 1919 to the aftermath of the Second World War. Still, it’s hard to escape the impression of a story that he is driven to tell and retell, like an epic poem, as if the telling were the sole means of keeping it alive.
Mind you, if you stopped people as they came out of “The Weeping Meadow” and
asked for a recitation of the major political shifts in
The clear outcome of this, Angelopoulos’s tribute to both expectation and
despair, is his trademark shot: a steady sideways track, as imperturbable as a
glacier and about as easy to divert, followed by a stately withdrawal to reveal
the majesty, or the horror, of his chosen spectacle. Or consider the head-on
view of a family home, to which we are introduced early in the movie; later, we
see it again, but this time the camera continues to travel calmly to the left
to show slaughtered livestock hanging from the tree outside, like giant fruit.
The family itself feels a secondary affair, defined not psychologically but by
ancient gestures of betrayal, defiance, and loss. Alexis, the blandly beautiful
son, impregnates the uncomplaining Eleni, an orphan from the
All the bits make Angelopoulos as open to parody as Antonioni, and just as
liable to hypnotic longueur. Even those who march out of “The Weeping Meadow,”
however, must concede that it could not have been created by anybody else.
Furthermore, how can one not revere a movie director who causes the printers of
travel brochures to cry out in distress? The
House
Next Door [Matt Zoller Seitz]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Nick's Flick Picks (Full
Review) Nick Davis
Long
Pauses Darren Hughes
by andrew tracy from Cinema
Scope
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Film Journal International (Kevin Lally)
Guardian
Article (2005) Tale of the Century,
Fiachra Gibbons from the Guardian talks
to the director
The New York Times (Dana Stevens)
DVDBeaver.com
[Per-Olof Strandberg]
TO EACH HIS OWN CINEMA (Chacun Son Cinéma)
France (120 mi)
2007 Angelopoulos, Assayas, and 36 international directors
To
Each His Own Cinema (Chacun Son Cinema)
Peter Brunette from Screendaily
Conceived as a homage to the 60th anniversary of the Cannes
Film Festival, this improbable congeries and potentially incoherent work of
cinema (35 different directors making three-minute shorts about the movie-going
experience and their own introduction to the world of film) is surprisingly
successful.
Most critics roll
their eyes, with good reason, at the mere mention of a "compilation
film" but fully 80% - a huge number - of the sequences of Chacun Son
Cinema run from good through very good to excellent. Since this probably
overlong baggy monster relies so heavily on in-jokes and a long-standing
acquaintance with the aesthetic minutiae of contemporary auteurist cinema,
commercial prospects appear minimal, if non-existent. However, the film should
do well on television worldwide.
It's unclear on what
basis the participating filmmakers were chosen, beyond the whim and personal
tastes of Gilles Jacob, long-time director of the festival, but one serious
fault is that out of the 35 directors on display, only one, Jane Campion, is a
woman. This choice seems rather anachronistic for a film produced in 2007.
Overlooking that
considerable flaw, however, what is left is an amazing variety of funny, wise,
sad, political, and occasionally egomaniacal contributions of surprisingly high
quality. The three-minute format seems to have had the beneficial effect of
forcing filmmakers to conceive their segments in mostly visual and aural terms,
rather than relying on narrative. The single, crystal-clear perception or
efficiently told joke also show to advantage in this format.
Though a couple of the
segments list their directors at the beginning, the authors of most are not
known until the end of each contribution, and part of the fun for obsessed
cineastes will come from trying to identify the directors on the basis of
characteristic style, technique, or themes, before the names are revealed.
Wong Kar Wai's
contribution, with its haunting sensuality, powerful composition and lush
visuals and sounds, is readily identifiable. And it may be cruel, but it's not
too far off the mark to say that it's a better film than his My Blueberry
Nights which opened this year's festival with a thud. Takeshi Kitano's
delightful take on a farmer trying to watch a film in a theatre run by an
incompetent projectionist (naturally played by Kitano himself) is wonderfully
simple, like a single musical note played at perfect pitch.
Theo Angelopolous'
contribution, a reunion of sorts between Jeanne Moreau and Marcello
Mastroianni, ends appropriately with a signature Brechtian flourish, while
Nanni Moretti's is of course all about himself, and quite funny. Hou
Hsiao-Hsien's denuded but powerful piece features families entering a theatre,
followed by a shot of a run-down cinema on whose screen Bresson's Mouchette is
playing to an empty house.
Females sobbing (and
getting robbed) is a motif that reappears several times, apparently by
accident, and is featured in a touching piece by the Dardenne brothers. The
other brothers, the Coens, contribute a hilarious vignette called "World
Cinema" about a cowboy (played by Josh Brolin, in a nod to their current
film in competition, No Country For Old Men) debating between watching
Renoir's Rules Of The Game and Ceylan's Climates at an art house
he wanders into.
Atom Egoyan's piece on
contemporary text-messaging teens watching Artaud in Dreyer's The Passion Of
Joan Of Arc is one of the most haunting, while the title of fellow Canadian
David Cronenberg's weirdly droll yet chilling "At The Suicide Of The Last
Jew In The World In The Last Cinema In The World" says it all.
Duds include Michael
Cimino's whacked-out and incoherent episode featuring him smoking a cigar and
running around a theatre shouting at a Cuban band performing there, and
Campion's weird fantasy about people dressed as bugs isn't much better. Claude
Lelouch proved that even limited to three minutes, he is incapable of making a
movie that is not sentimental.
The most egregious is
Youssef Chanine's segment, which features him finally getting the recognition
from
And despite a general
celebration of cinema throughout, the film ends with Ken Loach's funny but
dispiriting little bit showing a father and a son, disappointed by the
offerings at their local moviehouse, deciding to go watch a football match
instead.
Anger, Cédric
THE KILLER (Le Tueur)
France (91 mi)
2007
Festival
of New French Cinema Michael
Wilmington from The Reader
Dark-eyed dandy Gilbert Melki and sullen, feral-looking
Gregoire Colin make an interesting pair in this 2007 neonoir by writer-director
Cedric Anger. Melki plays a frantic, overstretched investment analyst, and
Colin is the stringy-haired provincial assassin hired to rub him out. The two
meet and strike up a relationship, which throws a wrench into the works; more
complications arrive with the hit man’s sudden conquest of ravishing Melanie
Laurent (a near ringer for 60s actress Francoise Dorleac). Despite a good score
by Gregoire Hetzel, a few twists, some high-rise style, and a bit of low-rent
substance, this proves no more original than its overused title. 91 min.
12th Annual Festival of New
French Cinema Facets Multi-Media
A symbiotic
relationship develops between a professional assassin and his mark in The Killer, a minimalist but stylish
thriller, by debut writer-director Cédric Anger. In a mix of mystery, fear and
paranoia, a gentleman's agreement improbably develops between a hit man and his
victim in this unconventional psychological noir. When the hitman, Kopas
(Grégoire Colin, Beau Travail, The Dreamlife of Angels) steps
into the office of a financial investor Léo Zimmerman (Gilbert Melki), the
latter already knows why. Zimmerman is the unhappily married but adoring father
of an eight-year-old daughter. He is involved in a murky business deal with his
partner, whom he knows is also chatting up his wife behind his back. The viewer
never finds out what kind of transactions are involved, but a hit has been put
on Zimmerman's head and he knows it. He tries to make a deal with his murderer,
asking for a few days to say goodbye to his daughter and put his life in order.
The Killer is an ingenious
character study of an assassin and a victim, offering protraits of two
contrasting energies and psyches, one a nervous businessmen, restless in
everything, but determined in his aims, the other a cold-blooded, seemingly
emotionless and nearly taciturn killer with no strong direction. But their pact
changes these men forever In his first full-length feature, Cédric Anger
chooses two powerful characters who move in an world that is quite different
from picturesque Parisian boulevards. The
Killer is an excellent example of the gritty yet melancholic crime genre
with psychological insight, populated by tortured characters who grapple with
their inner struggles. "The characters are rather one-dimensional figures:
we know nothing about their past, present or future, they have no psychological
depth. This isn't a realistic film, but a sort of dream-like meditation on
these figures in this neighborhood in eastern Paris." (Cédric Anger).
Plume
Noire Review [Fred Thom]
The directorial
debut from Cédric Anger, co-writer of Le Petit Lieutenant, The Killer chronicles the intriguing relationship between an
investment analyst (Gilbert Melki — Intimate
Strangers, The Right of The
Weakest) and the man who has been sent to kill him (Grégoire Colin —
Beau Travail, The Dreamlife of Angels).
Starting with
strong sense of paranoia, as the central character knows his days are numbered,
the film then settles for a surprisingly serene atmosphere as the relationship
between the two men develops.
Through Mr.
Melki's character, we're told that the worst thing about death is not knowing
when it will come and that a man can make peace with his fate as long as his
final days can be planned.
Centered mostly on
these two characters, with the killer as a metaphor for the reaper, The Killer echoes Ingmar Bergman's
Seventh Seal, which isn't
very surprising given the cinephile background of Mr. Anger, who worked for the
emblematic French magazine Les Cahiers du Cinema.
What interests the
filmmaker here isn't the final act itself but rather what goes through the
minds of the victim and the executioner while they wait for the sentence. Both
are painted as flawed human beings who seem to be victims of their surroundings
— there is no good character in this film. Mr. Anger also seems to point at
videogames and TV as causes for the normalization of murder in our society —
the killer is a childish character who doesn't really know the value of his
acts.
Though it takes
place in Paris, the film avoids any touristy clichés. We follow the characters
from the modern area of Bercy to the suburbs and the underbelly of the city;
all the locations have been chosen to reflect the emotional states of the
characters, whether it's their inner struggles, their coldness or their
solitude.
With its theme,
slow pace and character-driven dimension, The Killer can be defined as modern film noir, reminiscent of
the universe of the likes of Jules Dassin (Rififi). But what probably attests to the success of this work
is that, when fate comes, we not only do not feel sadness, as both characters
won us over with their motivations, but we also get a strong sense of
happiness, witnessing a highly satisfying amoral epilogue; there is no better
proof of the success of film noir than when it corrupts its audience.
eFilmCritic.com
(Jay Seaver) review [5/5]
SCREENED
AT THE 2008 FANTASIA FESTIVAL: "Le Tueur" is the very image of what
the phrase "French film" often brings to mind. It's alternatively
talkative and quiet, casually sexual, and deals with matters of life and death
with what seems like emotionless detachment. What makes it notable is that it
manages to scratch beneath that surface without seeming arch or self-satisfied
about it.
We start out with Leo Zimmerman (Gilbert Melki), a
reasonably successful financier, doing some shopping with his beautiful
daughter Alana. He seems nervous, as if he can sense the man following and
filming him. That footage winds up in the hands of Dimitri Kopas (Gregoire
Colin), an assassin who has been hired to kill Leo. When Kopas visits Leo in
his office, he knows his number is up, so he confronts him and asks a favor -
let him live until Saturday, so he can pull off one last big deal and make sure
Alana is taken care of. He knows his wife Sylvia (Sophie Cattani) is having an
affair with his partner Xavier Franzen (Xavier Beauvois), and the idea of
Franzen raising his daughter makes him blind with rage. Kopas agrees - why not?
- using the free time to strike something up with Stella (Melanie Laurent), a
model he meets in the hotel lobby.
There have been hundreds of cinematic hitmen, so often played as cool to the
point where it's become almost impossible to avoid self-parody. Gregoire Colin
doesn't quite sidestep that, but he handles it. He's got the cool exterior (and
interior, for that matter), but there's something awkward about his isolation
from regular people. He trips over his own tongue when hitting on Sylvia, and
seems to become keenly aware that he doesn't have much of an existence outside
of his job. He is so conditioned to leave no trace of his presence that he
sometimes seems likely to disappear entirely.
Gilbert Melki's Leo is another thing entirely. He absolutely radiates warmth
when sharing the screen with Alana, and is as jittery and nervous early on as
one might expect someone living under a death sentence to be. He's far from
perfect - there's sometimes hidden venom when he talks with his wife in front
of their daughter, and he spends time in a grimy heroin den - but he's a very
interesting protagonist, with a perfect mix of honor and anger with regard to
his predicament.
The rest of the cast does an apt job of supporting them. Melanie Laurent gets
the most time as Stella, the very self-aware girl who seems like an unusually
good match for Kapos, though is perhaps most captivating in the scene she
shares with Melki. There's a wonderful ambiguity to Sophie Cattani's Sylvia,
who falls well short of being a monster but is also clearly no saint. Xavier
Beauvois isn't around very much, but does the necessary job of making his
character kind of despicable without making him the one-note villain. I wish I
knew the name of the child actress playing Alana, because she's adorable.
It's a very strong feature debut for writer-director Cedric Anger. He stays
away from Paris's more photogenic areas, instead placing his characters in a
world that is anonymous and not glamorous, but can easily be seen as somebody's
home. He gets note-perfect performances from his cast. And the script is a
meticulously plotted thing of beauty, with nothing that's unnecessary, some
precisely targeted moments of humor, and the sort of plot twists that are
unexpected but also feel like the only way that the story could go. The ending
is a perfect example of that, inevitable and yet surprisingly heartfelt.
"Le Tueur" is very
representative of a certain type of french film, and as a hitman drama has a
lot of very familiar parts, but seldom do you see them handled so elegantly
Twitch
review Mack
The
Gazette (Liz Ferguson) who also
interviews the star Grégoire Colin here
Variety review Derek Elley
Anger, Kenneth
Anger,
Kenneth Art and Culture
The son of a Golden-Age Hollywood
agent, Independent filmmaker Kenneth Anger has an insider’s jaded perspective
on the film industry and all that goes with it. His scandalous 1958 exposé of
celebrity private lives, "Hollywood Babylon" (which discusses, among
other things, the genital sizes of various leading actors), summed up his
cynical view of the world. Beginning in his teens, he took on defiantly
original and openly sexual (often gay) themes.
The first of these films was
1947's "Fireworks." Raw graphics commingle with strikingly beautiful
personal symbolism in this fantasy of a solitary, lustful boy -- played by
15-year-old Anger himself -- who is picked up, beaten, and ravaged by a passel
of sailors. The film climaxes (in all senses of the word) with the image of a
penis transubstantiating into a Roman candle. Indie icon Jean Cocteau
rhapsodized, "It touches the quick of the soul, and this is very
rare."
Anger has managed to offend,
disturb, and wreak havoc with practically every subsequent cinematic offering.
"Scorpio Rising" (1963), his sardonic masterwork, was greeted with
police censorship due to its macho-biker subjects and rock 'n' roll
sensibility. Boasting friendships with the famous -- including Mick Jagger,
Jimmy Page, Anais Nin, Marianne Faithfull, and Dr. Alfred Kinsey -- Anger also
worked with and inspired many other experimental filmmakers, including Maya
Deren, Curtis Harrington, and Marie Menken.
Fascinated since youth by the
occult, he became a fervent disciple of the notorious satanist, Alastair
Crowley. This interest seems linked to his rather twisted worship at the gritty
shrine of fame and fortune, as evidenced in the gossip-mongering of his ongoing
Babylon literary series (part three was recently rejected by a major publisher
because it was too explicit). His passion for the myths of cinema and the
privileged excess of Hollywood life fueled his
own version of "Magick," which he adapted from Crowley
Anger believes that his films
hypnotize audiences through a mysterious alchemy that arises out of the
filmmaking process, from cinematography to acting to costume design. The
resulting cinematic experience is a portal to new states of consciousness, the
ones difficult to access within the mundane scope of everyday life. Celebrated
Independent filmmakers, from Fassbinder to Coppola to Scorsese, owe Anger a
large artistic debt. Anger’s truly original films are suffused with a haunting
personal mysticism, a satiric vision, and a contemporary cultural relevance for
audiences worldwide.
Montreal Mirror [Matthew Hays] a film
retrospective introduction
Kenneth Anger says he’s in a good
frame of mind. “Do you know what day it is?” he asks, on the line from the
lobby of the Hollywood Boulevard
Anger has a soothing voice, one
that belies the often disturbing imagery in his groundbreaking oeuvre, an
experimental odyssey that stretches back to the ’40s and continues today. The
man’s story is as incredible as any one of his mind-bending films. Now, the
filmmaker is the subject of an insightful feature-length documentary, Anger Me,
made by Toronto-based filmmaker Elio Gelmini. In the film, he looks back on his
career and reflects on his films, books and encounters with other public
figures. Anger will be in town this week for the Montreal
Anger began as a child actor at a
mere four years old, appearing in the 1935 Hollywood
production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While living in Beverly Hills
In 1947, Anger would take that
camera and create a startling short film. His parents went away for a long
weekend, and in that 72-hour span, he shot Fireworks, a dream-within-a-film
short in which a young man (played by the incredibly handsome Anger himself)
gets beaten up by sailors after trying to pick them up. Infused with libidinous
energy, the brazenly homoerotic Fireworks remains shocking in its sheer
audacity almost 60 years later. So sexually daring, it caught the eye of sex
researcher Alfred Kinsey, who was the first person ever to buy a print of the
film. “It’s about being attracted to something you’re afraid of,” Anger
explains. “You’re attracted to something that’s particularly dangerous, like a
rough, tough man can be. Like a working man can be, or even a college
professor, who knows.”
He goes on to discuss part of the
thrill of cruising itself. “The idea of being attracted to a stranger…
sometimes if you look at someone a split second too long, it can happen that
they’ll say, ‘What are you looking at?’ I knew not to do what the young man in
the film does, which is to ask them for a light for their cigarette. That used
to be, back in the ’40s, an old pick-up line. Among subterranean gay culture at
the time, that was a way to get picked up.”
Magnificent
digressions
While talking to Anger, it soon
becomes clear that the man loves to digress. A discussion of Fireworks leads to
talk of how gays smoke more than any other minority (“That’s why I don’t go to
gay clubs,” he explains, “I’m allergic to smoke.”), what Bette Davis thought of
her fans (she referred to them as “clods”) and his advice to fast-talking
Martin Scorsese. (“I told him to slow down—this is California
He’s so full of gossip-filled
digressions and tangential anecdotes, it’s not hard to believe that this is the
same man who wrote the hugely popular Hollywood Babylon and Hollywood Babylon
II, the books in which Anger painstakingly chronicled any and all manner of
Tinseltown scandal and legend.
When I discuss showing Fireworks
to friends, Anger inquires about where I rented the print. He’s quick to point
out that many of his films have been pirated, including Fireworks and Scorpio
Rising, and that’s been a real drain on him. “I don’t get any royalties for the
pirated prints that are circulating. I don’t get any money, which is pretty
painful because I live on the edge. The copies are often visually degraded. I
don’t have the energy to do a long-distance dispute in many cases. It’s one
thing for the Disney company to be pirated all over the world—and they are—but
it’s another thing for me.”
I bring the conversation back to
Fireworks, telling Anger that I’m amazed at how brazen the film is—and remains
to this day. “It’s easy to be brazen when you’re 17 and know what you want to
do and barely have the means to do it. My model is Arthur Rimbaud. He was
writing poems that are classic and immortal when he was a teenager. Then he
went to Africa and became an arms dealer and
never wrote another poem.”
“But you never became an arms
dealer,” I counter.
“No, in spite of the rumours,”
says Anger.
Hollywood nightmare
Anger takes umbrage when I
suggest that his films are anti-Hollywood. “No, I love a lot about Hollywood
But Anger does concede that he
was put off by the post-war paranoia that he saw unfolding in America Beverly
Hills High School New York
And then, he returns to the story
of Fireworks’ beginnings. Interestingly enough, the violence in the film was
inspired by a race-related riot that Anger witnessed in 1944. “It was called
the Zoot Suit Riot, and I happened to be there to see it. At that time, there
was a lot of racial antagonism between Mexican cool cats who were living in L.A.
These images stuck in Anger’s
head, and dreams persisted. “These white uniforms would come out and attack,
but in my dream they were attacking me.”
Fireworks would prove a
triumphant film for Anger, leading him to France Paris Britain U.S.
As our conversation comes to a
close, I express dismay that Anger has had a difficult time recovering
royalties and residuals for his legendary films and best-selling books. “I have
never been a businessman. My father wanted me to be an aircraft engineer, like
him. I said that I wanted to be an artist. He said no one can make a living from
that. I gave him a list of people who had, including Picasso. He cut me out of
his will—left me a dollar.”
What about his still-unpublished
book, Hollywood Babylon III?
“The publishers read it and said
there are too many hot wires in there. The Church of Scientology
“People compare me to Andy
Warhol. But he had the Midas touch. He could take a piece of crap and sign his
name to it and they’d sell it for a fortune.
“That’s not me.”
Magick Lantern Cycle Anger website with access to articles and film comments
The Films of Kenneth Anger more comments on Anger films, from
Magick Lantern Cycle
A Kenneth Anger Page with clips and comments from Anger films
Film Reference extensive profile by Ed Lowry
All-Movie Guide Sandra Brennan
Disinformation more bio info by Alex Burns
Mystic Fire's People Featured: Kenneth Anger still more bio material
TCMDB profile by Turner Classic Movies
Kenneth
Anger - Issue 51, 2009 - Senses of Cinema
Maximilian Le Cain from Senses of Cinema, January 2003
Anger, Kenneth They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
An article by Mr. Anger, "Modesty and the Art of Film" published in Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 5, September 1951, reprinted courtesy of Cahiers and Kenneth Anger. translated by David Wilson, printed from Magick Lantern Cycle
Kenneth
Anger Kenneth Anger, by Robert A. Haller from the Harvard Independent Film
Group, February 1980
Elusive Lucifer
by Tony Rayns from Monthly Film Bulletin, September 1982,
printed from Magick Lantern Cycle
An Interview with Kenneth Anger by Carl Russo, 2000
Observer
Article (2004) Look Back at Anger,
by Sanjiv Bhattacharya from the Observer,
Village Voice
Article (2007) Kenneth Anger Comes
Home, by Nathan Lee from the Village Voice,
What
I learned during “An Evening with Kenneth Anger” Eric Henderson from When Canses Were Classeled,
January 27, 2007
Kenneth
Anger Rising | Artopia - ArtsJournal John Perreault, November 6, 2007
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Inflammable desires Tony Rayns from Sight
and Sound, July 2009
Anger, Kenneth They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
FIREWORKS
USA
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
A 20-minute, blue-tinged home movie, reveries within
reveries, and the inauguration of Kenneth Anger’s private mythology. Jean
Cocteau must have swooned from the first image, a sailor cradling a battered
body to a receding camera while thunder rumbles somewhere in the distance --
cut to beefcake in close-up, the naked torso of pimply, 17-year-old Anger
tossing in bed, an object d’art under the sheets evoking a mock-erection. The
director’s yearning for unattainable beauty is already in place, and the young
upstart, unbuttoned jeans and all, goes cruisin’ into the nocturnal darkness of
the unconscious, stopping by a flat, painted-on barroom background to ask a
weightlifter flexing his pecs for a light. The intimate longings of a
youngster, queer, former child-star and magick enthusiast, playing with a
camera while mom and dad are away for the weekend: the personal trip of a
budding maverick bent on fashioning an Un Chien Andalou or Le Sang
d’un Poète out of moist fantasies. Nothing if not aware of his own place in
underground-film history, he enacts his masochistic death and artistic rebirth
for posterity -- cigarette lit with a burning branch, Anger turns to meet a
bunch of uniformed Navy thugs looming with chains. Fingers bloodily jammed into
nostrils, guts ripped apart to reveal a literal ticker, and pulping on the
tiled lavatory floor, before milk washes away the gore and an exploding Roman
candle sprouts from the sailor’s crotch. The flaming tip of a X-mas tree signals
agony toward ecstasy and a "bed less empty than before," the
self-fondling violence and rapture of being "different" in
The Anger Magick Lantern Cycle from
Time Out London
The anthology of Anger's nine
released films is the most coherent (and remarkable) body of work produced by
any American 'underground' film-maker. All the films are ritualistic in form
and content; the later ones refer directly to the 'magick' of Anger's professed
idol, Aleister Crowley. Anger's most obvious aesthetic forefathers are
Eisenstein and Cocteau. Fireworks (1947, 14 min) and its inverse twin Eaux
d'artifice (i.e. Waterworks, 1953, 13 min) show wish-fulfilment
quests, the first successful (a lonely, masochistic boy survives a
heart-stopping beating to earn himself a male lover), the second not (a
crinolined dwarf cruises the dark gods of a water garden but isn't picked up). Puce
Moment (1949, 6 min) salutes 1920s
The Village Voice [Nathan Lee]
Nothing
suffers more on home video than avant-garde film, by its nature inclined to
explore the outer limits, innate qualities, and subtlest effects of its medium.
Yet nothing is more exciting, from the perspective of the living-room
cinematheque (a/k/a the future of cinephilia) than the recent boon in
experimental DVDs. Sure, they suffer on the small screen—and Flaubert is better
in the original French—but that doesn't prevent translations of Sentimental
Education from blowing minds.
The latest blast from
the avant-garde cannon, The Films of Kenneth Anger: Volume One, arrives
this week on DVD in a terrific package from Fantoma. Proto-pop genius, gay
maverick, hardcore occultist, master of montage, and, through his pioneering
use of unauthorized pop songs and intensity of vision, one of the most
influential filmmakers of the 20th century, Kenneth Anger is a cornerstone of
the American avant-garde and a gift that keeps on giving. This long-overdue DVD
crests a wave of fresh critical interest: 2004 saw the publication of an
invaluable scholarly monograph on his life and works by Alice L. Hutchison, and
2006 offered a screening of Anger's latest short, Mouse Heaven (2002),
in the Whitney Biennial.
Scrupulously restored
and transferred in high definition, the DVD is a dream come true for newbies,
devotees, students, scholars, artists, stoners, black magicians, fetishists,
and Martin Scorsese. "Like many people, I was astonished when I saw
Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising for the first time," Scorsese writes
in his introduction to the accompanying booklet. "Every cut, every camera
movement, every color, and every texture seemed, somehow, inevitable, in the
same way that images of the Virgin in Renaissance painting seem inevitable—in
other words, pre-existing but dormant, and brought back to life through some
kind of evocation."
"Some kind of
evocation": in its vague way, an exact definition of Anger's enchanting
oeuvre. It's easy enough to place Fireworks (1947), radical as it was
for the time; here is cinema's most exquisite fantasy of gay gang rape by hot
teenage sailors. On the sparse yet fascinating commentary track, Anger claims
his inspiration was the Los Angeles Zoot Suit riots, but the influence of
Cocteau is far more evident on the film's brazenly oneiric and onanistic pulse
of images. Indeed, on discovering Fireworks at the Festival du Film
Maudit, the legendary poet awarded it a prize, encouraging Anger to spend the
next decade in
Shot in the famous
water gardens of the Villa d'Este at
Inauguration of the
Pleasure Dome
(1954) has the coolest title of any Anger film and many fans, though I've
always found it a tad tedious. An orgiastic fantasia of mythic personages,
crazy costumes, pancake makeup, hallucinatory superimposition, and lysergic
colors, Pleasure Dome posits a model of pagan cine-ritual that would
reach fuller expression in later works.
For all his emphasis on magic, myth, symbol, and rite, Anger is as material
a filmmaker as Brakhage. Puce Moment (1949) opens with a voluptuous
shuffle of evening gowns in close-up, a rainbow shimmy of silk, chiffon,
sequins, and beads. Emerging from the dazzle is Yvonne Marquis, styled like a
Warholian Elizabeth
CLOSE UP:
AMERICA YEAR ZERO by Ara Osterweil - artforum.com / in pri Ara Osterweil from Artforum, January 2017
Fireworks • Senses of
Cinema Chris Meir from Senses of Cinema, July 25, 2003
Austin
Chronicle [Claiborne K.H. Smith]
feature article and interview with the director, November 17, 1997
DVD In My Pants
- Films of Kenneth Anger: Vol 1 - DVD Review Shawn McLoughlin
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Fireworks (1947
film) - Wikipedia
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger,
1947) - YouTube (15:04)
PUCE MOMENT
USA
All Movie Guide [David Lewis]
Long before Kenneth Anger's book Hollywood
Babylon appeared in
RABBIT’S MOON
USA
All Movie Guide [David Lewis]
Rabbit's Moon
is a "Magic Lantern" Commedia del'Arte play in which Pierrot (André
Soubeyran) is attempting to reach the moon, occupied by a rabbit, and later
attempts to win the heart of Columbine (Nadine
Valance), though he thwarted by Harlequin (Claude Revenant).
Pierrot discovers a magic lantern, which provides him happiness and relief from
his unrealized ambitions. This is one of Kenneth Anger's
most delicate creations, one of the only post-WWII experimental shorts to
successfully recreate the look of a late nineteenth century lanterna magica.
Started on 35 mm in 1950 on a set owned by Jean-Pierre Melville,
Rabbit's
Moon was abandoned after only a few days of shooting, as Melville
needed his studio returned to him. The unfinished film was stored at the
Cinemathèque Française and forgotten. In 1970 Anger
returned to this project and realized it in a 16-minute version, synchronized
to an assemblage of pop hits. In 1979 it was shortened to a mere seven minutes
and a new soundtrack, which consists of distracting rock music that seems
wholly inappropriate for the film, was added. This is the version that
circulates in the current "Magick Lantern Cycle."
EAUX D’ARTIFICE
USA
All Movie Guide [David Lewis]
Filmed at the Gardens of the Villa
d'Este in
INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME
USA
All Movie Guide [Steve Blackburn]
Directed by famed homoerotic
underground filmmaker Kenneth
Anger in 1954, Inauguration
of the Pleasure Dome is considered a key work of American experimental
film. It has been cited as an influence on Roger
Corman's Edgar
Allan Poe series and on certain shots in Martin
Scorsese's Kundun.
Inauguration
of the Pleasure Dome varies in length from 38 to 43 minutes, depending on
the print or video, and also exists in a version altered by Anger in
1966. The color film is dedicated to British writer and occultist Aleister
Crowley (1875-1947), author of The Diary of a Drug Friend. Anger's
tribute presents a "Dionysian revel." Highlights include appearances
by erotica author and diarist Anaïs Nin
and by avant-garde filmmaker Curtis
Harrington. Anger
authored the book of scandal and gossip Hollywood Babylon.
Fantastic Movie Musings and Ramblings
Dave Sindelar
SCORPIO RISING
USA
Shock Cinema [Steven Puchalski] (capsule
review)
One of the coolest underground shorts ever made. Kenneth
Anger mythologizes the biker lifestyle (years before
New York Times (registration req'd) Nora Sayre
It's always fascinating to re-encounter experimental works after some years have passed—to see them outside the period that seemed to frame them. I first saw Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio Rising" in 1965, and it's pleasing to report that it holds up very well. The movie is playing today and tomorrow at the First Avenue Screening Room, and anyone who missed what was once called the underground should catch it.
"Scorpio," made in 1963, mocks the motorcycle cult and the voluptuous toughs who worship their machines. Blue-tinted shots of Marlon Brando in "The Wild One" and pin-ups of James Dean alternate with glimpses of Cecil B. De Mille's silent "King of Kings," and a Walpurgis party where genitals are plunged through a cardboard skeleton and mustard is squirted in a man's navel. The rock sound-track is hilarious: "Wind Up Doll," "She Wore Blue Velvet," "Baby, You're Torturing Me" and "I Will Follow Him" pound away throughout the proceedings, and there are flashes of some admirable abdomens. However, a few too many death's heads are included.
Oddly enough, the references to the nineteen-fifties, which seemed dated and rather ponderous in 1965, don't make the film appear old-fashioned now. Admittedly, one then saw it in an unfortunate context—draped in the mystique of the underground, when a number of inferior films employed some similar imagery, such as the juxtaposition of Christ and hipsters, or close-ups of all-purpose skulls. But after a decade's education in put-ons, one can savor the impudent freshness of "Scorpio" today.
Plugincinema.com Faust 667
Kenneth Anger's "Scorpio
Rising" is one of the most revolutionary films of the past forty years. It
set a whole new precedent to filmmaking in general, in terms of its fast
cutting style, rock n' roll montages, rebellious allure of motorcyclists, sex,
death, and so on. In fact, I may be so bold as to say that this is the first
sex, drugs and rock n' roll movie ever made. And Anger did it all in less than
half-an-hour of film time.
As director Anger recently
explained about his most famous (or infamous) short film, "Scorpio
Rising" is an ironic take on "The Wild Bunch," the latter being
a fairly tame motorcycle movie next to this one. In fact, "Scorpio
Rising" is all about irony, and yet it says something rather disconcerting
about the world in America
"Scorpio Rising" begins
with average men in their late teens or early twenties polishing and fixing
their precious bikes (or as Anger referred to them as "Christmas tree
versions of motorcycles".) They are inside their garages, and we hear
lovely pop songs in the background as the camera tracks back and forth between
the bikers and their bikes, wind-up toys of motorbikes, and a prominent visage
of a skull in the background. Later, we see the bikers dressing up in their
uniforms, a combination of leather jackets and straps to the tune of Bobby
Vinton's "Blue Velvet." The irony begins again, as the song has the
lyric, "She wore blue velvet," yet we see a blonde biker dressing up
wearing a blue shirt and a black leather jacket. As photographed in close-up,
along with subliminal shots of a barechested biker, there is a definite
homoerotic subtext occurring here, as there was with Anger's first film
"Fireworks" where Anger played a 17-year-old kid who dreams of being
sodomized and beaten by Navy officers. There is one shot in "Scorpio"
of the barechested biker standing over a cone pointing to his crotch.
Most of "Scorpio
Rising" has sexual connotations in every shot, especially the Halloween
party where costumed, masked guests stand around having sex with their
genitalia clearly exposed (the version I saw had such moments blotted out since
it was from a Japanese laserdisc).
"Scorpio Rising"
combines elements of teen rebellion, popular culture, Nazi ideology, the
motorcycle cult, sex, rock n' roll, religion, and death and it twists such
elements around to form a rather haunting collage about the inevitable decline of
the western civilization as we know it. And every sequence has a rock and roll
song or some sentimental ditty playing on the soundtrack. "Scorpio
Rising" is the first film to ever build a montage of shots with songs, and
to do so ironically. If you are wondering where Martin Scorsese, Quentin
Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson and any filmmaker since, not to
mention MTV, got their ideas for their famous use of ironic pop songs as
subtext or montage, look no further back than "Scorpio Rising." Another
ironic fact is that the film was brought up on obscenity charges back in 1964,
yet no one noticed the use of songs in the soundtrack which Anger had no
permission to use. Since then, the film has been tough to find in video stores
because the rights to such songs are still in a legal tangle.
"Scorpio Rising" is a
frenetically charged, highly potent piece of cinema and it is guaranteed to
still provoke anger (especially the use of the swastika symbol). It was a sign
of things to come, long before the advent of the post-60's youth rebellion in
films such as "The Graduate," or youth violence in "A Clockwork
Orange." There is of course the nineties equivalent of both, "Natural
Born Killers." It all began with Anger's film, and we can either be
grateful or unforgiving.
KUSTOM KAR KOMMANDOS
USA
Bent Clouds Jason Overbeck
In Kenneth Anger’s
film Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965, Kenneth Anger) sexuality and
gender roles are constructed by the aesthetics of the filmmaking. Anger
uses conventional cinematic technique and elements in unconventional ways to
produce non-normative sexual meaning.
The first thing heard in Kustom Kar Kommandos is the sound of a revving
car engine and the word “Kustom” appears on screen followed by a shot of the
car, with the engine exposed. Then the word “Kar” appears and the film
cuts to the two boys looking at the car engine. There is a cut back to
the word “Kar” and then back to a tighter shot of the boys looking at the
car. The message derived from the sandwiching of the two shots of the
boys with the word “Kar” is literally the idea that the car will bring this
couple together. After the second shot of the boys, the film cuts to
“Kommandos” which completes the title. The title is deliberately
misspelled, replacing the three C’s with K’s. KKK stands for Klu Klux
Klan; another group of associated with white male togetherness and the word
Kommando is derived from Commando, which means members of a trained military
unit. In both ways the title suggests togetherness and violence, and also
implies a relationship between togetherness of two men with sadomasochism as
does the film Fireworks (1947, Kenneth Anger).
After the revving of the engine and the two boys together, the song “Dream
Lover” begins to play and we see the door of the car open towards the camera,
as if we are invited to enjoy the car’s beauty. Then there is a dissolve
to the seats inside the car seen together, in red leather. This dissolves
to the exterior of the car where two shiny, metal, circular extensions of the
engine protrude from the car. The boy rises from below the car into the
shot, standing with his hands on his hips. The two metal objects
perfectly frame the boy’s crotch. The shot of the seats and the metal
objects conclude the importance of coupling to the film. The second shot
framing the coupling of the metal engine protrusion with the male crotch, this
implies these two things work in tandem. The car’s engine has the
ultimate importance to the car and the boy’s crotch has the ultimate importance
to the boy. Together these elements seem to drive all the other images
seen in the film - they are working for each other. Anger even pushes in
slightly on the boy’s crotch to drive home the message of the shot.
The film dissolves to the first of four long seductive takes of the boy gently
wiping down the car with a big fluffy ball. Each shot is separated by a
wipe but all the movement is slow and deliberate, from both the boys polishing
and the camera panning. While wiping down the car the boy is totally
detached from the film as a recognizable figure, only his body is seen and not
his face. As the boy is fetishizing the body of the car, Anger is
fetishizing the boy as well.
The emphasis of the film is not only to sexualize the car and its relationship
to the boys but also to show the importance of the dressing up process.
This process was also used by Anger to mock feminine displays in the film Puce
Moment (1949, Anger). Dreyer says in his essay Underground and After, "The idea of dressing up as the
assumption of an identity may be related to Jack Babuscio’s discussion (1977)
of the ‘gay sensibility’ which stresses the absolute importance of mastering
appearances and assuming identities in a gay life where passing for straight
(assuming a straight appearance) is so critical." The car is essential in
not only helping to create a couple but also in constructing the identity of
the boy taking care of the car; it is his reflection.
When the boy is finally done caressing the car he gets in and starts the
engine. Two shots show him and the car working in a synthesis that does
not seem to be contained by the shell of the car, again pushing how important
both are to each other. The revving of the car engine again echoes the
film’s beginning sound again reinforcing the idea of coupling, not just in the
film’s structure but also because the revving engine reminds the viewer to
associate that sound with the two boys together.
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
USA
User
reviews from imdb Author: Pete Tha GEEK! from
Copenhagen, Denmark
To the tunes of eerie synthesizer noise composed by Mick Jagger, Anger provides a death trip of the occult and hallucinative. 'Invocation of My Demon Brother' use montages of drugs, war and concert footage, stirring eyes, sex and magic to picture the descent into the underworld. It is surely not always an enjoyable experience, but it was clearly not the intention either. The Rolling Stones appears along with albinos, satyrs, bikers, costumed figures and Anger himself as a ceremonial leader. 'Invocation of My Demon Brother' contains a weird claustrophobic and nightmarish atmosphere and, I can spot some similarities with the masterpiece 'Scorpio Rising', but in general it is like all the work by Anger a a total standout. A commentary to the 68's generation could probably be hidden underneath the skulls, swastikas, psychedelic colors and rock & roll attitude. Watch, and judge for yourself.
LUCIFER RISING
USA Great Britain Germany
The Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
The violent forces of nature create volcanic eruptions as
letters of flame, spelling out the title and the intent, rise from the ocean.
The Ancient Egyptian Goddess Isis (Myriam
Gibril) contacts her deity counterpart Osiris (Donald
Cammell) and they harness those forces to create something simultaneously
new and old: Lucifer (Kenneth
Anger).
There's not really much point in trying to write a synopsis of Lucifer Rising,
as it, more than many other films, remains an experience better left to the reactions
of the subconscious. While not as influential as writer and director Kenneth
Anger's Scorpio
Rising (although Lucifer does have his name extravagantly written on the
back of his jacket perhaps in reference to the earlier short), this film has
all the implications of mysticism that make it essentially a religious work,
but one which fetishises its beliefs. Taking the view that Lucifer was an
ancient God himself, Anger places him among the pantheon of Egyptian and pagan
deities rather than the clichéd devil of modern Christianity, or even pop
culture.
However, what made the film notorious wasn't so much its visual content, but
its soundtrack. Jimmy
Page of Led Zeppelin was enlisted to create appropriate music for it, but
after a falling out with Anger when Anger felt Page's efforts weren't up to
snuff, a new composer was hired: a certain Bobby
Beausoleil, who was serving time in prison for being one of the murderous
Manson Family. Beausoleil had worked on a previous Anger project, and wrote the
moody score from jail; all this was one of the reasons the film took so long to
complete from initial filming to actually being released.
But the controversy aside, it's the images Anger finds that lend it that
hypnotic quality. Always threatening to look like dressing up and wandering
around tourist attractions (Marianne
Faithfull does quite a lot of rambling about), the sinister side manages to
keep a straight face on the audience, as if the immersion in the arcane was
conjuring up some authority from far back in time. Anger doesn't only film his
friends in such picturesque locations, but uses stock footage as well,
including volcanoes, bubbling mud pits (always a strangely fascinating sight)
and animals (a swimming tiger, a snake being stomped by an elephant's foot) to
weave his esoteric tapestry. And to top it all, a bunch of flying saucers show
up for the finale. Although Lucifer Rising is only as meaningful as the amount
you are willing to read into it, its dreamlike sleepwalk though ancient Gods
and tenets does captivate for the admittedly brief duration.
Jimmy Page and Kenneth Anger-Collaboration on Lucifer Rising. Very extensive with photos!" from Magick Lantern Cycle
THE MAN WE WANT TO HANG
USA
User
reviews from imdb Author bomarrcus from Oakland,
CA
This is the first film legendary avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger has
made in over 20 years. His last film being "Lucifer Rising". After
waiting that long to make a new film, you would think he might have done
something a little more elaborate. Granted, he has now passed the age of
seventy, but I know there must still be quite a bit of creativity in him.
"The Man We Want to Hang" is a 12-minute short, consisting of Anger
filming borrowed paintings done by legendary and controversial occultist
Aleister Crowley. The paintings themselves are interesting to see because of
their irony. For such a renowned "occultist"/"satanist",
MOUSE HEAVEN
USA
2006 New York Film Festival
"Views from the Avant-Garde"
Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
A surprise addendum to the thoroughly enjoyable show of
Anger restorations, Mouse Heaven is crude, frequently ugly, and adopts
an almost completely uncritical stance toward its subject, Mickey Mouse. This
is both shocking and disappointing, since Anger's best work is sophisticated, almost
always beautiful, and tinged with a subtle social commentary, wrapped in a
package of pop pleasures that, like Anger's scorpion emblem in Scorpio
Rising, his you with a sudden sting. Part of the problem is digital video.
When Anger isolated an object or an image against a piercing monochromatic
background in his earlier work (say, the baby blues of Kustom Kar Kommandos),
the technique regally draped the screen, paradoxically spare and lavish -- a
Baroque minimalism. Here, Anger uses video-generated color fields to accomplish
the same task, and they just look shabby, as though the fire-engine reds or
User
reviews from imdb Author: Pete Tha GEEK! from
Copenhagen, Denmark
Who could have believed, that cult favorite Kenneth Anger who had been
inactive in almost 30 years, suddenly would start to make movies again at the
age of seventy-something. Anger will always be remembered for beautiful,
thrilling, haunting and prophetic experiments like 'Eaux d'artifice',
'Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome', 'Scorpio Rising', 'Fireworks' and 'Lucifer
Rising'. Is it possible that he can overcome his own impressive reputation this
day? Hardly! 'Mouse Heaven' is only a shadow of what his earlier movies could
provide, still it not hits the rock bottom, because it have something
intelligent to say. But it is not as daring, as it could have been. The visual
aspect is especially a great step back. It is shot on video, with a lot of CGI
in use. Some kind of a bummer, but well, the times have changed.
'Mouse Heaven'is a documentary, about the symbol of American pop culture.
Mickey Mouse! Endless shots of comic strips and a gigantic collection of
merchandise through the ages, accompanied with old pop songs give a rather
disturbing picture of the apocalyptic culture of
The
Village Voice [Nathan Lee]
Angio, Joe
HOW TO EAT YOUR WATERMELON IN WHITE COMPANY (AND ENJOY IT) B 84
USA
A thoroughly enjoyable documentary looking at the life of Melvin Van Peebles, the legendary director of SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSS SONG, the first film that made being a revolutionary hip, opening the way for other filmmaker’s blaxploitation features like SUPER FLY, a film that made being a drug dealer hip. Van Peebles was actually present at the initial screening, but left town by the time I caught the film, probably disappointed at the scant crowd. A project that lasted more than eight years, the white director is a local Chicagoan who became chief editor at Time Out New York, and this is his first feature film, using a standard format that in many ways, other than language and nudity, resembles a PBS production, utilizing a technique of a conversation of voices, with various people recalling incidents about Melvin, adding accompanying footage as examples of what they are talking about. As there were no people available to talk about Melvin’s early days except Melvin, the director creates an irreverent newsreel piece of those early days that resembles an overly happy travelogue. Other than that, there is some terrific archival footage that begins in Paris, France, as other American black artists were also allowed freedom of expression in France in ways that were not acceptable in the United States, like Richard Wright and James Baldwin, where Melvin taught himself French, actually wrote stories for a social activist newspaper there as well as a few books, and made some short films that were discovered by the legendary Henri Langlois, who brought him to Paris and programmed his films, which were later exhibited at the San Francisco Film Fest, bringing him back to the United States.
Throughout the film, Melvin himself exhibits his own kind of infectious joie de vivre, displaying an indomitable spirit that refuses to be deterred, an example being he was tired of seeing black people show up at lynchings with a hymnal and a Bible, so he decided to do what he could to change people’s perceptions. SWEET SWEETBACK was a film that in its day was endorsed by the Black Panther Party, analyzed from a revolutionary perspective by Huey P. Newton in the Panther newspaper, and according to a few brief comments by Spike Lee, was extremely influential on today’s black filmmakers, including his ability to market himself. When Melvin is captured on camera talking about the radical 60’s, this film is riveting, as he truly is a historical figure from that era. In the Q & A afterwards, the director commented on a story about Melvin attending a college seminar with several other notables on cinema as art, where a young black man in the audience noticed how dark SWEETBACK was, how he didn’t use enough light. Melvin indicated he took great pains to capture the look he was striving for, to which the young man commented he still thought it looked “fucked up.” Melvin leaped off the podium into the audience and proceeded to punch the guy out. He also recounted the story of showing the film at a LA festival where Melvin’s son Mario witnessed the film for the first time. Mario, by the way, is captured on film comparing his father’s singing voice to a frog on crack, but he also indicated the film gave credence to events in his life that he thought his father had completely made up. The rest of the film unfolds in a rather routine manner, establishing he had two Broadway productions running at the same time in the early 70’s, one of which got such a scathing negative review from the reviewer of the New York Times that he had to apologize the next day, claiming he just didn’t get it on first viewing, and years later, he worked on the floor as a stock market trader, even writing a book on the subject and making a hilarious TV news commentary. Again, according to the director afterwards, Melvin met with the young rapper Quasimoto, who has plagiarized many of the early SWEET SWEETBACK songs, claiming he could either get a lawyer to rectify the situation, pay him a big check, or work together on a future CD that will be coming out later this year or early next. In addition, there are reports that Melvin may be coming out with a SWEET SWEETBACK video game.
An autobiographical note: I
actually saw SWEET SWEETBACK’S BAADASSS SONG in New Orleans
Annaud, Jean-Jacques
THE BEAR (L'ours)
France USA
(94 mi) 1988 ‘Scope
Brilliant Observations on
1492 Films [Clayton Trapp]
It's amazing that anyone can make this work, and Jean-Jacques
Annaud makes it look easy. An entire story, replete with plot and moral, told
from the point of view of a bear cub, but without having it speak human. I
wouldn't have thought that a young bear life was full of so many things that
could be communicated to me, but now I see. It's that kind of film. Of course
there are no car chases, and the secondary humans are arguably too simple or
complex, but it keeps right on rolling along, without ever getting dull or
feeling contrived. Ah, come on. Bear dreams? Edging towards reality and hallucination?
As if you won't allow any films about human activity that can't be objectively
demonstrated. So, basically all of history is off limits? It's not that this
couldn't have happened, it's that it no doubt happened all the time, still does
in one form or another, and so it's good of us to bother noticing.
Washington
Post (Rita Kempley) review
If you think you were traumatized when they shot Bambi's mother, just wait till you see "The Bear." Mud-and-guts director Jean-Jacques Annaud, who fictionalized the discovery of both fire and the missionary position in "Quest for Fire," leaves little to the imagination in this buddy movie for bears.
Told in ursine language and set to a thundering score, "The Bear" stars a real live teddy bear, Douce, as a fuzzy cub who is orphaned when her mommy is squashed in a rock slide. Mewling and pawing at her fallen parent, Douce finally realizes she cannot rouse her and timidly sets off on her own. Playing games with great frogs in a meadow pond, she is momentarily distracted.
Meanwhile, in another part of the woods -- Italy's Dolomites standing in for the Canadian Rockies -- a huge male (the superb Bart) is shot by hunters as he enjoys a lunch of bright orange berries. The angry, suffering bear mauls the hunters' pack animals, and the ignorant duo (Jack Wallace and Tcheky Karyo) swear vengeance against him, planning to return with a kennelful of vicious dogs. The cub follows gruff Bart at a distance, whining for acceptance, which she finally wins by licking the blood from his oozing shoulder wound.
The bear buddies go fishing together and enjoy other woodland recreation: Douce trips out on psychedelic mushrooms and Bart ruts enthusiastically with Doc (an "effeminate" male Annaud cast as the love interest). And for a moment, this beastly business becomes La Cave aux Folles. Well, it is a French film after all, part bedroom farce, part National Geographic special, but mostly an animal horror story. The hunters track the blissful bears like slashers sneaking up on high school kids.
Children, and adults for that matter, are sure to identify with Douce, the poor little love. Based on a novel written by American naturalist James Oliver Curwood in 1916, the movie is pretend realism meant to stay those little trigger fingers. It's certainly harrowing to sit through. Talk about your grizzly misadventures.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan
Rosenbaum) review [2/4]
UTK Daily
Beacon [Erin Leland]
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The
New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
THE LOVER (L’Amant)
France Great Britain
Vietnam (115 mi) 1992
Late '20s Indo-China.
A 15-year-old schoolgirl leans wistfully on the rail of a ferryboat crossing
the Mekong. Observing her is an elegant, rich Chinese. With exquisite Parisian
manners he offers her a lift to her lowly Saigon boarding-house. Thus meet the
Young Girl (March) and the Chinaman (Leung) referred to in Marguerite Duras's
assumedly autobiographical '80s novel (controversially, Annaud opted for a Gérard Brach
script rather than Duras' own). For all the footage of glistening flesh - most
of the film takes place in a darkened room where the two explore the realm of
the senses - this is basically a melancholic piece about the remembrance of
times, places and passions lost (with voice-over narration by Jeanne Moreau).
The Young Girl, altogether too complex for the inexperienced March to do more
than simply embody, was then in the process of taking her life into her own
hands. She will become a writer, and has developed the strength to avoid both
the predatoriness of her mother and the romantic dependence of her lover. But
at a price. This sombre quality dignifies an otherwise shoddily directed movie.
Washington
Post (Desson Howe) review
"The Lover," the adaptation of Marguerite Duras' 1984 novel, is nothing if not naked. But don't worry, this forbidden-fruit movie is artistic. You can still go.
Consider this a parent's note. Tear it out and show it to the disapprover in your life. Tell him or her it's the touching story of a young woman's extended liaison with a Chinese lover. It's about her attaining self-realization. It's about love beyond cross-cultural boundaries and taboos. It's about the ties that bind . . . no, skip that. It's about young, taut bodies living life to the fullest, celebrating their nudity. Better make that "their youth."
This French production, by the team that gave you "The Name of the Rose" and "The Bear," is beautiful to watch -- and not just because English actress Jane March and equally nubile co-star Tony Leung will never need Slimfast. Cinematographer Robert Fraisse creates a beautiful, sepia-like, bygone-era tint to this drama, set in French-occupied Vietnam in 1929.
That's the year that 18-year-old March, her foot coltishly perched on a deck railing, is crossing the Mekong River to Saigon. On her way to another horrid year of boarding school, the French girl sees dandyish, white-suited, 32-year-old Leung standing next to her. When he offers her a lift in his chauffeured limousine, it's the beginning of a plush trip into camera-ready sensuality. They soon begin meeting in Leung's rented "bachelor room" in a seedy district, where the couple (plus more than a handful of sexual stunt doubles) will tryst regularly.
The difficulties are manifold. March's dysfunctional French-colonial family -- including a wacked-out mother(Frederique Meininger) and a psychotic, opium-addled brother (Arnaud Giovaninetti) -- will not accept such an affair. Leung, entirely dependent on his (equally opium-drugged) father's wealth, will not break the traditional arranged marriage with a Chinese bride that is his destiny.
As for the two of them, Leung knows March will never love him; in art movies, prophecies like that come easily. She knows he's nothing but a lover of women.
Director Jean-Jacques Annaud and adapter Gerard Brach provide more than a few effective moments. Beyond her corporeal qualities, March is thoroughly believable. When she walks up to Leung in his car and plants a kiss on his window, her swoonish tentativeness gives the act incredible weight. But the story is dramatically not that interesting. After establishing the affair and its immediate problems, "Lover" never quite rises to the occasion. Scratch away the steamy, evocative surface, remove Jeanne Moreau's veteran-voiced narration, and you have only art-film banalities.
In the 1960 "Hiroshima Mon Amour," about the affair between a French movie actress and a Japanese architect five years after the bomb blast, Duras' screenplay achieved a satisfying thematic duality. Screenwriter Brach appears to aim for a similar Duras effect. But this time, East and West don't juxtapose. They just doff clothes.
THE
LOVER and RETURN TO INDOCHINE Returning to Indochina, by Sylvie Blum
from Jump Cut, May 1997
Film Court (Lawrence
Russell) review
Serdar Yegulalp retrospective
[0.5/4]
Steve Rhodes retrospective
[1.5/4]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web and Tuna
Entertainment Weekly
review [C] Owen Gleiberman
Washington
Post (Rita Kempley) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2/4]
The
New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Anspach,
Sólveig
THE
AQUATIC EFFECT (L'effet aquatique) B 88
aka: The Together Project
France Iceland (83 mi)
2016 co-director: Jean-Luc Gaget
One of those quirky films that deserves to be seen, featuring oddball
humor at its finest, yet it’s a rare style not easy to replicate, much of which
must be attributed to the director Sòlveig Anspach, who unfortunately died of
breast cancer in August of 2015, about a year prior to the release of this
film, completed by co-writer and co-director Jean-Luc Gaget. Having an Icelandic mother and an American
father, yet raised her entire life in France, Anspach has a unique
international perspective on life, one that is truly borderless, where in her
wacky sense of humor and upbeat Voltairian manner she utilizes the best of all
possible worlds. Thriving on absurdity,
sight gags, eccentric characters, and screwball comedy, she also creates
wonderful characters that you won’t find anyplace else, carving out a unique niche
in the world of cinema, awarded the SACD Award (Society of Dramatic Authors and
Composers) in Director’s Fortnight at Cannes in a jury headed by Bertrand
Tavernier. The third of her Trilogy of
Comedies, following BACK SOON (2008) and QUEEN OF MONTREUIL (2012), this film
picks up where her last film left off, in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil,
featuring returning characters Agathe, Florence Loiret-Caille, who is utterly
brilliant, unflappable in her calm assurance, yet fiery when it comes to things
she doesn’t like, such as liars and phonies, and Samir (Samir Guesmi), a
somewhat shy and aloof, yet quizzical French-Arab crane operator and
construction worker with a hangdog expression who is immediately blown away by
the way Agathe undresses a guy in public with a verbal tirade of incensed fury,
where she blows her stack in a bar at a guy’s lame tactics to get into her
pants, thoroughly brushing him off and leaving in a huff. Her sense of indignation is classic, and her
headstrong style unforgettable. Wanting
to see more, he learns she’s a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the Maurice
Thorez municipal pool, signing up immediately for lessons. His impeccable taste in Speedos catches the
eye of another instructor, however, Corinne (Olivia Côte), whose offensive body
humor and intrusive shower etiquette suggest sadomasochistic dominance, where
he needs the help of a sorry looking ticket seller Daniel (Estebán) and
eccentric pool manager Reboute (Philippe Rebbot) to help guide his way into
Agathe’s class.
Pretending he can’t swim, he enters at the introductory level, where
he’s very impressed by her hands-on approach, growing a bit delirious at the
thrill of it all, beautifully expressed in underwater scenes with both wearing
goggles, yet he carefully conceals his glee until one night when he awkwardly
gets locked inside the building.
Miraculously discovering Agathe alone in the pool, things go swimmingly,
so to speak, as they both open up to one another, leading to a trip up to the
high board where they share a kiss and an embrace before they are rudely
interrupted by Reboute with a boombox, a bottle of champagne, and designs on
impressing two young floozies by pretending to be the owner of the pool. When one of the girls sinks to the bottom of
the pool, Samir jumps into action off the high-dive, literally saving her from
drowning. Of course, Agathe realizes the
deception and quickly exits, leaving Reboute to face the charges of his
misconduct, where the investigation is led by none other than the film director
herself. She has a charming way of
getting him to realize the error of his ways, as Reboute sheepishly tries every
which way to squirm out of it. By the
time the storm has passed, Agathe is gone, having flown to Iceland for an
international lifeguard congress in Reykjavík — only in this film would they
invent such a thing, identified as the 10th International Congress
of Swimming Coaches, where she is the chosen representative of the
Seine-Saint-Denis region of Paris. Not
knowing what else to do, Samir heads for the airport. Life in Iceland is decidedly different, as
evidenced by the alternating schedule of City Counselors, Anna
(Didda Jónsdóttir, an Anspach regular) and Frosti (Frosti Jón Rúnólfsson), where they switch who is in
charge on consecutive days, with each thoroughly enjoying being the boss of the
other, making them perform the most humiliatingly trivial jobs. The sleek, modern look of the conference
center has an inviting style of architecture that accentuates glass windows,
creating an unusual sense of open air and unlimited space, providing a friendly
atmosphere that breathes openness and understanding.
With Agathe at the podium delivering introductory remarks, her eyes
become fixed on the Israeli delegate, none other than Samir, where she decides
to put him on the spot and cede the floor to him. In halting speech, after a bit of stuttering
and stammering, he comes up with the idea of meeting with the Palestinian
delegate to build a joint Israeli-Palestinian swimming pool, accent on the
often repeated word “together,” a peace gesture that he decides to call “The
Together Project.” The auditorium goes
wild with enthusiasm, where he’s immediately heralded the celebrity of the day,
with everyone wanting to shake his hand, or take selfies together, with a
skeptical Palestinian delegate, a real estate developer, handing him his
business card suggesting they meet, where overnight he’s the most popular guy
in town, where all the girls want to share a drink with him. Agathe, on the other hand, is stupefied by
the trickery on his part, knowing it’s all an act. But in Iceland, it’s all about Anna and
Frosti, an exaggerated comic routine of hyperbole, slapstick, and personal
ridicule, each continually making fun of the other. But it’s also a glimpse into Anna’s extended
family, viewed as a picture of complete dysfunction, where her son turns out to
be a foie gras smuggler, stealing a farmer’s geese to manufacture his own
product line, while at the same time Agathe fumes about the Israeli delegate’s
deceit. But when she describes how this
guy lied to her and then traveled all the way to Iceland just to see her again,
the others find it a terribly romantic gesture that subjected him to extreme
ridicule, a French-Arab character
pretending to be Israeli at an international event, yet he somehow landed on
his feet, where all the Icelandic women now want to flirt with him. Veering into totally unexpected territory,
Samir loses his memory from a freak accident, leaving him neurologically compromised,
as he can’t even remember his name, where he may or may not be faking it. Who knows?
It ends up being a goofy love story that is hilariously offbeat, always
providing the unexpected, yet it has the ability to capture characters at their
most vulnerable moments, providing a window into their true selves, where
they’re really just a couple of lonely people.
Totally implausible throughout, none of that matters, as it’s a touching
film that is a delight throughout, where the zany experience feels like a
breath of fresh air, where it will be extremely hard
to fill the void left behind from the loss of this director.
The
Together Project - Chicago International Film Festival
Smitten by a spirited swimming instructor at the local pool, a French-Arab construction worker signs up to take private lessons—even though he already knows how to swim. But when he is shamelessly caught in his bald-faced lie, he’ll have to travel all the way to Iceland to win back his crush’s trust. It’s sink or swim in this quirky romantic comedy, the final film by the late, great director Solveig Anspach (Queen of Montreuil). Original title: L’effet aquatique.
The
Together Project | 4:3 Isobel Yeap
Although screening at the Scandinavian Film Festival, The Together Project (French: L’Effet Aquatique) is very much a French romantic comedy with a sprinkling of Nordic eccentricity. It is Sòlveig Anspach’s third film in her trilogy of comedies (following Back Soon and Queen of Montreuil) and tells the story of a crane driver, Samir (Samir Guesmi), who pretends that he cannot swim in order to woo the headstrong swim teacher at his local pool, Agathe (Florence Loiret Caille). Although Anspach spent most of her career in France, The Together Project is heavily influenced by her Icelandic heritage; the first half of the film takes place in Montreuil, France, and the second half at a conference for swimming coaches in Iceland.
Anspach sadly passed away last year at the age of only 54. With the exception of the past decade, her career was dominated by documentary films. Made in the USA—a documentary about an execution in Texas that Anspach both wrote and directed—won the François Chalais Prize at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Indeed, Anspach’s experience in the documentary genre shows in The Together Project. Its plot is loose and meandering; it circles in on itself, probing at Agathe’s sentiments in a way that seems more fitting of a tight-lipped documentary subject than a romantic heroine. Although there are times when The Together Project threatens to lose itself in its quirk, it is this unconventional quality that saves it and elevates it to something that is truly special.
The Together Project is a beautiful film. The scenes of Iceland, many of them shot from the sky, are breathtaking. And yet for me, the most stunning scenes take place in the swimming pool at night, when Agathe and Samir are locked in together. The lights ripple across the water and tiptoe across walls. There is both a quietness and an electric energy to this scene that perfectly captures the frisson between them. Another charming scene takes place during their swimming lesson, when Agathe teaches Samir to hold his breath and sit on the bottom of the pool. They move up and down, their bodies clumsily in sync, their faces totally masked by goggles and caps, and we are shown how ridiculousness may be the cousin of intimacy.
That said, there are times when the plot veers a little too far from the plausible. Certain aspects of the film are left unexplained. For example, Samir follows Agathe by pretending to be an Israeli delegate and the film takes its English name from a project he fabricates when put on the spot (he wants to build a pool with the Palestinian delegate and call this ‘The Together Project’). We never find out what happened to the real Israeli delegate, nor is Samir’s disguise ever questioned, despite the fact that he speaks only French and English. Equally frustrating is the fact that Samir never apologises to Agathe for lying to her about his swimming abilities.
Such plot threads are clumsily tied up with Samir’s electrocution. His consequent memory loss, although stirring to watch at times, is a much-laboured trope in the romantic comedy genre (see: 50 First Dates, The Vow, The Notebook). It feels like Anspach could not think of any other way to have Samir and Agathe fall in love without compromising Agathe’s steely character: if she will not forgive him after he chases her to Iceland, she will definitely not forgive him unless a freak accident renders him neurologically compromised. Even more outlandish is the fact that other women continue to throw themselves at Samir despite the fact that he is clearly in a chronic state of confusion where he struggles to even remember his own name.
Even so, The Together Project is a delightful movie with plenty of comic relief provided by its Icelandic characters—Anna (Didda Jònsdòttir) is particularly hilarious and the way she exchanges her job every day with her co-worker Frosti (Frosti Runòlfsson) is a playful dig at Nordic egalitarianism. Although Samir and Agathe’s love story is not entirely convincing, Agathe’s palpable loneliness and Samir’s clear infatuation render it entertaining and touching in its own way.
The
Together Project : Love at first sight in Montreuil - Cineuropa Bénédicte
Prot
Solveig Anspach’s last film is a delectable comedy about a love that’s romantic as hell and a story about water to boot
At the halfway point of the Cannes Film Festival, Tuesday 18 May, as the European-Brazilian co-production team for Aquarius [+] paraded down those famous steps, Directors’ Fortnight placed the "best gift" from late Icelandic director and Fémis graduate Solveig Anspach at the centre of its programme, a film with a very blue title to match (the original title literally means ‘The Aquatic Effect’). The production for The Together Project [+] was negotiated around a broccoli gratin, a film that would alas be her last. It was therefore a very emotional audience that came to see this delightful film, 17 years on from the screening of the director’s debut feature, Haut les cœurs, in the same theatre, in which Anspach picks up the character from Queen of Montreuil [+], Agathe (Florence Loiret-Caille), a small slender woman who is not easily taken in and once again goes off in search of answers in a postcard-perfect Iceland filmed with as much tenderness as the swimming pool in Montreuil where she works as a swimming instructor, with a healthy dose of humour thrown in.
(The article continues below - Commercial information)
The emotion that accompanied the loyal Franco-Icelandic team that came to present the film on stage was transformed, as soon as the lights went out, into moving bursts of laughter. The opening scene, in which Agathe rebuffs a small-time womaniser with unnerving self-confidence that still betrays her fragility, endears this character to us immediately. In fact, Samir (Samir Guesmi), who shyly watches the scene unfold from a corner of the bar, is enthralled. In an instant, this gentle oaf with his breathtakingly naive look falls hopelessly in love. Without any hesitation, after buying some swimming trunks with a pretty palm tree design, he signs up for a three-month subscription to the local swimming pool, where Agathe gives lessons alongside a fantastic array of municipal workers (Reboute the clumsy, Estéban the enthusiastic, the outrageous swimming instructor with the nice bum who everyone ogles), the everydayness of which gives the director the chance to give us funny and ridiculous moments taken from life.
When Agathe once again takes off to participate in an international swimming instructor convention she has been invited to by her Icelandic friend Anna (Didda Jónsdóttir, who forms a hilarious alternate mayor-assistant duo with a big guy not unlike Dingo), Samir packs his bags at once. At the convention, the situation shifts thanks to some funny subterfuge that gets him into the conference: in Iceland, Samir sends the women wild and galvanises the masses – the word "together", which he uses insistently along with the accompanying gesture and in combination with the word "project", probably because he speaks very little English, makes him a trailblazer in swimming pool geopolitics. A second electric shock puts Agathe in the same situation that he found himself in previously, transfixed by love like an earthworm in love with a star.
And so Solveig Anspach leaves us with a lovable film that tells a story of absolute love between characters that are strong-willed yet vulnerable, who accept one another and all their most unusual quirks (which only make them more authentic) and are reunited by water, seen not as a boundary but as a bridge between people and cultures, a place where everyone is united, like Agathe and Samir when they take a dip in the baby pool. It really is true that in the water, we all hear the same sounds. Here, it is a love song.
'The
Together Project': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen Jonathan Romney from Screendaily
L'Effet
aquatique (2016) - Solveig Anspach - film review James Travers
Solveig
Anspach offers tender and funny posthumous rom-com in ... Lise Pedersen from Euro News
52nd
Chicago International Film Festival Screening #23: “The Together Project”
(France/Iceland) Jason Singer from
No Spoilerz! Just Reviews
Sundáhrifin
/ The Together Project – Bíó Paradís
The
Together Project | Volvo Scandinavian Film Festival 2016
film
reviews - L'effet aquatique - Cineman
Geoffrey Crété
“The
aquatic effect” and “Red Turtle”: the movie reviews of the week ... Archy
World News
'The
Together Project' ('L'Effet aquatique'): Cannes Review ... Jon Frosch from The Hollywood Reporter
"Sólveig
Anspach Dies: French Filmmaker Was 54" David Robb from Deadline, August 9, 2015
Anspaugh, David
HOOSIERS B+ 91
USA Great Britain
(114 mi) 1986
Often considered one of
the best sports movies ever, the standard by which others are measured, this is
a case where truth is stranger than fiction, as this is inspired by the real
life story of the 1954 Milan High School Indians, with an enrollment of only
161 students, winning a state high school basketball championship, the smallest
school to ever win a state basketball championship in Indiana. This mirrors a similar incident in the state
of Illinois in 1952 where Hebron, with an enrollment of only 98 students, beat
perennial powerhouse Quincy, the fourth-winningest high school basketball
program in the country as of 2010, holding the record for most state tournament
appearances, to win the state high school basketball championship in overtime
at a time when schools competed against schools of all sizes. These stories have a life of their own and
reflect the state’s unique basketball-obsessed character, as unlike the film,
in real life the game was much more dramatic.
Trailing in the 4th quarter 28-26 against 4-time state
champion Muncie Central, the coach ordered a stall and Milan, with no time
clock in that era, held the ball without moving for over four minutes before
eventually missing a shot. Tied at 30,
they again held the ball for a full minute until 18 seconds were left, setting
up a final shot that does in fact resemble the movie, called the Milan Miracle,
where the newspaper The Indianapolis Star
calls it the top sports story in Indiana history. Sports movies tend to be laden with cliché’s
and this one is no different, except here, despite the fictionalized
dramatization, they all have elements of truth, where one of the film’s
greatest strengths is capturing the essence of growing up in a small town
surrounded by rural farmlands, where on Friday nights high school football or
basketball games bring out the entire community, as it’s the biggest event of
the week, becoming the religion of the town where everyone is a believer, as
winning has a way of bringing everyone together. Given a sense of authenticity from the
director, who played middle school basketball in nearby Decatur, Indiana, and
writer Angelo Pizza, as both met while attending Indiana University during the
basketball frenzied Bob Knight era, winning an Olympic Gold Medal (1984 Gold Medal) and three
national college championships (1976, 1981, 1987) in little
more than one decade.
Set in the early 50’s,
the opening sequence shot by Fred Murphy of driving through the beautiful back
country roads offers the true character of the rural Midwest, where the new
basketball coach Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) eventually lands in Hickory,
Indiana. Greeted by the high school
principal, an old friend who’s apparently willing to overlook something that
took place over ten years ago when Dale was coaching a college team, but left
in disgrace, now given a second chance to resuscitate his fledgling career in
lowly high school basketball. He’s
immediately met with open contempt by both players and parents when he changes
the shooting oriented, offensive-minded coaching style, instead encouraging
fundamentals, conditioning, and hard-nosed defense. Even today at the professional level, not
everyone buys into this philosophy, as it de-emphasizes showboating, individual
talent and skill, and encourages teamwork where everyone works together, where
no one star player is valued more than anyone else, as everyone plays a part in
winning and losing. Today, this team
concept has become cliché, but only because of the success of people like coach
K, Mike Krzyzewski, as it builds teamwork and
solidarity where players learn to trust one another and at least have an
opportunity to win even when they’re not playing their best. But in many small towns, the parents think
they know better than the coach does, initiating gripes and rumors that often
lead to scandal, as it does here, where the town gathers a petition to remove
the coach. In dramatic fashion, the
town’s best player, Jimmy (Maris Valainis), who’s been sitting out honoring the
death of last season’s coach, agrees to return but only if the coach
stays. With his return, the team is
quickly operating on all cylinders and starts a winning streak.
While this is a
basketball movie, with much of it set inside a gym or a locker room, the local
flavor is provided by the brilliance of secondary characters, such as Barbara
Hershey, an unmarried high school English teacher, who has her doubts about the
coach’s secret past and the excessive attention paid by society to sports in
general, but she is eventually won over by the coach’s ethics and occasional
noble gestures, such as attempting to rehabilitate the town drunk, Dennis
Hopper, still resting on the laurels of his high school past when he missed the
game-ending final shot at Regionals. His
avid enthusiasm and knowledge of local teams, however, is unparalleled, and
Dale encourages him to sober up and become his assistant coach, especially
since he’s distracting the focus of his son, one of the team’s steadiest
players. Even in a cliché riddled film
about a small farming community where the outcome is never in doubt, these
actors rise above the predictable material, adding a degree of complexity that
might feel surprising, as their interaction always feels dramatically
interesting, never knowing where their side routes are going to lead, where the
warm and heartfelt music by Jerry Goldsmith adds dramatic heft as well, always
grounding the film in a sense of Americana and community. Some may find an old-fashioned story about
instilling moral values in a small, all-white high school basketball team that
still takes set shots as outdated, as teams today play a much more physical and
uptempo urban style game where high flying dunks are the norm, but consider the
time, a post-war, 50’s, conservative era when America was just getting back on
their feet, where it was these small town values that would lead them out of
the darkness of world war and the Depression, where these kids were already
shocked by the death of their earlier coach, so learning to take advantage of
the second chances life offers is a valuable lesson. The unsympathetic doubters in town become the
team’s biggest boosters in the end as winning has a way of healing all wounds. Shooting the finals at the legendary Hinkle
Fieldhouse, one of the original basketball arenas built in America (1928),
adds an air of historic authenticity to the film, as the Butler Bulldogs who
play there still personify the tenacious Hoosier spirit, and both the arena
itself is a National Historic Landmark, while in 2001 the film was also
selected to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress, claiming it
is “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott
Tobias]
Sentimentality may be
the curse of sports movies, but it's also the lifeblood of many sports fans,
who cling hard to those precious moments out of time when their underdog team
does something magical, something to justify those agonizing years (or decades)
of futility. For this reason alone, it should come as no surprise that 1986's Hoosiers
tops most polls of the greatest sports movies ever made, because it bottles the
uplift that fans can spend a lifetime chasing. There's no good excuse for many
of the devices at play—the countless montages, the prodding Jerry Goldsmith
score, the "magic hour" shots of farm boys lobbing jumpers into their
barn-mounted hoops—yet there's no denying their effectiveness, either.
Somewhere at the center of all that cheese is the essence of sport, which has
the power to seduce with broad emotional appeals and get away with it almost
every time.
The film draws its
inspiration from the 1954 Indiana high-school championship game, a classic
David-vs.-Goliath contest between perennial urban powerhouse Muncie and upstart
Milan, a rural backwater with a population just north of 1,000. The new Hoosiers
DVD includes remarkable footage from that game, which ends in a thrilling
sequence of events that the film recreates with scrupulous detail. Director
David Anspaugh and writer Angelo Pizzo, both Indiana University alums, don't
skimp on the old-timey Heartland nostalgia, but they grew up listening to this
story, and they show a genuine connection to the feelings it evokes. And
whenever the schmaltz threatens to ooze over, they have a secret weapon in Gene
Hackman, whose no-guff performance as a coach with a checkered past seems
lived-in and genuine, as he does his best to validate the big payoffs.
When Hackman pulls
into Hickory, a one-horse rural outpost that lives for high-school basketball,
he's greeted with suspicion and hostility for replacing the town's late,
beloved coach. He gets an especially chilly reception from Barbara Hershey, a
fellow teacher who doesn't want Hackman to poach the school's star player
(Maris Valainis), whom she believes has potential beyond the court. Things get
worse when Hackman's coaching methods, which introduce discipline and
fundamentals to an undersized team of perimeter shooters, result in early
losses and some embarrassing conflicts with the local referees. As if that
weren't enough, Hackman also recruits local drunk Dennis Hopper to serve as his
assistant, provided that he clean up and stay off the sauce. In spite of all
the controversy, the team comes together under Hackman's watch and makes a run
to the state finals in Indianapolis.
Particularly in light
of last summer's Olympics, when NBA stars were bested by less gifted European
teams with better fundamentals, Hoosiers warmly recalls the classic
school of Indiana basketball, with nods to the temperamental Bobby Knight and
former Celtics great Larry Bird, the model of a farm boy shooting daggers from
the outside. But Hoosiers doesn't have a reactionary agenda: Even the
racial makeup of the Muncie team, which is initially discomfiting, is confirmed
by the real-life game footage, and there's no attempt to posit one playing
style above another. A deleted scene showing the entire community gathering for
a harvest suggests that at bottom, what Anspaugh and Pizzo are really
celebrating is as much a bygone era in life as it is in sport.
filmcritic.com Pete
Croatto
It’s very simple.
When you talk about the best sports movies of all time, there is Hoosiers,
and then there’s everything else.
Hoosiers stars Gene Hackman as Norman Dale, a former successful college
coach with a checkered past, who takes a last chance job coaching small Hickory
High in 1951. Despite being located in basketball-crazed
Dale doesn’t endear himself to the locals, dismissing the team’s interim coach
and a player in about two minutes during his first practice. He closes off
practices, odd affairs in which the kids run and run and run, but never take a
shot. After the team suffers a losing streak, the folks are on the verge of
sending Dale home, until Jimmy steps in. He decides it’s time to play, but on
one condition: the coach stays. Then the winning begins, and it doesn’t stop.
Hoosiers’ story is can’t miss — small-town, underdog team makes an
improbable run for the state championship — but it features a rarity in a
sports movie. The actors actually can play the sport, which gives the game
scenes in Hoosiers a rarely seen realism. The athletic skills of the
actors allows for limitless editing and cinematography possibilities. Director
David Anspaugh (who promptly plunged into obscurity and now makes films like Wisegirls) takes full advantage, zooming in close to capture
the pushing and shoving, using slow motion to capture graceful drives, and
employing quick editing to capture the blinding pace. You get thrown into the
rhythm of the game, and with the help of Jerry Goldsmith’s rousing score, that
will appeal to anyone with a pulse.
Another fatal flaw in many sports movies is the script. A classic example is White
Men Can’t Jump. The basketball scenes are well-shot and fun, but the
repetitive, flaccid dramatic conflict between Woody Harrelson, Wesley Snipes,
and Rosie Perez dooms it. Angelo Pizzo’s script for Hoosiers is a
masterpiece of economy and balance. He’s able to reveal volumes about a
character with one line, and by doing so he creates a portrait of a team and a
town consumed with winning. Two examples: Dale’s response after his assistant
rants over his dismissal: “Leave the ball, will you, George.” Shooter, the town
drunk played with gusto by Dennis Hopper, sums up his sorry life with a two
sentence story about missing a game-winning shot.
Hackman anchors the movie, and he delivers a great performance because you’re
with him every step of the way, even when he’s firing employees like George
Steinbrenner and causing strife in the small town. He finds the likable streak
in what should be an unlikable man, which Barbara Hershey’s schoolteacher also
helps (rather redundantly) unearth. Hackman is such a commanding presence that
you’ll feel compelled to start dribbling a basketball in your living room. He’s
that good.
With a renewed life on DVD I’ll bet Hoosiers gets bumped to classic
status in another five years. It’s just that good; a rare example when every
reason we love watching movies comes together for two hours.
The DVD set of two discs includes half an hour of deleted scenes, a documentary
about the real Hoosiers, commentary track, and the actual video of the 1954
Indiana high school championship basketball game.
ESPN -- Reel life Jeff Merron from ESPN, comparing
reel life with real life
With March Madness in full swing, Page 2's Closer Look series figured it would be a good time to revisit the Maddest March of them all -- the one in which Milan High School, enrollment 161, won the Indiana state title. The victory, immortalized in the 1986 film, "Hoosiers," had plenty of real-life drama, but, said Angelo Pizzo, the scriptwriter, a great deal of fictionalization was necessary for the Hollywood feature "because their lives were not dramatic enough."
So, "Hoosiers" isn't a true story? Well, it sort of is, but mostly isn't. Or, it mostly is, but sort of isn't. You decide.
In reel life: The team that wins the championship is
Hickory High.
In real life: The team that won the championship is Milan High. There is
no town of Hickory in Indiana.
In reel life: Hickory wins the title in 1952.
In real life: Milan won the title in 1954.
In reel life: The previous coach dies, which is a crucial
part of the plot -- the team's star player, Jimmy, doesn't play part of the
season because he's so upset.
In real life: The previous coach, Herman "Snort" Grinstead,
who Bobby Plump (the real-life hero) said in an ESPN chat was "the most
popular coach in Milan's history," was fired for ordering new uniforms
against the superintendent's orders.
In reel life: The head coach, Norman Dale, is a
middle-aged man with a mysterious past that includes being suspended years ago
for punching one of his star players.
In real life: The head coach, Marvin Wood, was 26 years old when he
coached Milan to the title, and it was his second year as head coach of the
team.
In reel life: Coach Dale alienates just about everyone with
his independence, and there is a town referendum on whether the school should
keep Dale on as coach.
In real life: Marvin Wood did face an uphill struggle, because he
replaced Snort and changed both his offense and defense. But by the time the
Milan Indians were playing their championship season, he had won the town over.
In reel life: The assistant coach, "Shooter,"
(played by Dennis Hopper in an Oscar-nomination performance), is the town drunk
and the father of one of the players.
In real life: There was no assistant coach.
In reel life: Coach Dale is an outspoken and sometimes
abrasive man.
In real life: Coach Wood was softspoken.
In reel life: Hickory is the ultimate Cinderella team, a
classic underdog coming out of nowhere.
In real life: Milan High had made it to the semifinals of the state
tourney in the 1952-53 season, and the key players returned the next season.
They entered the tournament with a 19-2 record.
In reel life: Coach Dale has slow-burning romance with
teacher Myra Fleener (played by Barbara Hersey).
In real life: Coach Wood was married with two children and didn't have a
romantic relationship with a teacher.
In reel life: Coach Dale is a taskmaster during practices,
running the players through drills. He does so wearing shirt and tie.
In real life: Coach Wood often suited up and played with the team during
practices.
In reel life: Jimmy Chitwood, the team's star player (the
Hollywood version of Bobby Plump) sits out half the season because he's so
upset about the previous coach dying.
In real life: Bobby Plump played the entire season.
In reel life: Hickory's total enrollment of 161 is so
small that it can only field a team of six players.
In real life: Milan High did have an enrollment of only 161, but 58 of
the 73 boys in the school tried out for the team. Milan High had 10 team
members in 1954.
In reel life: The manager, "Ollie," comes on the
court in the semifinal and hits two free throws to win the game.
In real life: Milan's manager, Oliver Jones, stayed on the sidelines and
didn't make any heroic buckets.
In reel life: The film's director found it impossible to
find enough extras to fill Butler University's Hinkle Fieldhouse, where the
scenes for the final game were shot. About 1,000 extras had to be shuffled all
around the arena as the actors went through their moves.
In real life: Hinkle Fieldhouse was packed to the rafters, and tickets
were being scalped for up to $50.
In reel life: Jimmy Chitwood, during the timeout with 18
seconds remaining in the championship game and the score tied, is told that
he'll be a decoy while the team runs its "picket fence" play, and a
teammate is assigned the final shot. When the teammate, in the team's huddle,
gives a look of dismay and eyes Jimmy, Jimmy says, with confidence, "I'll
make it."
In real life: Coach Wood told Plump, not another player to take the
final shot. "I was a very shy kid," Bobby Plump told the Washington
Post in 1995. "I never would have said, 'I'll make it.' "
In reel life: Hickory wins the action-packed final by a score
of 42-40.
In real life: Milan won the final by a score of 32-30. During the final
quarter, with Milan trailing 28-26, coach Wood ordered a stall. Plump literally
held on to the ball, without moving, for 4 minutes, 13 seconds, before taking a
shot (and missing) with a few minutes left on the clock. Plump also held the
ball, without moving, as the clock ticked down from 1:18 to :18.
In reel life: "Hoosiers" has been listed by many
publications as one of the best sports movies ever made.
In real life: The Indianapolis Star said the Milan Miracle was the top
sports story in Indiana history.
In reel life: "Hoosiers" is available on VHS and
DVD.
In real life: The Indiana High School Athletic Association has complete
videos of Milan's 1953 semifinal loss to South Bend Central and Milan's victory
in the 1954 final. (http://www.ihsaa.org/video/BBBVIDEO.html)
"Hoosiers" is one hour and 54 minutes long. Although, as Bobby Plump said in his ESPN chat, "the film captured what it was like growing up in a small town in Indiana and how important basketball was," there's probably more truth than accuracy in the film. "The final 18 seconds were the only thing factual in the movie about the Milan-Central game," Plump told the Saturday Evening Post in 1987. "From the time the ball was in bounds after the final timeout, the movie was accurate."
Sports Hollywood - The Real
Hoosiers
Hoosiers is a cherished sports film, starring Gene Hackman, Barbara Hershey, and Dennis Hopper, in an Oscar-nominated performance. In the story, Hackman coaches a 1950's Indiana high school team in what could be his last shot at a title.
This story is loosely based on a real event in 1954, when a team from a tiny high school in the farmlands of Indiana rose against all odds to win the state basketball championship.
In 1954, Milan was a quiet rural town in the southeastern part of Indiana, with a high school of 161 total students, 75 being boys. But it became the scene of one of the greatest basketball stories in history. Their championship season, immortalized in the 1986 film, had plenty of real-life drama, but, said Angelo Pizzo, the scriptwriter, a great deal of fictionalization was necessary for the Hollywood feature "because their lives were not dramatic enough... The guys were too nice, the team had no real conflict." So changes were made... But how truthful is the film?
In 1954, tiny Milan, with a sharpshooter named Bobby Plump, dominated much larger schools on their way to a 28-2 record and the Indiana state finals. Among their victims was Oscar Robertson's high school team (Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis). In the finals, they shocked everyone when they squeaked past powerhouse Muncie Central for the Indiana state crown on Plump's last-second shot. It was considered one of the greatest basketball games ever played, and has attained a legendary status. In September 1999, Sports Illustrated named this team one of the top 20 teams of the century. The sports writers of Indiana named the "Milan Miracle" the #1 sports story in Indiana history.
It is a story that bears repeating. Milan's 32-30 victory over heavily-favored Muncie Central has since been a rallying cry for every small school in the state.
But the real story actually begins a year before that championship season. In the 1952-1953 season, their new coach, Marvin Wood, brought a "continuity basketball" program to one of the state's smallest high schools and also taught his young charges a full-court trapping defense and a four-corners offense he called "the cat and mouse." At first Wood was not very popular in the community -- he was replacing a very popular coach, and closed the team's practice sessions to the public while changing the offensive and defensive schemes. This caused quite a bit of controversy. But under his leadership, the Indians advanced to the final four of the state, bowing out in the semi-finals to South Bend Central (the school the fictional Hickory Hucksters defeated for the state title in Hoosiers). The nucleus of that team returned to form the '54 championship team.
The Indians began their rise to the top of the 751 teams entered in that year's tournament, with a record of 19-2. The mighty men of Milan then cruised through the state tournament relatively untested, until the final game against the Muncie Central Bearcats.
Wood knew that his players would be intimidated in the spotlight of a state championship. So, in a scene recreated in the film, he measured the height of the basketball goal in the monstrous Hinkle Fieldhouse as the team took the floor for a practice, to illustrate that it was exactly the same height as the goal in the tiny gym at the team's hometown school. That act, Rev. Daniel Motto later told the South Bend Tribune, was meant to reassure the team that, despite the enormous size of the field house where the state finals were being played, the team should "cast out their fear." Motto said when he watched "Hoosiers" for the first time, he sat on the edge of his seat, waiting to make sure that scene was in it. When it was, Motto said, he knew the movie was truly inspired by Wood.
The final game was a bruising, low-scoring affair. The Indians were paced in scoring by senior Ray Craft. However, Coach Wood's delay tactic game plan would place the ball in the trusty hands of another senior, Bobby Plump.
With the score tied at 30-30 in the final quarter, Plump held the ball at the top of the key for four minutes before firing a shot that missed its target.
The Indians kept Muncie Central from scoring on its next possession, setting the stage for Plump to redeem himself.
The senior guard would not disappoint, draining a shot at the top of the key with barely any time left to win the state championship 32-30. "The coach just shortened the game," Craft said. "If we went at the rate the game was going at, he felt that we wouldn't have won. Bobby held the ball once, missed, and then we went back to him. The right guys won."
Plump's famous final second shot assured the championship victory for the Indians, and the Indiana High School Athletic Association awarded him the Trester Award for mental attitude, sportsmanship, and character.
"The shot heard 'round the world'" changed his life, his teammates' lives, and his community's image forever.
"We came from a small community," Ray Craft said. "We wouldn't have gone on to college, unless we had won. I think about nine of the 12 guys on the team graduated from college. It was an important event for the community."
Even today, the '54 Indians impact is still felt by the community.
"Bobby Plump is a legend. He could've probably been governor of this state if he wanted to," said Roger Dickinson, president of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame. Plump was named one of the Most Noteworthy Hoosiers of the 20th century by Indianapolis Monthly Magazine. He was also one of the 50 greatest sports figures from Indiana in the 20th century, according to Sports Illustrated.
"The community is still celebrating," Don Swisher, superintendent of the Milan Community School District, said in an October 1998 article for the Odessa American. "People come from all over to see the trophy and team picture in the foyer of the gymnasium."
"It gave the little schools the chance that they could win. It gave hope. It gave dreams to people that we can beat the big guys," Dickinson said. "It made this state great in its basketball heritage."
And Hoosiers has helped to keep the story alive. In 1998, the current-day Milan and Muncie Central squads played against each other at the gymnasium where the movie was filmed. The game sold out, and was televised across the entire state and Indiana television added additional lighting to the gymnasium (actually in Knightstown).
Sadly, though, an actual "David vs. Goliath" match-up will never happen again in this state, as the Indiana High School Athletic Association did away with the single-class, "everybody in one big tournament" format at the end of the 1997 season.
Wood was elected to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1971. Wood never stopped coaching. Finally, in 1999, he resigned as the coach of his granddaughter's seventh-grade basketball team because of a recurrence of bone cancer. The 70-year-old Wood submitted a resignation letter to the Kirtland (Ohio) School Board in the wake of learning that bone cancer which had been in remission for more than seven years had returned. He died in 1999.
Plump went on to play basketball for Butler University where he was the MVP his junior and senior years, and one of the NCAA's best free throw shooters of all-time. After graduating, he played for Phillips 66 of the National Industrial Basketball League. After retiring from basketball he sold life insurance for many years. But he was always best known for his final shot for Milan.
Finally deciding to make that notoriety work for him, Plump opened a restaurant called 'Plump's Last Shot' in Indianapolis. It's filled with memorabilia from the 1954 state championship.
Indian guard Ray Craft became the assistant commissioner of the Indiana High School Athletic Association. He has two cameos in the movie: Ray is the person who greets the Huskers when they arrive at the state finals, and the guy who tells the team that it's time to take the court for the final game.
"Hoosiers" is one hour and 54 minutes long. Although, as Bobby Plump said in an ESPN chat, "the film captured what it was like growing up in a small town in Indiana and how important basketball was," there's probably more truth than accuracy in the film. "The final 18 seconds were the only thing factual in the movie about the Milan-Central game," Plump told the Saturday Evening Post in 1987. "From the time the ball was in bounds after the final timeout, the movie was accurate."
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Hoosiers
- TCM Turner Classic Movies Andrea Passafiume
Hoosiers The race, religion, and ideology of sports,
by Deborah Tudor from Jump Cut
Ultimate Book of Sports
Movies Ray Didinger and Glen Macnow
Illumined
Illusions--Seeing Cinema in a New Light [Ian C. Bloom]
Edward
Copeland on Film [David Gaffen]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Bruce
Newman - SI.com February 2, 1987
dOc DVD
Review: Hoosiers (1986) - digitallyOBSESSED! Jon Danziger, Collector’s Edition
DVD
Town [James Plath] Collector’s
Edition
DVD Verdict David Johnson
Collector’s Edition
Blu-Ray.com
[Casey Broadwater]
DVDTown - Blu-ray Edition
[James Plath]
DVD Verdict
(Blu-ray) [Clark Douglas]
Hoosiers -
QNetwork Entertainment Portal James
Kendrick, Blu-Ray
Blogcritics -
Collector's Edition DVD Review [Matt Paprocki] also seen here: DoBlu.com
(Blu-ray) [Matt Paprocki]
Film Freak Central
Review [Walter Chaw]
Hoosiers (1986) - Decent Films
Guide Steven D. Greydanus
Reel Film Reviews [David
Nusair]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
Hoosiers:
Collector's Edition - Directed by David ... - Exclaim! Vish Khanna
Hoosiers (1986). Movie reviews
by Dr. Edwin Jahiel.
Combustible
Celluloid film review - Hoosiers (1986), David ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
TheBoxSet.com - Complete
Movie/DVD Review Thor van Lingen
Hoosiers Review.
Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Nigel Floyd
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
Washington
Post [Paul Attanasio]
Movie
Revives Memories for Milan - Los Angeles Times Lindel Hutson, March 29, 1987
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Siskel
& Ebert video
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
DVDBeaver
Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
Antal, Nimród
KONTROLL B 87
Hungary
This film depicts a hyper-kinetic, uber-violent underground world of the Budapest
VACANCY B 83
After KONTROLL, the director takes a stab at
another subterranean world with a nightmarish vision of a couple’s descent
through hell, where what begins with the petty, self-centered squabbles of an
impending divorce, each constantly snapping at one another with sarcastic
derision from the front seat of a late night car ride, augmented further after
they conveniently pull off the main road, picking a short cut that eventually
gets them lost in the middle of nowhere, which in the end turns out to be the
least of their worries. Luke Wilson and
Kate Beckinsale are the feuding couple that meet their match with the Pinewood
Motel, a dead end roach motel where customers check in but they don’t check
out. The PSYCHO-like Anthony Hopkins manager
is played by Frank Whaley, a wimpish guy who could pass for Tom Arnold, where the
couple hears screams coming from the room behind the front desk, certainly
suggesting something is up, but the couple is too exhausted to pay a whole lot
of mind, believing he’s just watching a scary movie. As the only motel customers, they’re assigned
the “Honeymoon Suite” of a filthy, run down, hole in the wall place where they’re
immediately met with horrible incessant knocks at their door, but no one is
outside. They soon realize that they are
meant to be the evening’s entertainment, growing more and more terrified after
discovering old videos that are actually horribly violent snuff films made from
that same room with similar unsuspecting guests, that there are cameras filming
them behind every vent, and their every move is being watched.
The rest of the film plays on that incessant theme of constant dread, as they are effectively isolated and cut off from communication with the outside world, which leads to a rigged outdoor phone booth that feigns hope, but the lure of freedom only baits them into a trap, stuck in a hellish nightmare where late night arrivals are indistinguishable as friends or foes, as low-life customers arrive to purchase the latest snuff videos. Trapped inside their room, they discover an underground tunnel which conveniently has a string of electric lights all the way through, another sign of apparent freedom that leaves them just as trapped at the other end by this marauding gang of threatening men in masks, like zombies, who come at them in waves of attacks. What isn’t clear is why they aren’t just assaulted, as nothing is really stopping the invaders from coming through the motel room window or door, yet there are moments of perceived calm, allowing the couple to sneak outside believing the coast is clear only to be subject to yet another attack that somehow stops once they return safely behind the supposed protection of their motel room door. Clearly this is a taut, well made film, high on atmospheric tension, but barely plausible. While the frenetic pace and quick edits make this a suspenseful, tightly constricted claustrophobic thriller, danger always lurking just outside their door, it actually draws the quarrelling couple back into each other’s desperate arms, turning this into an odd yet strangely depraved love story, redeeming their broken marriage by staving off imminent harm.
The Village Voice [Tim Grierson]
Perfectly suited to the shabby
delights of the hometown drive-in theaters of yester-year, director Nimród
Antal's creepy cockroach of a thriller feels less horrifying than it does
curiously nostalgic. David (Luke Wilson) and Amy (Kate Beckinsale) Fox are a
bickering couple driving back to L.A. when David's wrong turns lead them to the
Pinewood, an old motel where, they soon realize, manager Mason intends to make
them the stars of his next grisly snuff film. Antal smartly adheres to the no-
frills demands of B-movie horror, eliciting impressive chills from
old-fashioned suffocating dread rather than the now usual gore. And Wilson and
Beckinsale superbly execute everything that's required of their
characters—namely, yelling and running. At a time when so many genre films go
splat because of large budgets or big egos, the small-scale pleasures of Vacancy
are a welcome surprise.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
There's no
small amount of irony in a movie that unmistakably references Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho, yet lacks any interest in human psychology. The
ruthlessly streamlined thriller Vacancy has a perfectly twisted villain
in Frank Whaley, the bespectacled proprietor of a roadside motel who preys on
his guests. He's like Anthony Perkins with updated technology, a voyeur who
tucks hidden cameras into every corner of the "honeymoon suite" and
patches together amateur snuff films with his masked associates. Only in Vacancy,
there's no "mother" or even the faintest impression that a decent
gentleman exists somewhere beneath his squirrelly exterior. Whaley's just a
creep who's into torturing and killing people, which is the biggest missed
opportunity in a movie that's considerably better made and acted than most of its
torture-porn contemporaries.
The
standard-issue setup finds bickering married couple Luke Wilson and Kate
Beckinsale taking a late-night detour through a remote mountain road, a
"shortcut" off the interstate. When a near-accident damages the
exhaust fan on their BMW, Wilson and Beckinsale stall out near the seedy
Pinewood Motel and decide to sleep away the rest of the night before getting
help in the morning. Shortly after Whaley escorts them to their suite, they
experience the first signs of trouble when they're assaulted by pounding noises
from the room next door. They then discover a cache of videotapes containing
footage of other guests being tortured and murdered inside their room.
Making an
assured transition to Hollywood after his Hungarian cult sensation Kontroll,
director Nimród Antal gets his business done with an efficiency that recalls Red
Eye, another thriller that clocks in under 90 minutes. But efficiency isn't
everything, and Antal sacrifices too much in order to sustain tension: Imagine
what Michael Haneke or Brian De Palma would have done with a premise like this
one, or what might have happened had Wilson and Beckinsale's crumbling
relationship led to more than just this extreme form of couples therapy. As for
Whaley, his witty introduction behind the check-in desk instantly establishes
him as the most interesting character, far from a garden-variety backwoods
cretin. But five minutes later, he's just the biggest cat chasing the mice
around, and the only detail left to savor about Vacancy is that the mice
are smarter than usual.
Fangoria Michael Gingold
VACANCY is a movie in which people get away with murder, in more ways than one. Not only have its villains been brutally killing people in secret for some time as the story opens, but the filmmakers telling that tale weave a number of credibility whoppers into the narrative and still manage to maintain a hold on the viewer while delivering the frights. Even as I groaned inwardly at its more implausible details, the film still had me jumping and even vocally responding to the action at times, and that was in a private screening room with about half a dozen other attendees; this movie will probably kill with a Saturday-night theater crowd. For all its dramatic hiccups, VACANCY delivers more of what you go to a horror movie for than any other genre film this year, GRINDHOUSE excepted.
And Mark L. Smith’s screenplay has a surefire thriller premise that updates PSYCHO for the video age. David and Amy Fox (Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale) are bickering their way down a lonely nighttime stretch of Southwestern highway when they develop car trouble and pull into a remote gas station. A young mechanic (Ethan Embry) supposedly fixes the vehicle, but it breaks down after a couple of miles, forcing the couple to seek shelter at the lonely motel adjoining the station. The proprietor, Mason (Frank Whaley), seems a little weird, but hey, it’s the only game in town. To their credit, Smith and director Nimrod Antal don’t pretend that the audience won’t know immediately that Mason and the mechanic have less-than-friendly intentions toward the Foxes, and Antal lopes through the setup scenes with a brisk but not rushed pace. Once the couple is ensconced in their dump of a room, there are a couple of nicely played and written scenes establishing the particulars of their relationship.
Then David, looking for some entertainment, checks out one of the videotapes lying on the VCR, and finds what appears to be a low-budget murder movie on it. He looks at another cassette and finds a similar scenario being played out in the same room—and once he watches the third, he and Amy come to the horrified realization that it’s their room in which the assorted helpless victims are being attacked. They discover hidden cameras secreted within the walls and furniture, and realize that they’re intended to be the stars of tonight’s snuff production.
I won’t spoil any details of what comes next (the TV commercials have already seen to that); suffice to say that Antal and Smith manage to move the action in and out of the motel and gas station buildings to give it variety, while keeping the proceedings both pacey and claustrophobic. Like any good scare show, VACANCY keeps the audience in “what would I do?” mode while also engaging sympathy for its frightened protagonists, whose actions aren’t always the right ones but don’t become outrageously foolish. Wilson and Beckinsale have a down-to-Earth chemistry that perfectly suits the material, while Whaley’s off-center delivery (suggesting a demented cousin of William H. Macy) makes Mason engagingly creepy, and believable as a kind of small-time criminal mastermind.
Antal scatters glimpses of the past snuff productions throughout to add extra shivers, and the final-reel action is rousingly staged, though there’s at least one lamentable development toward the very end, along with the suggestion that another was omitted in the final edit. The film in general moves along briskly, and Antal and editor Armen Minasian bring the whole thing in at 85 minutes—no longer than a movie like this should be. Other notable craft contributions are Andrzej (PULP FICTION) Sekula’s sharp, eerie cinematography, Jon Gary Steele’s realistically grungy production design, former Tangerine Dream-er Paul Haslinger’s edgy, exciting score and the terrific, Saul Bass-esque opening and closing credits by Picture Mill.
So yeah, there’s no way a phone cord yanked from a wall socket
could be workably plugged back in. And if the power to a room in which a VCR
was playing was shut off, the tape wouldn’t start up again when the juice came
back on. And it’s hard to believe that the bad guys could disable a vehicle as
they do halfway through the movie without one of the good guys spotting them.
But it’s no small achievement that VACANCY can incorporate moments like these
and still generate the tension and jolts that it does.
PopMatters Cynthia
Fuchs
eFilmCritic.com (Erik Childress)
eFilmCritic.com (Scott Weinberg)
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis
Anton, Karel
TONKA OF THE GALLOWS (Tonka Sibenice) B+ 92
This turns out to be
the first Czech sound film, speaking French no less, though shot as a silent
film, and could be mistaken for a Carl Dreyer film, bearing a startling
similarity to the look of his 1931 film VAMPYR, especially in the dramatic use
of shadows and in the dominant theme of guilt, but also using a kind of
hallucinogenic dream sequence that seems decades ahead of its time. Throughout this film, like the rounding up of
witches in DAYS OF WRATH (1943), there is relentless community pressure to
ridicule, despise, and eventually cast out this woman from the human race. Ita Rina as Tonka is a strikingly gorgeous girl
who moves from the country to the big city with dreams, but can only find work
as a prostitute in a bawdy brothel. But
she couldn’t imagine what was in store for her after she charitably volunteers
to spend the last night in prison with a man about to be executed, offering him
courage even as she is questioning her own.
Afterwards, she is literally shunned by everyone she meets, even the
brothel where she works throws her out, claiming the customers have no interest
in her anymore, leaving her penniless and destitute on the street. But this only begins her fall from grace, as
she’s destined to have her hopes built up once again only to fall even further
than where she started, eventually dreaming a happy SUNRISE-like ending to her
life. There’s plenty of dramatic
Freudian imagery, psychological mind games, and even a musical soundtrack that
includes a segment from Wagner’s Ring
Cycle, the ultradramatic sounds of “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music”
from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, also
throwing in what sounds like fragments of Beethoven and Dvorak, adding plenty
of depth to this portrait of a despised female martyr. This is another one of those films with an
ordinary story, but the way it’s told is remarkably bold and inventive,
saturated in the social miserablism of current day filmmaker Béla Tarr.
CZECH MODERNISM IN FILM: The 1920'S to the
1940's Charles
Coleman, Facets Film Programmer
Originally shot
as a silent film, sound was added later to make this
The film will be presented in the
original silent version with musical soundtrack and French intertitles with
English subtitles.
Village Voice J.
Hoberman (excerpt)
A more startling evocation of
female martyrdom, Karel Anton's 1930 Tonka of the Gallows (December 3) is
an expressionist ballad in which a kindhearted country girl turned big-city
prostitute volunteers to keep a condemned man company on his last night. No
good deed goes unpunished: Tonka is expelled from the brothel where she works
and, like Hans Christian Andersen's match girl, winds up dying—amid visions of
happiness—on the pavement. The idyllic sequence in which Tonka revisits her
native village anticipates the strain of pastoral lyricism that characterized
mid-'30s Czech cinema.
The Reeler
Peter Hames
Antoniak, Urszula
CODE BLUE
Sex,
death, rape, murder: Just another day at the movies Barbara Scharres at
To the surprise of festival veterans, there were oddly-phrased signs posted all around the line-up area for "Code Blue" by Urszula Antoniak, playing in the Quinzaine (Directors Fortnight). They read: "Some scenes in the film 'Code Blue' may hurt the audience feelings." Films here don't usually come with warnings. I had very much liked the director's previous film "Nothing Personal," and was certainly curious to find out how my feelings would be hurt.
It turns out that "Code Blue" is the film to which I
have had the strongest negative reaction of any film I've seen at the festival
so far, but I wasn't alone in that. There were walkouts throughout, but about
ten minutes from the end, a large part of the audience simply decided that
they'd had enough and started streaming out. I've never seen anything to match
it at
"Code Blue" is about a nurse who works in a nursing home. She cares for the infirm and elderly charges, some of whom are suffering, and she sometimes acts as angel of death, dispatching them according to her own judgment. Her private life is depicted as an empty, solitary existence in a stark Euro-modern apartment. There is little there of personal meaning to her except for cabinet holding her collection of mementos of the deaths for which she has been the catalyst. The most recent addition is a comb holding a few grey hairs.
One night, from her high-rise window she observes a woman being violently raped by two men on the beach below. A male neighbor is watching too. The next day she visits the beach and discovers a used condom and the gag that had been in the woman's mouth. If you guess that her next move was to call the police you would be wrong. She takes the condom home and rubs the rapist's semen into her vagina. She subsequently initiates a sexual encounter with the voyeur neighbor, who beats her to death.
I ponder what life experience, if any, this film came out of. I don't have a problem with violence, death, or any form of sexuality as content in art, but I do have a problem with a film that seems like an arty, empty, beautifully-composed facade for half-baked ideas.
Code
Blue: Cannes Review David Rooney at Cannes Hollywood
Reporter, May 15, 2011
Urszula Antoniak's self-consciously dour mood piece centers on a terminal-ward nurse whose humane treatment of her patients contrasts with her own punishing self-denial.
An oddly translated notice posted outside Cannes Directors' Fortnight screenings of Code Blue warns that the film may "hurt audience's feelings." But while the final scenes erupt into explicit sex and ugly violence (or ugly sex and explicit violence), viewers are more likely to be numbed or exasperated than hurt by Urszula Antoniak's self-consciously dour mood piece. Its central figure is a terminal-ward nurse whose humane treatment of her patients contrasts with her own punishing self-denial.
A Polish director based in
The behavior of ascetic Marian (Bien de Moor) is
driven by personal ethics, rather than by social, spiritual or professional
codes, which may be a nod to the typical Krzysztof Kieslowski protagonist.
And the stark apartment complex where she lives could almost be a high-end --
though no more aesthetically appealing -- version of the
The film's glowering intensity is evident the instant it begins, with a slow-motion close-up of a woman's face in what appears to be the agonized throes of death. While Marian clearly is accustomed to handling corpses, she lacks the brisk dispatch of her colleagues, performing her duties with solemn tenderness. She secretly takes small, worthless mementos from the deceased patients -- a pencil, a comb -- keeping a part of every death.
While institutionalized euthanasia is legal in
Antoniak gives the film a look as cold and clinical as the hospital in which Marian works. Jasper Wolf's camerawork is measured and deliberate in its unfriendly angles, while Vincent de Pater's production design is dominated by antiseptic whites and hard metal surfaces. All that chilly formality might have been atmospheric with a more involving central character, but Marian is, to put it bluntly, a boring downer.
When her rigid self-control starts giving way to suppressed desires, Marian's angel of death act starts to fall apart and the film becomes increasingly distancing. The more disturbing Marian's behavior becomes, the more studied and artificial it all seems.
Her sexual fantasies focus on a particular stranger (Lars Eidinger), who lives in the building opposite and spends an inordinate amount of time at the window. When they both witness a brutal rape happening in the adjoining field and neither of them does anything to stop or report it, an unspoken bond is formed. (What Marian does with her souvenir from the rape scene is probably the film's single most repugnant scene.) Given the grim tone, it's all too predictable that when the neighbors do finally get together, it won't be for an agreeable roll in the hay.
In a performance that's tightly wound but at the same time dazed and dreamy, Belgian actress de Moor holds nothing back. She lays bare the tortured inner life of a woman so removed from the fundamental pleasures of life and social interaction that she relates only to death. Sadly though, that doesn't make the character interesting. The brooding film is a slow grind even at 81 minutes, too mannered in its high-art austerity and funereal chill to be in any way compelling or provocative.
Code
Blue Dan Fainaru at
In Urszula Antoniak’s promising debut Nothing Personal, a couple of solitary
people find solace in each other’s company, on the windswept coast of
The main character, Marian (Bien de Moor), gradually sinks in the course of the film into the most abject solitude, by the end of which even self-immolation is suggested as preferable to her kind of existence. It is difficult to imagine what kind of audience would willingly submit itself to this kind of cheerless punishment, unfolding on screen at an incredibly slow pace and unflinchingly turning its screws just a little bit more with every passing minute.
Marian, an ascetic fortyish hospital nurse, is fully dedicated to her patients who appear to be, without exception, terminal cases, so much so that at times she even helps put an end to their miseries. As long as she is in the hospital, dressed in her white uniform, gently floating from one patient to another, she looks and acts like an angel of mercy.
Yearning for human companionship and terrified of it at the same time, she invents a lover and later a daughter, to populate the emptiness around her for the benefit of those who might threaten to invade her privacy. She walks around desolately in her spotlessly clean flat that no one enters, occasionally watches a film on television or masturbates out of desperation. One night she watches, almost enviously, a woman being raped under her window and later retrieves the semen filled condom to spread its contents between her legs.
Almost unwillingly dragged to a party, she makes the acquaintance of a male neighbour, takes him home but the predictable love scene that was supposed to ensue turns into a brutal encounter that sums up their mutual frustration at being unable to reach into each other’s loneliness.
The title, Code Blue, refers to a hospital code indicating a patient is in immediate need of reanimation. Which is most certainly the case of Marian, a kind of walking dead eventually capable of helping others but unable to resuscitate herself to life. Bien de Moor plays her with tremendously soulful sympathy, compassion and hopelessness deeply etched into her facial expressions.
Even her emaciated physique, revealed in the last scene in all its nakedness, a skeletal, tortured body, fits in with her part. The dark, foreboding, steely images provided by Jasper Wolf’s camera, Vincent de Pater’s spare, economical sets and the slow, insistent, often repetitive montage generate a brooding, doomed type of atmosphere, out of which the viewer has no reprieve.
If there is a religious message in all this, and there probably is, not much of it will find its way to an audience pushed into such excesses of depression that they might not care any longer whether Marian represents some kind of unredeemable redeemer or is just a flawed human being, deeply hurt because of her incapacity to establish any kind of contact with her own kind. The second option makes much more sense.
Cannes
2011: CODE BLUE Review Todd Brown at
Cannes May 16, 2011
Warning:
This Film May Hurt Your Feelings.
Posted warning at screening entrance
Cannes
2011: Unsettling Trailer For Urszula Antoniak's CODE BLUE
Cannes
2011. Urszula Antoniak's "Code Blue" David Hudson at Cannes May 18, 2011
Jay
Weissberg at
Cannes
'11 Day 5: Knock-offs Wesley Morris
(with more evidence of the posted warning) at
Antonioni, Michelangelo
BAM : Brooklyn Academy of
Music
One of the few artists
credited with creating a new language of cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni remains
enormously influential, yet impossible to imitate. While many of his Italian
contemporaries used Neo-realism to address political issues of the day,
Antonioni developed a new approach: one that directly attacked problems with
society and human interactions, while using a supremely confident visual style.
Never content to work on a small canvass, Antonioni explored weighty issues and
set his characters amidst stark and unfeeling landscapes, yet central to all
his work is a need to see, to understand, and to interpret the world around
him.
Director’s Chair from DVDBeaver: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/direct-chair/antonioni.htm
Michelangelo Antonioni's films are known for capturing erratic personal moments of uncertainty and moral disorientation within his characters sterile and malleable identities. They are often being tempted by the modern trappings of self-absorption, mercenary pleasure and indifference. His unique cinematographic style utilized long tracking shots of human isolation contrasted against an austere or bleak background terrain. The natural (or industrial) landscape would absorb the characters - plying them into a more vulnerable ethical state while emotionally separating them from their traditional bearings. Described as a 'quintessential modern artist' Antonioni is a fervent expressionist who utilized intense haunting imagery. His pure compositions are how he crafted a totally new cinema language - one frequently described as both pioneering and revolutionary.
Design
News - Modernist Master: Michelangelo
Antonioi - TAXI ...
A retrospective of the films of the Italian director
Michelangelo Antonioni is always timely—as our world changes, so, it seems, do
his films. This may be a characteristic of modernism in general, a movement of
which Antonioni (b. 1912) was cinema's most elegant proponent. Despite having
apprenticed to Roberto Rossellini, Antonioni skirted neorealism for a cinema of
interiority expressed through what author Seymour Chatman called “the surface
of the world.” His main contribution is said to be the characterization of a
void in the lives of the middle class; even more than Bergman, Antonioni made
absence a presence on the screen. But what was considered fashionable angst in
the 1960s today plays with astounding emotional currency. Is this because
Antonioni was prescient, or because of what his films, spanning five decades,
have taught us about looking at the world?
The strikingly delicate performances Antonioni elicits from his lead actors—not
only Monica Vitti, muse of his defining trilogy L'avventura, L'eclisse, and the
mid-career masterpiece Red Desert; but Jeanne Moreau in La notte, Jack
Nicholson in The Passenger—offer their own intellectual challenges. Since
Antonioni's typical male is a wanderer, at home nowhere and thus everywhere,
and since what Antonioni deals with is alienation and its spaces, it is not
always recognized that he is a consummate director of women's emotions—a
proto-feminist, distilling psychology into a protracted reaction shot. Today we
see that Antonioni painted his pain in facing the modern condition as few
directors have, and that this has made his films eminently human.
Antonioni, Michelangelo from World Cinema
After experimenting with 16mm films, writing
film criticism for a local newspaper, and working for a bank, he went to
He made his first real contact with film production at 30, collaborating on the
scripts of Rossellini's Una Pilota Ritorna
and Fulchignoni's I Due Foscari (both 1942), also working as assistant
director on the latter film. That same year he went to
Antonioni then collaborated on the screenplay of De Santis's Caccia Tragica
(1947). During the next three years he directed six short documentaries. In
1950, at 38, he finally directed his first feature film, Cronaca di un Amore
/ Story of a Love Affair, largely unnoticed, though it contained many
elements that would crystallize into his highly individualistic and acclaimed
style. During the next ten formative years, he directed four films—I Vinti /
The Vanquished, La Signora senza Camelie / Camille Without Camelias,
Le Amiche / The Girl Friends, and Il Grido / The Outcry—and also
collaborated on the script of Fellini's The White Sheik
(1952) and directed the "Tentato Suicidio" episode for the film Amore
in Città / Love in the City. In 1960 he scored his first international
triumph, L'Avventura, which marked the coming to maturity of his unique
aesthetic and of his theme and camera style. The dominant theme of L'Avventura,
of the next two units in Antonioni's so-called trilogy (La Notte / The Night
and Eclisse / Eclipse), and of the
subsequent Deserto Rocco / The Red Desert (1964), is the emotional
barrennessof modern man—his futile search to assert himself in a technological
world and his frustrating inability to communicate with others. Long, lingering
shots follow his characters until their inner selves are revealed. By their
leisurely immobility the shots suggest the overbearing pressure that time
exerts upon human emotions. The surrounding physical world is also used to
convey a state of mind and to express the strains of alienation and
psychological agony. Antonioni's films are almost plotless, their narrative
vagueness almost bordering on mystery. Interest centers on the female, with the
male functioning as catalyst.
L'Avventura also marks the first appearance of Monica Vitti as an Antonioni
antiheroine. She helped extend the appeal of his films to a wider audience and
also seems to have stimulated the element of sensuality that appeared in the
director's later films.
Antonioni's skill in manipulating time and space to express the metaphysical
world of his characters found a new outlet with his first colour film,
Antonioni's next film, Zabriskie Point (1970), was set in the American
West. Then, after a long absence, Antonioni returned to his style of the 60s
and to his preoccupation with the frustration and malaise of modern society
with the international co-production Professione: Reporter / The Passenger
(1975). Following a setback with The Oberwald Mystery, an
undistinguished attempt, marred by experimentation with video techniques, to
resurrect Cocteau's The Eagle Has Two
Heads, Antonioni returned to more familiar ground with Identification of
a Woman (1982). But his reputation rests mainly on his films of the early
60s, truly original works by one of the most remarkable creative artists of the
postwar cinema. — Ephraim Katz, The
Film Encylopedia
TCMDB Turner Classics Biography
Michelangelo Antonioni began
writing about film as a student at Bologna
University Rome
Antonioni's minimalist yet
poignant style, which critics described as "structured absence," and
his disdain for vulgar commercialism, made him an important influence on
post-neorealist Italian cinema. His first feature, "Story of a Love Affair"
(1950), used complex camerawork to tell the simple tale of a wealthy woman
whose husband dies, an approach that would typify his subsequent work.
"The Vanquished" (1952) focused on the youth of post-war Europe in three separate stories set and shot in Rome Paris London France England
After the release of "The
Outcry" (1957), a study of the inept men of the Po Valley, Antonioni's
developing assurance with the medium led him to look beyond the proletarian
subjects favored by neorealism. "L'Avventura" (1959) began a phase of
non-narrative, psychological cinema, examining the barren eroticism of a bourgeoisie
(Antonioni was himself from the middle class) which had abandoned its
traditional social and cultural values. The film attracted a political critique
that equated Antonioni's work with the writings of Andre Gide. Critics, citing
the united thematic concerns of "L'Avventura", "La Notte"
(1961) and "L'Eclisse" (1962), have grouped them as a trilogy in
which mankind reaches unsuccessfully for love as the last refuge in the modern
world. Antonioni made one more film directly charting the same universe,
although "The Red Desert" (1964), in which Antonioni working for the
first time in color had an entire landscape painted red to underline his theme
of despair, focused so intensely on the character of Giuliana as to lose the
trilogy's sense of alternative possibilities. Heroine Monica Vitti's palpable
frustration signaled the end of her four-film collaboration with Antonioni,
which had made her an international star.
"Blow-Up" (1966) marked
Antonioni's departure from Italy London California USA
In 1985, Antonioni suffered a
heart attack that left him partially paralyzed and over the next decade managed
to produce only the eleven-minute documentary short, "Volcanoes and
Carnival" (1992). However, with the encouragement of his wife Enrica and
the financial backing provided by French producer Stephane Tchalgadjieff,
Antonioni returned triumphantly with "Beyond the Clouds" (1995).
German director Wim Wenders, who had become involved because Antonioni's
precarious health made him uninsurable, shot the prologue, epilogue and linking
shots between the four episodes comprising the movie and otherwise stayed out
of the way, totally fascinated by Antonioni at work.
Based on stories in Antonioni's
book "That Bowling Alley on the Tiber: Tales of a Director" (1985),
"Beyond the Clouds" proved a brilliantly unified movie on par with
the director's best work, evoking such familiar themes as alienation in the
modern world while also exploring a religiosity not previously found in his films.
Employing his signature fluency of camera movement and shots sustained much
longer than the norm in the creation of an impeccable visual composition,
"Beyond the Clouds" demonstrated that the old master had lost none of
his technical expertise and was in fact still growing artistically at the age
of 83. His wife chronicled the experience and edited her nearly 85 hours of
film into a 52-minute documentary titled "For Me, to Make a Film Is to
Live" (1995). The director was presented with an honorary Academy Award
for lifetime achievement at the 1995 ceremony.
Film
Reference Kimball Lockhart
Michelangelo Antonioni's cinema
is one of non-identification and displacement. In almost all of his films shots
can be found whose striking emphasis on visual structure works in opposition to
the spectator's desire to identify, as in classical Hollywood cinema, with
either a protagonist's existential situation or with anything like a seamless
narrative continuity—the "impression of reality" so often evoked in
conjunction with the effect of fiction films on the spectator.
Since his first feature, Cronaca
di un amore, Antonioni's introduction of utterly autonomous, graphically
stunning shots into the film's narrative flow has gradually expanded to the
point where, in Professione: Reporter, but even more emphatically in Il
mistero di Oberwald and Identificazione di una donna, the unsettling
effect of these discrete moments in the narrative continuity of the earlier
work has taken over entirely. If these graphically autonomous shots of
Antonioni's films of the fifties and sixties functioned as striking
"figures" which unsettled the "ground" of narrative
continuity, his latest films undo altogether this opposition between form and
content, technique and substance, in order to spread the strangeness of the
previously isolated figure across the entirety of the film which will thus
emphatically establish itself as a "text."
That which might at first seem to
mark a simple inversion of this opposition—where narrative substance would take
a back seat to formal technique—instead works to question, in a broad manner,
the ways in which films establish themselves as fictions. Antonioni's cinema strains
the traditional conventions defining fiction films to the breaking point where,
beginning at least as early as Professione: Reporter, those aspects
always presumed to define what is "given" or "specific" or
"proper" to film (which are commonly grouped together under the
general heading of "technique") find themselves explicitly
incorporated into the overall fabric of the film's narration; technique finds
itself drawn into that which it supposedly presents neutrally, namely, the
film's fictional universe. One might name this strategy the fictionalization of
technique.
Such a strategy, however, is
anything but self-reflexive, nor does it bear upon the thematics of Antonioni's
films. In even those films where the protagonist has something to do with producing
images, narratives, or other works of art (the filmmaker of La signora senza
camelie, the architect of L'avventura, the novelist of La notte,
the photographer of Blow-Up, the television reporter of Professione:
Reporter, the poet of Il mistero di Oberwald, and the film director
of Identificazione di una donna), their professions remain important
only on the level of the film's drama, never in terms of its technique. It is
as though the image of the artist were trapped in a world where self-reflection
is impossible. Indeed, one common strand linking the thematics of all of
Antonioni's films—the impossibility for men to communicate with women—might be
seen to illustrate, on the level of drama, the kind of communicational impasse
to be found on the level of "technique" in his cinema. Though his
films are far from "experimental" in the sense of the work of Hollis
Frampton, Michael Snow, or Andy Warhol, Antonioni's fictional narratives always
feel flattened or, to borrow a term from Roland Barthes, they seem curiously mat,
as if the spectator's ability to gain immediate access to the fiction were
being impeded by something.
Antonioni's films, then, are not
simply "about" the cinema, but rather, in attempting to make films
which always side-step the commonplace or the conventional (modes responsible
for spectatorial identification and the "impression of reality"),
they call into question what is taken to be a "language" of cinema by
constructing a kind of textual idiolect which defies comparison with any other
film, even Antonioni's other films. This may at least in part account for the
formidable strangeness and difficulty of Antonioni's work, not just for general
audiences but for mainstream critics as well. One constantly has the impression
that the complexity of his films requires years in the cellar of critical
speculation before it is ready to be understood; a film that is initially
described as sour and flat ends up ten years later, as in the case of L'avventura,
being proclaimed one of the ten best films of all time ("International
Critics Poll," Sight and Sound). To judge from the reception in the
United States
As Antonioni has himself stressed
repeatedly, the dramatic or the narrative aspect of his films—telling a story
in the manner of literary narrative—comes to be of less and less importance;
frequently, this is manifested by an absurd and complete absence of dramatic
plausibility (Zabriskie Point, Professione: Reporter, Il mistero di Oberwald).
The nonverbal logic of what remain narrative films depends, Antonioni says,
upon neither a conceptual nor emotional organization: "Some people believe
I make films with my head; a few others think they come from the heart; for my
part, I feel as though I make them with my stomach."
Michelangelo Antonioni
Archive the Antonioni Archive,
including links to all his films
Michelangelo
Antonioni James Brown from Senses of
Cinema
Facets:
Antonioni, Michelangelo Susan Doll
provides bio information
All Movie
Guide: Michelangelo Antonioni
biography material by Jason Ankeny
Antonioni's Modernist
Language Glen Norton analyzes
Antonioni’s modernist language
The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni -
by Michael E. Grost Classic Film and Television
Michelangelo
Antonioni from They Shoot Pictures,
Don’t They
1960 Cahiers
du Cinema Article by Antonioni also
seen here: Cahiers du cinéma
in EuroScreenwriters
Charles Thomas Samuels
interviews Antonioni July 29, 1969 from EuroScreenwriters
The
other Michelangelo - Michelangelo Antonioni - Interview ... Miuccia Prada October 1995 interview
Michelangelo Antonioni UXL Newsmakers in 1995
Movie
Master Alexander Stille reviews the
book ANTONIONI The Poet of Images, by
William Arrowsmith
for The
New York Times,
World Socialist
Web Site Article Part I & Part 2 A
Flawed Legacy, by Richard Phillips,
Remembering
Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007)
J. Hoberman previews a retrospective from the Village Voice, June 6, 2006
The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in
Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura
Frank P. Tomasulo from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
First
Ingmar Bergman, now Michelangelo Antonioni
Xan Brooks from The Guardian,
July 31, 2007
Michelangelo
Antonioni: In Memory Roger Ebert,
July 31, 2007
Michelangelo
Antonioni, 94, Italian Director, Dies
Rick Lyman from The New York Times,
In
Memory of Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) Michael J. Anderson from Tativille
07/31/2007:
Michelangelo Antonioni, 1912-2007 two great film sequences from
Michelangelo Antonioni: Poet, Architect, Demolitions
Expert mildly irreverent views by Bilge
Ebiri from New York Entertainment,
Antonioni:
Chronicler of Alienated Europeans
Stephen Holden from The New York
Times,
Before Them, Films Were Just Movies reflections on Bergman and Antonioni by A.O.
Scott from The New York Times, August 1, 2007
Obituary: Michelangelo
Antonioni Penelope Houston from The Guardian,
The
desperate and the beautiful David Thomson from The Guardian,
Hollywood
Reporter Article (2007) Memoriam, by
Eric J. Lyman,
Telegraph
Article (2007) Memoriam, by Sheila Johnston,
Michelangelo Antonioni - obituary The Telegraph, August 1, 2007
A Director Also Elusive on Home Video Dave Kehr from The New York Times, August
1, 2007
The House Next
Door: Michelangelo Antonioni: September 29,
1912 ... Antonioni images (click to enlarge) selected
by Keith Uhlich, August 1,
2007
Michelangelo
Antonioni – A Life Giving Art to Us Sexuality in the Arts, a tribute through
photos, August 1, 2007
commentarybergmanantonioni Art Tattler, August 2007
Mike
Miley: Michelangelo Antonioni:
Secretary of the Interior ... The
Huffington Post, August
2, 2007
Beyond the
Multiplex | Salon Arts & Entertainment
Bergman vs. Antonioni, by
Andrew O’Hehir from Salon, August
2, 2007
When
Antonioni Blew Up the Movies Richard Corliss from Time magazine, August 5, 2007
People's Daily
Online - As the lights go down
Saying
Goodbye to Two Giants of Cinema J. Hoberman from the Village Voice, August
7, 2007
Arrivederci Michelangelo! The Antonioni
Adventure Winds Up | The ...
Andrew Sarris from The New York August 7, 2007
Bergman, Antonioni, and the stubborn stylists David Bordwell at Observations on Film Art and Film Art, August 11, 2007
The Man
Who Set Film Free Martin Scorsese
from The New York Times,
At the Movies Michael Wood from The
Naked
Bodies and Troubled Souls: Antonioni and the Ways of the Flesh Tony McKibbin from Senses of Cinema, February
2009
Antonioni’s End
of Existence – Part One Sly from The
Open End, March 13, 2009
Antonioni’s End
of Existence – Part Two Sly from The
Open End, March 15, 2009
Antonioni’s
End of Existence – Part Three Sly
from The Open End, March 17, 2009
Antonioni’s
End of Existence – Part Four Sly
from The Open End, March 19, 2009
Illusion
Travels By Streetcar: Old Stuff: Two Obits from Two Years Ago Tom Sutpen from Illusion Travels by
Streetcar, July 31, 2009
Michelangelo
Antonioni: the movie revolutionary
John Patterson from The Guardian,
July 20, 2012
Antonioni Ingmar Bergman's view on his colleague
Antonioni's
best scenes Andrew Pulver from The
Guardian
Six
of the best a gallery of Antonioni
film photos from The Guardian
Gerald Peary's Magnificent Seven (2006)
Wikipedia biographical information
MovieMail:
Tragic Muses Alan Boshier writes
about Monica Vitti and Anna Karina
A REVIEW OF ANTONIONI SHORTS
The Evening Class [Michael Guillen]
Returning
home to Miami via San Francisco after five months in Thailand, Peter Nellhaus
and I met briefly for PFA's first Antonioni shorts program yesterday afternoon. We
didn't have a whole lot of time to talk as I had to head off after the shorts
program to get back into San Francisco for Sleazy Sundays at the
Victoria; but, at least I was able to buy him a ticket to see I Vinti (1952), which he's
reviewed at Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee.
The
Antonioni shorts program was hits and misses. Gente del Po (The People of the Po,
1943-47) about a barge boatsman, his wife and their sick daughter;
allegedly prefigures Il Grido
(1957) (which, admittedly, I haven't seen though—if you read Italian—a
comparison has been made between the two at Cinemateque.net).
Its confluence of the sweet waters of the Po and the acrid waters of the
Adriatic didn't do all that much for me, despite the short's lustrous black and
white cinematography.
N.U./Netezza Urbana (Sanitation
Department, 1948) chronicled the lives of streetcleaners in
Rome. Though dark and somewhat underexposed, this short intrigued with its
depiction of the heedless littering of upper classes cleaned up after by these
working class heroes. The film was accompanied by a bluesy jazz score by Giovanni Fusco, which
juxtaposed interestingly.
I very much enjoyed L'Amorosa menzogna (Lies of
Love, 1949), a fascinating study of the "stars" of
the fumetti—photographed
comic strips—popular at the time in Italy. It held some delightful comic
touches.
I equally enjoyed Superstizione (Superstition, 1949)
for its laundry list of bizarre rural southern Italian superstitions including
drinking an infant's piss to cure arthritis and burning a viper in a campfire
until it's ash and then sprinkling the ashes on the threshold of the house of
someone you want to hex. This is the kind of film that gives me ideas.
La Villa dei mostri (The Villa
of Monsters, 1950) arrived in Italian with French subtitles
and—though Susan Oxtoby claimed it was a great opportunity to focus on
Antonioni's visual compositions—I used it as a quick opportunity to catch some
zees. I'm only human.
Tentato suicido (Suicide Attempt,
1953), Antonioni's contribution to the L'Amore in città (Love
in the City) portmanteau of six Italian directors, including Fellini,
only reminded how love isn't always the best thing for you, especially when it
goes sour. Fernando F. Croce has written some notes on the omnibus at Cinepassion.org.
Vertigine (1950) takes
the viewer on a tram over what appears to be the Italian Dolomites. It reminded
me of a similar experience I took on one of my first European sojourns and
reminded me of how I worried the cable would snap. I fearfully imagined myself
impaled on the tip of a pine tree. I can't find any information on this
four-minute short, though it seems to reflect Antonioni's interests in these
devices at the time. In the same year he did another 10-minute short La Funivia del faloria (The
Funicular of Mount Faloria, 1950), so perhaps Vertigine was likewise filmed at
the Cortina d'Ampezzo, Belluno, Veneto, Italy.
Finally, Sette canne, un vestito (Seven
Reeds, One Suit, 1949) was a thoroughly engaging short
documentary on the production of rayon, shot (again) in both the Po Valley and
Torviscosa, Italy. In league with his profiles on the working class, Seven Reeds, One Suit seemed most
like a true documentary to me. Its title alludes to the fact that it takes
seven reeds to make one fabulous dress. The process is convoluted and chemical
and I couldn't stop wondering who came up with this and how they figured it out
in the first place. As a study of industrial ingenuity, it proved thoroughly
informative. The IMdb user comment on this film is a handsome overview of
Antonioni's early work.
Cross-published at Twitch.
CHRONICLE OF A LOVE (Cronaca di un Amore)
aka: Story of a Love Affair
Italy
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Michelangelo Antonioni's first film, and already an identification of a woman: "No, it's not the same old story" mused over glamour snapshots of Lucia Bosé, a raven-haired beauty. A police sleuth is hired by her husband, a much older industrialist (Ferdinando Sarmi) with suspicions about her past; the snooping exhumes an old affair with a car salesman (Massimo Girotti), previously capped by the unresolved death of a woman. Bosé, swathed in white furs after a concert, spots Girotti and feigns illness, a wife's love is measured in migraines, Sarmi quips: their clandestine affair is restarted after seven years of separation, meetings follow in a planetarium, a cabin by the train lines (chugging heard outside), strolls in the park during overcast days. The tone is despairing poetry, consciously modern -- the heroine crying in her luxurious Art Deco bedroom and picking up her lover's call is a telefoni-bianchi memento, a bit of Camerini with a reminder of Magnani in L'Amore, yet Antonioni's melodrama points toward a new beginning in Italian film history. The main event is the director's discovery of the long-take, the camera's analytical mobility tracing a brooding curve through the plot: Bosé sailing anxiously through a posh party, contemplating Sarmi's death with Girotti, circling first vertically up a hotel's staircase and then horizontally around a bridge. Bosé makes a bid for a gown during a nightclub auction, the model blithely doffs it off and strides away in her undies ("A whim. Can you explain that?"); mega-sized, bottle-shaped advertisements loom over opposite sides of the road in the following shot, a car zips between them and past the lovers -- the irony of the husband's inquiry precipitating the affair is not lost, though the narrative's investigative format is soon revealed as a doomed attempt to impose sense onto a universe turning increasingly uncertain and inexplicable. The genre expectations of the thriller dissolve, the characters succumb not to the illicit passion of noir but to the heft of their despair, not to mention the sublimely numbed feelings of Antonioni's vision. With Gino Rossi, Marika Rowsky, and Rubi D'Alma. In black and white.
Slant Magazine [Dan Callahan]
After a series of striking documentary short subjects,
Michelangelo Antonioni made his first feature, Cronaca di un Amore (Story
of a Love Affair), a loose, neutral treatment of a seemingly standard noir
subject. Cronaca is much like Robert Bresson's early Les Dames du
Bois de Boulogne—you can detect the future abstract style of the director
underneath the conventional material. With these two films, a new type of
reflective cinema was born, dedicated equally to the interior lives of actor
"models" and the obscure surfaces of the photographed world.
Paola (Lucia Bose) has moved up a class by marrying a rich, crooked
industrialist (Ferdinando Sarmi). Her husband is curious about his wife's
background, so he has a private detective delve into her past, and we learn of
a mysterious death years ago involving Paola and a boy named Guido (Massimo
Girotti). Lower-class car salesman Guido and fur-swathed Paola reconnect and
she eventually decides that they should do away with her husband. "You
think it's easy to kill a man?" asks Guido, but dark-eyed Paola is having
none of it: "You fought in the war!" she exclaims.
In many ways, Cronaca is more difficult than Antonioni's later films
because it does seem to promise a narrative structure, yet it continually
frustrates our expectations. It's a bit like Ossessione meets L'Avventura. The attention to social class
in Cronaca is as intense as Antonioni's already piercing observation of
rain-slicked streets, dead black trees, and desolate modern architecture.
Dialogue drones on endlessly and rapidly, and this is made more alienating due
to the canned, entirely post-dubbed sound. It's extremely difficult to follow
the film scene by scene; the camera wanders away from people and makes radical
choices in what it wants to look at and linger over. What at first seems like
clumsiness finally falls away and something highly original takes its place: an
ambiguous meditation on the emptiness of upwardly mobile modern life. In other
words, Antonioni takes care of the secular tortures of the affluent damned
while Bresson handles the religious purification and even worse suffering of
the holy poor.
The acting is inept on the surface, but Antonioni gets what he's always after:
insecure non-acting (he even managed to get this from such flashy personalities
as Vanessa Redgrave and Jack Nicholson). Bose's exquisite, vulpine sociopath,
with her sculptured cheekbones and aimless movements, is a dark dry run for
Monica Vitti's yearning Antonioni heroines of the '60s. This isn't really a
love affair: the leads have zero chemistry, but that's the whole point.
Antonioni's films are about the absence of love and the way people foolishly
grope for something so ephemeral and unsatisfying. Of course, Antonioni never
comes up with a viable replacement for the concept of love—religion is out of
sight and out of mind. In later films, he perks up over the prospect of trips
to
In this first film, Antonioni ignores the verbal overload of the script (which
boasts far too many writers) and concentrates on evoking states of mind through
visuals. The feeling you get from his films, from Cronaca through to Beyond
the Clouds, is similar to the feeling Ozu evoked in his lyrical lulls
between scenes. But Antonioni's observation of empty rooms and deserted streets
is weirdly sexualized and usually despairing. This gloom he creates is very
stimulating, very intellectual, and sometimes close to suicidal in its
self-pity. When Paola and Guido first meet, they drive to the beach and then
meander over to some stone bleachers near the sea. As they sit, the imagery
powerfully gives you a sense of lostness, of time gone by, of lack of meaning,
of longing for meaning. All in a single shot.
Money and sex are intertwined; Paola's husband jokes that a colleague of his
wanted to buy her for 180,000 lira. At an auction for "war cripples,"
Paola purchases a dress, and the model strips it right off, standing in her
black underwear and handing it over (listless Paola tells the girl to keep it
for herself). In the film's most complex shot, Paola's husband drives through
two enormous freestanding cardboard liquor bottle advertisements. He's testing
out one of Guido's Maseratis (Paola wants her lover to have some money). It's
an incredible image, but difficult to make sense of. After watching the
Maserati disappear into the distance, Guido gets into his car and engages in a
hungry make-out session with Paola. "I'm tired of feeling alone," she
says. Antonioni soon cuts to them sitting back in their seats, staring straight
ahead, bored to death. This is not difficult to judge: it's a classic example
of what Andrew Sarris called "Antoni-ennui."
These two want to take action, but they never get relief, just guilt and
increasing lassitude. They want their lives to be like a movie. Paradoxically,
they are literally a couple in a movie, but Antonioni rips apart
cinematic conventions and lets shapeless life pour in, controlling the
subsequent mess with his masterful mise-en- scène. In the final sequences,
Paola runs around the dirty streets in a gown with a frilly white skirt, the
dress trailing behind her absurdly through the dark. The "scenes" of
her drama are deliberately unsatisfying, but in an image like this she is
transformed by Antonioni's stony, discreetly randy gaze. The unsurpassed beauty
of Antonioni's visual art lifts his two-penny story and hollow people into the
exalted realm of the senses; it's a noir dissolved and re-made into existential
poetry.
Bright Lights Film
Journal [Ian Johnston]
Turner Classic
Movies dvd review Nathaniel
Thompson
girish:
Undistributed/Antonioni August 13,
2007
The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni
[Michael E. Grost] Classic Film and
Television
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Wilson)
DVD Talk Glenn Erickson
Monsters At Play Tera Kirk
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
THE LADY WITHOUT CAMELIAS
(La
Signora senza camelie)
An early Antonioni
drama that looks at the sad fate of a manipulated woman, as well as taking a
satirical swipe at the commercial end of the Italian film industry. Bosè plays
a shopgirl, recently elevated to movie stardom, whose idolising producer
husband (Cecchi) puts her into a disastrous production of Joan of Arc
and sends her career into a downward spiral. Characteristically, Antonioni is
less concerned with plot than with creating fluid set pieces and eloquent
framings of his beautiful actress and the surrounding decor. The resulting
cocktail is slight on psychology, but invariably stunning to behold.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
Perhaps the most unjustly neglected of Michelangelo Antonioni's
early features, La Signora Senza Camelie (1953) is a caustic Cinderella
story about a Milanese shop clerk (Lucia Bose) who briefly becomes a glamorous
movie star. One of the cruelest and most accurate portraits of studio
filmmaking and the Italian movie world that we have, it's informed by a
visually and emotionally complex mise en scene that juggles background with
foreground elements in a choreographic style recalling Welles at times. Though
it's only Antonioni's third feature, and its episodic structure necessitates a
somewhat awkward expositional method, this is mature filmmaking that leaves an
indelible aftertaste. In Italian with subtitles. 105 min.
User
Reviews from imdb Author: antcol8
from
I gave this movie a Ten...does this mean it's a masterpiece? Because it's not - or let's say it a different way: it is a masterpiece because it isn't a masterpiece. Antonioni's Trilogy - these are great films, known to all serious cinephiles. They have a consistent take on the Human Condition. They have lots to say about failure. But here, Antonioni was still developing his language, and so the "philosophy", if you want to call it that, was not so omnipresent and all encompassing. In some ways, this is just a melodrama - and I love that! It's the beautiful suffering that women, particularly, do in Antonioni's films that led Andrew Sarris to speak of "Antoniennui". But did Monica ever suffer more beautifully than Lucia Bose does here? Let me say it again...Lucia Bose! The film - so relevant to our time - has to do with the capricious nature of stardom. A little Milanese shop-girl has the good fortune to be a world-class babe and gets the Schwab's Drugstore Italian Style treatment...but by the age of 22, she sees that it's all illusion and jive. In her teary- eyed words, she spends Three Months trying to become a Real Actress and no one takes her seriously! And, well, Bose can act - but who remembers her? In some ways, her fate is like that of the character. She was the Euro "it" girl of a particular moment, but that moment has not loomed large in the history - she was later than Garbo and Dietrich, earlier than Loren or Ekberg. Antonioni, on the other hand, would develop further, taking many of the patterns and tropes already found in this film and building on them. A couple of examples: Bose and her would-be lover discover that they cannot connect in the shadow of Mussolini's soulless modern suburb EUR (L'Eclisse); Bose's lover (Ivan Desny) is revealed as a weak individual, lacking in conviction, but in desperation Bose clings to him (L'Avventura). And speaking of L'Avventura (where Sandro is a failed architect), you have to love how architecture is destiny in this film. The house that Clara (Bose)'s husband builds for her is a nouveau - riche monstrosity, with all of its anachronisms and longueurs shoved in our face. A Rococco little dressing table is placed up against a Danish modern staircase...Hieronymous Bosch wallpaper competes with Fragonard curtains. All the emptiness and pretentiousness of Clara's husband Gianni (Andrea Checchi) can be seen in the house. This leads to the hilarious yet tragic set piece where the film he has directed, with Bose starring as Joan of Arc (!) is presented ("a failure, but a noble failure") at the Venice Film Festival. Oh, I could go on all day - all the uses of the Pathetic Fallacy (Antonioni waits for rain and miserable weather the way other directors wait for the Golden Hour). And Bose statuesque and miserable in her furs framed in the spooky shadows of old movie theaters - pure cinema magic! That Antonioni - has any director been able to critique and revel so much at the same time?
I VINTI
Coffee, Coffee and More Coffee
Peter
Jet lag is keeping me from taking as much advantage of the
film scene here in
The film is actually three short stories about post-war youth
and murder. If this were an American film, the poster would scream,
"Ripped from today's headlines!". Antonioni is more understated than
that in his introduction, which exposes someone far more conservative than the
filmmaker who would make Zabriskie Point sixteen years later. The three
protagonists are all middle class young men, each who murders someone without
thought of the consequences. Each sequence takes place in a different country -
The characters range in age from high school seniors to early college age. With his portrait of middle class youth, Antonioni has taken a different track from other films at that time which portrayed youthful criminals as primarily lower-class and uneducated. Where I Vinti is of interest is in presenting the students when they are with each other. The young people are shown as self-absorbed, shallow, and callous. Especially in the French sequence, it is easy to imagine these kids growing up to be Alain Delon or Monica Vitti in L'Eclisse, or the travelers of L'Avventura. The murders that take place are almost beside the point, which is why the film met with censorship problems. Antonioni's heart and head are more interested in portraying the sense of alienation that his characters feel, from their homes and families, and from each other.
The varying degrees of indifference of the three murderers also suggests that Antonioni may have been seeking to create a filmic equivalent to Albert Camus' The Stranger. That Antonioni has been linked with Camus is not new, especially in discussion on The Passenger. The main difference would be that Camus' character of Meursault is more self-reflective than Antonioni's young men. Although not referring to the auther in connection to this film, Antonioni has perhaps left a clue regarding his own motivations: The principle behind the cinema, like that behind all the arts, rests on a choice. It is, in Camus' words, "the revolt of the artist against the real."
LOVE IN THE CITY (L'amore in città)
Italy
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
An early example of the Italian omnibus film, a subgenre of irresistible conceptual appeal and inevitable built-in unevenness (RoGoPaG, Le Streghe, Boccaccio '70). The brainchild of neorealism doyen Cesare Zavattini, it huddles a batch of shorts from various directors hinging on amore thematics, whether built around strands of melancholy flirting (Dino Risi's surveilling of a provincial jitterbugging hall) or forlorn lechery (Alberto Lattuada's flipbook of males double-taking over strolling lookers). Not surprisingly, Zavattini's own contribution, following a poor unwed mother through the daily grind of Roman boarding houses and crowded welfare offices, is the one most obviously cuffed to neorealist ideas (the heroism of the wretched) and tropes (an unbroken diaper-changing shot apes the real-time integrity of the maid's morning routine in Umberto D.). By contrast, the more interesting segments by Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini push the aesthetics toward bladelike abstraction (alienated women reenacting botched suicide attempts for Antonioni's cooling lenses) and fantasy-tinged satire (Fellini's account of a pure, struggling country girl rung through a matrimonial agency). Note: The version I saw, already pricked with a lecturing English narration, was missing Carlo Lizzani's segment on prostitution. In black and white.
The Evening Class [Michael Guillen]
LE AMICHE (The Girlfriends) A- 94
Opening with the
sensual sounds of Latin jazz, something immediately associated nowadays with
Rosetta, it turns out,
is surrounded by wealthy friends whose self-centered arrogance is emblematic of
the reconstructed wealthy bourgeoisie that thrived after the war by ignoring
the needs of the working class, people who continually place themselves above
the rest, behaving as if the wealthy deserve to be wealthy and the poor have it
coming. We see a world through upscale
art galleries and dress shops, modern hotel rooms and lobbies, train stations,
and other lavish interiors that serve as a hostile environment for sustaining
friendships and trust, as people are continually constructing walls between
themselves. At one stylish art gallery
we soon learn that Lorenzo, Gabriele Ferzetti, a compulsive womanizer who
re-appears in almost the exact same role in L’AVVENTURA, is married to another
artist Nene (Valentina Cortese), who is offered an exhibition in New York,
which leaves Lorenzo wallowing in his own self doubt, where his confidence
immediately receives a jolt of encouragement from Rosetta’s open
affections. Mariella (Anna Maria
Pancani) is the other member of the female clan, always impeccably dressed and
the most flirtatious of all the women, making open sexual advances on anything
in pants. One of the most extraordinary
scenes takes place at a blustery beach where within seconds people are nearly
stepping over other couples that have formed who are writhing on the ground in
close embraces, where women are openly kissing their friend’s boyfriends just
for the thrill of it, where they are soon discovered and the men timidly offer
meek apologies while the women who initiated it all are thrilled by their
sirenesque powers.
The sole Antonioni
literary adaptation from the Cesare Pavese novella Among Women Only, it’s an unusual depiction of strong-willed women,
who have not only joined the post war work force, but through hard work and
perseverance have attained wealth and status, no longer the exclusive domain of
men, though it’s also clear from the nervous glances and long gazes in the
opposite direction that it’s not just men who haven’t yet accepted their new
role. When Clelia enters the women’s
high society in Turin, she witnesses a world of indulgences and petty
infighting, led by the perfectly dressed Momina, who seems to thrive on instigating
other people’s troubles, pulling the strings and encouraging others to plunge
recklessly headfirst into relationships that may or may not work just for her
own amusement, as she does by encouraging Rosetta to find love with Lorenzo,
all behind Nene’s back. Rosetta has
trust issues with Momina, a situation that comes to an explosive head early on,
as Momina’s status as the Queen Bee oversees every backstabbing act. So in self protection, Rosetta distances
herself from the group and throws herself headfirst at Lorenzo, who is
flattered and all too accommodating, but by the time he gets around to telling
her he’s not all that serious, it’s too late, with devastating
consequences. Much of the explosive,
behind-the-scenes tirades continue over one of Clelia’s fashion shows, where in
the middle of the show which comes to an instant halt, Clelia insists on
setting the record straight with Momina, calling her selfish and vain, someone
who attempts to fill her own shallow emptiness by manipulating others for her
own selfish amusement. While this is
certainly true, the same could be said for anyone in this catty social group,
as they all behave in much the same way, and from the viewer’s point of view,
they all deserve each other. The
scathing dialogue is as humorous as it is unsettling, as this intoxicating,
atmosphere rich, Antonioni mood of ennui, beautifully shot by Gianni Di
Venanzo, all but breaks away from the contemporary images of Italian
neo-realism that Antonioni and Rossellini helped create, where the director
brings to the foreground the underhanded indiscretions of the Italian
bourgeoisie.
The
Girlfriends Jonathan Rosenbaum from The Reader
This strong early feature (1955) by Michelangelo Antonioni,
based on a novel by Cesare Pavese, focuses on a woman who returns to her native
Turin to open a fashion salon, and on the troubled wealthy young men and women
she gets to know. Masterfully directed in Antonioni's choreographic manner,
with strong melancholic undertones. With Eleanora Rossi Drago, Valentina
Cortese, Yvonne Furneaux, Madeleine Fischer, and Franco Fabrizi. In Italian
with subtitles.
Though seldom seen now,
Antonioni's fourth feature is one of his greatest films, in which diverse plot
strands, character psychology, and a masterful control of the camera are
perfectly fused. Drawn from Pavese, the story begins when local-girl-made-good
Clelia returns to
Review: Le Amiche Ray Pride from New City
When is an artist the artist we discover them to be over the
course of their career? The perverse pop-art of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970
“Zabriskie Point” is plainly the work of his Swinging London “Blow-Up” (1966).
His exploration of urban space and the distances between alienated,
contemporary characters is also recognizable as the same author’s work, in movies
like “L’eclisse” and “L’avventura,” black-and-white dissections of time,
architecture and thwarted desire, lovingly collated and anatomized in Criterion
DVD editions. But Michelangelo was likely Michelangelo even as a babe, you’d
guess from the restored 35mm print of his 1955 “Le Amiche” (The Girlfriends), a
rare adaptation from the filmmaker. The acting is more emphatic, the melodrama
of a 1950s Italian cast, but yet… men and women, exceptionally striking women,
enact roundelays of attraction in mid-century modern settings. All the ache and
isolation of the movies to come are there, and hardly in germinal form. The
mysteries of solitude already transfix Antonioni, and even a
twenty-first-century audience should be able to recognize a great film from an
already-formed sensibility. Adapted from a novella by Cesare Pavese. With
Eleonora Rossi Drago, Gabriele Ferzetti, Franco Fabrizi, Valentina Cortese. “Le
amiche” comes from ambitious young distribution company The Film Desk: urrà for
cinephiles!
CINE-FILE: Cine-List Ben Sachs
One of the major discoveries of the touring Antonioni
retrospective of 2006, LE AMICHE returns to Chicago in a new, purportedly
gorgeous 35mm print. Those who know this great director only through his
high-Modernism of the 60s and 70s will be surprised to discover the extent to
which this satisfies the conventions of the 50s "women's picture."
The professional women and artistic aspirants who congregate around the heroine's
Turin boutique--each a different model of eloquent neurosis--wouldn't be out of
place in, say, a Joseph L. Mankiewicz film of the same period. Yet the
melodramatic subplots (which Antonioni juggles rather deftly) accumulate into
something far more unsettling than ALL ABOUT EVE, all but paving the way for
the monumental despair of IL GRIDO and L'AVVENTURA. "We should be careful
to note that just because this picture has a more conventional genre setup and
does not seem to be working towards a grand statement, that it doesn't have
something to say," wrote Glenn Kenny in the Daily Notebook in
June. "In fact the point it ends at is something quite devastating.
The successful suicide that any other film would treat as a tragic climax is
conveyed quite matter-of-factly, in a tossed-off fashion almost, and the
audience is meant to understand that this action is not just a satisfaction of
a genre convention but something even deeper, more primordial, relating to
dramaturgy and catharsis and its ancient roots in ritual. That is to say,
that this suicide is a blood sacrifice that, tragic as it is, provides the key
to the other characters' happiness/fulfillment. Except...and this is really
brilliant...it totally does no such thing, instead offering a series of images
and actions that are the exact opposite of what you've expected and/or hoped
for." (1955, 99 min, 35mm)
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Michelangelo Antonioni opens with a nod to his L'Amore in
Città segment, another tentato suicido: Eleonora Rossi Drago,
transplanted from
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Excavated from the deep '50s, Michelangelo Antonioni's Le amiche (known in English as "The Girlfriends") is an unexpected treasure. Or, perhaps, an expected one: Largely dismissed when it briefly played here in 1963, the movie was among the few to find favor with the two Voice critics Jonas Mekas and Andrew Sarris.
Mekas and Sarris both made the same observation, noting that this detached look at life among the rich and vapid anticipated Antonioni's 1960 breakthrough L'avventura by five years. It was with Le amiche that Antonioni found his métier (modern art galleries, cocktail parties, fashion shows), his modus operandi (multiple mysteries, many pretty women), and his dramatic meat (enigmatic emptiness, self-annihilating ennui). A scene in which the ensemble visits a deserted beach to aimlessly pair off or wander on alone is L'avventura's concentrated essence.
Adapted from Cesare Pavese's novella Among Women Only, Le amiche is casually episodic. Thirtysomething fashion designer Clelia (Eleonora Rossi Drago) returns from Rome to her hometown, Turin, to oversee the opening of a new boutique and, thanks to a young woman's failed suicide attempt, falls in with a group of wealthy ladies (and future customers). Like the Monica Vitti character in L'avventura, she's the responsible working girl kibitzing a circle of self-indulgent airheads. This Sex and the City setup is complicated by the presence of a masochistic ceramicist (high-strung Valentina Cortese) married to a philandering failed artist (Gabriele Ferzetti, who'd play a similar role in L'avventura), and Clelia's own flirtation with the humbly dumb but hunky foreman on her construction site.
Although relatively plotless, Le amiche is baroque by Antonioni's later standards. The various failed love affairs are enlivened by emotional confrontations and even a full-fledged brawl. The movie also considerably complicates the Pavese novella—which is striking not only for its cool understatement but also for its underlying existential despair. In 1955, Antonioni was subtly criticized by Pavese's friend, Italo Calvino, for his lack of Pavesean subtlety. The lesson was learned—even more than Le amiche, it's Among Women Only that anticipates the Antonioni of the '60s.
User reviews from imdb Author: mackjay from Out there
in the dark
Complex, dramatic, and visually seductive, "Le
Amiche" is not just a fine early work by Antonioni, it deserves a place
beside his more famous achievements.
For those approaching it in 'historical reverse', that is AFTER knowing the
'Trilogy' ("L'Avventura" "La Notte" "L'Eclisse")
and "Il Deserto Rosso", the film is stunning in the way it prefigures
nearly all the themes the director would continue to explore in his somewhat
more daring works of the 1960s. In the character of Clelia (played by the
beautiful Eleonora Rossi Drago) can be seen the ancestor of Monica Vitti's
Claudia in "L'Avventura": she is an outsider, curious and
compassionate, who is coming to terms with her own sense of self. Gabriele
Ferzetti plays Lorenzo, a frustrated artist, much like his lost architect in
the same famous film. And in Rosetta (Madeleine Fisher) is prefigured the
enigmatic Anna go 'goes missing' on the immortal volcanic island. Yvonne
Furneaux's Momina embodies the superficial leisure class characters with whom
Antonioni will continue to populate his next three or four films. And Nene
(Valentina Cortese) acts out the director's great theme of forgiveness.
But it is not just in the characters that "Le Amiche" points toward
the future. There are many scenes of wandering, along city streets, or beaches.
Casual sexuality it presented not for its sensual or aesthetic appeal, but as
an empty attempt to connect. And the great chasm of miscommunication between
men and women is on full view. Yet, even in 1955 the director knows that all is
not black and white. Characters of the same gender don't really understand one
another either. The film seems to ask a difficult question: is it possible to
'be yourself' and still need others? Clelia finds a difficult answer, while
Nene seems to find its mirror image.
And speaking of mirrors, the famous 'doubling' technique is here in germ form
as well. In the very opening shot, Clelia looks into the hotel bathroom mirror
while drawing her bath: she is about to find her self divided in her feelings
about her soon-to-be new friends and her old home town of Torino. Later, she
regards her reflection in a shop window mirror before deciding to pursue a
romance with the handsome Carlo (Ettore Manni).
Possibly most interesting of all is Rosetta, who, in attempting suicide, is
trying to 'disappear'. The film makes it more than clear that this character
has no real sense of self: she is dependent upon the affections of a man and
the perceived loyalty of her mostly vacant friendships. There is a telling
scene with Lorenzo in which she feeds off his flattery. And, in a beautifully acted
scene aboard a train, Clelia tries to help her understand the importance of
connection to others, never realizing how unstable Rosetta truly is.
Antonioni would in his next feature, the marvelous "Il Grido", begin
to streamline his technique. "Le Amiche" has far more characters than
he would later prefer, and they talk constantly. There are virtually none of
the characteristic, nearly silent sequences that will inform his later works.
Nor does landscape play the commanding role it will assume in the 1960s. Also,
the two main narrative threads of "Le Amiche" (Clelia and
Rosetta/Lorenzo/Nene) will be reduced to one for nearly all his remaining
films.
The
Film Sufi MKP
Le Amiche
(1955) Marilyn Ferdinand from Ferdy
on Films
A
Nutshell Review Stefan S
The Daily Notebook [Glenn Kenny] June 16, 2010, also seen here: Sex
and the City, Year Zero: Antonioni's "Le amiche" (1955)
The Films of Michelangelo Antonioni
[Michael E. Grost]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Daniel Hirshleifer) dvd review
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
User reviews from imdb Author: tieman64 from United
Kingdom
User reviews from imdb Author: Marcin Kukuczka from
Cieszyn, Poland
User reviews from imdb Author: Claudio Carvalho from
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
(Dennis Schwartz) review
The Boston
Phoenix (Gerald Peary) review
The New York
Times (A.O. Scott) review
IL GRIDO
aka:
The Cry
Italy USA
The Village Voice [Leslie Camhi]
Another noteworthy discovery, Michelangelo Antonioni's The Cry (1957) provides a missing link between Italian neorealism and the director's later work. A factory mechanic loses his moorings when the woman he loves abandons him and their daughter; he and the child drift aimlessly through a nearly empty, semi-industrial landscape. The camera's spare, stunning compositions and the tone of loss and disaffection anticipate Antonioni's later, brilliant explorations of bourgeois anomie.
Il Grido (The Outcry) from Kino
A compelling romance
bound in tragedy, Il Grido is a fascinating missing link in the career
of Michelangelo Antonioni, marking his transition from the neorealist impulses
expressed in Le Amiche (The Girl Friends, 1955) and I Vinti
(The Vanquished, 1952), toward the more subjectively stylized approach
of such classic works as L'Avventura (1959), La Notte (1961) and Red
Desert (1964).
Shot in Antonioni's native Po Valley region near
The narrative follows Aldo, a young refinery mechanic (Steve Cochran) who, when
faced with the sudden end of a seven-year affair with a married woman (Alida
Valli), abandons his past and embarks on an aimless quest with their young
daughter in tow. His travels take him to the home of an old flame (Betsy Blair),
to a filling station owned by a lonely widow (Dorian Gray) and into the arms of
a prostitute in an impoverished fishing community (Lyn Shaw). But he can find
no relief from his undying love for Irma and must return to her village, for a
denouement that is unexpectedly shocking, but inevitable.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Of all the giants who dominated
arthouses in the '50s and '60s, Michelangelo Antonioni may have suffered the
most from the passage of time—not because the years have passed him by, but
because they've caught up with him. How much hold does Blow-Up's toying
with illusion and reality possess when The Matrix is presented as
popular entertainment? Is it possible to be upset by L'Avventura's
portrayal of the dissolution of monogamy and idealized love after the general
indifference with which the public treated the Lewinsky scandal? It may be
that, as the chief cinematic prophesier of the collapse of centralized meaning
and tradition, Antonioni is now too much our contemporary to achieve the same
impact he did in the past. That said, you won't find the total immersion
Antonioni frequently achieves—finding the best possible common ground between
the spellbinding and the tedious—anywhere else, so it's nice to see the video
premieres of two of his least-seen films. Released in 1957, the formative Il
Grido finds Antonioni, like Fellini at the time, still shaking off the
influence of neo-realism by making a film that looks toward both his influences
and his future. After receiving news that the husband of his lover (Alida
Valli) has died in Australia, mechanic Steve Cochran asks her to marry him.
When Valli refuses, Cochran gathers up their child and a few possessions and
hits the road. A prototype for alienated drifters to come, though notably set
apart by social class, Cochran moves through one dreary, impoverished post-war
Italian landscape after another, striking up untenable relationships with a
succession of women before beginning the journey home. If Antonioni's
assuredness isn't yet in place, Il Grido remains a key transitional
work, with remarkable photography, fluid camerawork, and a typically
unforgettable finale ranking among its most notable virtues. Important in
establishing Antonioni's Italian reputation, Il Grido arrived shortly
before the director found international acclaim with L'Avventura; by
contrast, 1982's Identification Of A Woman arrived as that reputation
began to shrink, in part the result of the ambitious but financially disappointing
video/film project The Mystery Of Oberwald. Rarely screened in this
country, having lost theatrical distribution after disastrous early reviews, Identification
now looks every inch the Antonioni film, though it's a bit more aimless
than usual. Combining the concerns of L'Avventura with the feel of The
Passenger, it features the latter's coolly surfaced cinematography, air of
low-intensity paranoia, and concern with the slipperiness of identity. If it
lacks the same effectiveness, it still offers expected pleasures along the way.
The story of (self-indulgence red flag number one) a film director and his
affairs with two beautiful women (number two), Identification Of A Woman
finds Antonioni still viewing love as a near-impossibility, even among middle-aged
men and mysterious chic women. Whether you find his use of a science-fiction
fantasy sequence involving a cheap-looking spaceship flying toward the sun an
effective symbol or a laughable bit of bathos should determine your reaction to
the film, which is unmistakably Antonioni in both its best moments and its
worst.
Bright Lights Film Journal Gary
Morris
Antonioni’s Il Grido (1957) is a tonic to Losey’s
stiff, an unsentimental, visually bravura slice of neorealism that remains one
of the director’s great ‘50s achievements. Unlike Eva’s Tyvian, this
film’s Aldo (Steve Cochran) has minimal self-awareness but also lacks any of
Tyvian’s self-pity. He’s a mechanic in a small Italian village (in the Po
Valley near
His journey is a kind of Odyssey-in-reverse, with Aldo as a quietly tormented Everyman. Unlike Odysseus, he’s moving away from his beloved, not toward her. Asked why he’s traveling, he can’t answer. Asked to stay put, he simply moves on, accompanied by Rosina until it’s apparent he’s too alienated to take care of her. Aldo begins by visiting a woman from his past, Evira (Betsy Blair), who continues to love him in spite of his indifference but sees something in him that she can’t deal with. He continues through a succession of increasingly bleaker environments and encounters, ending with a liaison with a prostitute, Adreina (Lyn Shaw), with whom he lives briefly in a rain-soaked hut.
Steve Cochran was a fixture in American B movies, often gangster films, from the 1950s (most notably Walsh’s White Heat). Here he retains some of the coarse charm of his earlier incarnations, with the addition of a world-weariness that feels as authentic as the real locales in which the film takes place. He consistently underplays, movingly capturing Aldo’s transition from disillusionment to despair in small gestures and lingering looks. While the other actors also register strongly, this is finally Cochran’s show, and he delivers beautifully.
Antonioni’s evocations of vast, unforgiving landscapes that dwarf and finally swallow his characters is in splendid form here. Like Red Desert, Il Grido situates its denizens in a postindustrial wasteland made up of empty fields that drift into the hazy horizon, long stretches of empty highway, and occasional outposts of humanity that pop up within them: here a lonely gas station, a prostitute’s collapsing house. The camera pauses on these backdrops as long as it does on Aldo or Irma or Adreina, giving as much weight to a world that eventually engulfs its inhabitants as to the inhabitants themselves.
Senses of Cinema (James Brown)
IL
GRIDO Dan Schneider from Alt Film
Guide
ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Ulmer)
Il Grido Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
The New York Times (A.H. Weiler)
DVDBeaver.com
[Pascal Acquarello]
L’AVVENTURA A 99
Italy France
Kim Newman from 1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
At its premiere at the Cannes
Film Festival in 1960, L’Avventura
was jeered at and booed by a predominately hostile audience, though a large
number of influential critics and filmmakers to the unprecedented step of
signing a statement rejecting this reaction and hailing it as the most
important film ever shown at the festival. Within two years, L’Avventura was reckoned by the
international critics’ poll conducted by Britain
L’Avventura’s premise is disarmingly simple,
yet deeply unsettling: a small party of
monied Roman characters take a cruise from Sicily
A major cause of initial audience
befuddlement and fury with L’Avventura
is that Antonioni never reveals what has happened to Anna. Claudia and Sandro
are drawn together as they search, but none of the other characters even seem
that interested in the girl’s fate, and the main emotional impact comes from
Claudia’s feelings of guilt as she gets together romantically with Sandro
rather than her desire to find her friend. The plot, presumably by coincidence,
rather parallels Hitchcock’s Psycho
(1960), with the jarring absence of the character we assumed to be the heroine
in the second part of the film and an uneasy, not-quite-relationship growing
between the missing woman’s lover and a woman with an equal interest in her
welfare. The subject matter also parallels the same year’s La Dolce Vita. Anita Ekberg’s starlet has an equivalent in L’Avventura’s flighty star-writer-whore
(Dorothy De Poliolo) who is mobbed by “fans” early on when she (deliberately?)
rips her tight skirt in public and pops up not so much to wreck the central
couple’s new relationship as to reveal it as a sham – but there is none of the
ambiguous glamour of Fellini’s film here. Like Marcello Mastroianni’s
writer-slid-to-PR man, Ferzetti’s architect-turned-rich-man’s-flunky epitomizes
the failed promise of a direction, and Antonioni can only find a trace of hope
in an eternal feminine who ultimately stands apart from the corruption of new
money or too-easy sex.
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
Catcalls greeted its Cannes
Film Festival premiere, but filmmakers and critics recognized the artistic
importance of Michelangelo
Antonioni's experiments with psychologizing film
narrative, and L'avventura
(1960) was awarded a special Jury Prize. Abandoning the kind of
cause-and-effect plot line that might be expected in a film about the search
for a missing woman, Antonioni
instead sought to examine the barren inner lives of the postwar rich; the
"adventure" is in the encounters between characters as they attempt
and fail to make emotional connections. Limiting the audience's knowledge of
Anna's disappearance to what Sandro and Claudia learn, and depicting screen
actions in real time, Antonioni
turns viewing the film into a direct experience of the initial excitement over
the search and the waning of involvement as the effort becomes fruitless. Antonioni's
carefully controlled deep focus widescreen compositions further communicate the
characters' existential ennui and psychic disconnection from each other
in evocatively barren environments. Bolstered by the Cannes experience, L'avventura
became Antonioni's
first worldwide success; released within a year of Federico
Fellini's La Dolce
Vita (1960) and Jean-Luc
Godard's Breathless
(1959), L'avventura
helped announce a vital new era in international art cinema.
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
It is the most audacious rhetorical shift
in cinematic history: a woman disappears off the face of the earth while on a
boat trip to the rocky
DVDBeaver.com - Full Graphic Review [Gary W.
Tooze]
Characters
in Search of a Soul...
Viewing Michelangelo's "L'Avventura" for the first time represented quite a turning point in my film education. It spoke to me in a way that no film had previously. I couldn't explain or understand my emotional response but I was aware of the films grandeur. It left an authoritative dent, lingering with an essence of nobility. For days after my initial viewing, everything felt "profound". It collapsed my expected narrative designs to such a degree that I could easily understand fellow film enthusiasts being agitated at the unnerving displacement. On the surface, it shows itself as a film that surrounds its first half in mystery only to drift aimlessly away on a floating sea of unresolved conclusions. But there is so much more.
Upon deeper analysis (of which this film begs) we see that almost every detail of the plot, surrounding landscape and passive dialogue relate heavily to the characters identities and inner most feelings... their metaphysical world. If you hear the name Andrei Tarkovsky being uttered in comparison, it would be apt. With his picture perfect compositions Antonioni's films have more in connection with art than most other cinema.
As L'avventura opens we are greeted by Anna (Lea Massari), a jaded, spoiled socialite about to indifferently embark on a ship excursion with her girlfriend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) with whom she is in a long distance relationship. Her blasé attitude is initially acceptable as we do not yet know her complete story. After some disenchanted lovemaking with Sandro, her pain is expressed to be their lack of togetherness and indecision as to the direction of the relationship.
On the boat excursion, while anchored to swim near a barren volcanic island, Anna feigns seeing shark. She soon reveals to Claudia that she lied and for no other purpose than succumbing to a fit of boredom. For their apathy, we are gaining the sense that all of these characters on the trip could be dubbed "the idle rich". They show little to no interest in what each other communicates. As well as opening a window on this surfeit class, each object of the landscape is clearly portrayed, and forms its own separate defined area within the screen. Antonioni's flawless framing makes it all so beautiful, making our job of interpretation that much more distracting.
While touring the picturesque island with its Aeolian charm, Anna goes missing. We never know why and there is no direct evidence supporting any conclusions, but the aura of mystery is in the air. The initial concern for her soon dissolves and Sandro and Claudia begin an affair. It becomes hard to accept that these young, attractive and wealthy characters are so self-absorbed when we are used to gorgeous movie stars being the noble protagonists . As Antonioni states "I prefer to set my heroes in a rich environment because then their feelings are not determined by material and practical contingencies." In fact, there are no ' heroes' in this film, but the point is made that they have no mitigating factors to encourage their selfish behavior. Their foibles are bred through wealthy meaninglessness, not usual neo-realistic poverty and despair. In essence, these characters have nothing to overcome... no abject hardships to suppress or hurdles to leap. Because of this, we discern Claudia and Sandro's behavior that much more abhorrent in our eyes. The characters alligator tears and bluffed investigations of Anna's disappearance become an inquisition of who we are... our own superficialities become transparent and it is the viewer who is redeemed for reaching this conclusion. Antonioni's hidden skill in manipulating time and space while expressing the concealed undercurrents of his characters depths becomes rewarding to those who are cognizant of it. His images are more adept at conveying this meaningful experience than any script could have.
Lets step back. This film is not for everyone. You have to settle
in a certain mindset to reach my proposed conclusions. If you do, it can be an
eye-opener, if you don't it can be an eye-closer ("zzzzzzz"). I
certainly don't always come to the correct inference, and still struggle to see
the meaning in Godard or Hou, but this film was a revelation for me. Doing
research I was not surprised to see it 2nd only to "Citizen Kane" in
the 1962 Sight and Sound Poll, remaining in the Top 10 list until 1992! It is
comforting to see that Antonioni is viewed as a pioneer and revolutionary in
the language of cinema. Initially L'avventura was hissed at its
-Michelangelo
Antonioni Criterion essay
-Geoffrey
Nowell-Smith Criterion essay
Senses
of Cinema [Hamish Ford]
Senses
of Cinema [Gregory Solman]
Turner Classic Movies Felicia Feaster
The bourgeoisie is also a class: class as character in
Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura
Frank P. Tomasulo from Jump Cut,
Spring 2007
Images Movie Journal Gary Morris
DVD Journal DK Holm
ToxicUniverse.com
[John Nesbit]
digitallyOBSESSED!
DVD Reviews Dan Hirshleifer
DVD Savant Review Glenn Erickson
L'Avventura Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
Reel.com
DVD review [Rod Armstrong]
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
filmcritic.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
Psychologically Significant
Movies [Aleksandar Novakovic]
L'aventura Idyllopus
examines the sofa as a metaphor from Big Sofa
Boston Phoenix [Jeffrey Gantz]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther
Antonioni's
Nothingness and Beauty Stephen
Holden from The New York Times
LA NOTTE
aka: The Night
Italy France
Jonathan Rosenbaum from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Michelangelo Antonioni's 1961 follow-up to his groundbreaking L'Avventura (1960) is the middle feature in a loose trilogy ending with L’Eclisse (1962) that was made at the height of his international prestige in the international film scene. Repeating many of the melancholic themes and stylistic moves of its predecessor, with particular emphasis on the boredom and atrophied emotions of the rich, La Notte ends ends with the kind of regretful recollection of former sexual desire that characterizes the final scene of James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” For better or for worse, the mainstream cliché’s that would circulate throughout the 1960’s about Antonioni as a highbrow director making boring films about the bored rich stem largely from the excesses of this feature – despite the fact it also showcases some of the filmmaker’s most subtle and modulated work.
La Notte’s success
as a structured and shapely narrative is somewhat more mixed than that of
either L’Avventura or L’Eclisse, and the performances are
generally better than those of the former and not as good as those in the
latter. The minimal plot, restricted to less than 24 hours, involves the death
of passion between a successful novelist, Giovanni Pontano (Marcello
Mastroianni), and his frustrated wife Lidia (Jeanne Moreau). The best parts of
this movie tend to cluster around the beginning and end, and include the
novelist's brief encounter with a nymphomaniac patient at a hospital while visiting
a dying friend (Bernhard Wicki) and his longer encounter with the daughter
(Monica Vitti) of an industrialist at a party, both of which foreground his
shifting impulses and moods. Both these sequences show Antonioni’s mise en
scène at its most intricately plotted and emotionally subtle. By contrast,
probably the weakest section is an extended walk taken by the wife around
Chicago Reader [Jonathan Rosenbaum] (capsule
review)
Michelangelo Antonioni's 1961 follow-up to L'avventura--and the middle feature in a loose trilogy ending with Eclipse--repeats many of the melancholic themes and stylistic moves of its predecessor, with particular emphasis on the boredom and atrophied emotions of the rich. The results are somewhat more mixed, though on the whole the performances are better--which may not matter so much in an Antonioni context. The minimal plot, restricted to less than 24 hours, involves the death of passion between a successful novelist (Marcello Mastroianni) and his frustrated wife (Jeanne Moreau). The best parts of this movie tend to cluster around the beginning and end, and include the novelist's brief encounter with a nymphomaniac patient at a hospital and his longer encounter with the daughter (Monica Vitti) of an industrialist at a party; one of the worst is a walk taken by the wife around Milan, full of symbolic and pretentious details. Whatever one's occasional misgivings, this feature comes from what is widely considered to be Antonioni's richest period, and evidence of his stunning mastery is available throughout. German director Bernhard Wicki plays the couple's dying friend.
All Movie Guide [Jason Birchmeier]
An equally stunning follow-up to Michelangelo Antonioni's
landmark 1960 film, L'avventura,
La Notte
explores similar themes of dysfunctional relationships and a seemingly
unattainable search for sincere passion. Again, these underlying themes center
on a loosely strung, somewhat inconsequential plot, elevated to fascinating
heights by the film's meticulous pace and emphasis on visual nuance. The film
admittedly pales to its predecessor a bit, lumbering at times during the first
hour, before suddenly becoming rejuvenated when the iconic Monica Vitti
transforms the film's dysfunctional couple into a love triangle. It's difficult
to not fall under Vitti's
spell in this film, her Valentina character emanating a sense of seduction that
doesn't need dialogue. Unfortunately, Marcello Mastroianni
and Jeanne Moreau's
characters aren't quite as captivating, resulting in occasional lulls -- Moreau's
aimless journey through the city streets being one of the more disturbing
sequences. Yet even if these pre-Vitti lulls
seem a bit laborious for the viewer or even challenging in their slow
development, Antonioni's
gift for visual composition makes even the least interesting scenes simply
genius on a visual level. The powerful conclusion complements the film's poetic
yet cold view of a dying relationship -- from beginning to end, the film simply
wallows in unexplainable despair without even alluding to a sense of hope. Best
appreciated when benchmarked against L'avventura's
epic qualities and L'eclisse's
almost painful austerity, La Notte
serves as a perfect medium in terms of both narrative and technique -- engaging
and poetic yet simple and direct.
Long Pauses Darren
Hughes
Images: Opening titles are cast on nearly abstract shots of skyscrapers, grounding the film immediately in the modern landscape. Actors are frequently framed on opposing sides of the screen, alienating them from one another. Crowds are noisy and hostile, forcing characters to retreat to isolation for solace. Favorite images: the shame and self-conscious look on Moreau's face when she models her dress for Mastroianni; Moreau walking with a straight back in her wet black dress after the rain storm.
I'm very fond of Edward Hopper's painting, New York Movie. It's a great piece of early American modernism, simultaneously revealing, like a Fitzgerald novel, both the techniques of realism and the disillusionment and moral decay of the "lost generation." Like many of Hopper's portraits, "New York Movie" features a lone woman — here, a young usher — who suffers in isolation. Her pain is evident in her body language, her closed eyes and slumped shoulders, but, more importantly, it's communicated by the composition of the painting itself. The woman leans against a side wall, framed in the lower right corner, while the majority of the portrait is devoted to the mass of the public watching a film in darkness. Hopper positions her under a wall sconce that draws our eyes instantly to her shadowed face.
A similar image occurs in the opening moments of Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte, when Lidia (Jeanne Moreau) stares out a hospital window, drawn there by the sound of a passing helicopter. Like Hopper, Antonioni composes the frame with his heroine in the lower right corner, alienating her completely from her surroundings. Despite the presence of her husband and her dying friend in the room, Lidia stands alone, here and throughout the remainder of the film.
La Notte has little plot to speak of. Antonioni
follows Lidia and her husband, Giovanni (Marcello Mastroianni), through the
course of one night, as they wander the streets of
By examining in microscopic detail the workings of a marriage, that most essential of all human relationships, Antonioni extends his critique from the specific to the general, from the failings of a particular man and his particular wife to the apathy, solipsism, and alienation that plagues so much of the modern world. His is a world of towering mirrored skyscrapers, decaying brick alleyways, hostile, noisy crowds, and abrassive, intrusive technology, all of which send humanity fleeing to isolation for solace. With all that as its backdrop, the film's finale plays like a grim satire of cinema's cliched seduction scene. Lidia and Giovanni separate themselves from the crowd of party-goers (the Hopperesque framing returns once more) and make their way down a large empty field. They discuss their marriage in equal doses of bitterness, resignation, and denial, but finally admit that their love has atrophied. Giovanni's response is interesting: he becomes emotional, but would probably be incapable of explaining why. Perhaps he is moved simply because Lidia's confrontation has forced him to suddenly feel something, anything, for the first time in years. In what a less honest screenwriter would call a "fit of passion," he lunges toward her to make love to her, while she whispers in his ear, "Tell me . . . Tell me." That she wants to hear that he does not love her leaves the viewer with little hope for comfort.
My only criticism of La Notte is that too often Antonioni leaves us alone with his characters for extended periods, forcing us to listen to them talk and talk and talk about the human condition or other such matters of self-importance. I recognize the necessity of such scenes, as they reveal (intentionally or not) the emptiness of a purely intellectual existence. But they feel redundant to me. Antonioni's camera, particularly when it's directed on the faces of Moreau, Mastroianni, and Vitti, speaks more articulately than his flawed but sympathetic characters ever could.
Culture Court [Lawrence Russell]
Epinions [metalluk]
La Notte Syd Field
Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri
La Notte Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and Television
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther’s 1962 review
DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]
L’ECLISSE (THE ECLIPSE)
Italy France
Jonathan Rosenbaum from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
The conclusion of
Michelangelo Antonioni's loose trilogy about modern life at mid-century
(preceded by 1960’s L’Avventura and La Notte), The Eclipse is conceivably the greatest film of his career, but
perhaps significantly it has the least consequential plot. A sometime translator
(Monica Vitti) recovering from an unhappy love affair briefly links up with a
stockbroker (Alain Delon) in Rome, though the stunning final montage sequence –
perhaps the most powerful thing Antonioni has ever done – does without these
characters entirely. And because these two leads arguably give the most nuanced
and charismatic performances of their careers here, the shock of losing them
before the end of the picture is central to the film’s devastating final
effect.
Alternately an essay and a prose poem about the
contemporary world in which the "love story" figures as one of many
motifs, The Eclipse is remarkable
both for its visual/atmospheric richness and its polyphonic and polyrhythmic
mise en scène. Antonioni's handling of crowds at the Roman stock exchange is
never less than amazing, recalling the choreographic use of deep focus used in
the early features of Orson Welles, where foreground and background details are
juggled together in brilliant juxtapositions. But it is probably the final
sequence, which depends on editing rather than mise en scène, that best sums up
the hope and despair of the filmmaker’s vision.
Chicago
Reader (capsule) Jonathan Rosenbaum
(capsule from above review)
The conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni's loose trilogy
(preceded by L'Avventura and La Notte), this 1961 film is
conceivably the best in Antonioni's career, but significantly it has the least
consequential plot. A sometime translator (Monica Vitti) recovering from an
unhappy love affair briefly links up with a stockbroker (Alain Delon) in Rome,
though the stunning final montage sequence--perhaps the most powerful thing
Antonioni has ever done--does without these characters entirely. Alternately an
essay and a prose poem about the contemporary world in which the "love
story" figures as one of many motifs, this is remarkable both for its
visual/atmospheric richness and its polyphonic and polyrhythmic mise en scene
(Antonioni's handling of crowds at the Roman stock exchange is never less than
amazing).
All Movie Guide [Jason Birchmeier]
Michelangelo Antonioni furthers the
ambitious efforts of his two preceding films with L'eclisse, making it a fitting conclusion to his
early-'60s trilogy. With this in mind, the film's motifs seem familiar -- again
Antonioni
employs a cold, unromantic view of life and love centered on a dubious heroine.
Yet even if L'eclisse
doesn't explore any new territory, thematically or technically, one cannot deny
its power. If anything, Antonioni
refines his themes and techniques for this film, making Monica Vitti's
central character undeniably infatuating, and complementing his lumbering
pacing with a wealth of meticulously composed images. In fact, the way Antonioni
makes such a fraught film of such an arid script makes L'eclisse
his most impressive yet. Still, this same gift for sublime nuance is admittedly
challenging, almost too challenging for its own good: masterfully crafted or
not, the long sequences and barren plot test one's patience, particularly when
the emphasis shifts away from Vitti's male
encounters. The film's merits far eclipse these minor complaints, however. The
opening sequence -- when a confused Vitti
struggles to escape Francisco Rabal's
obsessive character -- sets the precedent for the remainder of the film, with
its unsure characters, desperate aura, and hovering ambience. The film's conclusion
operates similarly, communicating its confusion lyrically, body language
contradicting speech; it becomes even more striking when Antonioni
employs a final haunting silence, ending the film with an epic, despair-laden
montage sequence. Given its reduced narrative and obsessive emphasis on Vitti's
enigmatic sense of sadness, L'eclisse's
strength -- its ambiguity -- is also its most frustrating characteristic.
L'Eclisse
(The Eclipse) Film Trailer, Synopsis and Showtimes
L'eclisse (The Eclipse) is the
most perfectly achieved and the most aesthetically daring of Antonioni's
black-and-white 'trilogy' of the early 60s, winning the Special Jury Prize at
Cannes in 1962. The last film in the trilogy (which also includes L'avventura
and La notte) L'eclisse is distinguished for its subtlety and
variety of mood, and for the artistry of its images. A relationship breaks up,
a new one forms and dissolves in its turn. But, as so often with Antonioni, it
is not so much the action that counts as the events and non-events with which
it is interspersed.
The
narrative centre of L'eclisse is the love affair between the mercurial
Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and the restlessly extrovert Piero (Alain Delon). They
are not natural soul mates, they are not even matching opposites. So it is not
surprising if their affair appears to have no future. What is surprising,
however, is how much the film succeeds in conjuring up outside the narrative:
the mindless frenzy of the Stock Exchange with prices in free fall; the utter
peace of Vittoria's trip to a small provincial airport; the passage of time
while the camera waits at a rendezvous for which the lovers never turn up... L'eclisse
is worth seeing for these sequences alone.
L'eclisse is also probably the film in
which Antonioni's central concern with the fragility of relationships in an
alienated world is most rigorously expressed and where his painterly eye-view
yields up its most crystalline and revealing images. A must-see on the big screen.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Geometry Of Feelings Guido Bonsaver compares Antonioni and Fellini
in Sight and Sound,July 2005
The
rerelease of 'L'eclisse' brings the
high-modernist cinema of Michelangelo Antonioni, with its love of architecture,
back to the big screen. Guido Bonsaver describes the appeal of the anti-Fellini.
Nanni Moretti, interviewed in
Sight & Sound, once said that lovers of Italian films are divided into two
camps: Antonioni versus Fellini. A supporter of the Fellini camp, Moretti
indicated his preference for that director's ego-centred imagination,
kind-hearted social critique and joie de vivre. But what are the qualities that
characterise Michelangelo Antonioni? Formal experimentation and a disregard for
traditional storytelling are the first that spring to mind. A fascination with
modernity and a set of characters in the midst of existential crises come close
second. If a personal style and philosophy are intrinsic to the notion of the
film-maker as an artist, then Antonioni passes the test. And this month's
rerelease of L'eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962), winner of the Cannes Special Jury
Prize, invites us to reflect on his early achievements and to ask what his
films still offer 21st-century cinema-goers.
L'eclisse is the third film in the
black-and-white trilogy that established Antonioni as a ground-breaking
director. Taken together, L'avventura (The Adventure, 1960), La
notte (The Night, 1961) and L'eclisse display three overarching
qualities. First, human feelings are explored through unconventional means.
Antonioni himself in those years described his interest in the techniques of
the French nouveau roman, and his films adopt a similar approach. The
camera is turned into an inquisitive eye, scanning the surface of things,
moving from familiar objects to details of the human body or flashes of
landscape. From this comes Antonioni's detachment from traditional film
narrative, his refusal to present us with three-dimensional characters with a
clear past and present. What some viewers find frustrating and others
stimulating is his attempt to describe psychological states through visual
means.
The second
quality concerns the formal substance of these films. Antonioni's interest in showing
rather than telling a story is reflected in his framing, where the
search for meaning becomes a quest for signs of harmony and order in a chaotic
world. Inscribing reality within the rectangular geometry of each shot is an
act that is philosophical as much as technical. Hence Antonioni's fascination
with linear perspectives, geometrical objects, architectural forms.
English-speaking critics have often pointed to a parallel with modernist art,
but this risks confining the discussion to a mere matter of
cross-fertilisation. Rather, Antonioni seeks the linear and geometrical from a
need to find signs of sense in an otherwise meaningless world. He does not want
to praise or imitate the stylised beauty of modernist art but is attracted to
it for its attempt to rationalise reality. The angular shapes of EUR, Rome's
modernist district, or the simple lines of an angle-poise lamp stand as symbols
of our endeavour to give order to complexity and multiplicity. Equally
important is the fact that this is a frustrating and ultimately unsuccessful
endeavour.
The third
and perhaps most controversial aspect of Antonioni's cinema is found in an
obsessively recurrent theme. An all-seasons term often adopted to describe it
is 'alienation', used loosely to refer to the director's penchant for bourgeois
characters suffering from identity crises. Lack of communication and
understanding between lovers is a typical ingredient, though the crises also
extend to the way individuals relate to society and nature. Modernity and
wealth might be captivating, but there's a sense too of a lost capacity to be
at one with both oneself and the world. This is far from the Marxist idea of
alienation, nor does psychoanalysis provide a key. What we see are characters
at a loss over who they are and what they want, with no attempt at an
explanation or resolution of their state.
Are these
symbols of our own detachment from nature and history? Perhaps, though
Antonioni would reject any such sweeping generalisation. But certainly their
neurotic personalities add an unnatural quality to his films. Monica Vitti's
changing moods in L'avventura and L'eclisse seem sometimes
theatrical and wooden not because she's a poor actress but because her
character is suspended in a cinematic limbo, acting out a personality crisis
that pre-dates her appearance on screen. That a female character is the vehicle
for such crises invites a critique based on gender politics: here we have men
as symbols of rationality and power contrasted with women's non-rational, instinctive
and frail minds. Bourgeois, female, beautiful but lost – whether we like it or
not, this is a cliché in Antonioni's films of the early 1960s.
Masterclass in technique
The release
of a new print of L'eclisse offers us a renewed opportunity to
appreciate the full sophistication of Antonioni's black-and-white work.
Cinematographer Gianni Di Venanzo at the peak of his career – the following
year he was to work on Fellini's 8 1/2 – provides sharply defined
lighting that allows the director to turn his limited colour palette into a
powerful tool to reinforce his formal definition of space. If there is a film
that justifies the hesitation of postwar film-makers to move to colour
technology, it is L'eclisse. Antonioni immediately became an innovator in
colour with his next feature Il deserto rosso (The Red Desert,
1964), but L'eclisse ranks among the most sophisticated black-and-white films
ever made.
The opening
sequence is a masterclass in cinematic technique. As the credits scroll across
a black background we are alerted to the director's intentions when a catchy
pop song is abruptly replaced by the strident notes of an atonal piece of
music. The film then begins with a long sequence during which the camera probes
objects and people in a room, accompanied only by the unnerving buzz of an
electric fan. The preference for long, static takes could suggest a link to
Antonioni's past as a neorealist, but a closer look reveals that the slow pace
of the narrative is counterbalanced by a fragmented editing of the scene. We
are presented with snapshots of reality and thus made aware of the centrality
of the mise en scène. Attention to detail is paramount as an abundant
amount of information and symbolic references are presented visually to the
point where the characters' dialogue becomes redundant. The dark pyramidal
obelisk standing next to the male protagonist acquires full meaning when
compared with the objects Vittoria (Monica Vitti) is rearranging behind a
propped-up empty frame. The end of their love affair is communicated by her
removing one of the two objects from the frame, while at the same time this
gesture works at a meta-cinematic level to remind us of the director's careful
arrangement of objects within each shot.
Words get in the way
Antonioni's
formalism goes beyond the peppering of the realist setting with symbolic
references, however. As was suggested earlier, a quest for a lost sense of
harmony guides the director's camera. And this is present throughout the film.
The break-up of Vittoria's relationship with a left-wing intellectual – as
suggested by the pile of Communist cultural journals on a coffee table – takes
her to the other end of the political spectrum. During a visit to Rome's
chaotic stock exchange, she meets Piero, a raffish young share-trader played by
a brilliant Alain Delon. In many ways he is the product of Italy's new-found
wealth and cult of beauty: he drives a two-seater Alfa Romeo (an icon of the
Italian swinging 1950s) and when the car is stolen by a drunk who kills himself
in the process, all Piero is concerned about is the cost of the repairs. Even
in this scene the dialogue is almost redundant and Piero's selfishness is
somewhat over-emphasised. But what redeems it is Antonioni's meticulous
filming: the detail of a hoist's chain slowly emerging from the flat surface of
the water to pull out Piero's car is both aesthetically accomplished and
symbolically charged. This is Antonioni at his best – and the plot becomes
almost an impediment, a necessary evil.
L'eclisse is also a study in how modern
culture defines our perception of reality. However mannered his
representations, there is no doubt that Antonioni was tapping into a sense of
unease that a few years later would explode in the students' and workers'
protest movement and subsequently in acts of terrorism. The depiction of the
stock market has a surreal, documentary feel: millions of Lira are made and
lost in the space of seconds and Vittoria's incapacity to comprehend it shows
capitalism as an oligarchy where a few pull the strings while the rest look on
in amazement. Similarly her encounter with third-world culture – during a visit
to a friend who used to live in Kenya – only produces embarrassing
misunderstandings. All Vittoria and her friend can think of doing is to
improvise a childish party where they dress up as African warriors and dance
around the flat. This sense of unease, of a lack of understanding,
spectacularly takes over in the final scene of the film.
Here the
camera slowly revisits the places where Vittoria and Piero have previously met.
Only now they are nowhere to be seen. The absence of the protagonists
concentrates the spectator's mind on the urban landscape. Dictated by the
straight lines of Rome's EUR district, the shots provide the pleasure of
composed vistas mixed with puzzlement as to their meaning. An anonymous
character descending from a bus holds a newspaper whose headlines are clearly
visible: "The Atomic Age"; "Peace Is Weak". Does Antonioni
want us to reflect on the fragility of modern life? Once more there is a sense
that words get in the way since the beauty of the sequence lies in what is
outside language. Banishing the main characters allows Antonioni to frame his
vision of modern society as the camera slowly scans the streets and fills the
screen with urban details juxtaposed with a few signs of the natural world:
birds perched on a geometrical roof; water trickling from a barrel; a horse
trotting down a deserted avenue. The relation of industrialised society to
nature evoked in this collection of silent, documentary-like shots is at the
centre of Il deserto rosso to the extent that it has been hailed as the
first ecologically minded movie of world cinema.
Imperfect relationships
Antonioni is
not a storyteller, so to criticise him for not telling entertaining stories
misses the point. Also a painter, he is interested first and foremost in the
pictorial. Anecdotes of trees and lawns being colour-sprayed during the
shooting of Il deserto rosso show the lengths to which he was prepared
to go to create the desired visual effect. Yet the pictorial here is not at the
service of postcard beauty or sensual landscapes but rather seems to reflect an
uneasiness felt by the characters as much as by the director. This is at least
what one can conclude from the fact that with his return to film-making after a
period of ill-health – with Al di là delle nuvole (Beyond the Clouds,
1995) and the short Il filo pericoloso delle cose (2001) – Antonioni is
still exploring the themes of his 1960s features: the imperfect relationships
between nature, society and the individual.
Pictorial
beauty and existential broodings: if this is Antonioni's legacy then it is
tempting to look for other films that adopt a similar approach. Kie´slowski's Three
Colours trilogy (1993-4) and Wenders' Paris, Texas (1984) are
obvious choices. But is the hallucinatory quality of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse
Now (1979) also a homage to Antonioni's work? Colonel Kurtz's unexplained
crisis; the mixture of suspended action and beautiful shots; the aesthetics of
violence and destruction – think of the gigantic explosion concluding
Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1968); the impression of a world that has
lost its sense of direction: all these are tenuous but indicative traces. And
Joseph Conrad – whose Heart of Darkness is the inspiration for Coppola's
film – is one of Antonioni's favourite novelists too for his capacity to depict
the alienation of characters from their environment. In her acceptance speech
after winning the Oscar for Best Orignal Screenplay with Lost in Translation
(2003) – a visually sophisticated study of two people in a foreign landscape
struggling to give sense to their daily lives – Coppola's daughter Sofia
unsurprisingly mentioned Antonioni as one of her sources of inspiration.
Another such film is Lynne Ramsay's second feature Morvern Callar (2001),
the story of a young Scottish woman's existential journey told in brilliant
visual and musical terms.
In 1995
Antonioni received an honorary Academy Award "in recognition of his place
as one of the cinema's master visual stylists". Three years earlier
Hollywood had granted an honorary Oscar to another unawarded director from
Italy, Federico Fellini, "in appreciation of one of the screen's master
storytellers". It was a belated but fitting act of double homage. If
Fellini deserves the plaudit of great storyteller, there is little doubt that
Antonioni – love him or not – remains a master visual stylist.
-Jonathan
Rosenbaum Criterion essay
Epinions [metalluk]
DVD Talk - Criterion Collection Bill Gibron
Turner Classic Movies Nathaniel Thompson
digitallyOBSESSED.com [Matt Peterson]
ToxicUniverse.com [Jeremiah Kipp]
L'Eclisse Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
FilmExposed Magazine Talha Burki
Kamera.co.uk [Antonio Pasolini]
Psychologically Significant Movies [Aleksandar Novakovic]
Bright
Lights After Dark: MICHELANGELO
ANTONIONI (September 29 ... with a video clip from the film
Guardian/Observer
New York Times (registration req'd) Bosley Crowther’s 1962 review
DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]
RED DESERT (Il deserto rosso) A 100
Italy France
(120 mi) 1964
Jonathan Rosenbaum from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature in color remains a
high-water mark for using color. To get the precise hues he wanted, Antonioni
had entire fields painted. Restored prints make it clear why audiences were so
excited by his innovations, not only for his expressive use of color, but also
his striking editing.
Monica Vitti plays a neurotic married woman (Giuliana) attracted to industrialist Richard Harris. Antonioni does memorable, eerie work with the industrial shapes and colors that surround here, shown alternately as threatening and beautiful as she walks through a science-fiction landscape. Like any self-respecting Antonioni heroine, she is looking for love and meaning – she finds sex. In one sequence a postcoital melancholy is strikingly conveyed via an expressionist use of color, following Giuliana’s shifting moods.
The film’s most spellbinding sequence depicts a pantheistic, utopian fantasy of innocence, where the heroine recounts to her ailing son, implicitly offering a beautiful girl and a beautiful sea as an alternative to the troubled woman and the industrial red desert of the title.
Perhaps the most
extraordinary and riveting film of Antonioni's entire career; and
correspondingly impossible to synopsise. Monica Vitti is an electronics
engineer's neurotic wife, wandering in bewilderment through a modern industrial
landscape (the film is set in
All Movie Guide [Lucia Bozzola]
In his first color film, Michelangelo Antonioni
expressively visualized the inner turmoil of a well-heeled wife as she tries to
put her life together after a nervous breakdown. Beginning with the title
sequence of an out-of-focus factory, Antonioni
creates a near-abstract vision of modernity, replete with power stations, radar
towers, merchant ships, and stark domestic interiors, drained of natural
colors. Monica Vitti's
Giuliana inhabits a world of smokestacks belching yellow poison, rotted brown
industrial locations occasionally punctuated by brightly painted machinery, and
thick gray ocean fogs that contrast sharply with the pristine blue sea and pink
sands of her imagined fairy tale. Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's
shallow depth of field repeatedly folds Giuliana into the desolate, blurry
landscape, yet it emphasizes her alienation by setting her off in sharp focus;
she cannot comfortably exist in a world that engulfs her. The dissonant
electronic score and soundtrack of noisy machinery enhances the representation
of Giuliana's unease. Red Desert's
extraordinary deployment of color inspired Federico Fellini,
among others, to add color to his experiments with film form, while the legacy
of Antonioni's
study of environmental female dislocation can be felt most notably in Todd Haynes's
Safe (1995), often considered one of the best
American movies of the 1990s.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben Sachs
Antonioni's first film in color (and how!) begins deliberately out-of-focus; it seems as though the theater projectionist has erred until the credits appear fully legible. There are plenty of similar tricks throughout RED DESERT, which befits the theme of humanity's disorientation from modern life. Various settings--namely the chemical plant owned by the heroine's husband--suggest science-fiction until the film reveals their real, albeit arcane, function; and major sequences begin without explaining how the characters arrived and end without suggesting they're going. For several films, the director had innovated formal strategies to convey the transience and spiritual poverty of industrial society: In L'AVVENTURA (1960), he famously had the main character disappear from the film one-third of the way in, never to return; and the final seven minutes of L'ECLISSE (1963) removed people from its urban setting entirely. But RED DESERT represents the full-on Antonionification of the world, a film in which individuals make little impact on their surroundings, whether they inhabit them or not. (Hence the quiet heartbreak of the film's conclusion, which some viewers misinterpret as anticlimax: the heroine simply realizes there's nowhere for her to escape to.) Monica Vitti's Giuliana has recognized this crisis, and her failure to respond to it has driven her to madness. The film depicts an unspecified period following her release from a sanitarium, a series of abortive attempts at emotional connection. Giuliana stares abjectly at a factory workers' strike, a monumental new device that will allow people, ironically, to "listen to the stars," and an aristocratic party that fails to transform into an orgy. The last of these accounts for one of the great sequences of Antonioni's career, and it alone is worth the price of admission. (Needless to say, this new 35mm print is not to be missed.) It's staged in a shipyard shack where Giuliana and several of her husband's friends--including the introspective engineer (Richard Harris) with whom she's contemplating an affair--have retreated for an extended bacchanal. The two-room structure becomes a microcosm for the already-cloistered world of the shamefully rich; and within Antonioni's masterful frames it becomes as frightfully imposing as any of the giant industrial structures owned by any of the characters. The camera finds numerous snaky passages through the space, time itself seems to have been elongated; these characters, so full of imagination and drive, transform the space into a little paradise. But the air turns chilly the following morning, and the men and women proceed to demolish the wooden walls and furniture to add to the furnace. As Giuliana (and Antonioni himself) knows all too well, the heedless expedition of pleasure gives way to destruction and leaves a gaping absence in its wake.
DVDBeaver.com - Review [Fred Patton]
Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1964 Red Desert Red Desert
The sketchy back story of Red Desert
The plot unfolds with a disoriented Giuliana bringing her
young son, Valerio, to the plant where her husband works. Here she meets an
important business associate of her husband, named Corrado. The way he looks at
her uncomfortably disarms her—evidently she has not been looked at this fashion
for some time. The possibility of connecting with someone begins to give hope
to her desperate crisis. Her son and Corrado constitute the only real prospects
in this regard, as the doctors have tasked her to love someone or something in
order to reintegrate herself into a mentally healthy life. Corrado comes
closest to understanding and connecting with Giuliana on some level, given his
own existential issues, but for this very reason, the pre-requisite of emerging
from such a depth of self-absorption presents a questionable prospect.
On a sufficient level of abstraction, Red Desert
The soundscape of Red Desert borrows from two
genres—thriller and sci-fi—employing eerie and suspenseful sound tropes
reminiscent of classical thrillers as well as outer-space sound effects in
addition to the undercurrent of industrial noise. For a modernist work, this
borrowing out of context foreshadows post-modern developments, situating it
more as a late modernist work. The fact that Red Desert, a drama, is stylized
by the sonic staples of genres it does not conform to in regards to content,
provides a subtle cue to reassess the manner in which story and plot function.
The thriller aspects can be seen functioning within the plotline of Giuliana
trying to cope in the aftermath of nervous breakdown. The sci-fi element can be
seen in the exploration of the resulting dislocation.
In considering mise-en-scène, principally composition and
the use of focus and color, more functional cues emerge that increasingly
suggest the film’s underlying formal unity. Antonioni sought to paint a film,
more than write it, and indeed it is a film of picturesque framings and
evocative moods. The extensive use of doorways and passageways call attention
to the operation of framing, and the manner in which a character may come into
or out of frame. The long takes tend to hold both the moment before and after
the character has entered the frame, suggesting impermanence and the
independent, though vulnerable, existence of the landscape. Furthermore, the
framing can become very restrictive, such as slowly exposing Giuliana’s small
empty shop through ten distinct shots, where the space is only very gradually
revealed. This creates a very fragmented perceptual experience corresponding to
Giuliana’s own state. Each shot affords a precise framing for artistic
composition, with swatches of color augmenting the effect. For meta-narrative
touch, Giuliana remarks, “They are neutral colors that shouldn’t disturb.”
In lieu of much depth-of-field, Antonioni opts to control
exactly what is in and out of focus in a given shot, making a myriad of
unusual, unconventional choices that suggest an underlying thematic statement.
This strategy runs throughout the film, commencing with out-of-focus shots of
an industrial work site as the opening credits flow. While we never see
Giuliana out of focus, we often see surrounding people and things in a blur,
with Giuliana occasionally popping into frame in focus, establishing a thematic
tie with the alienated Giuliana’s POV.
The use of color is the most dazzling aspect of Red Desert
Whether it’s painting in gray the grass and ground or a
fruit vendor and his cart, or after some love-making, a nice touch of pink,
color is constantly on the move. Whether the action is taking place within the
factory, in the town, in the home or outdoors, there is a unified look, turning
everything into an interesting piece of modern art. How reminiscent the factory
and Giuliana’s house appear. The paintings in Giuliana’s home help key this
modern art motif, as well as the housewife opening the curtains in her home to
reveal the domestic décor’s complement to the scenery outside—the play of the
real flowers on the living room table with the pinkish painted flowers on the
wall juxtaposed with the pink-colored building outside.
A striking image of Giuliana and Valerio in their colorful
coats in contrast to the drab gray of both the outdoors and the soldiers in
uniform makes one think of a similar, though contextually much more powerful
scene given its context in Schindler’s List where the little girl in the red
coat contrasts with the surrounding gray of the Jewish ghetto.
It should be said that these colorful compositions don’t
depict the ugliness of any of the locales and objects, and therefore don’t
yield a simple condemnation of modernity and industrial advancement. These
subjects are re-invented through these depictions, taking on new modes of
beauty. In fact, beauty is revealed in a myriad of modern modalities. At the
same time, humankind’s role as being engulfed in its technology, such as
evidenced by Ugo and Corrado in the plant during the steam incident, or the man
in the giant antenna, is quite suggestive. As for the latter example, the man
is shown in conformance with the “other” beams in two aspects: 1) visually,
given his complementary angular stance; 2) on the function of support, the
beams provide structural support, and the man, maintenance support. On a
similar note as the relationship between humankind and technology, even the
logic of one plus one equals two is challenged with a lab scene with the young
Valerio determines that one drop plus another drop equals one drop. Will logic
always prevail?
The love triangle aspect of Red Desert
The presence of boats pervade the film, such as the
mysterious boat harboring sickness, the industrial liner where Giuliana has a
key discussion with Corrado, the mysterious boat that comes and goes in
Giuliana’s beach story, and lastly, the docked boat where Giuliana has a
discussion with the Turkish sailor. This significant conversation where neither
speaks each other’s language yields for Giuliana perhaps the least vacuous
conversation. This is where she comes closest to clarity for herself, voicing
some realizations, as well as making a resolve to “stay.” A remarkable scene
within the context of the movie, and says lot about the theme of communication
that runs through the movie.
The beach story Giuliana tells to Valerio is a significant
inclusion in the narrative. Besides the striking visual differences from the
rest of the movie, we contrast the not depicted girl from hospital with this
adolescent in idyllic surroundings. The latter has found this isolated beach
that serves as a refuge from grownups whom both bore and scare her (and growing
up by extension), as well as boys who pretend to be grownup. Giuliana narrates
“and there was no sound,” even as the natural sounds are there, just not the
disturbing sound that has characterized the entire film. For all the beauty in
the scene, the serenity breaks. First, there’s the disruption of the mysterious
boat, “one of those that braved the seas and storms of this world.—And, who
knows… of other worlds.” Next, a peculiar song arises, for the second time in
the movie. This first time, was at the opening of the movie. The song in both
cases makes the same progression, moving between loneliness, tension, calm and
sweetness. The girl asks in the story, “Who was singing?” Giuliana answers,
“Everybody. Everything.”
Considering the story with the other girl, tasked to love
someone, something, but not everybody, everything indiscriminately, the nature
of the singing, whether heard at the beach or at the factory site, represents
an overall awareness, longing, empathy, and vision that can overwhelm both in
its intensity and the impossibility of sustaining it. The camera adapts the
same rhythm with respect to pans and cuts in both scenes, unifying the much different
factory sequence with the beach sequence. The beach has changed for the girl,
inevitably it is not a place she can stay. The singing—the inner voice—will
persist.
At last, and she stands once again with Valerio roughly
where we found them at the beginning of the movie, the insight about the birds
and the poisonous, yellow smoke imply Giuliana has new insight into how she may
begin to adapt.
Epinions [metalluk]
Bright Lights Film Journal [Gary Morris] also seen here: Images [Gary Morris]
Strictly Film School Acquarello
Time Magazine
Red Desert Jonathan Rosenbaum (capsule review)
DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]
BLOW-UP
Italy Great Britain
Kim Newman from 1001
MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
After a run of masterpieces from L’Avventura to Il Deserto
Rosso, revolving around jaded Italian upper-class ennui and Monica Vitti,
Michelangelo Antonioni became an international filmmaker with this 1966
picture. Based on an anecdote-like story by Julio Cortazar, Blowup follows L’Avventura in offering a mystery with no solution but goes even
further by wondering after a great deal of obsessive investigation whether
there even was a mystery outside the protagonist’s mind. Turning his outsider’s
eye on a
The central character is Thomas (David Hemmings), a photographer who – perhaps like Antonioni – divides his time between assault-like sessions with vapidly lovely fashion models and verité work among down-and-outs. Snapping away in an eerily unpopulated park in hopes of finding a peaceful image to conclude his latest book, Thomas gets some shots that seem to show an older man and a younger woman (Vanessa Redgrave) having an innocent, quiet moment. However, the woman pursues Thomas and demands he turn over the film, then turns up at the studio to press her case with a jittery, neurotic flirtatiousness that further piques the terminally cool Thomas’s interest. He palms her off with the wrong film and develops his photographs under extreme analysis, he seems to find a man with a gun lurking in the undergrowth catching the woman’s panicky or complicit eye. Another photograph shows a vague form that might be a body, and another visit to the park turns up an actual corpse – but then all the evidence is taken away and Thomas loses his conviction that he has latched onto a murder and surrenders to the distractions that clutter his life.
Despite its thriller-style hook (often hommaged in straighter suspense films like Coppola’s The Conversation or De Palma’s Blow Out), this is less a mystery than a portrait of swinging alienation. In 1966, when nudity in English-language films wasn’t commonplace, there was a real charge to Redgrave taking off her red blouse and lounging around the studio with her arms crossed over her breasts, not to mention the notorious (and actually rather tactful) sequence in which Thomas grapples on the floor with a pair of gawking, giggling groupies. Most of all, this is a film about an alien world. The creepily unvisited park, a concert (featuring The Yardbirds) where the audience stand impassive until a guitar is smashed and they erupt into a feeding frenzy, a pot party where Thomas searches for someone, he is then unable to explain anything to, and a game of tennis between student mimes that leads to an ambiguous finish as Thomas is drawn into the game by returning a lost “ball.”
Blow Up Pacific Cinematheque (link lost)
- One of the most celebrated works of Swinging London 60s cinema!
- One of the major masterpieces of modernist master Michelangelo Antonioni!
- The movie most mimicked in
the recent shagadelic 1960s spy spoof
- It’s a Carnaby Street-cool, pop-art, models-and-mods motion picture landmark . . . AND one of the cinemas most memorable metaphysical meditations on the subjective nature of reality!
- And it’s hardly dated a day!
Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni’s first film in English, and his first bona fide commercial hit, was this mid-1960s meditation on the search for meaning and the subjective nature of reality, set in Swinging London, and featuring a bevy of chic 60s icons. David Hemmings stars as a trendy fashion photographer who thinks that he may have inadvertently photographed a murder; he keeps enlarging and enlarging the photos in question until they become Rorschach-like abstract forms in which almost anything can be seen. Blow Up was notorious in its day for a daring and unprecedented sex scene that had its photographer-protagonist in a rambunctious, nude, mnage--trois romp with two birds. If its portrait of pop art, pot parties, fashion models, mod youths, and hip nightclubs mark it as the quintessential Sixties time capsule (National Board of Review), it also remains a quintessential Antonioni piece -- a work totally fascinated with questions of illusion and appearance and shifting surfaces, and the way objects adjust their character according to the nature of the observing eye (Penelope Houston). And, as a work concerned with the very act of perception, it just begs to be seen as it will be presented here: in a beautiful new 35mm print! Based on a short story by Julio Cortazar, the film co-stars Vanessa Redgrave, and features The Yardbirds in an instrument-smashing concert cameo.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray] (excerpt)
Michelangelo Antonioni's 1966 film Blow-Up sparked debate outside urban arthouses and in mainstream-media opinion pages throughout the late '60s, sharply dividing those who thought the movie was the height of cinematic art and those who considered it a load of pretentious crap. These days, the existential mystery at the center of Blow-Up's plot isn't as captivating as the film's atmosphere. Arrogant young fashion photographer David Hemmings rollicks through "Swinging London," passing face-painted hippie jesters and emaciated models wearing two-tone op-art miniskirts and pouty expressions. Like Alice's Restaurant a few years later, Antonioni's sour inside perspective on hipster culture cultivates a mood of sophisticated exhaustion even as it exploits the scene's wildness. Hemmings bullies women and plays games only he understands, and when he thinks he may have inadvertently captured a murder on film, he finds the evidence receding from him the closer he looks. The question of what Hemmings sees and what it means matters less than it once did, except maybe to ponderous undergrads and Blow-Up DVD commentator Peter Brunette, who gets hung up on specific camera angles as proof of the director "foregrounding his presence." Blow-Up defies analysis by design, given that it's about an artist who makes messes and cleans them up only in part, leaving behind the splatter that interests him. Antonioni follows a similar methodology, making strict interpretations of Blow-Up pretty pointless, and certainly less enjoyable than soaking up the mod decadence and ennui.
All Movie Guide [Jonathan Crow]
A masterpiece of 1960s art-house cinema, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up is a
dizzying exploration of images, appearances, and existence amid the mod glamour
of Swinging '60s
Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]
Six years after the seminal L'Avventura, Michelangelo
Antonioni caused another international feeding frenzy with his Palm d'Or winner
Blowup, the story of a disillusioned fashion photographer, Thomas (the
great David Hemmings), in '60s mod
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Michelangelo Antonioni's
"Blowup" opened in
Young audiences aren't interested any more in a movie about a
"trendy"
Over three days recently, I revisited "Blowup" in a shot-by-shot
analysis. Freed from the hype and fashion, it emerges as a great film, if not
the one we thought we were seeing at the time. This was at the 1998 Virginia
Festival of American Film in
Watching "Blowup" once again, I took a
few minutes to acclimate myself to the loopy psychedelic colors and the
tendency of the hero to use words like "fab" ("Austin
Powers" brilliantly lampoons the era). Then I found the spell of the movie
settling around me. Antonioni uses the materials of a suspense thriller without
the payoff. He places them within a
The movie stars David Hemmings, who became a 1960s icon after this performance as Thomas, a hot young photographer with a Beatles haircut, a Rolls convertible and "birds" hammering on his studio door for a chance to pose and put out for him. The depths of his spiritual hunger are suggested in three brief scenes involving a neighbor (Sarah Miles), who lives with a painter across the way. He looks at her as if she alone could heal his soul (and may have once done so), but she's not available. He spends his days in tightly scheduled photo shoots (the model Verushka plays herself, and there's a group shoot involving grotesque mod fashions), and his nights visiting flophouses to take pictures that might provide a nice contrast in his book of fashion photography.
Thomas wanders into a park and sees, at a distance, a man and a woman. Are they struggling? Playing? Flirting? He snaps a lot of photos. The woman (Vanessa Redgrave) runs after him. She desperately wants the film back. He refuses her. She tracks him to his studio, takes off her shirt, wants to seduce him and steal the film. He sends her away with the wrong roll. Then he blows up his photos, and in the film's brilliantly edited centerpiece, he discovers that he may have photographed a murder.
Antonioni cuts back and forth between the photos and the photographer--using closer shots and larger blowups, until we see arrangements of light and shadow, dots and blurs, that may show--what? He is interrupted by two girls who have been pestering him all day, and engages in wild sex play as they roll around in crumpled backdrop paper. Then his eyes return to his blowups, he curtly sends them away, he makes more prints, and in the grainy, almost abstract blowups it appears that the woman is looking toward some bushes, there is a gunman there, and perhaps in one photo we see the man lying on the ground. Perhaps not.
Thomas returns to the park, and does actually see the man lying dead on the ground. Curiously, many writers say the photographer is not sure if he sees a body, but he is. What's unclear is whether he witnessed a murder. The audience understandably shares his interpretation of the photos, but another scenario is plausible: Redgrave wanted the photos because she was having an adulterous affair, her gray-haired lover dropped dead, she fled the park in a panic, and his body by the next morning had simply been discovered and removed. (The possibility of a scandalous affair plays off the Profumo scandal, in which a cabinet minister was linked to a call girl; the analysis of the photographs recalls the obsession with the Zapruder film.)
Whether there was a murder isn't the point. The film is about a character mired in ennui and distaste, who is roused by his photographs into something approaching passion. As Thomas moves between his darkroom and the blowups, we recognize the bliss of an artist lost in what behaviorists call the Process; he is not thinking now about money, ambition or his own nasty personality defects, but is lost in his craft. His mind, hands and imagination work in rhythmic sync. He is happy.
Later, all his gains are taken back. The body and the
photographs disappear. So does Redgrave. (There is an uncanny scene where he
sees her standing outside a club, and then she turns and takes a few steps and
simply disappears into thin air. At
In the famous final sequence, back in the park, Thomas encounters university students who were in the film's first scene. (These figures were described as "white-faced clowns" in Pauline Kael's pan of the film, but a British audience would have known they were participating in the ritual known as "rag," in which students dress up and roar around town raising money for charity.) They play tennis with an imaginary ball. The photographer pretends he can see the ball. We hear the sounds of tennis on the soundtrack. Then the photographer wanders away across the grass and, from one frame to the next, disappears--like the corpse.
Antonioni has described the disappearance of his hero as his "signature." It reminds us too of Shakespeare's Prospero, whose actors "were all spirits, and are melted into air." "Blowup" audaciously involves us in a plot that promises the solution to a mystery, and leaves us lacking even its players.
There were of course obvious reasons for the film's great initial success. It became notorious for the orgy scene involving the groupies; it was whispered that one could actually see pubic hair (this was only seven years after similar breathless rumors about Janet Leigh's breasts in "Psycho"). The decadent milieu was enormously attractive at the time. Parts of the film have flip-flopped in meaning. Much was made of the nudity in 1967, but the photographer's cruelty toward his models was not commented on; today, the sex seems tame, and what makes the audience gasp is the hero's contempt for women.
Blowup Jonathan Dawson from Senses of Cinema
Blow Up Re-creation instead of adaptation, by Gustavo
Pessacq
Turner Classic Movies James
Steffen
DVD Times Karl Wareham
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
Movie House Commentary Johnny Webb
DVD Journal DK Holm
The Film
Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an ... Anatomy
of a Murder: Bazin, Barthes, Blow-Up, by Asbjørn Grønstad
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
Apollo Movie Guide [Dan
Jardine]
The Greatest Films (Tim Dirks)
Blowup Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
Michelangelo
Antonioni - Blowup « Sexuality in Art
a photo montage
YouTube - Jane Birkin - Blow
Up the final shot
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
The 'Blowup'
Generation Gap Nathan Lee and Stuart
Klawans from The New York Times
ZABRISKIE POINT B+ 92
USA
Life’s an illusion, love is a dream.
—Everybody’s Happy Nowadays, by the Buzzcocks, 1979 Buzzcocks : Everybodys Happy Nowadays : AUDIO Punk Vinyl ... (3:09)
This film garnered such
horrible reviews when it came out, one of the biggest money losers in film
history at that point, where production expenses were at least 7 million
dollars and only $900,000 was returned from the domestic release, such a
financial flop that The New York Times
called it “One of the worst films of 1970.”
Even twenty years after its release, Rolling
Stone magazine, once the voice of the counterculture, declared: “Zabriskie Point was one of the most
extraordinary disasters in modern cinematic history.” A year after its release it was often
screened and linked with another hippie head trip movie on a double bill, the
deplorable ZACHARIAH (1971), also shot in the desert in Mexico, advertised as
the “first electric western” with Country Joe and the Fish, legendary jazz
drummer Elvin Jones, a member of the John Coltrane quartet who performs a
brilliant drum solo, and, incredibly, Dick Van Patten as the Dude, more than 25
years before Jeff Bridges inhabits the character in The
Big Lebowski (1998). This is likely
the only double bill ever seen with both films beginning with the letter
Z. OK, enough on the personal
flashback. Antonioni’s picture of
America consists of vintage automobiles, giant street billboards, radicals,
police violence, capitalist cronies, endless desert landscapes and discontented
youth, using unknown stars who had never acted before, where the prerequisite
was not acting talent, but to flaunt their youth and be completely
unashamed. If we follow the life
trajectory of the two stars, both lovers having a turbulent affair during the
shoot, no other couple embodied the spirit of the 60’s counterculture like
Daria Halprin and Mark Frechette, captured on the cover of Look magazine, living together in a commune and somehow bridging
the mainstream straight and counterculture worlds. Halprin left the commune and went on the have
an ill-fated marriage with Dennis Hopper that lasted 4 years before becoming a
practitioner of creative arts therapy, founding San Francisco’s Tamalpa Institute, believing arts can have a
transformative and healing property, while Mark Frechette donated his entire
$60,000 salary to Mel Lyman and the Fort Hill Commune, but two years after
the film release he was nabbed in an armed bank robbery in the nearby Roxbury
section of Boston, where he was quoted afterwards saying: “robbing that bank
was a way of robbing Richard Nixon,” where two men were killed, including one
of Frechette’s partners in crime, but Frechette was sentenced to 6 to 15 years
in prison where he died at the age of 27 in a freak weightlifting accident,
found choked to death when a 150 pound barbell fell on his throat. Antonioni discovered Halprin being herself in
a 60’s counterculture documentary REVOLUTION (1968), while Frechette was
discovered during an argument screaming “motherfucker” to someone at a bus stop
on the streets of Boston. Rod
When Antonioni was in
the
While the white kids attempt to empathize, the Panthers are not buying their fake sentiment, as they have cozy homes to return to as opposed to their ghetto neighborhoods where they are constantly hassled and brutalized by the police. But the interesting question raised is what would it take to revolutionize the white students? Let’s not lose sight of that, as this becomes an underlying theme of the film. From the back of the room, Frechette acknowledges he’d be willing to die for a cause, but then disappears, thinking this is all a load of crap, as nobody is taking any of this seriously. His next move is to go out and buy a gun, as he’s tired of sitting on the sidelines allowing the cops to continue to bust kid’s heads, literally bashing their skulls in with billy clubs. The next day during a particularly confrontational moment between students and police, he pulls out his gun and aims it at an officer that goes down. In a rather clever escape tactic, he commandeers a small plane and literally flies away to the Grateful Dead’s “Dark Star,” Grateful Dead: Dark Star (Part. 1, Live) - YouTube (9:08) and Grateful Dead: Dark Star (Part. 2, Live) (9:56)
ZABRISKIE POINT - Sunnydunes
Commercial YouTube (1:22), Daria Halprin works
for him as a temporary secretary, basically indicating she works when she needs
the money. She gets a head start and
decides to drive to
What drives Frechette to return the plane remains a
mystery, but he feels morally obligated, playfully redecorating the airplane in
the style of Further,
the acid bus driven by Ken Kesey and Merry
Pranksters, where the parting transition
scene plays The Rolling Stones “You Got the Silver” Zabriskie Point, you got the
silver, rolling stones - YouTube (1:30).
As the airport is literally
lined with cops and television reporters, this attempt feels doomed, as it
doesn’t seem possible for Frechette to re-integrate into the Los Angeles
mentality, where the plane is driven off the runway by police cars, surrounded
by guns and he’s shot, killing him instantly in an example of vigilante police
justice. Daria arrives in Phoenix at
about the same time she hears the radio news reports, where the luxury resort
is literally built into the surrounding rocks.
Antonioni has a particular fascination with filming architectural magnificence,
and this is a perfect example of upscale desert architecture, where the
creative design is nothing less than eye-popping. Daria slowly walks into and around the
premises as if in a daze, as this allows the camera to gaze into every nook and
cranny while she attempts to regain her focus.
As she hears the rich wives gathered around the pool, she doesn’t
recognize herself in any of them. The
language of business being spoken may as well be a foreign tongue, as it feels
utterly useless, where the business convention itself, the goal of her road
journey, feels like such a waste of time.
Much like she felt when attacked by the Lord of the Flies kids, she feels a desperate need to get away,
driving a few hundred yards or so, then stopping to take one last look, where
the building literally explodes about a dozen or so times from different
angles, initially to an incendiary Pink Floyd piece, like the frenzied climax
of Pink
Floyd-Careful with That Axe, Eugene(Ummagumma) - YouTube (8:44) that feels like a raging madness, seen
here: Zabriskie Point:
Final Scene (Music by Pink Floyd) HQ
YouTube (6:57). After the explosions, Antonioni films
debris flying through the air, floating in slow motion as an inevitable peace
sets in, returning to the dreamy Pink Floyd music that opened the film. It should be noted that the film released in
1970 had a different ending, where much like “Ballad of Easy Rider,” Roy
Orbison wrote a similar over-the-top theme song (“Zabriskie Point is
everywhere”) called “So Young” Roy Orbison - So Young (1970)
- YouTube (3:33), a heavily orchestrated pop song that played over the end credits. In the 35 mm print seen recently, there were
no end credits or Orbison song, as the Pink Floyd music drew the film to a
close.
Even though these are only projected thoughts, Daria’s
reaction is a fascinating cinematic answer to that initial question about what
it would take to revolutionize white
Note – For more on this, please refer to what’s omitted
from Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar
(2011) and find a chance to see
Howard Alk’s THE MURDER OF FRED HAMPTON (1971).
Jonathan Rosenbaum from
1001 MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
Though Michelangelo Antonioni’s only American film was
poorly received when it was released in 1969, time has in some ways been kinder
to Zabriskie Point than to La Notte, made a decade earlier. The
director’s boldly nonrealistic and poetic approach to American counterculture
myths, and his loose and deliberately slow approach to narrative, mat still put
some people off. He also cast two young unknowns as his romantic leads – a
carpenter (Mark Frechette) and a college student (Daria Halprin), neither of
whom has been seen since – along with a relatively wooden professional, Rod
Taylor. Antonioni was at the height of his commercial prestige at the time,
having just made his only international hit in
But his beautiful handling of widescreen compositions, Pop
Art colors and subject matter (largely derived from southern
Zabriskie Point/Woodstock - Dave Kehr
“Zabriskie Point is everywhere!” wails Roy Orbison at the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s parched and pessimistic 1970 examination of America’s alienated youth, which earned scornful reviews and bombed at the box-office only a few weeks before Michael Wadleigh’s verdant music documentary “Woodstock” proved that there was still plenty of money to be found in the youth market.
The MGM logo has probably never preceded a film so un-Hollywood-like and experimental. The movie has three sections, all disjunctively different. The opening section, which includes the famous student meeting scene, has a loose, improvised feel (unlike other Antonioni); the second section sets us down in an engulfing landscape (very much like other Antonioni); and the third section ends with the most orgasmic explosion in movies. I had a pan-scan VHS copy of this film for years that I could never bring myself to watch; I tossed the tape soon after seeing it in teeming widescreen in the theater.
Time Out Geoff Andrew
Antonioni's sorrowing,
stranger's-eye view of modern America is sadly flawed by the way his 'story' (a
rambling, jumbled and mumbling mess scripted by a variety of writers including
Sam Shepard, Tonio Guerra and Claire Peploe) is bogged down in the mood of
student revolt dogging the nation in the late '60s. Frechette, suspected of
shooting a cop during a campus riot, steals a plane, meets Halprin, and makes
love with her in
All Movie
Guide [Michael Hastings]
Michelangelo Antonioni's first American
film is, in many circles, a legendary debacle, an indulgence of some of the
director's worst elliptical, impressionistic, and baldly absurd habits. Taken
on another level, however, Zabriskie Point
is a sensual, atonal fantasia on the late '60s, a film perhaps not meant to be
taken too seriously. At least, one can only hope. Taken from an over-earnest
script cobbled together by four writers -- including the young Sam Shepard
-- and featuring a blankly attractive cast of amateurs, Antonioni's
film is full of ridiculous plot lines and character traits, chief among them a
counterculture hero (Mark Frechette)
whose means of challenging the establishment includes answering the phone by
saying "Goodbye?" But Antonioni is
more interested in creating visual non-sequiturs than verbal ones, and in this
respect, his film doesn't disappoint. The director's use of barren Southwestern
landscapes suggests an oasis from all the urban political turmoil, however
improbable, famously exemplified in Zabriskie's
sand-swept orgy sequence. And the climactic, Pink Floyd-scored
demolition of a bourgeois desert home, while thematically obvious, is still a
treat to watch.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
After enjoying the biggest success of his career with 1966’s Blow Up, Michelangelo Antonioni spent two years (and $7 million of Hollywood’s money) making Zabriskie Point, an aloof, unfocused study of American crassness and its corrupting influence. By the time the movie arrived in theaters in 1970, critics and hip moviegoers were growing weary of anti-establishment screeds on the silver screen, so Antonioni got hammered for his already-dated take on hippie revolutionaries, as well as for his insistence on using a cast of inert, mumbly non-professionals. Then in the ensuing decades, Zabriskie Point’s critical standing improved, as directors like Gus Van Sant and Bruno Dumont paid homage to the movie with their own challenging, existential films about empty souls roaming around deserts.
So was Zabriskie Point grossly misunderstood in its own time, or is it overrated now by fans of the self-consciously arty? Perhaps both. There certainly isn’t much to the story. Antonioni spends two hours showing two young strangers—a gun-toting, plane-stealing radical (Mark Frechette) and a sappy secretary (Daria Halprin)—as they meet by chance in Death Valley and spend an afternoon talking and making love before diverging to meet their separate fates. And though Antonioni’s imagery is frequently striking, his montages of industrial waste and roadside signage—along with his comparisons of corporate types to model-home mannequins, his aerial shots of a smog-bound Los Angeles, and his fleeting glimpses of litterbugs, juvenile sexual predators, and people who ruin a perfectly good salami sandwich by slathering it with mayonnaise—are all pretty flat and blunt as social commentary.
But not enough attention was paid in 1970 to the movie’s innovative soundtrack, which mixes folk-rock, electronic drone, and near-complete silence into an aural representation of what Antonioni is trying to say about the natural and the synthetic. And maybe Antonioni intended the moviegoers of the time to roll their eyes at Frechette and Halprin’s “We’re just misunderstood, beautiful people” chatter. Critics at the time talked about the movie’s famous final scene—a hillside house exploding in slow motion, over and over—as Antonioni’s statement of support for violent revolution, but those critics may have been too close to the cultural moment to see the big picture. Perhaps all the gorgeously shot explosions and the talk of armed insurrection in Zabriskie Point were never meant to be admired. Maybe those scenes—like the film’s centerpiece “orgy in the dust” sequence—were only ever meant to show that even the most idealistic Americans were as crude in their philosophy and behavior as the culture that spawned them.
EyeForFilm.co.uk Chris
Antonioni’s much-maligned movie of American mores, and the bedrock of human spirit forcing its way through materialism, is best viewed without trying to force it into what we think it will be about.
A Sixties undergrad (Mark Frechette) drops out after a close brush with violence in the student uprisings of the time. He steals a plane and flies across the Californian desert. Here begins a romance that is both unlikely yet whimsically believable. He flirts with a young woman (Daria Halprin) who is driving across the desert to meet her capitalist boss. After landing the plane, the two of them enjoy the freedom of the desert, unconstrained by thoughts of who each other might be in the ‘real’ world. Their idyllic lovemaking in the sand encompasses (in the dreamlike visuals) many other couples. But Daria’s ‘destruction’ of her boss’ world, however vivid, emotional, and seemingly justifiable, remains in her imagination. Mark tries to take his Woodstock values back to ‘society’ only to face an unjust end for his minor misdemeanour.
What at first appears to be a film about student protests and a myopic view of consumer society eventually goes much deeper than primitive hippie philosophy. Mark is neither swept up by the extremism of his classmates nor willing to concede anything less than a beautiful vision of life. His flawed character sets off with all the unchecked enthusiasm of frustrated youth, much like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. When he meets Daria, their lovemaking goes beyond any ‘Garden of Eden’ scenario: only away from everything (and in the arms of a woman) can he truly be himself. Any ‘gardens’ are also firmly generated only in imagination - in this case, Daria’s. (Those who like this symbolism will enjoy Daria biting into an apple as she drives away from her wilderness interlude.)
Daria’s arrival at a similar point to Mark is the opportunity to experience something more significant in her life. Unlike Mark, she is basically law-abiding, but with no less frustration at a consumerist society from which there is no escape. Even her boss’ plan of ‘holiday homes in the desert’ simply transplants patriarchal commercialism into the heart of nature at its most innocent.
Her mental cry of pain (expressed in Pink Floyd’s music written especially for the film, but reminiscent of their earlier Careful With That Axe, Eugene) foments an anger to which she cannot give action. Her tears, suddenly released and merged with the artificial waterfall, are only swept away by turning her back. Like Mark, she might not be able to do anything about the society that she finds herself in, but that does not mean she has to acquiesce or become part of it.
Antonioni’s sweeping landscapes of Death Valley, the surreal back-to-nature lovemaking scenes, his lingering treatment of consumer adverts as if they were add-on art, all pull us towards a view that transcends the apparent rambling nature of the narrative. The director’s statement here is not confined to anything as petty as supporting or deflating the student-protest viewpoint: as Daria says at one point, “There's a thousand sides to everything - not just heroes and villains.” Like the geological Zabriskie Point, where rock formations push upwards through the main strata, counter-culture and anti-establishment messages are merely an element of the whole, a phenomenon that is part of a bigger picture rather than a simple moral high-ground.
For those wanting a straightforward story with identifiable protagonists, Zabriskie Point may seem like a mess. But if you were wanting such simplistic entertainment, why would you go to see a film by Antonioni?
He creates in Zabriskie Point, as in his other films, a profound indifference in the viewer towards his characters. We observe their journey, as outsiders. He creates in us a sense of emptiness (neatly symbolised by the desert) – a theme he would return to some years later in The Passenger. We may feel frustrated that Antonioni finds this more interesting aesthetically (or philosophically) than using it to project a political agenda. It is as if he constructs a wonderful piece of architecture and then lets us observe what people use it for, and without becoming passionately involved in the specific trivia of their lives. ‘Stuff happens’ – whether it be enlightenment or deep expression of loss, or not knowing who or why we are.
The temptation most directors succumb to will be to force meaning and connections onto life that are essentially devoid of a Prime Mover’s Booker pen. Such characters join up the dots far more than any living person does in reality. Part of Antonioni’s haunting appeal maybe that he reminds us that the world and our relationships do not, in reality, fit into a coherent big picture explainable either by science or religions. His characters are psychologically many miles apart. Only in a common wilderness can they, and we, perhaps find an overall poetry that goes beyond individual agendas.
Return to
Zabriskie Point: The Mark Frechette and Daria Halprin Story Sam Tweedle from Confessions of a Pop Culture Addict
The
Spinning Image [Dan Schneider]
Here
Comes the Sun: New Ways of Seeing in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point Fiona Villella from Senses of Cinema, March 2000
Sex on the Desert Dennis Lim from Slate, July 14, 2009
Zabriskie
Point by Michelangelo Antonioni
David Fricke from Phinnweb
DVD Savant [Glenn
Erickson] also seen here: Zabriskie
Point Read TCM's Home Video Review on this film
Ruthless Reviews
("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale
Some
Came Running: "Point" given
Glenn Kenny
Zabriskie Point | A Regrettable
Moment of Sincerity Rhett Miller,
one of three reviews
Zabriskie Point -
Movie Lists - AMC Keith Breese
Ozus'
World Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz
A Nutshell Review
Stefan S
The Spinning Image Graeme
Clark
Michelangelo
Antonioni - Director - Films as ... - Film Reference Kimball Lockhart
Some Came Running
Glenn Kenny
Zabriskie
Point's soundtrack is unforgettable
Paul Moody from The Guardian,
July 31, 2007
Michelangelo
Antonioni – A Life Giving Art to Us photos from Sexuality in the Arts, August 1,
2007
Zabriskie Point/Woodstock the original Zabriskie Point cover spread
from Look magazine, June 7, 2009
daria halprin
strikes back more photos from
Chained and Perfumed, June 19, 2009
Film
locations for Zabriskie Point (1970)
::
rogerebert.com :: People :: Interview with Michelangelo ... Ebert interviews Antonioni, June 19, 1969
Zabriskie
Point (1970) - Sergio Leone part of
an Antonioni interview from a film journal, Filmcritica #252,
March 1975
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New
York Times [Vincent Canby] also seen
here: New
York Times (registration req'd)
Zabriskie Point (film)
- Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zabriskie Point -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YouTube - Zabriskie Point -
Exploding Stuff (9:17)
CHUNG KUO (China
User
Reviews from imdb Author: webbertiger
from
For some reason, it's not easy to get sufficient information
of this movie from this website. This movie has never been popular. Not many
people have watched it. To make the situation worse, the limited available
information is not even accurate enough. So I will try to share more background
story of this movie when I make my comments.
Being invited by the Chinese government, Antonioni spent eight weeks in
Generally speaking, this is a very interesting movie, even though the pace is a
little bit slow sometimes. The version I watched includes three parts. The
first and second parts each last one hour and twenty minutes, and the third
part lasts almost one hour. So the total length is more than three hours, and
you may want to give some patience if you like finishing it at one time. It was
said the original version even lasted for four hours.
As a documentary, this film was composed of many "snatches", which
could be either prepared or unprepared. Prepared snatches were what the Chinese
government wanted to display to Antonioni, such as the well-trained children in
a primary school singing political songs, or the
It's definitely not about acrobat, although acrobat was also filmed. It is
about the Chinese society, especially the lives of regular people who were
living in the cities or rural areas during the early 1970's in
For those who are interested in Chinese modern history, they do not want to
miss the history of the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, launched by Mao
Tse-tung. Nowadays, it may not be too hard to collect stories that happened
during that era from novels or other materials that you can get from a library
or online. However, I've scarcely seen a movie like this showing the *real*
lives of those people. That is not a story. Instead, that is a page of life,
recorded in a film by a great film maker. There were so few movies available to
let you know this, which was another reason that made this movie very special.
Among the three parts of this film, the first part focused on
The second part was about
The third part showed Shanghai, the biggest industrial city in China. There the
European-style buildings that had used to be business centers were used as
government offices. He was shown a steel-making factory. He also filmed some
restaurants, where people were enjoying noodles. He said, "We don't feel
happy when we hear Chinese always say they invented spaghetti."
The narration ended with an old Chinese saying, "Appearances certainly are
deceptive." It's profound and very interesting.
THE PASSENGER A 97
aka: Professione: Reporter
Italy France Spain USA
Sort of a cross between the wandering existentialism of Eric Heumann’s later 1998 film PORT DJEMA and the visually extravagant, behind the scenes devastation of Jia Zhang-ke’s THE WORLD (2004), this is a grim, near wordless film that is visually stunning, cinematography by Luciano Tovoli, with a constantly roving camera that explores some of the more remarkable locations in southern Spain, including Gaudi museums in Barcelona, but also other hotels, restaurants, road café’s and exotic locales in Seville, Málaga, and Almería. Supposedly, 18 minutes have been added to a director’s cut, but that version has been lost, so a European version which is 9 minutes longer is now circulating. It's another one of those wandering films in the best existentialist tradition where someone loses themselves in an exotic locale, with a gorgeous woman, of course, but this one takes a differing turn into vacuousness, and it has one of the greatest endings in the history of film.
David Locke (early Jack Nicholson) arrives in a desert hotel in the middle
of nowhere in Northern Africa, constantly exchanging cigarettes for information
which takes forever in coming, a strange system of communication that rarely
uses words, but takes him into the middle of the desert in search of something
unknown. When his mission is thwarted by
unexpected intervention, he frustratingly runs into a giant sand dune in the
middle of an unending Sahara desert and is
forced to walk back to town. When he
nonchalantly visits the neighbor in the room next door named Robertson, he’s
surprised to discover he’s lying on his bed, dead. Thoughts go through his mind, and he
exchanges passport pictures and luggage with the man, discarding his past,
gaining an uncertain future that includes an address book with dates and places
already marked.
We discover from a tape recorder conversation and earlier television interviews that Locke was a reporter searching for guerilla freedom fighters, and had previously interviewed the leader of the government, who minimized the effectiveness of the rebel forces. When Locke keeps Robertson’s first appointment in the book, he picks up gun running information from a storage locker, then wanders aimlessly into a fabulously designed local church during a wedding, sticking around for awhile in a sort of daze until he is met by two men who want the gun shipment information, and pay him a huge amount of cash. Meanwhile, his English wife back in London, Jenny Runacre, who had all but written off her husband with disinterest, suddenly takes a new interest in him with his reported death, and seeks this man Robertson who supposedly was the last man to speak to him. Locke’s TV producer friend agrees to track him down, which leads to unexpected difficulties for Locke, posing as Robertson, as people familiar with who he is are looking for him suspecting he is dead. By chance, to avoid the producer, he ducks into a Gaudi museum where he runs into Maria Schneider, known only as the girl, an architecture student who at first walks away, but he discovers her again at another museum which features an extraordinary Gaudi rooftop which is mixed with laundry hanging on a line. In order to avoid being seen, she agrees to gather his luggage from his hotel and they leave town together with no particular destination.
Passing through some of the most fabulous locales, there is scant philosophical dialogue about purpose and identity, where Locke is losing his resolve. She's relaxed, sexy and comfortable with herself, much more morally centered, and has to remind him that Robertson had a purpose, so even if he’s lost his, he needs to carry on Robertson’s mission. But Locke retreats into his own vacuousness, unable even to relate to the girl, but agrees to keep the next appointment in the book and sends her off to Tangiers, agreeing to meet her in 3 days. Unexpectedly, she is already waiting at his hotel destination, posing as Robertson’s wife, already providing her passport to the manager. Locke is thoroughly disgusted with this sham of running from who he was, which continues even as someone else, and hasn’t the will to care anymore. He asks the girl to leave and sits alone in his hotel room.
This leads to “the shot,” which lasts for about 8 minutes, and rivals final shot sequences from Tarkovsky or Kiarostami, two of the best. From inside the hotel room, we see only the feet of Locke who is lying on his bed, as the camera peers out the window, we see an old man sitting in a chair across the street, a car drives by, in and out of the picture, while the girl slowly walks across the frame, stopping only to look in the hotel window. A little boy runs into the middle of the street and faces the old man, picks up a rock and throws it at him, leading to a profanity-laced tirade which can only be heard as background noise. Throughout this shot, the camera is slowly moving forward, moving to the vertical iron bars at the window, peering out at the dusty street, where a horizontal structure, like a bull ring is across the street, with an opening that resembles a giant keyhole, where sky can be seen on the other side. From behind the prison bars, a man is frozen in time, unable to open the key to the universe that lies nearby. A shot is heard, the girl runs back into the picture, staring at the window, cars arrive at a furious pace, initially the police who clear the street, then another vehicle that includes Locke’s wife and the TV producer. The girl enters the hotel and pounds on the adjoining door to Locke’s room, but it is locked. The police arrive with Locke’s wife and unlock the door to his room. The girl, the producer, the wife all deny knowing who he is.
There is an afterlude shot showing the front of the hotel, Hotel de la
Gloire, just before darkness as beautiful classical Spanish guitar plays
sounding very much like Segovia
*******************
from the imdb site (link no longer available):
Apparently Antonioni was under contract at the time to deliver a film of "no more than 120 minutes" and his final submitted film was just over 126. So scissors-happy executives cut 9 minutes from the film, which have now been restored.
According to imdb writer daydreamblvr1210, the following are the cut scenes that have been returned:
• a scene of Locke with the hotel manager and a guard outside
the hotel discussing what to do for the funeral arrangements of Robertson (re:
"Locke"). They agree that a Christian mission nearby would suffice.
• A crucial scene inside Locke's house in
• a brief shot of Locke getting in the rented BMW in
• The omission of Locke asking passersby in
• An additional scene in
They are all minor differences except for the one at Locke's flat. I read the
running time is actually 9 minutes longer.
from Elena Spilioti, with M.A.
degrees in journalism, architecture, and stage-and-costume design, also a
Facet’s film instructer:
The Passenger (Professione: reporter) is a film directed and co-written by Michelangelo Antonioni, released in
1975, in which Jack Nicholson stars as a reporter in Africa who assumes the
identity of a dead stranger. The film
was nominated for the Palme d’Or award at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival.
The Passenger has been considered remarkable
for its camerawork (by Luciano Tovoli) and acting. While the movie has been critically praised
by such movie critics as Peter Travers of Rolling
Stone and Manohla Dargis of The New
York Times, it has also been criticized by Roger Ebert, Danny Peary and
others for being slow-moving and pretentious.
Ebert has since changed his stance on the film, and now considers it a
perceptive look at identity, alienation, and mankind’s desire to escape
oneself.
The long
final shot
There were a number of reasons
why the shot proved so difficult to accomplish and is so studied by film
students. The shot needed to be taken in
the evening towards dusk to minimize light differences between interior and
exterior. Since the shot was continuous,
it was not possible to adjust the lens aperture at the moment when the camera
passed from the room to the square. As
such, the scene could only be shot between 5:00 and 7:30
in the evening.
Difficulties were further
compounded by atmospheric conditions.
The weather in Spain
Then there were further technical
problems. The camera ran on a ceiling
track in the hotel room, and when it emerged outside the window it was picked
up by a hook suspended on a giant crane to mask the change from a smooth track
to the less smooth and more mobile crane.
The bars on the outside of the window were fitted on hinges. As the camera came up to the bars they were
swung away at the same time as the hook of the crane attached itself to the
camera as it left the tracks. The whole
operation was co-ordinated by Antonioni from a van by means of monitors and
microphones to assistants who, in turn, communicated his instructions to the
actors and the operators.
In the DVD commentary, Nicholson
states that Antonioni constructed the entire hotel entirely so that the final
shot could be accomplished, though he suggests that the entire hotel was built
on hinges instead of simply bars outside the window.
DVDBeaver.com [Gary W. Tooze]
Michelangelo Antonioni takes his own uniquely unanswerable and elliptical look at the basic precepts of identity and truth. Character study, suspense and road picture wrapped up into one intentionally-paced masterpiece of pure cinema. Not unlike Antonioni's L'Avventura and Blow-Up we are introduced to a mystery - soon to uncover an even deeper one hidden under its emotional surface. An international reporter (another of Antonioni's working-class professional heroes - ex. see Il Grido) David Locke, played by a young-ish Jack Nicholson, chances upon the circumstance to switch identities with a similar looking guest of the Hotel he is staying at in Africa. The doppelganger is deceased on his bed. The switch is easy... too easy. Perhaps again, the atmospheric conditions strike influence as a typical Antonioni trapping. The surrounding barren and arid environment spark some unaccustomed behavior - sculpting more of the uncertainties that tie the film together. Included is one of the most memorable, and technically infuriating, tracking shots in the history of film coupled with an important use of natural audio throughout. Again defining Antonioni as arguably the greatest Italian film-maker of all time, The Passenger is simply required viewing.
Time Out
The best of Antonioni’s three
English-language pictures (which also include ‘Blow-Up’ and ‘Zabriskie Point’),
‘The Passenger’ has been off our screens for around two decades now, the result
of a legal quirk that demanded that either Jack Nicholson, the film’s lead
actor (and, until recently, owner of the rights to the film) or Antonioni himself
had to be present at any public screening of the movie. Finally unleashed, the
film will now play at the NFT after being conspicuously absent from the venue’s
otherwise comprehensive Antonioni season last summer and will also enjoy a DVD
release in a fortnight’s time.
The film opens in the heat of the North African desert. David Locke (Nicholson)
is a famed television reporter at the end of his tether. Trudging through the
sand on the trail of political rebels, he’s on a sweaty mission to nowhere that’s
compounded by harsh terrain and desperate temperatures. When his Land Rover
buries itself in a sand dune, it’s a symbol of deeper frustration. He’s a man
alienated from his world, reporting on nothing, slipping slowly into the sand.
His identity is crumbling.
All of which helps to explain why when he finds his fellow hotel guest, a Brit
named David Robertson, dead in his bed, he takes strange advantage of the
situation. He swaps sweaty shirts, passport photos and hotel rooms and assumes
Robertson’s identity, leaving the dead Robertson his own name. And so David
Locke is dead, and Jack Nicholson is now ‘David Robertson’ – an identity which
brings with it a whole host of new dangers…
It’s the beginning of a languorous, mysterious and quite captivating thriller
that moves from Saharan Africa to
Although the pairing of Nicholson with a random, anonymous girl (Maria
Schneider, no less, fresh from ‘Last Tango…’) for the latter part of the movie,
which is essentially a road-trip through Spain, is perhaps the film’s most
superficial tic, ‘The Passenger’ lacks any of the embarrassing contemporary
touches that let down parts of both ‘Blow-Up’ (frolicking models) and
‘Zabriskie Point’ (cavorting hippies). Peploe’s screenplay offers a solid
inquiry into journalistic nihilism and professional and personal identity,
which, coupled with Antonioni’s imagery – as captured by cinematographer
Luciano Tovoli – make for an endlessly satisfying experience. Its final, famed
seven-minute shot remains a delight to behold.
When Canses Were Classeled... [Eric
Henderson]
The only thing that rolls off the back of Jack Nicholson’s hand and onto the signature crumbling Antonioni white wall is the signature Antonioni ennui. If it isn’t entirely gone, it has been pummeled like a red desert flower petal into the stucco, having moved along the path of grief and loss from the fabulous denial of L’Avventura to an occasionally violent semblance of anger. The Passenger (alias Professione: reporter) is probably going to go down as Antonioni’s final flirtation with worldwide art-house crossover, not just because of the recent 30th anniversary re-release (at the orchestration of its star Jack Nicholson, who controls the film’s domestic distribution and has kept it effectively out of circulation for all these dark, A Few As-Good-As-It-Gets Men years), but because it was probably the last time contemporaneous connoisseurs rose up en masse to reject Antonioni’s unfashionable not-so-nouvelle vagueness. Jack Nicholson tackles the film’s central role (and I do mean central, in opposition of any misconceptions of the film not having a center) as a documentary filmmaker who (while in the middle of the desert covering a shady, African autocrat) finds that the mysterious businessman in his hotel has died. He unpremeditatedly switches photos on their passports and lets the country’s diplomats bury “his” body while he globetrots assuming the dead man’s identity. (It’s almost a thesis or clue as to what exactly did happen to L’Avventura’s Anna.) Though it’s undoubtedly one of Nicholson’s least-fuelled performances, the once and future Jack Torrance shares with Antonioni’s muse Monica Vitti a set of unquenchable, cat-like eye slits that convey a turbulent self-awareness, which becomes the antithesis to the muted, anti-Fellini profligacy. In Fellini films, characters breathlessly try to maintain physical momentum in order to avoid letting anyone notice their emptiness. In The Passenger, Nicholson is in a state of perpetual flight, but none of his Mediterranean stops leap quite so far as the distance between his eyelids and his eyebrows. He never quite manages to understand what it is that he is trying to escape from, least of all Antonioni’s almost too easy moral punchline -- that you can neither completely leave your past behind, nor can you completely avoid everyone else’s future impact on the rest of your life. If the film’s climactic seven-minute tracking shot beginning at one end of a hotel room and ending on the opposite side of the window’s iron bars (shades of Wavelength; resurrected again in Crimson Gold only to commit suicide) feels like a revelation, it might be because Antonioni’s architecture goes staid and square at the precise moment that his camera really takes off. And it does so at the precise moment that Nicholson seems to passively reclaim his own identity, and the gravity of having already killed that identity off. Antonioni would soon revisit this theme of cloistered souls and their doomed attempts to transcend their own personae with fabricated doppelgangers in the 1980 video experiment The Mystery of Oberwald, a fascinating if novelty stunt-tinged adaptation of a Jean Cocteau play in which Vitti (trading in her spike-heeled sway for an androgynous strut) plays a reclusive queen who falls in love with the young buck revolutionary sent to assassinate her. Both Vitti and Nicholson’s love is real, even if they are not.
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)
Largely unavailable to American audiences for nearly three decades (save for the release of an atrociously pan-and-scanned videocassette that is also long out of print), Michaelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” has returned to the screen and it is strangely comforting to realize that it is just as odd and bewildering to behold today as it must have been in 1975. In fact, the simple act of watching it is a stark reminder of just how conventional most films and filmmakers have become these days–precious few people would have the nerve to make something this defiantly oblique and no major American studio would dare to finance of distribute it.
In a quiet and subdued performance, Jack Nicholson stars as David
Locke,a British TV reporter (think David Frost) who has grown disenchanted with
his entire existence. While out in the African desert looking for rebels to
interview for a documentary, he discovers that his next-door neighbor at his
hotel–another middle-aged man whom he superficially resembles–has dropped dead;
impulsively, David decides to abandon his own life and assume the man’s
identity. With the assistance of a sexy tourist (Maria Schneider), David
impulsively decides to follow the appointments in the man’s datebook–the man
turns out to have some dark secrets of his own and, without realizing it, David
spends so much time running from his own life that he winds up potentially stumbling
into another man’s death.
Although this might sound like the premise for an exciting thriller, Antonioni
is more interested in exploring the inner turmoil and ennui of his characters
than in putting them through the paces of a conventional action film. As a
result, I suspect that most contemporary audiences will find themselves as
alienated with the film as the central character is with his life and even
those with a taste for Antonioni’s elliptical narratives would probably have to
admit that works such as “L’Avventura” and “Blow-Up” dealt with similar material
in a far more compelling manner (and neither had the additional handicap of the
weak performance by Schneider, in her only significant post-“Last Tango in
Paris” role). Nevertheless, “The Passenger” has more than its share of
virtues–a strong central performance from Nicholson, gorgeous visuals from
cinematographer Luciano Tovoli and a couple of sequences–a moment in which
Schneider is seen standing in the back of a car as it drives off into the
countryside and the famous extended closing scene that is shot in one take–that
still retain their power after nearly 30 years.
Best of all, “The Passenger” is a film that, like “2001" or “Apocalypse Now” or much of Antonioni’s best work, refuses to tie things up at the end and forces the viewer to actively engage with it in order to understand it–at a time when most commercial films seems to have done all the thinking for the audience ahead of time, it is always nice to encounter one that will inspire endless debates as to what it all means.
Reporting on The Passenger Larysa Smirnova and Chris Fujiwara from Fipresci magazine, 2006
Slant Magazine Nick
Schager
PopMatters Mike Ward
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Derek
Malcolm's Century of Films Derek
Malcolm from the Guardian
stylusmagazine.com (Jake Meaney)
The
Passenger Marty Gliserman, 1975
essay from Jump Cut
The
Passenger Martin Walsh, 1975 essay
from Jump Cut
The Passenger Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Talking Pictures (UK)
Alan Pavelin
All Movie
Guide [Wheeler Winston Dixon]
CineScene.com [Chris
Dashiell]
Not Coming to a Theater Near
You [Leo Goldsmith]
Monsters
and Critics - DVD Review [Jeff Swindoll]
The
Passenger Bryant Frazer from Deep
Focus
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Wilmington]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Full New York
Times Review » Manohla Dargis
New
York Times (registration req'd) Vincent
Canby’s 1975 review
THE OBERWALD MYSTERY (Il mistero di
Oberwald)
An oddly misjudged
attempt by the master of Italian alienation to film Jean Cocteau's melodramatic
play The Eagle Has Two Heads, previously filmed by Cocteau himself (L'Aigle
à Deux Têtes, 1948). Ten years after the assassination of her husband
Prince Ferdinand, the lonely internal exile of the queen (Vitti) of a middle
European country is broken when she gives refuge to a fugitive anarchist poet.
Shot on video and transferred to film, this features muddy visuals and suffers
badly from the predictable mismatch of Cocteau's flamboyant aestheticism and
Antonioni's emotionally distanced formalism.
Chicago Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum)
This is an experimental film in
the original rather than fashionable sense of that term--a 1980 adaptation by
Michelangelo Antonioni of Jean Cocteau's play The Eagle Has Two Heads
that reunites the filmmaker with Monica Vitti in the starring role as a widowed
queen who falls in love with an anarchist poet sent to assassinate her. What
makes this experimental is neither the play nor the performances, but the fact
that Antonioni shot it in color video (later transferred to 35-millimeter),
regarding the medium not as "television" but as a new kind of
cinematography, and associating each character with a different color as part
of his visual exploration. The choice of the Cocteau play seems more arbitrary
than inevitable, which raises the form-versus-content issue even more than in
most Antonioni features. The results are singular, to say the least. In Italian
with subtitles. 128 min.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
As a passel of
contemporary filmmakers scrambles to proclaim digital video the future of
movies, it's worth pausing to consider how other methods of recording the moving
image have been touted and then essentially abandoned. In 1980, Italian
director Michelangelo Antonioni attempted a feature film shot on TV-quality
videotape, and endeavored to give the video production the artful arrangement
of color and the profound tone he had brought to such acknowledged celluloid
classics as L'Avventura, Blowup, and The Passenger.
Antonioni adapted Jean Cocteau's 19th-century romance The Eagle Has Two
Heads into The Mystery Of Oberwald, and cast former flame (and star
of Antonioni's Red Desert, among others) Monica Vitti as a reclusive
queen who falls in love with would-be assassin Franco Branciaroli, mostly
because he reminds Vitti of her late husband. Theatrical in form and content, The
Mystery Of Oberwald takes place in drafty castle chambers, in long
conversations between thwarted lovers and political malcontents. The story is
fairly stolid, and apparently of little interest to the director, who utilizes
the simple scenario as a platform from which he can demonstrate what can be
done with videotape. Antonioni uses optical effects to insert ghostly figures
into the background of scenes, and to add layers of haze. Most dramatically, he
experiments with color filters, indicating everything from weather changes to
interior emotional states via red, blue, green, and gray tints. The visual play
is interesting, but it doesn't make the director's case that video is as viable
as film for artful storytelling. The main drawback is that video tends to look
too harshly "real," and the lifelike presentation of Oberwald's
sets and costumes makes the film more evocative of 1980 than the 1800s. Even
Antonioni's deliberate effects have developed some mold over the past two
decades; what might have seemed exciting at the time now has the quaintness of
a Todd Rundgren video. Which is not to say that movies shot on film can't look
dated, too. But, given that Antonioni put more stock in his technique than in
the dry historical love story it was meant to enhance, he'd probably be
dismayed to find that those techniques seem dry and historical today.
In scientific research, the
researcher's ideal is the experiment in which all but one variable is
controlled. In such an experiment, varying the single parameter can tell the
researcher the precise results of changes, small or large. Artists, on the
other hand, tend to experiment with abandon, introducing a multitude of factors.
The effects of any given part of an artistic experiment become clear only after
many experiments include it, so that experience about the results can be
validated. Michelangelo Antonioni, one of the bolder cinematic experimenters of
the 1960's, however, has chosen a more scientific method in THE OBERWALD
MYSTERY. He presents a film that is utterly conventional in all ways -- except
one.
THE OBERWALD MYSTERY is based on
a play by Jean Cocteau. The story concerns a queen of an unspecified Middle
European country who retired into solitude following the assassination of her
husband. An encounter with another assassin forces the queen to re-examine her
choice, and accept responsibility for her country's fate. The story, faithfully
followed by Antonioni and his co-screenwriter, Tonino Guerra, is a sub-standard
piece of early twentieth century intellectual claptrap. Antonioni and Guerra
even preserve such stagebound devices as the opening scene between two minor
characters who explain the background of the plot, shabbily concealed behind a
relationship that proves of no importance whatsoever to the story. The play
(called THE EAGLE HAS TWO HEADS) was obviously not Cocteau's finest hour.
Similarly, acting, editing, and
score have no surprises. Monica Vitti gives a dull, respectable performance as
the queen, and the supporting cast goes through the motions in a manner
familiar to anyone who has seen many old Hollywood
melodramas. The editing is professional, but unexciting. The music is culled
from classics by Strauss, Schoenberg, and Brahms, and is used in the most
conventional ways. Were this the entire story, THE OBERWALD MYSTERY would be a
bafflingly stodgy addition to Antonioni's credits, doubly baffling as Antonioni
has never done anything so obvious and old-fashioned before.
But there is one unique element
-- the cinematography, or, perhaps more accurately, the videophotography. Even
here, much is standard, and reminiscent of the work of the untalented. The
camera is permitted no interesting angles or movements. (Well, almost none. A
director with as instinctive an eye as Antonioni's is hard-put to eliminate
every shred of interest from his camerawork.) The only innovation is in the use
of color and video special effects.
Antonioni and cinematographer
Luciano Tovoli shot THE OBERWALD MYSTERY on videotape. They then performed odd
permutations on the video image for three years, and transferred the results to
film. Actors are bathed in colored lights suggestive of moods and motives.
Ghostly figures appear and disappear, obedient to the characters' memories.
Backgrounds fade and are replaced with images suitable to the feeling of the
scene. It's all quite peculiar.
And, alas, ineffective. Some
experiments, unfortunately, are failures. THE OBERWALD MYSTERY must count as
one such. The coloring of the characters is more silly than artistically
satisfying, especially the blue filtering perpetually placed over the
villainous head of the government's secret police. The ghostly images are
puzzling. The switch of backgrounds is sometimes too subtle to be effective,
otherwise too obvious in its intentions. Moreover, the visual quality of
videotape is too poor to stand up to a 35mm blowup. The color, when not washed
out with Antonioni's little experiments, is garish; at its best, it suggests a
rather faded print of a Roger Corman Poe movie. Sudden movements cause easily
visible breakup of the image into scan lines. And, as usual, video lends a
flat, boring texture to almost any scene.
Antonioni might simply be ahead
of his time in the use of videotape. For some years, Hollywood
filmmakers have been talking about high-definition videotape, and extolling its
virtues. (Most of which have to do with the ease of editing.) The results have
not been too impressive, so far. The special effects Antonioni incorporates
through the use of special video processing machines are no great shakes.
Selective tinting of scenes has been around since the silents. It wasn't a very
effective technique then, being the poor man's color film, and it shows little
potential for ever being any more effective. Superposition of images is a
well-developed technology for film, and the video version shown off in THE
OBERWALD MYSTERY is not nearly as good as mediocre film work in this area. And
that's about it for Antonioni's bag of video tricks.
As an experiment, THE OBERWALD
MYSTERY has some interest for those few who care about the technology of
filmmaking and the future of video. The mere fact that such a prominent
European filmmaker would spend so much time and effort on video has to be of
some interest, in and of itself. However, beyond this small band, and the
equally small band of Antonioni completists, THE OBERWALD MYSTERY has little to
offer. Its tired story and run-of-the-mill production provide little
entertainment value. Its intellectual underpinnings are musty. Antonioni has
put all his efforts into playing with one variable, leaving the rest untouched.
It's a pity that he didn't set those other variables to more interesting
values.
PopMatters Mike Ward
The
Mystery of Oberwald Gerald Peary
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
IDENTIFICATION OF A WOMAN
(Identificazione di una donna)
Italy France
Very much the film of an elder
statesman arrogantly conscious of being the most 'modern' director of his
generation. It is a contemporary love story - based upon a film-maker's chance
encounters with two women - designed to bury the controversies of his
courageous video manifesto (The Oberwald Mystery) and to regain access
to
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Of all the giants who dominated
arthouses in the '50s and '60s, Michelangelo Antonioni may have suffered the
most from the passage of time—not because the years have passed him by, but
because they've caught up with him. How much hold does Blow-Up's toying
with illusion and reality possess when The Matrix is presented as
popular entertainment? Is it possible to be upset by L'Avventura's
portrayal of the dissolution of monogamy and idealized love after the general
indifference with which the public treated the Lewinsky scandal? It may be
that, as the chief cinematic prophesier of the collapse of centralized meaning
and tradition, Antonioni is now too much our contemporary to achieve the same
impact he did in the past. That said, you won't find the total immersion Antonioni
frequently achieves—finding the best possible common ground between the
spellbinding and the tedious—anywhere else, so it's nice to see the video
premieres of two of his least-seen films. Released in 1957, the formative Il
Grido finds Antonioni, like Fellini at the time, still shaking off the
influence of neo-realism by making a film that looks toward both his influences
and his future. After receiving news that the husband of his lover (Alida
Valli) has died in Australia, mechanic Steve Cochran asks her to marry him.
When Valli refuses, Cochran gathers up their child and a few possessions and
hits the road. A prototype for alienated drifters to come, though notably set
apart by social class, Cochran moves through one dreary, impoverished post-war
Italian landscape after another, striking up untenable relationships with a
succession of women before beginning the journey home. If Antonioni's
assuredness isn't yet in place, Il Grido remains a key transitional
work, with remarkable photography, fluid camerawork, and a typically
unforgettable finale ranking among its most notable virtues. Important in
establishing Antonioni's Italian reputation, Il Grido arrived shortly
before the director found international acclaim with L'Avventura; by
contrast, 1982's Identification Of A Woman arrived as that reputation
began to shrink, in part the result of the ambitious but financially
disappointing video/film project The Mystery Of Oberwald. Rarely
screened in this country, having lost theatrical distribution after disastrous
early reviews, Identification now looks every inch the Antonioni film,
though it's a bit more aimless than usual. Combining the concerns of L'Avventura
with the feel of The Passenger, it features the latter's coolly surfaced
cinematography, air of low-intensity paranoia, and concern with the
slipperiness of identity. If it lacks the same effectiveness, it still offers
expected pleasures along the way. The story of (self-indulgence red flag number
one) a film director and his affairs with two beautiful women (number two), Identification
Of A Woman finds Antonioni still viewing love as a near-impossibility, even
among middle-aged men and mysterious chic women. Whether you find his use of a
science-fiction fantasy sequence involving a cheap-looking spaceship flying
toward the sun an effective symbol or a laughable bit of bathos should
determine your reaction to the film, which is unmistakably Antonioni in both
its best moments and its worst.
ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
BEYOND THE CLOUDS (Al di là delle nuvole)
Italy France Germany
Antonioni's first film in ten
years, and it's like he's never been away. This is European art cinema as it
used to be known: composed, stately, meditative, in every sense formal.
(Modernism looks better than ever, now it's so old fashioned.) The film tells
four stories - four potential films in the mind of director Malkovich (the
linking material is by Wim Wenders) - in Italian, English, French, music and
silence. Four brief encounters are imbued with concerted philosophical and
spiritual gravitas by the grace and patience of the camera: 'I only discovered
reality when I began to photograph it,' muses Malkovich. Antonioni has always
been one to exercise his metaphoric droit de seigneur, and women may
feel uncomfortable with the intensity of the director's gaze here, but it makes
for entrancing cinema.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
As the director's surrogate in Michelangelo Antonioni's Beyond The Clouds, John Malkovich talks about his compulsion to keep making movies, explaining its roots in a belief that beneath each image lies another that's closer to reality. The compulsion part is undeniable: The 83-year-old Antonioni (L'Avventura, Blowup), who suffered a 1985 stroke that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, came back a decade later to direct the film, with German compatriot Wim Wenders (Wings Of Desire) serving as a standby for insurance purposes. But beneath the pristine images in Beyond The Clouds lies not reality so much as the emperor's clothes, the empty modernist strokes of an artist with a dried-out palette. Based on short stories from an Antonioni collection titled That Bowling Alley On The Tiber, each of the film's four parts is introduced by Malkovich through pretentious, Wenders-directed interludes. The first, about a maddeningly oblique encounter between two beautiful young people (Inés Sastre and Kim Rossi-Stuart), is a sign of things to come. Though mutually attracted, they spend a regretful night in separate hotel rooms; three years later, they meet again by chance, but rather than make love, he leaves her strewn naked on the bed, presumably satisfied with the memory of her untarnished beauty. The next two are no less remote: One with Malkovich drawn to a "character" (Sophie Marceau, also naked) acquitted of stabbing her father 12 times, the other with Peter Weller as a married man who continues a three-year love affair with a younger woman (Chiara Caselli, again naked), while his wife (Fanny Ardent) meets another man (Jean Reno). Only the last segment, about a stranger (Vincent Pérez) infatuated with a convent-bound Catholic woman (Irene Jacob), has traces of Antonioni's magic; one line, when she rebuffs his love by saying, "It would be like lighting a candle in a room full of light," is as close to real emotion as the film ever gets. An exquisitely composed softcore glossed in blank philosophical musings, Beyond The Clouds could be a parody of a European art film. Despite his limited faculties, Antonioni seems very much in control of his craft, as he reduces an all-star cast to listless pawns in his grand, obscure design.
All Movie Guide [Tom Wiener]
Beyond the Clouds hardly seems the
work of an 83-year-old man who has suffered a debilitating stroke, though it
does come off as the film of an older man: contemplative, rueful, even playful.
With the help of his wife (who communicated to the crew and actors verbally for
her speech-impaired husband) and colleague Wim Wenders
(who is credited with the prologue, epilogue, and entr'actes), Michelangelo Antonioni
offers four stories about chance encounters that may lead to love. As in his
best films, Antonioni
masterfully portrays the yearning for meaning beyond simple physical coupling,
and by dealing four variations on the theme, he's able to sustain interest
without seeming repetitive. The most effective of the four stories are the
opening and closing episodes, both involving slow dances of seduction with
similar outcomes, but for very different reasons. (In the closing story, Irène Jacob's
reply to Vincent Perez's
"Can I see you tomorrow?" has to be one of the great blow-off lines
in screen history.) John Malkovich,
who plays a stand-in for Antonioni in
the film's framing scenes, and Sophie Marceau
are an intriguing couple in the second episode, but their encounter is too
sketchy to register. Peter Weller
and Fanny Ardant
can't seem to bring any real conviction to their tired roles of the disaffected
bourgeois couple, though Ardant and Jean Reno do
get in a wonderful exchange at the end of the story. Approaching her, he says,
"There's a cure for everything." Entering his embrace, she replies,
"That's what disturbs me." The film is packed with Antonioni's
visual signatures, particularly in his use of doors and windows as frames
within the frame of the screen. And it does feature a lovely scene between Marcello Mastroianni
and Jeanne Moreau,
who come off much more animated than they were over 30 years before in Antonioni's La Notte.
Finally, in a scene presumably directed by Wenders but
clearly under the influence of Antonioni,
the film closes with a crane shot up the side of a hotel with peeks into four
rooms, a shot that, as one critic noted, actually recalls Ernst Lubitsch.
Not two directors you'd find mentioned in the same sentence, but there are
definitely moments in this film where Antonioni is
almost as playful as his predecessor, without losing his own famous touch.
Nitrate Online [Gregory
Avery]
Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
The Village
Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Film Journal International (Peter Henné)
Beyond the Clouds Michael E. Grost from Classic Film and
Television
Apollo Guide (Christabel Padmore)
Boxoffice Magazine Bridget Byrne
Boston
Phoenix [Jeffrey Gantz]
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Transformed
by Obsession, Heart, Mind and Soul Stephen
Holden from The New York Times
THE GAZE OF MICHELANGELO (Lo Sguardo di Michelangelo)
aka:
Michelangelo Eye to Eye
Perspective has always been a bigger key to the work of Michelangelo Antonioni than almost any other director. For all this wordless short seemingly entails - looking around Rome's San Pietro at what's left of the wall tomb Michelangelo Buonarroti made for Pope Julius II - you could just visit the cathedral yourself, but Antonioni's gift has always been opening up a new world through the way he sees and experiences life. As always, much of the screen time is spent lingering, in this case on various aspects of Buonarroti's Moses. Antonioni not only reveals the texture, form, grandness, and imperfections of the marble statue, but, in his first screen performance, compares and contrasts it to his own body, particularly focusing on the intense knowing but unknowable gaze their inability to speak renders far more enigmatic and profound. Both may have seen better days, as shown by the shots of their aged bodies, but are also more fit than we've seen them in a while through the deception of modern technology that has restored them. Part of the what makes Michelangelo Eye to Eye special is Antonioni, partially paralyzed by a wheel chair confining stroke in 1985, "walks" for the first time since the tragedy. It could be argued that Antonioni aggrandizes himself through comparison, but the correlation shows the grandness of the still imposing sculpture, marked by some age spots but still shimmering as a whole, triumphing over the frailty of the decrepit skin and bones that caress it. In typical Antonioni fashion, whether the architecture is natural or artificial, it still has a way of dwarfing humans who believe they control it. Of course, like all Antonioni the film refuses to fill in the blanks, asking far more than it answers and haunting the audience by finding ways to force them to ponder the possibilities and mysteries of life.
Antonioni 2004: Lo Sguardo di
Michelangelo Jonathan Rosenbaum and
Enrica Antonioni from Rouge
Strictly Film School Acquarello
EROS
directors: Michelangelo Antonioni – The Dangerous Thread
of Things (Il filo
pericoloso delle cose)
Steven
Soderbergh – Equilibrium
Wong
Kar-wai – The Hand
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
A title like "Eros"
promises much -- something sexy, earthy and cerebral. Wong Kar Wai's tale of a
tailor's apprentice and his unspoken devotion to the tempestuous mistress (Gong
Li, imperious and vulnerable) in 1950s Shanghai
The
Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Anthology
projects always sound much better than they turn out to be. Yet more often than
not, the entries are halfhearted throwaways or half-formed riffs, not unlike
the B-sides that some bands toss onto charity compilations. Even so, Eros
seems like an especially strong idea: It's a triptych of erotic-themed short
films directed by contemporary giants Wong Kar-wai and Steven Soderbergh, and
nonagenarian master Michelangelo Antonioni. But the auteurist feast turns out
to be a paltry spread, with one director on autopilot, another playing it safe,
and the last apparently working on assignment for the European Red Shoe
Diaries. Proving the rule that it's hard to make onscreen erotica look
remotely sexy, the best of the three (Soderbergh's entry) succeeds by being
brazenly anti-sexy—he didn't ignore the assignment, exactly, but he ties it up
in deft comedic neuroses.
Separated by
lovely painted interludes featuring a lilting Caetano Veloso score, Eros
opens with Wong's The Hand, a characteristically ravishing yet oddly
rote chamber piece that seems like the runoff from In The Mood For Love.
Set almost entirely in an elegantly decorated room, it centers on a
sophisticated courtesan (Gong Li) who makes a strong impression on her tailor
(Chang Chen) when he overhears her pleasuring one of her clients. Chen's love
for Gong goes unspoken and unrequited, but things change when the two meet
again years later under different circumstances. The first collaboration
between Wong and Gong pays homage to the Chinese beauty with lighting that
caresses her features, but the ambience carries too much of the load.
Perhaps
knowing that he could never out-art Wong or Antonioni, Soderbergh opens his
brisk, amusing Equilibrium with a faux-erotic dream sequence, then
backtracks to a psychiatrist's office, where two lonely sad-sacks can only
think about being somewhere else. As the dreamer, Robert Downey Jr. babbles on
the couch about the woman of his fantasies, but he's tortured with guilt about
it because he's happily married. Meanwhile, his psychiatrist Alan Arkin
pretends to listen, giving the occasional "uh huh" as affirmation,
but he mostly peers through binoculars at a woman in the neighboring building.
Working from his first original script since Schizopolis, Soderbergh
writes dialogue with the pungent snap of a good one-act play, and his
dialed-down ambitions make a good foil to the entries of his more art-damaged
peers.
Both Wong
and Soderbergh dedicate their films to Antonioni, but to say that the aging
Italian icon has lost the old magic doesn't begin to account for the
pretentious calamity that is The Dangerous Thread Of Things, which is
just as nonsensical as its mysterious title. Based on a short story from Antonioni's
book That Bowling Alley On The Tiber, the film listens intermittently to
the bickering between an Italian sexpot and her American boyfriend. But before
long, topless women on beaches and under waterfalls permanently distract
Antonioni, who ogles them for some obscure symbolic reason that only he and his
most hardened devotees understand. Note to future omnibus producers: Try to
save the best for last.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
indieWIRE
[Nicolas Rapold] with responses from
Kristi Mitsuda and Nick Pinkerton from Reverse Shot
The
Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
PopMatters Zach Hines
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
Too
hot for the White Plains Times!
Bryant Frazer from Deep Focus
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Chuck Aliaga)
eFilmCritic.com (Peter Sobczynski)
China-Underground Cina Oggi
Thoughts on Stuff Patrick
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob Vaux]
Strictly Film
School Acquarello
Being There
Magazine [Nathan Williams]
Washington Post (Ann Hornaday)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Movie Review |
Sex, Sex, Sex, Seen Through Experienced Cinematic Eyes A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Aoyama, Shinji
TWO PUNKS (Chinpira)
Chinpira/Two
Punks / Chinpira Aaron Gerow from The Daily Yomiuri
Played by the likes of Tsuruta Koji, Takakura Ken or Sugawara Bunta, yakuza in movies are usually made-of-steel, superhuman macho heroes who coldly stare death in the face and fight for honor and gang tradition. If these heroes express emotion, it is within the confines of the melodrama of duty versus friendship, of emotional excess repressed by obligation and the demands of being a man.
The two gangsters featured in Aoyama Shinji's new film Chinpira/Two Punks effectively reject this identity by refusing to formally enter a gang and become a yakuza. They remain "chinpira," punks who live on the fringes of the gangster world without ever receiving from the boss the traditional sake cup that makes them official gang members.
Looking like a third-rate salary man, the slightly dumpy Michio (Dankan) has reached his
mid-thirties without ever joining the mob, confessing fear about life as a
yakuza. Yoichi (Osawa
Takao), the wild country boy from
The two run an illegal bookie joint on behalf of the gangster Otani (Ishibashi Ryo). But far from accepting the rules of the gang, Yoichi steals Yoko (Kataoka Reiko) away from Otani's lieutenant Masao (Terashima Susumu). And against his own better judgement, Michio gets Otani's woman Miya (Aoyama Chikako) pregnant. The film speeds towards a violent conclusion when Otani is assassinated by a junkie and Michio, his pride hurt and hoping for a better life, absconds with Miya and the gang's money.
Two Punks is based on a script written by the legendary Kaneko Shoji that was first filmed in an altered form by Kawashima Toru under the title Chinpira in 1984, after Kaneko's death. While treating the same themes as Aoyama's version, the 1984 film, with it's tacked-on happy ending and slick stylistics, was half a heartrending buddy film and half a disco Saturday Night Fever.
Two Punks is more true to the original, though both Aoyama and scriptwriter Morioka Toshiyuki have added their own touches. What makes the film stand out is Aoyama's stylistic choices: his refusal to pull emotional heart-strings or glorify the gangster life and instead maintain his distance with a masterful long-take aesthetics and a complex, nonlinear narrative.
Yet this is not the brutally unemotional world of Kitano Takeshi, to whom Aoyama, sharing some of the same actors and motifs, has been compared. Takeshi's dead pan characters disturb us to the degree their expressions reveal no inner fear, to the extent they are externalized, inhuman masks who can arbitrarily shift from comedy to violence in the blink of an eye.
Aoyama's gangsters are more inextricably mired in the grit and grime than defines being human. From Michio with his constant stomach aches to Otani refraining from kicking a pregnant Miya, these characters experience fear, love, and frustration that are all too real.
It is Aoyama's genius that none of this slides into the mold of yakuza melodrama. One can say his decision to refrain from editing, from adding sound in crucial scenes, or from providing an easy-to-understand, linear narrative all strip the characters of contrivances, allowing them to reveal their inner emotions bit by bit by themselves. It is thanks to the excellent cast that this succeeds marvelously in the end.
The nucleus of the world of Chinpira/Two Punks is precisely the frustration and freedom of not fitting into these set patterns, of existing on the border of such categories as yakuza and straight, town and country. The circular motif, which represented the cruelty of the world in Takeshi's Kids Return, functions here as the inability to maintain such fixed identities or directions.
Aoyama has been busy for a neophyte director. Since he debuted as a director last year, he has already megaphoned two made-for-video movies, his first feature film Helpless, and now Two Punks. After viewing the latter, one eagerly awaits his third feature, which he has reportedly already finished shooting.
WILD LIFE
Wild
Life Aaron Gerow from The Daily Yomiuri
It almost feels like Aoyama Shinji has been toying with us all along. With three feature films already under this maverick new director's belt in the year since his debut, he keeps us guessing about what he will do next.
He started off with Helpless (1996), a shockingly amoral evocation of death and nihilistic youth. Then Two Punks ("Chinpira," 1996), his second movie, dropped the nihilism to beautifully etch the human side of the all-too-fallible world of petty gangsters. But just when we thought we could at least call Aoyama a "serious" director, his new "comedy" Wild Life reminds us that this is a filmmaker who still continues to roam the cinematic savanna, free of the constraints of genre and audience expectation.
It's hard to say kind of film Wild Life is--an action thriller, comedy, film noir, love story, detective flick, or experimental art film. Perhaps it's best to call it a jigsaw puzzle since this film comes out of the box all scrambled up and out of chronological order--a story that we, like the jigsaw puzzle-loving hero, have to put together.
The pieces are this: the former boxer Sakai Hiroki (Toyohara Kosuke)
is the right-hand man of a pachinko parlor owner named Tsumura Kenzo (Mickey Curtis). One
day, Tsumura mysteriously disappears, leaving Hiroki and Tsumura's daughter Rie
(Natsuo Yuna) to figure out what happened. In what might be a related turn of
events, Hiroki is confronted by a peanut-munching
Battling these hoodlums with his hands and solving the mystery with his brains, Hiroki also enlists the help of a couple of foreign hostesses and a gay cop to get to the bottom of a sordid tale of police corruption and revenge--all the while falling in love with Rie.
However, this is not the order in which the events are told. Aoyama's deft editing pulls us from one point in time to another and his bravura camerawork sometimes gives us two temporalities in the same shot (a technique also used in Two Punks). We move in and out of different points in the tale like on a narrative roller coaster. It is like witnessing a fine pachinko machine at work.
But Wild Life, as its name implies, is by no means a cleanly ordered film. Frankly, those watching probably don't know quite what to make of it. While the tension and violence of an action thriller are present, they are mixed with a comedic use of kitschy music from the forties and fifties and bizarre characters who just don't seem to take this all seriously.
However, our uncertainty over what to expect next--whether to laugh or work up a cold sweat--is, in fact, the joy of watching Wild Life.
We also don't always know if the clues we are given are crucial to the final solution. Aoyama throws a lot in our way which may or may not be significant--such as the mysterious intertitles ("Bigger Than Life," "As Time Goes By") vaguely related to other movies, or the ominous shots of a pachinko machine graveyard. In the Hitchcockian tradition, he seems to enjoy leading us on the wrong track.
Aoyama is playing with us, and we should sit back and enjoy it. The pleasure of Wild Life is in seeing professionals at work. The loyalty of the fastidiously skillful Hiroki, who surrounds himself with clocks and always maintains his daily routine, reminds one of the hero of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key, and his romantic side of Hammett's Nick Charles. The whole cast is also a joy to behold, particularly Toyohara and the scene-stealing Kunimura.
But in the end, the true master we are beholding is Aoyama Shinji. Wild Life is his cinematic funhouse, a grab bag of movie tricks and film allusions that is sure to thrill any true film buff. Having been invited to more than a dozen foreign festivals and with his fourth film already in the making, Aoyama's future is bright--only I think he'll keep us guessing as to what will come next.
AN OBSESSION (Tsumetai chi)
An
Obsession / Tsumetai chi Aaron
Gerow from The Daily Yomiuri
In only the year and a half since exploding on to the feature film scene with his shocking portrait of alienated youth, Helpless (1996), the prolific Aoyama Shinji has already turned out three more movies, including his new one, An Obsession. At a time when young directors are lucky to shoot one film every few years, if at all, the fact all four are outstanding works is testimony to Aoyama's amazing craftsmanship as a filmmaker.
Working in the gangster and action genres has helped find him work, but like the best of the 1950s American B-movie directors, Aoyama has consistently presented a personal vision between the de rigeur action scenes, one which has made him one of the most promising filmmakers today. His touch has ranged from the disturbingly cold in the violent Helpless to the comically grandiose in Wild Life. But in all his films, he has focused on the alienation of his own generation--youths without a secure sense of identity or moral values who are engaged in a desperate search for meaningful contact with others.
An Obsession is Aoyama's remake for the 1990s of Akira Kurosawa's Stray Dog ("Nora inu," 1949). The basic plot situation is the same: a cop, after losing his gun to a killer, sets out on a search for the criminal who in the end is all too disturbingly similar to the hero. Under Kurosawa's humanistic world view, Stray Dog presented the fundamentally shared nature of Japanese suffering amidst the Occupation and postwar poverty. An Obsession, however, is different.
The film begins with a fin-de-siecle, apocalyptic sense of insanity which Kurosawa's humanism could never tolerate: The detective Saga (Ishibashi Ryo) doesn't merely have his gun stolen (as in Stray Dog)--he is first shot by an assassin who had just killed an Aum-like cult leader--and then loses his gun to Shimano (Suzuki Kazuma), a nihilistic genius who is terminally ill and begins offing people not to survive, but as part of his own disturbing design.
Saga's search for Shimano is doubled by the search for human contact that both men share. After he is shot, Saga's wife, Rie (Nagashima Eiko), divorces the workaholic husband who basically never gave her a care, leaving Saga to wonder about the meaning of personal relationships. His doubts over whether two people can really come together in love are deepened through conversations with Shimano's ex-girlfriend Kimiko (Toyama Kyoko), who tells him of Shimano's conviction that love can only be proved in death.
It is these two couples, more than Saga's obsessive pursuit of Shimano, which occupy the film's philosophical center. Shimano and Kyoko represent a young generation with no place to go and no values to call their own--the only certainty they can find is in a love solely verified by the mutual decision to die. Death permeates their world and that of the streets of their town as eerie death squads dressed in anti-radiation gear travel around and execute people at the edges of the film's frame.
Aoyama sympathizes with the young couple's nihilistic lack of direction, but as in all his films, it is the confrontation with death that prompts his heroes eventually to choose life and their own moral basis for living. In the end Saga and Rie present the grim and hard, but still hopeful reality of human contact. This could be called Aoyama's humanism, the nitty-gritty fact of being fallibly human that he so brilliantly evoked in Two Punks ("Chinpira," 1996). It is not, however, the universalistic humanism of Kurosawa. In Aoyama's world, we all begin alone and must create our own morals through confrontation with death and the need for human relationships.
Aoyama thus presents in An Obsession a message both personal and generationally relevant. But if one were to find fault with this film, the least strong of the four so far, it is precisely in its philosophically schematic nature. Aoyama has a strongly allegorical side--which is is often abstract and unrealistic. He is at his best when that tendency is tempered by the grim humanity of his characters. In An Obsession, however, symbols like the death squads stand out too much as symbols, conflicting in their nature with the realism of relationships like that of Saga and Rie. An Obsession being his first original screenplay since Helpless, one wonders if Aoyama wouldn't be better served working with stories or screenplays written by a third party (as in Chinpira and Wild Life) to help tone down the allegory, and work out his own cinematic contact with the Other.
SHADY GROVE (Sheidî gurôvu)
Shady
Grove / Sheidi gurov Aaron Gerow
from The Daily Yomiuri
It is commonplace to mourn the inability of contemporary youth to communicate. Lost in their virtual realities of video games and cellular phones, they seem unable to handle people of flesh and blood--other than perhaps through random violence. It is as if they cannot establish contact because they don't even acknowledge the existence of their conversation partner.
Aoyama Shinji has always maintained an ambiguous stance toward this image. The teenage hero of Helpless (1996), like so many Aoyama heroes, seemed to confirm this media stereotype by resorting to violence as a means of contact. Yet he, too, develops a moral code based precisely on protecting others. The young man in An Obsession ("Tsumetai chi," 1997) also goes on a killing spree, which culminates in the death of his lover and himself, but that couple's demise through mutual consent represents--at least to each of them--the only confirmation of the love and existence of the other.
Always maintaining a distance from these characters, Aoyama appears to simultaneously confirm, doubt and offer a solution to problems often stereotypically viewed by the media.
This tricky stance becomes more complicated in Shady Grove, if only because, as a love romance, it is his first film without any killing. Of course, An Obsession showed that the connection between love and violence is sometimes greater than we think, but Shady Grove, with none of the noirish wit of Aoyama's other romantic film, Wild Life (1997), is closer to the realm of the trendy drama (the title sparks memories of Fuji TV's Nemureru mori).
Fujio Rika (Kurita Rei) is a bright young woman so set on marrying her ideal (i.e., rich, tall and handsome) boyfriend Ono Seiichi (Sekiguchi Tomohiro), an up-and-coming executive, that she descends into an almost neurotic state of shock when he suddenly dumps her. Drunk one night, she begins calling people randomly on her cell phone, until one, Kono Shingo (Arata), finally responds. But she seems unable to follow the advice that he or self-help books give; she confronts Ono at his apartment, threatens to commit suicide and hires a private investigator to follow him.
Not only Rika, but also Ono and Kono are extremely self-centered. Rika is so set on her plans that she ignores Ono's input; when Ono finally decides to marry her, it is only because it is necessary for promotion in his company. Kono, a publicist at a movie distributor, is so unsure of himself that he takes the extreme opposite tact of insisting he is always right.
These may not be the rampaging teens of Helpless, but these yuppies still seem to conform to the stereotype of solipsistic and uncommunicative young Japanese. Aoyama's assertion, however, is that even these three problem cases can find a solution by coming to terms with their own identities through recognizing how others see them. Just as Rika uses her cell phone, the bane of contemporary youth culture to many, as her means of reaching out, Aoyama insists today's youth can establish their own communication if given the chance.
Even this solution, however, would be trite if Aoyama had not decided to throw a couple of wrenches into the works. For instance, 80 percent of Shady Grove (mostly the scenes showing the everyday life of the characters) is shot on digital video, giving a grainy quality that Aoyama has associated with his view of reality. Against these images, the film presents scenes of the eponymous grove shot on 35mm film, functioning as a dreamlike place of repose that first Rika, and then Kono, desire. This apparent reality-vs-dream opposition becomes complicated at the end when Rika and Kono finally unite in the forest (a place from Rika's childhood itself supposedly bulldozed under years ago) in a crisp 35mm film image. Is their union--and their solution--then dream or reality?
Another problem is that the narrator of the movie, speaking throughout about the internal states of Rika and Kono, ends up being the voice of the private investigator who could not possibly know such things. This impossibility at the center of the film's narration reflects Aoyama's ambiguous stance, spanning, as it does, the real and the unreal, the conventional and the unconventional, as well as the often contradictory genres of trendy drama, social problem movie, comedy and art film.
What, then, do we make of Shady Grove? Much of the dialogue seems like something we have heard before, but Aoyama skillfully shoots it with slow camera movements or long takes that give us the opportunity to work with the film on our own rather than have the director's views imposed on us. Shady Grove works if we can take the images and relate them to our own lives. It is our cinematic opportunity to define ourselves through the lives of others.
EMBALMING (Enbamingu)
Embalming
/ EM/Enbamingu Aaron Gerow from The Daily Yomiuri
First a head is lopped off, then a scantily clad beauty gets sliced in two, and finally everything ends in a dance of blood and knives. It is de rigeur for a horror flick and clearly as fake as it can be. Did you ever meet someone who really thought Janet Leigh was stabbed to death in Psycho?
Horror films, however, maintain their long-standing popularity through a play between this fakery and reality, prompting a suspension of disbelief that allows us to vicariously enjoy the bloodshed while all the while knowing it's not authentic.
But what do you do with a horror film that makes little effort to trick us
into thinking this is real? This is a question that came to mind when watching
Aoyama Shinji's Embalming.
As the crude, B-movie-like title suggests, this psycho-thriller is full of the
grossly excessive, but not much is done to make us accept it nevertheless.
The plot itself borders on the comedic: Murakami Miyako (Takashima Reiko) is an embalmer called in by her detective friend Hiraoka (Matsushige Yutaka) to take care of the body of Shindo Yuki (Masao Masatoshi ), the 17-year-old son of a prominent politician who apparently committed suicide. But after she fixes him up, someone sneaks into the morgue and steals Yuki's head.
An investigation leads in directions that strain credibility: an organization that trades in body parts; a powerful religious cult headed by a former doctor who hopes to "reset" people's personalities like a computer; a legendary illegal embalmer named Doctor Fuji (Shiba Toshio) who may be Misako's father; a girl with multiple personalities who was not only the lover of Yuki but also of his secret twin brother Kuniaki. Et cetera, et cetera.
Everything ends in a mess of infidelity, incest, corruption, dismemberment and multiple murder, but under Aoyama's distanced direction, it remains as fake as it can be, from the lengthy embalming of Yuki done in close-ups, to Doctor Fuji's mobile embalming room, to the back-screen projection used in some of the car scenes.
The uninitiated might write this off as poor, low-budget filmmaking, but Aoyama, with superior films like Shady Grove and Wild Life (1997) under his belt, is too immensely talented to be dismissed like this. As the use of back-screen projection indicates (the old practice of projecting filmed street views behind actors when filming a car scene), it seems Aoyama has chosen to make Embalming this way. But why?
One possibility is that he was intending to create a tongue-in-cheek parody. Certainly not a few people laughed during the press screening I attended. But I feel Aoyama's style is too neutral for this film to succeed as satire.
Another possibility is that Aoyama is leveling a critique at the recent spate of psycho-horror films brought on by the success of The Ring ("Ringu") and The Spiral ("Rasen") double feature. While some entries in the cycle have been interesting, most were all flash with no substance, reeling out the tricks for scaring the audience but offering them nothing else. By refusing to use these ruses, Aoyama seems to be distancing himself from this kind of cinema.
In fact, it does seem Embalming is Aoyama's statement on cinema. The
film in fact reminded me of the view of Hitchcock offered by the critic
Shigehiko Hasumi (who was one of Aoyama's teachers and is now president of
Aoyama clearly refuses to play the recent horror movie game. Others can try to convince us that someone just got killed, but Aoyama reminds us that death, except in the rare documentary, is impossible in cinema - and that we know that. Film is too complex to merely become an endless show of hiding the basic facts of cinema and reality.
In that sense, Embalming is a welcome intellectual caution against a certain trend in Japanese cinema. But it doesn't exactly work as entertainment. What Aoyama, and Hasumi before him, seem to have forgotten is that Hitchcock's psycho-suspense films are also profound explorations of the manipulative power of cinema, of the sadism and masochism inherent in filmmaking and viewing. By remaining neutral throughout Embalming, Aoyama reveals cinema's fakery without reminding us of its frightening power.
EUREKA
Japan France
The most emotionally devastating film of the year, hauntingly powerful, serene, filled with long, drawn out silences, with superb acting performances by the adult bus driver and the two children, a long, carefully crafted, well focused film that slowly builds to an extraordinary climax
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Shinji
Aoyama's "
The
"interior road movie," as Aoyama described it, is now the finale of
the Shooting Gallery's third series and it surely would never have found a
distributor without them.
Sad-eyed
Koji Yakusho (from "Shall We Dance") is Makoto, the withdrawn bus
driver who returns home two years after the shattering incident but finds
himself unable to connect with his family.
The
other two survivors, teenage schoolboy Naoki (Masaru) and his younger sister
Kozue (Aoi Miyazaki), have been rendered mute since their mother abandoned them
and their father died. They've simply holed up in their family home.
"I
ran away from home," Makoto confesses at their doorstep in a scene at once
hilariously understated and heartbreakingly sincere. "Can I stay with
you?"
Joined
by their garrulous cousin Akihiko (Yohichiroh Saitoh), a vacationing college
kid who shrugs and accepts the odd little situation, they form an unusual,
undemanding family unit doing their own thing on the fringe of the community.
When a series of murders rocks the small town, Makoto buys an old bus and takes
them on the road to search for peace, redemption and a new route out from the
past that still holds their future hostage.
"
The
pace is measured but never dawdling, always keyed into the rhythms of character
and the pace of a life disconnected from the race of modern society.
Aoyama's
monochrome images are filled with a simple shadowy beauty and his scenes are
rich in tender sensitivity and empathy.
At
three hours and 37 minutes, it's a haunting, sublime film that demands patience
but rewards with grace.
Can a movie that's twice as long as ordinary movies still be small? Such is
the conundrum posed by "
As mainstream movies all over the world melt together into one smirking, ass-kicking blur, independent cinema is also converging, albeit in a much different fashion. Borrowing both from Hollywood genres like the thriller or the western and from the "village film," directors from literally every continent are exploring the bewildering, dislocating and sometimes liberating effects of global culture on isolated provincial life. So "Eureka," with its vision of Kyushu, in rural southwestern Japan, as a society traumatized by sudden violence, uprooted from the past but not quite Westernized, belongs to a tradition that extends far beyond Japan (although Shoei Imamura's "The Eel," an even more mysterious and elegant work in a similar vein, is a good starting point).
In this sense, "Eureka" belongs on a list with Canadian director
Atom Egoyan's "The
Sweet Hereafter" (and many of his other films), French director Bruno
Dumont's extraordinary "The Life of Jesus" and
"L'Humanité," Iranian master Abbas Kiarostami's "The Wind Will
Carry Us" and almost anything by Senegal's Ousmane Sembène, the founding
father of African cinema. "Eureka" even belongs, to stretch the point
a little, with some of the wealth of new films from the Chinese-speaking world,
like Edward Yang's masterpiece "Yi
Yi" or Zhang Yimou's "Not
One Less." (Anybody who tries to tell you that world cinema outside
the grasp of the
All that said, "
Still, you can believe -- as I do -- that Aoyama could have shortened his film by up to an hour without sacrificing anything important and still respect the fact that he is clearly obeying his own instincts, his own sense of rhythm. He wants you to live with emotionally shattered bus driver Makoto (Koji Yakusho, who also played the enigmatic hero of "The Eel") and the motley, de facto family group he assembles around him. We watch them fall asleep in front of the TV set and conduct one-sided arguments about octopus dumplings. We learn how thorough Makoto is in washing wet cement off trowels and shovels, and how Japanese bus drivers navigate that country's narrow roadways in reverse gear (with the aid of tiny video cameras on the back of the bus). In the always-controversial task of making the movies seem like life, Aoyama has succeeded brilliantly; like life, his movie will still be here if you doze off or sneak out for coffee or a bathroom break.
Aoyama has made several previous
features, although this is the first to gain international attention, and he is
most striking as a visual stylist who combines long, spacious takes, grand
vistas of unexceptional scenery and surprisingly economical editing. Cinematographer
Masaki Tamra shot "
When a demented passenger on Makoto's bus pulls a gun,
stages a hijacking and begins to shoot the other passengers, we see the action
only in unsettling fragments. The final shootout, in which Makoto survives and
the bus-jacker (Go Riju, another young Japanese filmmaker) dies, is filmed from
a great distance away, as if we were watching a news broadcast from behind the
police lines.
This event, which would be the climax of an ordinary movie, is only the
prelude to "Eureka," which picks up again two years later when
Makoto, divorced by his wife and thrown out by his family, shows up on the
doorstep of Naoki and Kozue (real-life brother and sister Masaru and Aoi
Miyazaki), teenage siblings who also survived the hijacking. Although the
film's events are presented in a strictly realistic mode, Naoki and Kozue's
situation is clearly symbolic: They don't speak, their parents have died or
disappeared and they live by themselves in a fussy, Western-style house piled
waist-high with dirty dishes and fast-food containers. I have no idea whether
this is consciously intended as an allegory about
Beneath the leisurely progress of "
By the time Makoto buys an old bus and decides to take his foursome on a
road trip aimed at exorcising their evil memories, you'll most likely have
figured out where they're headed. (It's the same destination as all human
voyages, actually.) Still, the delight and the exasperation of "
Chicago Reader Fred Camper
Senses of Cinema (Jared Rapfogel)
DVD Times Noel Megahey
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
Film Journal International (Peter Henn)
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Mark Peranson
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
New York Times
(registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Apted,
Michael
THE UP SERIES – made for TV
Great Britain 1964 to the present, every 7 years
7 Up! (39 mi)
1964 d: Paul Almond
7 Plus Seven (52 mi)
1970
21 Up (100 mi)
1977
28 Up (136 mi)
1985
35 Up (123 mi)
1991
42 Up (139 mi)
1998
49 Up (180 mi)
2005 co-director: Paul Almond
56 Up (60 mi)
2012 co-director: Paul Almond
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
The inexorable progression of
life has long become the true subject of the Up Series, Michael Apted's
ongoing work-in-progress that every seven years checks in on a dozen people
randomly picked in their childhood back in 1964 as "a glimpse of Britain
Ten Greatest Films of All Time Roger Ebert (excerpt)
* "28 Up." I have very particular reasons for including this film, which is the least familiar title on my list but one which I defy anyone to watch without fascination. No other film I have ever seen does a better job of illustrating the mysterious and haunting way in which the cinema bridges time. The movies themselves play with time, condensing days or years into minutes or hours. Then going to old movies defies time, because we see and hear people who are now dead, sounding and looking exactly the same. Then the movies toy with our personal time, when we revisit them, by recreating for us precisely the same experience we had before. Then look what Michael Apted does with time in this documentary, which he began more than 30 years ago. He made a movie called "7-Up" for British television. It was about a group of British 7-year-olds, their dreams, fears, ambitions, families, prospects. Fair enough. Then, seven years later, he made "14 Up," revisiting them. Then came "21 Up" and, in 1985. "28 Up," and next year, just in time for the Sight & Sound list, will come "35 Up." And so the film will continue to grow...42...49...56...63...until Apted or his subjects are dead. The miracle of the film is that it shows us that the seeds of the man are indeed in the child. In a sense, the destinies of all of these people can be guessed in their eyes, the first time we see them. Some do better than we expect, some worse, one seems completely bewildered. But the secret and mystery of human personality is there from the first. This ongoing film is an experiment unlike anything else in film history.
Slant Magazine [Ed Gonzalez]
Predicated on the
Jesuit maxim "Give me the child until he is seven and I will give you the
man," Michael Apted's Up Series began in 1964 with the lovely Seven
Up!, a 40-minute production by Granada Television directed by Paul Almond
(Apted was only a researcher on the film) about 14 children from all over
England and their dreams of the future. An anthropological study of human lives
taking shape over the course of 42 years, the series begins with the primitive
shot of children making their way through a jungle gym. These adorable British
tykes talk about their girlfriends and boyfriends, engage in innocent gay
behavior, and share their naïve thoughts on the world. Shaped by the unseen
adults in their lives, these tiny men and women share opinions that are
alternately amusing, unfortunate, and sublime (asked by the narrator what he
thinks of rich people, one boy replies, "Not much"), and as such much
of the allure of the series is watching how these ideas will evolve in
relationship to their changing cultural climate, a notion unintentionally
impacted by the humorously sinister "World in Action" logo that
closes the film.
The older the subjects
of Apted's experiment in behavioral evolution become, the more seriously they
grapple with issues dealing with money, politics, God, race, sex, and
everything in-between in Thatcher-day England, all notions Apted conflates
throughout 7 Plus Seven and believes originate from everyone's very
specific place in Britain's class system. The flashbacking technique employed
throughout the Up Series is part of each film's dialectic approach and
is alternately compelling and cumbersome. In 21 Up, for example, Bruce
Balden speaks to the camera, but not before the interviewee is introduced by
glimpses from his life as captured in the previous two films. Though this
technique may prove wearisome for anyone who isn't watching these films seven
years apart (indeed, an argument can be made that Apted's audience should probably
experience the world at the same time his subjects do), the stacked nature of
the flashbacks fascinatingly evokes life as being propelled by a domino-like
social mechanism.
It's during 21 Up
that the motley crew of interviews reveal themselves to be Apted's harshest
critics, strangely—sometimes cruelly—questioning the social and entertainment
value of the series. One could say "expectation" is the overriding
theme of the third film and that their harsh criticisms point to their shock at
seeing themselves as pawns rooted in an "indestructible birthright." Seven
Up scene-stealer Neil Hughes becomes the series' tragic figure in 21 Up,
and throughout this film and the rest of the series his economic instability
and disappointment with life could be seen as a result of his refusal to be
confined to a predetermined caste system. While others are getting married and
having children, the good-hearted Neil—who says he failed to get into Oxford in
21 Up (a tragic moment echoed time and again in the later films)—is now
homeless and resigned to a life without children for fear they'll inherit his
loneliness.
The 14 subjects of the Up
Series came together as a group only twice, and by the end of 28 Up,
three will have dropped out of the project. In much the same way that that the
remaining 11 participants grapple with disillusionment, their reconcilement of
the past, and their relationship to their own children throughout 35 Up,
death is very much on their mind throughout 42 Up. Their parents are
beginning to die, and in their children they begin to see dreams Apted charted
in earlier films that somehow slipped away from them (one man can't even
remember the child he was in Seven Up). Just as the series' three
dropouts lose sight of their role in Apted's moral plan and its contribution to
world cinema and human culture, two subjects acknowledge their conjoined
lifeline, become best friends, and as a result a life is forever changed. It's
in this one heartbreaking moment that Suzie's line about not being able to change
what we're born into begins to disintegrate.
The
Up Documentaries Roger Ebert
Documentary Films .Net
[Bryan Newbury]
The Village
Voice [Michael Atkinson]
49 Up | Film | Movie Review |
The A.V. Club Noel Murray
DVD Verdict [Jennifer
Malkowski]
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
COAL MINER’S DAUGHTER
USA (125 mi)
1980
Beautifully acted
(with Spacek winning an Oscar) rags-to-riches biopic of Country & Western
singer Loretta Lynn, here working her way from the Kentucky coalfields, via the
Grand Ol' Opry, to superstardom. For all the modern gloss, what with poverty
and nervous breakdowns it's still highly conventional stuff, but lovingly
constructed to produce unremarkable but heart-warming entertainment.
Turner Classic Movies Mary Anne Melear
What could be a more authentically American subject for a
movie than Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), the movie biography that
chronicles the life and times of Loretta Lynn, one of country music's most
beloved singers? Ironically enough, the film was directed by a Brit - Michael
Apted - yet it offers an insider's point of view that feels honest and true to
the country music scene and Lynn's career.
Sissy Spacek received an Academy Award for her performance as the legendary
Nashville superstar, who rises from the poverty of rural Kentucky to become the
reigning queen of country music. The film begins with Lynn's adolescent years
when she was living with five siblings in a small shack in rural Kentucky while
her father struggled to support them through his work in the coal mines. When Lynn
is just fourteen, she meets her future husband, Doolittle Lynn (played by Tommy
Lee Jones), who is substantially older and more experienced than Loretta,
having left their community, Butcher Hollow, to serve in the army.
The two fall in love and soon marry, leaving their humble beginnings in search
of less life-threatening work. Recognizing his wife's musical talent,
"Doo" gives Loretta her first guitar and encourages her to write and
perform her own songs. Soon the couple begins pedaling Loretta's tunes to any
radio station that will play her music, often performing live in the studio.
Eventually Lynn scores a hit record which effectively launches her career and
brings her into contact with country star Patsy Cline, who becomes a close
friend and mentor to the naive young singer.
While Coal Miner's Daughter is saddled with some of the expected cliches
of the musical biopic, it also refuses to sugarcoat the more painful aspects of
Lynn's private life and how fame and fortune can wreak havoc on ordinary relationships.
Though not entirely factual - the film does take liberties by glossing over
Lynn's drug abuse and mental breakdowns - the movie is based on the
autobiography of Loretta Lynn. And the singer herself was involved in the
shooting, often conferring with cast members and offering her perspective on
her life in between scenes.
The one element that consistently holds the film together is the music of
Loretta Lynn, which, surprisingly enough, is performed by Sissy Spacek. Among
the songs performed in the film are "You Ain't Woman Enough to Take My
Man," "You're Looking at Country," "I'm a Honky Tonk
Girl," and the title tune. Unlike other female musical bios where the lead
actress lip-syncs to the original recordings (Ann Blyth in The Helen Morgan
Story, 1957), Spacek skillfully interprets all of Lynn's songs in the
movie, proving that she could have had an alternate career in music. For that
matter, so could Beverly D'Angelo as Lynn's friend, Patsy Cline, who also does
her own singing in the film and does a memorable rendition of "Sweet
Dreams." Still, Spacek is most humbly grateful to Lynn, who attended the
Oscar ceremony in 1980. After thanking her as "the woman who gave me all
that hair," Spacek told the press: "Just to be nominated makes me
feel like a real actress. I used to watch the Oscars growing up, so all this is
like a dream come true, like living out a fantasy."
DVD Talk [Stuart Galbraith IV]
An honest and utterly engrossing
movie biography of country music star Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner's Daughter
(1980) works in unexpected ways. It shatters hillbilly stereotypes while mostly
eschewing the conventions of the musical biopic, and its offbeat and inspired
casting offers no less than four great performances that few had anticipated.
Only in its more familiar (if no less interesting) third act does the picture
falter somewhat; even so, it's still one of the best films of the 1980s.
Adapted for the screen by
Kentucky-born Tom Rickman (The River Rat, The Reagans) from
Lynn's autobiography (with George Vecsey), the film traces the future star's
child-bride romance in the backwoods of Kentucky with Doolittle Lynn (Tommy Lee
Jones), who married Loretta (Sissy Spacek) in 1948, when she was just 13 years
old. Doolittle, known to Loretta as "Doo" but to everyone else as
"Mooney" (owing to his days smuggling moonshine), having fought in
France during the war and far from the confines of the Appalachian Mountains,
wants more than life there has to offer. As whiskey runner Lee Dollarhide
(William Sanderson) points out, Doo has just three options in the backwoods
community of Butcher Hollow: "coal mine, moonshine, or movin' down the
line."
Despite a promise to Loretta's
father (Levon Helm) never to move his daughter far from home, Doo packs his
bags and heads for Washington State, sending for Loretta after he's saved up
enough money. They have several children, but life there isn't much better. He
gives her a guitar as an anniversary present, and soon realizes she has a
natural talent as both a songwriter and a singer, and together they embark on
building her a career.
Coal Miner's Daughter is a revelation in several respects, not the least
of which is how well it dramatizes the difficult (but not always unhappy) life
in the hills of Kentucky. Lynn's family lives in a house with no electricity,
no running water. There's not even a dirt road leading up to house, just a
brush-covered path. A package from Sears & Roebuck with new shoes for all
the children is considered a Big Deal, and Lynn's father scolds one of the kids
for messing with the radio - they simply don't have the money to buy a new
battery.
The community isn't the cliched
poor-but-happy-sharecropper type. Rather, and this seems to reflect Lynn's own
approach to life in general, is one that takes the good with the bad. She and
her neighbors enjoy a night out at the local grange where they dance and
auction off homemade pies. Later, when Loretta and Doo pursue Lynn's music
career, they are charmingly naive and ambitious, and the equally quaint,
back-room studio atmosphere of the industry of the period (one cramped homemade
studio nails sleeping bags to wall to control the noise) is endlessly
fascinating.
Lynn apparently asserted her rights
when Universal optioned Coal Miner's Daughter, personally selecting an
initially reluctant Sissy Spacek to play her and Brit Michael Apted (the Up
series, The World is Not Enough) to direct. She picked Apted on the
grounds that as an outsider he wouldn't approach the material with preconceived
notions about hillbilly life, unlike Americans exposed to years of Ma & Pa
Kettle, Jed Clampett and Hee-Haw. Apted's background making television
documentaries was an obvious asset as well, and the look of the film is
astonishingly authentic. The overall look of these scenes, as reflected in Ralf
D. Bode's cinematography, vaguely recalls the Robert Altman-directed, Vilmos
Zsigmond-photographed McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971).
The inspired casting sticks to
non-stars like Tommy Lee Jones, The Band's Levon Helm, and Beverly D'Angelo (as
Patsy Cline). Spacek and Jones hail from Texas, Helm from Arkansas, and most of
the rest of the cast consisted of locals like Phyllis Boyens (as Loretta's
mother), all of which adds to the verisimilitude. Except for Jones's
unconvincingly-dyed red hair (they might just have well have left it its
natural color) the film strikes no false notes.
D'Angelo was singled out for
praise for her few scenes late in the film, but this is as much the result of
Rickman's script, which subtly references Cline throughout, her songs
frequently heard in the background on car radios and the like. By the time Lynn
finally meets her, the character has been so built up D'Angelo mostly just runs
with what was a great part. Still, it's a shame the actress didn't reprise the
character for the Cline bio Sweet Dreams (1985).
Spacek won a well-deserved Oscar
for her mesmerizing transformation. So many of these musical bios feature
better-established stars playing dress-up, imitating rather than inhabiting the
characters they play, but Spacek really is almost like an extension of the real
Loretta Lynn. Helm is equally fine as Loretta's father; if not for his
familiarity as a musician many probably would have assumed he was another
non-actor plucked out of a Kentucky coal mine for the part. It's no wonder the
film has the cult following it has, or that the line between the manufactured
reality of the film and the real Lynn (still performing at 70) have, for many
fans, become blurred. Even Lynn herself confesses that the film so frequently
nails the essence of her early life, especially her parents, that she hasn't
been able to sit through it since its initial release.
Until its last act the film
avoids the cliches of such movies, largely by honestly depicting both Doo and
Loretta in unglamorized, non-sanitized terms. It avoids turning Doo into the
dead weight other movie biographies of female celebrities often resort to, and
he's shown to be instrumental to Lynn's success. Ultimately, it's their
difficult but lasting romance, combined with the mixed emotions Lynn feels
toward her early life of poverty, rather than her career as a country music
star, that is the heart of the picture.
DVD Times Gary Couzens
Reel.com DVD review [Tim Knight]
KQEK DVD Review [Mark R. Hasan]
UTK Daily Beacon [Kelly Volpe]
Cinema de Merde: Movie Rental Review
filmcritic.com Christopher Null
Southern
Fictions Coal Miner's Daughter, Honeysuckle Rose, and
The Night the Lights Went Out
in
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
FILM/DVD;
Loretta's Early Years, Tough as Ever
Stephanie Zacharek from the New
York Times, letter to the editor: LORETTA
LYNN; An American's Tale
ENIGMA
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "enigma : how to stay awake"
Michael Apted has a fine, honourable TV career as the brains behind the seminal 7 Up series. But as a movie-maker he’s barely third rate. There’s no way to tell whether Robert Harris’s novel – a fictional drama based around the real-life code-breakers of wartime Bletchley Park – has the makings of a decent movie or not, such is the deadeningly respectful way in which this “director” brings it to the screen.
23 years ago he tried to a similar trick with Agatha, another claustrophobic, fuzzily incomprehensible costume ‘thriller’ concocted around actual early-20th-century events, and he got away with it, thanks to the miraculous Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Agatha Christie. This time, despite sterling work from Northam and Winslet, it’s clear Apted hasn’t advanced a single inch in the intervening two decades. He’s such a careful pair of hands he was even entrusted by the Broccolis with their oh-so-priceless James Bond-shaped Ming vase.
The Bond connection is the most interesting thing about Enigma – just
as Agatha featured a young Timothy Dalton as Christie’s boorish husband,
here Northam shows once again why he’d make the best ever 007, oozing suaveness
as the Secret Service agent dispatched to Bletchley on the scent of a potential
traitor. All roads seem to lead to a missing blonde bombshell named Claire (Burrows),
chief cause of genius codebreaker Tom Jericho’s (Scott) nervous breakdown. The
only person
It’s all grindingly laborious stuff, borderline watchable as a low-wattage
thriller but unsuitable for any closer scrutiny. While Winslet and Northam
inject what pep they can into Tom Stoppard’s constipated script, their efforts
are stranded within an essentially bogus product. Scott is worryingly
convincing as the tormented brainbox – his eyes often look like they’ve been
boiled in their sockets. But what’s his accent doing, oscillating wildly
between
Trouble is, the real Turing was homosexual, and the persecution he suffered
led him to a genuinely tragic suicide, the nature of which is way beyond
anything covered in this relatively anodyne, conventional treatment. The way
Turing was dealt with during his lifetime was a national disgrace, and this
movie is hardly a step in the right direction. There’s a street in
Author Robert Harris has the dubious honor of writing great books that are made into mediocre movies. Fatherland, his masterful alternate-history thriller set in a victorious post-war Nazi Germany, was turned into a well-cast but clunky HBO movie. Enigma, his second WWII-era novel, suffers much the same fate. Director Michael Apted and screenwriter Tom Stoppard boil down Harris' complex tale into a handsome but unfulfilling suspense drama more suited to a quiet evening on PBS than a night out at an AMC.
Suddenly, the Germans change their codes, just as the Allies' largest convoy
enters U-boat-infested waters. Tom Jericho (Dougray Scott),
However, if
Even though that's already a lot of plot, further complications make Enigma's final half a corker of a thriller. Regrettably, much of what comes before that isn't nearly of the same caliber. The lion's share of the first hour is about as exciting as sitting in the library. There are countless shots of men in tweed coats concentrating on pieces of paper, but Apted and Stoppard give nary an insight into these characters' well-honed thought processes. It's hard to get excited about people breaking codes if we haven't the foggiest idea how they're doing it. Even worse, there's zero explanation of the functions of the "bombe" machine, a primitive computer used to decipher the Enigma code; we just see a bunch of wheels whirling around, and that's that.
Then there's the immature romance between
Thankfully, the clumsy dramatics fade as the intrigue compounds.
If Apted and Stoppard don't quite live up to the promise of Harris' book,
then Enigma's cast most certainly does. Scott is perfect as
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
d+kaz . intelligent movie reviews [Daniel Kasman]
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Ruthless Reviews ("potentially
offensive") Jonny
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
digitallyObsessed! DVD Reviews Dan Heaton
DVD Verdict
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Enigma Chris
Fujiwara from the
Washington Post [Michael O'Sullivan]
Los Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THE POWER OF THE GAME
The
Power Of The Game David D’Arcy from
Screendaily
Michael Apted's new documentary, The Power Of The Game,
is a film with a thesis: how football creates a global bond among countries. It
also serves as an illuminating reflection of internal tensions within each
country that plays the sport, even the
The earnest
celebratory documentary has vivid local scenes which examine the
particularities of the game in individual countries as they pay tribute to its
global reach, yet it seems destined for TV rather than for the big screen. In
the
Beyond that its reach
might be stronger, although as we move closer to the 2010 World Cup in
Although there is
plenty of match footage – sometimes balletic, sometimes violent, almost all of
it from television broadcasts – Apted's inquiry probes the world behind the
game. For South Africans, football – once all-white - is a measure of the
country's emergence from decades of apartheid.
For Americans,
football is viewed as the reverse application of globalism, the slow acceptance
of a foreign sport, starting with school play and moving haltingly up to the
professional level. (The
In
The characters that
Apted follows in the various strands of his stories are fascinating. An Iranian
woman sports journalist, who was a protester for women's rights 20 years ago,
won a small victory to be allowed to enter the stadium in
Apted shifts deftly
between dazzling match highlights and the eloquence of his interviewees. His
film is almost always a pleasure to watch, but his subject turns out to be much
larger than his documentary can accommodate. He succeeds in celebrating a sport
that is already well-celebrated but is less successful at exploring the
challenges that the sport faces.
The Power Of The
Game also notes accurately
that football can be a platform for racist demonstration, including some
footage of the gruesome side of this problem. Yet there are barely any scenes
of football hooliganism, a recurrent problem in
Araki,
Gregg
Film Reference Robin Wood
Of the heterogeneous group of
young gay filmmakers currently lumped together under the term "New Queer
Cinema," Gregg Araki is arguably the most challenging and audacious. The
very titles of the three films that have received a limited theatrical release
and secured him a reputation (The Living End, Totally F***ed Up, The Doom
Generation) suggest the impulses that drive his work: anger, desperation, a
sense of imminent apocalypse, a passionate and reckless romanticism. A possible
motto for his work might be the famous line "Freedom's just another word
for nothing left to lose." The films have been labeled
"nihilistic." To anyone truly alive to the realities of contemporary
life (not only gay life), they might equally be found inspirational.
Nihilism means a belief in nothing; it should never be confused with pessimism.
Araki's passionate commitment to his characters ("totally f***ed up"
as their lives may be) is anything but nihilistic.
Araki's aesthetic allegiances are
clear already in The Living End: its subtitle, "An Irresponsible
Movie," refers (if somewhat esoterically) to Hawks's Bringing up Baby,
but the most obvious influence is Godard—the early, anarchic Godard of Breathless,
who also lost no opportunity (as both critic and filmmaker) to express his
commitment to the more subversive of the Hollywood
genres. The film also introduces the themes ("radical" in every sense
of the word) that propel Araki's work: gay life in the age of AIDS, human life
at the end of western civilization. The question, What can one still find to
live for in a world in which there really is "nothing left to lose"?,
generates the extraordinary fury, intensity, and desperate humor of this film
and its successors.
Just as The Living End can
be seen as a loose remake of (or gay variant on) Breathless, so Totally
F***ed Up (the asterisks are Araki's, not imposed by censorship) relates
structurally to Masculin, Féminin. But Araki's characters are no longer
"the children of Marx and Coca-Cola": they inhabit the desolate
landscape of America
The Doom Generation (subtitled "A Heterosexual Movie," it
could only have been made by a gay director) is Araki's most fully achieved
statement to date. Because he does not make overt political statements,
one should not assume that his films have no political meaning. Apocalypse is
expressed in The Doom Generation not only in the running gag of every
storekeeper charging $6.66, or in the "Welcome to Hell" of the
opening. It is there in the fleeting landscapes through which the characters
pass: the clouds of smoke, the graveyard of wrecked cars—the destructiveness
and detritus of Capitalism. Araki himself has drawn a comparison (favorable,
and quite rightly) between his film and Kids. Larry Clark's kids are
mainly treated as passive objects for his gaze, the gaze expressing
simultaneous desire and repugnance. Araki identifies with his kids up to
the hilt, without ever glamorizing or idealizing them. He knows and they know
that they are living near the endpoint of the decline of western civilization,
that they have no viable future and nowhere to go (his next film is titled Nowhere),
but he loves them, believes in their impulses, and allows them authentically to
find each other, while Clark's kids just meanly manipulate.
Araki himself has insisted that
the film is not nihilistic. Nihilism is what Capitalism has brought us to, and
a stand against it is becoming increasingly problematic, but Araki (the true
rebel, unlike, say, Lynch and Tarantino, whose alleged "audacities"
merely reinforce contemporary alienation) is exempt from it. The Doom
Generation actually achieves, immediately before the climactic bloodbath,
the realization of a utopian sexuality: the three characters, having
progressively cast off all the bourgeois constraints and inhibitions
(including, importantly, squeamishness about bodily functions), have by the end
of the film not only all fallen in love with each other but are able to accept
the fact, without jealousy or possessiveness. The essentially obsolete
patriarchal notion that fidelity can or should be judged in terms of sex
finally disintegrates.
The culminating bloodbath (the
most terrifying I have ever seen, perhaps deriving from, but outdoing, the
murder at the end of Looking for Mr. Goodbar), whatever the narrative
motivation, seems precipitated by the image of the three having sex together,
two males, one female, each loving the other two: the image of the
not-to-betolerated. The bloodbath itself juxtaposes two images of "America America America
The Doom Generation was clearly a hard act to follow, its ending
marking a terrible finality. Araki's work since has been, so far, perhaps
inevitably, disappointing. Nowhere is precisely where his next film
takes us: extremely complicated beside the pared-down directness of the
previous films, relentlessly inventive in its multi-character plot and its
elaborate set design and color-schemes, the impression it leaves is of
emptiness, as if all the passion and rage of the early films had been spent,
leaving only a kind of decorative doodling. The Doom Generation created
its own world, but that world existed in relation to the actualities of
contemporary so-called civilization; the world of Nowhere is
determinedly hermetic, all outside reality excluded. Splendor marks a
return to the three-character film, but, despite its amiable actors and its
efforts to be disarming, it is ultimately even more discouraging. Explicitly
based on classic screwball comedy (remaking Design for Living but
drawing more widely on screwball conventions, such as the heroine rescued at
the altar from the "wrong" marriage), its relation to its sources is
essentially parasitic. Where The Living End and The Doom Generation
used Bringing up Baby creatively, as a source of inspiration, Splendor
merely reuses conventions that have lost their force. But most artists go through
relatively arid stretches; the early works have lost none of their resonance
with time, and their achievement gives one faith in Araki's capacity for
renewal.
Gregg Araki.com official website
Unofficial Gregg Araki Site
All-Movie Guide early bio info from Hal Erickson
My
Own Private New Queer Cinema Mark
Adnum from Senses of Cinema, February 2005
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies profile
Bright Lights Film
Journal: Gregg Araki A
Conversation with Gregg Araki and other members of the Doom Generation, by
Matthew L. Severson
Gregg Araki, Roddy Bogawa, Jon Moritsugu, Marcus Hu / SFIAAFF
"Down & Dirty" Panel Discussion, Pt. 1 Michael Guillen from The Evening Class
Gregg Araki, Roddy Bogawa, Jon Moritsugu, Marcus Hu / SFIAAFF
"Down & Dirty" Panel Discussion, Pt. 2 Michael Guillen from The Evening Class
Araki, Gregg They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
THE LIVING END
Washington Post [Rita Kempley]
"The Living End" chronicles the exploits, mostly erotic and excretory, of an HIV-positive couple on the lam in what director-writer Gregg Araki snidely refers to as "the desolate, quasi-surrealistic American Wasteland." A scruffy road movie with Craig Gilmore and Mike Dytri as hunky homosexuals, this pretentious drama on alienation, anger and living outside the law recalls the punk outrage of "Sid and Nancy" and boasts of its cinematic influences -- Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol and assorted other poseurs. In case nobody notices, Araki plasters the sets with movie posters.
It's convenient that Gilmore plays a movie critic, Jon, who offers this to Dytri, as the buff hustler Luke. "You know what they say: Those that can't do, teach. And those that can't teach get 25 cents a word to rip other people's work." In this case, there aren't quarters to equal the pleasure of condemning this tiresomely nihilistic self-indulgence. Originally titled "{Expletive} the World," it is a profane gesture meant to shock and enrage. Certainly there's no other reason, not a dramatic one anyhow, for recording Luke's bowel movements. Unless Araki figures this will be something everyone can relate to.
Needless to say, "The Living End" is not for just everyone, not even lesbians, who are depicted as foul-mouthed, green-eyed man killers (Mary Woronov and Johanna Went). After narrowly escaping death at their hands, Luke, now armed with their gun, runs into a quartet of gay-bashers and shoots them dead. Jon, who is passing the scene, rescues the blood-splattered Luke and takes him home, where they make love but not before Jon tells the other man that he has just learned he's carrying the AIDS virus. "Welcome to the club, partner," whispers Luke in one of the film's few touching human moments.
Jon, a conventional sort, is infatuated by the rebellious Luke, a Valley Guy who says "dude" a lot and drinks bourbon from a Ninja Turtles water bottle. When Luke kills a cop off-screen, he persuades Jon to run away with him to the quasi-surrealistic wasteland. They swear, urinate, drink and pleasure one another in various fashions -- none of them exactly explicit. Jon's only contact with the life he left behind is a woman friend (Darcy Marta) whom he phones collect from time to time.
The relationship between the leading men begins to disintegrate as Luke becomes increasingly obsessed with suicide. Their lovemaking becomes a reflection of this awful circumstance, just as their conversations become flirtations with death. Luke's anger turns inward finally, and he attempts to destroy himself and debase the only man he ever loved. His rage is understandable; too bad the movie isn't. Crudely made and in your face, "The Living End" is mostly annoying.
My
Own Private New Queer Cinema Mark
Adnum from Senses of Cinema, February 2005
Mondo Digital also reviewing SPLENDOR
TOTALLY F***ED UP
USA
Slant Magazine [Fernando F. Croce]
Gregg Araki once described Totally
F***ed Up, his follow-up to the 1992 New Queer Cinema staple The Living
End, as a "rag-tag story of fag-and-dyke teen underground…a kind of
cross between avant-garde experimental cinema and a queer John Hughes flick."
The statement attests not only to Araki's committed radicalism, but also to his
sense of how the politics of pop culture play to alienated youth. (He probably
loved a rave from a
Godard
has always been among Araki's biggest influences, and, indeed, Totally
F***ed Up has been called his Masculin, Féminin. Vivre Sa
Vie is also evoked via the film's segmented structure, yet the biggest
stylistic shadow here may be Katzelmacher, during which Fassbinder
similarly propped a batch of young outsiders against the wall of society and
watched the resulting wreckage. The characters try to flee into their own
self-contained universes, complete with self-contained slang (jacking off to
Randy becomes "shooting tadpoles at the moon"), but the world is
always breaking in, inevitably in the form of emotional pain. Randy's tentative
romance with a potential Mr. Right (Alan Boyce) provides the film not only with
the closest it has to a narrative, but also with Araki's sense (also shared
with Fassbinder) that coming to terms with your sexuality doesn't necessarily
shield you from the agonies that often come with relationships. After all, this
is a film where a bootleg Nine Inch Nails video is reason enough to betray
another person's affections.
"Life
is shit," Andy says in one of his sunniest moments, but the nihilism is
never Araki's. In fact, for all the mumbled rants about AIDS and shitty
relationships, most of the film's tone is spiky in its compassion and humor
(due in no small amount to Behshid and Gill, maybe the funniest lesbian duo
since Helena Kallianiotes and Toni Basil in Five Easy Pieces). The total
lack of pity and condescension carries the film over its rough spots and
aimless patches. The endings of the director's Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (of
which Totally F***ed Up is the first part) may seem utterly desolating,
yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but
inescapable complexities of the world. Life is fucked up, Araki is saying, but
it is worth living.
New York Times (registration required) Janet Maslin
THE DOOM GENERATION
Littered with pop culture references and celebrity cameos,
and assuming a laughable attitude of hipster vulgarity, Greg Araki’s The
Doom Generation self-consciously strives for transgressive nihilism without
ever recognizing the sheer absurdity of its every component. Bitchy Amy (Rose
McGowan) and brain-dead boyfriend Jordan (James Duval, doing a third-rate Keanu
Reeves impersonation) are disaffected teens convinced of the world’s
hellishness, and after a chance encounter with pansexual provocateur Xavier
(Johnathon Schaech) – seemingly an impish demon in human form – leads to
murder, they become brooding lovers on the run.
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Admittedly, Araki's new feature may not appeal to all tastes,
but that does not at all diminish its immediacy and wit. This bloody road movie
about two bored teenaged lovers, Amy Blue (McGowen) and Jordan White (Duvall),
who get mixed up with the manipulative and violence-prone drifter Xavier Red
(Schaech), contains images of sickening mayhem that are matched only by the
director's inveterate romanticism. These alienated teens are TV babies, whose
notions about love and affection sound just as deep as the advertising slogans
they were reared on. Nicknamed X, Xavier adds an ambisexual challenge to the
couple's sexual diet; he adds, if you will, an X factor to the situation. Sex
with Amy is consummated quickly, but X's homosexual come-ons to
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
NOWHERE
The
Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Gregg
Araki's (The Living End, The Doom Generation) latest homage to
teenage nihilism stars James Duvall as a doe-eyed, beatific teenager set adrift
in a Los Angeles where everyone looks like a model for the Gap, talks in
second-generation Valley-ese, and devotes their lives to the stubborn and
relentless pursuit of pleasure. Duvall is madly in love with perky girlfriend
Rachel True, but is unable to deal with her rampant infidelity. Over the course
of one day, True, Duvall and dozens of other characters fuck, take drugs, get
immolated by space aliens, are raped by a member of the Baywatch cast,
await an imminent Armageddon, and generally behave in telegenic acts of
decadence and depravity. Featuring a large and kitschy cast including The
Facts of Life's Charlotte Rae, Rose McGowan, Traci Lords, Christina
Applegate, Butthole Surfers' Gibby Haynes, David Leisure, Beverly D'Angelo and
Shannen Doherty, Nowhere is by far Araki's largest and most ambitious
film, and for the first hour or so, it almost lives up to its ambition,
providing a visually stunning and oft-hilarious portrayal of an insanely
decadent L.A. on the verge of anarchy. After that, however, the film starts to
lose its bearings, as Araki drops most of his plots and focuses on Duvall's
earnest search for true love, which he comes close to finding in a beautiful
but cerebrally impaired young hunk, who of course is transformed into a
hideous, insect-like space alien by the film's end. Nevertheless, Nowhere
is Araki's most accomplished film yet, and if it never quite comes together,
it's still a wildly entertaining film.
Thoughts on Stuff Patrick
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov] including an
interview with actor James Duval
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
SPLENDOR
Who could have guessed that Gregg Araki, notorious director of postmodern, apocalyptic teen movies, would make the movie version of television's Three's Company? Changing the gender ratio to two guys and a girl, Splendor is a surprisingly high-spirited and jovial contrast to Araki's dark, sarcastic, and manic previous films. And though fashioned like a '30s screwball comedy with a distinct '90s sensibility, Splendor plays most like a color-saturated, big screen sitcom.
"Love is a mysterious and baffling thing." — So says Veronica (Kathleen Robertson), an aspiring actress in Los Angeles whose romantic drought abruptly ends one night when she meets Abel (Johnathon Schaech), a dark and handsome freelance rock critic, and Zed (Matthew Keeslar), a bleached-blond, hard-bodied drummer in an exceptionally awful punk band. It isn't long before Veronica is steadily dating, bedding, and then living with both the witty-and-charming Abel and the dumb-but-sexually-dynamic Zed. For six months, it's a kinky three-way match made in heaven. After that, however, Abel and Zed's vagabond, constantly broke lifestyles start to grate on the very employed Veronica. Enter Ernest (Eric Mabius), a successful director who falls instantly for the now-pregnant Veronica, forcing her to re-evaluate her three-way relationship and make some important life decisions before the arrival of her unborn child.
Araki has a natural gift for blending MTV-style visual aesthetics and ultra-attractive twenty-something actors into highly entertaining, sexually provocative eye candy (most successfully in his last effort, Nowhere). In his new film, he strips away some of the high-gloss visual thrills and focuses on fewer characters. The result is still engaging, though Araki's continued inability to create character depth leaves Splendor playing like The Philadelphia Story by way of Beverly Hills 90210. The film would have made a much better pilot for a risqué, made-for-HBO comedy series like Sex and the City. Granted, it's a cheap thrill to watch our attractive threesome playing a lightly sexual game of "Truth or Dare," but is it really big-screen worthy entertainment? My guess is that, like most of Araki's films, it will play better on home video.
The best thing about Splendor is Araki's comely cast, who all do their best to keep things brainlessly lively and constantly daffy like all best screwball comedies. Kathleen Robertson (Nowhere) carries most of the weight in the film as Veronica, giving a warm and inviting (albeit valley girlish) performance. Johnathon Schaech (That Thing You Do!) makes for a handsome, dapper, Cary Grant-type romantic lead as the not-so-book-smart Abel, and Matthew Keeslar (The Last Days of Disco) is both hilarious and sexy as the nimrod musician Zed. Like most Araki characters, they're clueless but fun to watch, ultimately making Splendor a breezy, sparkly diversion that melts away as quickly as a sugar cube perched on the end of your tongue.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Unburdened by the
heavy nihilism that dogged his so-called "Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy"
(Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere), Gregg
Araki's Splendor is his brightest, most tolerable work to date, a
day-glo romantic fantasy that sweetly considers the long-term possibilities of
a drunken three-way. A camp reworking of Noel Coward's bohemian farce Design
For Living, the film stars Beverly Hills 90210's Kathleen Robertson
as an aspiring actress and self-described "good girl" drawn to two
polar opposites at a Halloween rave: Johnathon Schaech, a bespectacled (and
thus sensitive) freelance rock critic, and Matt Keeslar, a neanderthal drummer
for a sub-par punk band. Robertson falls for her competing lovers equally, but
rather than choose between them, she allows both to move in and share her
affections. This sort of premise would normally bring out Araki the obnoxious
provocateur, but Splendor instead carries a bubbly, inconsequential tone
that marks a surprising and welcome change of pace. While Araki's
self-conscious dialogue still pounds with leaden irony, he continues to make
great strides as an avant-garde stylist, painting the film's appealing surfaces
with bold splashes of primary colors, eye-popping artificial sets, and a
hypnotic art-pop sound design. Were he to invest the story with the same
conviction, Splendor might have been the blissful, forward-thinking
modern romance he intended. But for all his gifts, Araki is paralyzed by cool
self-awareness, caught in the impossible position of trying to make this trio
emotionally resonate while snickering at the Three's Company phoniness
of it all. Love stories require some measure of earnestness and heart, but
Araki seems to have deposited his on the beach in The Living End, and
hasn't recovered it since.
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
A kinder, gentler Gregg Araki film?
Surely this signifies that the seventh seal has finally been broken and chaos
(in the form of giant, ant-headed alien fundamentalists) is just around the
corner. Or perhaps the bad boy of new queer cinema is finally growing up a bit.
Either way, Splendor marks a bellwether change in the way Araki presents
his vision to the world at large. Mostly gone are the stridently juvenile (and
hilarious) ripostes of his
Mondo Digital also reviewing THE LIVING END
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
MYSTERIOUS SKIN A 95
USA
While this film has a distinct look, beautifully filmed by Steve Gainer, it isn’t impressing anyone visually, instead it finds an interior voice that speaks volumes, that deals superbly with internalized pain and anguish and the awkward and strange ways we alter our harshest repressed memories. Complete with plenty of humor, I don’t know that anyone could ever see a more honest and uncompromising representation onscreen of this subject matter, as this is one extraordinary story about the aftereffects of sexual abuse, following the separate lives of two molested children. Adapted from the 1995 Scott Heim novel, there are simultaneously intertwined stories of two 8-year old kids, both on the same little league baseball team somewhere in small-town Kansas during the early 1980’s, one the nerdy worst player who sits on the end of the bench and rarely plays, and one who stands out above the rest, both attracted to and abused by their coach, who turns his bachelor pad into a children’s paradise, complete with games and snacks and everything that could lure a kid into his depraved world.
The choice of actors is impressive, Chase Ellison as the young kid whose confidence at that age is stunning, but most especially Joseph Gordon-Leavitt as that wild, aggressive kid grown up ten years later, who takes reckless chances, all the while holding everything inside, who develops a strange relationship with the perfectly cast Michelle Trachtenberg, his wacky teenage confidant who lights up the screen in each and every appearance, the only one who knows his personal secrets, who he describes when he meets her as someone he would fuck if he liked girls, but instead she becomes his most trusted cohort. Even Elisabeth Shue looks terrific as his overly flamboyant, boozy floozy mother. Brady Corbett plays the shy, nerdy kid with giant glasses, who thinks he was abducted by aliens at an early age, which is the only way he can explain his inexplicable inner feelings. Mary Lynn Rajskub becomes his only friend, perhaps the only other person in the universe more lonely than he is. His part of the story plays out in the most strange and peculiar fashion, yet by the end, it’s his sensitivity that makes this film work, so he remains at the heart and soul of this film. Along the way, they meet a mutual friend, Jeff Lihon, who dresses so freaky he’s outside everyone else’s radar, but who provides both of them with the friendship and sweet tenderness they are missing in their lives.
The film bears a strange resemblance to BOYS DON’T CRY (1999), as it deals so openly with gay subject matter, including graphic sexual experiences, as the more confident kid turns into a gay male hustler, but he seems to use sex as a way of covering up, of maintaining control over his completely reckless and otherwise fragile interior world. The narration is always interesting, as it’s achingly real, and by the end, poetic in the most positive sense of the word, appealing to the better half of our nature, searching for the redemption that may never come to so many of these abused kids. From start to finish, this film was clearly on a mission to cut through the bullshit and take us on a brutally honest journey that is emotionally devastating, as close to the real thing as any of us could possibly imagine unless this has already happened to them. The strange music by Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins is captivating, so often expanding the realm of what we are experiencing. It’s an interesting title, as the words are never referenced in the film, yet it makes perfect sense, as in so many ways, body and soul, we can become complete strangers locked inside of our own skin.
Free of the stylistic show-offery of his prior work, Gregg Araki’s magnificent Mysterious Skin charts the divergent paths of two teenagers – emotionally remote, unbearably cool gay street hustler Neil (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), and nerdy, reclusive mama’s boy Brian (Brady Corbet) – as they attempt to cope with the lingering effects of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by their Little League coach (Bill Sage). Years after their traumas, Neil remains certain that the coach’s actions were born of love while Brian, having almost fully blocked memories of the event, becomes convinced that he was abducted by aliens and falls into a relationship with a supposed abductee (Mary Lynn Rajskub). The boys exist as two sides of the same tarnished coin, one meek and the other self-assured, but both deliberately mired in a state of denial in which carefully constructed fantasies function as their primary means of expressing pain, embarrassment and anger over their pasts. Araki utilizes womb imagery, a healthy dose of signifiers regarding childhood and innocence, and his usual array of pop culture references for his fractured flashback-saturated story (adapted from Scott Heim’s novel), creating a real-and-yet-also-unreal sense of psychological dislocation. And Gordon-Levitt’s performance is nothing short of astonishing, exuding equal measures of hungry sexuality and destructive alienation in crafting an unsettling vision of teenage confusion and longing.
A founding member of the "New Queer Cinema" movement that began in the 1990s, filmmaker Gregg Araki (The Living End) has been MIA since his uncharacteristically frothy comedy Splendor (1999). With Mysterious Skin, his first film in five years, Araki has made his most shocking film to date—a disturbing and sexually graphic story of two boys victimized by a pedophile. Fortunately, it's also Araki's most accomplished and lucid film, free of the self-consciously subversive touches and disregard for narrative coherence typical of his earlier work.
Adapted from Scott Heim's 1995 novel of the same name, Mysterious Skin
is set in a dead-end
Meanwhile, Brian is attempting to unravel the mystery of the blackouts he repeatedly experienced as a child. He'd lose hours at a time and awaken with a bloody nose. At first, he assumed it to be the result of an alien abduction; he even contacts a local woman (Mary Lynn Rajskub) who claims to be an authority on the subject. Gradually, however, the aliens disappear from his dreams, only to be replaced by the Coach and an eight-year-old Neil. Desperate to make sense of his murky past, Brian reaches out to Neil for help.
Alternately bleak and mordantly funny, Mysterious Skin is also unexpectedly moving. In the past, Araki's films have often emphasized shock value and subversion at the expense of substance. All too often, the characters came across as emotionally glib hipsters and poseurs. Here, the characters reveal unexpected layers—even Brian's overprotective mother (Lisa Long), who still comes this close to being a squawking suburban caricature. The glaring exception is the "Coach," a manipulative sexual predator whose seduction of the young Neil (suggested, not shown) is chilling.
Araki also deserves kudos for his surer grasp of narrative and pacing. He skillfully cuts back and forth between Neil and Brian until their radically divergent paths unite at the conclusion.
Under Araki's sensitive direction, the cast delivers uniformly fine performances. Best known for the NBC series Third Rock from the Sun, Joseph Gordon Levitt upends his sitcom image with his brave, uninhibited performance as Neil. Corbet (Thirteen) is equally good as Brian, whose dawning awareness of the truth shakes him to his core.
Although the NC-17 rated Mysterious Skin is often quite difficult to watch, this beautifully made and haunting film is ultimately explicit without being exploitative.
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Filmmaker Gregg Araki, heretofore best known for his
numerous ragged and nihilistic coming-of-age, gay melodramas, here crosses over
from the fringes to make his most mature and penetrating drama to date.
Although he’s still transgressive to the core, Araki nevertheless creates with Mysterious
Skin a story that is psychologically rich, emotionally haunting, and
technically superior to anything he has ever done. And although the film’s
subject matter is disturbing and its outlook bleak, Mysterious Skin is
not without hope and possibility. Adapted by Araki from a first novel by Scott
Heim, the movie explores the long-term effects of child sexual abuse. The focus
of the film is not on the abuse or the abuser, but on the aftereffects and
lingering scars. Araki handles the material with a sensitivity and delicacy
that is newly apparent in his work and smooths over his usual anarchic touches
with this film’s elegant compositions and camerawork and nuanced performances.
Araki has always had a kindred sense for drawing out the emotional truths of
young adults, but Mysterious Skin marks the first time the filmmaker has
been able to shape these dramas into something that pushes beyond simple
catharsis and into the realms of compassion, understanding, and reclamation. Mysterious
Skin slips in and out of time periods to show us its
CineScene Chris Knipp
DVD Times Anthony Nield
The Village
Voice [Dennis Lim]
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
Mysterious
Skin Henry Sheehan
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
DVD Talk - Deluxe
Unrated Director's Edition [Preston Jones]
Filmmaker
Magazine Anthony Kaufman
Thoughts
on Stuff Patrick
Talking Pictures
[Howard Schumann]
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
SMILEY FACE
Smiley
Face David D’Arcy from Screendaily
Smiley Face opens as a would-be LA actress's pot-induced journey stumbles to an end, with blonde stoner Jane (Anna Faris) reflecting on the binge that, as the omniscient narrator (Roscoe Lee Browne) puts it, took a young woman "from point A to point Z."
The comedy should draw the under-30 crowd, thanks to Faris' deft blend of earnest innocence and slapstick stupefaction. Given the international reach of Faris' Scary Movie vehicles (soon to be five), Smiley Face could build on that audience in foreign markets; one might say, wherever pot is smoked.
When a stoner film relies on broad physical comedy, as this one does with its star falling down or bumping head-on into anything or anyone in her way, subtitles are barely necessary. Smiley Face also has strong home-video potential for dorm-room repeat rentals.
Gregg Araki's ninth feature is structured around an age-old
formula. A well-meaning young woman finds herself in an improbable situation –
sitting high above the ground in a ferris wheel in
The movie then flashes back to her big mistake – getting hopelessly stoned on her dour roommate's cannabis cupcakes – which triggers the chain reaction of wild misadventures as she heads to an audition and into the cruel world beyond.
There's a bit of Candide and Jane Austen in the
forthright narration, a bit of a Perils Of Pauline picaresque road-trip
from one end of
Make no mistake: Smiley Face, true to its title, is a silly movie, but not one that's stuck in hammy predictability. The farce is a step out of the stoner template of Dude, Where's My Car? and a step up from the teen-market Scary Movie comic-gore series that has earned Faris her fans.
Yet it's not enough of a step up for her to lose those fans on the way. And there's plenty of nuance in Faris's hilarious depiction of stupefaction to win her some new ones.
The lean script of gags, smoke-ingestion and blank stares from Faris was written by the actor Dylan Haggerty, which may explain the absence of explicit sex and dark gay content found in Gregg Araki's self-scripted films. Araki's direction is largely limited to directing Faris, whom the camera follows from one mishap to the next.
The palette of Jane's odyssey, shot by Shawn Kim, is mostly in the primary colors that are easy for the addled eye to recognize. Is he anticipating a stoned audience?
No money from what looks like a super-low budget wasted in John Larena's production design, as the action zig-zags through apartments, offices and other ordinary LA locations.
Just as ordinary is the film's approach to make-up. Most of the time, Faris looks as if she's not wearing any. As her character Jane would say, "No problemo." She still looks fine in a close-up, another reason why Smiley Face will be watched by those casting future projects.
Smiley Face Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
KABOOM B+ 92
USA France
Queer film fantasia at
its finest, actually shot in ‘Scope, a first for Araki who returns to his
filmmaking roots where he is constantly having a blast with this candy-colored
material where he imagines being 18 again, set from the perspective of the New
Order (not “the seminal band of the 80’s”) in the universe, where strange is
the new normal. The entire story
revolves around a single character, Smith (Thomas Dekker), a bisexually curious
college student whose dreams, everyday gay fantasies and thoughts are
embellished onscreen with little left to the imagination, where constant blasts
of lurid sexual imagery bombard the voyeuristic impulses from the audience and
pretty much typifies how college life is portrayed. It’s all about getting laid. While most students may imagine this kind of
lurid sensuality, most remain alienated and alone, isolated from the rest of
the world in the worst way, even as they hang around in groups as a cover so
that they at least entertain the possibility that they are social
creatures. Araki does wonders by turning
that common perception upside down.
Smith has a best friend, the constantly-at-his-side lesbian companion
Stella (Haley Bennett), the acid-tongued, highly sarcastic art student that
invites him to a party where he immediately sees two women he’s never met
before, but seen in a constantly recurring dream. One, the voluptuously beautiful Lorelei
(Roxanne Mesquida, from Catherine Breillat films), immediately goes home with
Stella while Smith, who sees the other dreamgirl only instantly, the mysterious
Red-haired girl (newcomer Nicole LaLiberte), is grabbed by London (yes she’s
British, Juno Temple, daughter of documentary filmmaker Julien Temple), where
both have near surreal sexual adventures, where Lorelei amusingly has
supernatural powers where she casts a spell on her sexual partner to prolong
the bliss in bed while London is simply every guy’s dream, as she won’t stop
until her partner is completely satisfied.
This little montage of sexual satisfaction is hilarious, as at 18,
that’s
Adding to the intrigue
is Smith’s roommate Thor (Chris Zylka), seen in an opening dream montage, a
blond surfer dude with marbles in his head for brains, exactly as Smith likes
them, he fantasizes, but Thor insists he’s straight, while an amusing theme
recurs throughout the film where this declaration is constantly in doubt. Out of nowhere, Smith imagines he was
attacked late one night along with the Red-haired girl by strange men in masks,
where she might have been bludgeoned—cut to bright red jam in a scene at
breakfast where Stella finds no evidence of any crime, but according to
Smith’s investigations
reveal cult-like symptoms in what is perceived as normal society, where an
interesting family secret escalates to grotesque behavior, where the world is
run by an L. Ron Hubbard style guru who seeks world domination, yet makes dire,
apocalyptic proclamations that the end is near.
Poking fun at the acceptance of Scientology among the well-to-do in
Hollywood circles, a movement known for its condemnation and abhorrence of
homosexuality, yet accepted by a society where cult status becomes accepted as
the norm, Araki uses this prevalent theme of a world falling off its axis. While the story grows ever more ridiculous,
reaching comic book proportions of conspiracy theory absurdity, this insanity
is seen as a looming threat that is constantly menacing Smith and the world he
knows, where men in masks run a secret campaign to round up innocent victims
and make them disappear, much like the Ku Klux Klan once did, reigning terror
against their intended victims, a lawless sect using fear tactics and violence
that spread beyond the reach of the law, seen as a totalitarian threat intent upon
annihilating gays, perhaps even willing to use the New Testament as a sign to fanatically bring about ultimate doom to
the entire world, literally carrying out the wishes of a new Revelations. Perhaps only in this manner can gays be
eradicated from the earth. But much like
DOCTOR STRANGELOVE (1964), the director relishes each and every misstep, where
there are more twists and turns in this film, all shown in humorous good fun,
where the finale plays like the staging of a burlesque review, where the mad
romp into the ever wackier world of the absurd is an irreverent dash to the
finish line. This is an insanely
appealing film filled with clever twists and beautifully written dialogue that
is so outrageously over the top that one can’t help but stand back and admire
afterwards what a rollicking good time this was, and like a Sirk film, that
through the veneer of a film soaked in sarcasm and bright artificiality there
is a glimpse of something serious lurking underneath.
With Dekker’s Smith acting as our guide through a college
experience far removed from the usual fare, the feature delves into the need to
belong and the desire to be something special. Struggling with the social side
of his tertiary studies, and plagued by potentially prophetic, possibly
psychotic dreams of black doors, red dumpsters and girls he hasn’t yet met,
Smith takes a drug-induced trip into the darker side of a time his best pal
Stella (Bennett) describes as “the intermission between high school and the
rest of your life”. Encountering murder and mayhem, animal masks and insatiable
sex maniacs, witches and weird cults at every turn, Smith and his friends stumble
head first into a plot of nightmarish proportions. With the insanity filtered
through a combination of the horror, comedy and sci-fi genres, the end product
of Kaboom is
completely trashy and borderline absurd (let down by the preposterous third
act), yet also wickedly offbeat, strikingly self-aware, and truly, devilishly
funny.
Ten
Movies You Didn’t See in 2011, but Should Have Grady Hendrix from Slate, December 13, 2011
These days, movies are obsessed with violence and scared of sex, despite the fact that most of us are far more likely to have sex than get shot. Kaboom single-handedly attempts to rectify that imbalance by throwing more nubile, naked flesh at the camera than should be legal. Gregg Araki continues to refuse to act his age, turning in a wonky, college comedy about cults, the apocalypse, fluid sexuality, and lesbian witches. Thomas Dekker is a gay boy who goes to college, exchanges razor-sharp quips with his BFF (Haley Bennett), and is obsessed with his hunky roommate, Thor. Oh, and he might also be the messiah. This movie is so frank about sex, so good-natured about hooking up, and so casual about nudity that you’ll find yourself tapping your toe to the rhythm of its nonstop bonking. The world could use more movies that are this sweet and this good-natured. (Released simultaneously in 11 theaters and on VOD, it’s the highest grossing movie on this list, with a whopping $116,814. Now available on DVD.)
Kaboom Review.
Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Dave Calhoun
Winner of the inaugural Queer Palm at
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
capsule review
Strange is the new normal in Gregg Araki's splashy, squishy screwball gem, which, more than Smiley Face, has the filmmaker finding a balance between the anarchic impulses of his New Queer Cinema earlier efforts and the stirring maturity of Mysterious Skin. A "sexually undeclared" cutie (Thomas Dekker) is the guide through the movie's exuberant teenage wasteland, a college film student waiting for his 19th birthday as he soaks up sarcasm from his tart, baby-dyke BFF (Haley Bennett) and negotiates his lust for his hunky, straight, chowder-headed roommate (Chris Zylka). The polysexual hothouse beginning is really just the jumping-off point for a wacky assembly of cults, messiahs, and apocalypses, faced with ticklish aplomb by a cast that includes Juno Temple as a shagtastic party minx and, in a nearly unrecognizable cameo, longtime Araki axiom James Duval. Fusing the fleshy with the anxious (characters are constantly snapping out of humid reveries only to find ominous figures sneaking up behind them), Araki has fashioned something like the young new decade's own Repo Man.
Time Out New
York [David Fear]
The Peter Pan of queer-punk indie films, Gregg Araki has spent almost 20 years carving out his own goth-kitsch corner in teenage-wasteland cinema. If his previous two movies—the heavenly hustler drama Mysterious Skin (2004) and the super-stoner farce Smiley Face (2007)—didn’t exactly suggest maturity, they hinted that he was finally ready to move on. The director’s latest, however, takes us right back to the Araki Zone: Malleable sexuality, mall-snark as the lingua franca and eye-rolling misfits as transcendental heroes are all back with a vengeance.
Cute, awkward college freshman Smith (Dekker) spends his days nursing
a crush on his priapic surfer roommate (Chris Zylka) and palling around with
his female best friend (Bennett). Then strange things start happening: People
from Smith’s recurring dream begin showing up in real life. Men in animal masks
start stalking him. A comely British student (
For fans who’ve missed the filmmaker’s whateversville witticisms (“You got something better to do?” “Uh, sucking a fart out of a dead seagull’s ass?”), Kaboom will feel like the ’90s never ended. But while Araki has finally perfected a shoegazey visual aesthetic that’s simultaneously sensual and too cool for school, it’s hard not to feel that his reprise of yesterday’s greatest snits borders on being stuck in a rut. Even when the film eventually shifts gears and descends into glorious delirium (sapphic witches! conspiracy theories! cult sacrifices!), you can’t tell whether the director is parodying the pop paranoia of Richard “Donnie Darko” Kelly or moving in on his territory. Such giddy third acts—and one bitch of a punch line—can’t be easily dismissed. You just wish that Araki provided more of a creative big bang and less fizzle overall.
Kaboom Mark Adams at Cannes
Gregg Araki’s
marvelously mad movie has ‘cult classic’ written all over and with its
delirious mix of teen sex (gay, lesbian and straight), drugs and loopy
conspiracies it is a real audience pleaser and likely to strike a chord with
buyers aware of its breakout potential and sheer sexy coolness.
The film is a tasty blend of the culty naivety of his earlier films (such as Doom Generation and Totally F**cked Up) and the increasing filmic maturity he displayed with the impressive Mysterious Skin. Combined with a good-looking young cast and an amusing script it.
Appropriately showing in the out of competition
College student Smith (Dekker) lusts for his sexy-but-dim surfer roommate Thor (Zylka), but spends more time with his lesbian best pal Stella (Bennett) and having sex with the free-spirited London (Juno Temple, charming but with an odd mid-Atlantic accent).
After tripping on some hallucinogenic cookies at a party he finds his dreams merging with real life, and is convinced he witnesses the murder of a red-haired girl by men wearing animal masks.
His investigations lead him to sex with both men and women; find out the truth about the father he thought had died in a car crash and then getting involved with a global conspiracy involving a cult called New Order as the world threatens to explode with a ‘kaboom’!
Thomas Dekker is suitably handsome as Smith, who is never quite sure of his sexuality, but quite happy to swing both ways, though best of all is the impressive and cool Haley Bennett as his waspish best pal Stella, an actress surely destined for great things.
The film is beautifully shot in widescreen, using a glossy colour palate with all of the young stars looking darn good (handy as they are frequently naked) and stylishly costumed.
There are a whole lot of Twin Peaks influences in the loopy conspiracy story (involving mind control and psychic powers), but Araki never takes it too seriously…he is more busy having fun with his impressive cast and shooting them in various states of undress.
You can usually tell if you’re watching a Gregg Araki movie within the first few minutes. The film will open with a close up on an attractive young person – probably a man, but occasionally a girl. There will be a voiceover from the aforementioned hottie, ruminating on his/her feelings, place in the universe and tangled love life. There will also be multiple slow fades to white, arch dialogue from a cast of familiar-but-not-really-famous youngsters and a soundtrack consisting of ‘90s shoegaze and dreamy guitar pop. And lots of sex.
All of which is present and correct in Kaboom, Araki’s latest effort and a return to the type of film he was making during the 1990s, before he diverted into more serious subject matter (Mysterious Skin) and misjudged stoner comedy (Smiley Face). If you’ve seen any of those earlier films – in particular The Doom Generation, Nowhere and Splendor – then your opinion of Kaboom will already be set. More than any of his indie peers who rose to prominence in the 1980s, Araki is a divisive filmmaker. So safe to say, if you don’t care for any of the pictures mentioned above, you won’t care for this one. But for those who find Araki’s best work to be strange, funny, sexy and entertaining, then Kaboom should hit all the right spots.
This is a colourful mix of student lust and conspiracy thrills, with a vague sci-fi edge. Smith (Thomas Dekker) is a bisexual 18-year-old who has been experiencing weird, intensely vivid dreams involving two unknown girls and a dumpster behind a door. On the eve of his 19th birthday, these girls enter his life – one is an edgy French lesbian called Lorelei who has begun dating his best friend Stella – the other an enigmatic redhead who is being pursued by scary men in animal masks. What can it all mean?
That’s the ‘plot’, but while all the pieces to fall into place by
the end, this isn’t exactly a gripping mystery. The first half of Kaboom is
more concerned with generating laughs from Smith’s messy love life – lusting
after his braindead surfer dude room-mate Thor, embarking on an affair with
saucy new (female) friend
As is the way with these things, the whole cast look like they finished college some time ago, while Araki’s dialogue is heavy on witty metaphor (“it’s nuttier than squirrel shit!”) and overly-astute observation, and never once sounds like the sort of things kids really say. But unlike a film like Juno, which presented an infuriating witty teenager in an otherwise ‘real’ situation, Araki’s characters inhabit a world far removed the inanities of the true student experience. Kaboom is no more believable a slice of teen life than your average episode of Glee. But just in case we don’t get the point, Araki throws in the supernatural stuff early on, with Lorelei possessing strange powers and the animal-headed men presented as unearthly aggressors.
That all said, there is something refreshing about the film’s unprejudiced, open attitude towards sex and in particular homosexuality. Gone are the days when Araki would use his gay characters as mouthpieces for his own anger at ignorance and homophobia; at 50, he’s a mellower, more relaxed filmmaker happy just to celebrate our differences. Of course, critics might question why a man in his 50s would want to make films about teenagers having sex at all – a fair point, but for my money Kaboom has more youthful energy than anything he’s made for well over a decade.
The final third is a crazed, headlong rush to wrap up the various dangling elements of the ‘thriller’ plot that plays like a deranged spoof of sci-fi conspiracy movies. There are amusing cameos from Kelly Lynch and James Duvall (star of several of the director’s earlier films) and all sorts of ridiculous double-crosses and contrivances, before it all ends with a couple of uproariously silly scenes and the best end shot of the year. Mysterious Skin is unquestionably Araki’s best, most mature film, and I would love to see him tackle subject matter like that again. But I still had tremendous fun with Kaboom – it’s frivolous, funny and utterly disposable, and I can’t think of higher praise than that. Awesome soundtrack too.
Genuine
Anarchy Armond White from the NY
Press
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Jigsaw Lounge /
Tribune [Neil Young] - Viennale 2010 report
CANNES
REVIEW | The New Doom Generation: Gregg Araki’s “Kaboom” Eric Kohn at Cannes May 17, 2010
David Edelstein on 'Kaboom' --
New York Magazine Movie Review
Filmcritic.com Norm Schrager
Kaboom
Review | Molesting Donnie Darko | Pajiba: Scathing Reviews ... Dustin Rowles from Pajiba
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel
Murray]
Slant Magazine
[Fernando F. Croce] longer review
Sound On Sight Ricky D
Smells Like
Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Film-Forward.com [Kent Turner]
Cannes '10: Day
Four Mike D’Angelo at
In
Which We Judge The Maturation of Gregg Araki Youth
Doom Fantasies, by Ryan Linkof from This Recording,
The
House Next Door [Matt Noller]
Joe Utichi at Cannes from Cinematical, May 16, 2010, also
seen here Joe Utichi » Kaboom
Review
Guy Lodge at
Cannes
Review: "Kaboom" Anthony
Kauffman at
Anthony Kaufman Gregg Araki Goes “Kaboom”: Indie Rebel
Returns to His Roots, interview at Cannes May 15, 2010
Shadows on the Wall |
Kaboom Rich Cline
Boxoffice
Magazine [Richard Mowe]
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Cannes
2010. Gregg Araki's "Kaboom"
David Hudson at Cannes May 16,
2010
Kirk Honeycutt at
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle] also seen here: 'Kaboom'
review: Sci-fi sex comedy
Movie
review: 'Kaboom' - Los Angeles Times
Kevin Thomas
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott,
Young
and Restless Never Gets Old Dennis Lim with the director from The New York Times, January 14, 2011
'Old-School'
Gregg Araki at Cannes Dennis Lim,
which includes audio interviews from The
New York Times, May 19,
2010
Aranda,
Vicente
FATA MORGANA B 86
Spain
Poetic sense can never become common sense
In the Buñuel surrealist mode, this is a somewhat futuristic film, opening
within a comic strip, where a man accepts his assignment to serve his country
and save Yim, a beautiful model featured in perfume advertising billboards all
across town. Yim is in love with Al, who already lives with another beautiful
but extremely possessive woman, Miriam, in a very modernistic house that
features a white room, seen with two beautiful models with false eyelashes
immersed inside Salvador
The film is revealed as a fable about beauty, where all men want to possess or destroy beauty, suggesting there is a connection between every victim and his or her killer. Fear turns one into a victim, each victim has a willingness to die and is vulnerable, naked, even helpless against impending death, like Ophelia or Desdemona in Shakespeare, or Marilyn Monroe, all helpless victims. Yim stands in front of a camera being asked to speak, where she does a rendition of Hamlet’s soliloquy which is marvelous until interrupted, asked to repeat her last line, adding “I want to live,” but instructed to do it with a smile, revealing a superfluous artificiality that dominates this film. “Hysteria is always justified. Nothing ever just happens,” suggesting reality is another world from this superficiality, but that in the end, we are all victims of the superficial world.
IF THEY TELL YOU THAT I FELL (Si te
dicen que caí) B 89
Spain
Based on the Juan Marsé novel, the film opens with an entire screen filled with non-subtitled words which, I assume, explains the entire film, which was admittedly confusing, with a time frame constantly moving back and forth between childhood and the present, where the same actress plays three different roles, with a narrative that is complex, serious, and confusing. The film opens in 1970 with a car crash, followed by the coroner performing an autopsy as he describes to his assisting nun the subsequent complex series of flashbacks which involve the past of the dead man, beginning in 1940 when the young man visits a prostitute, Ramona, in one of her many roles by Victoria Abril. This scene is particularly memorable as Abril is definitely pregnant and does a nude scene with a young boy who tells her, “Don’t worry about my age, worry about my balls,” then proceeds to fuck her in the ass, beat her, and pee on her, all under the watchful eye of a paying voyeur who watches from behind a curtain. This reminded me of Greyson’s LILLIES, which similarly featured a very complicated story from the point of view of a priest locked inside a confessional, followed by frequent flashbacks going back and forth in time.
In burnt out churches or in a children’s play rehearsal, girls from a neighboring orphanage are victimized by playing doctor with the boys, tying them up, interrogating them, torturing them, playing with sex and guns and knives in what appears to be a variation on what adults around them are doing. One of the victims is Juanita, who may, in fact, be the nun assisting in the autopsy. All of this is under the backdrop of the Spanish Civil War. Using newsreel footage, we see Hitler meeting Franco in “a friendly and relaxed encounter,” before analyzing various factions of the war. The winning Fascists have all the power and the money, while the losing Communists are in desperate straits, willing to “kill all the bastards” while constantly looking for ways to rob the Fascists, “no funds, no fight,” while the church is inhabited by “the cowards who watched churches burn in the 30’s are in the churches now.”
A child in a church play takes on the role of Lucifer. As an angel is about to throw him out of
heaven, Lucifer proclaims “An eternal unease disturbs my soul,” then proceeds
to make sexual advances towards the angel.
The director of the play, a Fascist, the same voyeur we saw watching
from behind a curtain before, shivers with depraved delight. Abril plays Aurora Nin, a blond-wigged
prostitute owned by a racketeer, but she loves a resistance fighter, and also
plays another character Menchu, who gives hand jobs to patrons in the movie
theater, culminating in a terrific scene when the film ends, the audience
stands and salutes the screen to the playing of the national anthem, while the
police walk around the theater and raise people’s hand higher, slapping them in
the face to get their attention.
If They Tell You I Fell - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arango
Garcia, Juan Andrés
LA PLAYA DC C+ 79
Colombia France
Brazil (90 mi) 2012
‘Scope Official site
A dour and
stylistically downbeat film without an ounce of sentimentality shot on the
streets of Bogotá, Columbia, where La Playa is one of the poorest
neighborhoods, inhabited by black or dark skinned Colombians, a nation with the
third largest Afro-Colombian population in the western hemisphere after North
America and Brazil, where most are concentrated in northwest coastal
areas. Common to each is a disconnection
from their past histories and culture, much of it forgotten or erased in the
push for modernity, as many encounter a noticeable degree of racial
discrimination and prejudice, a holdover from the Colonial era where African
slaves were brought into Colombia by the Spaniards in the 16th century to
replace the dwindling indigenous population, where their labor was an essential
component of the gold mining industry and the sugar cane plantations. Afro-Colombians have been historically absent
from high level government positions, and many of the original coastal
settlements have also been targeted for displacement by armed guerrilla
militias in Colombia’s continuing internal conflicts over control of the
illegal cocaine markets, leading to an influx migrating into urban areas since
the 1970’s. This film marks the debut of
this 35-year old white Colombian director currently living in
The coming-of-age story
concerns a single family with three brothers whose father was killed years ago
in their hometown of
By the next day,
however, Tomás finds his older brother,
Chicago Reader JR
Jones
This Colombian mean-streets drama (2012) suffers from a rather jumbled script, but it's rescued by its easy authenticity and Luis Carlos Guevara's magnetic lead performance. He plays an Afro-Colombian teenager whose family has begun to splinter after being driven from the Pacific coast to Bogota by the ongoing civil war. His father has been killed, his ambitious older brother has just returned from Canada and may be going back soon, and his rudderless younger brother is being hunted by drug dealers after smoking the stash he was supposed to sell. Writer-director Juan Andres Arhas sets much of the action at a glassy, brightly lit mall where the protagonist works as a barber's apprentice, learning to shave designs into Afros; these attentively detailed sequences and the bouncing Afro-Caribbean hip-hop on the soundtrack are typical of the movie's vibrant street culture, which counteracts the downbeat story line. In Spanish with subtitles.
After premiering in the Un Certain Regard category at Cannes
last year, La Playa D.C. won the Best Film Award at the Lima
International Film Festival. The debut feature from Colombian writer-director
Juan Andrés Arango, it's a visually distinctive and understated tale of urban
survival. Three brothers negotiate the everyday hustle of Bogotá: caught
between feelings of responsibility for younger, drug-addicted brother Jairo
(Andrés Murillo) and his streetwise elder brother Chaco (Jamés Solís), Tomás
(Luis Carlos Guevara) navigates a fatherless adolescence with dormant anger and
resentment. The treatment of his coming-of-age arc is refreshingly low-key;
Arango's direction is gripping and quietly confident, while Nicolas
Canniccioni's cinematography employs a palette of compellingly deep violets and
icy blues - both of which seem to gradually dissipate as the film progresses,
as if the cool fronts put on by the three central protagonists are just fragile
avatars for premature masculinity.
FilmGordon | FilmFest
DC | La Playa D.C.
The 27th Annual FilmFest DC officially began tonight in earnest with a full slate of films playing at various locations in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Our first film “coming straight out of Columbia” is the gritty drama, La Playa D.C.
The film focuses on Tomas (Luis Carlos Guevara), an Afro-Colombian teenager who fled the country’s Pacific coast pushed out by the war, faces the difficulties of growing up in a city if exclusion and racism. When Jairo (Andrés Murillo), his younger brother and closest friend disappears, Tomas plunges in the streets of the city. His search becomes an initiatory journey that compels him to face his past and to leave aside the influence of his is brothers in order to find his own identity. Through this journey, Tomas reveals a unique perspective of a vibrant and unstable city that, like Tomas, stands on the threshold between what once was and what might be.
Written and directed by Juan Andrés Arango Garcia, the film is a gritty tale of love, family and brothers at various levels of resignation and acceptance. Tomas is the older brother between his stylish older brother, Chaco and his drug-addicted younger sibling, Jairo. After his younger brother disappears for a couple of months in a drug binge and suddenly returns, his mother and step-dad refuse to let him stay home and soon Tomas follows him to the street. Jairo, in debt to drug dealers for getting high on his own supply, is resigned to his demise much to the dismay of Tomas.
After Jairo disappears again, Tomas hits the streets searching for him once again. He travels north and reconnects with Chaco and the two plan to leave but only after they’ve reconnected with Jairo. Under Garcia’s direction, to paraphrase Ice Cube, every hood is the same. If you stumbled into the film with no knowledge of the geography, it would be easy to assume that this story could have happened on the streets of NYC or in Cali. Chaco (James Solis) dreams of a better life, despite cutting hair part-time and washing cars to raise money. Meanwhile, Tomas is an artist and barber who only wants to save Jairo’s life by any means necessary.
La Playa D.C. is a bleak, somber look at life on the other side of the tracks where life doesn’t always give you want you want but definitely what you need.
Eye
For Film [Michael Pattison]
Colombia’s latest cinematic export is La Playa DC, a refreshingly low-key and visually distinct work that marks debut writer-director Juan Andrés Arango as a confident talent to watch. Premiering in the Un Certain Regard strand at Cannes last year, the film tells its otherwise unremarkable tale – of adolescents on the daunting threshold of premature adulthood – with the same care and precision with which its ensemble of teenagers style outrageous designs into their hairdos.
Afro-Colombian teenager Tomás (Luis Carlos Guevara) navigates an emotionally claustrophobic, physically clustered and financially sparse present-day Bogotá, where he lives with his mother and stand-in father. Having moved to the Colombian capital from their beachside home in coastal city Buenaventura in flight from the country’s ongoing civil war, Tomás’ family is already broken: though his older brother Chaco (Jamés Solís) has returned following deportation (from, we later learn, Canada), his drug-addicted younger brother Jairo (Andrés Murillo) is still missing on the streets.
When the latter casually reappears, however, their mother’s new partner takes a firm hand, chasing the youngest sibling off; Tomás follows in pursuit. Taking up close-quarter lodgings with older brother Chaco, Tomás looks for Jairo while flirting with other interests and responsibilities, in the respective form of a teenage crush and an apprenticeship at a small barbershop in the local shopping mall.
Working with cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni, Arango directs with clarity, subtlety and sensitivity, and elicits excellent and unassuming performances from his young cast. Already displaced and made fatherless by an endless war, Tomás is a reluctant protagonist, and Guevara does well to convey dormant resentment alongside a rugged determination to hold things together. For Chaco, meanwhile, Colombia has little appeal. “Every time I come back here,” he says, “I want to leave again. This fucking country…” When Tomás finally catches up with Jairo, his younger brother is astute enough to admit that his crack addiction is in direct response to childhood displacement; smoking, he tells Tomás in the film’s most moving scene, allows him to go back to their Buenaventura home.
Arango sets up thematic riffs from the off. As a symbolic backdrop, Tomás’ passion for skilled hair styling echoes his and others’ need for purpose, focus and identity in a world that guarantees none of them. In the film’s first line of dialogue, meanwhile, Tomás’ mother tells him there is a job going as a security guard, to which Tomás responds aggressively. As it turns out, of course, stepfather Roel is a security guard, and later in the film, after he has been unjustifiably driven out of a public area by overenthusiastic security staff, Tomás imagines shooting Roel with Jairo, as if doing so would instantly solve their shared misery and restore the cosmic balance. No such equilibrium is assured, of course, and it’s to Arango’s credit that he doesn’t permit his characters the security of escape. His is an urgent and satisfying debut indeed.
La
Playa D.C. Allan Hunter
at Cannes from Screendaily
La Playa DC - Sounds
and Colours Leo Nikolaidis
PAFF
2013 Review: 'La Playa D.C.': An Afro-Colombian Coming of ... Nilja Mumin from indieWIRE Shadow and Act
PAFF
2013 Review - Juan Andrés Arango's Quietly Absorbing 'La ... Tambay A. Obenson from indiieWIRE
Senses
of Cinema – A Sense of Space: The 32nd Sundance Film ... Bérénice Reynaud from Senses of Cinema, March
2013
2012
African Diaspora International Film Festival Reviews: "La ... Chris Bourne
Fr.
Dennis at the Movies: La Playa D.C. [2012]
Dennis Kriz
Film
Intel: BIFF 2013 - La Playa D.C. - Cinema Review
LA
PLAYA D.C. Facets Multi Media
Hollywood Reporter
Neil Young
Pan
African Film and Arts Festival 2013 Spotlights ... - LA Weekly Ernest Hardy
Afro-Colombian - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Arbid, Danielle
A LOST MAN (Un Homme Perdu)
A
Lost Man (Un Homme Perdu) Dan Fainaru from
Screendaily
Somewhere, buried deep down this pseudo-road movie that moves
round in circles, there is a burning issue begging to be explored. All the more
pity that Danielle Arbid never actually comes to grips with it, though it is
pretty obvious the relations between the two protagonists, one French (Melvil
Poupaud) the other Lebanese (Alexander Siddig), are supposed to reflect in some
manner the unbearable difficulty of the relations between the West and the
Middle East.
Failing to actually
flesh out her one-dimensional characters - the French man chases women and the
Lebanese runs away from himself – she instead drags them through repetitious
situations that seem unlikely audiences will be willing to follow through to an
inconclusive the bitter end… which could have been introduced much earlier.
A first sequence
introduces Fouad (Siddig) running away from something down the embattled
streets of
Thomas offers the
mysterious Fouad a lift to
At face value, there
is nothing of interest in this tale. As a metaphor, Thomas is the depraved
Westerner sticking his nose in all the wrong places, lighting up all the dark
corners (which he does with his camera) but finally understanding and feeling
nothing because he is dead inside. For him, an experience does not exist unless
it is photographed, women are objects to be used and discarded, and a mystery
is not solved unless it is defiled. Fouad could qualify as the proud and noble
savage, pursued by a crime he did not commit. But since there is no additional
light shed on the characters, the metaphor is not taken any further.
Thomas's arrogance and
Fouad's stubborn silence are equally irritating. Poupaud's performance does
nothing to alleviate the unpleasantness of his part, while Siddig looks as if
he could have used more guidance. Early suggestions of a documentary style are
dispelled in favour of a non-descript approach and director Arbid seems at a
loss to get more out her own story.
Arcand, Denys
Arcand, Denys from World Cinema
A political and social activist from early
youth, he contributed to the review Parti Pris before studying history
at the
— Ephraim Katz, The Film Encylopedia
All-Movie Guide Jason Buchanan
His intensely personal, challenging, and intellectual films
have gained Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand
a devoted international following. A former documentarian whose understanding
of the human condition often results in movies with realistic and honest
personalities, Arcand
has seemingly cornered the market in cerebral, character-driven stories in an
era when computer-generated explosions fill the multiplexes. A native of
Following his next political documentary, Quebec:
Duplessis et Après... (1972), Arcand
graduated to feature films. La Maudite
Galette (also 1972) proved a brutal crime comedy concerning thieves,
mistrust, and greed. In his growing years as a feature filmmaker, Arcand
would alternate between fiction films and documentaries, at times combining the
two in such efforts as 1975's Gina.
A stint directing the 1985 television series Murder in the
Family found Arcand
becoming increasingly prolific, and the following year, the established
director would release his masterpiece. An academic, character-driven drama in
which a group of four men and four women explore themselves and the society
surrounding them, The Decline of
the American Empire was nominated for Best Foreign Film at the
1987 Oscars, won both best Canadian feature and the People's Choice Awards at the
Toronto Film Festival, and swept the Genies in eight categories.
If critics and audiences claimed that lightning could not strike twice, Arcand's
success with Jesus of
Montreal the very next year proved that all bets were off.
Inspired by the director's interaction with street actors who portray religious
figures by night and pursue more commercial endeavors by day, the film once
again received a Best Foreign Film nomination at the Oscars and swept the
Genies — this time in 12 categories. Arcand's
skyrocketing success in the late '80s ultimately gave way to a something of a
lull in the early to mid-'90s, and though his audacious comedy drama Love and Human
Remains (1993) did strike home with some viewers, it went
largely unnoticed in both his native Canada and the United States.
After exploring more pressing issues in 1996's Poverty and
Other Delights, Arcand
once again sharpened his knives for the social comedy Stardom
(2000). A revealing tale of a young girl plucked from the spotlight and thrust
into worldwide fame, the film proved somewhat of a departure from Arcand's
generally more serious usual fare, in that it dealt with the subject of fame in
a notably humorous fashion. After receiving generally positive reviews, Stardom
quickly faded from the box office and was relegated to life on the home video
market. Revisiting the characters of The Decline of
the American Empire in his 2003 drama The Barbarian
Invasions, Arcand
was back on more familiar ground, and the tale of a man with terminal cancer
revisiting his past took both the
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies profile
Film Reference Philip Kemp
Arcand, Denys They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Quebec
Cinema Themes and Ideology in Quebec Cinema, by Michel Houle from Jump Cut
Canadian
Screenwriter Interview by Monique
Beaudin
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS (Les invasions
barbares) A- 94
Canada France
I absolutely enjoyed this film, as it’s a very humorous and literate take on THE BIG CHILL, only instead of the guy being dead at the beginning of the film, all the friends and family gather around him while he’s lucid enough to still rant and rave about everything he’s ever read, bickering about every known philosophy, as he revisits all the people and points of view of his life in a rather bizarre and circus-like atmosphere where ideas and memories are brilliantly bandied about like they actually matter. Suggesting that in the days of yore, the role of the monarch was to protect the populace from invading barbarians, which now take the form of drugs, sickness, or terrorists, even your own children, whose ideas may seem completely foreign to you, here a dying father and his estranged son, who at one point he sweetly calls the “prince” of the barbarians, reconcile their differences when it matters the most and it’s done with affection and warmth and plenty of humor. Marie-Josée Croze won the Cannes Best Actress Award, playing a variation on the Meg Tilly role, as she grows connected to the deceased even after he’s gone, while the writer-director of the film won Best Screenplay for these wonderfully witty and vitriolic exchanges.
The
Barbarian Invasions David Denby from
the New Yorker
Rémy (Rémy Girard),
the plumply boisterous philanderer of Denys Arcand's 1986 film, "The
Decline of the American Empire," is now in his early fifties and dying of
cancer in a
The
Barbarian Invasions Michael Sicinski
from the Academic Hack
A few years back, during an argument about the scum-rabble
depiction of the sans-cullottes in Rohmer's The Lady and the Duke, my
right-wing buddy Victor
Morton urged me to "embrace [my] inner reactionary."
Okay for the distant past, or for an aesthetic challenge worth rising to, in
the case of a master like Rohmer. But any film that asks me to join in
the present-day mockery of every tenet of social theory I hold dear had better
be well-written, sardonic, and revelatory enough to generate insight amidst the
nonstop coal-raking. Instead, Arcand delivers a truckload of cheap shots
at willfully distorted targets. Rémy (Rémy Girard) is a dying, mediocre
academic, surrounded by his faded-libertine friends. As Rémy's son
(Stéphane Rousseau) keeps laying out the cash, the patriarch prattles on about
all the failures of the 60s generation, as Arcand surrounds him with grotesque
caricatures of any and every liberal social institution. In this film,
lefties and everything they stand / stood for (including, but not limited to,
socialized medicine, greater power for unions, Marxism, deconstruction, Godard,
and liberal sexual morés) are depicted as wrongheaded at best and idiotically
self-delusional at worst. What does Arcand offer in their place? Money,
xenophobia (a recurring and unproblematized motif of Islam and other immigrants
as the titular "barbarians," an implicit rebuke to multicultural
Film of the Month: The
Barbarian Invasions Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound
THE AGE OF IGNORANCE (L'âge des ténèbres) B 83
Emma de Caunes
especially has a celebrity worship syndrome in his fantasy world and can’t drop
her pants fast enough. Diane Kruger
joins him naked in the shower even as his wife is chatting nearby on her cell,
or again as a guest on a TV talk show describing how brilliant he is, while his
work supervisor, Caroline Néron, a stickler for rules who constantly finds his
work inadequate, becomes his masochistic sex slave. When his wife leaves him on a business trip
to Toronto, he hasn’t a clue how to raise two recalcitrant girls, but it turns
out they don’t need him as they have other ideas, like giving blow jobs to the
neighborhood boys. After a quick round
of speed dating, where he fails miserably to meet other’s expectations, one
offers him an interesting opportunity to return to the Dark Ages, where he can
joust for her honor, nearly killing himself just climbing into a suit of armor,
where just as he’s about to get beaten to death by a more physically imposing
opponent, he is literally saved by the bell.
This is much too difficult, risking life and limb for a girl from another
century who turns out to be something of a prude, so he attempts to move
on. But he’s such a miserable wretch
that even his fantasy girls start complaining about what a drag it is to keep
having to appear in some “loser’s” fantasies, when they could be servicing
Russell Crowe or Brad Pitt, where he then suffers the indignity of having to
witness the indifference shown at his own fantasized funeral.
After a rip-roaring
opening filled with a series of satirical sketches, with sequences running hot
and cold, the film runs out of gas about the time their marriage does, turning
on a dime into an existential look at loneliness and self worth, as he has to
finally stop criticizing others and face up to himself, where his country’s
malaise becomes his own. After all the
hilarious antics, the end is somewhat baffling, becoming as sad and downbeat as
it was initially uplifting.
And despite much bad buzz in the wake of market screenings
earlier in the week, Denys Arcand's fest-closing Days of Darkness (
)
turned out to be less of a disaster than I'd feared. The story of a Walter
Mitty-like fantasist who works for the
Reel Film Reviews [David
Nusair]
It's hard to imagine just what filmmaker Denys Arcand was attempting to accomplish with L'Âge des Ténèbres, as the movie - though infused with a few interesting interludes and a fantastic central performance from Marc Labrèche - comes off as a consistently underwhelming effort that's never even remotely as engrossing as his last effort (2003's The Barbarian Invasions). Set within an Orwellian Quebec that's been overrun by political correctness and red tape, the movie follows a put-upon civil servant (Labrèche's Jean-Marc) as he escapes from the myriad of annoyances in his life by engaging in fantasies that are primarily sexual in nature (he will, however, occasionally imagine a harsh comeuppance for his controlling boss). There's a distinct feeling of repetitiveness to much of L'Âge des Ténèbres, as Arcand hammers home many of the same points time and time again - with a particular emphasis on the government's proclivity towards wastefulness. And while Jean-Marc is certainly an intriguing figure, he's been surrounding by a series of over-the-top caricatures (including his workaholic wife and his perpetually sullen daughter). The incredibly uneven structure only exacerbates the film's various problems, as there reaches a point at which Arcand plum runs out of things for Jean-Marc to do (a seriously tedious excursion to a Crusades re-enactment in the third act smacks of needlessness). The inclusion of a few honest moments towards the film's conclusion come too late to make any real impact, with the end result a staggeringly disappointing effort from a genuinely talented filmmaker.
One of the best films of the year, Days
of Darkness takes what could be a difficult and tedious subject
-- getting old -- and makes if poignant and gripping by filtering it all
through the prism of one man's declining years as a sexual being.
French-Canadian actor Marc
Labreche plays Jean-Marc, a Walter Mitty sort with thick, coke-bottle
glasses and a mousy speaking voice, who has a mundane office-cubicle existence,
helping injured people file claims against the state in what seems to be a
near-futuristic, independent state of
It's hard to say whether the film intends to make a strong statement on that
possibility, but if it does, then it must be decidedly negative. This
futuristic
His fantasy file is thick with subjects -- there's his blond supervisor at the
office, who calls him to the carpet for every infraction and on whom he seeks
revenge by crafting for her a fantasy scene that is, to his mind, exceedingly
cruel. Specifically, he imagines her as being made the sex slave of several
large, black men who pull her around by a choker. Then there's an anonymous
fantasy brunette who acts as a sexual component to Jean-Marc's various 'success
fantasies.'
In each one, he plays a powerful man and she's a woman who wrangles a few
seconds alone with him only to beg for sex. Then there's my personal favorite
-- Diane Kruger. Jean-Marc is
obsessed with actress Diane Kruger, and saves his most romantic scenarios for
them to share. Denys Arcand
brilliantly fleshes out each of these fantasy girls with their own reality,
despite them being created by and for Jean-Marc. At one point, we see Diane
Kruger approaching the door of Jean-Marc's house, and having to stop to sign an
autograph and answer a question about working with Brad Pitt.
This would be good for laughs even if the movie had no higher ambition, but it
does. The longer it goes on, the more we worry for Jean-Marc. He's not a bad
man, but he's a desperate man and somewhat weak -- kind of like a film-noir
stooge who could be easily bowled over by a beautiful dame, should any ever
show interest in him in the real world. As he begins to sink lower and lower
into a morass of escapist fantasizing, and in turn becomes more alienated from
his wife and children, we start to wonder if there's a way forward for him.
What else does Jean-Marc have to look forward to, except another night with
Diane Kruger or once again imagining what it would be like to be a guest on his
favorite talk show? There's a long, heartbreaking passage in the film where he
attempts to find an innovative solution to that question and ends up learning
about the non-transferable nature of a fantasy life – the more intricate it is,
the less likely someone else can share it.
In that crucial passage, Jean-Marc meets an attractive woman who frequents a
Renaissance Fair, playing a running role as a princess searching for the
perfect mate. All in the service of what he thinks of as the ultimate sexual
payoff -- screwing a woman who is lost in a fantasy zone with him -- Jean Marc
goes to great lengths to lose himself in the world of lords and ladies, and
even goes so far as to put on medieval armor and joust with a fellow fake
knight while someone off to the side chats on a cellphone. What is this guy
thinking? The obvious answer, of course, is that he's just doing what men do --
testing their sexual prowess against what's possible to achieve and then using
fantasy to pick up any slack. In Jean-Marc's case, there just happens to be a
lot of slack. The mid-life crisis story is certainly nothing new, but anything
can be new if it's done with skill and style, and Days
of Darkness certainly is. The ending of this film was one of the
saddest I can remember.
CBC Arts Online
[Matthew Hays]
Screen International Dan Fainaru
AN EYE FOR BEAUTY (Le règne de la beauté) B 83
And you may find
yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself
Well...How did I get here?
Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money's gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground
And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife
Talking
Heads - Once In A Lifetime - YouTube (
Quite unlike any other
opening, the director prefaces this film with a few introductory remarks about
Canada, his home, claiming it is the most peaceful nation on earth, that there
has never been any wars fought on its territory, no revolutions, no leftist
governments, and that from other people’s perspective, a routine uneventful
life may seem boring in comparison, reflected perhaps in Canadian art,
literature, and even films. Shot over
the course of a year in order to capture all four seasons to their fullest,
Canada is known for their long cold winters, where life’s problems intrude here
as elsewhere. Whatever autobiographical
claims this film may have, it feels a bit embellished, using something of a
Hollywood hunk to play a much younger version of an artist (as a stand-in for
the director), Éric Bruneau as Luke, a successful Canadian architect in his
thirties living in Baie-Saint-Paul in the Charlevoix region of Québec in
a spectacular home in the woods overlooking the St. Lawrence River that he
designed himself. Completing the dream
and making it even more perfect is his ravishingly beautiful blonde wife,
Stéphanie (Mélanie Thierry), who keeps herself fit as a sports instructor and a
lover of all sports. While they are an
idyllic couple living the perfect life, their story is told in flashback where
a much older Luke happens to run across a mysterious woman from his past. More intrigue ensues. The rhythm of the film, however, is built
around the comforts of an upper-middle class bourgeois existence as part of a
super sophisticate Québec elite, sharing meals with friends, including lesbian
couple Isabelle and Melissa (Marie-Josée Croze and Geneviève Boivin-Roussy),
accompanied by only the finest wines, where Luke drives a flashy red
Thunderbird, sings in the church choir, while playing tennis, golf, hockey,
hunting, or skiing (shot in slow-mo montage) depending on the season, and even
finds time to grow his own pot in the nearby woods, imported, no less, from
Humboldt County, California. One begins
to appreciate the opening remarks from Arcand, as this does begin to feel like
the idyllic picture postcard version of Canadian living as reflected in a
glossy magazine spread.
Luke is invited to sit
upon an architectural jury for a project in Toronto, joking to others that he
needs the money while actually expressing a certain contempt, suggesting this
is beneath his dignity, until he shares a private moment with another woman on
the panel, the English-speaking Lindsay (Melanie Merkosky), who eventually
invites him to come stay (sleep) with her in her cottage on Centre Island, the
largest of the Toronto Islands, offering a skyline view of the
city over the water, taking a short ferry to get there. While she’s obviously more invested than he
is, he nonetheless plays the part, obviously loving the idea of being pursued,
where it’s in the code for gallantry, one supposes, that an honorable man never
turns down a woman’s offer. Perhaps more
surprisingly, both profess their love while knowing little to nothing about
each other. Having already seen the sexy
vivaciousness of his wife, both seen having sex in the nude on an isolated
beach during a holiday camping trip, this seems like a step down into something
far more conventional, as if it comes with the territory of aspiring artists,
where there’s not an ounce of chemistry between them. Still it’s a bit surprising that his view is
to feel entitled, as this romantic escapade repeats itself in time, if only
because he doesn’t have the moral fortitude to say no. Adding to the dramatic arc, Stéphanie goes
into an inexplicable swoon of depression where she literally loses her
bearings, and even tries to throw herself off a ski lift in a panic
attack. In another off-kilter moment she
throws herself at Melissa in a flurry of kisses, which she doesn’t exactly
reject. Nonetheless, despite this
suicidal episode, the changing moods, and his wife’s spiraling descent into
despair, Luke decides to play the gallivanting lover again when Lindsay is
passing through Québec. Because of the
devastating deterioration of his wife’s health, one thinks he’ll have the
decency to stay, but instead he behaves like a male in heat, giving little
thought to the negative possibilities, choosing his own destiny based upon spur
of the moment interests. Arcand films
this scene in the suspense thriller mode, offering ominous implications of what
awaits him upon his return, as if his conscience is weighing heavily upon
him.
While it’s highly
unconventional to present such a reprehensible portrait of male chauvinism,
especially when combined with career success, as Luke’s professional career
takes off during this period, but to the viewer, despite his Hollywood handsome
good looks, he couldn’t be more unsympathetic and loathsome. In contrast, however, he designs some of the
most jaw-droppingly beautiful homes one has ever seen, with clean, modernistic
interiors usually offering giant window views that coexist with the natural
world outside, where he’s designed a dream house overlooking the river for one
of his oldest contracting friends Roger (Michel Forget), but before he can live
to appreciate it, the poor man learns he’s dying of cancer. Luke spends many hours visiting him in a
hospital corridor, where he’s not even assigned to a room due to overcrowding
conditions, offering a devastating critique of the once highly lauded Canadian
healthcare system, instead he withers away on a bed in a crowded hallway until
he begs to be allowed to die in the beauty and splendor of his own home. Because of the spectacular beauty of these
meticulously designed homes, the film bears some resemblance to Paolo
Sorrentino’s The
Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza), which captures the rapturous beauty of
art, but also the callous emptiness of a human species that has lost the
ability to appreciate its elegance and grandeur. Arcand finds a similar connection between
meaning and desire, drawing an appreciation for those people we love, and the
things we own, showing a desire to possess both, where the elite sophisticated
class loves to surround themselves with objects of beauty, including, as they
get older, trophy wives on their arms, a reminder of their own lost youth,
while striving for immortality by creating works of art that will stand the
test of time. By the end we discover the
man is a serial philanderer, making a profession out of lying while concealing
his secret affairs, for which there are few, if any consequences, supposedly
the benefits of success, while he’s also the creator of some of the most
astonishing masterworks of modern architecture.
Gorgeously shot by Nathalie Moliavko-Vistozky, including
some rather stunning shots of the St. Lawrence River in the changing seasons of
the year, Arcand uses buildings designed by Canadian architect Pierre Thibault, including a series of images shown over the classical
piano music playing during the end credits of buildings that he designed, many
of which are simply awe-inspiring.
An Eye
for Beauty movie - CinemaMontreal.com
Luke, a brilliant young architect whose talent is not yet
recognized, leads a peaceful life with his wife Stephanie, instructor of sport,
in the beautiful Charlevoix region. Beautiful house, beautiful woman, loyal
friends, hunting, skiing ... a perfect life, it seems. Invited to sit on a
committee of architecture in
TIFF
2014 | An Eye for Beauty (Denys Arcand, Canada ... Angelo Muredda from Cinema Scope
“Some people are stuck in a wheelchair and they’re happy, and others want to kill themselves when their poodle died,” a ponderous Adonis muses early in Denys Arcand’s tiresome An Eye for Beauty. That’s one of many meaningless canards spouted in a film that mostly scans as a dumb almanac for the Québec elite, a squad of healthily tanned thirtysomething professionals whom Arcand is fond of framing at play in synth-heavy, slow-motion tennis montages that only barely register as satire. Érin Bruneau plays Luc, the aforementioned fount of wisdom, a vaguely dissatisfied young architect with a depressed wife (Mélanie Thierry) tucked away like Bertha Mason in his beautiful custom-made home (overlooking the St. Lawrence River, naturally),and an Anglophone mistress (Melanie Merkosky) holed up in a skyscraper in Toronto. With a beautiful wife here and a beautiful girlfriend there, what’s a beautiful architect who makes beautiful things to do?
Unable to muster much in the way of tension, thanks to that napkin doodle of a plot and a pair of sublimely wooden lead performances, Arcand shoots for the moral complexity of Éric Rohmer and ends up with lesser Gabriele Muccino: a European-styled sex drama for people who don’t much like sex. Throw in the usual Arcand jabs at public health care and political correctness and you might just call it a movie. It’s not only the thinness of the premise that rankles: everything here feels off, from the incoherent Toronto geography to the tasteful humping of the overextended sex scenes to Merkosky’s equally dreamy, Egoyan-inflected delivery of lines as disparate as “He’s been the only man in my life, until now” and “Is granola okay?” Let’s give the last word to Luc: “Hockey, hunting, even love: It’s not enough.”
Denys Arcand disappoints with his latest offering An Eye for Beauty (Le règne de la beauté). Arcand’s signature flair for capturing cultural mores and attitudes in clever language just doesn’t work this time around. For a filmmaker who seemed so perfectly on the pulse of culture in 2003’s The Barbarian Invasions (arguably the best Québécois film ever made), this latest entry feels out of touch and empty. There’s no beauty and poetry here. Only witty repartee.
An Eye for Beauty offers a mostly
straightforward infidelity drama as Arcand presents a one-night stand that
turns into a two-night affair when an architect named Luc (Éric Bruneau) leaves
his cozy home in
The second act of sexy time comes, you guessed it, when
Lindsay visits
Arcand uses a trope of pathetic fallacy to symbolize the
growing coldness of both relationships as Luc's marriage to Stéphanie becomes
as barren as a Canadian winter while the warmth of his affair with Lindsay loses
its spark. It's a nice visual effect from Arcand, but visuals and aesthetic
have never driven his films as strongly as dialogue and characterizations do,
so the meandering An Eye for Beauty
unfortunately doesn't have a titular sight to which it claims. (Although the
views of the landscape, especially the
Any redeeming qualities, however, completely perish with the film's
disastrously nonsensisical ending. An Eye for Beauty ends with an
incomprehensible development that is utterly unfathomable from such a decorated
screenwriter. (The audience at the film's premiere at the VISA Screening Room
actually required a full explanation from Arcand to make sense of the ending.)
This shoddy endnote reinforces the sense that the affair is essentially
pointless. An Eye for Beauty is a minor work from one of
TIFF
'14 Review: Denys Arcand's An Eye for Beauty - Playbac Thom Ernst from Playback
TIFF: An
Eye for Beauty Review - Next Projection
Jacqueline Valencia
TIFF 2014
Review: An Eye For Beauty | Scene Creek
Danielle La Valle
TIFF 2014
Review: An Eye For Beauty - Toronto Film Scene Matt Rorabeck
'An
Eye for Beauty' ('Le Regne de la Beaute): Toronto Review Jordan Mintzer from The Hollywood Reporter
'An
Eye for Beauty' Review: Denys Arcand's Blank Greeting ... Andrew Barker from Variety
Arcel,
Nikolaj
A ROYAL AFFAIR (En kongelig affære) B+ 92
Denmark Sweden
Czech Republic (137 mi) 2012
‘Scope Official site
Anyone who has seen a
Karl Theodor Dreyer film knows exactly what this film is about, especially the
corrupt power of the Church which in the mid 18th century still
believed in torture, heresy, and fear mongering, spreading vicious rumors to
undermine any threat to their own power, creating such a repressive, punishment
oriented society that they were viewed with disdain by the rest of neighboring
Europe which was undergoing an Age of Enlightenment, led by radical
free-thinking French such as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau that endorsed
individual freedoms over tyrannical and oppressive regimes, ideas that sparked
American independence while also leading to The storming of the Bastille, which
opened the doors of the French Revolution. But while the rest of the world was enjoying
newly discovered freedoms,
The director is known
for having written the screenplay, adapted from the Stieg Larsson novel, for
the Swedish version of THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO (2009), much superior to
the American David Fincher version, in my view, as it best captures the depth
and interior strength of the characters, which is certainly the captivating
allure of the immensely popular novel.
He has done the same here, where the film begins and ends with Alicia
Vikander, who won the Swedish Best Actress Award several years ago for her
performance in Pure
(Till det som är vackert) (2009), playing Caroline Mathilde, a gorgeous and
highly educated member of the British royal family. Reminiscent of Sofia Coppola's MARIE
ANTOINETTE (2006), her family has arranged a marriage to the young King of
Denmark, someone she’s never met, making her Queen of Denmark at the age of
fifteen, where the opening landscape sequences frame the horse-driven coaches
and the royal entourage as tiny objects at the bottom of the screen,
overwhelmed by the majestic beauty that surrounds them. To her utter surprise, the man to whom she
has been betrothed, Christian VII (Mikkel Boe Følsgaard), is mentally
deficient, not overly so to the point of incompetence, but his infantile
interests and crude, self-centered manner, subject to embarrassing outbursts,
keep him secluded behind the walls of the royal palace where the nature of his
condition is kept secret. When they
first meet, he has no interest whatsoever in marriage, but prefers the
entertainment of watching plays and spending all his time with women of the
flesh, enjoying a life of pampered decadence.
When it’s clear she has brains, talent, and much to admire, exactly what
he lacks, he angrily warns her “Don’t steal my light!” as he needs to be the
center of attention, with people constantly at his beck and call, where being
King is more a game he plays, a theatrical role he relishes, while she’s called
upon to display the aristocratic reserve and proper etiquette and manner of a
royal head of household. He
sarcastically calls her “Mommy” throughout, as she’s constantly admonishing him
for spending so much time in bordellos, eventually refusing to see him
altogether, as it’s simply a waste of time.
While this is the surface reality, there is an ominous underlying tone
in Caroline’s narration, where she is sometime in the future writing letters to
her children, explaining the horrific circumstances as to why she hasn’t seen
them. These thoughts, however, are
revealed sparingly, yet it interestingly provides insight into the
present.
Mads Mikkelsen plays Johann Friedrich Struensee, the son of a well known yet highly conservative German judge, seen as little more than a country doctor treating the poor at the outset, but we quickly discover he’s a bold and radical proponent of the Enlightenment freedoms, exactly the opposite of what his father stands for, so he keeps a low profile, writing materials anonymously. His superior intellect and elegant manner, however, lands him a position as the personal physician to Christian VII, gaining his trust instantly by being able to quote Shakespeare, becoming his friend and trusted ally, though Christian views him as his favorite playmate. Over time, Dr. Struensee wins over the royal court, having a positive effect on the King, who has fewer moments of outrageous instability, which impresses the Queen, who is struck by how he managed to sneak in censored books into his personal library, reading them all, quickly becoming intimate friends. It must be mentioned that while the King is freely screwing every harlot in the county several times over, the Queen is isolated by duty and custom, raising a young son, but leading an extraordinarily repressive existence where she has little social life to speak of. The intelligent conversations with Struensee feel like a godsend to her, a rare opportunity, leading to a scandalous secret affair. This opened the doors for radical reforms, where the King, in a stroke of momentary clarity, literally dismissed the oppositional cabinet members loyal to the Church, allowing Struensee to craft new laws, eliminating censorship, abolishing torture, free labor, and the slave trade, while assigning land to peasant farmers, reforms that captured the attention of the rest of Europe, as if Denmark had come out of the Dark Ages. When the Queen had another baby, however, almost certainly Struensee’s, it created a scandal and their brief window of freedom was coming to a close, acknowledging they underestimated the cruelty of the opposition, who began spreading vile lies and xenophobic rumors about the German’s influence, all designed to reassert what they claimed was their legitimate authority, eventually bribing their way back into power, arresting both Struensee and the Queen, sending him to the guillotine while exiling her for the rest of her life, but only after taking away her children. While Gabriel Yared and Cyrille Aufort’s lushly scored music adds elegance and depth to the proceedings, it’s a riveting tale, told with exquisite detail, perhaps overly long, but the severity of tone is in stark contrast to that brief flurry of freedom and happiness where the doors are suddenly opened to a new dawn, only to be slammed shut again, torture and censorships quickly reinstated, leading Denmark once again back into the darkness.
In 18th century Denmark, the ideas of the Enlightenment struggle against the entrenched interests of the Church and aristocracy. The lecherous, mentally ill king (Mikkel Boe Folsgaard) has married a bookish English princess (Alicia Vikander) and befriended the freethinking royal physician (Mads Mikkelsen). The doctor and the queen launch a passionate love affair — and also team up to influence the clueless monarch, who begins to rapidly liberalize the nation to the chagrin of the nobles at Court.
A Royal Affair stakes out some interesting ground in its
second hour, having to do with the practical limitations of unfettered idealism
and the ethics of using a crazy person you mostly despise to further your good
intentions. It features Mads Mikkelsen in the most straightforwardly positive
role I’ve ever seen him in, and he turns out to have an expressive
impassiveness to rival Ryan Gosling’s. It’s also, alas, precisely the sort of stultifying
costume drama the title suggests, gorgeous, stuffy, and drawn-out, filled with
klutzy historical exposition (“You’re quite a mystery Streunsee. Your father is
one of the most conservative priests in the nation, yet you spend your time
writing surprisingly provocative tracts advocating for the most dangerous new
ideas of the Enlightenment!”), scenes of people loudly demanding that other
people sign things, etc. If you’ve the patience to stick it out, there’s
eventually worthwhile stuff on offer, but be warned.
Eschewing the litany of philosophical rationalizations and
explanations for the Age of Enlightenment, Nikolaj Arcel's straightforward
biopic about Denmark's late 18th Century ideological shift, A Royal Affair
suggests mainly that it was a process of secularization overthrowing theology's
antiquated hegemony.
Moreover, what Nikolaj Arcel's impeccably framed melding of emotion and politics
depicts is how radical enlightenment proved problematic during the reign of
Christian VII (Mikkel Følsgaard).
Known for being affable, but unstable and incredibly inconsistent (read:
possibly schizophrenic), Christian's time as King was mostly artifice. Married
to British cousin Caroline Mathilde (Alicia Vikander) to keep up appearances
and fulfill obligations, he was more interested in watching plays and
fornicating with the help than performing a patriarchal role, leaving decisions
to an existing committee.
Where Affair finds its drama is in the experience of Caroline as a young
girl thrust into a miserable marriage. Sticking mostly to raising their first
son, Frederick, her passion is later inspired by her husband's personal
physician, Johann Friedrich Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen), whose underground,
radical political views eventually influence the King, with whom he has formed
an intense, albeit calculated bond.
Amidst the stunning cinematography, intricate set design and mature framing,
the overriding theme of cultural enlightenment as a mode of freedom from
subjugation mirrors Caroline's dangerous sexual awakening with her husband's
best friend and ally.
As Johann gradually manipulates the King into giving him increased political
influence, dramatically changing Denmark, much to the simultaneous delight and
confusion of its denizens, their indulgence spirals increasingly out of
control.
As much a championing and reminder of the importance of modern freedoms as it
is an admonitory for the dangers of tempestuousness and impatience in the game
of political change, this clever drama works more so in technical and theoretic
terms than emotionally.
While each character demonstrates increasingly flexible morality, ultimately
making the erratic and initially aggravating Christian the victim of this film,
the surface story of repressed passion actualized wanes, leaving the outcome
more informative than cathartic or tragic.
Still, few biopics manage to blend historical accuracy with cinematic cohesion
as effectively as this clever treatise on the dangers of overstepping your
boundaries.
Monsters
and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Steamy court intrigue, wild passion and the momentous decisions of charismatic visionaries have never had it better than this 18th Century Danish potboiler.
Mads Mikkelsen (“Flame and Citroen” and “The Hunt”) plays man-of-all-seasons Johann Friedrich Struensee, the physician who befriended their hapless lunatic Danish King Christian the VII (played to the hilt by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) and changed the world. His redoubtable lover was none other than the queen of Denmark, Caroline Mathilde (Alicia Vikander).
Nobles Rantzau (Thomas Gabrielsson) and Brandt (Cyron Melville) fabricate a meeting with the naturally charismatic and hyper intelligent Struensee. Under the guise of a penile examination (yes, that is right) the two evaluate the German doctor for his ideas, leadership and ability to place them closer to the throne. Their verdict is thumbs up and doc Struensee is ensconced as the kooky king Christian’s care provider.
At first obnoxed by the king with the permanent brain of a six year old, the doctor uses bits of clever psychology here and there to bring the arrogant and tortured young man around. After a couple of years the two have bonded and the doctor is getting very close to the thrown and even closer to beautiful Queen Caroline Mathilde. The queen has a problem with her immature husband Christian. Namely, he alternately hates her and fears her, but mostly seems to have little interest in women, in general.
This leaves the door wide open for the handsome and urbane doctor to have the love affair of a lifetime with the beautiful queen.
Of course, things could never go on like this, or what would be the point of making a film? The court boils with jealousy as displaced despots claw and scratch their way back into fighting position. As the cross hairs are leveled at the royal family, the revolutionary progress of a decade of visionary laws is put to the test. In the end, the ultimate double-cross comes from exactly where one would expect: those closest to the brilliant doctor, the innocent king and the alluring and loving queen.
Nikolaj Arcel directed this 137-minute marathon of court intrigue. It has all of the extravagant costumes, the outrageous royal carriages and the gruesome 18th century torture and execution machinery. That was a good time to be someone brimming with new ideas, especially when they were new ideas that raised the poor out of deathly poverty at the expense of the rich nobility. When one of the minority ruling class broke the rules, there was no grand jury hearing, it was run for your life and hold on to your head.
In spite of the over whelming odds, the progressive and earthshaking legal, medical and freedom of speech legislation that came out of the reign of Christian VII are documented and respected to this day. As the good doctor was ministering to the queen, he was also administering the first inoculation in Europe to the King’s younger brother, the crown prince. In doing so, he may well have saved the life of the one man who could take over the throne in the unlikely (well, maybe likely) event that something happened to the good king.
It was during this same time that censorship was abolished and freedom of speech instituted, as the streets were cleaned of filth and health regulations and procedures instituted. In spite of the terrible penalties the hapless trio would end up paying, the impact these three left on western civilization survives to this day.
A fascinating story, largely true, this film is shot in color with allegiance paid to the historical accuracy of every scene. The sets are mostly interior, tight takes that get into the minds of the scheming, desperate courtiers of that time (at this time, for that matter. At 137 minutes, director Arcel has his work cut out for himself in keeping the crown from going to sleep. However, he keeps up the pressure until the bittersweet end.
A championship performance as Christian VII by break-through actor Mikkel Boe Følsgaard who took home the 2012 Silver Bear at Berlin for Best Actor for his work in this film. Named as one of European films' Shooting Stars by European Film Promotion, Alicia Vikander also plays one of the main roles in Joe Wright’s soon to be released Anna Karenina.
The Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen has a unique and memorable
face, Sphinx-like and sculptural. All he has to do is not get in the way of it.
His new movie, A Royal Affair, is Denmark's most lavish film production
yet, but the camera spends a lot of time just dwelling on that face, which
gives us something to focus on. How Mikkelsen's character the German doctor
Johann Friedrich Struensee becomes royal physician and for a while takes over
the Danish government is one of the great mysteries in a story full of enigmas.
Struensee's rise to power is possible because the king, Christian VII (Mikkel
Boe Følsgaard), is deranged. Or is he? It's never quite clear, and this
uncertainty is what chiefly makes the film interesting -- and may distract us
from the too many other questions that also remain unanswered. Young
Følsgaard's buoyant, dashing performance as the unpredictable king is so
arresting and original it got him the Best Supporting Actor award at the
Berlinale, and he hadn't even finished acting school at the time. Obtrusive
music and conventional bodice-ripper trappings get in the way of the more
interesting stuff. But beyond the confusion there's always Følsgaard's
performance and Mikkelsen's face.
This film isn't really just about "a royal affair" any more than
Spielberg's new movie is just about "Lincoln." However it is
bookended with an autobiographical letter written by Caroline Mathilde (Swedish
actress Alicia Vikander), as the Danes called her, a member of the British royal
family who's sent to Denmark at the age of fifteen to be the queen. This point
of view and even the coach arrival and meeting have reminded people of Sofia
Coppola's Marie Antoinette. And due to Christian VII's immediate oddity
-- he and Caroline Mathilde don't hit it off -- they also mention the
Hytner-Bennett collaboration The Madness of King George. But then the
focus shifts to the doctor, whose situation takes some explaining. He's living
in Altona, which was in Germany but administered by Denmark, and a place where
out-of-favor Danish aristocrats were sent. Struensee knows some of them,
particularly Enevold Brandt (Cyron Melville) and Count Schack Carl Rantzau
(Thomas W. Gabrielsson), who share the doctor's Enlightenment ideas and have
read his anonymous pamphlets. They push him to apply for the job of King
Christian's traveling physician, hoping he can get them back to the court.
Stuensee succeeds on both counts fairly rapidly, but an hour of the movie goes
by before he and Caroline Mathilde manage their first passionate kiss.
Meanwhile there's a somewhat more convincing bromance between him and
Christian, who begins to seem more a free thinker and carouser (he likes
drinking and whores with big breasts) than a madman. Or perhaps Struensee's liberalism
just tames him. Initially the doctor is hired, in this version anyway, because
he can quote Shakespeare as freely as Christian, and the King's great
enthusiasm is acting.
Crazy or not, Christian does have a key voice in the royal council, and he comes
to love and trust Struensee so much, it's easy for Struensee to make him
"act" in introducing the laws he wants, though eventually he gets the
King to sign over all his power ("you don't like writing"). Despite
Caroline Mathilde's having had a son early on by Christian, they still don't
get along, which may explain Christian's apparent unawareness of her wild
affair with Struensee. A dip into the history indicates the adulterous couple's
behavior was more overt and tasteless than the film, in its romantic gloss,
allows. One of the film's grand scenes is a court dance with a patch of more
intimate slo-mo that makes Struensee and the Queen de facto lovers in a
sweeping and elegant way before the actual act.
There's an amusing scene where Caroline Mathilde worries Struensee by standing
out in the rain because she says it reminds her of England. But this is one of
many examples of how the film meanders too much. In this screen version the
details of the affair are only ferreted out by quizzing servants after the
Queen has a child by the doctor, a girl.
Another dip into history tells us that Struensee spoke German all the time in
doing "business" at court, and if he did that, we'd understand better
why his enemies, of whom there are soon many, as he robs aristocrats of perks
and bankrupts the country with his liberal measures, always call him "the
German" and the people come to hate him as a "foreigner."
Mikkelsen never speaks a word of German even when he's in Altona at the
beginning.
Nonetheless it's surprising how much of the history is included, parhaps too
much, though it's held together by Følsgaard's brilliant turn, Mikkelsen's
Sphinx-like yet raw stare, and the grand romantic sheen over everything,
enhanced by Rasmus Videbaek's realistically limited lighting, alternating with
glorious brilliance in outdoor summer scenes in the last bloom of the
adulterous love affair. It's even historically true that another grand ball was
under way when the doctor, Brandt, Rantzau and the Queen were arrested and taken
away. Torture and beheading of Suensee are shown, but we're spared his
behanding and other cruelties. The revelation is Suensee's 16-month reign, when
he was privy counselor and passed hundreds of liberal laws, receiving a letter
of praise from Voltaire. Then the film tells us after Suensee's removal the
country reverted to "the middle ages." But, we're reassured to learn,
Christian's son, Frederick VI -- played at 15 by William Jøhnk Nielsen, the
disapproving son in Susanne Bier's In a Better World -- grew up to
conduct a long liberal regime.
Of course there are many characters, whom I haven't mentioned, and everyone is
good. As the young Queen Alicia Vikander is sexy and fresh-faced, and she's one
of three European "Shooting Stars" in the film, but as a character
she's a bit colorless, perhaps because she's forced to be so passive and
there's not much chemistry with Mikkelsen. In real life Struensee was only 29
when he met the Queen, not 48 like the actor. Obviously it was more important
to cast the international star Mikkelsen than for him to fit the role
perfectly. And we got Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, who does fit his perfectly, and
will be fun to see again.
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
Film-Forward.com [Kent
Turner]
Spectrum Culture
[David Harris]
Digital Journal [Sarah Gopaul]
Paste
Magazine [Annlee Ellingson]
Slant
Magazine [Andrew Schenker]
MovieMetropolis
[Michael Hiscoe] Blu-Ray
DVD Talk - Blu-ray
[Thomas Spurlin]
DVD Verdict
(Blu-ray) [Gordon Sullivan]
Blu-ray.com
[Casey Broadwater]
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
The
Spinning Image [Graeme Clark]
Hollywood
and Fine [Marshall Fine]
The
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
A Royal Affair | review,
synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Cath Clarke
A
Royal Affair: A mad king, a sex-starved queen, a Danish delight ... Liam Lacey from The Globe and the Mail
Review: A Royal
Affair - Reviews - Boston Phoenix
Peter Keough
'A
Royal Affair' dresses up nicely - A&E - Boston.com Ty Burr from The Boston Globe
Just
your everyday 'Royal Affair' | Boston Herald James Verniere
Critic
Review for A Royal Affair (En kongelig ... - Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Mads
Mikkelsen, sexiest man in Denmark, stars in 'A Royal Affair ... Ann Hornaday from The Washington Post
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
Age of Enlightenment -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Johann Friedrich
Struensee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Archer,
Cam
SHIT
YEAR
USA (95 mi)
2010
CANNES
REVIEW | A Non-Linear Labyrinth: Cam Archer’s “Shit Year” Eric Kohn at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17,
2010
Ellen Barkin puts on a bold, candid performance in Cam Archer’s “Shit Year,” but the enigmatic movie is composed of too many fragments to sustain her efforts. An experimental account of fictional actress Colleen West, this obsessively non-linear character snapshot never settles down and consequently loses focus. The sum of its parts is both imaginative and emotionally remote.
Shot on grainy 16mm, the black-and-white story drifts around through several disconnected parts, all of which put Barkin front and center. While she constantly displays a rawness and depth to the character, the big picture never comes together. It appears that Archer had too many good ideas without a proper strategy for stitching them together. Colleen emerges in a handful of unrelated segments: She develops a budding relationship with a young man, receives a visit from her brother (Bob Einstein) in her country home, and apparently also exists in some alternate dimension of her own making.
The latter bit has Barkin sitting in a barren white “information room” right out of “The Matrix” and attempting to participate in some form of virtual reality simulation related to her real life. That’s not the only confusing digression - although at least it has hip appeal on its own. At one point, Barkin floats a guitar in her bathtub. The symbolism, if that’s the word for it, doesn’t fail in individual moments; instead, it lacks a full-bodied justification, which is worse. The resulting mess deadens the dramatic potential.
While I admire Archer’s attempt to tackle the well-worn path of the fading superstar narrative with ingenuity, his high-minded conceits muddy the vitality of Barkin’s performance. She spends much of the running time bemoaning her life in abstract terms with little to no wider context. It’s like Norma Desmond of “Sunset Boulevard” wandered into an avant-garde labyrinth and couldn’t find a way out.
“Sunset Boulevard” benefited from a lively style that turned its statement about aging celebrity into a highly engaging commentary on the nature of fame. “Shit Year,” as indicated by the title, sticks to an intensely grim approach from start to finish. Dreary philosophical obsessions with mortality permeate the dialogue (“It’s kinda like the end of everything and the start of nothing,” “I’m surrounded by a world of nothing”). Barkin remains the single virtue that carries “Shit Year” through to the end, particularly in a final close-up that defines the movie’s sole appeal. At the very least, it seems appropriate that the main attraction of a movie about a star is the star herself.
Shit
Year Howard Feinstein at Cannes from
Screendaily
In Wild Tigers I Have Known (2006), Cam Archer used
both experimental and naturalistic techniques to tell in vivid colour a story
of frustration, that of a not-yet-out gay teen and the slightly older, straight
macho man to whom he is attracted.
In Shit Year, the unattainable is once again his subject, with a few significant differences. The obsessed character, the actress Colleen West (Barkin, still sexy if somewhat reworked at 56), is the older one, and even though she beds for a while the object of her desire, the strikingly gorgeous newcomer Harvey West (Grimes), he abandons her.
The film’s style will limit it to the festival circuit and esoteric arthouse venues. The prolific Barkin might, however, expand its potential, once word spreads about her gutsy portrayal of a burned-out cynic.
Formally, Archer opts for black-and-white and he is sparer here than in Wild Tigers with the staccato scratchiness that has become an avant-garde trope, filming abstracted dream scenes in a relatively naturalistic manner.
The strategy is logical, because Colleen, who has just retired on account of the failed relationship, is so borderline unhinged that she can’t distinguish the real from the imagined. Given her state of mind, minimalist surreal scenes of her attempts to purchase a simulation of her ex-lover are almost credible.
Colleen’s sarcasm is democratic, aimed at everyone and everything. She tells bouncy Shelly (Walters), her new neighbor once she’s thrown in the towel and relocated to the countryside, that she sees her life as “a succession of contracts….How did ‘nothing’ become my ‘something?’”.
The camera is almost always on Colleen, whose self-absorption makes it appropriate, but when Archer does shoot Harvey, whether in extreme close-up or, with the young man clad only in tight swimming trucks, in long shot, the director reveals a compulsion as intense as hers.
More ethereal than earthy, Harvey comes across like one of Warhol’s androgynous young men. Perhaps Colleen embarked on the ill-fated affair as an act of self-destruction, a therapeutic involvement that would enable her to hit rock bottom, exit from a successful but soul-searing career, and discover some kind of rapport with the world. By the end of the film, she is no longer making fun of sweet Shelly and her apple dolls, but opening herself up for some kind of friendship.
Melissa Anderson on day
four of the 63rd Cannes Film Festival
Melissa Anderson at Cannes from ArtForum,
May 15, 2010, also here: Melissa Anderson
Matt Bochenski at
Cannes from Little White Lies, May 18, 2010
Cannes
2010. Cam Archer's "Shit Year"
David Hudson at Cannes from The Auteurs, May 19, 2010
Interview Video
interview with the director from The Director’s Fortnight (5:28)
Ray Bennett at
Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter,
May 16, 2010
Ardant,
Fanny
ASHES
AND BLOOD (Cendres at Sang)
France Portugal
Romania (105 mi) 2009
Melissa Anderson at Cannes from Artforum, May 22, 2009
In one of Visage’s many longueurs, a triad of Gallic
grandes dames—Fanny
Ardant (who is also at the festival with Ashes and Blood, her
debut as a director), Jeanne
Moreau, and Nathalie
Baye—gather at a dinner table. “If we talk, time will go by,” Ardant
says to her dining companions. Yet not even the estimable Fanny could make the
minutes pass fast enough.
Ashes
And Blood (Cendres Et Sang) Dan
Fainaru at Cannes from Screendaily
Gorgeous
landscapes and spectacular cinematography aside, Fanny Ardant’s first feature
seems to indicate that she might be better off staying with her day job as a
highly respected actress. She seems uncomfortable behind the camera in Ashes
And Bood, and not terribly confident as a writer. Her tale of blood
revenge, which takes place in an unspecified location but is shot entirely in
Transylvania, is hesitant, confused, and too sketchy to follow. Though Ardant’s
name might draw attention, this will be a tough sell in the marketplace.
Judith’s
(Elkabetz) husband has been murdered in the “old country”. Once widowed, she
severs her ties with her family and takes her two sons, Pashko (Belaga) and
Ismael (Ruchmann), and younger daughter Mira (Bouanich) to Marseilles, to live
far away from the homeland she evidently abhors. Ten years later, she is
invited for a family wedding and reluctantly returns.
The cold reception
waiting there for them indicates some problems, and some of the reasons for
this animosity are eventually clarified as the relationships between the three
clans which run this mysterious place become clearer.
Thanks in part to
Judith’s actions, there is now a visceral vendetta between the families, which
could have been averted by the forthcoming wedding. Instead, the presence of
Judith and her sons, particularly the hotheaded, uncontrollable Pashko, breed
even more animosity, reaching its inevitable climax in another death.
The convoluted
story takes place in the empty countryside, and is uniformly over-acted, as if
there were no firm hand on the reins. With uneasy dialogue, in French and
Romanian, the editing confuses rather than clarifies the issues. It is hard, at
the end, to understand what exactly attracted Ardant to this story or why she
found it so necessary to put on screen.
The one real
consolation are the glorious Transylvania locations and Gerard de Battista’s
camera. He always manages to find the most interesting angles to shoot and
captures the most striking colour combinations and contrasts throughout the
entire film.
Ardolino,
Emile
DIRTY
DANCING B 85
USA (100 mi)
1987
“Nobody
puts baby in a corner.” —Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze)
Something of a guilty
pleasure, this is an improbable and downright corny feel good love story that
turned into a word of mouth smash sensation featuring a scorching soundtrack
accompanied by wall-to-wall dance routines that highlight dance master Patrick
Swayze in various states of bad boy dress and undress and his new girl on the
block Jennifer Grey, daughter of dancing legend Joel Grey. Following on the amazing success of another
earlier dance movie, FLASHDANCE (1983), who knew whether the public’s
fascination with sensational dance routines might have been a prelude to John
Waters’ HAIRSPRAY, released a year later in 1988? Both movies were set in the early 1960’s,
reflecting a new social message coming out of the nauseating conformity of the
50’s, and while Waters’ film features a much earthier politically subversive
take on race with hyperactive white kids listening to that “Negro music,” DIRTY
DANCING certainly utilizes a soundtrack peppered with well-chosen black music
to help accentuate class differences, where the contrast between the two worlds
of the spoiled and pampered rich and the subservient working stiffs who wait on
them hand and foot, couldn’t be more striking.
This is a coming of age story where a girl about to head off to college
accompanies her family to a largely Jewish summer resort in the Catskills where
loud speakers continually announce different activities as if you were onboard
a cruise ship. Bored with the largely
elderly clientele, Jennifer, known as Baby, explores the terrain and sees a
wild party in progress that’s supposedly off limits, as it’s employees only,
but the dancing choreography by Kenny Ortega is truly phenomenal. In no way does it feel natural or resemble
real life, as the quality is so exceptional it matches the energy of a Broadway
show. But the love bug has bit Baby,
who’s completely enamored with the sexual explosion that is Johnny Castle,
Patrick Swayze, the man in black. While
they tease her about her naiveté and having all the comforts while they have to
work for a living, this is further emphasized when one of the girls, Johnny’s
usual dance partner Penny (Cynthia Rhodes, and they are electric dancing
together), gets knocked up and needs money for an abortion when the guy turns
out to be a jerk. When Baby’s dad just
up and gives her a sizeable sum of money, no questions asked, all just for the
asking, someone has to substitute for Penny in the resort dance numbers. Ooh la la, didn’t Baby walk right into that
opportunity? This leads to intensive
rehearsals, close body contact, and spending every minute of every day together
in the 3 days of preparation. A romance
ensues.
But first, a dramatic
conflict, as the abortionist was a back-alley amateur leaving Penny
precariously close to losing her life.
Baby’s dad, none other than Broadway’s own Jerry Orbach, just happens to
practice medicine and comes to her rescue to save the day. But in the process, he freezes out his
favorite daughter and demands that she stop seeing that riff raff, giving her
the cold shoulder treatment. Of course,
to a teenager already infatuated with the man in black, her dad may as well
have been speaking a foreign tongue, as she completely ignores his
instructions. Instead, they practice
night and day and collapse in each other’s sweaty arms at night, as Baby enters
a new world. Without her dad to bale her
out of every decision, she starts making decisions for herself, initially a bit
over her head, but the dancing helps calm her down, as it’s within her element
and comfort zone, even though she completely avoids spending time with her own
family. No one thinks to ask what’s
going on, so her life becomes a big secret, and Johnny is a big questionmark,
as her father has made it clear that he’s off limits. What rescues this dime story melodrama is the
positive vibe music and continual dance energy driving the film. Swayze is a bit rough under the collar as an
emboldened but sensuously raw kid who’s gone through the school of hard knocks
while Grey positively sizzles in his company, especially when making eye
contact while dancing, as her eyes literally glisten. They work well together, even in quiet
moments, as they’re the connection that supposedly brings the two separate
worlds together. To that end, after a
few more missteps down the road, a rollicking dance fantasia at the end is as
good a way as any to bring down the final curtain, where a spirit of joy, even
love and happiness, fills the air. Some
complain that the effectiveness of using period 50’s and 60’s music was ruined
by the introduction of 80’s synthesizers in the final number, but one must
remember that Johnny said he was thinking about introducing some new stuff he
was working on, so perhaps he was decades ahead of his time. While much of the dialogue is pretty corny,
it’s written somewhat autobiographically by the original Baby, screenwriter Eleanor
Bergstein, who was knicknamed “Baby” and was named after Eleanor Roosevelt,
whose family was a frequent vistor to the Catskills in the early 60’s, and
whose father was a doctor. Bergstein
herself learned the “dirty dancing” routines from house parties and eventually
became a professional dance instructor.
Who knew this was the vehicle that Swayze would ride to stardom, making
dozens of movies afterwards, while Grey unfortunately got plastic surgery on
her nose shortly after the movie, lost her unique look, and has had scant work
ever since. It should be noted that the
film was an independent venture from the now defunct Vestron Pictures, quite
rare in the 80’s when it was released, where Grey was led to believe that
nobody would see this “little” film that became a tremendous success and went
on to earn hundreds of millions of dollars as well as cult status to an adoring
public.
Be My Baby"
Written by Jeff Barry
(uncredited), Ellie Greenwich
(uncredited), Phil Spector
(uncredited)
Performed by The Ronettes
Courtesy of Phil Spector International, Inc.
Produced by Phil Spector
"Big Girls Don't Cry"
Written by Bob Crewe
(uncredited) and Bob Gaudio
(uncredited)
Performed by Frankie Valli
and The Four Seasons
Courtesy of Bob Gaudio and Frankie Valli
dba The Four Seasons Partnership
"Merengue"
Written by Erich Bulling, John D'Andrea, and Michael Lloyd
"Fox Trot"
Written by Michael Lloyd and John D'Andrea
"Waltz"
Written by Michael Lloyd and John D'Andrea
"Johnny's Mambo"
Written by Erich Bulling, John D'Andrea, and Michael Lloyd
"Where Are You Tonight"
Performed by Tom Johnston
Written by Mark Scola
Produced by Leon Medica for Inside Track, Inc.
"Do You Love Me"
Performed by The Contours
Words and Music by Berry Gordy
Used by permission of Motown Recording Corp. and Jobete Music Co., Inc.
"Love Man"
Written by Otis Redding
(uncredited)
Performed by Otis Redding
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp.
by arrangement with Warner Special Products
"Stay"
Written by Maurice Williams
(uncredited)
Performed by Maurice Williams
& The Zodiacs
Courtesy of Arista Records, Inc.
"Wipe Out"
Performed by The Surfaris
Courtesy of MCA Records
"Hungry Eyes"
Written by Franke Previte and
John DeNicola
Performed by Eric Carmen
Produced by Eric Carmen
"Overload"
Written by Zappacosta (as
Alfie Zappacosta) and Marko Luciani
Performed by Zappacosta
Produced by Zappacosta (as
Alfie Zappacosta)
"Hey Baby"
Written by Bruce Channel
(uncredited) and Margaret Cobb (uncredited)
Performed by Bruce Channel
Courtesy of Le Cam Records
"De Todo un Poco"
Performed by Melon
Written by Lou Perez
Published by Vaya Publishing, Inc.
"Some Kind of Wonderful"
Performed by The Drifters
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp.
by arrangement with Warner Special Products
"These Arms of Mine"
Performed by Otis Redding
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp.
by arrangement with Warner Special Products
"Cry to Me"
Performed by Solomon Burke
Courtesy of Atlantic Recording Corp.
by arrangement with Warner Special Products
"Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"
Written by Gerry Goffin
(uncredited) and Carole King
(uncredited)
Performed by The Shirelles
Courtesy of Gusto Records
under license from CBS Special Products
"Love Is Strange"
Written by Mickey Baker
(uncredited), Sylvia Robinson
(uncredited) and Ethel Smith
(uncredited)
Performed by Mickey & Sylvia
Courtesy of Sugar Hill Records
"You Don't Own Me"
Written by John Madara
(uncredited) and Dave White
Tricker (uncredited)
Performed by The Blow Monkeys
Produced by Peter Wilson and Doctor Robert
The Blow Monkeys - Courtesy of RCA / Ariola International
"Yes"
Written by Terry Fryer, Neal
Cavanaugh and Tom Graf
Performed by Merry Clayton
Produced by Michael Lloyd for
Mike Curb Productions
"In the Still of the Nite"
Written by Fred Parris
(uncredited)
Performed by The Five Satins
Courtesy of Arista Records, Inc.
"She's Like the Wind"
Written by Patrick Swayze and
Stacy Widelitz
Performed by Patrick Swayze
featuring Wendy Fraser
Produced by Michael Lloyd for
Mike Curb Productions
"The Time of My Life"
Performed by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes
Written by Franke Previte, Donald Markowitz, and John DeNicola
Produced by Michael Lloyd for
Mike Curb Productions
Jennifer Warnes - Courtesy of Cypress Records
filmcritic.com
(Pete Croatto) review [4/5]
Dirty Dancing’s initial success in 1987 was probably a mixture of
factors — Patrick Swayze’s anointment as a sensitive hunk, the fact that the
movie’s sweetness was a change of pace from the loud, expensive blockbusters
that dominated the landscape at the time and a pop soundtrack of golden oldies
and then-current songs that flooded radio stations.
However, after watching the movie recently, the key to the movie’s limitless
charm is revealed to be due to the presence of Jennifer Grey. Without her
performance, the movie is a flop, Bill Medley isn’t cool again and, well,
Swayze and Grey drift into irrelevance a year or two earlier.
Set at a posh Catskills resort in the summer of 1963, soon-to-be college
freshman Baby (Grey) and her family are set to get some relaxation in. However,
volleyball and lame dances don’t appeal to the worldly Baby. Out looking for
some excitement, she stumbles upon the staff’s lodge, where much to her
surprise, she sees a ton of young people set free of familial restraints.
They’re grinding, they’re sweating, they’re dirty dancing.
The hero of this pack of well-toned hoofers is Johnny (Swayze), the resort
dance instructor who plays by his own rules, but can’t get anyone else to play
along. Baby falls instantly for him, and she sees her chance to get closer to
him and that rebellion when his lifelong dance partner, Penny (Cynthia Rhodes),
suffers an unwanted pregnancy and botched abortion.
Though Johnny is a two-step taskmaster, he and Baby quickly become close. She
gives him courage and confidence; he gives her the strength to break free from
her family ties. Despite the syrupy dramatics, Dirty Dancing is still immensely
appealing and Grey is the reason. Yes, I know Swayze became huge because of
this movie, but I think it was more because of his physical presence. We all
know he’s good looking, that women will fall for him like lemmings off of a
cliff. But he has to fall for Grey, who is adorable, but certainly not a beauty
queen. Most importantly, the audience has to buy them as a couple.
Grey doesn’t drip with teen sensuality or flash a come hither stare. She
giggles inappropriately, she curses herself for not getting dance steps right.
By embodying every awkward young adult emotion about falling in love, she makes
you want the romance to work. In the process, she also validates all the soap
opera theatrics that revolve around her. Credit must also be given to the late
Emile Ardolino, who directs the intimate scenes with Swayze and Grey with a
seductive restraint that borders on the unbearable—check out the bedroom slow
dance. The movie eschews sex and teenage tomfoolery for real emotions and comes
out of the corner dancing up a storm.
Eye for Film
("Chris") review [4/5]
After the decline of ballrooms as a popular night out, partner dance enjoyed a revival with the rise of mambo and various forms of salsa in the US. The Eighties also saw an upsurge of partner dance in Britain with the development of modern jive, a simple dance that anyone could learn. Tapping into this enthusiasm comes Dirty Dancing (1987), a well-constructed if cheesy love story that has partner dance at its core. Fronted by the charismatic Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey, it also contains a note of rebelliousness that appeals to its teenage target audience.
The opening credits (in luminous pink) set the tone with sepia shots of sexy dance routines, slowed down to emphasise sensuousness. The Sixties Ronettes song, Be My Baby, hearkens back to an era before the Beatles, before the death of Kennedy.
Baby - the insultingly diminutive name for the heroine (Grey) - is a young girl ahead of her time. She can't wait to join the Peace Corps. But for now, she is being whisked off to summer camp with her protective parents and her superficial sister, Lisa. "Baby's going to change the world," quips her father, whereas Lisa's going to decorate it...
At the camp, glamorous female dance teacher Penny (Cynthia Rhodes) has the job of making staid dances, like line dancing, look appealing to the masses. Baby, however, chances upon the staff's private party, where a much raunchier dance is practiced. Johnny Castle (Swayze) is a downtrodden instructor from the streets. In contrast to the Harvard and Yale educated (and outwardly respectable) youngsters, he is labelled with an unfairly bad reputation and with strict instructions not to flirt with guests. As Castle and Baby follow their hearts, each striving towards a moral high ground forsaken by society, they are drawn inevitably together.
Why such a formulaic and much copied movie has held such fascination is sometimes a mystery. Its strengths are the tightness of its construction and the first rate dancing abilities of its stars. With the gradual demise of studio based song-and-dance films, associated with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, came a shortage of stars who could both dance well and act. Swayze not only had considerable acting experience, but was born into a dance family and trained with the prestigious Joffrey Ballet School. As is evident from the companion (dance instruction) video, Swayze Dancing, he toned down his abilities as a dancer to play Castle, but still looks riveting.
Mambo, which can be performed in a very erotic and sensual manner, is sometimes called "diabolo" - the devil's dance. Unlike many dance/romance movies that followed, this one features many actual dance sequences, augmented by a spontaneous style of acting, but with the dancing obviously performed for real, rather than produced as a result of extensive fast editing cuts, as was the case, for instance, in films like Chicago (2002).
The dirty dancing in the film is ultimately a mix of styles, principally mambo and showcase, which provided momentum for many of the popular dance schools of the time and in the years that followed. The film is part of the wave of Eighties indie films that convinced the big studios to diversify and join forces with independents to capture teen audiences. Its sexiness combines with a James Dean style defiance, appealing to male fantasies.
While Dirty Dancing lacks greatness, its enduring qualities are too easily overlooked. If nothing else, it provided a template for dozens of lacklustre movies that followed its song and storyline formula without emulating its strengths.
Mutant Reviewers from
Hell review
Clare's Rating: There are only a few basic irrefutable truths in the known universe. One of them just happens to be that nobody puts Baby in the corner.
Clare's Review: In celebration of my ongoing bout with some of the worst PMS in recorded history, I have decided it's about damn time this site reviewed a movie perfect for us gals who, occasionally, must find refuge from our own horrifying hormones by diving head long into anything and everything we can find that brings us comfort. Comfort in movie form, for me anyway, is Dirty Dancing. Yes, this movie is made entirely of cheese. It's trite. It's manipulative. It's a DANCE movie for Jerry Orbach's sake. But for my money, it's one of the best guilty pleasure girlie flicks ever made.
I've seen it so many times that recapping the basic story line seems kind of hilarious to me. But I'll try.
Dirty Dancing is about a wide eyed, precocious, teenager named Francis (Jennifer Gray) who, for some ungodly reason, actually prefers to be called "Baby". She and her family go to the Catskills for a three week vacation at one of those old timey resorts that specializes in things like organized sack races and charades. Oh. And it's set in the 1960's so the audience understands right away that things like lust and fornication hadn't yet been invented, so all this squeaky clean fun has no irony attached to it at all.
But it doesn't take long for the seedy underbelly of
Dirty Dancing came out in theaters when I was all of 12 years old. So my attachment to it is rooted deeply in nostalgia. However, I've watched it pretty regularly since my 12th year on Earth and still find it entertaining. I wish I could say that I love Dirty Dancing because it's so much fun to make merciless fun of (which, really, it kind of is). The truth, however, is that I love Dirty Dancing because I actually love it. I always buy into the fun and nervousness associated with Baby and Johnny finding themselves attracted to one another. I always get choked up when Baby confronts her father on the deck and they both cry like little inconsolable, melodramatic infants. I always stop and rewind the "sex" scene in Johnny's room to look at Patrick Swayze's ribs and Jennifer Gray's funny, perfect, old lady bra. I always wait in breathless anticipation for Johnny to look Baby's father in the eye and tell him, with unbelievably believable conviction, that nobody puts Baby in the corner.
I'm not embarrassed to admit any of that. Because in trying times like these, when I find myself feeling irrevocably fat and unendingly moody, there is a real, palpable salvation found in watching a movie that's unabashedly good hearted, filled with schmaltz and un-ironically about how dancing can save us from the limitations we put on our own joy.
Dr. Daniel's Movie
Emergency review
Okay, here's the deal. There are a few different ways I could go here. I could sugar-coat things, to help the medicine go down. But that just ain't my style. I could tell you what you want to hear, but, like Howard Cosell, I calls 'em like I sees 'em. So, I guess I'm just gonna go horns first, hope for the best, and expect the worst. Here goes:
I have a loud holler for you people out there. Dirty Dancing is, was, and will always be one of the stupidest movies to ever drip out of Hollywood's backside. It is, was, and always will be a soundtrack album in search of a movie. And it is, was, and always will be a movie that needed a Tenth Anniversary re-release about as bad as we need another O. J. Simpson trial.
Now, right at this sec, you're brain is sloshing in one of two directions. Either you're saying, "How dare you attack a beautiful movie like this," or you're saying, "Testify, Brother Daniel, testify!"
For those of you who approve of my viewpoint, you're dismissed. Saunter toward the hall and smoke a butt. For those of you crushed by my statements like Wile E. Coyote under an anvil, keep your fists down. Let me show you how many ways this movie offends me and the precious artform we call "cinema".
1. A period piece that features 80s music in it?
2. The lead character in the movie is named "Baby." Her name...is..."Baby."
3. Muscle shirts.
4. Jennifer Grey as a sex symbol.
5. It tries to make a superfluous Pro-choice statement in a '50s flick.
6. Did the world need another "brooding hero"? And, if it did, did he also have to be a mambo teacher named Johnny Castle?
7. Shakespeare did the star-crossed lovers plot already, and he had the decency to kill 'em off at the end.
8. A Bill Medley comeback?
9. Patrick Swayze and his bad lip-syncing.
10. The "Dirty Dancing In Concert" tour?
11. Why is Baby's father giving that dork money for med school? Where was he when I had my scholarship revoked for drinking tequila in Pathology class?
12. In the heart-wrenching finale, Johnny says that he's created the dance moves for himself and Baby. So how do 40 other dancers fall in step to the entire routine when he prances into the aisle?
13. Could that chick playing Baby's sister have been any less believable? I know pot roasts that deliver lines better.
14. Just when we thought they were gone...pedal-pushers and Keds sneakers!
15. Back to that finale - Johnny put a 45 rpm record on, and it plays for the next eight minutes. What gives, this the flipside of Inna-Gadda-Da Vita or American Pie?
16. Somebody please explain to me how dragging teenagers to Camp in the Catskills was expected to be fun. What sort of horrific parents were these people? I know it had to be based in truth. Somebody, anybody explain it to me!
17. Newman.
Does it seem like I know way too much about this movie, for someone who despises it so much? Bullseye. Know why? 'Cause I was between wives in 1987, and I was dating. Anyone that was dating in 1987 went to see Dirty Dancing. And, I know I am not alone when I say that, if you were a dating guy in 1987, you got dragged to see Dirty Dancing way too many times, at the then-unheard of price of $3.50 per ticket. And then it hit video, and everybody bought it and watched it over and over and over. And then it hit HBO, and, because it was rated PG-13, they could show it morning, noon, and night, 7-24-365. And they keep draggin' it back out when they have 90 minutes to burn. And so on and so on and so on.
I have not used the phrase "chick flick" yet, and I am trying not to, but, ladies, if you're boyfriend/ husband/steady/blind date/whatever told you he enjoyed Dirty Dancing on his first viewing, he could be telling the truth, but it's doubtful. If he still tells you that every time you whip out the video, he's a boldfaced liar, and he's saying so to keep you from hounding him the next time he wants to watch The Dirty Dozen. It's the same premise that will occur when The English Patient hits video or pay-tv. He may sit through it, but, inside, he's praying that the VCR will melt right there on the TV, or that the tape will vanish into thin air. I would not be the least bit surprised if you were to tell me that you had to buy another copy of Dirty Dancing 'cause the first one got "accidentally misplaced." Brace yourself, ladies. Your significant other heaved that first one in the dumpster and prayed you'd forget about it. And, when the new one showed up, he immediately started thinking of ways to leave it exposed to the melting hot sun without you catching on. In fact, guys, the next time you're forced to watch that excuse for a movie, occupy your mind with creative ways you could permanently destroy the tape. Believe me, this technique got me through many a tedious night.
If you must catch this revival of Dirty Dancing, then please help yourself. Grab all your girlfriends and make a night of it. But for pity's sake, leave your hubby at home with a tallboy and the pennant races.
Daily Film
Dose [Alan Bacchus]
DVD Times Gary Couzens
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince
Leo) review [2.5/5]
Slant Magazine
review Rob Humanick
DVD Town (John J.
Puccio) dvd review
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Dale Dobson) dvd review [Special Edition]
DVD Verdict (Bill
Treadway) dvd review [Ultimate Edition]
Fulvue
Drive-in dvd review [Ultimate Edition]
Nate Goss
DVD
Talk (Randy Miller III) dvd review [1/5] [Ultimate Edition]
DVD MovieGuide dvd
review [Ultimate Edition] Colin
Jacobson
DVD Verdict
(David Johnson) dvd review [20th Anniversary Edition]
CHUD.com
(David Oliver) dvd review [20th Anniversary Edition]
Fulvue
Drive-in dvd review [20th Anniversary Edition] Nicholas Sheffo
The Trades (R.J. Carter)
dvd review [20th Anniversary Edition]
DVD Talk (Greg
Elwell) dvd review [4/5] 20th
Anniversary Edition
DVD Town (Dean
Winkelspecht) dvd review [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Joshua
Zyber) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
DVD Talk (Matthew
Hinkley) dvd review [3/5] [Blu-Ray Version]
That Cow (Andrew Bradford) review
[8/10]
Cinema Blend
review Nate Yapp
Crazy for
Cinema (Lisa Skrzyniarz) review
MovieEye.com
review David Litton
Three
Movie Buffs (Eric Nash) review [3.5/4]
Entertainment Weekly
capsule dvd review [B+] [20th Anniversary Edition] Nicholas Fronseca
The
Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
Time Out
London (Anna Smith) review
BBC
Films (Almar Haflidason) review
Philadelphia
City Paper (Margie Fishman) review
The
Seattle Times (Jeff Shannon) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [1/4]
Siskel
& Ebert (video)
The
New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
Celebrity
Cosmetic Surgery: Jennifer Grey May
25, 2006
Dirty
Dancing - Dirty Dancer Grey's Nightmare Nose Job October 29, 2006
Jennifer
Grey Plastic Surgery February, 2008
Patrick
Swayze, Actor With Physical Grace, Is Dead at 57 ... Anita Gates obituary from The New York Times, September 14, 2009
Patrick Swayze dies at 57; star of the blockbuster films 'Dirty
... Valerie J. Nelson obituary from
The LA Times, September 15, 2009
This week's cover:
Patrick Swayze, 1952-2009 Entertainment Weekly, September 17, 2009
Arestrup,
Niels
THE
CANDIDATE (Le Candidat) B- 81
The film opens with a
reference to the game of chess, acknowledging that skilled players can think
two or three moves ahead of time, grandmasters six or seven moves, while the
best players in the world can foresee the outcome of the game after only a few
moves. An odd choice for a French film,
this takes place in an unnamed ubiquitous country, a stand in for any European
Union country where elections are about to be held for the presidency. Michel Dedieu (Yvan Attal) is a last minute
replacement candidate, as cancer has forced the party’s nominee out of the
race. The film opens with scheduled
meetings with staff that take place in heavily fortified opulent estates, where
the grounds themselves represent a select territory that few individuals will
walk upon in their lifetimes. It’s
impossible not to be aware of the money involved just to utilize such lavish
territory, which separates the rich from the rest of us. Inheriting the staff of the former candidate,
there’s not a close-knit relationship, in fact, just the opposite, as he is
picked due to failed expectations, currently running behind the lead candidate
in the polls, a snake oil salesman with an assured smile. What we see is a series of disasters happen,
each leading us to believe Dedieu is hardly qualified for the job, as he is
easily distracted, poorly prepared on the issues, with a rather wooden look on
television and without a clue how to respond to attacks. His team seems to barely know him and offers
little support other than to rehearse him endlessly for an upcoming debate
which only seems to expose his weaknesses and ultimately drain the candidate of
his energy. For the most part, we wonder
what we are witnessing, as the candidate has such little appeal, this appears
to be a disaster in the making.
Withholding any sense of political
acumen or intelligence, we are led to believe our man is in over his head. Enter the lead political strategist, the
director himself, Niels Arestrup, whose bushy white hair we’ve seen before in
other films, such as the ruthless slumlord in THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED
(2005), where his low key, Brando-like mumbles betray his sinister behind the
scenes motives. The man is a political
operative, a shark who could be intentionally undermining Dedieu’s campaign, or
so the candidate thinks, so he takes extreme measures, literally canceling all
appointments before this all important debate, which includes his last public
rally where he is a no show. At the
debate, he has no handlers or spin doctors, but relies on his own instincts,
where he exudes a certain charm that has been altogether missing, but not
before he goes silent for about 30 seconds or more on the first question, a
peculiarly uncomfortable moment that has us all believe he’s lost it, but he
recovers by suggesting the silence was a metaphor for our lack of knowledge or
experience when it comes to handling real life situations, that at times we do
more harm than good by not fully assessing all possibilities ahead of
time. By God, the man’s attempting to
tell the truth. There’s an eerie
reference to the Americans behind the scenes, as television news reports keep
focusing on an invasion of some sort, a generic act of aggression which the
French can easily declare inappropriate foreign policy, taking the position
that in war, everyone loses. While there
are a few clever moments, there are no real characters of interest and few revelations,
with a lot of behind the scenes shenanigans that simply seem amateurish or
unprofessional. Attal is very good at
selling his inadequacies, less so at addressing his staff’s shortcomings or
pouncing on his opponent during the all important debate, which supposedly
resurrects his campaign from the dead.
While the film is not an entirely hollow exercise, being short on
specifics, it’s a smooth and sophisticated film that ramps up the tension by
overselling its case.
Festival of New French Cinema JR Jones from the Reader
This campaign drama shares its
title with the Michael Ritchie classic (1972), but its political naïvete seems
to reach back even further, to the democratic la-la land of Frank Capra
Festival of New French
Cinema Charles Coleman from Facets
Shortly before
the presidential election in a European state, Michel Dedieu (Yvan Attal) has
had to stand in at a moment's notice for his party's candidate, whose rapidly
progressing cancer has obliged him to withdraw. The day after the first round,
very little time remains for Michel to prepare with his inner circle for the
televised debate that will pit him against his opponent. Considered unfavorable
by the media and public opinion, it is imperative that he ameliorate his image
and hone his arguments. With this aim in mind, he organizes a working weekend
at home, and we observe the candidate, initially docile and fragile, as he
accedes to the demands of his staff until, nearing exhaustion, he realizes that
he is in fact caught up in a terrible plot. The only way he can pull back will
be by playing his own score... First-time director and ubiquitous French film
star, Niels Arestrup, presents a Machiavellian view of the enigmatic universe
of politics in this suspenseful thriller, which is filmed with elegance and
subtlety. Directed by
"It's not very often that
French cinema addresses the world of politics, and it's even more rare for it
to do so with such intelligence and finesse"
-Rolling Stone
User
Reviews from imdb Author: Iliyana
from United Kingdom
The plot appears to be very simple. After the unexpected withdrawal of the initial candidate, Michel Dedieu is designated by his party to continue the presidential campaign. Dedieu, a reticent candidate, must face its adversary the popular Eric Carson during a televised debate. In order to improve Dedieu's image in front of the media, he gathers a group of advisers in a residence in province. There he has only a few days to prepare himself for the coming debate. But behind this simple plot lies a very complicated and intriguing subject. Indeed Niels Arestrup has chosen not a particularly easy subject for his first film as a director. But compared to some American movies on the subject, "The Candidate" succeeds in reflecting very well not only the French political mentality but the whole European as well. And the ups and downs of the central character, played brilliantly by the talented Yvan Attal, are revealed with such elegance that only an actor turned director could achieve. The film itself is not your usual political drama packed with fast paced dialogues and explosive scenes. It actually possesses the fine quality of a good theatrical performance which makes it an even more enjoyable viewing!
Argento,
Asia
Asia Argento - Official site –
Asia Argento bio from Celebutopia
Asia Argento >
Overview - AllMovie bio from Rebecca
Flint Marx
Asia Argento profile page
Asia Argento brief bio from The Auteurs
ode to Azia: an A s i a A r g e n t o official
website
Asia Argento
| Italy Asia Argento – A Modern Renaissance Woman, by Deanna Couras Goodson
from Life in Italy.com (Undated)
Asia
Argento Is a Hottie - Sex - Salon.com
Charles Taylor from Salon, August 9, 2002
Asia
Argento - Scarlet Diva Alan Jones
excerpts from his forthcoming book, Profondo Argento from Senses of
Cinema, September 2002
Wild child | Film | The
Guardian Steve Rose from The Guardian, July 8, 2005
Asia Argento -
Movies - New York Times Sexy, Scary and Often Naked: That’s
Acting! by Dennis Lim from The New York Times, June 24, 2007,
including a slide show: The
World of Asia
::
The Playlist ::: Asia Argento: Naked Cliché or Provocative Real ... The Playlist, June 25, 2007
His
triple witching hour comes - Los Angeles Times Mark Olsen from The LA Times, September 5, 2007
NYFF:
The Passions of Asia Argento | SpoutBlog
Karina Longworth from Spoutblog, October 15, 2007
Asia
Argento can't bare it anymore John
Clark from The NY Daily News, March
14, 2008
Asia
Argento Rising - Page 1 - Movies - New York - Village Voice Nathan Lee from The Village Voice, March 18, 2008
SF360: Asia
Argento, in full flower Dennis
Harvey from SF 360, April 23, 2008
Bright Lights Film
Journal :: An Argento Family Reunion Special ... Erich Kuersten from Bright Lights Film
Journal, November 2008
“Sexy, Scary, and Often Naked: Asia
Argento” Asia Argento retrospective
at BAM, November 1 – 9, 2008
Twenty-One Years with Asia
Argento Glenn Kenny from The
Auteurs, November 6, 2008
Runway
To X Factor Italy - Asia Argento In Sophia Kokosalaki « Red ... Red Carpet Fashion Awards, October 30, 2009
Hollywoodtuna » Blog Archive »
Rosario Dawson and Asia Argento Get ...
gossip photos from Hollywood
Tuna (2009)
Filmmaker
Magazine | Fall 2000: DANGEROUS BEAUTY
Travis Crawford interview from Filmmaker
magazine, Fall 2000
Index
Magazine Bruce La Bruce interview
from Index magazine (2001)
Asia
Argento - Horror Star | Cover Girls | Bizarre Girls | Bizarre ... Interview with Bizarre magazine (2002)
Asia
Argento: for some, art imitates life. For this dynamic ... Adrien Brody interview from Interview magazine, August 2002
Asia Argento Talks
<i>xXx</i> - Movies Feature at IGN KJB interview from IGN, August 7, 2002
Tabula Rasa: Asia
Argento Interview Steve Proposch
interviews the actress at the 2003 Melbourne Underground Film Festival
Asia Argento's
Interview - George A Romero's Land of the Dead Interview from Made in Atlantis (2005)
Asia
Argento and Michele Civetta on Cannes Controversy and Porn-y ... Dennis Lim interview at Cannes from New York magazine, May 27, 2009
Asia Argento Pics | Actress
Archives
F-Listed » Archive Asia
Argento Gallery «
Cult Sirens: Asia Argento
Asia Argento Pictures -
Zimbio
Actress
Asia Argento in a red leather trench, Paris, 2000 ... Vogue
magazine photo
Asia
Argento Pictures - The Chopard Trophy - 2009 Cannes Film ...
Asia
Argento and Shu Qi - Cannes Film Festival 2009 | Celebrities ... photo gallery from Cannes, May 13, 2009
Asia Argento - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
SCARLET DIVA
Italy
The Nick Schager Film Project
Asia Argento’s Scarlet Diva is like the cinematic equivalent of scabies – raw, skeevy, and more than a tad unclean – and I mean that as a compliment. The Daughter of Dario’s semi-autobiographical directorial debut wantonly wallows in the decadent filth of drugs, sex and stardom, following an up-and-coming starlet named Anna Battista (Asia) – the self-described “loneliest girl in the world” – as she aimlessly rummages around hypo-littered urban underpasses, strobe light-illuminated night clubs, and other assorted nasty locales. Its beyond-grungy aesthetic giving off the impression that Argento put the film together with a rusty chainsaw, Scarlet Diva is the near-epitome of narcissistic self-indulgence, an extravagant piece of me-me-me cinema in which the actress/director lavishes endless attention on that most fascinating of subjects: herself. With Anna suffering through one humiliating casting couch encounter after another, show business ultimately becomes the primary target of censure. But what really turbocharges Argento’s alternately insufferable and scintillating vanity project is her intimate familiarity with all that is unseemly, from the explicit sex that pockmarks Anna’s odyssey, to the sight of a naked woman left hogtied on a bed for two days by her lover, to Anna’s hilarious conversation with a gynecologist who, upon notifying his patient that she’s pregnant, reflexively follows up his news with the question “What shall we do? Another abortion?”
City Pages [Matthew Wilder]
In the
tradition of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane, Bob Dylan's Renaldo and
Clara, and Vincent Gallo's The Brown Bunny, Asia Argento's Scarlet
Diva is a stellar example of It's All About Me cinema. Newly available at
your local Blockbuster this week on an R-rated DVD (though anyone who's
remotely interested would do well to seek out the earlier, unrated edition), Scarlet
Diva reveals a filmmaker who has at least one thing in common with her
fellow daughter-of-a-'70s-auteur Sofia Coppola: a profound unfamiliarity with
what you and I commonly know as real life.
Reeling from a magazine photo
shoot where she's loaded with Special K and then raped, Argento's character
Anna Battista races to the apartment of a friend who has been hog-tied in the
nude and left for dead by a misbehaving beau. Within minutes (or days--the
sloppy editing makes it hard to tell), Anna is nearly raped by an American
movie producer while trying to read the latest Gus Van Sant script, and is then
beaten and nearly raped by a delusional gay acquaintance who has what looks
like a white-power flag on his wall. In the midst of all this Sabine squalor,
Argento keenly locates the true heart of darkness: the IHOP on
No
question that Argento herself has become a directress. Appropriating her
father Dario's style for a slice of porno-biographical infotainment that gives
new meaning to the term splatter movie, Argento has made an intensely
autistic work of closed-circuit narcissism, a picture that's endlessly
fascinating. (In one scene, Argento spends two full minutes putting on makeup,
then shaving, spraying, and licking her own armpit--an extended riff that has
the triumphal quality of an action scene or a cum shot.) Probably no filmmaker
in history has ever been so vacuum sealed into the "write what you
know" approach, but Argento finds weird pockets of humor and a pulsing
intensity that the nine million other people who've taken the same tack
couldn't touch. The tricky element of Scarlet Diva--around which
Argento's otherwise assaultive European critics tiptoed--is that the movie is
also extremely hot. Indeed, Argento's sex scenes, none of them particularly
graphic (especially not in the new version), are as potent as any in recent
mainstream movies.
There isn't a thought in Argento's
film that couldn't be found in the diaries of 17-year-old girls all across the
planet: Parents are fucked up, boyfriends can be assholes, older guys just want
to molest me, and no one really cares that I'm...an artist! But Argento
puts all that juvenile hurt and defensive self-love across in a manner as
frenziedly decadent as her dad's. In an interview included on the DVD, Asia
Argento says with a sigh, "Nobody really liked the movie. Only the freak
critics like the movie." What can I say? Color me freaky-deaky!
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
The Village Voice [Michael Atkinson]
Reel.com DVD review [Rod Armstrong]
New York Times (registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS
USA Great Britain France Japan
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Actress-turned-director
Asia Argento may not have grown up wanting for material comfort, but the
daughter of Italy
The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Ordinarily I would never be caught dead reading Film
Threat, much less agreeing with it. But this review actually sums
up my reaction to Argento's film quite well. While I was continually repelled
by this film, my reaction ping-ponging between mere discomfort and outright
disgust, it manages a delicate balancing act between the squalid and the
humanistic. Sure, some characters (particularly the Southern Christians) are
cartoonish, emotionless villains. The film is certainly not without flaws. (How
much of this is carried over from the J. T Leroy source material I can't say.)
But most of its characters (Argento's Sarah most notably) are not exactly vile
people. They are psychologically damaged, drug-addled people who do vile
things. And yet the film doesn't let them off the hook or pardon their
behavior. It just stringently refrains from treating them as human garbage, and
asks its horrified viewership, against all odds, to do the same. Argento's
direction has matured significantly since Scarlet Diva, with a visual
style and imagination that recalls Harmony Korine, but without the adolescent
petulance and snot-punk need to shock. In fact, in temperament the film
resembles an unlikely gene-splice of Korine and Lukas Moodysson. (Granted, I
haven't seen Moodysson's widely-reviled latest, A hole in my heart,
which sounds like a lurch into artsploitation territory.) In addition to her
unpretentious inventiveness, Argento is also to be commended for her restraint.
Scenes that could have been cheap shockers with a little more nudity or graphic
violence usually leave it all offscreen, to much more unsettling effect. Should
this film get a release in the
THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
There’s a big obstacle to appreciating “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All
Things.” It’s based on a novel by a writer who doesn’t really exist. As
revealed in several magazine and newspaper articles over the past year,
hustler-turned-novelist J. T. Leroy is the invention of
As a film, “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” is blissfully unconcerned with keeping it real. A nightmarish vision of the South from an Italian director, Asia Argento, who cast herself in the second largest role, it suggests what Todd Solondz might make if he finally achieved some mature perspective on life’s cruelty, rather than being content to simply catalogue it.
Seven-year-old Jeremiah (Jimmy Bennett) lives comfortably with a foster family until his mother Sarah (Argento) comes one day to return to his care. Drinking heavily and taking drugs, she lives with a series of unstable boyfriends. After being molested by one, Jeremiah ends up in the care of his Christian fundamentalist grandfather (Peter Fonda). He becomes a child preacher. Three years pass, and Jeremiah is now played by the brothers Cole and Dylan Sprouse. Sarah finds him preaching on the street and swoops him away. Growing even more desperate, she heads close to madness, threatening to drag him down with her.
A flat plot description would make “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” sound like one of the most harrowing films ever made. However, Argento presents it with a lyricism that makes its horrors bearable. Living with Sarah, Jeremiah quickly adopts the defense mechanism of tuning out the world. Sarah and Jeremiah in the car together one night, she gives him drugs to stay awake, and the blurred headlights he watches take on a new vividness. These hallucinations aren’t far from his everyday perceptions. In situations where a meth lab explosion is as likely as a night spent watching cartoons and eating popcorn, a sense of unreality is a survival mechanism. Argento relies on disorienting camera angles and movement, even animation, to keep the mood off-kilter.
Argento’s debut, “Scarlet Diva,” was an impressively personal, if not autobiographical, work about the difficult life of a young actress. It was memorable both for Argento’s willingness to exploit her own body and for her anger at the many men who’ve screwed her over, literally and figuratively. Its cast of characters includes caricatures of director Abel Ferrara and former Miramax head Harvey Weinstein.
Argento’s performance in “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” is similarly raw. It’s not the kind of seamless work that brings home Oscars. Adopting a regional accent in one’s second language must be one of the most difficult tasks an actor faces, and she doesn’t quite pull it off. However, she makes Sarah something larger than a villain. Especially on drugs, the character shows a capacity for tenderness, even if it goes hand in hand with a willingness to tell Jeremiah that she wanted to abort him.
Most of the weaknesses of “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” stem from its source material. Its view of Southern life—especially religion, which it views with utter contempt—and presentation of Sarah’s boyfriends as a long string of redneck boogey men suggest that Albert steeped herself in clichés about the region.
The film’s strengths are mainly visual, but they also result from Argento’s attitude toward the characters. Humanism is easy when you’re depicting nice people. Having sympathy for the devil is harder. Argento treats Sarah with a great deal of empathy—in the end, she’s as much a victim as Jeremy, which excuses none of her actions. She centers her film as much around Sarah’s plight as Jeremiah’s. In the end, “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things” is a mother’s nightmare, grounded in a female—if not feminist—perspective. It would be a shame if Argento’s powerful vision goes ignored—or not taken seriously—because of Albert’s shenanigans.
Slant Magazine [Jeremiah Kipp]
DVD Times
Anthony Nield
PopMatters Christian Martius
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Wild child | Film | The
Guardian Steve Rose from The Guardian, July 8, 2005
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd)
Manohla Dargis
Argento, Dario
Dario Argento Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
“I like women, especially
beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to
watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. I certainly don’t have to
justify myself to anyone about this. I don’t care what anyone thinks or reads
into it. I have often had journalists walk out of interviews when I say what I
feel about this subject.” —Dario Argento
Dario Argento was born on September 7, 1940 in Rome , Italy
Dario decided to direct Bird with
the Crystal Plumage because he did not want any other director messing up with
the production and his screenplay. When The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
became an international hit Dario would follow up with two more thrillers in
the same vein Cat O’ Nine Tails and Four flies on Grey Velvet with The Bird
with the Crystal Plumage these films are referred to as the animal trilogy.
Dario would take a break from the giallo genre and direct some T.V. and the
historical TV drama Five Days of Milan
Tenebre would see Dario return to
the giallo genre that had been his bread and butter followed by Phenomena.
After Phenomena Dario would take a brief break from directing and produce films
before returning to the directors chair for Opera one of his most brutal
giallo’s to date. After the failure of Opera Dario would settle in America Asia . In the mid-1990’s Dario would return to Italy
All-Movie Guide bio from Jason Buchanan
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies profile
Senses
of Cinema: Great Directors Xavier
Mendik
Dark Dreams—The Films of Dario Argento
Dario Argento: Master of the Macabre
The Argento
Syndrome
Dario Argento: Master of Colors
A Fistful of Dario: The Dark
Cinema of Dario Argento
Dario Argento Horror Director’s Profile
Dario Argento Director’s Lounge from Neil Young’s Jigsaw Lounge
Slant
Magazine - Dario Argento's Dreams Ed
Gonzalez
Assault on the senses: The
horror legacy of Dario Argento (Part one)
Linda Schulte-Sasse from
Kinoeye
Assault on the senses: The
horror legacy of Dario Argento (Part two)
Linda Schulte-Sasse from
Kinoeye
A Dario Argento
bibliography Kinoeye
Off Screen Article (2006) Dario Argento, Maestro Auteur or Master
Misogynist, by Will Wright from Offscreen
Mondo Argento Simon Drax interviews Argento from Videoscope
Argento, Dario They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE
(L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo)
Italy Germany
Static Multimedia [Sean Axmaker]
Dario Argento took the reigns
from Bava as if born to the genre and the promise is right there in his 1970
directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Blue Underground), a handsome thriller (shot by
the great Vittorio Storaro), about an American in Rome (Tony Musante) who
witnesses an attempted murder in a locked art gallery (helplessly trapped
behind the panes of glass as he watches the assault). Argento wrote the script
with the popular mystery novelist Bryan Edgar Wallace (whose works are part of
a similarly sadistically violent genre of German thrillers known as
"krimi"), but it's really an edited version of Fredric Brown's
thriller "Screaming Mimi" (previously made into a 1958 film). The
mystery ultimately collapses into bizarre and silly twists, but the story is only
a structure for Argento to spin his painstakingly choreographed visions of
violence and terror with a fluid camera and carefully controlled colors. It's
all about the spectacle, and while it's only a rough draft for the delirious
"giallo" to come, Argento fills it with inventive character bits (a
stuttering pimp, an artist who lives in a house with no doors). Suzy Kendall,
Eva Renzi, and Enrico Maria Salerno co-star and the moody score is by Ennio
Morricone. The newly remastered 2-disc set from Blue Underground (fast proving
itself to be a rival of Criterion for its excellent work on both arthouse and
grindhouse Italian cinema) features commentary by journalists Alan Jones and
Kim Newman and interview featurettes with director/co-writer Dario Argento, cinematographer
Vittorio Storaro, composer Ennio Morricone, and actress Eva Renzi among its
supplements.
The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Dario Argento's first and most
conventional film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, is loosely based
on American pulp writer Fredric Brown's The Screaming Mimi. Featuring a
bubbly pop score by Ennio Moriccone, the film is arguably Argento's most
Hitchcockian venture. American writer Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) walks past an
art gallery one night and witnesses two figures struggling: a woman and a man
in a black raincoat. Sam rushes to the woman's defense only to be locked inside
a double set of glass doors that separate the gallery from the street. From his
make-shift prison, Sam watches as the male figure flees the scene, leaving the
bloodied woman, Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi), writhing helplessly on the gallery
floor. In this, the film's most startling set piece, signature Argento
obsessions are on fierce display. Soon Sam's memory of the crime is called into
question and his gaze, once again, rigorously forced.
Bird With the Crystal Plumage
is perhaps best enjoyed by those new to Argento. The film lacks the color glory
of Suspiria and the
self-reflexive auteur treatise of 1982's Tenebre and could pass for one
of Agatha Christie's mannered puzzles. All the ingredients of Argento's greater
films are present here in muted form. The film's fashionable killer dons black
gloves. This fashionable archetype may not have originated here though it has
certainly become de rigueur (primarily in the films of Brian De Palma)
because of Argento. Sam plays an American writer though his occupation seems
tangential to the film's plot; not until 1975's Deep Red would occupational
angst become a potent element of an Argento narrative. Like Marc from Deep Red, Sam defies the
town's ineffectual police officers by launching an amateur investigation of his
own.
Sam's
journey first takes him to an antique store, where the killer's first victim
worked as a salesgirl. The establishment's owner is Argento's first gay
construct, a foppish man who makes sexual advances at a seemingly nervous Sam.
While slowly pursuing the writer through his store, the man brings up the
salesgirl's suspected lesbianism: "They said she preferred women. I
couldn't care less. I'm not racist." While Argento has never been
particularly deft at handling the sexuality of his characters, this comic
scenario immediately conjures the moral discourse at work in Tenebre. While the antique
owner's actions are silly, the use of the word "racist" (here, a
substitute for "homophobic") is of special interest to Argento. If
the salesgirl was indeed a lesbian, is it possible that the killer is a
ready-made moral cleanser? Sam hopes to spot the killer during a police
line-up, though the procedure is interrupted by the arrival of a transvestite.
The head investigator says, "Ursula Andress belongs with the transvestites
and not the perverts." The scene may be mildly offensive but Argento
clearly understands the line between crime and subjective morality.
Though
Bird With the Crystal Plumage may not invoke active spectatorship, the
two-killer theory popularized by Argento in films like Tenebre and 1996's Stendhal Syndrome makes its
first appearance here. During the film's infamous set piece, a bloody Monica
crawls toward a caged Sam only to pass out on the gallery's floor. Above her
rests a large sculpture of a bird's talons, a visual conceit that fascinatingly
blurs the bird/prey relationship that develops between Sam and Monica
throughout the film. Through a gap between two of the sculpture's claws, Monica
is able to stare at the trapped Sam—a stunning composition that evokes
Argento's obsession with sightnessness while prefiguring the rigorous
architectural terror of Tenebre. Thematic comparisons
to Psycho are perhaps unavoidable though Argento's visual stylings are
most certainly his own. And while Argento's fondness for all things
psychological may not out-Freud Hitchcock, the film's ending brings to mind Psycho's
own. If Hitchcock's ending needlessly showcases the Hitchcock's fascination
with psychoanalysis, Bird With the Crystal Plumage's ending is at least
tidier and more poetic. A TV show announces Monica's capture and a newscaster
bemoans her husband Alberto's sacrifice: "Her husband, who loved her
wisely but not too well, lost his life in an attempt to turn suspicion away
from his wife."
Intimations (and more) of
colonialism: Dario Argento's L'Uccello dalle piume di cirstallo (The Bird With
the Crystal Plumage, 1970) Frank
Burke from Kinoeye
DVD Times Michael Mackenzie
DVD Times -
Special Edition [Michael Mackenzie]
Classic-Horror Nate Yapp
Bird with the
Crystal Plumage, The Michael Den
Boer from 10kbullets
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
Bird
with the Crystal Plumage, The Comparison
Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
CAT O’ NINE TAILS (Il gatto a nove code)
Italy France Germany
Cat O' Nine Tails Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Structurally and thematically, Dario
Argento's The Cat O' Nine Tails is an improvement over The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,
even if the film's non-linear convolutions of plot may purposefully distract.
Set against a backdrop of genetic research and espionage, Argento's formal
obsession with allusions to seeing and sightlessness is on fierce display.
Franco "Cookie" Arno (Karl Malden), a blind former journalist with an
affinity for crossword puzzles, walks along a street adjacent to the Terzi
Institute with his young niece, Lori (Cinzia De Carolis). Passing a sleek red
vehicle,
At
the Terzi Institute, research is being completed on both an experimental drug
and a highly confidential investigation into the chromosome alteration XXY,
which indicates criminal tendency in the individual. In her book Broken Mirrors/Broken Minds: The Dark Dreams
of Dario Argento, Maitland McDonagh discusses how that the
film's camerawork invokes Argento's thematic concerns with the impossibilities
of sight. The film's faceless killer breaks into the Institute, committing a
burglary (what is stolen remains a secret to everyone, including the spectator)
with considerable detail. McDonagh says of the scene: "What has not been
seen—concealed in the blind spot of the camera-as-thief point-of-view (which is
to say, what happens behind the lens) is the thief's face, as well as the
object that has been stolen. The how of the crime has been explored at
length, while the why and by whom remain tantalizingly
obscure." Soon after the Institute is burglarized, Doctor Calabresi (Carlo
Alighiero)—the man in the car that Lori identified—is pushed to his death in
front of a train. More important than the delirious method with which Argento
directs this set piece are the rich allusions he makes to the eye (ours, the
killer's and, ultimately, that of the film camera).
Cat O' Nine Tails
begins Argento's lifelong fascination with the grotesque close-up. Similar to
the pulsating brain of Opera's killer, the eye of Cat
O' Nine Tails's perpetrator comes to embody deep-rooted despair—more
simply, it's also a reminder of the killer's near omniscience. Even before the
eye of Calabresi's killer is shown dilating on the screen, his murderous
presence is already hinted at through a clever signifier: an advertisement with
a large eye as its logo. With the help of reporter Carlo Giordani (James
Franciscus),
Reporters
prepare to take photographs of a starlet about to board the train that kills
Calabresi. After taking a picture of Calabresi falling onto the tracks (here,
the camera sees and records the truth), the reporters search for their wayward
starlet. The blond bombshell poses for the camera as a reporter comments, "That's
right. Smile. Smile. A man is dead." Not only is this priceless
self-criticism from a paparazzo (incidentally, Blowup's protagonist is a
female-hungry fashion photographer), Argento seemingly pokes the spectator for
enjoying Calabresi's remarkably staged demise. Argento later makes expert use
of the colors inside the red room operated by a newspaper worker in charge of
blowing up the picture of Calabresi's death. The photograph reveals the
killer's hands and as the film's murder count rises, usual suspects are
introduced: Doctor Braun (Horst Frank), a highbrow homosexual engaged in
espionage with Calabresi's fiancée, Bianca (Rada Rassimov); Anna Terzi
(Catherine Spaak), the lascivious adopted daughter of the Institute's owner
(Tino Carraro); and Doctor Casoni (Aldo Reggiani), a genius with an unusual
fondness for the XYY chromosome configuration.
Argento
avoids an easy trap by not revealing the homosexual character as the film's
killer though Braun seems to implicate himself (at least to the careful spectator)
when he seduces Carlo by saying that the reporter/detective has beautiful eyes.
Braun doesn't stand out of as a particularly offensive gay construct. Like
Anna, Braun is no less defined by his sexuality than any other typically
"perverted" Argento character. The jealous ex-boyfriend of Braun's
lover gives Braun's address to a desperate Carlo. While the nameless man may be
a prissy gay archetype (he threatens to kill himself if his lover Manuel
doesn't return to him), Argento avoids insult with one clever line: "You
probably think I'm despicable." The man is less ashamed of his sexuality
than he is concerned that Carlo might judge him for being a snitch. Not unlike
what he accomplished with a transvestite's appearance in The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,
Argento has carefully made a distinction between sexuality and criminal
pathology.
Early
in the film, a sequence fabulously hints at Doctor Casoni guilt. When Carlo
visits the doctor's office, Casoni stands before a series of chromosomal
charts. Similar to an eye doctor's sight chart, Casoni's chart shows the
letters x and y in a series of pyramid formations. Argento's ever-gliding
camera recalls Fassbinder's as it slithers smoothly from left to right,
positioning Casoni before the charts that fascinatingly implicates him in the
film's murders. Like Tenebre and Deep Red, Cat O' Nine Tails
showcases Argento's formal obsession with the disorienting effects of
architecture and interior design. Thanks in part to the garish décor of the
film's '70s milieu, Bianca's fabulous death recalls both Jesus Franco's Vampyros Lesbos and Polanski's
Repulsion.
Most
glorious, though, is the film's final scene, where Casoni and Carlo come face
to face atop the Institute's roof. Here, Argento toys with the disorienting
nature of the roof's ridges. Even when Casoni is revealed to be the film's
murderer, Argento refuses to view his actions as a result of some sort of
chromosomal disfigurement. Casoni was merely concerned with what the results of
the genome project would mean for his career. Casoni kidnaps the young Lori and
hides her inside a room at the Institute inhabited by a family of rats. Lori's
childhood seems to go hand-in-hand with her innocence—she calls
From punctum to
Pentazet, and everything in between: Dario Argento's Il gatto a nove code (The
Cat O' Nine Tails, 1971) and Quattro mosche di velutto grigio (Four Flies on
Grey Velvet, 1972) Gary Needham from
Kinoeye
DVD Times review
[Michael Mackenzie]
Images Movie Journal Joe Pettit Jr.
Cat O Nine Tails Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
DEEP RED (Profondo Rosso)
Italy
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "Can zebras read minds???"
Deep Red marks a crucial transition in Argento’s career: a move away from conventional ‘giallo’ mystery-thrillers into more a more experimental mix of art film and splatterfest horror. While the results are often messy, not just in terms of onscreen bloodshed, this is the most fascinating kind of failure, a necessary stepping-stone to his masterpiece, Suspiria.
Waving farewell to giallo, Argento pushes the genre to its limits, piling up spectacular murder sequences around a confusing tale of madness, violence and revenge. Marc (David Hemmings), a jazz pianist and composer, witnesses the murder of Helga (Macha Meril), a psychic who’d previously detected the presence of a ‘twisted mind’ during a public display of paranormal powers. Though Marc can’t recall seeing the assailant’s face, he knows he saw something vital - vital enough to attract the attention of the police, shapely journalist Gianna (Daria Nicolodi), and the killer.
In Deep Red, everything is taken to extremes - to the edge of parody. Viewers of the two-hour version may be surprised by the amount of comedy sprinkled among the shock-filled suspense - there can be few non-spoof thrillers with so much broad humour. Argento never tires of gags involving Gianna’s wonky old car - its defective passenger-seat drops Hemmings down almost to the floor. Everything involving Gianna is played for laughs, right from her absurdly perky entrance, flouncing into the crime-scene at Helga’s flat with a cheap flash-camera.
But there’s a point behind everything Argento does: the car-seat slapstick ties in with the serious theme of weak masculinity cowed by dominant women – Marc, who regards the case as ‘a challenge to [his] memory’, turns out as useless an ‘investigator’ as Hemmings’ Thomas back in Antonioni’s Blow Up.
Nevertheless, many viewers will find Deep Red suffering from wild tonal shifts between laughs and shudders. It’s hard to laugh when we’ve just watched a man’s head bashed in on the corners of a desk, or a woman scalded to death by being dunked in a red-hot bath (as another critic rather mildly put it, “pretty harsh.”)
Argento doesn’t need to strain for comic effects - he’s amusing enough when he’s being ostensibly ‘serious.’ The script is dotted with his trademark deadpan absurdities: at the paranormal display, a professor notes telepathy is common among “butterflies, termites, zebras…” Zebras?! Much of Deep Red operates on this nonsensical plane. Argento and his co-scriptwriter Bernardino Zapponi have cited the old chestnut about attempting to replicate the disorienting craziness of nightmare - with most directors, this is a weak, catch-all defence. But Argento justifies it with the breathtaking audacity of his outrageous ingenuities.
During one tense killer-stalking-prey sequence, a door flies open and in strides a child-sized, cackling robotic dummy: this gadget makes no rational sense, and adds nothing to the plot, but it isn’t half disturbing – not to mention entertaining. When Deep Red is good, as here, it’s great: Argento does some staggering things with the camera, including hyper-real closeups of bizarre knick-knacks in the killer’s lair.
But when it’s bad, it can be murder. Even worse than the unwelcome comic relief, Argento’s pacing deserts him around the middle, allowing one’s mind to drift and pick apart what is, beneath all the virtuouso visuals, a pretty basic plot. As Gianna remarks during a moment of crisis, “All this… for a lousy story.”
It’s always best to give Argento the benefit of the doubt, however, and he does know exactly what he’s doing. The film opens with Marc interrupting a rehearsal and asking the musicians to be “Less formal… it should be more… trashy.” As Deep Red oscillates between extremes, it’s understandable that the rough edges occasionally get out of hand. The eclectic score music is generally superb, a radical departure from familiar usual horror-movie music - the way it’s deployed when Marc and Gianna wordlessly explore a spooky old school is nothing short of brilliant. But the improvisations veer self-indulgently haywire when Marc visits a ‘haunted house,’ the soundtrack erupting into incongruous, woozy electronica.
There’s much that doesn’t work in Deep Red and it can be, on first viewing, difficult to sit through – for several reasons. But stick with it: the climax is simply sensational, much better seen than described. There’s a long, conspicuously music-free tracking shot, then a cut to a final freeze frame. This reviewer defies anyone watching on video (or DVD) to resist immediately rewinding and marvel at the sequence a second time. Critics and aspiring directors will be in danger of wearing out the tape. The preceding two hours’ unevenness is swept away by a stunning display of cinematic bravado. Only a genius could do it – only, in fact, Dario Argento.
Deep Red Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
DVD Verdict Bill Gibron
Images Movie Journal Shane M. Dallmann
Classic-Horror.com Rob Wrigley
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
not coming to a theater
near you [Rumsey Taylor]
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
SUSPIRIA A- 94
Italy
The Only Thing More Terrifying Than The Last 12 Minutes Of This Film Are The First 92. —poster tagline
One of the Granddaddy’s
of horror films, largely due to the spectacular effects, where this is one of
the most outstanding uses of color of any film ever made, using the three-strip
Technicolor process (already obsolete at the time of shooting), where every
single shot is literally bathed in the sensuous beauty of Technicolor, always
accentuating the eye-popping visual design of the film, shot by cinematographer
Luciano Tovoli. Using something of a
barebones story, the film is instead prone to extreme exaggeration, featuring
spectacular murder sequences, where much of the film plays out like a visit to
a mad funhouse, where behind each door is another frightful experience designed
to produce shocking horrors, each one more astonishing than the last. Using a repeating musical theme composed by
Argento along with the band “Goblin,” this has a familiarity with John
Carpenter’s creepy and hypnotic electronic score in HALLOWEEN (1978) released
the following year, where you get a pervasive sense of foreboding dread just
from the opening sequence, Suspiria (1977) Very
scary first 15 minutes!!! YouTube in HD (15:12), which is a breathtaking lead-in
to this nightmarish world drenched in brilliant colors, a master class of
filmmaking technique taking place on fabulous sets, including the initial
murder sequence starting at about the 9:30 mark. The spookiness of the taxi cab ride may as
well be an arrival to Transylvania, instead it’s Jessica Harper as Susy
arriving in Germany to study at a prestigious dance academy, featuring an
extraordinary sound design throughout, but also horribly amateurish dubbing and
hysterical overacting. In a sudden shift
of narrative, a frightened woman, Eva Axén, flees the school in a panic, finding
safe refuge in the apartment of a friend, only to be murdered by an unseen force
in the middle of the night, two white eyes staring from out of the dark, where
some may confuse this character with Susy, as both are soaked by the rain. Argento, in something out of the Werner
Herzog handbook for making movies, supposedly played the musical soundtrack at
full blast on the set to force the actors into an unnatural sense of
powerlessness to circumstances beyond their control, perhaps best expressed in
this weirdly ominous sequence of Susy simply walking down the corridor of the new
dance academy, MOVIE :
SUSPIRIA [1977] - YouTube (1:18).
Literally nothing can
prepare the viewer for the assault on the senses that Argento throws at you,
feeling as if you’re stuck in the hypnotic intrigue of a nightmare you can’t
escape, captivated by a relentlessly horrifying, fear-inducing experience where
you’re continually drawn deeper and deeper into this cavernous abyss, where you
find yourself alone in a dark and hallucinogenic fever dream with an evil force
on the loose. Even before her entrance
to the academy, all is not right, as things are strangely out of whack, where
Susy is seen as a
young, wide-eyed innocent lured into the
mysterious lair of dark and hidden forces which have their own peculiar
designs. The school is run by Joan
Bennett (her final screen appearance), a former film noir femme fatale in Fritz
Lang’s SCARLET STREET (1945), as the seemingly sophisticated and ultra polite
Madame Blanc, while the harsh taskmasker and disciplinarian is Miss Tanner,
none other than Alida Valli from THE THIRD MAN (1949), both familiar faces that
add character and and a kind of camp personality to the overall rich décor of
what appears to be a witch’s coven, something along the lines of ROSEMARY’S
BABY (1968), where we get a clue when the doctor treats the young ballet
dancer’s blood instead of any illness, recommending a glass of red wine every
night, which has the effect of inducing sleepiness, leaving her helplessly
drugged each night. Her roommate is
Sara, Stefania Casini, best friends with the girl killed earlier, who suspects
foul play but has little to go on. When
a shower of maggots falls from the ceiling, not to mention a bat attack, and
the mysterious death of a blind pianist, mauled by his seeing-eye dog, you’d
think this ought to provide sufficient warning to one and all, but no one
leaves or turns to the police. As dark
fates continue to befall several more individuals, Susy stupefyingly remains on
the premises, remaining drugged and clueless to the source of evil. There’s even a Susy and Sara swimming pool
sequence with the eerie tone of DIABOLIQUE (1955), where in the calmness of the
still water, the atmospheric presence of a disturbing force is everpresent,
which eventually leads to her roomate’s gruesome demise, another spooky
sequence of slasher horror Suspiria's
best scene - YouTube in HD (3:35) that is quickly covered up by the next
morning.
When Sara supposedly
disappears, according to school officials, packing and leaving without a word
early the next morning, Susy contacts one of her friends, a young, cherubic
faced Udo Kier who plays Sara’s former psychiatrist. They discuss the possibility of witchcraft,
as if this is the message Sara was trying to send her from the grave, but Udo
offers the standard psychobabble mantra, “Bad luck isn’t brought by broken
mirrors, but by broken minds.” However
one of his colleagues offers keen insight by suggesting witches have an
insurmountable desire to accumulate power, where all the minions of the coven
collectively offer their knowledge to a single leader who rules over them all,
amassing supernatural powers that can literally alter reality. Most of this narrative information is for the
audience’s behalf to help them find their way through this dizzying weirdness,
as the director only accelerates the relentless slasher assault with
terrifyingly creepy, wall to wall music that continually sounds like glass shattering. Argento really is a master of the tracking
shot, as this is his chosen method to take us slowly on a dreamlike journey
into a strange new world, becoming something of a haunted house movie, where
characters are forever exploring the remote interiors of the building at their
own peril, including Susy who finally throws out the wine and thinks she’s on
to something. The slow pan of the camera
through the hallways literally becomes her hesitant, but curiously fearful
perspective as she attempts to trace the source of evil, following her down
corridors that are suddenly saturated in a torrent of red, continuing through
hidden doors into strange, mysterious rooms, all with a strikingly beautiful
decorative design, accompanied by the sound of whispered shrieks on the
soundtrack, past two Russian fat ladies who menacingly stand guard to their
eerie, secret world, seen in the kitchen giggling hilariously while they chop
meat. As Susy climbs deeper into the
unknown, with the mind-altering music weighing upon every anticipated thought,
the suspense by itself is hair-raising, but she continues to wander into the
mysterious lair of a Hellish underground, a place where the living and the dead
coincide, where we’ve already seen what can happen to her helpless friend
Sara. Argento’s slowly building sense of
dread is met with simply extraordinary Art Deco splendor, using lush visual
effects to create an unsurpassed boldness that literally redefines the genre
through such a brilliantly extravagant, heavily stylized art design, where the
frightening onslaught of terror onscreen becomes a uniquely individualized film
experience.
Adam Simon from 1001
MOVIES YOU MUST SEE BEFORE YOU DIE:
In its sheer enigmatic weirdness, Dario Argento’s Suspiria serves to remind us that no film is ever really a text, but always an experience. Distinctly European in flavor, Suspiria begins as if it were an Italian giallo (pulp thriller)—with a series of spectacular murders stages with the baroque quality of a musical. But Argento soon switches gears, revealing a world not of masked or gloved human killers, but of supernatural forces, black magic, and malignant witches.
However, Suspiria is not only a late-ish entry is a European horror subgenre, it is also a product of a particular stylistic influence, namely that of Argento’s mentor, Mario Bava, a pioneer in multiple Italian genres whose highly visual effects were created with amazing intelligence and economy. Perhaps the most enduring contribution of Bava’s style was the kind of relentless tracking shot which Argento makes outrageously his own, and which now, thanks to directors ranging from Martin Scorsese to Sam Raimi, has become a basic part of contemporary film language.
Suspiria takes place in a classically gothic setting—an old dance academy. The true nature of the instruction offered there is revealed in a rain of maggots that showers the girls one evening. In this pure gross-out lies a kind of key, as the big spectacular scenes themselves become tests of endurance. While the audience and the student-protagonist, Susy Banyon (Jessica Harper), are drawn along by traces of mysterious and esoteric revelations, Suspiria’s intense array of audiovisual shocks and effects teeter on the very edge of unbearableness. This is the texture of the whole film, not only in its grand surreal deaths but even in its smallest gestures, as when a malevolent dance instructor pours water straight into Susy’s mouth, the heavy glass pitcher rattling against her teeth.
Argento’s film stands out even among the best of its form for the sheer intensity of the experience of watching—and hearing—it, the latter due to an almost overpowering score by the director and his frequent collaborators, the rock group Goblin. From beginning to end, this is a nightmarish fairy tale, culminating in a grotesque confrontation with the hideous elder of the witches coven. Finally, Suspiria reveals the horror film to be a kind of initiation ritual for protagonist and spectator alike—the horror genre itself as a kind of secular mystery religion.
Suspiria Time
Out
From his stylish, atmosphere-laden
opening - young American ballet student arriving in Europe during a storm -
Argento relentlessly assaults his audience: his own rock score (all dissonance
and heavy-breathing) blasts out in stereo, while Jessica
Harper gets threatened by location, cast, weather and camera. Thunderstorms
and extraordinarily grotesque murders pile up as Argento happily abandons plot
mechanics to provide a bravura display of his technical skill. With his sharp
eye for the bizarre and for vulgar over-decoration, it's always fascinating to
watch; the thrills and spills are so classy and fast that the movie becomes in
effect what horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see
them. Don't think, just panic.
DVDBeaver.com [Eric Portelance]
Suspiria is probably one of the most atmospheric horror
movies I've ever seen. What makes it especially interesting is that it was shot
on standard Eastman Kodak color film stock but was printed using the
three-strip Technicolor process. This was achieved by using one of the last
remaining machines of the kind out there. It really gives the movie a unique
look and very vibrant colors.
This is the story of a young American girl, Suzy, who accepts an offer from a
prestigious ballet school in
The Onion A.V. Club
[Scott Tobias]
In the justly celebrated opening sequence of Dario Argento's
1977 horror classic Suspiria, an American ballet student arrives at a
German airport late in the evening, ready to be shuttled off to the most
prestigious dance school in Europe. As she's about to exit into a pounding
rainstorm, the automatic doors yawn and snap with a menacing hiss, and snippets
of Goblin's aggressive score (a gothic fusion of twinkling keyboards, African
drums, and whispered vocal taunts) sound a clear warning: "Abandon all
hope, ye who enter here." With the waifish, doe-eyed innocence of a
fairy-tale heroine, Jessica Harper unwittingly stumbles into Dario-world, a
sadistic Eurotrash torture chamber leavened by sumptuous visuals and enough
elaborately orchestrated set pieces to rival Brian De Palma. As distinctive in
its painterly colors as Val Lewton's horror films were in their expressive
swaths of black and white, Suspiria serves up a gorehound's feast of
explicit mayhem. But never has gratuitous bloodletting seemed so ornately
beautiful. On the gorgeous new DVD transfer, Argento's vibrant color scheme
leaps off the screen like a '50s Technicolor musical, with sets and lighting
design that fill the Cinemascope frame with bold reds, greens, yellows, and
blues. Atmosphere and style dominate his thinking to such a degree that Argento
(Deep Red, Tenebrae) can be forgiven for his inattention to
niggling concerns like acting or storytelling. Loaded with expository
dialogue—some of it laughable, some of it merely clumsy—the script overexplains
its simple premise about a ballet academy with a secret history of witchcraft.
The night Harper arrives on a scholarship, she witnesses a young dancer fleeing
the school in terror, and finds out the next morning that the woman was
brutally murdered in a neighboring dormitory. Her suspicions are heightened
when she meets her fellow students, who are unusually petty and hostile, and a
pair of schoolmarmish administrators (Joan Bennett and Alida Valli) who have a
strange, conspiratorial relationship. With sights and sounds that aim for
sensory overload, Suspiria converts vulgarity and excess into high art,
escalating to a fever pitch on former Antonioni cinematographer Luciano
Tovoli's eye-popping images and Goblin's assaultive score, which is available
as disc three of a limited-edition three-disc set. On the mostly useless
documentary that takes up disc two, Harper talks about how the confusion of
playing scenes with actors who spoke variously in Italian, German, or English.
But Argento atones for his apathy about the performances (all the dialogue was
dubbed, badly, in postproduction) with one stunning segment after another, from
the opening murder to a blind man haunted in a vacant city square to the
stops-out climactic showdown. Long admired in cult circles, Suspiria
stands as one of the most visually striking horror films ever made, and the
high watermark of a first-rate splatter stylist.
Suspiria Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
“You have been watching SUSPIRIA” proclaim the closing credits. This is a jarring note of understatement after an hour and a half of extravagant excess: watching is a hopelessly inadequate way to describe what’s less a film, more a full-on experience of quadrophonic sounds and quadrophenic images. Argento aims for, and achieves, total sensory overload – it’s just as well nobody suggested smell-o-vision. By the end, you may feel that you’ve had needles thrust into your ears, and acid thrown in your eyes: but, this being cinema, you’re unscathed – in fact, you’re better off, as your sensory frame of reference has been forcibly widened.
To do the film full justice, this review should probably be
written in bold, underlined, italic CAPITALS flashing on
and off, in garish red… At the time of the
But you’ll search in vain for Suspiria among ‘ten best’
lists of seventies cinema. Argento’s aims, and his methods, differ so radically
from those of his more ‘respectable’ arthouse contemporaries - Tarkovsky,
Rivette, Angelopolous, Godard. Suspiria is, first and foremost, a horror
movie, made for the widest possible international market, and it was a
notable box-office success on both sides of the
This is all immediately apparent from the bravura opening sequence, in which American ballet student Suzy Banyon (Jessica Harper) arrives in Germany to attend the prestigious Freiburg tanzakademie - as Argento himself has informed in his deadpan, amusingly redundant opening-credits voiceover. Just as Suzy is confronted by a confusing, insanely hostile new environment as soon as she lands at the airport in the middle of a raging storm, so the audience must also adapt to Argento’s new world of garish colour schemes and pounding music, a heightened realm where nothing is familiar, nothing can be taken for granted. The film’s technique can be read as an attempt to convey Suzy’s frenzied frame of mind – as ballet movies go, this is more Red Shoes than Billy Elliot, though Argento goes much further, in every respect, than even Powell and Pressburger dared to attempt. His relentlessly inventive camerawork endows the most mundane items, such as a sliding-door mechanism, with a bizarre aura of sinister intrigue: as Suzy is later informed, ‘magic is everywhere.’
Having established an overwhelming mood of ominous foreboding, Argento further disorients us by rapidly switching to mode of pure terror, as two of Suzy’s fellow students are killed in a ludicrously over-elaborate, extended sequence: by this point, audiences will either be hooked or repelled. The ‘plot’, such as it is, is really just an excuse for such set-pieces – there have often been rumours of an American remake of Suspiria, and it’s hard to think of a film less suitable for such treatment, the story-line being by far the least important aspect. Disturbed by the spate of mysterious killings, Suzy discovers that the dance-academy, as run by the formidable Miss Tanner (Joan Bennett) and the harpy-like Miss Blanc (Alida Valli), is a front for a witches’ coven. Suzy eventuallypenetrates the school’s inner sanctum to confront ancient uber-witch Helena Markos, sparking a climactic orgy of destructive pyrotechnics.
It’s tempting, but not quite correct, to describe this finale as a crescendo – the oft-misused term refers to a piece of music which gradually gains in intensity and loudness throughout its length, so it would be better to describe the whole film as a true crescendo. The film lends itself to such musical analogies: Argento pays at least as much attention to the way his movie sounds as to how it looks – and, with this director, that’s really saying something. The frame is typically packed full of remarkable things – startlingly designed rooms, clothes, furniture, weapons – as the prowling camera makes the tanzakademie a character in its own right, one of the great haunted houses of the movies. But Argento can go the other way: there’s an audaciously lengthy sequence which takes place in an eerily empty public square at night, shot to resemble one of Giorgio de Chirico’s sparse, quasi-classical surrealist vistas.
Rather less attention, it must be said, has been lavished on the screenplay, but there is a startling amount of humour in there, which even the dodgy dubbing can’t obscure. Everything is played totally straight, even the most ludicrous lines and events, such as when, in what must be a unique moment in movie history, an unseen villain is identified by her snoring. At one point, as the ailing Suzy rests in bed, Miss Blanc notes approvingly that she’s got ‘colour’ back in her cheeks – it’s hard for us to tell for ourselves, as Argento’s suffused the room in a characteristically hellish red glow. Bennett makes the most of these droll quips – she and Valli make for a quirky double-act, a kind of satanic Hinge and Brackett. Or, given, the movie’s fairy-tale structure, the Ugly Sisters: Bennett businesslike and off-hand, Valli screeching most of her lines in a permanent fit of foul temper.
It’s touches like these that make Suspiria among the most enjoyable of all great movies – never afraid to go too far, in fact embracing excess. The crazy design is partly underpinned by rudiments of structure, with aspects of both detective story and fairy-tale giving shape to Suzy’s ‘quest’ for the truth: she must piece together clues, using her eyes (not for nothing does the plot hinge on an ‘iris’) and her ears – precisely the organs most dangerously threatened by the film’s collection of lethal sharp edges. And Argento, in a typically daring move, withholds many of these clues from the audience, as in the early sequence when a fleeing, doomed student yells some vital but, to us, inaudible phrases as a thunderstorm drowns out her words, phrases which only Suzy can hear and, much later, comprehend.
This is Argento at his best – casually pulling off what few other directors would even dream of attempting. There are moments in Suspiria that defy critical description – not to mention rational analysis – but which genuinely seem, to use overworked expressions, magical… transcendent. And these ‘Argento moments’ come thick and fast. To pick just one: Suzy, making her way down a corridor, suddenly comes across the academy’s sour-faced maid, with her ever-present companion, a strangely dressed, eerie child known as ‘little Albert’. The maid is polishing a bizarre, dagger-like ornament, tilting to reflect bright light onto Suzy’s face, dazzling her, into the camera, dazzling us. Time stands still as the scene freezes in static tableau: the air in the corridor shimmers, and the dust particles drift, bright as fireflies.
*Suspiria has often brought out the best in its reviewers: in Time Out, Scott Meek (later producer of Velvet Goldmine) noted that “the thrills and spills are so classy and fast that the movie becomes in effect what horror movies seemed like when you were too young to get in to see them.” In Guide for the Film Fanatic, Danny Peary was perturbed by the ‘deafening’ score: “One begins to suspect that the unseen murderer walking about is an avant-garde rock musician.” In a way, that’s exactly what he is – as usual, Argento wields the knife, and also collaborates with the ‘Goblins’ on the music. Peary complains that the film is ‘done in by too much visual flair.’ For Argento, of course, too much is never enough.
Cinefantastique
Online Steve Biodrowski
Kinoeye [Linda Schulte-Sasse]
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez, also seen here: Suspiria
DVD Verdict - Limited Edition [Bill Gibron]
Images Movie Journal [Robert Firsching]
not coming to a theater near you [Rumsey Taylor]
DVD Journal DSH
Suspiria -
Filmcritic.com Movie Review Keith
Breese
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Parallax View
[Richard T. Jameson] Originally published in
Movietone News 56, November 1977
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Joe Bob's Drive-In
Movie Review Joe Bob Briggs
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
[Dennis Schwartz]
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
kindertrauma unkle lancifer
Ruthless Reviews » SUSPIRIA Matt Cale
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Brilliant Observations
on 1776 Films [Clayton Trapp]
BBCi
- Films (DVD review) Almar
Haflidason
Suspiria
- Movies - The New York Times Janet
Maslin
DVDBeaver.com
[Eric Portelance]
Suspiria - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
INFERNO
Italy
Inferno Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
“I don't know what price I shall have to
pay for breaking what we alchemists call Silentium. The life experience
of our colleague should teach us not to upset laymen by imposing our knowledge
upon them. I, Varelli, an architect living in
Rose,
a poet, comes to believe that her gothic abode is a coven for Mater Tenebrarum,
the Mother of Darkness. Rose's building is inhabited by curious characters: her
rich friend Elise Stallone Van Adler (Daria Nicolodi), her ominous manservant
Carlo (Gabriele Lavia), an elderly cripple (Feodor Chaliapin), his nurse
(Veroniz Lazar) and the building's landlady, Carol (Alida Valli, Suspiria's Miss Tanner).
Rose's brother Mark (Leigh McCloskey), a music student in
Varelli's
text details that "the land upon which the three houses have been
constructed will eventually become deathly and plague-ridden, so much so that
the area all around will reek horribly." The mothers' secrets are
accessible through three keys: the first, no doubt, was the iris in Madame
Blanc's Suspiria office; the second
"is hidden in the cellar under their houses"; and the third key
"can be found under the soles of your shoes." The smell that consumes
the Inferno building is enough to convince Rose that she must be living
inside Mater Tenebrarum's deadly abode. In the film's most outstanding set
piece, she goes looking for the mother's key by diving through a hole in the
building's cellar. There she encounters Mater Tenebrarum's underwater chamber
and a hideous floating corpse to boot. Giallo director Mario Bava, whose
influence on Argento is legendary, staged this sequence for his protege. Bava's
presence here may explain why the film's subdued lighting brings to mind Bava's
The Whip and the Body. If Inferno
is remarkable to look at, Argento's use of signs and metaphors are loopy at best.
Kazanian,
the antique bookseller, tries to drown a sack full of cumbersome cats in a
For the love of smoke and
mirrors: Dario Argento's Inferno (1980)
Jodey Castricano from Kinoeye
DVD Times review
[Michael Mackenzie]
Images Movie Journal Shane M. Dallmann
Classic-Horror.com Brandt Sponseller
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
TENEBRE
aka: Unsane
USA
Tenebre
(Dario Argento, 1982) Eric Henderson
from When Canses Were Classeled
On one level, it's very obviously about the culpability of violence in entertainment in influencing receptive and "unsane" folks (and one which lays a great piece of blame on itself). On another level, it's a most beautiful and stunning paean to violence as the highest form of art. At any level, it's probably the best Dario Argento film I've yet seen. But back to the art, one need look no further than the murder of Peter Neal's cheating wife as an astonishing moment of both torrential foul-play ugliness as well as the creative artistic process at its most liberated. The stump of her arm gushing blood, she turns around, sprays the wall behind her in an arc, and she may as well be Jackson Pollock on a bender. When she is whacked with an ax in the back, she slowly turns face front again, and her arched back, missing arm, and overwrought emotional expression all resemble nothing less than a gothic statue -- the Venus de Milo, before she lost her other arm. And what of the dowdy lesbian, with her left breast always hanging out of her flimsy garments (or, later on, in her toga-like bath towels) like a voloptuous Bottecelli? Intriguingly enough for a film steeped in artsy reference points, Tenebre is far more jaggedly edited and less concerned with architecturally expansive cinematography than Deep Red or Suspiria. It's a far more brutal piece, with high-jumping attack dogs, red bitch-heels, and a sky-high body count. In that respect, it's Argento's most hedonistic film. Should we be surprised, then, that it is also a portrait of the artist at his most self-obsessed?
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young) : "maximum
darkness"
Tenebrae isn’t based in the present, but about five or more years in the
future. It was never meant to be a story about something that is happening now.
It isn’t exactly my Blade Runner, of course, but nevertheless a step into the
world of tomorrow…
Tenebrae occurs in a world inhabited by fewer people with the results
that the remainder are wealthier and less crowded. Something has happened to
make it that way but no one remembers, or wants to remember.
Dario Argento*
Intriguing ideas – but anyone stumbling across Tenebrae might
initially be baffled that the movie could be taken seriously at all, let alone
analysed in terms of philosophical or cinematic concepts, or cited as the work
of a fascinating ‘auteur’. In the first few scenes the acting is, at best,
erratic, with the additional barrier of haphazard dialogue-looping that makes
the script sound extremely stilted. The garishly bright images are scored with
pounding synth music, and the plot seems to be a tawdry brand of Eurotrash
stalk-n-slash: cult
But there’s much more to Tenebrae than meets the eye, and it would be a grave mistake to be put off by the film’s superficial clumsiness. Just as the audience is starting to balk at the general air of banal crudity, Argento pulls off a staggering coup that should convince even the most skeptical viewer that he is, despite evidence to the contrary, a master of cinema. It’s a two-and-a-half minute crane shot that lingers over the surfaces of a futuristic tower-block, gliding nimbly over concrete, slates, windows, blinds… snooping in on the two women who live there, and who are about to become the killer’s next victim. A sensual symphony of angles, shapes and movement, it seems to go on forever, accompanied by that infernal synthesiser – until the shot ends with a cut to one of the women shouting “Turn it down!”, and we realise that the racket’s coming from her flatmate’s record-player.
Argento is, it must be said, showing off his technical virtuosity with this sequence. But by having the character express the audience’s impatience with the music, he’s also revealing a sense of humour that radically alters the mood of what could easily have been yet another tedious psycho-on-the-loose bloodfest. Tenebrae becomes, instead, a bizarre, deadpan black joke of a movie, in the vein of Hitchcock, with Argento seeing how far he can push genre conventions over the top, while deftly delineating a nightmare world of constant, irrational threat.
There’s a lengthy sequence in which John Saxon, as Neal’s sleazy agent, is murdered in a Roman piazza - a very modern, almost futuristic kind of Roman piazza, of course - and the whole thing plays out in the broadest of daylights. So broad, in fact, one realises that even movie’s superbly evocative one-word title – a Latin term meaning ‘darkness,’ it’s also the title of Neal’s new potboiler – indicates ironic intent, as there’s barely a shadow in the whole movie. As another critic has noted, ‘even the night scenes are brightly lit.’
Tenebrae should ideally be watched in maximum darkness, in a cinema. On video, there’s too much temptation to immediately replay scenes, such is the engagingly bizarre and unexpected nature of what’s shown - from set-pieces like Saxon’s death, to throwaway bits, such as a Doberman somehow leaping a ten-foot fence - and what’s said. “What languages does she speak?” says a policeman, referring to a Filipino maid who’s emerged as a pivotal witness. “Only Tagalog and Spanish,” comes the straightfaced reply.) Or sometimes both: early on, as Neal is being told of the atrocities committed by the killer, a cop thrusts an explicit photo of a murder victim into his face, only for the author dismisses it with a bafflingly businesslike “No.”
Such moments make Tenebrae much more than merely watchable – the movie becomes a fascinating example of what happens when a real artist takes hold of a particular genre’s tired conventions and twists them into something utterly idiosyncratic, perverse, and fascinating. But by doing so Argento runs a massive risk. There’s the matter of the acting – Franciosa is such a battle-hardened pro he can look after himself. Veronica Lario, however, as his vengeful ex-girlfriend Jane, is laughably inept, and most of the cast are closer, in terms of ability, to Lario rather than Franciosa.
Again, Hitchcock is a valid comparison – for Argento, the actors are elements to be manipulated – a necessary evil. He’s not interested in whether they’re able to deliver a ‘believable’ performance. After all, they’ll probably be quickly, and messily despatched. Tenebrae builds to a climactic fifteen minutes which leaves only one character standing, and she’s a hysterical wreck. To steal Danny Peary’s comment on Videodrome, the movie ‘loses its mind’ in these latter stages, abandoning its careful whodunnit structure and throwing itself into an increasingly wild bloodbath.
It’s as if Argento has decided to emulate his protagonist Peter Neal, who’s said to ‘cut out the boring bits.’ Tenebrae may baffle, it may annoy, and it may nauseate unsuspecting viewers. But, in terms of a creative individual using cinema to express a particular way of looking at the world, and using a commercial genre as a vehicle for genuinely subversive ideas and methods, it ends up, against all the odds and expectations, something close to an astonishing achievement.
*This Argento comment is taken from interview with Alan Jones in Cinefantastique (Vol.13, No.8 / Vol.14, No.1), reproduced in Maitland McDonagh’s book Broken Mirrors, Broken Minds – The Dark Dreams of Dario Argento. The book contains a lengthy, informative and intelligent analysis of Tenebrae, as opposed to the essay by Chris Barber & Stephen Thrower in Art of Darkness (ed Chris Gallant), which bogs down in endless academic jargon and filmschool-speak.
Transgressive drives and
traumatic flashbacks: Dario Argento's Tenebrae (1982) Xavier Mendik from Kinoeye
Tenebre Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
DVD Times review
[Michael Mackenzie]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
not coming to a theater
near you [Rumsey Taylor]
Classic-Horror.com Brandt Sponseller
Cinephile Magazine [Richard X]
DVDBeaver.com
[Jayson Kennedy]
PHENOMENA
aka: Creepers
Italy
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil Young): "insect is
best"
I am sleepwalking. I must wake up. I am sleepwalking. I must wake up.”
Jennifer Corvino, Phenomena
Phenomena isn’t the best introduction to Dario Argento - newcomers
may be baffled by both this particular movie, and also by Argento’s reputation
as the maestro of recent Italian horror. On a rational, normal level, the movie
is ludicrous, and there are occasions when it seems sloppy, even
amateurish. But Argento has never been especially interested in ‘rational’ or
‘normal’ material, and the world of cinema would be much the poorer without
such crackpot, visionary mavericks. It also doesn’t help that the full,
111-minute version of Phenomena has been only intermittently available
over the years, and many viewers have had to make do with the 83-minute cut
released in the
The plot, if it can be called such, sees American teenager Jennifer Corvino
(Connelly) packed off to a Swiss finishing school by her father, a movie star
filming his latest epic in the
Or something. It’s a crazy set-up for a film, and, adding in the wooden
performances, the absurd, clumsily dubbed dialogue, and the apparently random
application of heavy metal on the soundtrack, you end up with a very strange
viewing experience, as likely to provoke giggles and chills of fright. It’s
never easy to tell just how much is being played for laughs, and how much
should be taken seriously. One of the most disturbing things in the movie is a
hideous, cheap Bee Gees t-shirt, and there’s a wry moment when Jennifer, trying
to creep silently out of a room, knocks over a knitting needle which falls
straight down into a handy ball of wool. And though the script is played
‘straight,’ it’s full of wild absurdities (“I have to join my regiment at dawn”
deadpans a young bloke to his girlfriend), and every line spat out by the
harpy-like head-mistress is borderline hilarious. When a dozy pupil blurts out
‘screw the past’; during a poetry lesson, the head sets off on a foot-stomping
rant: “What about ancient
Such quirks keep Phenomena watchable, even though they also make it very hard to take seriously. But Argento knows exactly what he’s doing at every stage – the film opens with a slow pan up some wind-blown trees that’s worthy of Tarkovsky, and he shows remarkably little of the killer (not even a gloved hand) until very late on. He confidently deploys weird imagery, lighting and sound-effects to construct a bizarre, surreal, dream-like state. Jennifer sleepwalks, and finds herself unable to wake, even when she realises she isn’t awake or in control, just as the audience, while constantly aware of the artificiality of the movie, are powerless to act. The film thus makes perfect sense in psychological terms (if no other) as as a representation of Jennifer’s disorientation in this strange new country. Argento similarly disorients and unsettles the audience with his unpredictable use of (bad) mid-80s heavy metal on the soundtrack and his increasingly haphazard plotting, liberally peppered with ‘shock’ moments.
But even the most ludicrous aspects of the movie do make, on reflection, a kind of sense. The headmistress is a cardboard caricature of stroppy strictness, but surely this beautiful, repressed woman, forever obsessing over ‘normality,’ is a savage satirical swipe at the Swiss national character. Behind the superficial orderliness of these picture-postcard surroundings, Jennifer finds a maelstrom of violence, horror and irrationality – as in any persecution-complex nightmare, she’s surrounded by irrational foes, people who despise her, who work against her. But the original twist here is that she also has irrational friends – the insects. She receives telepathic ‘images’ from the perspective of ladybirds and maggots, and trusts a corpse-eating fly to lead her to the killer’s lair, eventually commanding a vast swarm of bluebottles to engulf the monstrous psychopath in a sensationally visceral, no-holds-barred finale.
Visions of deformity: Dario Argento's Phenomena (1985) Donald Campbell from Kinoeye
Phenomena Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]
Phenomena Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Classic-Horror.com Rob Wrigley
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
OPERA
Italy
Opera Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
Dario Argento once entertained the notion
of providing audiences for his films with rows of straight pins attached to
pieces of tape, which they would place directly below their eyes. This would
force the spectator's eyes to remain open during the goriest portions of his
films. Argento's "Eyeorama" never came to fruition for obvious
reasons though he fascinatingly incorporates this idea as a conceit in Opera,
his last full-fledged masterpiece. Opera is a violent aria of memory,
bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare. Betty (Cristina
Marsillach) is haunted by memories of her dead mother, once an opera diva
herself. Argento's flashback sequences are predictably opaque. Secret corridors
and staircases run alongside both Betty's apartment and the film's opera house,
evoking the secret recesses of the subconscious. An image of a pulsating brain
(here, a visual signifier of the girl's Freudian despair) precedes images of a
killing spree that imply that the girl's mother may have been more than a
passive victim.
The
film's performed opera is an avant-garde rendition of Giuseppe Verdi's Macbeth
with Betty taking in the lead. She lands the part only after the great Mara
Cecova fights with the film's director and breaks her leg. Cecova remains
unseen throughout the film, a reminder perhaps that some divas refuse our
stare. Vanessa Redgrave was to play Cecova but declined the part after her high
salary demands were rejected. This is a blessing because Cecova's non-presence
becomes a rich composite of Argento's fascinating attention to cinematic
absence. When she falls and hurts herself before the opera house, a voice
declares: "The great Mara Cecova has been knocked down by a car." Of
course, she hasn't (the cab pulls up after she has fallen), but the
illusion is far more dramatic than the reality. Opera itself is a film
of forced illusions. The film's opening shot (a close-up of a crow's eyes)
immediately establishes Argento's fascination with mnemonic despair and
distortions of reality and internal spaces.
Verdi's
opera is historically known for bringing bad luck to its casts, a fact that is
not lost on Argento. Incidentally, Argento was advised to choose a different
opera for the film but wholeheartedly refused. Though Opera was never
plagued by post-production chaos of the Poltergeist sort, a series of
on-set occurrences seemed to suggest that Argento's production may have been
compromised by some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. The director has
suggested that Opera's loveless tone was intended in part as a kind of
AIDS metaphor. Ian Charleson (Macbeth's director, Marco) would tell
Argento during the filming of Opera that he was HIV+. (Charleson, whose
film credits included Oscar winners Gandhi and Chariots of Fire,
would die of AIDS in 1990.) Betty performs her grandiose aria with faceless women
seemingly hovering in the background of the stage, their frilly garbs flapping
in the wind. A wayward bullet kills one of the girls. Not only has the prophecy
been fulfilled but on-screen death has never looked this beautiful.
The
cast of Argento's opera-within-a-film is a typically weird lot: Daria
Nicolodi's stars as Betty's agent and mother substitute; Urbano Barberini as
Alan Santini, the opera-loving inspector; William McNamara as Stefan, Betty's
horny boyfriend; and Coralina Cataldi Tassoni as Giulia, the show's half-witted
seamstress. Once Betty takes to the stage as Lady Macbeth, a monster from her
mother's past is awakened and the killings begin once more. If the crows in the
film only screech in the presence of a familiar evil, then the killer must be
the only character here not directly involved in the production of Mabeth.
If you've pinpointed the identity of the film's killer, it's of little
consequence—the genius of the film lies not in such details but in Argento's
operatic attention to death and the way in which the film's killer forces
Betty's gaze.
The
killer ties Betty up and places a row of needles below her eyes, forcing her to
watch the grueling deaths of her friends. Stefan is stabbed in the throat with
a sharp knife. Giulia is killed but swallows a bracelet belonging to the
killer, forcing him to perform a last-minute autopsy on her body with a pair of
scissors. What with the crunching sounds that imply bones being cut into, this
may be one of the more squeamish sequences ever captured on film! More
impressive is the fact that Betty is placed inside a glass container and comes
to resemble one of Giulia's many mannequins. Mira's death also serves to
reinforce Argento's obsession with seeing and sightlessness. Betty's vision is
temporarily blurred after she applies drops to her dried-up eyes. This is
precisely at the time when she allows a detective into her apartment. Mira
enters the apartment and Argento introduces a second detective, one who stands
outside the apartment. Is the killer the man outside or inside the apartment?
Regardless, he has free access to the apartment (not to mention Betty's
consciousness) via the corridors that run alongside the apartment. As for the
film's infamous keyhole set piece, it reinforces Argento's fascination with
seeing as terror mechanism.
Opera was
Argento's most expensive production and it shows (indeed, the film's many
elaborate compositions don't look cheap). Macbeth's crows circle the
opera house in a secret plan hatched by the show's crew. When the birds spot
the killer, they go directly for his eyes. While Opera's ending isn't a
favorite amongst fans, Argento fascinatingly toys with the spectator's
perception. The killer supposedly died in a fire at the opera house, leaving
Betty and her director to enjoy life in the country. A helicopter suddenly
appears in the air and a horde of dogs run wildly through the forest. Both the
audience and Betty pay little mind to these otherwise strange occurrences. The
killer makes one final appearance, forcing Betty to stare at death one last
line. This finale may seem forced and facile but Betty's delirious romp through
the countryside and her strange relationship with a lizard recalls Jennifer
Connelly's transcendental relationship to animals in Phenomena. Here, though, it
really looks as if the heroine has cracked. Take Opera as the last time
the great Argento was cracked himself.
A dangerous mind: Dario Argento's Opera (1987) Michael Sevastakis from Kinoeye
DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]
Images Movie Journal Gary Johnson
Not Coming to a Theater Near You [Rumsey Taylor]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
TWO EVIL EYES
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
It was a match made in hell and a
dream realized for many horror fans. 1990's Two Evil Eyes brought
together Dario Argento and George Romero for the first time since Dawn of
the Dead. Edgar Allen Poe was their source material. While Romero imagined
"The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdenar" as a poor man's episode of
"Tales From the Crypt," Argento's "The Black Cat" stands
out as one of the giallo director's more notable achievements. Argento imagines
Poe's protagonist with a name and a job. Roderick Usher (Harvey Keitel) is a
photographer with easy access to crime scenes. If Roderick's surname is
Argento's shout-out to "The Fall of the House of Usher," then the
film's opening tableaux mort deliriously literalizes the title of "The Pit
and the Pendulum". He's proactive, turning on the pendulum from the
opening crime scene in order to get a more "in the moment" view of
the action. In the end, Usher's downfall is directly proportional to his
occupational success. His critics scoff at the banality of his genuinely
frightening police photographs, which provokes him to abuse the film's black
cat for variety's sake. The resulting photographs lead to the publication of
his book "Metropolitan Horrors."
In the opening paragraph of "The Black Cat," Poe's protagonist
declares: "Yet, mad am I not—and very surely do I not dream. But tomorrow
I die, and today I would unburden my soul. My immediate purpose is to place
before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere
household events." Argento stunningly evokes the man's burgeoning madness.
Similar to Nabokav's Lolita, "The Black Cat" is a first-person
testimonial. Though seemingly convinced of his humanity, Poe's nameless
protagonist still seeks to justify his behavior. Usher shares his spacious
two-family home with his pet-loving girlfriend, Annabel (Madeleine Potter). The
titular feline is called Pluto, after the one-eyed Greek god. In a fit of rage,
Poe's anti-hero cuts out one of the animal's eyes (sadly, the scene is never
visualized in the Argento film). While the existential cat vs. man dynamic is
considerably more terrifying in the Poe story, Argento is more concerned with
the residual damage of this relationship. In the film, the cat gives Usher a
serious case of the heebie-jeebies and, therefore, must be punished for its
gaze.
"Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly
action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?"
says Poe's protagonist in "The Black Cat," consumed by a spirit of
perverseness (he calls it a "final and irrevocable overthrow"). Both
Poe and Argento's felines develop metaphorical white markings on their necks—in
the shape of the hangman's gallows—that foreshadow the deaths of their masters.
The cats, in both versions of the tale, are brutalized, killed by hanging and
subsequently return from the dead. Perhaps the greatest element of Poe's story
is the main character's incapability to dream (for him, there is no escape from
reality). In the film, Usher not only creates his own version of truth through
photographs but his dreams are seemingly invoked by the cat's markings. Black
Cat's weakest moment finds Usher making his way through an elaborate, guilt-induced
nightmare where a horde of Middle Age brutes punish him for killing of the
black cat.
Argento's use of point-of-view is remarkable. Not only does the cat's sneaky
ins and out frequently shock Usher but Argento heightens the element of
surprise by shooting parts of the film from the cat's eyeline. Annabel could
easily be a relative of Polanski's pre-natal Rosemary—she runs through the
streets desperate to get away from her husband's growing madness, makes a phone
call to a friend and discovers at a shop window that her husband used her cat
as inspiration for his book. Before leaving Usher, though, Annabel decides to
leave behind a farewell letter but the reappearance of the cat (now on its
second or third life) ironically seals her fate. Working to Usher's favor is
Annabel's note, which provides him with his alibi. Poe's story isn't quite as
detailed—this is typically rock-solid detective work on Argento's part. The
details of Annabel's murder, though, remain the same. When Usher chases the
black cat out of a kitchen window, Annabel's hand gets in the way of his meat
cleaver. In this incredible sequence, Argento horrifyingly evokes the runaway
nature of violence that, when set into motion, is unstoppable.
DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]
Film as Art [Danél Griffin]
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
Classic-Horror.com Brandt
Sponseller
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
PopMatters Marco Lanzagorta
Monsters At Play Scott Phillips
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Washington Post [Richard Harrington]
TRAUMA
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Trauma was Dario Argento's first full-length American production,
a bizarre psychologically repressive thriller that smacks of lesser De Palma.
The film, like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red, questions the authenticity of its
protagonist's sightline when Aura (Asia Argento), an anorexic junkie, witnesses
the decapitation of her parents after having escaped from a local clinic. Trauma
is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma
is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento's
excesses of gore.
The film opens with a female African-American chiropractor's decapitation. A
young insect-loving boy, Gabriel (Cory Garvin), crawls into the killer's house
(not the chiropractor's—yes, the opening scenes are confusing) after one of the
killer's lizards munches on a rare butterfly. In the film's greatest sequence,
the boy discovers the killer's instrument of death (a sawing machine with a
wire attachment), almost uses it on himself, and accidentally squeezes
the lizard to death when the killer comes home. Though he narrowly escapes, the
boy has already developed an attachment to the murderer's house. The night
before, George notices a black woman staring down at him from one of the
windows. Argento places Gabriel and the spectator in the same shoes, showcasing
his signature talent for summoning hazy shades of confusion. No, this isn't the
home of the chiropractor. What Gabriel is looking at is the woman's decapitated
head!
Aura flees a local clinic, bumps into the film's dapper male hero, David
(Christopher Rydell), and shows him her war wounds (here, track marks on her
arms). David discusses his own history with drugs and they seemingly bond.
After stealing David's wallet, Aura is apprehended by a pair of aggressive
social workers and is taken back to the home of her mother, Adriana (Piper
Laurie). Locked inside her room, Aura overhears her mother conducting a séance
with a bunch of creepy houseguests. The loony acting and busy soundtrack
comprised of overlapping voices highlights the scene. Adriana conjures up a
ghost named Nicolas, whose relationship to the woman won't be revealed until film's
end. Windows shatter, guests panic, and Aura (from her second-floor bedroom
window) witnesses her parents running into the woods behind their home. She
climbs down to the ground only to stumble across the headless corpse of her
mother. The film's faceless Headhunter killer stands in the distance, holding
the heads of her parents. The film is on.
Argento undervalues David's job as an art director for a local news station.
The man's fondness for art is ripe with moral discourse—he's in charge of sketching
the Headhunter for news coverage of the serial killer's crimes. The station's
correspondent happens to be David's girlfriend, a dumb blonde whose only
significant contribution to the narrative is to provide self-reflexive
commentary on her boy-toy's graphic doodles: "Keep it tasteful!"
Equally sketchy is the story's kooky, beside-the-point treatment of anorexia:
David's coworker goes on about the disorder when Aura's sanity comes up, and
Argento, in turn, acknowledges David's concerns via a campy sequence that
seemingly resembles a Paxil commercial. David drives through a city street
populated by overly thin girls and prostitutes, and in ridiculous voiceover, he
mumbles: "A lot of anorexics die. There's something like eight million of
them out there. Deeply attached to an unstable mother, she'll dream her father
is leaning over her about to kiss her." This is Argento trying desperately
to bring Freud into the equation. But the elegance of the imagery and editing
is unmistakable Argento, like the fascinating cut to a scene where Dr. Judd
(Frederic Forrest), Anna's psychiatrist and father figure, leans over the
girl's fragile frame, forcibly feeding her a bunch of psychotropic berries.
It's amazing she's able to keep them down.
After Dr. Judd's death, Aura leaves behind a suicide note that sends David into
a downward spiral. It is here that Argento conjures themes from his upcoming Stendhal Syndrome. David's drug-induced
stupor outside a gallery evokes his overwhelming sense of loss and feelings for
Aura. While staring at a print of John Everett Millais's "Ophelia"
(which depicts the suicide of Hamlet's girlfriend), David seemingly stumbles
across a clue. Though his eyes are blurry from crying, he thinks he sees Aura
on the street. What he really sees is a black-clothed stranger sporting the
girl's snaky bracelet. This remarkable sequence calls attention to the
relationship between art and reality. Korean director Chang Youn-hyun would take
this theme, Millais's painting, and other elements from Trauma to the
max in his delirious Tell Me Something.
On American turf, Argento's distinctly European sensibility seems out of place
(see the fairy tale nature of the Gabriel scenes) but certainly not without its
charm. At one point, Argento's camera makes a 360-degree turn as it approaches
the doorway of Aura's home. It's a pointless stylistic maneuver, Argento's
desperate attempt at giving Trauma a sense of structural coherence.
Without Poe as claustrophobic leverage, Argento spiritlessly freewheels his way
through the film's events. Unlike The Black Cat, Trauma is constantly
fighting to negotiate Argento's baroque direction. Needlessly convoluted, yes,
but batty sometimes in a good way: For sure, it's worth taking in for its
spectacular decapitation sequences and rigorous attention to detail. Not to mention
Laurie's campy performance.
Talking heads, unruly women and wound culture: Dario Argento's Trauma
(1993) Linda Badley from
Kinoeye
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
Trauma:
Comparison (Tartan vs. Anchor Bay)
Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
THE STENDHAL SYNDROME (La sindrome di
Stendhal)
Italy
The Stendhal Syndrome Ed Gonzalez from Slant magazine
In 1817, Stendhal walked into the Santa
Croce church in
As
Anna walks through the streets of
Visual
effects coordinator Sergio Stivaletti ( Phenomena, Opera) fantastically morphs
the film's frescos into illusory gateways into Anna's subconscious. Less
successful, though, are his inside-the-body effects (pills going down Anna's
throat, a bullet through a woman's cheeks). Anna seemingly falls asleep only to
become haunted by a painting that transforms itself into a door that reveals a
gruesome crime scene. The film's rapist has struck again. An upward shot from
the point of view of the dead woman reveals an elderly couple staring down at
Anna and Inspector Manetti (Luigi Diberti). Anna returns to her room through
her door/painting, which casts a beautiful pattern of light onto the outer
sidewalk. This stunning array of shots calls attention to Argento's painterly
concerns and the unreliability of Anna's gaze. While lying in bed, she is
visited and raped by Alfredo. She later awakens in his car, forced to watch as
he rapes and kills another woman. Lying by Alfredo's side is Anna's snow globe
of Michelangelo's David. Anna flees from this unusually erotic torture chamber,
passing a window where the elderly couple keeps watch.
Though
there's no question that Anna has been raped (see the bloody sheets and a
doctor's affirmation), Argento fascinatingly questions the role of fantasy in
Anna's violation. Anna rises from her hospital bed, cuts her beautiful long
hair and the rest of Stendhal Syndrome is the same. A psychologist, Dr.
Cavanna (Paolo Bonacelli), diagnosis her with the Stendhal Syndrome.
(Conveniently situated on his desk is a book on the subject as well as a copy
of Stendhal's The Red and the Black.) Even though Anna's obsession with
the film's paintings continues, it takes a backseat to her cryptic
transformation. At the behest of Dr. Cavanna, Anna begins to paint in what at
first appears to be a too-obvious attempt at coping with her pain. In
retrospect, though, the film's rhetorical shift compliments Anna's psychotic
split.
Police
officer Marco Longhi (Marco Leonardi) is sent to protect his ex-girlfriend
against a possible second attack. Marco suggests that he and Anna get back
together. She reacts violently, turning Marco around and shoving him against
the wall. She mock rapes him while stuffing her hand down his pants. Marco is
emasculated, reduced to a cowering punching bag in an obvious game of sexual
role-reversal. Key to the failure of these scenes is
After
Stefano is pegged as the film's murderer, Argento still frames one rape sequence
from the point of view of the killer. Faceless to the camera, the killer
silently does away with a female victim. There is no apparent logic here
because Stefano is mercilessly loud killer. Is this Argento's desperate attempt
at introducing the possibility of an alternate suspect? Despite the state of
Stefano's body when it was thrown into the river, the possibility that he
survived becomes plausible after Anna begins to receive a series of crank phone
calls. Since Stefano's earlier phone calls are easily audible to the audience,
the silence of the calls may point to an obvious red herring. None the less,
these stylistic choices fascinatingly mirror Anna's dilemma.
Anna
stands before Marco when she receives a call from Stefano, who supposedly expresses
his jealousy over her recent romance with a young art student, Marie (Julien
Lambroschini). Marco, oblivious of this affair, has seemingly abandoned any
hope of reuniting with Anna. Marco picks up the phone and a click is heard—the
killer has hung up. "He said he knows we're in love, that we make
love," says Anna challengingly. Marco is noticeably stung by the comment
though he's more troubled by Stefano's concern with the men in Anna's life than
he is with his own remorse. Marco says, "That doesn't seem like him.
That's not his way of operating."
When
Stefano's body is pulled from the river, the alternate killer theory becomes
plausible. After Marie's murder, Cavanna's visit to Anna suggests the
psychologist himself might be responsible. Marco suspects him to be the killer
but finds him hacked to pieces when he reaches Anna's apartment. Since the
spectator never really believes Stefano survived his fall into the river, the
revelation that Anna took on Stefano's identity after his death may come as little
of a surprise. Argento sacrifices some logic in trying to keep Anna's new
identity under wraps (if she's the only perpetrator, what is the rationale
behind the click Marco hears over the phone?) Still, the fact that Anna would
go to such desperate lengths to make Marco jealous is a chilling testament to
her ramifications of her trauma.
During
an earlier trip to Stefano's home, Anna discovers her snow globe amongst his
possessions and a print of a Narcissus painting with a message attached:
"Disturbing. Morbid. Who knows what effect it would have on Anna?"
While Kretschmann's Stefano seems conscious of himself as a killer Adonis
(perhaps Michelangelo's David personified), Argento only vaguely taps into the
idea that narcissism is an instigator of chaos. Stendhal Syndrome,
though, ends on a chilling note. Anna kills Marco and is caught by a group of
male police officers that try to calm her down. All she sees is a pack of
hungry males trying to tear her clothes apart. This disturbing scenario evokes
Anna's conflicted relationship with the hostile frescos that have repeatedly
challenged her concept of reality.
Female subjectivity and the politics of 'becoming other': Dario Argento's
La sindrome di Stendhal (The Stendhal Syndrome, 1996) Colette Balmain from Kinoeye
DVD Times review
[Michael Mackenzie]
Stendhal Syndrome, The John White from 10kbullets
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy
Film Review Richard Scheib
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
Classic-Horror.com Nate Yapp
The
Stendhal Syndrome Gerald Peary
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Stendhal
Syndrome, The: Comparison (Dutch Film Works vs. Medusa) Michael Den Boer from 10kbullets
SLEEPLESS (Non ho sonno)
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
In an interview he did for Shivers
Magazine, Dario Argento said, "I meet so many fans at festivals and in my
Roman shop 'Profondo Rosso' and they all say one of two things. It's either
'Please complete the Suspiria trilogy,' or 'Please can you make
another movie like Deep Red.' This has been going on for years
and I've been adamantly opposed to doing either. My life and career is my own
adventure. I've resisted those easy options because I've followed my own path
no matter where it has led. I want to do what I want when I want to do it not
be dictated to by audiences." Though all of Argento's '90s films have
rehashed themes from Deep Red. Though Sleepless is
unlikely to win Argento any new fans, it must count as a return to form. The
film's overcooked "mama's boy" syndrome is par for course and recalls
Deep Red's evocation of a repressed
subconscious let loose in the present.
Detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) approaches a grueling murder scene
where a young boy's mother has had a flute violently and repeatedly shoved into
her mouth. This is a classic Argento set piece which recalls the randomness of Deep Red's classic and mysterious opening
sequence. Angela (Barbara Lerici), a prostitute, leaves the home of the film's
faceless killer. He's sadomasochistic (the prostitute says "you can do
those nasty things with someone else!") though Argento doesn't reveal the
John's alleged fetish. The film's next half-hour is riveting, each scene greater
than the one prior. A nervous Angela flees the killer's apartment only to bump
into a drawer full of weapons (here, mostly knives and axes). Argento's camera
crawls silently through the apartment, sensuously evoking the killer's
sightline and languid walk. Once she boards a train, Angela thinks she has him
beat. Upon opening her bag she discovers she accidentally took a folder from
the man's apartment that extols the murders once committed by the infamous
Dwarf Killer.
Though not as gritty as Stendhal Syndrome or gloriously artificial
as Suspiria, Sleepless is luminously
shot by Academy Award winning cinematographer Ronnie Taylor. The film's eerie
allure is predicated on all sorts of dreamy blue tones and sharp primary
colors. After calling a friend and fellow-prostitute (Conchita Puglisi), Angela
seemingly assures her safe passage from the train. The phone rings only to
reveal the familiar voice of the whispering John she left writhing under
bedroom sheets. He spits accusations—he calls her a thief and, like Tenebre's Maria, must die for her sins. She
promises "not to tell" but he couldn't care less (indeed, he's
already inexplicably on her heels). When Argento is in top form he can be
forgiven for faulty timelines and small lapses in logic. Does it really
matter that Tenebre's Peter couldn't have possibly
killed Christiano, wounded his own head and greeted the scared Gianni in such a
short time span? Regardless of whether the Sleepless killer managed to
board the train along with his potential victim is of little consequence. Her
frantic sprint through train cars eerily without passengers makes for a
frightening set piece. He eventually kills her but fails to snag his missing
envelope. Just as the spectator begins to believe that the killer has departed,
the next domino falls. Amanda's demise is an especially notable one, not so
much for its lack of gore than for how Argento cockily celebrates her naivete:
her car has been inexplicably moved from one side of the train station's parking
lot to the other yet she still gets in!
Unfortunately, what follows is hardly worth extolling. The long-retired Moretti
returns to the police beat on a nonprofessional basis with Stefano Dionisi's
Giacomo playing as partner (Giacomo is revealed to be the older version of the
boy in the opening sequence). Though the case of the Dwarf Killer was closed
when the dead body of Vincenzo De Fabritiis (Luca Fagioli) was discovered
shortly after the killer's final murder, a string of new crimes implies that he's
returned (or, at the very least, a copycat killer). The killer leaves a
familiar clue behind at every crime scene: a paper cutout of a farm animal.
Books written under Vincenzo's nom de plume are found in the man's
long-abandoned home, now inhabited by the homeless Leone (Massimo Sarchielli).
A child's nursery rhyme called "Animal Farm" (written, incidentally,
by Asia Argento) is discovered inside a copy of George Orwell's own Animal
Farm.
Every line of the rhyme details the method behind the killer's crimes. A
picture of a pig is found near Angela's body. Because the killer perceived her
to be a pig, he thusly slit her throat. This is a great gimmick that doesn't
always work to Argento's advantage. Dora (Barbara Mautino) works at a fast-food
restaurant and, before she leaves work, is curiously called a "little
rabbit" by one of her coworkers. "The Animal Farm" poem
celebrates the death of a rabbit whose teeth are smashed out. When Dora bites
into the hand of the Sleepless killer, he smashes her face into a marble
wall until her teeth fall out. Assuming the killer never heard Dora being
called a "little rabbit," you may ask yourself why he likens her to a
rabbit or how he benefits from his random woman's death. Either way, Argento's
curious obsession with a child's rhyme suggests that the killer may be reacting
to childhood trauma.
Evidence is found beneath the fingernails of two of the killer's victims.
Though police gather DNA from one site, the results are never made clear. The
killer is more careful the second time around, removing his victim's
fingernails after drowning her in a dance club's fountain. The woman's death is
particularly notable because the club is called a Zoo and he likens her to a
cat. As such, he chases her through a series of cavernous staircases while
meowing like a cat. Beside her dead body is found the paper cutout of a kitten.
Vincenzo's grave is exhumed and his body is discovered missing, leading
everyone to believe that he's returned from the dead. Before Sydow can fully
sink his teeth into Moretti, the character dies of a heart attack while firing
bullets at what appears to be a small man's shadow. Though the death of the
train station's parking attendant implies that the killer might be a person of
small stature (the attendant looks down at the faceless killer before
meeting his demise), the awesome death of a ballerina (a swan whose neck is
"broken") suggests that the perpetrator is tall and very strong.
Argento then unleashes a series of cheap red herrings: Gloria (Chiara Caselli),
Giacomo's ex-girlfriend, scowls without reason while
Argento's films are far from erotic though his '90s output suggests that he is
warming up to the possibilities of sexual release. Trauma's David sleeps with his reporter
girlfriend before a peeping Aura (Asia Argento) cuts short his orgasm. Black Cat's Annabel welcomes the possibility
of love from one of her students. Giacomo, still haunted by the image of his
dead mother and the strange hissing sounds surrounding her death, seeks comfort
in the arms of the past: the harp-playing Gloria. Though interrupted by a
curious phone call from Moretti, Gloria and Giacomo's sex scene is noticeably
warm by Argento standards. Their sex is cut short though there's an implication
that orgasm was reached (at this rate, Argento's next film might feature full
penetration). Where Syndrome's Alfredo uses sex to wield power,
the Sleepless killer is a non-sexual fetishist (indeed, none of his
victims have been violated).
Anyone bothered by Deep Red gay subtext may be offended by the
overt homoeroticism of Giacomo's relationship to Lorenzo. Hell, even Lorenzo's
father seems to notice, resenting the lustful stares the young men seemingly
exchange. Sleepless is new enough that its ending shouldn't be spoiled
for any Argento fans who haven't had the chance to see it. I will say, though,
that it's both predictable and downright silly. Argento can still get beneath
your skin and while Sleepless certainly features a good half dozen set
pieces worth taking a look at, the giallo director's fascination with the
subconscious has reached a ridiculous lows here.
Trains of thought: Dario
Argento's Non ho sonno (Sleepless, 2000)
Reynold Humphries
DVD Times review [Michael Mackenzie]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard
Scheib
Classic-Horror Kairo
Scifilm Review IronWolfe
BBC
Films Interview with Dario Argento on Sleepless Almar Haflidason
Read
Part 2 of our Argento interview
Almar Haflidason
Dario Argento Can't Sleep Alan Jones from Shivers
DRACULA 3D
Italy (106 mi)
2012
Dario
Argento’s Dracula Mark Adams at
Cannes from Screendaily
A bloodsucking euro-pudding of epic proportions, you have to hope that Dario Argento’s Dracula was always planned as a bit of tongue-in-cheek, fang-in-neck, gothic silliness. In fact it is so lushly loopy that against all odds it could become something of a 3D cult title, and certainly for those of us who have ‘experienced’ it there is a certain ‘I was there’ badge of honour to go alongside having been at the Cannes screenings of The Brave or Southland Tales.
In truth though, what stands in the way of making the film a must-see cult number is that bizarrely, Argento lets things slip when it comes to the boobs, blood and barbarism that any self-respecting proper 3D horror B-movie really needs. Instead it is more sub-Hammer fare that never really makes the most of the stereoscopic 3D.
The film got its biggest laugh in the opening credit block with a line stating that it is a ‘film of cultural interest’, and from then on lacks any kind of knowing humour until a scene close to the end where Dracula (for some unexplained reason) turns himself into a giant green mantis to attack a drunken villager.
For Argento it is almost as if the vampire genre has never moved sideways into Buffy, Twilight, True Blood and Let The Right One In territory, as he takes it back to its Bram Stoker roots (well, at least he riffs off Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation) and favours cobbled Transylvanian villages, horse-drawn carts, busty village maidens and pointy stakes.
German actor Thomas Kretschmann plays Count Dracula as a stuffy and moody vampire who finds, in the form of fetching Mina Harker (Marta Gastini), the reincarnation of his beloved Dolingen De Gratz, who had died some 400 years before.
With the help of Mina’s friend Lucy (Asia Argento), to whom he promises eternal life via a little bloodsucking action, he lures Mina to the Transylvanian village of Passo Borgo by pretending to offer her husband Jonathan (Unax Ugalde) a job as his castle librarian. Luckily the day is saved by the arrival of Abraham Van Helsing (Rutger Hauer hamming things up nicely) and his leather bag full of crosses, stakes, holy water and a healthy supply of garlic.
Kretschmann looks the part and has a few suitably daft lines (“I am nothing but an out-of-tune chord in the divine symphony,” is his best as he sets about entrancing Mina), while Argento’s daughter Asia provides her trademark silky sexuality without really smouldering…that is until she is set on fire and reduced to ashes. Miriam Giovanelli as sexy Tania – who is bitten early in the film - gives you hope that the film will launch into B-movie sexploitation territory, but her busty scenes are few and far between, and while there are a few nice 3D horror moments (heads chopped off, eyeball impaled etc) Argento’s reputation as a horror maestro is not enhanced with this flabby and flailing movie.
Dario
Argento's Dracula 3D: Cannes Review - The Hollywood ... David Rooney from The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2012
CANNES – You’ve got to love Italy. The first of many unintentional laughs in Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D comes on the opening credits of this seriously intended but risible gothic trash, when a tag that indicates partial government funding identifies it as a “film of national cultural interest.” Really?
Vampire entertainments have taken countless divergent paths in recent years, from the toothsome Louisiana luridness of HBO’s True Blood to the haunting sensitivity of Let the Right One In to the swooning teen passions of the Twilight series. So perhaps it makes sense to go back to the granddaddy of them all, with a fresh take on the Bram Stoker model, shot in stereoscopic 3D and making use of new-generation digital effects developed since Francis Ford Coppola revisited the classic with his sumptuous 1992 version. But if anyone really thought the right person for that job might be Dario Argento, a director stuck in stylistic gridlock for well over a decade now, they were drunk on V. The only explanation for this dismally kitsch spectacle’s official slot in Cannes is that Argento evidently has acquired sufficient auteur status to become part of the title.
This is a tired rehash that adds little to the canon aside from such outré touches as having Drac shapeshift into a swarm of flies or a giant grasshopper in one howler of a scene. The film sits awkwardly between the 1958 Hammer Horror version with Christopher Lee and the campy 1974 Andy Warhol-Paul Morrissey Blood for Dracula. Sadly, there’s nothing even remotely as fun here as Udo Kier sinking his fangs into the scenery and the “wirgins.”
Instead, there’s Thomas Kretschmann, looking sleepy and embarrassed as the undead Count Dracula, who only seems engaged when he’s mutilating a bunch of troublesome village officials. (Neither gore nor sexual titillation is in short supply.) “I am nothing but an out-of-tune chord in the divine symphony,” he groans in one of the rare attempts to breathe some grandiose dimension into the character in the lumbering script by Argento and three other hands.
German actor Kretschmann heads an old-school Europudding cast – an orgy of different acting styles, poorly post-synched into stiff English. While she’s been used effectively in small roles such as in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the director’s daughter Asia Argento has always been less of an actress than a fetish object. As Lucy, she’s at her most self-conscious, pouting and disrobing on cue before being reborn as a vamp and then char-grilled in a craptastic CGI fire.
As Lucy’s friends Jonathan and Mina Harker, lured to Transylvania so dead-ringer Mina can take the place of the Count’s mourned wife, Unax Ugalde and Marta Gastini are pure wood. Rutger Hauer’s Van Helsing crushes garlic cloves and sharpens wooden stakes with the concentration of someone who just wants to grab the check and get out of there. There’s fierce competition among Dracula’s minions for bad-acting honors. But Miriam Giovanelli, who appears to be channeling ‘70s soft-core porn as frisky Tania, and Giovanni Franzoni as fawning Renfield share the runner-up prize behind Franco Ravera as the town priest. (“He is evil! EEEVILLLLL!!!”)
The soundtrack is a thick soup of creatures-of-the-night ruckus and Claudio Simonetti’s hilariously cheesy vintage horror score, while visually, the film is predictably over-saturated with the standard palette of deep reds and blacks. So-so digital effects mix with low-tech makeup work from veteran Argento collaborator Sergio Stivaletti. Beyond the occasional swooping owl, leaping wolf, severed head or bloody impalement, the 3D serves mainly to make the whole sad, cadaverous enterprise more ludicrous.
Argy, Stephanie and Alec Boehm
THE RED MACHINE C 72
USA (84 mi)
2009
While this is an
interesting stab at an el cheapo period film, something not seen that often due
to how expensive it can be to recreate a period look, shot entirely in Whitter,
California, though it is set in the nation’s Capitol during the heart of the
Great Depression in 1935, years before the United States ever thought they’d be
going to war against Japan, at a time when they still maintained cordial
diplomatic relations. However, U.S.
Intelligence sources reveal new cryptically coded messages to Japan from the
Japanese Embassy that appear to be sent from a decoder machine, something
beyond the range of what the American Intelligence could comprehend at that
point. Rather than spend years figuring
it out, they choose a short cut method—hire a thief, a professional safecracker
who is an expert at leaving no tracks.
Combing the penal system they discover their man, newcomer Donal
Thoms-Cappello as Eddie Doyle, a charming kid who once lingered too long at a
heist, an error that cost him his freedom.
When the U.S. Navy sends a reticent officer with a chest full of medals,
Lee Perkins as Officer Coburn, Doyle’s more than happy to accompany him, only
to discover they need him for a government heist, perhaps the ultimate irony—a
man who is asked to steal for his country.
But not so fast, as they can’t let the Japanese know they’re on to them,
so they have to steal what they need to know without being detected. In other words, Eddie has entered the spy
business. Promised he would be scot free
if he pulls off the job, damn if the guy doesn’t pull it off perfectly. But of course, no real surprise, the
government reneges on their promise. But
Officer Coburn knows the job is not over, as they need the code book in order
to decipher the messages. After being
duped, will Fast Eddie come back for more?
While Thoms-Cappello is
terrific, a real find, with plenty of off-beat humor and energy to burn, the
rest of the cast feels like they’re sleepwalking through their lines, as no one
else stands out. Except for Fast Eddie,
all are stock, stereotypical characters with little to no development. There is a twist in near subliminal imagery
of flashbacks, as Officer Coburn has a history seven years ago in Japan which
is only fleetingly suggested. This works
for awhile, generating a certain amount of curious interest, but everything is
eventually explained in dialogue, which I found disappointing, explaining too
much, as that ruins the intrigue. And so
goes the movie, which is only as interesting as Eddie, as he’s the fresh
face. The rest all fade into the
woodworks, though Coburn does bear a certain physical and psychological
resemblance to Major Garland Briggs (Don S. Davis) from Twin Peaks (1990-91).
Unfortunately much of the background falls flat, though the hard nosed
female Navy Officer in charge of the cryptology division was in fact based on a
real historical person, Agnes Driscoll.
It’s an interesting effort, and to their credit, the filmmakers
themselves are traveling around the country wherever their film is being
exhibited, doing a Q & A following every single screening across the
country, which is something I’ve never seen before. Somehow, I find that interactive experience
at least as interesting as this rather old fashioned style of film.
Review: The Red Machine Ray Pride from New City
Ambitious craft for a low-budget digital production,
including coded color, strikingly bare production design and whizzy editing
gimmicks, highlights Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm’s espionage and cryptography
caper “The Red Machine,” a neo-programmer set in 1935 among a world of thieves
and code-crackers. In an article provided as part of the press notes, Argy says
there are “cryptographic sleeper cells” waiting to be “activated” by puzzle
fans. Overemphatic, stagy delivery of ripe dialogue may diminish the pleasure
of other viewers. Boehm photographed; Argy edited under the pseudonym “Pansy
Heritage.” With Donal Thoms-Cappello, Lee Perkins, Meg Brogan, Mo Byrnes. 84m.
Chicago Reader
Joshua Katzman
Set in Washington, D.C., in 1935, this low-budget period drama concerns an incorrigible safecracker who, after getting arrested, is offered a deal to work with a navy spy to decipher a system of codes that the Japanese are using to relay messages to their homeland. First-time feature directors Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm establish a claustrophobic vintage noir atmosphere, and the set design is abundant with striking period detail. Towards the film’s conclusion, several plot twists abruptly swing the story in a different direction, and it’s executed more credibly than many well-endowed Hollywood films of late. Lee Perkins is appropriately enigmatic as the cold, withdrawn spy with a troubled past; Donal Thoms-Cappello plays the thief.
THE
RED MACHINE Facets Multi Media
Washington, DC, 1935: At the height of the Great Depression, Eddie Doyle (Donal Thoms-Cappello), ace safecracker, is just doing what he does best: stealing. Now facing prison, Eddie finds he has another option. Enter Lt. F. Ellis Coburn (Lee Perkins), a cool-as-ice Navy man with a problem only Eddie can solve. The Japanese Foreign Office has changed its encryption codes, and the government is not very happy. A prominent Japanese diplomat holds the key to his country's secrets in the form of a mysterious machine. As Eddie and Coburn work together to pull off the heist of a lifetime, they find more to the job than they bargained for as things get very personal. Full of crackling dialogue, eye-catching visuals and unpredictable twists, co-directors Stephanie Argy's and Alec Boehm's The Red Machine is a charming throwback to the great espionage capers of the 1930s.
Jigsaw
Lounge / Tribune [Neil Young] Edinburgh Int'l Film Festival notes
Hailing from a spot much further down American cinema’s
“independent” spectrum, writer-directors Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm’s The
Red Machine is a bold attempt to make a period movie on a
sub-shoestring budget. Set in the Washington DC of 1935 – period detail evoked
is with minimal fuss – it’s a larkish jeu d’esprit in which the US
Navy, in the personage of straight-arrow F Ellis Coburn (a suitably
ramrod-erect Lee Perkins), recruits the services of a pro safecracker
(appealing newcomer Donal Thoms-Cappello, channelling John Garfield) to steal
certain secrets from the city’s Japanese consulate. Imaginative shenanigans
duly ensue in a droll, digitally-shot affair that plays like a cross between
Michael Mann’s Public Enemies and Michael Apted’s Enigma,
albeit with a vein of gritty humour all its own. Catch it if, and when, you
can.
Eye for Film (Andrew
Robertson) review [4.5/5]
This is a brilliant period heist movie, an entertaining glimpse into a forgotten period of history, of the shadowy intersection of espionage and criminality.
It's 1935, and the Imperial Japanese Navy has a new cipher, one the United States Navy can't crack. For the last seven years they have enjoyed absolute supremacy in the field of Naval Intelligence, and with the invasion of Manchuria in full swing the information hidden by that code is vital. They know what it is, and where it might be, and that they have to steal it. They also know that they can't let the Japanese know that they have it. What follows is a supreme lesson in economical storytelling, as spy and counter-spy conspire, cross and double-cross unfold.
The spy is F Ellis Coburn, played brilliantly by Lee Perkins. He is impassive, delightfully so, and despite a lengthy career this might be a breakthrough role - with credits like "boxing announcer" and "even more annoying cell phone guy" it's an acheivement to be compared to Lee Marvin. It's also totally justified. He's got a strong jaw, a wry smile, piercing eyes, and one of those demeanours that speaks of steely resolve. He is the archetypal Naval Officer, seemingly hewn from starch and sea spray.
For this job they acquire a thief. Eddie Doyle is talkative, garrulous even, a so-called 'grease man', a safe-cracker who uses finesse rather than dynamite. The two actors have worked together before, in alternate reality baseball flick Ghandi At The Bat, but here they form an impeccable double act. One is chatty, streetwise, wide-eyed and optimistic. The other isn't. Perkins' performance is quiet; in contrast Donal Thoms-Cappello wanders around the screen running his mouth, but both inject subtleties into their characterisation. Eddie gets pinched in a sequence that's startling in its simplicity - a trait seen again and again in The Red Machine.
Cryptographic grand-dame Aggie Driscoll is played by Meg Brogan, and though her role is small it's vital. The unit's Admiral is played by David Ross Paterson, who, like most of the cast, has a CV full of minor roles in all sorts of films. His lackeys, Commanders Petrie & Dean, are well played by Roger Ainslie and Bryan Larkin. Indeed, all the roles are well filled, in particular Eddie Lee as the Japanese Naval Attache (and owner of the titular machine) and Madoka as his wife Naomi.
There is a reductive aspect to The Red Machine - every scene is character focused, with them usually foregrounded. As such every actor has a chance to shine, and none fails to take it. A few scenes interpolate objects or barriers to add meaning, but the camera always follows someone, be it the stony countenance of F Ellis Coburn or the conspiring grand-matronly Stella Schneider (Mo Byrnes). Set dressing is economical but seemingly accurate, the tight focus means that period detail isn't lost in background concerns. The only odd note is that there are no cigarettes - there don't even seem to be ashtrays anywhere, but we all know the past is a foreign country - everyone smokes. There's also a somewhat unconvincing elephant. That aside, the crisp framing of each scene is almost stage-like, actors front and centre. It's refreshing, a caper movie that's going for the 'who' rather than the 'how', though there are several good moments of tradecraft.
This is a mechanism for telling a particular story, and it does so without a wasted movement. Yet everything it does hides a clue to something else - this is almost cryptographic film-making, every action having an apparent and an actual meaning. As the two work to find the Red machine, and steal it without stealing it, the key to what is going on starts to unfold.
At one point Eddie asks why he and F Ellis Coburn have been picked for the job. "Any yegg could do it", he opines, but he's wrong. The attention to detail seen everywhere else also applies to the script. Given that it was both written and directed by the the same pair, Stephanie Argy and Alec Boehm, that's hardly surprising. Its language recalls Chandler, Hammett, Whitfield, that clipped depression argot laden with a variety of jargons. It's well-shot, well-acted, well-scripted, a picture that does almost everything right. The credits are inventive too, revealing snippets of the fates of the characters as a dossier is leafed through. There's an odd visual element; the slightly washed out palette is reminiscent of Public Enemies, but in conjunction with beautiful, almost-still establishing shots it sets a tone. So too does the swinging soundtrack, scored by Mabel Echo.
At Film Festivals the film has been promoted with little wax-paper envelopes containing trading cards like those that came with chewing gum, and before that with cigarettes. Each carries a production still and on the reverse a few facts. The back of the envelope is stamped with details of the festival screenings. It's a small thing, indeed, few outwith festival audiences (and those of you who read this review) will ever know about it. It's that same kind of attention to detail that saw Weta's armourers put their maker's market on the inside of Gondorian helmets, world-building (or here, world-recreating) done convincingly, cleverly.
All of the above might serve to obscure the message here, which is either apt or ironic - decoded then, know this - The Red Machine is a very good film, and you should see it.
Wired Tyler Hinman
Variety
(Dennis Harvey) review also seen
here: Chicago Tribune
San Francisco Chronicle
G. Allen Johnson, which includes an interview with the directors
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
Aridjis, Eva
THE FAVOR C 70
A film like this makes
us better appreciate Gus van Sant’s unique status in making movies about
teenage angst, using real, non-professional teenagers, where ELEPHANT (2003) or
PARANOID PARK (2007) may be definitive offerings in the field, while films like
this one told almost entirely through a small series of antiquated stereotypes
resemble Hallmark Card versions that lack any real emotional authenticity.
Throughout the entire film, nothing really feels right, as the director
continues to miss her mark, which is especially noticeable when the lead is
supposed to be a 16-year old kid, but he’s played by a man in his late 20’s, a
good 10 years older than the part calls for.
This kind of callous disregard for reality affects the entire picture. Following two shorts and one feature
documentary, first time feature director Aridjis displays an ability to handle
actors, but remains clueless in telling a story.
The center of the film
is the performance of Ryan Donowho as Johnny, the troubled teen whose mother
dies in the first reel of the film, an accident caused by his own negligence,
which he immediately suppresses even further with much pent up anger and
resentment. Frank Wood is Lawrence, a
very ordinary guy, quiet and unassuming, a man who loves photographing people
and their pets, but who also loved Johnny’s mother back in high school, but she
left him for another guy who eventually fathered Johnny but then left the
picture, which is revealed in a
throwaway flashback opening that feels strangely disconnected from the
rest of the film. By the time Johnny is
16, with no explanation for the interim, his mother re-enters
Fortunately for the
viewers there is at least one interesting diversion when Johnny discovers a
gorgeous love interest living nearby, Isidra Vega as Mariana, a smart girl with
conservative parents who actually likes school, but is somehow intrigued by
Johnny and his wayward ways. When she
brings him up into her room when her parents are away and plays him her
favorite song, “In Your House,” by the Cure, this leads to a heated embrace,
but he blows her mind by then blowing her off, as he had just taken a hit of
acid and objects were visibly starting to alter shape, so he couldn’t handle
it. When the instability of his life
suddenly veers even more out of control, amusingly distorted by the
cinematographer cheesily capturing his altered state of mind, things simply get
worse. Johnny’s deterioration is
unsurprising and predictable as he breaks loose from all authority, but rather
than explore some of the real dangers he could get himself into and the types
of characters he’d likely encounter, the film instead takes a miraculous turn
for a bit of underserved redemption, a turn for the better that happens all too
easily because it’s scripted that way, not because it’s earned or makes any
sense within the context of the film.
This might have made an intriguing short film subject offering a few
credible performances, but as a feature length piece relying on such an
unusually mediocre script, other than an intriguing performance from Vega,
there isn’t much to hold the audience’s attention.
Time Out Chicago (Hank Sartin)
Lawrence (Wood) is
a character type beloved of indie filmmakers: the shut-down man. In his
mid-forties, Lawrence leads a life that embodies quiet desperation, with the
accent on the quiet. When his high-school girlfriend (Turco) calls out of the
blue, it looks like things might get interesting. Whoops. She dies in a freak
accident, and Lawrence takes in her teen son Johnny to save him from foster
care. Shut-down man and grieving teenage rebel must heal each other. Aridjis
has a flat style that’s frankly numbing. Wood tries valiantly, but he and
Donowho are both dragged down by the script. Shut-down characters can be
interesting, but not a shut-down film.
The Favor Facets Multi Media
Lawrence (Frank Wood), an
unmarried photographer living in New
Jersey U.S.A.
Bob
Matter, Facer’s volunteer:
My first impression of "The Favor" was mediocre.
But, the more I thought of it, the better I thought of it.
"The Favor" has that small, quiet, "indie" feel to it
cherished by art house lovers. It is set in
The film centers around Lawrence, a sensitive, early middle-aged bachelor who
lives alone, save for his loyal canine companion Lucy, a small white
curly-haired dog of unspecified breed.
Johnny is the quintessential teenage bad-boy reminiscent of James Dean. He is
tall, thin, and good looking with large, dark, deep-set eyes and full, brooding
lips. He smokes, takes drugs, lies, steals, fights, ditches school, and is
disrespectful. Rotten Johnny is soon in hot pursuit of Marianna, the
quintessential "good girl" who lives nearby and attends the same high
school. Marianna is often seen in the neighborhood walking her family's German
shepherd dog. She is pretty, innocent, studious, self-disciplined, and respectful.
Marianna is from a traditional Mexican-Catholic family. She has feelings for
Johnny and lights candles and prays for him to her other "shepherd,"
Jesus.
Johnny's bad behavior finally reaches
In what some might chide as a too "television-like ending", the
following morning Johnny re-appears at
where he takes his film for processing. Such was life in the halcyon days
before digital cameras.
Film Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice Jamie Tipps
Dropped by his high school sweetheart, the perpetually timid
As an exploration of constructed family, director Eva Aridjis’s work is artfully nuanced. Subtlety is the film’s tact, and Aridjis refuses to manipulate the audience’s emotions with a heavy hand. This approach is bolstered by strong performances from the lead actors: the meek, yet eternally generous Lawrence (Frank Wood) and the angst ridden, taciturn Johnny (Ryan Donowho). Through dexterous performances, Wood prevents his character from becoming a Christian caricature, and Donowho tempers his character’s outbursts with enough personal anguish to avoid alienating the viewer.
Though individually
worthy of sympathy, the relationship between Lawrence and Johnny is akin to two
ships in the night—their growing mutual attachment is implied rather than observed,
and at times the bond of family between them is hard to feel. However, the
introduction of the charming Marianna (Isidra Vega) kicks the film to another
level. As Johnny’s driven love interest who refuses to take shit from anyone,
Marianna forces Johnny to re-evaluate his behavior, to actually vocalize his
feelings. The burgeoning romance lends volatility and variation to an otherwise
consistently paced narrative.
If the drama sounds
heavy, it is balanced by ample comedic relief-- notably a Twix-loving, senile
grandfather (who regrettably disappears, presumably off to the nursing home),
as well as a dazed and confused drug dealer with a heart of gold (who, despite
the stilted delivery of his lines, is destined to be an audience favorite). The
humor offers necessary counterpoint, bringing us out of the dark before the
story slides into pathos.
Overall, the film is
alternately sweet and sad, amusing and moving. If Aridjis’s reserve sometimes
prevents us from hitting the intense highs and lows of the human experience,
she nevertheless delineates this small world with mastery, providing an
understated commentary on finding friends and family in unlikely places. Though
not faultless, this is a solid turn by the up-and-coming filmmaker.
LA
Times: Aridjis Reed Johnson from the
LA Times
Some emerging filmmakers might freak out if they had to share
a shooting locale with Steven Spielberg. But Eva Aridjis always has been drawn
to offbeat situations. Offbeat people too.
"I think the one common theme that I always have in mind is kind of the
misfit," says Aridjis, referring to her small but impressive, and growing,
body of film work. "The characters are always in kind of their own world,
people living on the edge of society, kind of outcasts or misfits."
Born in Europe, raised in Mexico City and now living in New York, Aridjis
(pronounced ah-REE-jees) knows a thing or two about feeling like a resident
alien, and her ability to fathom the humanity in outsiders and eccentrics
stamps all her films.
One of her first cinematic efforts was a short documentary about taxidermists
and their bizarre art. Her 2002 Spanish-language feature "Niños de la
Calle" (Children of the Street) was a disturbing, sensitively made
documentary about the desperate drug-addicted children who prowl
Since that film was released three years ago, earning a strong response from
Mexican critics, Aridjis has maintained her personal relationship with three of
the film's adolescent protagonists.
But even "Niños de la Calle" didn't anticipate the striking emotional
precision and storytelling power of "The Favor," Aridjis' first
English-language feature film, which she wrote, directed and co-produced on a
$500,000 budget. Her achievement is all the more impressive given the paucity
of female filmmakers to come out of
Though beautifully acted by a cast that includes Tony Award winner Frank Wood,
"The Favor" is most notable for its screenplay. Aridjis' voice as a
writer is humane, smart, worldly and armed with a dead-on sense of humor that
never strains to be edgier-than-thou.
"Sometimes what I see as a film producer is, you get the script where it's
very quirky without having a lot of heart," says Howard Gertler, executive
producer of "The Favor," "and what I love about Eva is despite,
sometimes, like the coolness of the setting … or the quirkiness of the events,
there's a real sincerity of the emotional connection there."
Wood, who performed in the recently closed South Coast Repertory production of
Bertolt Brecht's "The Caucasian Chalk Circle" in Costa Mesa,
describes Aridjis as "one of those extremely intelligent
but-not-dependent-on-irony people."
"I don't think she thinks of [her characters] as particularly
quirky," Wood says. "She's not an anthropologist looking at
contemporary mores. I think she's looking at people that capture her interest
immediately."
Befitting Aridjis' own bicultural perspective, "The Favor" takes an
unusual insider-outsider view of its idiosyncratic characters and their
thoroughly Middle American milieu: It manages to delve deeply into their heads
and hearts, yet still regard them with a certain objective distance and tender
humor. Like another recent breakout film by a young female writer-director wise
beyond her years, Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation," "The
Favor" focuses on a type of relationship seldom depicted on screen, in
this case between a troubled teenage boy and his unlikely foster
"father."
Lawrence (Wood) is a fortysomething
The movie's title refers to Frank's act of sublime (but also rather strange)
generosity in deciding to become Johnny's foster parent when his mother is
killed in a freak accident. "The Favor" is in post-production, and Aridjis
intends to shop it around the international film festival circuit this winter.
There's a curious behind-the-scenes twist to this story: The bulk of "The
Favor" was shot over a six-week period last year primarily in Bayonne,
N.J., where Spielberg happened to be filming the sci-fi epic "War of the
Worlds," starring Tom Cruise. Many times, en route to her own movie set,
Aridjis says, she would pass street signs directing the "War of the
Worlds" cast and crew to that day's shoot. Coincidentally, Spielberg shot
another part of "War of the Worlds" on the block where Aridjis lives,
in
Strange but true — which is the way Aridjis tends to size up the world, both as
a person and as an artist.
Cosmopolitan upbringing
THE daughter of an American mother and a Greek Mexican father (the poet and
environmental activist Homero Aridjis), Aridjis has spent most of her life
shuttling between different languages, cultures, creative viewpoints. Born in
the Netherlands while her father was serving there as Mexico's ambassador, she
later attended the elite American School Foundation in Mexico City and spent a
lot of time immersed in books and make-believe worlds.
"I was very shy as a little girl, and I was never terribly popular,"
she says. "I would always gravitate toward the kids that others picked on.
I started wearing black and wearing my hair black and painting my nails black.
I was very close to my sister, and she was kind of introverted too. A lot of
times our friends were kind of the characters in the novels we were
reading."
Aridjis says her creative bent was influenced by her parents, who were
constantly dragging her and her sister (now a novelist in
She remembers once as a child getting angry when she found Luis Buñuel, the
great Spanish film auteur, smoking with her parents in their living room. What
angered her most, she says, is that her parents normally didn't smoke. "I
got really mad, like, 'Who's this man sitting and making you smoke
cigarettes?!' I came home and threw a tantrum. I was, like, swearing and
slamming doors. Ten years later, I was smoking and watching his films."
Moviemaking, for Aridjis, became a way to translate the images in her mind into
tangible form. Two early short films hint at her oddly lyrical sensibility. In
"Billy Twist," a 10-minute short that plays like one of Maurice Sendak's
Freudian children's fables, a willful boy stages a minor coup against his
domineering mother before a piano recital. "Taxidermy: The Art of
Imitating Life," a 7 1/2 -minute black-and-white film that Aridjis made as
a New York University student, evinces a creepy deadpan humor as a man
painstakingly reconstructs a dead deer's head. (Both films can be downloaded
from www.atomfilms.com.)
But as a Mexican American film student, Aridjis sometimes felt herself being
typecast. For her NYU thesis, she wanted to make a ghost story about a used
car's female owner falling in love with the specter of its previous owner.
Instead, she says, one of her professors told her: You're Mexican. You should
be doing a film about a Mexican immigrant family in
A painful exploration
NEVER, perhaps, has Aridjis put that conviction more to the test than when
she made "Children of the Street." Her interest in the Mexican
capital's homeless children developed casually enough. "I just noticed all
these kids on the street, and I wondered what their daily lives were
like." Over time, though, her interest turned into something much more personal,
and painful.
Like their counterparts elsewhere, many of
Since making her movie between September and December 2001, on a $70,000
budget, Aridjis has stayed in contact with the protagonists and tries to see
them whenever she visits her family here, every six months or so. During a
visit last January, she found all three children from the film still living on
the street, where they are shunned as pariahs by passersby and harassed by
police and security guards. "I don't like situations where some people
have a lot of power and other people don't have any, whether it's in a
playground or a social-political situation," Aridjis says.
Her experience with the children has reinforced Aridjis' sense that
For now, she says, she's still happy and creatively fulfilled in
So if she films the next "War of the Worlds" remake, a reporter suggests,
it will probably be from the aliens' point of view? Aridjis laughs and nods.
"Like with the street kids," she says. "It's like you hear
something or you see something, it's interesting to you — you know nothing
about it."
eFilmCritic.com [Erik Childress]
Eric D. Snider
CompuServe [Harvey Karten]
Director interview John Wildman from the Dallas Daily News, March 28, 2007
Variety.com [Justin Chang]
Chicago Tribune
Maureen Hart
Arkin,
Alan
LITTLE MURDERS
USA
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]
The years haven't
been particularly kind to Little Murders, a modishly nihilistic,
shrill satire masquerading as an offbeat black-comedy romance. Zonked out,
self-proclaimed "apathist" photographer Elliott Gould dates
loudmouthed, hyperactive, relentlessly cheery Marcia Rodd (whatever happened to
her?). Despite his inertia, they're soon married - by a disarmingly
straight-talking hippie-philosopher ‘Minister' (Donald Sutherland, whose
hilarious, extended cameo is by far the best thing about the picture). But
their happiness is threatened not only by their own hang-ups, but by the fact
that
Little Murders was adapted from Jules Feiffer's hit Broadway play, and
there are numerous lengthy, dialogue-heavy scenes - most of them taking place
in the over-decorated apartment inhabited by Rodd's oddball, middle-class
parents and vaguely subnormal teenage brother. Gould ambles through the chaos
with his trademark Mogadon-hip detachment, but even he fails to give the
audience very much to latch on to as the film goes through numerous disorienting
shifts of tone while retaining a general air of arch, pretentious discomfort.
Not without interest as a document of how the looming, ‘me-generation'
seventies must have looked to the "kids" of the sixties, but director
Arkin never really gets a handle on the incendiary material - we're left with a
scattershot, jangly, unevenly-paced exercise in disorientation and alienation
from which it's far too easy to become (terminally) alienated.
DVD Verdict George Hatch
New York State Writers
Institute - Film Notes Kevin Hagopian
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Roger Greenspun)
Armendáriz
Barrios, Montxo
SECRETS OF THE HEART (Secretos del
corazón) A 96
Spain France Portugal
In the early 1960’s, two boys dare each other to explore a haunted house, which may unlock family secrets that have been haunting their own parents. A sweet and tender examination of a child’s viewpoint, a time of heightened awareness, intelligently mixing adult emotions, discovering meaning and love by unraveling the mysteries in sharing the human experience, not in the rules of order, which are revealed to be chaotic and uncertain. This is a poetic and inspiring film which shows love can be sweet.
Time
Out review Geoff Andrew
A nine-year-old gradually discovers the skeletons in the family closet when he and his elder brother, who live with their aunts in Pamplona during the 1960s, pay a visit to their widowed mother in a Pyrenean village. The portrait of lives partly defined by repression and superstition is sensitive, the re-creation of the rituals of rural Basque life fascinating, and the characterisations mostly subtly detailed. Unlike such comparable films as The Spirit of the Beehive and Cria Cuervos, however, this one never really pulls away from the curious young protagonist to tell us much about the wider political realities of the period.
Boxoffice
Magazine Wade
Major (link lost)
The Oscar-nominated, multi-award-winning "Secrets of the Heart" belongs to a proud European tradition of insightful films about childhood that ranges from Truffaut's immortal "The 400 Blows" to "My Life as a Dog" and the brilliant "Totos le Heros." This particular story, set in a small town during the 1960s, centers around a 9-year-old boy named Javi who believes he can hear the dead as they whisper their unspoken secrets to him.
There's a touch of magical realism in the film, but not so much that it overwhelms the poignancy of the story and its very astute observations about human nature and the innocence of childhood. Anyone buying or even considering this wonderful film probably isn't the type to be swayed by "extras," since the film itself offers more than enough food for the soul.
On a more sobering point, the disc won't win any awards for DVD production value, with clear artifacting evident throughout the film. Thankfully, though, it's never so severe that it distracts or detracts from the film. Also, for those who take issue with such things, subtitles are of the "burned-in" variety and cannot be toggled on or off.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Secrets of the Heart (1997) Kim Newman from Sight and Sound, October 2000
Provincial
Over the Easter holidays, the brothers visit their mother. Javi is
fascinated by a room forbidden to them where Antonio, his father, died in a
shotgun mishap. Hearing sounds at night, Javi wakes Juan who tells him that the
noise is of Teresa and Ignacio having sex. Back in town, Juan is dismissed from
a school play after a fight with a boy who has informed on him for a mild
sexual escapade with a local girl. Returning to the old house, Javi discovers
that Ricardo, a mysterious man, has moved in. Aunt María resumes a love affair
with Ricardo. Carlos' mother, after years of abuse by her husband, commits
suicide. María tells
Review
For a film far more concerned with nuance and mood than plot, Secrets of the Heart is surprisingly packed with incident, all viewed through the eyes of the film's young hero, Javi. The child initially interprets the adult world, notably his many family troubles, in terms of mystery and melodrama, but by the end he realises that all the secrets withheld from him revolve around sexual activity (the magic word imparted by his brother is "chinga", translated here as "humping"). Charting Javi's learning curve, writer-director Montxo Armendáriz's film is necessarily full of repetition: scenes that at first seem to suggest a ghostly, magical world are later reprised in a more mundane manner - Javi's first peek at an abandoned house encourages wild speculations, the second discloses the presence of Ricardo, and the third, Ricardo and Javi's aunt María in noisy carnal embrace. The passion he imagined has become real, but few crimes are committed. This said, with the deaths of Javi's father Antonio and his friend Carlos' mother, Armendáriz hints that suicide might be the only course of action available to those trapped in intolerable marriages in this divorce-free Catholic backwater.
Armendáriz hasn't got much to add to such films as The Night of the Hunter (1955) and The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) which, like Secrets of the Heart, revolve around a wide-eyed, wayward child at a loose end. Admirably, Secrets of the Heart avoids melodrama: Javi's investigations never rebound, he's not placed in any danger and the revelation about his paternity is made with a minimum of pain. (Since his real father Ignacio is Antonio's brother, Javi is still the grandson of the stay-at-home patriarch, a shattered man following his son's suicide.) Ignacio is also seen to be a decent parent and considerate lover to Javi's mother, which introduces a note of fairy-tale harmony to Secrets of the Heart's happy ending.
Above all, Secrets of the Heart is a modest film of quiet stretches and small pleasures (a ford which Javi is afraid to cross is an especially intriguing location, seeming safe or perilous depending on the camera angle). Though sexual passions have riven the several families we see, Javi's only actual experience with girls suggests that the whole chinga business is something of a con. The girl who gets Javi's brother Juan in trouble takes Carlos' and Javi's money, then sits on a park bench and, firmly holding her skirt down, parts her knees three times without revealing anything. And Carlos' quiet sister, on whom Juan has a crush, is a saint-in-waiting cipher, with nothing to add to the stew of revelation, complicity and covenant that unites the film's main characters. Only the two aunts, the tipsy María and the seamstress Rosa, show Javi anything like their real feelings, having a blazing row when María announces she is leaving with the (married?) Ricardo and separately collapsing into tearful fugues when prodded by innocently asked but piercing questions from Javi.
Nitrate Online (Eddie Cockrell)
New
York Times (registration req'd)
Stephen Holden
Arnold, Andrea
Andrea
Arnold , 24/12/07, Kinoeye
British Council Brit Films entry on Andrea
Arnold
Andrea Arnold The
Auteurs
BBC
NEWS | Entertainment | Briton wins short film Oscar Jason Korsner from BBC News, February 27, 2005
Report from Time Out on a visit to the set of Red
Road Emilie Bickerton from Time Out London,
Director calls for
CCTV debate Darren Waters from BBC
News,
BBC Press Office report on Prix du
Jury at Cannes for Red Road BBC
Press Office, May 28, 2006
Time Out feature on Red Road Time Out
Chlotrudis
Mewsings: Andrea Arnold's RED ROAD Leads the Advance Party Chlotrudis Mewsings,
Red Road and the Surveillance Society Tom Jennings,
Andrea
Arnold: A Well-Kept British Secret David Gritten from The
Telegraph, May 14, 2009
Andrea
Arnold wins Jury Prize in Cannes | Britspotting May 27, 2009
Do
films like Fish Tank and Katalin Varga signal the rebirth of the British art
film? | Andrew Pulver The Guardian, July 24, 2009
Andrea
Arnold: 'I wish cinema could be braver' - Telegraph David Gritten from The Telegraph,
Katie
Jarvis – from the school steps to the red carpet Maddy Costa interviews actress Katie Jarvis
from The Guardian, September 3,
2009
Fish Tank |
Film review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, September 10, 2009
Fish
Tank, Andrea Arnold, 124 mins, (15) - Reviews, Films - The ... Jonathan Romney from The Independent,
Andrea
Arnold: 'I don't do easy rides' Ryan
Gilbey from The Guardian,
'I
like darkness' Danny Leigh feature
and interview from The Guardian,
Interview
with Red Road director Andrea Arnold - Monsters and Critics Monsters & Critics interview,
EXCL: Director
Andrea Arnold on Red Road - ComingSoon.net
Edward Douglas interview from Coming Soon,
Filmmaker
Magazine: Web Exclusives Ray Pride
interview with Arnold and actress Katie Dickie from Filmmaker magazine,
Director Andrea Arnold's
thrilling film experiment - CBC Arts | Film Katrina Onstad interview from CBC,
An
Interview with Andrea Arnold | Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin (undated, probably
2007)
Fabien Lemercier Interview with Andrea
Arnold at
kagablog
» 304. Red Road (Andrea Arnold 2006 GB)
Interview from Kagablog,
Real
life in the Fish Tank Amy Raphael
feature and interview from The Observer,
Andrea
Arnold: Behind Glass | The Skinny
Gail Tolley interview from The Skinny,
Film:
Andrea Arnold interview - Scotsman.com Living Siobhan Synnot interview from Living
Scotsman,
Fish
Tank: An Interview With Andrea Arnold | Birds Eye View Sophie Ivan interview from Brids Eye View,
/
HAMMER TO NAIL » Blog Archive » A Conversation With Andrea Arnold Michael Tully interview, September 13, 2009
Andrea Arnold: The Path
to The Red Road | GreenCine Jonathan
Marlow interview from GreenCine, September 13, 2009, also seen here: Greencine interview with Andrea
Arnold
Andrea
Arnold, writer-director of Fish Tank | Jan Gilbert Jan Gilbert interview from Curzon magazine, September/October 2009
Andrea Arnold - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Andrea Arnold - Zimbio photos
DOG
User comments from imdb Author: bob the moo from
A teenage girl gets ready to go out to meet her boyfriend,
despite her mother's loud verbal disapproval of her clothes. She goes out to a
deserted area with him and he begins to touch her up and have sex with her,
however a dog reveals the true nature of her boyfriend.
Screened as part of the BBC2 compilation of shorts entitled `Ways to leave your
lover' this was probably the most realistic depiction of modern romance for
many people - fumbled sex, selfish relationships with self seeking, unstable
people. However it does make for a pretty bleak short film. The depiction of
the `love making' is so without any type of opinion or sensationalism that it
is very real.
The meaning in the `dog' and the reaction of Leah when she gets home is a
little too hard to read and I must admit to not totally getting it. However it
is still very sharp and bleak, mainly because I (and I'm sure many others) can
relate to this story a lot easier than I could to the other, more comic,
stories told in the same season of shorts.
Bleak and honest but the meaning is a little unclear at the end.
WASP
PopMatters
[Shaun Huston] Cinema 16: European Short Films (excerpt)
Wasp‘s (2003) big moment, an image of a wasp entering a baby’s mouth, is overwrought and roughly rendered, but by the time it appears, writer-director Andrea Arnold has already spun a story of such complexity and conflicting emotion that its failure hardly matters. The film is grounded by Nathalie Press’ performance as “Zoë,” an all too young, poor, and unworldly mother of four. Wasp‘s narrative turns on Zoë‘s chance meeting with an ex, “Dave” (Danny Dyer), which leads to a date later that day. Unable to secure care for her children, but not wanting Dave to know the full details of her life since they last knew each other (or maybe wanting to return to a time when she could just be young), Zoë stashes her kids outside of the pub while she hooks up with the guy.
Zoë‘s choices here are appalling, verging on neglect, but Arnold never lets the audience simply judge her at a distance. As bad as Zoë ‘s parenting is at this moment, it is also easy to understand why she does what she does. It helps that earlier in the film you get to see her bonding with her children. She does seem to be doing the best she can, even if her best isn’t very good. The weight of class bears down heavily on Zoë, but while this helps to explain her life situation, it is never intimated that her immediate choices are anything but her own. In twenty-three minutes, Press and Arnold achieve a level of complexity that few narrative features reach in two hours. Of all the films in the set, this is the one that I found myself thinking about the most days after having viewed for the first time.
The
House Next Door [Robert Humanick]
Similarly thudding is Andrea Arnold’s
Oscar-winning Wasp (2003), though it takes some
time until the film’s manipulations become apparent. Detailing a day in the
life of the poverty-stricken Zoë (Nathalie Press), a single mother of four, it
is a reminder that vérité aesthetics do not always result in a cinema of truth.
The titular bug is first glimpsed during an understated scene in Zoë's
ramshackle apartment; while the youngest toddler cries after having dropped his
pacifier onto the floor, the buzzing insect vainly attempts to pass through a
closed window. In this way, the wasp comes to represent the poverty-stricken
protagonists in their struggle against invisible social and financial
structures. Unfortunately, Wasp ultimately sidesteps such readings. After
running into an old flame on the street, Zoë hikes the kids down to a local
pub, leaving the eldest to babysit them in the parking lot while she gets her
groove on inside. The film sympathetically portrays the seemingly inescapable
plight of these youngsters, but when the wasp returns to potentially choke one
of the tykes (interrupting Zoë’s backseat fuck in the process), it reduces the
morality play to one of mere incidence.
User comments from imdb Author: planktonrules from
WASP is a thoroughly unpleasant film due to its subject matter. The film is
about a poor mother with four small children who is simply unfit to take care
of them--let alone herself. Though technically an adult, Zoë is completely
irresponsible and selfish. As you watch her hungry children and her ambivalence
towards them, you'll find the film very shocking. Now I don't think that she
hates her kids--it's just that her needs trump all others and right now her
need to to hook up with a man. Now despite having these kids (and the oldest
looks to be only about 7 or 8), she drags them to the pub and tells them to
wait outside and leaves the oldest one in charge. And the children wait, and
wait, and wait for many hours--often playing in the street to amuse themselves
and starving while mom is inside buying drinks for her date.
This film earned the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film and it deserved it
even though it was hard to watch and was so very unpleasant. There were two
main reasons I liked the film. First, it was completely unflinching in how it
showed a neglectful mother and her kids--you couldn't help but feel sorry for
the kids and you wanted to scream out loud towards the end of the film when
they are in such grave danger. Second, I really appreciated how the film didn't
take a definite stand (right wing or left) and simply showed the family without
commentary or trying to shove an agenda down your throat.
The film is very crude and harsh, but all this is necessary to accurately
portray this lifestyle. This, combined with the shocking images make this a
terrible film to show children, but an amazing film for anyone else. I dare
anyone to watch this film and not be effected.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: bob the moo from
Zoë is a single mum with four kids living on a council estate. Things are
rough for the family, with little money to spend on basics such as food and the
like although Zoë doesn't really help herself by what she does. Asked out to
the pub by Dave, Zoë has to try a place for her kids so she can meet him up.
Perhaps not worthy of the status of being an Oscar winner this is still an
interesting and well-made film. Another reviewer on this site has commented
that the film can probably be interpreted to suit your politic leaning but I
thought that was actually a good aspect of it because it is so ambiguous. Is
Zoe a victim of her surroundings or is she just a selfish, council-estate chav?
On the surface it is an easy question to answer but, although I did lean
towards the latter, the film did make me think about her situation, her poor
options and the depressing future that her kids have in front of them. The
inability to come down on either side of the fence does take away from the film
a bit but I found that the thoughts it gave me covered for it; although I can also
see why it would the subject would bother some viewers – after all, are we
really expected to be engaged by a lead character that we would move cities to
avoid? Press plays her well regardless though. She is totally convincing and
deserves credit for being so natural and not allowing the sentimental leaning
of the script to turn her into a sympathetic character. Dyer is a good face to
have involved and is his usual good value in a wide boy character. The kids are
very good and are the heart of the film, delivering depressingly natural
depictions of council estate kids – f**ked from birth.
Overall this is an uneven film that will be taken different ways by different
viewers but will likely bother many with its forgiving look at a real piece of
white trash. However it is still thought provoking and that makes it worth
seeing along with very good direction and generally strong performances.
Fin
de cinema: Victoria Beckham, my ass: Andrea Arnold's Wasp Joe Bowman from Fin de Cinema,
Combustible
Celluloid film review - Cinema 16 - European Short ... Jeffrey
M. Anderson
Culture Wars [Emilie
Bickerton]
DVD Verdict-
Cinema 16: World Short Films [James A. Stewart]
DVD Verdict
[James A. Stewart] Cinema 16: European Short Films
Wasp - cinema16
| short film dvds Cinema 16
Wasp British Films Catalogue
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
YouTube - WASP Andrea Arnold
(clip) www.cinema16.org on YouTube (
RED ROAD
Great Britain Denmark
In the manner of
Bresson, and more recently the Dardenne brothers, Arnold establishes herself as
a firm minimalist believer that less is more, introducing short sequential
pieces of a larger enveloping puzzle, that by the very emotional austerity
leads us to believe that something awaits us up the road. Much of the film is wordless, following the
roving eyes and thoughts of a serious minded policewoman, Kate Dickie as
Jackie, whose dreary life is spent sitting in front of dozens of police
surveillance screens, working in a dark, strangely secluded central control
room with the capacity to zoom in and out or change the camera angle of
existing images, all captured from police cameras fixed atop telephone poles
centrally spaced around a looming housing project at the end of Red Road. The story originated from Danish writers Lone
Scherfig, ITALIANS FOR BEGINNERS (2000), and Anders Thomas Jensen, who combined
to write the wonderfully off-beat character comedy WILBUR WANTS TO KILL HIMSELF
(2002), while Jensen co-wrote each of Susanne Bier’s last three films, OPEN
HEARTS (2002), BROTHERS (2004), and AFTER THE WEDDING (2006), all with origins
from the Danish Dogma movement, where this project arose from Lars von Trier’s
“the Advance Party concept” where three first-time filmmakers will make their own
films from similar story origins.
What little we know of
Jackie is learned from her aloof, uncomfortable manner with relatives and her
every other week loveless sexual escapade conducted from inside a van parked in
a secluded field where the guy lets his dog run free. Other than that, she spies on the local
citizens and notifies police authorities when she witnesses a crime in
progress, not a very fulfilling life it appears, as the audience is privy to the
excruciating alienation she feels at every turn, finding small pleasures in the
ordinary routines of her regular dog walkers, while always on the lookout for
suspicious activity. Unfortunately, as
we’re peering at security screens, the grainy, slightly out of focus images leave
the audience bleary-eyed after awhile, and there’s no way we could suspect that
one of them caught with his pants down with a girl up against a remote,
graffiti-scrawled wall would suddenly catch her eye. But soon afterwards, old newspaper clippings
tell us she’s seen him somewhere before, and something god-awful happened to
leave her in this sorry state. The facts
of the matter, however, remain out of our reach.
Beyond police
surveillance, she begins to take a more heightened personal interest by
literally stalking this guy on her own, even allowing him to see her, which
feels overly amateurish, but she continues to lurk ever closer, as mysterious industrial
music adds layers of atmospheric tension, eventually quietly crashing a party in
his apartment, which is a wonderfully brooding, slowly developing moment of
music, underlying dread, and flashing colors, as if she’s intentionally walked
into her own personal nightmare, beautifully captured by cinematographer Robbie
Ryan. Like a dream, she suddenly wakes
up, as if she’s come to her senses, but she continues her obsession with this
man, much of which has to have been captured by the very security screen she
monitors, yet she moves ever closer to what feels like her prey. So long as we haven’t a clue what their
connection is, this is truly a creepy stalker film, as we’re not sure what to
expect, but whatever it is, it’s laced with the profanity and street violence
of grim realism, where the constantly moving hand-held camera remains viscerally
in-your-face, capturing every bulging vein of screaming ex-cons with explosive
tempers, where a rowdy, bar-room brawl becomes the foreplay to the eerie cries
of wild foxes in the night, and what looks graphically real feels a bit surreal
in this beaten down, dilapidated sprawl of urban decay.
Dickie is excellent, as
her subtle role requires mesmerizing close ups of a woman bluffing her way into
the poker match of her life, where it’s obviously worth her life to risk it
all. When we discover the connection,
which is held back until the very end, there’s a final cathartic coda, the only
real emotional release in the entire film, as it all plays out so drearily void
of human emotions, almost like a sci-fi flick, where the audience remains
outside the realm of what's happening onscreen, where newspapers and garbage flutter in the breeze of this
dead end portrait of life at the end of the world. While this doesn’t have the political
consciousness of Haneke’s CACHÉ, nor his lyrical touch, to name a recent Cannes
film that excelled in the use of surveillance tapes, this is instead immersed
in the raw-edged, more experimental universe of low-budget thrillers, where
there’s an eerie calm underneath this near psychopathic hounding of a man from
her past, a man she means to exorcise from her consciousness by any means
necessary. The imagery is vivid, with an
exceptional electronic music sound design by Nicolas Becker, making this one of
the best trailers of the year, but the film works best as a ghost story, when
none of the pieces fit together, when there’s an underlying fear of the mysterious
unknown. When too much is revealed,
unfortunately, the air goes out of the balloon and the mood dissipates. A film that works this hard to create a cloud
of ambiguity doesn’t need to be explained.
Like Hou Hsiao-hsien’s GOODBYE SOUTH, GOODBYE (1996), this could have
ended in the oblique emptiness of the night, with those foxes racing across the
headlight-illuminated road, going or coming from nowhere, with questions still
floating around inside the audience’s heads.
Bright Lights Film Journal (Robert Keser)
Surveillance
footage also permeates Andrea Arnold’s intensely immediate Red Road (as
does the Dogme aesthetic’s palsied camerawork), which at first encourages
identification with a woman whose job requires vigilant scrutiny of live street
activities captured on Scotland’s public spycams from multitudinous angles,
especially a public housing monolith that houses ex-cons. As she
sympathetically tracks a man walking an elderly bulldog on its last legs, she
begins to stalk another rowdy inhabitant for her own reasons, at which point we
must re-evaluate what we are seeing: this freshly released criminal’s treatment
of her (including during a scorching sex episode) seems decent enough even as
she busily sets up a questionable entrapment scheme. Meanwhile, the movie hums
with machines busily capturing human foibles, while gripping tracking shots and
shallow focus surprises cement our involvement. The cries of wild foxes amidst
the urban rubble and the hot neon clarity of a red-purple lava lamp stand out
as shockingly aesthetic moments in the faux naturalism of Dogme (though the
film usefully comes equipped with English-language subtitles to explicate the
Glasgow accents and slang), and two other directors are planning films that
will follow the same three principal characters (though it’s unclear whether
these include Roger the woman-hating budgerigar).
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Like all voyeurs, Jackie (Kate Dickie), a
gaunt young woman surrounded by the chilly fog of the horribly lonely, lacks a
life to call her own outside of her job manning a police closed-circuit
television camera in
Zoom In Online [Annie
Frisbie]
Jackie (Kate Dickie) is watching.
Behind a bank of televisions she's privy to
the open secrets of
Writer/director Andrea Arnold infuses Red Road with carefully measured reminders of the joys
available to Jackie if she can just let go of her grief--the sight of an old
aunt dancing at a wedding, a group of drunken friends singing along to Oasis in
one of those awful bachelor pads that are made for parties--but the sum of the
parts feels derivative. This story has been done before, and not just by the
far more audacious Morvern Callar, which
Jackie's the kind of movie character who
sleeps with the ashes of her husband and daughter, and who has perfunctory,
alienating sex with a married man, story choices that feel very contrived here.
Despite the script flaws, Dickie gives a brave, compelling performance, and she
finds the truths in
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
In Andrea Arnold's
washed-out Scottish melodrama Red Road, Kate Dickie plays a watcher for
Glasgow's "City Eye," a camera-connected security station that
monitors criminal activity around the towering Red Road apartment buildings.
Because Dickie is supposed to call the police whenever she sees anything
suspicious, she half-imagines herself as the arbiter of the lives she follows
on her hundreds of tiny screens. If she spots a couple having sex in an alley,
she lets it go, because she's partial to quickies herself. But when she notices
that the male half of the couple looks a lot like a convicted criminal who had
a direct hand in destroying her marriage years earlier, Dickie can't just
ignore it. She follows him with her remote-control cameras, and when their
range proves too limited, Dickie clocks out and hits the streets to practice
some private surveillance.
Anders Thomas Jensen
and Lone Scherfig created Red Road's characters as part of the
Dogme-like "Advance Party" concept, in which three fledgling feature
directors are assigned the same actors, the same setting, and the same
essential narrative circumstances, and told to create three different films. Arnold's
is the first, coming on the heels of her acclaimed short films (one of which,
"Wasp," won a live-action-short Oscar). Like Lynne Ramsay—another
veteran of the shorts circuit—Arnold likes watching people think more than
listening to them talk, and she employs an intense, close-up-heavy style that
holds on the heroine while keeping the bigger picture just out of focus. In Red
Road, the style suits the subject, because Dickie sometimes gets so
preoccupied with electronically trailing her favorite people that she misses
the real crimes taking place.
Red Road has a mesmerizing, grainy look, and its
premise and its plot present a lot of possibilities. But there appears to be an
underlying struggle between the movie Arnold wanted to make—an elliptical study
of obsession and voyeurism—and the necessary backstory that Jensen and Scherfig
provide. As long as Arnold can avoid giving any reason for Dickie's strange
behavior, Red Road remains creepy and hypnotic, but as soon as Arnold
explains what's going on, the movie's structure collapses into the rubble of
cliché. So Arnold delays and delays, and eventually even the delays become
tiresome and self-indulgent. Red Road is a promising debut by a talented
director, but with luck, next time, Arnold will be in a real position of
authority, and not just manning someone else's watchtower.
Red
Road Allan Hunter in Cannes from
Screendaily
The question of whether Andrea Arnold can expand her
Oscar-winning talents from short films to features is answered with a
resounding yes by
Red Road is the first project to emerge from Von Trier’s The Advanced Party scheme to make three low-budget features using a set of characters created by Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen. Arnold impresses in how she crafts a multi-layered story, adding texture to the way an artist builds up layers of paint in the process of creating the bigger picture.
She also secures vivid portrayals from her cast with the unknown Kate Dickie giving the kind of committed, draining performance that may present Penelope Cruz with a run for her money when it comes to the Jury’s final deliberations. Her sharp, angular features dominate a film that often eschews unnecessary dialogue to tell the story visually. Dickie makes you accept the emotional conflicts within a woman struggling to resolve the unbearable legacy of a tragic accident.
Inevitably, there is a considerable difference between the giddy enthusiasm of Cannes critics and perceptions of the film in the real world where its narrative discretion, downbeat nature and unsparing evocation of working-class lives might not qualify as useful marketing hooks. UK audiences are notoriously leery of indigenous productions, preferring fluffy and feel-good (Billy Elliot, Love Actually etc) to harrowing and hard-edged. Red Road may be a tough sell for Verve who pre-bought UK rights but critical support and the ability to generate interest in the discovery of new talent should give the film a real fighting chance. The Zentropa imprimatur, Dogme influences and prestige Cannes premiere should help to make it a viable commercial option throughout Europe.
Arnold has the comparatively rare quality of convincing the audience that they are in safe hands. She takes you on a journey with the promise that once the final destination has been reached all your questions will be answered. It does require a certain amount of faith and patience on the viewer’s part and Arnold pushes the point at which we really need to know more than we have been told. Just when the faith falters, she brings everything together in a shattering climax that makes good on her promise.
Just like the central character of Jackie (Kate Dickie) you are made to feel as if an enormous weight has been lifted from your chest and breathing is possible once again. Almost like a quintessential Atom Egoyan character, Jackie has become a passive observer of other peoples’ lives. She is a CCTV operator, watching over the world like a hi-tech version of James Stewart’s immobilised photographer in Rear Window. Dwarfed by a bank of monitors, she sees fragments of stories and the vast underbelly of Glasgow’s mean streets.
We know there has been tragedy in her life. We sense she is numbed by grief and that there is a past that will not let go its hold over her. Then she catches sight of the man who was responsible for her pain. Clyde (Tony Curran) has been given early parole from a 10-year jail sentence and is now attempting to go straight. She becomes fascinated by his activities, stalking him and befriending his flatmates Stevie (Martin Compston) and April (Natalie Press). As her obsession grows, it becomes impossible to determine whether she wants to kill him or bed him or what she might be willing to sacrifice in pursuit of closure.
Red Road takes its name from the street of notorious high rise apartment blocks where Clyde lives and Arnold lets the camera linger over the detritus of modern urban living from streets strewn with fast food cartons to abandoned skips and graffiti-covered walls. There is misery at the heart of the story but the narrative takes some unexpected turns and what feels like a journey of utter despair becomes a road to redemption reminiscent of Von Trier’s Breaking The Waves.
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young] Tallinn Film
Festival report
Though it's been almost uniformly
hailed as one of the most striking and accomplished British feature debuts of
2006, writer-director Arnold's Red Road turns out to have an
unexpected amount in common with one of the very ropiest of this year's UK
releases: Penny Woolcock's Mischief Night (in many of its themes, it's
also particularly reminiscent of another recent misfire by a female British
director, namely Juliet McKoen's Frozen.)
As it happens, both Red
Road and Mischief Night were shot by Robbie Ryan, whose
cinematography is one of the most consistently impressive elements of Red
Road: a film which (despite the quotidian grubbiness of many of its
settings) is great to look at, awkward to listen to, and decidedly troubling to
ponder. To explain the specifics would involve giving away the ending: suffice
it to say that the more you think about the plot (once it's finally been
revealed in its entirety) the more implausible and, indeed, morally
objectionable it seems.
Like the Leeds-based Mischief
Night,
Like Mischief Night, Red
Road purports to present an accurate image of real urban lives in the first
decade of the 20th century: the main difference being that Mischief Night is
(mostly) played for larkish laughs, whereas
Simply put, the characters in
these two films quite often don't talk like real people, they talk in a manner
which the scriptwriter seems to think people in these circumstances
might talk: it's probably no coincidence Woolcock's personal background is
(quite literally) half a world away from inner-city Leeds; that Arnold didn't
know Glasgow before she went there to make her movie. And it isn't just what
the characters say that comes across as unconvincing here: it's also
what they do: Red Road carries with it a distinct whiff
of patronising exploitation in its presentation of a haplessly
lumpen, undereducated, inarticulate underclass, here presented in an
uniformly stygian set of flats, pubs and litter-strewn streets. In one
particularly unlikely touch, a young 'cockney sparrer' (played by My Summer
of Love's Natalie Press) feeds her dog by spooning the meaty chunks
directly on to the kitchen floor.
Just as such details smack of
scriptwriting contrivance, Red Road falls down in its general tackling
of major themes. The proliferation of surveillance cameras in modern
But this particularly disturbing
implication is skipped over with barely a thought:
Perhaps we shouldn't be so
surprised by Red Road's deficiencies: the last major Scottish-Danish
co-production was the similarly shoddy, phoney-sounding Wilbur Wants To
Kill Himself, while this film is is the first part a conceptual trilogy
dreamed up in the over-fertile mind of Lars Von Trier. We can look forward to
two more films, featuring many of the same characters and actors, all of them
set in
BFI | Sight &
Sound | The Times BFI 50th London Film Festival: Mean ... Hannah
McGill from Sight & Sound,
November 2006
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale
DVD Times Noel Megahey
PopMatters Cynthia
Fuchs
filmcritic.com
(Chris Barsanti) review [4/5]
stylusmagazine.com
(Nancy Keefe Rhodes) review
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review
Harry Chotiner
Beyond
the Multiplex Andrew O’Hehir from
Salon
DVD Talk theatrical
[Jamie S. Rich]
RED
ROAD Steve Erickson from Chronicle
of a Passion
Cinematical
[Jeffrey M. Anderson]
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie
Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [C+]
Electric
Sheep Magazine Caroline Blinder
The New York Sun (S. James Snyder)
review
DVD Town (William David
Lee) dvd review
Eye for Film (Angus
Wolfe Murray) review [4.5/5]
Eye for Film (Sam Moore)
review [5/5]
Cinemattraction.com [Phillip
Piggott]
Between
Productions/Robert Cashill
Eye for Film
("Chris") review [4.5/5]
Film Journal International (Erica Abeel)
DVD Talk (Thomas Spurlin)
dvd review [3/5]
DVD Verdict (Roy Hrab) dvd
review
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
Celluloid Dreams Simon Hill
ReelTalk
(Donald Levit) review
The
Flick Filosopher (MaryAnn Johanson) review
Reel.com Ken DuBois
Monsters
and Critics [Ron Wilkinson]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Exclaim!
review Radheyan Simonpillai
Combustible Celluloid
(Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Verve
Pictures Production notes available
in Word or (pdf) setting
Chlotrudis
Mewsings: Andrea Arnold's RED ROAD Leads the Advance Party Chlotrudis Mewsings, April 14, 2007
Red Road and the Surveillance Society Tom Jennings, August 12, 2007
Report from Time Out on a visit to the set of Red
Road Emilie Bickerton from Time Out London, May 19, 2006
BBC Press Office report on Prix du
Jury at Cannes for Red Road BBC
Press Office, May 28, 2006
Time Out feature on Red Road Time
Out London, October 11, 2006
'I
like darkness' Danny Leigh feature
and interview from The Guardian,
October 18, 2006, also seen here: Guardian Interview with Andrea Arnold
Interview
with Red Road director Andrea Arnold - Monsters and Critics Monsters & Critics interview, April 10,
2007
EXCL: Director
Andrea Arnold on Red Road - ComingSoon.net
Edward Douglas interview from Coming Soon, April 11, 2007
Filmmaker
Magazine: Web Exclusives Ray Pride
interview with Arnold and actress Katie Dickie from Filmmaker magazine, April 12, 2007
Director Andrea Arnold's
thrilling film experiment - CBC Arts | Film Katrina Onstad interview from CBC, June 29, 2007
An
Interview with Andrea Arnold | Reverse Shot Michael Joshua Rowin (undated, probably
2007)
New Statesman Review of Red Road Fear and Loathing in Glasgow, Ryan Gilbey
from The New Scotsman, October 30,
2006
Red Road: The best British films 1984-2009 #20 from The Observer, August 30, 2009
Movie
review: 'Red Road' Michael Phillips
from the Chicago Tribune
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
FISH TANK A 95
Great Britain (124 mi)
2009
This
is a truly complicated film, as everything you’ve been led to believe changes
intrinsically, almost without recognition, until by the end one is startled to
discover how emotionally gripping this film becomes. It creeps up on you. There are no camera tricks, no narrative
inventions, no fancy flashback sequences, simply solid direction behind some
excellent storytelling that can make all the difference in the world. 30 minutes into this film I wasn’t buying it,
finding Katie Jarvis’s 15-year old character Mia nearly insufferable, as she
curses everyone, grotesquely headbutts another girl, and has contempt for
nearly everything she sees except a strange attraction that comes over her when
she sees a white horse chained to a rock in a vacant field. The allure of that horse feels like a
mythical sensation, as if Mia’s very soul is connected to that horse’s ability
to run free. When she tries furiously to
break the lock with large stones, she is nearly gang raped by a group of boys
who seem to live in nearby trailers.
Instead, they just give her a good scare. Home is the worst place imaginable for Mia,
standard high rise housing projects where she’s already dropped out of school
and lives with her alcoholic mother (Kierston Wareing) who makes sleeping with
men what she does for a living and little sister Tyler (Rebecca Griffiths) who
is wild and brilliantly untamed. These women
knock heads whenever they are around one another, so much so that mom is ready
to send Mia off to boarding school. The
only reprieve from anger and hostility is Mia’s interest in free form
breakdancing, which we see her perform throughout the film, usually locked up
in a room by herself, where true to form, she’s not blessed with talent, it’s
more that she’s perfectly copied the attitude.
Things
come to a head when mom’s boyfriend Connor, Michael Fassbender, brilliant as
usual, moves into the household and develops a personal interest not just in
mom, but in Mia as well, which certainly takes Mia by storm, as she becomes
consumed by the guy. At first everything
is playful and light, like a big brother where he turns her onto yet another
movie take of the song “California Dreamin,” this time by Bobbie Womack, but
eventually they’re kicking back beers and hard liquor as well. Language and atmosphere are key here, beautifully
shot by Robbie Ryan, where every note rings true, as the working class setting
(without the work) couldn’t be more ultra realistic, from the decaying project
towers themselves to the claustrophobic interiors, all matching the interior
discontent of the residents who are always at each other’s throats and never
get any privacy, which Arnold beautifully captures in the all but invisible
moral guidelines and with Mia’s humor, sarcastic comebacks, and brooding. Without sentimentality or moralizing, the
audience immediately identifies with the gut-wrenching household tension
because what we witness in the unflinching character of Mia’s mother is so
atrocious, as she’s a man magnet with no regard whatsoever for the well being
of her own children who must fend for themselves, so there’s simply no way out
of this systematic miserablism where like a prison, you’re always surrounded by
those same four walls.
Using
the Mike Leigh method of working without a script and developing characters
through rehearsals, Arnold did not give the characters scripts before shooting,
but simply coached them scene by scene in order to obtain a sense of urgency in
more naturalistic performances. Utterly
riveting, challenging, and intelligent throughout, with characters that never
let down their guard, Arnold displays especially vivid observational prowess. What’s truly surprising, however, is the
level of vulnerability obtained in Jarvis’s tough-as-nails Mia by the end of
the picture, where the girl we loved to hate we suddenly sympathize with. The ultimate triumph of this film is how
unspectacular it is to get at the bleak, unsparing truth in these lives, where
Arnold does not have to resort to trickery or big scenes. Even the goodbye she gets from her mother as
Mia finally packs her bags and gets ready to leave couldn’t be more
underplayed, where the sadness of it all, not the elation, is
indescribable. You just want to reach
through the screen and give that girl the hug or sense of affirmation she’s
never received. Wise beyond her years,
one has to think she has the capacity to love even after a life that’s been
beaten down by abuse and neglect and a world of indifference and pain. Yet in the words of Maya Angelou,
appropriately enough, herself a survivor of rape and sexual abuse: “You may trod me in the very dirt, but still, like dust,
I'll rise.”
Special
Note – lead actress Katie Jarvis, lead actor Michael Fassbender, supporting
actress Rebecca Griffiths, direction and screenplay Andrea Arnold, cinematography Robbie Ryan,
editing
Ruthless
Reviews (potentially offensive) Matt
Cale at Telluride
Andrea Arnold is a director at the top of her game. After the magnificent
short film Wasp, which was soon followed by the gritty, uncompromising
Though largely plot-free, Fish Tank is, above all, the coming-of-age tale of 15-year-old Mia, though unlike nearly every effort in this overstuffed genre, no life lessons are learned, and what hope we find comes in the form of a failed audition for a strip club. Mia dreams of dancing her way out of her dreary existence, and though she has drive and desire, she lacks any visible talent. Much screen time is devoted to her routines, the painfully earnest exercises of youthful abandon, yet they are utterly dreadful from top to toe. Throughout this movie, I quietly cheered this brave directorial decision, as we’re usually expected to believe that our ghettos exist solely to hide reservoirs of untapped potential; unkempt saints denied their just due by the brutal indignities of short-sighted, bigoted gatekeepers. Mia, no plucky heroine, is a feisty, surly, foul-mouthed little bitch, and she’ll end up just like her bleached tramp of a mother, whatever her efforts.
Sure, there is young love, lust, and pained jealousy, but all evolve from
the wellspring of authenticity, not detached idealism. Mia and her sister, for
example, are about as close to real siblings we’re likely to see on film, and
there isn’t a false note to be found in their caustic co-dependency. A new
school beckons, but the film tempers its temporary optimism with a closing
scene of quiet, depressing power. As the mother sadly gyrates to a driving beat
while settling in for yet another booze-soaked, work-free day, both daughters
join in her dance. What appears to be an atypical escape from failure and
hardship is instead the ultimate representation of how generational pathology
is passed along like a virus. I’ve always believed that the boy of ten is the
man of forty, and here is no more striking example. These are fiercely
unreflective people, “working” class in name only, who will die largely
unchanged. And yet they keep trying; carving out small moments of fleeting
pleasure that dissipate the precise moment they are acknowledged. It’s life as
lived, without the
Fish
Tank (Andrea Arnold) Peter Bradshaw
at Cannes from The Guardian
In the claustrophobic flats which
incubate family dysfunction and rage, and the wild beautiful spaces
thereabouts, where the urban sprawls out into the country, film-maker Andrea
Arnold finds a powerful story of betrayed love. One of three British movies in
competition at Cannes this year, Fish Tank is a
powerfully acted drama,
beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak
interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner.
Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches
exactly, then certainly familiar — but makes them live again and steers the
movie away from miserabilism, driven by a heartfelt central performance.
Mia, played by newcomer Katie
Jarvis, is a lary 15-year-old who lives with single mum Joanne, played by
Kierston Wareing, her lippy younger sister Tyler — a scene-stealer from Rebecca
Griffiths — and their drolly named dog, Tennents. As well as a sincere devotion
to cheap supermarket booze, the girls have learned from their mother mannerisms
of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings. Mia
herself is a wannabe dancer, and when she's trying out some moves in the
kitchen one morning, her mother's new boyfriend ambles in half-naked, looking
to put the kettle on.
This is handsome, charming
Connor, outstandingly played by Michael Fassbender, and he looks at Mia with
frank appraisal. "You dance like a black," he says, " ... I mean
that as a compliment." Poor Mia has never had a compliment or any praise
in her life and responds with alternating suspicion and fierce, semi-controlled
gratitude, especially when Connor behaves like a real dad, taking everyone out
for drives in the country.
Of course there is a sexual
atmosphere between Connor and Mia, so tropically humid that the ceiling is
almost dripping. Mia pretends to be asleep one night so Connor will carry her
to bed, and there is an extremely gamey mock-spanking scene, when Connor
pretends to "discipline" her. Mia has no idea how to express or
manage huge, unspent reserves of passion: she doesn't know if she wants a
lover, or a father — or just someone to love her unconditionally. Connor is
perhaps the man for this, but the slippery charmer has secrets.
The performances of Jarvis and
Fassbender are outstanding and their chemistry fizzes — and then explodes. It
is another highly intelligent, involving film from one of the most powerful voices
in British cinema.
Movie
Vortex Michael Edwards
Gritty council estate films were coming a bit one-dimensional. Downtrodden youths attempt to make it to the top of their local fiefdom through a little rascalry and some narcotics trading, all shot in grainy DV to make the grey British weather and grey council estates look gritty. It is therefore a great pleasure to see something that breaks the mould a little.
The first thing to note about Fish Tank is that it's
not based in
The second thing that's different about this film is that it's main characters
are women. The focus is on 15 year-old Mia, an archetypal angry teen whose
sullen demeanour and combative personality have recently seen her chucked out
of school and shunned from her group of friends. Mia lives with her mother and
younger sister in a small flat on a big council estate, and they all grate
horrifically as they try and get on with their lives.
The third main distinguishing factor is that there is no drug dealing, and no
major violence. Mia doesn't want to earn a big score or fleece some middle
class fools to escape her life, in fact, like most teenagers, she doesn't know
what she wants.
So where does the drama come from? Intricate layers of emotional abuse and
increasing instances of shattered aspirations. Beginning with the arrival of
her mum's new boyfriend Connor (Michael Fassbender) Mia sees her life turned
upside down. First his presence is an unwanted intrusion, another reason for
Mia to feel neglected and ostracized, but soon he begins to win the family over
by becoming the caring father figure that has previously been missing in their
lives. However, the situation gets darker as the film develops into a new
Lolita scenario and threatens to blow the whole family apart, as well as
destroy Mia's chances of leading a normal life.
The sensitivity which writer/director Andrea Arnold shows to the range of
issues faced by her characters prevents the film from ever resorting to
stereotypes. The result is a rich and, importantly, realistic portrait of the
life of many people in
Aside from the quality of the storytelling, which I hope I have established is
top-notch, the film is notable for the performance of it's star: Katie Jarvis.
Supposedly Andrea Arnold found her arguing with her boyfriend on the platform
of a train station and immediately decided that she was perfect for the part of
Mia, and she wasn't wrong. But not only does Jarvis look every inch the part,
but she delivers a performance that a seasoned pro would be proud of.
Dark, compelling and packed full of surprises, Fish Tank is the kind of
well-written, genre-expanding film that the
Dave
Calhoun at
British filmmaker Andrea
Arnold has stormed the gates of the film world with her first few works.
Her short film ‘Wasp’ won an Oscar in 2005, her first feature ‘Red Road’
screened in competition at Cannes in 2006 and won a Jury Prize, now her second
feature, ‘Fish Tank’ is also screening in competition. It’s hugely
satisfying to report that ‘Fish Tank’ shows Arnold going from strength to
strength, offering new depths of filmmaking while at the same time building on a
view of the world and a way of telling stories that are distinctly her own. She
also coaxes a performance of extraordinary emotion from young British newcomer
Katie Jarvis.‘Fish Tank’ is another intimate portrait of a female character
living on the margins of a city.
This time Arnold, whose camera always lingers and examines, up close and
intimately, gives us a teenage girl – a girl teetering dangerously between
childhood and adulthood and trying to put down roots in a world that has set
her loose far, far too early. The beauty of ‘Fish Tank’ is that Arnold’s
portrayal of the inner life of this girl is as sensitive, imaginative and
credible as her depiction of the wider world in which she lives. You could say
that Arnold’s interests match those of other British filmmakers with their eye
on working-class lives, such as Ken Loach. But Arnold brings to this tradition
of reporting on the real world a very particular interest in female sexuality:
how sexual attraction shapes behaviour and, in turn, how sexual behaviour
shapes relationships. Her brand of realism is strikingly poetic and, of course,
focused on women, which in a filmmaking world dominated by men, is no trite
observation.
Anyone who saw ‘Wasp’ will recognise the world of ‘Fish Tank’. It’s the
unpredictable world of a young working-class mother with two young daughters
who live together on an estate in the Thames estuary, a part of south-east
England that Arnold indulges so strongly that it’s hard to imagine anything
beyond it. For this story the director turns her gaze on a similar family’s
eldest daughter, Mia (Katie Jarvis), a 15-year-old who many, including her
distracted mother Joanne (Kierston Wareing) - who calls her a ‘cunt’ - and the
social services - who want to put her in residential care - have all but given
up on. Mia’s spunky little sister, barely a teenager, smokes and drinks and
answers to the call of ‘fuckface’, while their mother parties in the living
room and her mate has a bloke’s hand up her skirt in the kitchen. Mia is
aggressive with most people she meets – she headbutts another teenager in the
film’s opening minutes – but she has a world of dreams into which Arnold
invites us: Mia loves to dance, to hip hop and R&B, and she practices
whenever she’s alone.
It’s into this universe of swearing, cider, distant flyovers and travellers
with clapped-out horses on bits of scrubland that Conor (Michael Fassbender)
arrives. He’s Mia’s mum’s new boyfriend, an affable Irishman who warms to Mia
immediately, and within days he’s living in their house and paying a fair bit
of attention to his lover’s daughter – lending her money, admiring her dance
moves, showing her how to catch a fish – even if Mia’s mum would prefer he
ignored her altogether. We’re immediately suspicious about his motives. Is he predatory?
Is he harmless? The fact that he’s affable and gives Mia much-needed attention
makes these questions even harder to answer. He gives Mia something she needs –
but at what price?
Eventually, Conor’s presence provokes a crisis. But what’s interesting is that
while the story takes a dark turn, Arnold never presents Mia purely as a victim
or allows the black-and-white details of the story to obscure the greyer areas
of desire, attraction and adolescent development, both sexual and emotional.
This is a very strong film – one that’s utterly gripping and always surprising.
Again, Arnold is working with DoP Robbie Ryan, and they find great beauty in a
part of the world that a lot of people would prefer to observe from a safe
distance through a car window. Those familiar with ‘Red Road’ will recognise
the distant views from tower block windows. The dialogue, especially that in
the mouths of teenagers, rings remarkably true and there’s a fair bit of humour
in a plot that could, on the surface, sound fairly grim. In the end, there’s
nothing grim about the film at all – we don’t feel sorry for anyone because
Arnold leaves us with a strong, hopeful sense that there’s life outside the
tank for Mia – and everyone else can go to hell in a handcart.
The Auteurs David Cairns
Screenjabber review Adrian Hieatt
Confession of
a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Global
Comment [Mark Farnsworth]
Hope Lies at 24 Frames
Per Second (UK) Adam Batty
Jigsaw Lounge /
Tribune [Neil Young]
Fish
Tank Allan Hunter at Cannes from
Screendaily
Moving
Pictures magazine [Eric Kohn]
Future Movies (Paul
Gallagher) review [9/10]
Long Pauses
[Darren Hughes] at Toronto
Cannes
'09: Day Two Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May
14, 2009
The
discovery of Cannes (so far)? Katie Jarvis. Eugene Hernandez at Cannes from indieWIRE,
May 14, 2009
Cannes.
"Fish Tank" David Hudson
at Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 14, 2009
Tom Carson GQ
magazine Cannes blog, May 14, 2009
Cannes
Competition Blog Fionnuala Halligan
from Screendaily Cannes Blog
Cannes
Day Three: Lou Ye's Spring Rain Disappointing, Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank
Eminently Respectable J. Hoberman from The Village Voice, May 15, 2009
Fabien Lemercier Interview
with Andrea Arnold at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 14, 2009
The Hollywood Reporter review Ray Bennett
Variety (Leslie Felperin) review at Cannes, May 14, 2009
The
Irish Times review [4/5] Donald
Clarke
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Tim
Robey
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev
Sandhu
The
Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5]
The
Independent (Kaleem Aftab) review [4/5]
Hampstead
may pass into nothingness, but this Romford girl is a joy forever Jason Solomons at Cannes from The Observer, May 17, 2009
How
row set in train life-changing offer for Fish Tank star Charlotte Higgins at Cannes from The Guardian Blog, May 14, 2009
Cannes
'09 Day 2: Attaque du sex Wesley
Morris from The Boston Globe, May 14,
2009
WUTHERING HEIGHTS B- 82
Great Britain (129 mi)
2011
While revisionist works
are always controversial, this one is a flawed misstep, reverential in tone as
a visual essay of a literary work, where the words are lost in an
incomprehensible mix of bad acting and mumbled sound recording. Throughout this mostly wordless film, very
few words can actually be understood, instead relegated to background noise,
which seems to be by design as the director’s intent. Arnold is known for using non-professional
actors, but that appears to go awry in this version, as the actors are simply
incapable of generating any interest towards any of the characters, all of whom
are mere sketches of mostly unpleasant people.
The same criticism was levied against the original novel, that the story
was unlikeable and the 18th century characters unpleasant. While the 1847 novel by Emily Brontë was
published in the mid-19th century, this film version feels more like
the Middle Ages of Chaucer, especially since language is all but obscured,
which heightens the graphic brutality on display, including continual
mistreatment of animals, where people are seen as little more than wretched and
contemptible people. Within this setting,
where nature abounds, they are literally surrounded by a near idyllic pastoral
landscape of verdant rolling hills in the Yorkshire moors, a place where human
evolution lags behind, as despite the pristine, Edenesque beauty, humans are
little more than grotesque animals on the loose, matched by the constant
presence of continually barking dogs.
The opening hour of this film is largely an abstract visual essay, a
mosaic of constantly shifting patterns of darkness and light, where the
stunning compositional beauty of the cinematography by Robbie Ryan is
painterly, much like a Joseph
Mallord William Turner (1775 – 1851) landscape, like “Landscape with a River and a
Bay in the Background” (1,016
× 768 pixels), an English landscape style that pre-dates the
Impressionists. Shot in a boxed 1:33
aspect ratio literally saturated in a claustrophobic, arthouse style,
everything layered in a sensuous glaze, the experimental style initially feels
highly inventive, but after awhile the style itself grows repetitive,
especially when the mind’s eye of a child grows into an adult and the
surrounding world looks exactly the same, unchanging and still
uncompromising.
While there are at least 15 different versions of this
story on film, making it one of the most popular movie adaptations of a novel,
the most famous is the William Wyler version with Laurence Olivier from 1939,
an overly stiff costume drama suffocating in Gothic period atmosphere, where
reality is nowhere to be seen in that production. Given Andrea Arnold’s penchant for social
realism, she literally turns the genre form upside down and reshapes this into
an experimental film, using handheld cameras and a pervasive use of the natural
countryside, almost always engulfed in low-lying fog, not to mention endless
wind and rain, becoming not just melancholy but overwhelmingly dreary. Arnold makes a few significant alterations,
changing class differences to racial inequity, casting Solomon Glave, a young
black actor as Heathcliff, who is an abandoned boy, perhaps a runaway slave
found roaming the streets of Liverpool, taken in by the Earnshaw family as part
of their Christian duty and raised as one of their own, much to the utter
contempt of eldest son Hindley (Lee Shaw), who continually makes abusive and
disparaging racial taunts (“He ain’t
my brother, he’s a nigger”), but is
loved openly by the only daughter Catherine (Shannon Beer). The two are seen forever roaming the
hillsides together where their playfulness leads to budding sexual feelings. When her father dies unexpectedly and Hindley
takes over the farm, Heathcliff is immediately treated as a servant, banished
to sleeping in the barn, unable to eat or socialize with the family. The film is seen completely through the eyes
of Heathcliff, often peering around the corners of buildings, behind a hedge,
looking into a window, all in search for Catherine, where he becomes obsessed
by her every move. Hindley’s temper
often gets the better of him, where he can be seen punching and kicking Heathcliffe,
all for minor infractions, becoming more explicitly racial, calling him a
“nigger” and a thief, giving him a brutal whipping, continually showing him his
place, where he’s not one of the accepted family members. Still, Heathcliff seems to hang around for a
chance to see Catherine, though when he actually utters something, it feels
crude, horribly insulting, and completely out of place. When Catherine decides to marry a local boy,
Edgar (Jonny Powell), a rich neighbor, Heathcliff quietly disappears in the
pouring rain.
A significant period of time
passes, as Heathcliff (James Howson) has elevated his class status and returns
a wealthy man, but Catherine is still married.
This doesn’t prevent continual visits, where they return to the open
wild of the hilly countryside, also mixed in with flashback sequences of when
they were younger. For all practical
purposes, Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) is the lady of the house now, complete
with servants waiting on her, where her rendezvous visits out on the moors with
Heathcliff have scandal written all over it.
Older actors assume their roles, but they fail to convey any of the
sense of exuberance or naturalness of the younger actors, lacking deep
affection or the brooding gravitas needed, where Heathcliff is more of a
stalker than a lover, and despite his elevated class status, there is little
that can be done, as she has married into wealth and a life of comfort and
ease. Danger, however, surrounds their every
move, as no good can come of it. The
more Heathcliff insists on staying, the more their lives are doomed, destroying
everyone around them. Initially in his
return, Heathcliff was driven purely by revenge to get back at Hindley, whose
life has spiraled into drunken chaos and debt, a shell of his former self,
hardly worth thinking about. Purists
will scoff at Heathcliffe’s use of profane gutter language, though mostly he
says nothing, where at some point Catherine actually realizes, “You never have
anything to say,” to which he responds, “That never bothered you before.” Brontë followers will likely be offended by
Arnold’s choice to make a near wordless film of a literary masterpiece, and if
the spontaneity of young actors had succeeded, perhaps this might have been a
boldly exciting, quasi punk experiment in power and passion. But instead the audience feels cheated by the
lackluster performances, feeling emotionally empty, where despite the
overwhelming brilliance of the style, this is an overly bleak and completely
unengaging adaptation, a missed opportunity, an unrelenting trek into abject
misery and pain. Often adding visual metaphors of birds stuck in cages,
moth’s fluttering at a closed windowsill, or insects caught in a spider’s web,
animals are as plentiful onscreen as humans, but with each species, we are unable to decipher interior
ideas or emotions, where the complexity of the novel has been completely
transformed into what becomes by the end an exhausting visual abstraction, a
descent into human degradation.
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
Midway through Wuthering Heights, Hindley blinks in
disbelief at the grown-up, returning Heathcliff: "What the fuck…?"
Long before this groggy-hooligan double take, Brit kitchen-sink realism maven
Andrea Arnold has already left her gritty imprint on this version of Emily
Brontë's novel, shooting the rustic open expanses of 19th-century Yorkshire
moors with the same splintery, handheld camerawork she used for the cramped
housing project of Fish Tank.
Immersive, elemental sensation is all: Blood from wounds is gently licked in
extreme close-up, a character smelling another's hair during a horse ride is a
luxuriant event, wind and mud are virtually supporting characters. However,
while Arnold's provocative decision to cast Heathcliff with black actors
(Solomon Glave as a youngster, James Howson as an adult) both reaches back to
Brontë's original description of the character and adds a new dimension to his
romance with Cathy (played by Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario), her conception
of the couple as feral creatures knocking between a rugged Eden and foppish
civilization, unsubtly accented with multiple glimpses of snared critters, is
blunt and amorphous. Designed to hack away at the ornamental crust created by
years of genteel literary adaptations, it's a visually forceful attempt at
seizing the ardor of the novel that nevertheless pales next to the abyss of
passion explored by Luis Buñuel in his own strange, 1954 visualization of
Brontë's classic.
Washingtonian
[Ian Buckwalter]
When watching the classic William Wyler adaptation of Emily Brontë’s only novel, the essential misery and pettiness of the doomed would-be lovers, Heathcliff and Catherine, is somewhat concealed under the romantic sweep of Wyler’s period drama. Audiences arriving for Andrea Arnold’s new take on the novel may be a little disoriented by the utter lack of period piece airs put on this story, as well as the impressionistic techniques she uses to tell the story. Fans of Arnold’s work will be familiar with her style: extremely visually oriented, preferring to let a handheld camera watch in voyeuristic close-up rather than rely on dialogue to be the primary delivery method for the narrative.
But even more striking than that style is the way in which she strips these characters down to their abusive and vindictive cores. Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) is as fickle and opportunistic as ever, while Heathcliff (James Howson) is sullen and feral, and as he puts up with the continued abuse doled out by Catherine’s horrible brother, Hindley, he becomes as tempestuous and violent as the storms that lash the Yorkshire countryside. That landscape, richly colored through Arnold’s lens, plays practically as much of a role in the film as the leads, as the harsh environment, with occasional moments of unspeakable beauty (one could really just spend the entire running time marveling at Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan’s staggeringly gorgeous compositions), reflects the alternating romance and despair of the classic relationship between these two. When the end comes, the feeling is less one of overwhelming tragedy for their missed opportunities, and more one of relief that they can stop tormenting one another.
Removing the framing device and epilogue of Wuthering
Heights (Emily Brontë's stark and unnervingly cruel ode to emotional
turbulence and unhealthy passions), grittily realist director Andrea Arnold has
taken the title and themes to heart, ripping away all the lace and niceties
associated with previous cinematic renditions, leaving us with an unsettling
portrait of a renowned text.
While not particularly compelling to watch, being a dry experiment in stripping
away our collective idealizing of the past, it does disturb and inspire
consideration, providing a thoughtful look at what living conditions must have
been like in the late 1700s.
Much of the core story remains intact, despite Heathcliff (James Howson/Solomon
Glave) being black rather than a gypsy, with the brooding, wilful orphan being
adopted by Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton), much to the chagrin of his jealous son,
Hindley (Lee Shaw). His daughter, Catherine (Kaya Scodelario/Shannon Beer), on
the other hand, develops an immediate attachment to the boy, striking up a teen
romance heightened by isolation and increasingly challenging circumstances.
Instead of focusing on the flowery aspects of the love story, Arnold takes care
to explore her environment, lighting everything with candles and sunlight only,
capturing just how cold, wet and muddy the washed-out, grey landscape was. She
also makes the characters somewhat animalistic and sinister, as the novel
implies, featuring bloodsucking and wound licking on the part of Catherine and
some exceedingly discomforting and vivid animal abuse and slaughter by
Heathcliff.
And since there's no score, opulent costumes or powerful slow motion looks of
desire, we're left mostly with excess scenes of people trudging through the mud
and treating each other like crap, especially later on when Heathcliff decides
to marry the sister of Catherine's husband, Isabella (Nichola Burley), just to
spite her.
Because the material is handled with such harsh realism, including use of the
word "cunt," which was apparently quite common between the 13th and
18th centuries – it's impossible to identify with any of the characters, who
are all grotesque in varying ways.
This pares the film down to a cold exercise in text deconstruction, which is
interesting, but becomes extremely grating somewhere around the second hour.
SBS Film [Don
Groves]
Devotees of Emily Brontë’s classic novel probably will be
hugely disappointed, if not offended, by Andrea Arnold’s bleak, soulless
adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
Tossing out most of the novel’s rich prose and dialogue robs the film of its
power and passion while the tactic of using untried actors as the young and
adult Heathcliff and the teenage Catherine Earnshaw backfires badly. The kids
can’t act and Heathcliff is given so little dialogue viewers can only guess as
to what drives him, his thought processes and emotions, beyond the obvious:
revenge.
For those who haven’t read the novel or seen any of the
previous screen versions, the film fails in its own right as an unengaging
melodrama. Most of the interminable 129 minutes consists of an unrelenting saga
of misery, pain and suffering, interspersed with tediously repetitive close-ups
of birds, insects, animals, cobwebs, nettles and mud.
Arnold showed great promise with her debut film Red Road (a
tense thriller about a woman who stalks an ex-convict) and her second effort Fish Tank (chronicling
a 15-year-old girl’s dalliance with her mother's boyfriend), but her judgment
is astray here.
The narrative sees the orphan Heathcliff (Solomon Glave) being rescued from the
streets by Mr. Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) who owns the manor Wuthering Heights in
the chilly, windswept Yorkshire moors.
Glave, 14, and 23-year-old James Howson, who plays the older Heathcliff, are
black so Arnold has substituted the novel’s preoccupation with class divisions
with the race card. That’s not such a great stretch as Brontë described him as
a dark skinned gypsy.
Heathcliff is treated as a member of the family, virtually a brother to Cathy
(Shannon Beer) and Hindley (Lee Shaw). Heathcliff and the tomboyish Cathy grow
close, typified by a scene in which they wrestle in the mud, with hints of a
sexual undercurrent.
After Earnshaw dies, the loathsome Hindley takes charge, banishes Heathcliff to
the barn and he’s beaten and reviled as a “nigger”. Cathy literally licks the
wounds on his back after he’s been whipped, a scene which may be meant to
convey tenderness but comes across as a strange fetish. Later, their relationship
cools when Cathy complains, rightly that “You never have anything to say”.
Heathcliff departs after Cathy announces she intends to marry a rich but dull
neighbour, Edgar Linton (James Northcote). Years later he returns and vows to
Cathy (now played by Kaya Scodelario) that he will never leave her. Fate, of
course, decrees otherwise.
Brontë purists may blanch at Heathcliff’s use of the f— and c— swear words,
while pining for the novel’s powerful, often poetic dialogue, which is largely
absent here. For instance, young Cathy’s revelation when she explains her
decision to marry Edgar, a masterpiece of elegant writing, is condensed to a
few sentences. It’s doubtful that Beer could convincingly deliver that speech
and it would have sounded odd coming from a girl who looks no older than
13.
Beer, who was discovered when the casting agent visited her school, is a plain,
lumpy lass who looks nothing like Scodelario, a luminous beauty and
accomplished actress. Howson does resemble Glave so that transition is more
plausible, whereas Shaw’s Hindley does not age at all. Glave often looks blank
or opaque while Howson frets and broods before exploding in anger, both
betraying their inexperience.
Heathcliff’s cruelty to animals and to Isabella Linton (Nichola Burley) no
doubt is meant to be interpreted as his revenge for the cruelty he endures
through his life but such acts often seem sadomasochistic. At no stage does the
film capture the novel’s eloquent portrayal of Heathcliff and Cathy as wild, rebellious
spirits, twin souls, who were often brutal to each other.
Robbie Ryan, Arnold’s regular cinematographer, shot the film in an old
fashioned 1:33:1 format, which results in a ‘boxy’ look that induces a
claustrophobic closeness to the characters.
The soundtrack plays up the howling wind, driving rain and trudging through
slush, a stormy environment that mirrors the stormy relationships, but the
result may leave you unmoved.
Slant
Magazine [Joseph Jon Lanthier]
Permanent
Plastic Helmet [Sophia Satchell-Baeza]
Andrea
Arnold's Wuthering Heights reviewed: A ... - Slate Magazine Dana Stevens
Sound
On Sight Ricky D
Film
Freak Central Review [Walter Chaw]
Review:
'Wuthering Heights' Is A Superb, Groundbreaking - Indiewire Oliver Lyttelton
'Wuthering
Heights' Movie Review | TIME.com
Mary Pols
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film review: Wuthering Heights (2011)
Kate Stables, December 2011
Confessions
of a Film Critic [John Maguire]
Blu-Ray.com
[Dr. Svet Atanasov]
Obelist
en Route [Kevin Royal Johnson]
Paste
Magazine [Maryann Koopman Kelly]
We
Got This Covered [Kristal Cooper]
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Wuthering
Heights (2012) — Inside Movies Since ... - Boxoffice.com Sara Maria Vizcarrondo
Review:
Andrea Arnold's 'Wuthering Heights' is beautiful, but - HitFix Drew McWeeny
WUTHERING
HEIGHTS: THE SMELL OF THE EARTH, THE WAR...
Nick Bruno from The Rain Falls Down on Portlandtown
Pasadena Art Beat [Jana J. Monji]
Hollywood
Jesus [Darrel Manson]
Wuthering
Heights : The New Yorker David Denby
(capsule)
Wuthering
Heights Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun
Wuthering
Heights – review | Film | The Observer
Philip French
Wuthering
Heights – review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
Wuthering
Heights – review | Film | guardian.co.uk
Xan Brooks
Cathy
and Heathcliff in dance - The Globe and Mail Paula Citron reviews a dance
choreography
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
San
Francisco Examiner [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
DVDBeaver
- Blu-ray [Gary Tooze]
AMERICAN HONEY B+ 92
Great Britain USA
(162 mi) 2016
I won’t compromise
I won’t live a life
On my knees
You think I am nothing
I am nothing
You've got something coming
Something coming because
I hear God’s whisper
Calling my name
It’s in the wind
I am the savior
—Raury “God’s
Whisper” 2014, Raury -
God's Whisper (Official Video) - YouTube (4:39)
A film
with an attitude, where sometimes in the Darwinian universe that’s all one has
from those at the bottom to keep them alive. Winner of the Jury Prize (3rd Place) at Cannes,
the director’s third instance of receiving this award following RED ROAD (2006)
and FISH TANK (2009), while also receiving an Official Commendation from the
Ecumenical Jury, as the film reveals “mysterious depths of human beings,” the
film is skillfully directed, where the director’s talent for getting
extraordinary performances out of non-professionals is what makes this movie
tick. This is another film with a
European view of America, similar to Antonioni’s Zabriskie
Point (1970), Wim Wenders Alice
in the Cities (Alice in den Städten) Road Trilogy Pt. 1 (1974) and Paris,
Texas (1984), but also Aki
Kaurismäki’s LENINGRAD COWBOYS GO AMERICA (1988), Emir Kusturica’s ARIZONA
DREAM (1993), Bruno Dumont’s TWENTYNINE PALMS (2003), or perhaps the least seen and maybe the most delightful of
them all, Percy Adlon’s BAGHDAD CAFÉ (1987).
These directors bring a curious eye to the American landscape, often
adding their own humorous insights, but they also capture a completely
different mood and set of questions about the world we live in. Roughly based on the startling abuses
discovered in a 2007 New York Times
article ("For
Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews") about traveling groups of
teenagers, many of them runaways or from broken homes, who sell magazine
subscriptions for unscrupulous managers that show little sympathy for their
best interests and instead drop them off anywhere along the road if they don’t
produce, ruthlessly exploiting them for minimum pay, working purely on
commission, as they only earn 25% of all subscriptions sold, but nearly all end
up spending most of what they earn for daily needs, as what they’re provided is
not nearly enough. A Congressional
investigation in 1987 uncovered 418 sellers, where 413 remained in debt to the
company, while the managers themselves reported huge profits. If sellers regularly had poor success rates
or complained about the job, enforcers were brought in to instigate violent
beatings. The behavior of the managers
unfortunately resembles pimps in the sex industry, where they intimidate and resort
to cruel and excessive punishment to guarantee they get their money. A grotesque portrait of capitalism,
suggesting it is alive and well, where sometimes
art is meant to be uncomfortable, and here it’s aimed as a heat-seeking missile
directly into the heart of the status quo.
Getting
a better critical reception than when it was released at Cannes, one of the
criticisms of the film is just how blunt it tends to be, offering a wrenching
view of poverty in America, and an explosive, in-your-face look at throwaway
kids living off the grid, barely garnering enough attention to matter even in
their own lives, where instead they are seen as a forgotten or lost generation,
as their parents and families have little use for them, while a nation barely
notices. So the film focuses on a
rag-tag group of teenage dropouts and misfits in search of something better
than the often disturbing places they are leaving behind, with ringleaders
signing them up to work as a team of about a dozen kids from various places
across the country selling overpriced magazine subscriptions that people don’t
really want to buy, literally dropping them off in targeted neighborhoods while
they spend their day going door-to-door as they make their way in a van
traveling across the heartland of the American Midwest, stopping in cheap
motels along the way, where they tend to drink heavily and do drugs, often
partying long into the night. Rather
than sell the magazine, each kid has to sell themselves, using some
imaginative, heart-tugging technique to grab someone’s attention straightaway,
then using fabricated or personalized embellishments about how they’re trying
to better themselves, making the buyer feel good about their potential
investment, that it’s going to a good cause.
The audience wants to believe in these kids, even as we learn it’s all a
scam. To Arnold’s credit, the spirit of
the film is uncompromising, as nothing is soft peddled, offering a damaged
portrait of the American Dream conveyed through a bleak tone of broken lives,
yet it’s filled with a youthful exuberance that’s beautifully expressed by a
brash contemporary soundtrack reverberating throughout the film, much like the
communal spirit of this song, Raury - God's Whisper
(Official Video) - YouTube (4:39), where the incessant flow of extended music
video style images are so in tune with the characters onscreen that almost
every kid knows the lyrics to each and every song, becoming an anthem to lost
and disaffected youth, as the downbeat tone and searing social realism breaks
out into a musical format, as if the music has a spiritually cleansing effect,
shaking them out of their doldrums, resuscitating their wounded souls, and
literally bringing these kids back to life.
It is this energy they feed on, more than any junk food they eat for
nourishment, sticking with the audience long after they’ve left the
theater.
While
casting took pace in Oklahoma, searching beaches, construction sites, parking
lots, and street activity, the lead character Sasha Lane was discovered while
sunbathing on spring break in Panama City, Florida. A 20-year old student at Texas State
University, she was at a crossroads, trying to get her life back on track when
she met Andrea Arnold, who auditioned her in the hotel where she was staying,
offering an opportunity to go on the road for two months filming a movie. Shooting in Muskogee, Okmulgee, and Norman,
Oklahoma, the crew traveled to Mission Hills and Kansas City, Kansas, Omaha and
Grand Island, Nebraska, going as far north as Williston, North Dakota. The opening sequence plays out like a
prelude, yet typifies the lives of so many others, as Star (Sasha Lane), a
fragile soul in dreads, is living a dead-end existence somewhere in Texas
dumpster diving and taking care of two kids that don’t even belong to her,
while living with an older, abusive guy who’s more interested in staying drunk
and getting high. By chance, she spies a
group of kids pulling off the road into a Wal-Mart parking lot, where in the
store she makes eye contact with one of them, Jake (Shia LaBeouf), who
immediately starts flirting with her, jumping on the check-out counter, dancing
to the upbeat vibe of the piped-in music, Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” American Honey | We
Found Love | Official Clip HD YouTube
(1:34). Transfixed by his personal
magnetism, as well as the expressive abandon of the entire group, Jake turns
out to be a recruiter for the mag-crew, encouraging her to join them,
suggesting she be at a Motel 6 the next morning, as they’re leaving for
Kansas. It’s only then that we’re
offered a window into her deplorable homelife.
On the spot she decides to leave, sneaking out the window, marching both
kids over to a local country western bar featuring line dancing and dropping
them off with their stunned real mother, "American Honey",
extrait du film YouTube (1:17).
By morning she is heading to Kansas, suddenly free as a bird. While this carefree group of characters feels
upbeat, constantly joking and horsing around with each other, they each similarly
have no one else in the world to call a friend, as all they have is each
other. Star’s uninhibited, free-spirited
nature doesn’t kick in at first, where she’s unfamiliar with their near cult
camaraderie, discovering they share the same kind of groupthink that’s been
beaten into their heads by their cutthroat boss, a surprisingly strict Riley
Keough (Elvis Presley’s granddaughter) as Krystal, a woman who takes most of
the profits and has Jake completely under her thumb. She has no problem with their foolish
shenanigans of staying wasted on the road so long as the crew brings her
money. Consider her George C. Scott from
THE HUSTLER (1961). At her most
manipulative, she reads Star the riot act while clad in a Confederate bikini
with the price tag still hanging from it, with Jake dutifully oiling her legs,
just for good measure, American Honey |
Krystal's Motel | Official Clip HD YouTube (1:42). She leaves no question about who’s in charge,
aligning her troops on the street every day with military precision. At the end of the day, those who sell the
least are forced to fight each other, with the others looking on with
heightened interest.
Arnold
has a tendency to showcase young underprivileged women characters, but the
electrically charged Star surprises even herself, as she sabotages Jake’s pitch
when it turns too manipulating, finding it morally objectionable, something she
cannot bring herself to do, while Krystal is wired to believe lying and selling
are the same thing, suggesting that’s the business of making money. Instead, Star has a tendency to go off
script, engaging in extremely risky behavior, where she comes across as somewhat pure or saint-like in an otherwise bleak universe
engulfing her, where she has a habit of saving bugs or insects, and is even
visited by a friendly bear at one point, though this may just be imagined, and
while she continually puts herself in harm’s way, jumping alone into groups of
strange men, convinced they will purchase magazine subscriptions, she retains a
spirited attitude throughout her entire ordeal, where her face is constantly on
camera, where a light seems to follow her wherever she goes. Beautifully shot by Robbie Ryan, working
regularly with Ken Loach as well as Andrea Arnold, who seems to find a balance
between well-manicured suburban lawns and dilapidated houses on the outskirts
of town, taking in the entire spectrum of social classes, where easily the most
affecting are those experiencing profound poverty, living in hopeless
circumstances where small children are routinely left alone, with one young
girl, a child of meth addicts, proudly spouting the lines of a Dead Kennedy’s
song “I Kill Children.” Despite the
length of the film, the stream of images onscreen feels like a barrage to the
senses, a joyous and optimistic journey that is musically transformative, with
every day feeling like the 4th of July, although there is excessive drug
and alcohol use, where it’s hard to believe they could actually perform
cognitively under such a constant onslaught, yet there is no one watching over
these kids, who are free to willingly walk in their own shoes and make their
own mistakes in life. What the film has
is a distinguishing swagger, where there’s a boldness in their discovery of
personal liberation, in their willingness to defy conventional wisdom, yet
these risks have a downside, as there are consequences for going too far. Star’s moodiness with Jake leads to a drop in
his sales, where there’s some question whether she can actually cut it, which
forces her to recklessly take even greater risks. While there’s an undeniable attraction
between them from the outset, as he’s the only reason she joined in the first
place, their whirlwind romance is only briefly interjected throughout, as it’s
constantly thwarted by Krystal’s dominating presence. Shia LaBeouf is outstanding, where all he has
to do is just be himself, charming, impulsive, dangerous, yet incredibly
flawed. The film is extremely well
directed and has a beautiful rambling flow about it, but there’s not much of an
actual story, as there’s no real beginning or end, much like the undeveloped lives
of these kids, suggesting an impressionistic, stream-of-conscious montage of
youthful impulses, where it’s as much about a yearning to be free as it is a
deplorable picture of capitalistic exploitation, yet perhaps its greatest
strength lies in vividly capturing the lives of discarded kids who are barely
ever acknowledged, who feel they have no future, no place in society, yet
remain among our most vulnerable, living a shadow existence that most of us
never see.
American
Honey Soundtrack on Spotify
Cinema Scope: Mark Peranson June 27, 2016
Maybe it’s not the best segue from The Neon Demon (though I suppose an argument can be made), but perhaps the most notable common ground amongst the Competition titles was the representation of strong female protagonists. Though Frémaux brushed off the criticism that he only included three female directors in Competition, his eye seemed to be drawn towards powerful and/or multidimensional portraits of women, and for that he deserves some credit. Not all, however, succeeded. Directed (rather, “screamed”) by Andrea Arnold, the 162-minute crapfest American Honey has both, but the (again) former Cannes juror’s gross foray into the milieu of young, white-trash door-to-door magazine salesman stands alongside the worst examples of foreign directors trying to tell us about “America.” (Like many who can’t take Arnold in typical “girl with the most cake” mode, I fled halfway through after getting the point.) Jaclyn Jose’s performance in Ma Rosa—a real shock considering the other actresses in the Competition—is buried in a smudge film with a true aesthetics of ugliness, as Brilliante Mendoza again descends into the slums of Manila for one night of hell, albeit this time taking a breath in a corrupt police station and making a minor heroine out of a minor drug dealer in what is barely a minor film.
Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
Andrea Arnold’s American Honey was another high-profile competition film made by a woman director; by a strange coincidence, it also clocked in at 162 minutes. A rambling film set in the socially anomic American South, the British director’s foray across the Atlantic Ocean follows Star, an 18-year-old orphan who abandons dumpster diving for a shiftless boyfriend in order to embark on a new life: after encountering the irrepressibly ebullient Jake (Shia LaBeouf) in a supermarket, she joins a squadron of drop-out kids who operate a magazine subscriptions scam under the imperious tutelage of the tempestuous Kristal (Riley Keogh).To Kristal’s ire, Star and Jake tentatively explore their budding passion for each other, while the rest of the gang listens to a barrage of hip hop and pop music as they travel in a van across the backwaters of America. Several directions for the film are suggested, but, disappointingly, none are decisively taken by Arnold, and American Honey’s inconclusiveness after more than two-and-a-half hours is a little hard to swallow. Moreover, certain aspects of the film come off as derivative – a dance scene to Rihanna recalls Céline Sciamma’s Bande de filles (Girlhood, Céline Sciamma, 2014), while LaBeouf’s character is redolent of James Franco’s turn as Alien in Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2013), and his laboured clowning detracts from the film as a whole. Finding poetry in the world of the downtrodden is clearly Andrea Arnold’s preferred modus operandi, but whereas in films such as Fish Tank (2009), she has an acute sensitivity for the milieu she depicts, here the filmmaker’s eye comes across as that of a gawker taking macabre pleasure in unfamiliar surrounds, not too different to the poverty-tourists who fill their Instagram feeds with photos of rust belt cities. It is only in rare moments of American Honey – a late scene where Star drops in on a house of meth addicts, for instance – that Arnold is able to transcend this sociological voyeurism for something more profound.
Cinema Scope: Adam Nayman September 03, 2016
Following Andrea Arnold’s third consecutive Cannes Grand Prix, allow me to suggest another award, this one for lifetime achievement: Most Literal-minded Use of Pop Music. Determined to top the deployment of Nas’ “Life’s a Bitch” at the climax of the 2009 Fish Tank (in which life was a bitch), Arnold kicks off her 162-minute ode to America—its Honeys, its Beauties, its Psychos, its Idiots, you name it—with Rihanna’s undeniable “We Found Love” blaring over the loudspeakers at a Wal-Mart, which the now transatlantic auteur takes pains to show is, indeed, a hopeless place. Elsewhere, the caravanning, magazine subscription-selling kids who comprise American Honey’s dramatis personae bump Juicy J to get psyched (sadly, not Fiddy’s “I Get Money”); make out to Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You” (fresh royalties for Hope Sandoval!); and describe their dreams to the accompaniment of, um, “Dream Baby Dream” (the version by Born in the USA-era Bruce, of course). That Lady Antebellum gets to bat cleanup with the title track suggests that Arnold is trying to touch a mainstream nerve, and yet American Honey doesn’t feel like a true crossover move, stuck as it is in a formal-rhetorical Never Never Land halfway between Malickian lyricism (when in doubt, cut to a bug!) and Vice travelogue. It’s possible that dreadlocked star Sasha Lane is a good actress as well as a compelling camera subject, but you’d never know it from her studiedly affectless performance, which at least evens out Shia LaBeouf’s shameless post-Gosling posturing. As for the hacked-off aspect ratio, it may be that Arnold is trying to compromise the inherent widescreen grandeur of the landscape (and the entire road-movie genre), but like almost everything else here it’s a conceit rather than an idea, and it’s the strategic vaporousness of the entire enterprise—its canny refusal to be “about” anything except an immersion its own roiling, over-conscientiously detailed millennial milieu—that rankles. If only the soundtrack supervisor had cued up “Big Empty.”
Film Comment: Eugene Hernandez May 16, 2016
The Cannes Film Festival experienced a moment of pure exuberance on Sunday afternoon as Andrea Arnold and her new film’s cast of kids, some wearing baseball caps and multicolored tuxedos, danced to E-40’s “Choices (Yup)” on the red carpet before entering the Lumière Theatre for the gala premiere of American Honey. Kristen Stewart danced along at the bottom of the stairs, waving her arm and bouncing in solidarity to the beat of the song.
Cannes came alive in its first weekend following the premieres of two strong entries, both directed by women. A festival that has faced persistent criticism for the underrepresentation of female filmmakers in its Competition section front-loaded two new movies—Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann and Arnold’s American Honey—in prime opening-weekend slots.
In Panama City Beach, Florida, on spring break two years ago, college freshman Sasha Lane was walking on the sand when she was spotted by Andrea Arnold as a potential actress for a film that the British director was to begin shooting a few weeks later. The Texas teen had never acted before but that didn’t discourage either Arnold or Lane. (In fact, of the 15 young people who appear in the film, just three of them—Shia LeBeouf, Arielle Holmes, and Riley Keough—had ever acted before.) They hung out on the beach, walked down a pier, and later grabbed a meal together at a Waffle House. Arnold staged an audition in a hotel lobby and then got on the phone with Lane’s mom to make the pitch for permission to cast the young woman as the lead in her movie.
“I felt Andrea’s vibe,” Lane explained during a press conference Sunday afternoon at the Cannes Film Festival. “She just came up to me, she just seemed like really nice, she was smiling. She was in her overalls. I was really happy that day.”
Shot on the road in the heartland of the United States—Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota—American Honey follows the journey of a ragtag group of disenfranchised American youths. Inspired by a 2007 New York Times article about crews of kids working as door-to-door magazine salespeople, Arnold staged a road trip that lasted nearly two months. Arnold, the kids, and DP Robbie Ryan traveled nearly 12,000 miles together to shoot the movie.
Lane shines as Star, an 18-year-old Texan who is trapped inside a broken family. One day at a K-Mart she catches a bunch of kids dancing in unison to Rihanna’s “We Found Love” and spots ringleader Jake (Shia LaBeouf). She is immediately taken with him and her life changes in an instant. Star joins the teen crew and hits the road.
Managed by a domineering twentysomething (Keough) and her boy-toy sidekick (LaBeouf) who dole out cash after taking a commission, the outcasts fan out in a new town and go door to door trying to sell magazines by day and then reconvene at night to dance, drink, and hook up, crashing at a roadside motel before getting up the next day to do it all again.
In order to shape the script, Arnold researched the world that rural American kids like these live in today, and she relied on the stories and experiences of some of her cast members, whose backgrounds were similar to those she had read about in the New York Times article.
The more time Arnold spent traveling the country and researching these kids, the clearer her view became. And, as with any road trip, the journey is punctuated by a playlist. In fact, American Honey unspools as a sort of musical, pulsating with the energy of rap, country, and pop music (Sam Hunt, Kevin Gates, Lee Brice, Juicy J, and more) strung together to bind its episodic segments.
It may seem a bit on the nose, but Rihanna’s “We Found Love” recurs in the film, a pitch-perfect anthem for a dramatic turning point in a young girl’s life. Star embraces its lyrics as she rides the roller coaster of her bond with the elusive Jake. Like the song, American Honey is bleak yet hopeful.
The soundtrack for the film was inspired by the tunes that the kids were listening to at the time, but Rihanna’s “We Found Love” was an unlikely choice. The young people weren’t into it, but Arnold was, so when the shooting began the director asked LaBeouf to dance to the tune at the K-Mart.
“It meant a lot to me at the time. I love Rihanna,” Arnold explained yesterday. “Shia didn’t like dancing to Rihanna,” she laughed, and the actor concurred during the press conference: “It was day one of shooting. It was very awkward amongst the boys in the group. Everybody was alpha male-ing [and Andrea said] I need you to body roll to Rihanna. It was a little bit awkward.”
The director, a 2004 Oscar winner for her short film Wasp who has since screened features Red Road and Fish Tank here in Cannes, recalled an eye-opening trip to a tiny West Virginia town. It had multiple pharmacies but little else to offer. Chatting with a local pharmacist, she was told that business was brisk, doling out painkillers for older people and antidepressants for the kids. “Once I started looking at it, I realized that I didn’t know the United States really well,” Arnold said at the festival press conference. “I did a whole bunch of road trips to make a connection with it.”
“I find real life and real people inspiring.” Arnold added. “That’s where I go to. I try and find my own way, I try and find my own voice.”
Review:
American Honey | Andrea Arnold - Film Comment Paula Mejia, September/October 2016
The winner of this year’s Cannes Jury Prize, American Honey opens with a shot of two children and their teenage sister and caretaker, Star (Sasha Lane), scavenging dinner out of a dumpster. There they find an entire raw chicken still in its package, among other treasures. The scene functions both as a moment of grim reality—food is not easy to come by for Star and her family—and a metaphor for the inequity immortalized in singer-songwriter Bill Callahan’s “America!”: “All the lucky suckle teat / Others chaw pig knuckle meat / Ain’t enough teat . . . Ain’t enough to eat,” he croons. Sadly, the spoils in this land of plenty are sometimes seen as disposable and are far from distributed equally.
In Andrea Arnold’s first feature filmed in the United States and her fourth overall, the British filmmaker traverses state lines real and emotional with a gang of teenagers to stitch a sprawling portrait of this America, the complicated home that its residents at once adore and abhor. The film follows Star—played with verve and vulnerability by newcomer Lane—as she stumbles from the dumpster into a life-changing opportunity. Later that afternoon, she spots a van thumping with hormones and hip-hop. Intrigued, she follows the passengers into a K-Mart. While Rihanna’s “We Found Love” blares from the store’s speakers, she locks eyes with Jake (a disheveled, charming Shia LaBeouf). He climbs up onto a cash register and grinds his hips in her direction, and later, in the parking lot of that hopeless place, dares her to touch his shirt. “Boyfriend material,” he smirks, right before he offers her a vague-sounding sales gig.
She joins the crew the next day, bound for Kansas City and everywhere else. Like her, they hail from a diverse string of broken homes and dead ends, and they think of the job—rolling across America and selling magazines door-to-door, traveling in a party bus where the alcohol flows and weed smoke blows—as either a welcome distraction, a way out, or both. These kids are no Robin Hoods, though. It’s all about dough. The crew rallies around the van every morning to chant about “getting money” in unison, and the long rides cruise along to bouncy rap songs about riding dirty, work and paydays, notably E-40’s “Choices (YUP).” There’s a whole review to be written about Arnold’s careful soundtrack selections here too, from zeitgeisty hip-hop (Rae Sremmurd’s “No Type”) to atmospheric folk (Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You”) and slick indie pop (The Raveonettes’ “Recharge & Revolt”). It’s one thing for Arnold to feature music evocative of a perfect road trip playlist—a varied journey full of old favorites and deep cuts alike, rounded out with great pacing by the DJ. But ponying up for the rights to these big numbers pays off, because they evolve from songs into unexpected and fleeting characters, especially when juxtaposed against the sparse landscapes fading behind the van’s dirty windows.
An outsider among outsiders, Star has a rough start. She immediately ticks off the gang’s ringleader, Krystal (played by a frowning Riley Keough, flexing the tattoo nope on her arm), because of her romance with Jake and her low daily earnings. Soon she discovers that her outspokenness can be useful out in the field. Her daring sales strategy often involves hopping into cars with random boys and men, singing the likes of “Dream Baby Dream” and swilling the worm at the bottom of a mezcal bottle. This leads her into both fortuitous situations and downright exploitative ones—reimaginings of the harrowing New York Times article that Arnold drew from to craft her film.
The 2007 story, about the harsh realities and violence that young runaways in “mag crews” experienced while illegally hocking magazines on the road, has facts that wriggle their way into American Honey. For instance, one anecdote of a mag crew that punished members who didn’t meet their weekly monetary quota by forcing them to fistfight each other is brutally realized in the film, with a horrified Star looking on. Arnold seldom told the cast where they were headed next during the 12,000-mile trek across America (an approach which is echoed in the film by Krystal’s hands-on style of management).
Yet American Honey injects a visceral human element into the spaces where hard reporting doesn’t. That’s in part thanks to Arnold’s great talent for capturing private moments people have when they don’t think others are looking—such as a stray hair toss, nose-picking—and color-saturated shots that allow languid details, like ants crawling over French fries, to take over the frame. Most impressively, American Honey hard-wins its nearly three-hour length by making the audience grow through the characters instead of alongside them; we swoon with Star when Jake gives her a butterfly kiss and feel the pangs of homesickness for a place that no longer welcomes her. The distinctive way American Honey embodies a too-long summer—with a particular stir-craziness drummed up by unmoving air coupled with uninhibited possibility—can’t be discounted, either. It recalls Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in that, while watching, you almost want to wipe sweat off your upper lip that isn’t there.
American Honey’s loose plot, rambling pace, and lack of resolution inevitably will be maddening to some. But it’s the only way this sprawling tale can be told; fittingly, American Honey goes on until it doesn’t, just like every other summer. One of the film’s most bittersweet moments comes near the end, when its tongue-in-cheek namesake—a song by country group Lady Antebellum that waxes on girl-next-door types growing up “good” and “slow”—is revealed. During this sing-along, Star realizes that this sweet-sounding “freedom,” as removed as it is from her troubled life at home, still has a price. No wonder the word “honey” rhymes with “money.”
Reverse
Shot: Nick Pinkerton September 30,
2016
Cannes
Review: Andrea Arnold's 'American Honey' Is A ... - The Playlist Jessica Kiang
American
Honey is an immersive, hard-partying ride across - The Verge Tasha Robinson
Review:
'American Honey' Is a New Indie Classic - The Atlantic David Sims
American
Honey :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
Cannes Review: 'American Honey' Proves
Andrea Arnold is One of the Best Working Filmmakers and Finds a Breakout Star
in Sasha Lane Eric Kohn from
indieWIRE, May 14, 2016
Brooklyn
Magazine: Benjamin Mercer
The Village Voice: Danny King September 28, 2016
Movie
Review: American Honey's Magnetic Realism -- Vulture David Edelstein
Sight & Sound: Alissa Simon May 16, 2016
Time: Stephanie Zacharek September 29, 2016
ScreenAnarchy
[Ryland Aldrich]
The
Film Stage [Rory O'Connor]
Andrea
Arnold's American Honey, reviewed. - Slate
Dana Stevens
Slant
Magazine [Steve Macfarlane]
'American
Honey': Cannes review | Reviews
Jonathan Romney from Screendaily
Little White Lies: Sophie Monks Kaufman
The Talkhouse: Ryan Fleck September 28, 2016
American Honey |
2016 Cannes Film Festival Review - Ioncinema Nicholas Bell
Cannes:
Shia LaBeouf is in for a surprise when he finally ... - Vox May 16, 2016
PopMatters
[Alex Ramon] May 16, 2016
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 16, 2016
The House Next Door: Sam C. Mac May 15, 2016
MUBI's Notebook: Daniel Kasman May 17, 2016
Fish
Tank's Andrea Arnold returns with Shia LaBeouf and a rowdy road trip Mike D’Angelo from The Onion A.V. Club
Film-Forward.com
[Hayden Jacoves]
Movie
Mezzanine: Kenji Fujishima September 09, 2016
Talking
Pictures [Freda Cooper]
A
Movie Waffler [John Bennett]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
Sight & Sound: Nick James May 18, 2016
Fandor: Susan Gerhard September 13, 2016
Brooklyn Magazine: Eli Goldfarb calls it the Dud of
the Month
The
Playlist [Jessica Kiang / Nikola Grozdanovic]
Daily | Cannes
2016 | Andrea Arnold’s AMERICAN HONEY
David Hudson from Fandor
Sasha Lane | Filmmaker
Magazine interview, Summer 2016
Andrea
Arnold in Cannes: I was shocked and upset by ... - The Guardian Andrea
Arnold in Cannes: I was shocked and upset by the poverty I saw in the US, Catherine Shoard interview, May 15,
2016
'American
Honey': Cannes Review - Hollywood Reporter David
Rooney
'American
Honey' Review: Shia LaBeouf Stars in a Ravishing ... - Variety Guy Lodge
American Honey,
directed by Andrea Arnold | Film review - Time Out Dave Calhoun
American Honey: the all-singing, all-dancing road trip movie of
the year John Patterson from The Guardian
American
Honey review: Andrea Arnold mislays map on sweet, indelible roadtrip Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
American
Honey, Cannes Festival, film review: 'A ... - The Independent Geoffrey Macnab
Cannes
2016: American Honey, review - Shia LaBeouf has never ... Tim Robey from The Telegraph
'American Honey' movie review: Dreams, desperation collide in
moving road-trip drama Mike Scott
from The Times-Picayune
The
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
The Los Angeles Times: Justin Chang
Cannes:
'American Honey,' 'The Handmaiden' - Los Angeles Times Justin
Chang
American Honey
Movie Review & Film Summary (2016) | Roger Ebert Brian Tallerico
Cannes
2016: "The Handmaiden," "Transfiguration," "American
Honey ... Barbara
Scharres from the Ebert blog
"For
Youths, a Grim Tour on Magazine Crews"
Ian Urbina from The New York
Times, February 21, 2007
Ian Urbina, Investigative
Reporter, The New York Times
American Honey
(film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Arnold, Jack
IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
USA
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
Inspired by an outline by Ray Bradbury and
modified for the screen by Harry Essex, It Came From Outer Space remains
the granddaddy of the '50s atomic-scare pictures. It's relatively easy to
pinpoint the metaphors at work yet It Came From Outer Space remains
especially evocative thanks to Jack Arnold's 3-D savvy direction and the poetic
tonality of the film's dialogue. Astronomer John Putnam (Richard Carlson,
perhaps an early prototype for David Duchovny's Fox Mulder) spends a
comfortable night at home with his girlfriend Ellen Fields (Barbara Rush). His
opening voiceover suggests a man both wary of the future and convinced that
truth lies somewhere in the stars. A meteor crashes into a secluded desert area
just outside his home. At the crash site, Jack discovers an alien spacecraft
and is convinced of a foreign threat when the film's gelatinous eye creatures
begin to turn the townsfolk into host bodies. Though the sheriff is
respectfully mindful of John's individual mantra ("He's an individual and
lonely, he thinks for himself"), he still sees the "young
astronomer" as a crackpot. When schoolteacher Ellen skips class to go
alien-hunting, the sheriff's assistant questions her "responsibility to
the community" when he's clearly oblivious to John's own concerns for the
well-being of the town. Beyond the poetry of its words, It Came from Outer
Space evokes an American landscape unprepared for friendly alien contact.
Alien perspective is rendered via an oil-filled dish placed directly over the
camera but Universal would later insist on the addition of 3-D compliable
scenes of the actual aliens (here, a glitter-dropping eyeball with bad hair
extensions). The hokey "xenomorphs" would egregiously emphasize the
film's subtle indictment of human prejudice: that we seek to destroy what we
don't understand.
Turner Classic Movies [Jeff Stafford]
Big House Film [Roger Westcombe]
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
digitallyOBSESSED! [Dan Lopez]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
Arnold, Pascal and Jean-Marc Barr
AMERICAN TRANSLATION (Traduit De
L'Americain) C- 67
What might have been a
nod to AMERICAN PSYCHO (2000), a twisted and hilarious tale using serial
killing as a scathing social indictment on the anything goes, free-wheeling and
out of control opulent lifestyle of Reagan era banking executives, offering a
similar contextualization French style, but this was not to be. Instead this is a grainy and seedy looking
movie shot on video that offers instead a putrid looking examination of one
revolting individual played by Pierre Perrier as Chris, a loathsome character
who is as narcissistic as they come, who feels it is his right to indulge
himself any way he sees fit, as that is the ultimate freedom, even when it
crosses the line into murder. There is
nothing left to the imagination from the opening scene in the film where an
oddly contorted dead body is left deep in the woods with the perpetrator making
his anxious getaway. The film follows
the habits of this man for the duration of the film. Rather than a detached and scientifically objective
exposé, this reaches into exaggerations of comic absurdity, becoming so
intentionally ridiculous that it loses any significance to the viewer. Making matters worse is he collects a
girlfriend as an accomplice, Lizzie Brocheré as Aurore, the spoiled and
pampered daughter of a rich American industrialist, meeting on the dance floor,
where she spends much of the rest of the picture naked and helplessly in love,
where she can’t take her eyes off of him from the moment she sees him, a theme
that continues throughout the movie.
There is plenty of
nudity in this film, where the two gorgeously attractive leads portray sexually
obsessed lovers that simply have the mating habits of rabbits. Neither is capable of exhibiting much brain
power, as instead they are stirred exclusively by the feelings between their
legs. While there is an initial pang of
doubt whether she would survive, but she instead develops a successful coping
mechanism with a psycho-sexual killer, which is to agree with everything that
he says and become his yes person, reinforcing his right to liberty and freedom
through murder, in fact becoming turned on by the idea that her man is
invincible and all powerful. There is
something profoundly disturbing that the couple in love has such a blasé
attitude towards his “condition,” where even after she discovers the truth
about his serial killing, she continues to hop in his lap at his beck and call,
kiss and have sex on demand, completely unaware that murder crosses the line. As the body count rises, the level of
absurdity becomes even more ridiculous, where any impact this movie might have
had is lost to such a woefully inadequate script written by the director and
Jean-Marc Barr, who plays Aurore’s mostly absent father in America.
Since this is
fictionalized and not based on an actual case study, you’d like to think
there’s a satirical comment to be made somewhere, but instead this is another
sad example of how the French exploit sex onscreen as a kind of societal
boredom with themselves, as they can’t help themselves, as the French movie
industry continues to churn out sexploitation movies with the thought that they
remain somehow socially relevant. And so
long as they find audiences around the world who are willing to showcase this
portrait of sex and liberation, oh, and yeah, murder too, they are likely to
continue to think that way. This is
nothing like Christophe Honoré’s MA MÈRE (2004), adapted from the Georges
Bataille novel by the same name, an odd little story that actually contrasts
base sexuality with the divine, as we follow what appears to be a quest for
transcendence through hedonism and complete sexual indulgence. Instead this is closer to a snuff film, as
the aphrodisiac of murder to incite sexual desire is a repugnant way to spend
two hours in the theater. Perrier and
Brocheré are excellent, if truth be told, as they do exhibit the casual air of
becoming lost in one another and losing any connection with the world around
them, where his poisonous influence replaces the living blood in her veins,
becoming unhinged from herself in the process.
The musical soundtrack may develop something of a cult following, as
it’s loud and raucous, but the idea that this is somehow an artistically relevant,
realistic reworking of the collected minds of actual serial killers, as this
movie suggests in the finale, is simply ludicrous.
Directed by Pascal Arnold (who also wrote the thing) and Jean-Marc Barr, American Translation is yet another movie that we’ve seen done numerous times before and done better.
Young Aurora (Lizzie Brochere) can speak both French and English and when
she hooks up with young Chris (Pierre Perrier) he likes to occasionally ask her
to speak in English for him, despite the fact that he can’t understand a word
that she’s saying. The relationship gathers momentum quickly and soon the two
are doing what all young lovers rushing everywhere do, in the movies anyway,
and
American Translation is one of those movies that I didn’t think was made any more. A French movie full of sex, nudity and stereotypes of the worst aspects of French people. Hell, there’s even a ménage a trois in the mix and you can hardly get more French and sexual than that phrase. It’s a film that feels as if it would have been dated over ten years ago and it has absolutely nothing good to give audiences.
The performances are brave, if not really all that good. Pierre Perrier isn’t a charming enough young actor to put any spark into his appalling character while Lizzie Brochere fares a bit better though never really gains your sympathy thanks to her placid, passive way she simply tolerates everything from her new man in the first half of the movie. Co-director Jean-Marc Barr is onscreen briefly but easily shows his experience from past movies.
The technical aspects are just fine, the movie simply suffers from a central character who comes across as a horrible ass from start to finish, no matter how the movie then twists and turns to reveal more.
It doesn’t help that the film ends with a couple of excerpts and quotes from studies of a subject matter that it seems to want to give some earnest treatment. Perhaps the good intentions were there but this film just doesn’t say anything interesting or thought-provoking about the darker side of the human psyche. It’s far too busy showing us a series of ugly, unsexy, over the top displays of affection from two people so desperate to show each other, and themselves, that they are really fully loved up when everyone else already knows the truth of the matter. And I HATE those kinds of displays of affection.
Eye for Film :
American Translation Movie Review (2011)
Chris
Do you like to feel inspired, entertained or educated by a film? Those are my usual benchmark categories and I’m not sure which one American Translation fits into. The story is straightforward: Aurore, the kept daughter of a rich American, falls in love with a freewheeling and attractive young Frenchman (Chris) only to discover he is a psycho-sexual killer. The viewer is seduced by photogenic young stars, convincing acting, a throbbing soundtrack and plenty of sex. But the real pull is Pierre Perrier’s character, the handsome killer. The movie is largely a portrayal of how he becomes excited by the struggles and death-throes of his victims, whether throttling them slowly, or beating them to death. “He asked me to strangle him, you know...” A nod to the dangerous practice of erotic asphyxiation used by enthusiasts to heighten orgasm. Ah, that makes it all right then.
Our killer is a helpless victim of his urges: the girlfriend (played by Lizzie Brocheré) is helplessly in love with him. His passion, his confidence, his ability to dominate her. And then she becomes his confidante, the one he can trust, the one who gives him a chance, the one who thinks she can somehow ‘change’ him.
Even before release, I can hear British censors crying foul – not for the amount of sex but for the insidious sexual violence. The BBFC is fairly liberal, but categorically states, “Sexualised violence or works which glorify or glamorise violence will receive a more restrictive classification and may even be cut.” Since much of the extended nudity involves (non-violent) relations between the two young lovers, perhaps it will scrape by. Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, for instance, was passed without cuts because the rape scene contained little in the way of overtly sexual images, whereas Ichi The Killer had scenes of sexual violence censored, as did Baise-Moi, in which scenes of violent penetration were removed.
That the mind of Chris is well-portrayed without such graphic detail is a compliment to directorial skill; but the other question is, how far should art be able to push boundaries for the responsible viewer? Reading a sanitised version of Marquis de Sade is worse than not reading it all. If Noe or Breillat felt the use of graphic sexualised violence was required to give us a window into the visceral reality of such horrid acts, should such respected directors be censored? And how do we justify a film such as this that seems to have merit but is also very distasteful?
The question, for some, will hinge on whether it is a true work of art or simply pornography of a low kind (an argument that raged both ways over Baise-Moi). With American Translation, the lines are not clear cut. It might not be the masterpiece of the decade, but its horrific and tantalising portraits carry more weight and credibility than, say, the shock value of films such as Brown Bunny and, by means of moralistic ending, avoid the token approval given to sexualised violence in Breillat’s masterpiece A Ma Soeur! (which was cut for video release).
Many readers will have realised at this point that American Translation contains nothing of interest for them, and they may well be right. If you find the psychopathology of the sexual killer interesting, check it out. But be warned it lacks the entertainment value of, say, American Psycho, the originality of Antichrist or the sheer, sad, iconic appeal of sicko movies such as I Spit on Your Grave. It is neither sexploitation nor trash aesthetic. It gives us an insight into the mind of a deranged young man but, whatever one thinks of films of sexual violence, there is no overarching point, such as in A Ma Soeur’s exposing of the traps of conventional heterosexuality. It tells us nothing we do not already know – yet it at least says it quite colourfully.
As a serious film, American Translation is not original enough to stand out further than a ripple of the festival circuit. The theme is well-worn, and there is an absence of secondary themes to keep us interested. Long sequences have nothing more than a vehicle being driven to a blaring soundtrack, or lazy, extended shots of the two lovers’ bodies. If you fell asleep in Brown Bunny or 9 Songs, be warned this has only slightly more caffeine in it, and most of that comprises violent excess. There simply is not enough going on plotwise, even if it is a reasonably fascinating psychological study.
The title stems from the fact that Aurore’s Father doesn’t speak French and
Chris doesn’t speak English. She therefore has to translate and try to stop
them beating each other up. One could say she is caught between two worlds that
don’t really translate very well. Most men in the film seem to have, or have
had, at least some homosexual attraction to Chris. Attractive young male
prostitutes loiter conveniently waiting to be bumped off (sometimes it takes
quite a while for them to die). Aurore is besotted, but she would have to be
almost deranged to save Chris’ life when one victim, after several minutes of
strangulation, manages to grab a weapon. There is no background story to
suggest that she fantasised about Bonnie and
One of the finest moments in the movie is when Aurore asks a policeman to cover her ears so she won’t hear Chris’ screams. As the sounds block out, we realise that blocking out reality has been the only way she can cope. Delicate viewers may wish to cover more than their ears.
American
Translation (Traduit De L'Americain) Film Review ... Matthew Turner from View
Variety Reviews - American
Translation - Film Reviews - New Int'l ...
Boyd van Hoeij
Aronofsky, Darren
Combustible Celluloid -
Interview with Darren Aronofsky by
Jeffrey M. Anderson
PI
USA
The Onion A.V. Club [Joshua Klein]
Writer/director Darren Aronofsky's audacious debut comes across like Eraserhead re-envisioned by cyberpunk author William Gibson. Sean Gullette plays a mathematical genius beset by debilitating headaches and an insatiable quest for a numerical series that links everything in the world, from the stock market to The Bible. After a breakthrough that costs him his homemade computer, Gullette is approached by members of a radical Jewish Kabbalah sect, as well as armed Wall Street goons. Both are after the mysterious numbers in his head. As Gullette's headaches worsen, his quest becomes more and more maddening. But what does this numerical code of the universe mean, and why are so many people interested in it? Strikingly shot in high-contrast black-and-white with a variety of novel, stylish camera techniques, evokes the paranoia of Poe and Kafka within the fuzzy framework of science fiction. Shadowy figures lurk in subway stations, dripping blood and leaving behind a gory record of their presence. Ants infest Gullette's computer, oozing sticky goo. Brooklyn is visualized as narrow alleyways, claustrophobic rooms, and winding catacombs. Aronofsky lets most questions hang until the film's conclusion, and keeping the audience in the dark is just another way to heighten the chaotic, exhilarating, frequently imposing mood of Aronofsky's film. [Pi] won the Directing Award for Dramatic Competition at Sundance, and rightly so: Aronofsky's ability to capture the rush and confusion of racing down a timeline toward infinity, only to suddenly slam into a dead end, makes for impressive and occasionally disturbing stuff.
Mark Sinker from Sight and Sound (link lost):
A computer-age update of Der Golem (1920) by way of Jorge Luis Borges, where technology is rendered lethal by an admixture of quasi-Kabbalistic symbols, π is a Hegelian occult thriller that never sheds its sense of its own cleverness (not entirely merited). For a film that's basically about a man chasing the secret of the universe regardless of the cost to sanity and humanity, and despite its teasing claims to knowledge from the frontiers of the knowable, it's often a bit timid.
Part of the problem is that the film-makers don't understand the maths they're using to sex up their plot. Certainly π when represented digitally never ends; it is a doorway to the infinite, if you like. But to real mathematicians, proofs of π 's infinitude are linked to proofs of its 'transcendentality', professional jargon for a very rigorous algebraic form of patternlessness. For many the allure of the various geometrical diagrams flashed before us in montage during the credits derives from their visually 'abstract' mystery rather than their concrete content. Max has a little mantra setting out his philosophy of cosmic patterning: it shows him to be either a rotten mathematician, ignorant of π 's proven properties, or else a lunatic, the kind that blitzes Harvard professors with 'disproofs' of Einstein in angry green ink. This latter option, Max as madman, is so overdetermined (he's forever shooting up and seeing things) it wrecks much chance of drama.
In its favour, π looks great, shot in a high-contrast
black-and-white 16mm stock that recalls Maya Deren, Tetsuo, David Lynch
and Cabaret Voltaire's early videos, with a nod to Buñuel that's a plain old
bad pun (ants on a brain for bugs in a computer). Seeing the Hasidim in the
role reserved by
As Max, Sean Gullette gives a one-note performance which sells short the sublimated passion of genuine intellectual obsession (compare recent television footage on Horizon of a choked-up Andrew Wiles recalling his solution of Fermat's 'last theorem'). The amused affection shown by female neighbours toward Max – Devi who feeds him, little Jenna who plays calculator games with him – makes up for the pushy corporate cipher that is Marcy Dawson. Max's mentor Sol has the best joke, about Archimedes and common sense – and perhaps the nicest touch is his apartment, which captures well the ambience of a Scientific American reader's room circa 1974, right down to the Go board instead of chess. But π would be much more fun if it wasn't trying to kid us that it's about so much more than fun.
Chicago Reader (Bill Boisvert)
Sci-Fi Movie Page (James O'Ehley)
Salon:
Pi Laura Miller
TheWorldJournal.com:
Pi Giancarlo De Lisi
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Philadelphia City Paper Sam Adams
Film Journal International (Ed Kelleher)
The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review Richard Scheib
Nitrate Online Elias Savada
Raging Bull a conversation between Vanes Naldi and Mike
Lorefice
Cold Fusion Video - Pi Nathan Shumate
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York
Times (registration req'd) Stephen
Holden
REQUIEM FOR A DREAM B 89
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
Set in a bleak but stunningly realized New York where the periodic appearance of hope somehow seems to make everything worse, Requiem For A Dream stars Marlon Wayans and Jared Leto as junkies searching for that elusive big score. Ellen Burstyn co-stars as Leto's mother, a desperately lonely widow whose legal addictions to television, dieting, and a demonic self-help program (hosted by Christopher McDonald, that icon of sinister banality) parallel Leto's and eventually lead to a similarly debilitating addiction to diet pills. Darren Aronofsky's second film (after 1998's tremendously accomplished [Pi]), based on co-screenwriter Hubert Selby Jr.'s 1978 novel, is a relentlessly grim wallow in the depths of human misery, a film that doesn't so much ponder the void as plunge into it. It's also a gripping, uncomfortably intense tour de force that tops even [Pi] in terms of ambition and stylistic overload. A visual stylist of the highest order, Aronofsky is a student of the more-is-more school of filmmaking, and he piles on stylistic tricks in ways that would be laughable in the hands of a lesser filmmaker. For him, style and substance are hopelessly intertwined, and the film's rhythmic, hypnotic repetition provides a fitting visual equivalent to the rapturous, ritualized repetition of the junkies it depicts. But as brutal and raw as Requiem For A Dream is, it retains a shattering sense of humanity throughout, resonating with the contrast between the vulnerability of its characters and the cruelty of the world they inhabit. One of the most stylistically audacious films ever made—it features what was reportedly the most complex editing scheme in history—Requiem is at its best during its quiet moments, particularly during a heartbreakingly lucid monologue in which Burstyn reveals to her son the depths of her unhappiness and the frailty of her dreams. There are times when Requiem's unrelenting darkness begins to feel cruel and almost sadistic, but it's hard not to admire Aronofsky's vivid, uncompromising vision of a world where even madness is preferable to the misery of an unfeeling universe.
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
Every year, there seems to be one film that kicks you in the stomach and leaves your head reeling. In 1999, it was Tim Roth's profoundly disturbing, unforgettable The War Zone. This year, it's Darren Aronofsky's Requiem for a Dream, one of the most forceful anti-drug narratives ever to be committed to celluloid. To call this movie a cautionary tale would be to apply a label that is too tame -- Requiem for a Dream presents the darkest take imaginable on a story of hopes and dreams shattered by drug addiction. There's no preaching or sermonizing here, just an almost-clinical depiction of lives laid to waste. This is not a film for the weak of mind or soul. Even in the midst of the whirlwind of a film festival, when I was seeing four films a day and the tendency was for everything to blur into a continuum, this one stuck out, demanding attention and rumination. It is a force to be reckoned with.
As he proved with his art house success, Pi, Aronofsky is not afraid to take chances, and Requiem for a Dream represents a big one. Based on the novel by Hubert Selby Jr., this movie was granted the MPAA's NC-17 "kiss of death" for its uncompromising portrayal of the depths to which some people will sink to get their fix. No punches are pulled, no images "prettied up". Undaunted by the MPAA's hypocritical and senseless stance, Aronofsky appealed the rating, rightfully claiming that cutting any portion of the film would dilute, if not outright destroy, its message. The appeal was denied, but Artisan, in a move that affirms their commitment to art over commercialism (at least in this case) has decided to release the film unrated.
Every actor with a major role - Ellen Burstyn, Jennifer Connelly, Jared Leto, and Marlan Wayans - should be commended not only for their strength of performance but for the courage they exhibit in putting themselves on the line the way Aronofsky requires. They are artists in the truest sense of the word, sublimating their egos and committing themselves fully to the needs of the project. Each of them is shown in a state of physical and mental degradation. They are depicted doing the kinds of things that many higher profile celebrities would not permit. Connelly especially goes all out, appearing naked from the waist down in one shot and participating in a lesbian orgy scene. (Those looking for an erotic charge from Connelly's nudity should see one of her previous outings - Requiem for a Dream is far too disturbing to do anything for the libido.)
The movie starts slowly, introducing each of the characters and establishing their relationships. Visually, Aronofsky tries for something a little different here, employing a split-screen approach that neither enhances nor detracts from the narrative. (It isn't around long enough to become distracting.) The central figure is Harry (Jared Leto), a young man who lives hand-to-mouth because nearly every cent he saves, earns, or steals goes towards buying something he can inject into his veins. His best friend and business partner is Tyrone (Marlon Wayans, playing it straight and doing so effectively), who shares many of Harry's aspirations. His girlfriend is Marion (Connelly), who, like Harry and Tyrone, is an addict. The fourth significant player is Harry's widowed mother, Sara (Ellen Burstyn), who is as addicted to television as Harry is to drugs. When she learns that a marketing company may be able to offer her a spot in the studio audience of a live TV broadcast, she decides to lose weight. Following a visit to the doctor's, she is on her way to dropping 30 pounds and becoming hooked on the uppers and downers that comprise her diet.
For these characters, drugs gradually take the place of everything else - food, sex, aspirations, and even the day-to-day impulse to live. They become the sole sources of pain and pleasure. They form the core of relationships. Would these people have anything to do with one another if they weren't bound by the ceremony of the injection? Perhaps it's not that way in the beginning, but the life-destroying power of drugs is insidious and undeniable, and the spiral of all-consuming addiction is what Aronofsky has captured with unnerving effectiveness.
Everyone in this film has their own dreams - or at least they do before
their gut-churning, animalistic need for the next fix has destroyed their
capacity for reason. These aren't grandiose dreams - they're the kinds of
things we all hope for during the small hours of the night when we lie awake
wondering how our lives might change for the better. For Harry and Tyrone, it's
to be able to make one big score and build a financial nest egg. For
Requiem for a Dream certainly isn't the first recent motion picture to offer an unpleasant picture of what happens when an individual becomes hooked on drugs, but its quadruple character study is unsparing. This is in large part because of the brilliant final fifteen minutes, which is a tour de force of direction and editing. Employing hundreds of cuts, Aronofsky careens back and forth between his four main players, showing their increasingly dire circumstances and allowing those to escalate to a brutal climax. This is easily the most startling and memorable extended sequence in any film this year, and, for raw power, it exceeds any scene I can recall from other films about addiction. Don't be fooled by the passively poetic title; there's nothing serene or restful about this motion picture. Requiem for a Dream gets under your skin and stays there.
The Village Voice
[Michael Atkinson]
Philadelphia
City Paper review by Sam Adams
Senses of Cinema (Megan Ratner)
Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Montreal Film Journal (Kevin N. Laforest)
The UK Critic (Ian Waldron-Mantgani)
Flipside Movie Emporium Michael Scrutchin
The Onion A.V. Club [Nathan Rabin]
DVD Verdict Mike Pinsky
DVD Journal Gregory P. Dorr
Film Journal International (Peter Henn)
PopMatters Cynthia Fuchs
eFilmCritic.com
(Rob Gonsalves) review [3/5]
CineScene.com (Chris Dashiell)
Darren Aronofsky Online: Requiem
For A Dream Nick Mead
TheWorldJournal.com (Giancarlo De Lisi)
Requiem For a Dream Unofficial film site
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times
(registration req'd) Elvis Mitchell
THE FOUNTAIN B- 81
USA
Death, as an act of creation
Originally set to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett for a whopping $75 million dollars, they both dropped out and the film was shot for half that amount in a reconfigured version that stars Aronofsky’s girl frend, Rachel Weisz, in close ups drenched in a saturated white light, giving her a timeless angelic effect. The problem here is Hugh Jackman, her “conquistador” who never gives up fighting for her, who continually projects negativity onscreen, who is so hellbent on doing things his way he remains oblivious to others. His singleminded purpose leaves him so isolated and alone that his concerns are lost in a vacuous disinterest to the audience. However, beauty is in the mind of the beholder, perhaps others can see through the gloominess of this strangely conceived, oddly colored phantasmagoria.
Weaving back and forth between 3 time periods, there is an evolving relationship between the two leads who are present in each era, the 16th century age of the Mayans, where under the Queen’s orders, the conquistador fights his way past a Mayan temple which guards a sacred tree of life, the present day where a doctor frantically works in a research lab to find a cure for his wife’s brain tumor, and space traveler floating in a tiny bubble off in space somewhere in the future nestled under the golden hue of a dying nebula, haunted by memory flashbacks of his wife, yearning for reunification. Unfortunately, as a couple, these two never really connect. Of the three, the middle section works the best, as Izzy (Weisz) becomes fascinated with the idea of death as rebirth, studying ancient Mayan legends to confirm this belief, and even wrote an unfinished novel about the earlier section, which was complete except for the final chapter, which she needed her husband Tom (Jackman) to complete, which turns out to be the futuristic section. In a film that is overly dark and morose, where the presence of death intervenes in nearly every scene, Weisz comes close to playing a character of eternal light, even while facing her own death. Her transcendance in accepting death is the film’s transcendance. It’s Jackman who refuses to accept her grace, claiming “death is a disease,” insisting he’ll find a cure.
Tom’s research team discovers a strange compound from a South American tree that may have an impact on age, a tree that was searched for in the earlier section, and a tree that is nourishing an aging space traveler, who may have been kept alive for centuries by eating the bark of the tree. But mortality (death) is a finite concept, while immortality (love) lasts forever. The film seems to suggest the space traveler is only prolonguing the inevitable by his stubborn unwillingness to die. When he finally accepts his fate as the same as all other living things, he actually levitates into a strange eternal world. Much of the futuristic imagery was completed by sculpted models and photographing color enhanced organic materials under a microscope, which when blended together creates a luminous futuristic imagery. This couple searches through time to discover the secrets of eternal love, and perhaps by the end, they’ve found it.
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
Hugh Jackman accomplishes a lot
in The Fountain: He levitates, fights Mayans as a 16th-century
conquistador, possibly discovers a way to reverse aging as a 21st-century
cancer researcher, lives off the sap of a tree while floating through space in
a futuristic orb, and cries copious tears, usually in close-up. Do all of these
feats belong in one movie? By any usual standard, no. But Darren Aronofsky,
director of Pi and Requiem For A Dream, clearly didn't set out to
make a usual movie. A romantic fantasy played out in three interlocking
strands, The Fountain sets out to do nothing less than dramatize the
human ambition to transcend time and space in the form of a love story played
out across several centuries. It's a story of overreaching that itself
overreaches, but that might have been impossible to avoid. Any film that
concludes with an explosive demonstration of the universe's incomprehensible
vastness wouldn't feel right if it felt perfect.
Jackman co-stars with Rachel
Weisz, who plays queen to his explorer in the film's earliest section, sending
Jackman on a quest that eventually leads him in search of a heavily guarded
tree that might contain the secret of eternal life. In the contemporary
segments, she plays his dying wife, writing the story of that conquistador
quest as Jackman experiments with a radical therapy derived from a mysterious
South American tree. And in the scenes of Jackman floating through space—whose
spectacular effects were accomplished without CGI—she's the spectral presence
he hopes to revive by traveling with, yes, a magical tree.
Not since John Boorman's Excalibur has a film worn its Jungian imagery so unashamedly. If the scenes of the 21st-century Jackman and Weisz didn't play out so movingly, The Fountain might exist solely in the realm of symbols and ideas. Their flesh, blood, and tears (and more tears) keep it grounded, however, giving Aronofsky the license to take his long-delayed, doggedly pursued film over the top in other respects. Viewers not attuned to his heartfelt, bombastic Richard Wagner-by-way-of-2001: A Space Odyssey lyricism might be better off looking elsewhere. But they'll never see anything else quite like it.
As early festival rumblings suggested and
the final product confirms, you're either with The Fountain or you're
against it. Darren Aronofsky's sci-fi saga spans eras, overflows with
parallels, and drapes its central love affair in Judeo-Christian and Buddhist
trappings, in the process risking embarrassment and incoherence by venturing
way out onto a sincerely poignant, heart-on-its-sleeve limb. In its own sappy way
as daring and gonzo as Aronofsky's hyper-stylized trip down heroin lane, Requiem
for a Dream, the director's latest arrives after six years of
well-documented production turmoil, its original big-budgeted incarnation
shelved after the departure of original stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and
its finished form a more constrained creation in which microscopic close-ups of
organic particles stand-in for CG effects, tight framing masks the limited
scale of ornate sets, and a compact running time moderately truncates (to its
minor detriment) two of its three analogous storylines. The film's literal
size, however, doesn't correspond to its scope, as Aronofsky's vision is
nothing shy of epic, striving for a timeless purity of feeling—with regard to
both the heart and the flesh—via a brazenly fanciful tale that at times is
contrived, uneven, and slightly absurd. It's a search for genuine sentiment in
out-there operatic fantasy, the kind of earnestly romantic-philosophical
endeavor that dares to be silly in the greater service of emotional truth.
And
silly it sometimes is. As written by Aronofsky (from an idea co-conceived with
Ari Handel), The Fountain self-consciously cuts back and forth between
three intertwined narratives, its repetition of lines, motifs, and camera
movements—as well as its stunningly ethereal, painterly images of outer space's
webby gaseous clouds—making clear its prevailing belief in interconnectedness.
In the present, scientist Thomas (Hugh Jackman) valiantly searches for a cure
for wife Izzi's (Rachel Weisz) terminal brain tumor, his risky research on a
monkey with the aide of a South American tree-based compound coming at the
expense of spending time with his fading love. Meanwhile, in 16th-century Spain
during the Inquisition, conquistador Tomas (also Jackman) is sent by Queen
Isabel (also Weisz) in search of a hidden Mayan temple that guards the Garden
of Eden's legendary Fountain of Youth, a.k.a. the Tree of Life—a segment later
revealed to be the crux of Izzi's uncompleted novel. And in the far-distant
future, bald, despondent Tom (Jackman, again) weeps and meditates in the lotus
position while flying through the cosmos in a translucent, snow globe-ish
bubble that houses the now-perishing Tree (from which Tom eats), his final
destination being a dying star named Xibalba that the Mayans believed was the
gateway to the underworld and rebirth. Seriously.
The Fountain
certainly doesn't lack for ambition, a fact that frequently gets it into
trouble but which also, ultimately, stands as its most endearing quality. The
film's trippy melodrama is, at its core, an intensely grandiose and sincere
rumination on the nature of love as the universe's only eternal element, as
well as a poignant portrait of the inherent cyclicality of existence. "Death,
as an act of creation," muses Izzi to Thomas, an outlook that typifies
Aronofsky's conviction about reincarnation and is embodied by a powerful (if
somewhat cheesily executed) climactic conception of everlasting youth as bodily
disintegration and symbiosis with Mother Earth. That she's prone to such
pronouncements is indicative of the film's placement of theme and mood ahead of
character and plot development, as modern Izzi is a symbol of noble, revered
femininity rather than a fully formulated human being. Likewise, the past and
future segments prove to be vehicles for Aronofsky's quasi-religious musings
instead of equally realized counterparts to the 2006 action. It also doesn't
help that unnecessary exposition sporadically threatens to literalize the
story—when Thomas tells his colleague/professional den mother Lillian (Ellen
Burstyn) "Death is a disease…and there is a cure," it's as if The
Fountain doesn't quite trust its audience to glean its overriding concerns
from the drama at hand.
And
yet if one's capable of overlooking these deficiencies, the audaciousness with
which Aronofsky proceeds is invigorating, just as his marriage of aesthetic and
thematic concerns is subtly spellbinding. As opposed to Steven Soderbergh's
similarly dreamy but chilly Solaris, The Fountain
is positively aflame with sentimentality, its thin scripting bolstered by the
director's tender depiction of Tom's painful memories—highlighted by an
entrancing first-person view of Izzi playfully running away from him, as well
as another shot that captures the unparalleled beauty of a slumbering lover's
back—and Clint Mansell's elegiac score, whose sparse theme brings a yearning,
desperate mournfulness to even the corniest of scenes. Such sincerity is
matched by technical artistry at once flamboyantly rapturous (notably, the
finale's ecstatic, orgasmic vision of death-as-life) and meticulously arranged.
Innumerable circular images—including, among others, wedding bands, tree
ring-like arm tattoos, concentric floor designs, fiery Xibalba, and Tom's
rotating bubble—complement the film's belief in spiritual/emotional perpetuity,
while the director's rigorous compositional use of hallways, doorways, and
passageways speak to the constricting prevalence of humanity's mortal coil and
visualize the notion that man's corporeal progression is a one-way journey that
can't be altered.
Consigned
to a role that mostly requires her to look beatific (occasionally in heavenly
white light, no less), Weisz competently personifies the angelic—if somewhat
abstract—object of affection, ceding the brunt of the heavy lifting to her
co-star. And in a triple-duty turn, Jackman finds himself with little to do but
look hairy and gruff as a Spanish conquistador, and is handcuffed by the
awkwardness of space explorer Tom, whose hairless head and flowing kung fu
robes bring a measure of goofiness to the otherwise gorgeously shot future
sequences. Nonetheless, as Thomas, Jackman's grief-stricken devastation is
palpable, the actor exuding a doleful honesty that transcends the proceedings'
intermittently overwrought histrionics. His guileless passion is in step with
Aronofsky's wealth of close-ups, which, as with those of Jackman's whispering
mouth on Weisz's nape, or his fingers almost stroking the Tree of Life's raised
hair-coated bark, capture a tangible sense of physical and romantic intimacy.
Whether the expressionistic grandeur of the film's golden-hued cinematography
and many graceful touches—such as its linking of burning stars with blazing
lanterns and the firmament debris that rains around Tom's intergalactic craft
like tears—overshadows nuttier moments involving gooey tree sap and shrieking
Mayan savages is the question liable to dominate discourse about the
sure-to-polarize The Fountain. To these eyes, it does so strikingly, and
definitively.
James Berardinelli's ReelViews
The Fountain is Darren Aronofsky trying to be Stanley Kubrick. However, while Aronofsky is able to match Kubrick frame-by-frame for ending ambiguity, that's one of the few areas in which The Fountain keeps pace with 2001. Technically, this is an impressive motion picture, but the fragmented story results in poor character development and Aronofsky's clinical approach limits identification. The overall experience fails to satisfy on a basic level. This is one of those films it's easier to be impressed with than it is to like.
The Fountain takes place in three eras: the 16th century, the 21st century, and the 26th century. The majority of the narrative transpires in a contemporary setting, where drug developer Tommy Creo (Hugh Jackman) is trying to save his wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz), who is afflicted with an inoperable brain tumor. Izzy is writing a book about a 1500s quest for the Fountain of Youth in New Spain, with Queen Isabel (Weisz) sending a Conquistador (Jackman) to find it. Finally, there are flash-forwards to the future where a bald man (Jackman) is taking a space trip in the company of a giant tree. One of the objectives of The Fountain is to reveal the connective tissue between these stories.
There's little doubt this is an ambitious effort, but one can argue that Aronofsky's vision has exceeded his ability to bring it to the screen within the allotted running time. The Fountain isn't as perplexing or as profound as it would like us to believe. The conclusion, rather than revealing some great truth or leading to a moment of transcendent awe, comes across as little more than a quasi-mystical sleight of hand. The emotional content is almost entirely absent. At the core of the movie is Tommy's desperate obsession to save his wife. However, because the characters are so thinly drawn and poorly illuminated, we don't connect with Tommy's pain. We recognize it in an abstract fashion, but it doesn't reach us. That puts viewers in the position of asking: So what?
The acting by Jackman and Weisz, is fine, and the visuals are striking without being ostentatious, but there's a feeling about this movie that the Emperor has no clothing. However, I would rather experience an interesting failure like this than a "success" that displays neither ambition nor vision. The Fountain has both qualities, even if they remain only partially realized.
The
Fountain Michael Atkinson from Sight and Sound
House
Next Door (Matt Zoller Seitz)
Camera Eye Evan Pulgino
The Village
Voice [J. Hoberman]
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
The
Fountain (2006) Bryant Frazer from
Deep Focus
Film Journal International (Ethan Alter)
ToxicUniverse.com (Lee Chase IV)
eFilmCritic.com [Rob
Gonsalves]
Flipside Movie Emporium [Rob
Vaux]
Not Coming to a Theater Near
You [Chiranjit Goswami]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
House
Next Door [Sean Burns and Andew Dignan]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
THE WRESTLER B+ 91
USA (109 mi)
2008 ‘Scope
Using the Dardenne
brothers’ documentary style template, this is a fictionalized docudrama where
the 16 mm and grainy video look really does aptly portray the seedy and
unglamorized world of second and third tier professional wrestling, the fringe
element that nearly nobody ever sees, but it's
captured here in all its pathetic glory. Appearing in nearly every
frame of the film is Mickey Rourke as Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a down on his
luck wrestler who has lingered in the business for over 20 years, who has to
work side jobs in a grocery store just to make ends meet and still, in hard
times, lives out of his van when he can’t make the payments for his rented
trailer. Appearing in high school auditoriums
filled with screaming kids, the film is defined by a brief scene in the
dressing room where a traveling medicine salesman, another behemoth who is
himself pumped up to size enormous, sells him every known variety of steroid,
human growth hormone, and pain killer that allows him to endure the continual
pain of working in the business for so long.
One is reminded of the Charles Mingus Jazz Workshop composition from
1959 called “The Clown” with an improvised narrative from radio personality and
Beat writer Jean Shepherd that describes the pain of a clown that no one likes,
so he tries so hard to gain acceptance and please the crowd that he dares ever
more dangerous pratfalls until they finally burst into the biggest applause of
his life only to discover that he’s dead, where the audience all along thought
it was just part of the act. His
sadness, obviously, was kept concealed from his audience. Much of this was painful to endure, much like
“The Clown,” where the audience endures a continuous series of ever more
painful pratfalls.
Clearly immersed in the
theme of down and out and lost and wasted lives, the film is somewhat formulaic, in the ROCKY (1976) mode,
but darker and bleaker, with occasional quiet yet completely unpretentious
humanist turns, as Randy’s best days are ancient history (beautifully expressed
in a montage of fight posters) and his opportunities at fame and fortune long
gone, so he survives as a headliner living on his past glory, working bottom of
the barrel weekend road shows where a meager share of the overall take is a
mere pittance. But the man lives to
rumble and rock ‘n’ roll in the ring where his hard core ability to withstand
ever new levels of pain are legendary, especially within the circle of fellow
wrestlers, who are in awe of his accomplishments. Rourke is simply brilliant as a rock, the
unassuming man of steel who never complains, who outside the ring is a broken
down warrior who can barely walk, who mumbles to himself much of the time,
whose miserable existence consists of working menial jobs, having to take
orders from egg-headed bureaucratic managers who assign him the worst
jobs. Occasionally, he ventures to strip
clubs where he finds Marissa Tomei as Cassidy in a similar position, working in
a seedy dive where she’s forced to endure insults from drunken patrons who
expect younger, perfectly shaped girls, not a mature woman who herself is
viewed as well past her prime. The two
obviously share something in common living on the edge of tawdry and exploited
worlds, shunned from nearly every corner of the globe, yet both refuse to be
deterred and press ahead with each passing day, despite the accumulated warts
and battle scars which make them wary of any real intimacy.
When wrestling at its
most outrageous extreme, including a staple gun, a ladder, broken glass and
barbed wire, leave him a scarred and bloody pulp after a match, he blacks out
and suffers a heart attack, where the medical advice afterwards is to give it
up if he wants to survive. He attempts a
reconciliation with his grown daughter, Evan Rachel Wood, but his decades long
absence has left her angry and suspicious, where she pretty much thinks he’s a
washout as a father. At the same time,
he attempts a different form of rapprochement with Cassidy, both with less than
satisfactory results. Even worse, he
tries to go straight at the grocery story, assigned to work at the deli counter
on weekends, which are among the best sequences in the film when things are
going well, but spirals out of control, as does the film, when things start to
go wrong. Rather than develop any of
these possibilities, the Ram simply ploughs headfirst back into the ring with
mixed to frustratingly disappointing results.
There’s a beautiful build up, hyped by some 80’s Axl Rose macho music
that he loves, calling that “pussy Cobain” responsible for the shit music of
the 90’s, but the film, perhaps purely intentionally (think John Sayles 1999
film LIMBO, which is in itself interactive, asking the audience what they think
happens next?), throws in the white flag at the end and has no ending, leaving
all the loose ends hanging, where one is struck by the possibility that perhaps
only good things lie ahead, who knows, with at least a passing thought towards
suicide when the film fades to black, perhaps an homage to all those who died
or were forgotten in ignominious fashion on the circuit, but then none are
mentioned in the closing credits, where the Springsteen song written for the
film feels out of place, unnecessarily duplicating what’s already been
emphasized in the film. The finale is
open ended and can be what the viewer wants it to be, but for Rourke to inhabit
the character as perfectly as this, he deserved better, as it's unfortunate
that great films with weak endings leave the viewers dissatisfied—winner of
Best Film at the Venice Film Festival.
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Viennale '08 capsules
Mickey Rourke delivers an Oscar-worthy performance - one that, barring accidents, surely will be recognised by the Academy - as a washed-up WWF-type ring-warrior, eking out a living on the New Jersey circuit some 20 years after his prime. But what's genuinely startling is that the film is much more than just a showcase for its star - indeed, the work by director Aronofsky (vaulting far beyond anything he's previously achieved) and feature-debutant scriptwriter Robert D Siegel, plus their various technical collaborators, matches Rourke at every step. The stunning result is a thunderously entertaining, surprisingly moving, deftly thought-provoking example of current American cinema at its very best: by some measure the finest movie of the year, and one of the decade's top half-dozen so far.
Slant Magazine
[Fernando F. Croce]
What was Darren Aronofsky doing futzing with The Fountain's abstruse mysticism
when, on the evidence of this no-frills crowd-pleaser, he really should have
been working on Rocky Balboa? In his least gimmicky
film yet, Aronofsky ditches his usual skittery stylistics in favor of a relaxed
atmosphere of seediness and a comeback-kid performance from Mickey Rourke. As a
blond-maned, broken-down holdover from the '80s WrestleMania craze, Rourke
still seems to be buried under the steroidal latex of the comic-book Caliban he
played in Sin City. The dissolute face and body
are Rourke's, however, and the actor seems to draw on his own experiences as an
ex-palooka to give his character the dignity of a wounded old lion. A bum
ticker forces the protagonist to take stock of his life, but of course there
are a few body slams still left in him. The communal side of small-time
wrestlers is disarmingly etched, though the ringside clashes, as befits the
director of Requiem
for a Dream, remain baroque visions of corporeal abuse.
The Onion A.V. Club [Noel Murray]
In The Wrestler,
Mickey Rourke plays a wrung-dry ex-superstar dealing with the realization that
his body is breaking down, and that he doesn't have much going on in his life
to compensate. His daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) wants nothing to do with him,
because he was never around when she was growing up. He's infatuated with a
stripper (Marisa Tomei) whose affection dries up whenever he puts his money
away. And his part-time supermarket job doesn't pay well enough to keep him in
wrestling costumes, muscle-enhancing drugs, and rent for his cruddy trailer in
New Jersey. Frankly, it's hard to imagine an actor better suited for this part
than Rourke, whose surgically altered face and chemically altered body don't
require much makeup to look worn and abused—and that's not even taking into
account Rourke's own well-documented fall from showbiz grace, which gives every
apologetic line he speaks an extra layer of contrition.
It's also hard to
imagine a better director for a story of wrestling and its discontents than
Darren Aronofsky, who emphasizes the barrenness and chill of the story's wintry
suburb-scapes. Early in The Wrestler, Aronofsky goes overboard with the
Dardennes-style follow-shots, holding on the back of Rourke's head more for
affectation's sake than to enhance the mood. But Aronofsky also helpfully
lingers over the lurid details of combat theater—the razors, the barbed wire,
the staple guns, the faint whine of feedback from an old hearing aid—and gives
what might've been just another thinly plotted, often obvious indie melodrama a
thick shot of viscera. (At the least, WWE devotees now have their own Passion
Of The Christ.)
The Wrestler's biggest flaw is that much of it is
predictable, including the subplot involving Rourke's estranged daughter, which
features a lot of stock "You were never there for me!" speeches. But
even that flaw isn't too glaring, given that this story takes place in the
milieu of a fake sport that relies on simple, manufactured drama. Besides, The
Wrestler has its habitat down cold, from the under-filled small-town arenas
that host the after-market wrestling circuit to the upbeat '80s metal and seedy
strip clubs where the hero finds solace. There's a lot in The Wrestler
about people who sell their bodies, and about the wreckage left behind once the
milling throng loses interest. (The scene in an abandoned beachside fun park is
particularly effective.) Mostly though, the movie feeds off Rourke, who plays a
genuinely decent guy who never lets his dawning self-awareness interfere with
his responsibility to give the fans a show.
(Editor's note: The
Wrestler was written by Robert Siegel, a former editor of The Onion
and personal friend to several members of The A.V. Club staff. Noel
Murray has no relationship with Siegel.)
Village
Voice (J. Hoberman) review
The Wrestler may be plenty visceral, but it's no more a sports movie than professional wrestling is a competitive sport. Chronic over-reacher Darren Aronofsky's relatively unpretentious follow-up to the ridiculous debacle that was The Fountain is all about showbiz. It's also a canny example. You want to make a comeback saga, you get a washed-up star—in this case, Mickey Rourke, for whom, as Scott Foundas reported in a Voice cover story, Aronofsky and screenwriter Robert Siegel conceived the movie.
The old "new De Niro" of the Reagan era and a famous flame-out well before Bill Clinton took office, the volatile Rourke gives a career performance as Randy "The Ram" Robinson—an amiably broken-down wrestler who was himself a star of the 1980s. A ravaged steroid hulk with a stringy blond mane and a head full of Mötley Crüe, the Ram is actually something of a sweetie, who enjoys playing Nintendo with the neighborhood kids. Rourke is scarcely more recognizable as this over-the-hill palooka than as the hulking cyber-enhanced mutant shtarke he played in Sin City, but there's still the shadow of his soft-lipped, baby-face smile.
Present in every scene, if not each shot, Rourke gives a tremendously physical performance that The Wrestler essentially exists to document. The movie has a deliberately cruddy, lurid look; set entirely in Nowhere, New Jersey, it could have been shot by the Dardenne brothers. The camera hastens after the Ram, scampers backs as he advances, or perches on the hood of his car as he drives through the night. Aronofsky dotes on the details of the Ram's routine (securing meds, getting a perm, visiting the tanning parlor), especially his preparations for a bout. A true professional, Randy carefully works out a routine with his adversary, concealing razors with which to cut himself and share some blood with his fans.
Rourke, too, is a pro, and The Wrestler, which won the Gold Lion at Venice and closed the New York Film Festival, has its share of action. The most gruesome bout is one in which a younger, more degenerate fighter—cast as a villainous "heel" rather than a sympathetic "face"—introduces the Ram to the strategic use of a staple gun. The crowd loves it, appreciatively chanting, "You sick fuck," when Randy's opponent staples a $20 bill to his forehead. It's this bloody mess, 20 minutes into the movie, that triggers the Ram's heart attack, landing him in the hospital with a doctor's warning that it's past time he retired.
It seems likely that the Harvard-educated Aronofsky would know Roland Barthes's essay on the semiotics of wrestling, which, among other things, discusses this "spectacle of excess" as a dramatic ritual of suffering and humiliation: "It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all." In any case, The Wrestler's vivid concern with the mortification of the flesh is given a spiritual dimension by a veteran stripper who goes by the nom de pole Cassidy (Marisa Tomei, Hollywood's go-to gal for an Oscar-quality lap-dance).
Cassidy's sleazy workplace is the female equivalent of the Ram's blood-slimed wrestling arena. Hoping to cheer up her favorite customer, Cassidy advises him to see The Passion of the Christ: "It's amazing. They throw everything at him—rocks, stones, arrows!" ("Tough dude," the wrestler mumbles, missing Cassidy's joke that he is the Sacrificial Ram.) A touching scene in which these two cartoon gladiators meet after-hours on a Saturday afternoon, wearing their normal outfits, is topped only by the day in which the Ram tries to go straight, taking a job at the deli counter in a neighborhood supermarket. He even seems to be enjoying himself. But, however you slice it, it's all about the meat, and the attempt ends with a debacle worthy of his "Ram Jam" ring antics.
Not nearly as successful is the Ram's attempted reconciliation with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood). Rourke's character may be larger than the movie, but this time, the Ram gets ground up in the mechanics of the plot.
What WWE champion Mick Foley thought of
The Wrestler. A three-time WWE
champion explains what Darren Aronofksy's pro-wrestling movie gets right, from
Salon, December 18, 2008
A couple of years
ago, I met with a respected and successful producer who believed that one day,
the motion picture industry would finally make a great pro-wrestling movie …
and that I was the guy to write it. I had written several books—fiction, nonfiction, and children's—over the course of my 20-plus years as a pro
wrestler, which apparently made me a credible candidate for this type of project.
But I didn't have high hopes for it. The wrestling business has been the source
of more than one critically acclaimed documentary—I was one of the subjects of
Barry Blaustein's Beyond the Mat—but I worried that my vocation was not
respected enough to merit a thoughtful fictional screen representation. The
chances of seeing a great pro-wrestling movie seemed right up there with the
likelihood of a Mickey Rourke career renaissance.
You can see why I was pessimistic about Darren Aronofsky's wrestling project. I received an inquiry early on about serving as a consultant but cited the need to "spend time with my family" as a reason to refrain. If I felt like having my name attached to a failure, I figured, I'd write another novel. Casting Rourke in the lead seemed like a mistake. Sure, he had been in some good films a few election cycles ago, and I'll admit to stealing his popcorn-box trick from Diner back in '82. But he seemed unlikely to deliver the portrait of a wrestler I wanted.
And so I attended a recent
I was hooked within a minute. Within five, I had completely forgotten I was looking at Mickey Rourke. That guy on the screen simply was Randy "the Ram" Robinson, a '80s mat icon on a two-decade-long losing streak in the game of life, searching for a way, any way, to fan the dying embers of his career. Rourke somehow makes the pathetic seem heroic and imbues in this sad, broken man a sense of quiet dignity and deep-down decency that makes the prospect of not rooting for him—in both his life and the ring—impossible.
I found great authenticity in so many aspects of Randy's battered psyche. His constant need for acceptance—from his estranged daughter; from his possible love interest, a stripper played by Marisa Tomei (who is wonderful, if a bit shocking for any guy who ever had a crush on her in My Cousin Vinny); from a random collection of customers at the deli counter where he works; from his dwindling number of nostalgic wrestling fans—is a theme that many a wrestler will grudgingly admit to connecting with. The scene depicting a poorly attended "Legends Convention" where Randy, a man so proud of his past, is forced not only to accept his present but to take a glimpse at the future, will strike an uncomfortable yet legitimate chord with every wrestling star whose personal appearances have ever been met with a symphony of silence.
I also loved the wrestling scenes. Rourke deserves great credit not only for whipping himself into incredible shape—packing 30 pounds of muscle on for the role—but for doing his wrestling homework. Learning the trade at age 52 could not have been easy, but Rourke's in-ring work is good enough to pass this wrestler's sniff test. No one will ever confuse Randy's clothesline with Stan Hansen's, and the scenes surely benefited from careful editing, but much of what Randy did—his flying "Ram Jam"; a Japanese enzugiri kick—actually looks pretty good. Importantly, it doesn't look any better than it should. His first in-ring scene, with a starry-eyed rookie thrilled just to be in the same arena with a former mat legend, looks realistically rudimentary. I could have done without the self-induced bloodletting, especially because it seemed so slow and deliberate, like a magician performing a card trick in slow motion. While such acts are a small but accepted part of the business, you wouldn't often see them at a sparsely attended event like this.
And everyone involved—Rourke, Aronofsky, independent wrestler Necro Butcher, stunt coordinator Douglas Crosby—deserves credit for creating a memorable midmovie bloodbath, a fight involving broken glass, barbed wire, a staple gun, and other implements. Difficult to watch but impossible to forget, the scene shows not only how far Randy has fallen but what lengths he's willing to go to in order to get back in the game. Fights like this do exist, but stars of Randy's magnitude, no matter how faded, don't often venture into matches this extreme.
Aronofsky also achieves an authentic atmosphere in the variety of wrestling venues he showcases. His decision to cast working independent wrestlers and to film at real independent wrestling shows was wise and gives the film a gritty documentary feel. The Wrestler also does a wonderful job depicting the backstage camaraderie among Randy's fellow wrestlers, the eclectic blend of muscle heads, dreamers, athletes, and artists who serve as an unlikely support system for Rourke's character.
I have been thinking a lot about The Wrestler since
that
I may be in the minority here, but (SPOILER ALERT!) I also felt a certain amount of hope at the movie's end. In the final scene, Randy—who over the course of the film has suffered a heart attack and been told by his doctors to stop wrestling—is back in the ring for a match with an old rival, the Ayatollah. The aging adversaries do their best to overcome the tag team of Father Time and Mother Nature and put on a decent match. By the end of the bout, Randy is clutching his chest and panting for breath. As he leaps from the ropes onto his opponent, the film cuts to black, the credits roll, and we hear Bruce Springsteen's haunting title tune. Still, I couldn't help but feel that things were going to work out for ol' Randy. Then again, I thought Alan Ladd was just really tired at the end of Shane.
Now for the nitpicking. The steroid transaction seemed either a little too convenient (All those substances at once? In the locker room?) or like an anabolic homage to Travis Bickel's purchase of enough weaponry to quell a Third World uprising in Scorsese's Taxi Driver. And I wish there had been some visible difference in Randy's physique after he underwent heart surgery and gave up 'roids—even if just to illustrate the effectiveness and necessity of those substances in "the Ram's" life.
There was one other minor note of disappointment for me: I never did detect any of myself in the movie. Believe me, I tried. Hey, if you are going to be an influence on a movie, it might as well be a great one like The Wrestler. Who knows, maybe I inspired Randy's ratty assortment of faded flannels. And a few people have suggested that I inspired that grisly wrestling scene. But I can claim with a clear conscience that I never used a staple gun on an opponent. Thumbtacks, yes; barbed wire, definitely; but never a staple gun. Maybe one day I will find out I did play some kind of role in the development of one of the great characters in modern movie history. I hope so. Because I kind of feel like I owe Mickey Rourke—you know, for that popcorn trick back in '82.
Village
Voice (Scott Foundas) review
Slant Magazine
review [3.5/4] Nick Schager
Ruthless
Reviews review Matt Cale
indieWIRE
review Jeff Reichert from Reverse
Shot
Cinematical
(James Rocchi) review
Plume
Noire review Fred Thom
Flipside Movie Emporium (Rob
Vaux) review [A] also including Q&A: Mickey Rourke
and Q&A:
Darren Aronofsky.
Reel.com
review [4/4] Chris Cabin, also seen
here: filmcritic.com
(Chris Cabin) review [4.5/5]
not coming to a theater
near you (Leo Goldsmith) review
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Rob Gonsalves) review [5/5]
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Old School Reviews
[John Nesbit]
Screen
International review Fionnuala
Halligan
Q Network Film Desk
(James Kendrick) review [4/5]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
also see the interview
with Darren Aronofsky and Marisa Tomei
Salon
(Stephanie Zacharek) review
Film
Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
Critic's
Notebook [Martin Tsai]
Entertainment Weekly
review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Variety (Todd McCarthy)
review
Time
Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/6]
Time
Out Chicago (Hank Sartin) review [5/6]
Boston
Globe review [4/4] Ty Burr
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York
Times (A.O. Scott) review
BLACK SWAN B 88
A venture into
psychological horror, an odd genre that is rarely explored with the Freudian
relish and mad passion of Darren Aronofsky where every film he makes seems to
contain an immersion into obsession until it becomes debilitating. Perhaps his ultimate freakout movie, he
brings his own lowbrow sensibility into the opulent world of professional
ballet, quite a step up from the seedy gymnasiums of second and third tier
professional wrestling in his last movie.
Natalie Portman stars as his ultimate ballerina, Nina, the unsung new
dancer chosen to open the season starring in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, replacing aging star Winona Ryder who does not bow out
gracefully, where she needs to personify dual roles of the white and black
swan, good and evil opposites that are both competing for her heart and soul,
all in the name of an all-possessing love.
Vincent Cassel plays the tough ballet taskmaster who always wants more
from his performers, driving them into the ground at times to bring out more
passion. Nina is a poster child for a
Disney character, as she surrounds herself with a room full of stuffed animals,
goes to sleep to the sound of a music box and lives at home with her over
domineering mother, Barbara Hershey, who helps her out of her costume each day,
winds up her music box every night and seems to control every aspect of her
life. Typical for a stage mother,
Hershey seems used to having her way, getting what she wants out of her
perfectly molded little girl, which is strict, inhesitating obedience. But only in this way is there an absence of
friction between them, as one smothers and dominates the other, reminiscent of
Haneke’s mother and daughter in THE PIANO TEACHER (2001), where an adult
Isabelle Huppert seemingly exerts self-control and independence, but only while
having the security of sleeping in the same claustrophobic room just a few
inches away from her mother every night.
Out of this good girl
image, the anorexic looking Nina has to have a breakthrough into her darker
side, as she is perfect expressing the purity and innocence of the white swan,
but doesn’t convincingly portray the persuasive evil of the black swan, which
has the power to mesmerize and seduce any subject at will. This film convincingly shows Nina’s slide
into that darker side, as once she gets the part, it heightens the anxieties
and insecurities and becomes a story about having a self-loathing secret,
accentuating her near psychotic fear and pain of performing, taking the form of
hallucinations, panic attacks, paranoia, unexplained injuries, self mutilation
and eating disorder episodes, all reminiscent of Gena Rowlands behavior in
Cassavetes’ OPENING NIGHT (1977), where both are forced to face their inner
demons in an attempt to get closer to their onstage role. This film effectively highlights that unseen
barrier between the stage performer and the audience, where the need to please,
or to be perfect, may drive one to invent personal obsessions. What this film does really well is start off
showing the world the way it is, but slowly reality recedes into the
background, making it harder and harder to tell what’s real and what isn’t,
until by the end, they are indistinguishable.
Using plenty of handheld digital camera work from Matthew Libatique,
Aronofsky prefers those grainy in-your-face views, up close and personal,
following Nina everywhere she goes, even as she invents worlds that aren’t
there, becoming so over the top at times that it becomes deliciously
amusing.
Adding to Nina’s
troubles is the choice of her more sluttish understudy, Mila Kunis as Lily, an
Asia Argento-style character who, to make matters interesting, actually has a
tattoo of black wings on her back and sleeps with all of the characters in
Nina’s life, including the dancers, the artistic director, and even Nina
herself. Slowly Lily penetrates into
Nina’s psyche, literally terrorizing her through devious means, where by the
next day she denies any personal involvement, as if Nina has invented the whole
thing, which continually gnaws at her.
Nina’s mother grows in magnitude, where just her presence after awhile
becomes a terrorizing force as well, as if her psychologically controlling
methods are personifications of pure evil, where Nina literally backs herself
into a corner where she has no contact left with anyone else. Her obsession has literally driven everybody
else away. All that’s left is Nina alone
with her performance. Has she conquered
her demons? The movie builds to an
extraordinary intensity and plays out like a good old-fashioned horror movie,
including ample amounts of blood and gore, delving into the deep interiors of a
terrorized and delusional soul, dazzling the audience with a CGI sequence where
black wings literally grow out of the black swan’s back, escaping and immersing
herself finally into the darker world of her character, where perhaps, like Hansel and Gretel, she never finds her
way back out of the woods.
Black Swan | Film |
Movie Review | The A.V. Club Keith
Phipps
The sheltered ballerina Natalie Portman plays in Darren
Aronofsky’s Black Swan dreams of dancing the part of Odette in
It’s hard knowledge to process, however, and harder still to
incorporate it into performance. A seasoned dancer usually consigned to
supporting roles, Portman gets a chance to audition for Odette thanks to the
unexpected, not entirely voluntary departure of her company’s prima ballerina.
Her director (Vincent Cassel) has concerns about her ability to dance Odette’s
dark counterpart, the Black Swan. She has the technique, but
Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique give Black
Swan the look of a degraded nightmare and the intensity of a shared
hallucination. Dealing in the same grand gestures and overstated themes as its
balletic inspiration—while adding touches of The Red Shoes and Repulsion,
plus its own atmosphere of unshakable dread—Black Swan is a florid,
often lurid, completely enthralling film held in place by a disarming Portman,
who rarely leaves the frame. A psychological thriller about the creative process,
Black Swan lingers on the pain and repetition that allowed Portman’s
character to reach ballet’s rarefied heights, and explores the effects of that
dedication. (It isn’t just a film about ballet, either: As an actress, Portman
has never seemed particularly convincing in Black Swan roles. And the
casting of the outgoing ballet star, and the way dance chews women up and spits
them out, consciously echoes
Black Swan - Film
- Time Out Melbourne David Jenkins
Trust Darren
Aronofsky to make the dainty, ultra-refined art of classical ballet appear
as physically gruelling as cracking rocks with a pick-axe. ‘Black Swan’ is a
head-spinning, unabashedly hysterical psychodrama set in the back-biting world
of
Coming across like a Lars Von Trier fanboy who set out
to fuse ‘The Red Shoes’ with ‘Repulsion’, Aronofsky introduces us to Nina (Natalie
Portman) a hardworking, happy-go-lucky dancer with dreams of lead roles and
an all-round plucky outlook on her future prospects. He then, over 103 riveting
minutes, proceeds to smash them to smithereens in bravura fashion. Portman
gives it her all as the Mommy’s-girl dancing queen whose life takes a turn for
the clinically insane when she’s grudgingly cast in the lead of ‘
As Nina starts to take leave of her sanity and slip
into paranoiac frenzy, Aronofsky charts the changes to her disposition and
physical shape. ‘Black Swan’ confirms the director's Cronenbergian fascination
with the limits of the human body – both external and internal – amplifying the
sound of bones clicking, nails snapping and muscles stretching to stomach-churning
levels while constantly honing in on grazes and open wounds.
Some viewers may find themselves put off by the
melodramatic tone. Barbara
Hershey as Nina’s smothering mother doesn’t do the film any favours in the
credibility stakes: initially all smiles, hugs and words of encouragement, just
when Aronofsky needs more ammo withn which to bombard his lead, she mutates
into a crazed, over-protective harridan who resents her daughter’s spell in the
limelight.
But, quibbles with its tenuous connection to reality
aside, this is a thrilling slab of old-fashioned
BLACK SWAN
review Jim Tudor from Twitch
A common refrain, in the early criticism of "Black Swan", has been that filmmaker Darren Aronofsky has reworked his previous film, "The Wrestler", to be set in the world of ballet. This is lazy criticism. Yes, both films chronicle the unraveling of protagonists involved in an athletically inclined profession. Both professions in question, professional wrestling and ballet, are the centers of microcosmic worlds occupied by obsessive individuals. But there the connective tissue begins to disintegrate. With "The Wrestler", Aronofsky demonstrated that there is more to him artistically than merely being a craftsman of the psycho-traumatic. Utterly character and performance based, "The Wrestler" presented a grittier, more grounded aesthetic than ever before, with no post-production flourishes of any kind. That film worked beautifully, and having gotten it out of his system, Aronofsky has once again unapologetically dialed up the visual style - albeit in a masterfully subtle way - with his follow up, "Black Swan".
Natalie Portman turns in a career highlight performance as Nina
Sayers, a young member of a
Tragically, Nina can never celebrate the opportunity that this lead role brings
to her. Instead, it only serves to trap her all the more. Already a lifelong
victim of her emotionally abusive single mother, her longtime social and mental
isolation is replaced with a delusional flurry of late-term rebellion. The
notion of "reality" is as uncertain to the film's audience as it is
to Nina, as instability fueled by drinking, drugs, sex, bizarre hallucinations
and grotesque imagery eek their way into the fabric of everything. (If the film
has a glaring misstep, it would be the exact, on-the-nose nature of these
hallucinations.) Further complicating matters is Nina's relationship with her
rival-turned-uneasy confidant, Lily (played with astonishing confidence by Mila
Kunis).
Aronofsky has attempted something grandly different with "Black Swan",
detailing at once the harsh realities of life in the ballet (bloody toes,
tricked-out slippers, etc.) while infusing them with a deceptively sure-handed
stylization that permeates every frame, every moment of the film. Even the many
handheld camera shots are framed intentionally and precisely. The carefully
controlled color palate of black/white/grey (most powerfully displayed in
Leroy's dwelling and vicinity) is punctuated by the sickliest of washed-out
geriatric pink hues peppered throughout scenes in the ballet world and Nina's
home. These flourishes, while effective through and through, never call
attention to themselves in a loud way. It all adds up to making the tragedy of
"Black Swan" an artistic cinematic success in every sense. It is a
dark and rich film experience that won't be soon forgotten.
New York Magazine [David
Edelstein]
Pajiba
(Daniel Carlson) review
Movieline
(Stephanie Zacharek) review [8/10]
The
Conversations: Darren Aronofsky Part I
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discuss the director from Slant,
The
Conversations: Darren Aronofsky Part II: Black Swan Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard from Slant,
Black Swan José Teodoro from Film Comment, November/December, 2010
A Regrettable Moment of
Sincerity [Adam Lippe] 2 Critiques in one!
Review:
“Black Swan” > Todd McCarthy's Deep Focus - indieWIRE
DVDTalk.com -
theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Edward
Copeland on Film (Josh R)
World Socialist
Web Site [Jordan Mattos]
"Technicians and Artists" Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Nick's Flick Picks review
of Black Swan
Movie
Review - Black Swan - eFilmCritic
Mel Valentin
Black
Swan, I Love You Phillip Morris, Night Catches Us | Film ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
Filmcritic.com Sean O’Connell
Ferdy on Films [Marilyn Ferdinand]
tonymacklin.net [Tony
Macklin]
Lessons
of Darkness [Nick Schager]
Film Freak
Central Review [Walter Chaw]
ReelViews
[James Berardinelli]
Natalie Portman as an unstable dancer
in the inert Black Swan ... Dana
Stevens from Slate
Jewish Daily Forward
[John Semley]
Eye for Film : Black
Swan Movie Review (2010) James
Benefield
Movie
Review - Black Swan - eFilmCritic
Rob Gonsalves
Review of
"Black Swan" | Movie Reviews, Celebrity Interviews ... Lesley Goldberg from AfterEllen
Black Swan Lisa Skrzyniarz from Crazy for Cinema
Daily
Film Dose [Greg Klymkiw]
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
Moviefreak.com
[Sara Michelle Fetters]
Monsters
and Critics [Anne Brodie]
Smells Like
Screen Spirit [Don Simpson]
Best
Movies Ever [Curt Johnson]
Digital
Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]
The Reel Bits [Richard
Gray and Sarah Ward]
DVD Talk [Jason Bailey] also seen here: Fourth
Row Center [Jason Bailey]
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
The
House Next Door [Fernando F. Croce]
TIFF
Movie Review: Black Swan (2010) – RopeofSilicon.com Movie ... Brad Brevet
Mark
Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
DVD Talk [Brian
Orndorf] also seen here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf]
DVD Town
[Christopher Long] theatrical
Sound On Sight Simon Howell
Living in Cinema
[Craig Kennedy]
Movie
Cynics [The Vocabulariast]
The
Parallax Review [Kyle Kogan]
BLACK
SWAN Frank Swietek from One Guy’s Opinion
The
L Magazine [Benjamin Sutton and Henry Stewart]
Phil
on Film [Philip Concannon]
Box
Office Magazine [Pete Hammond]
Combustible
Celluloid film review - Black Swan (2010), Darren ... Jeffrey M. Anderson
Natalie
Portman: Dancing queen Lyndsey
Winship interview from Time Out London,
Carpetbagger
Blog: A Slipper-Clad Mila Kunis Speaks
Melena Ryzik interviews actress Mila Kunis from The New York Times,
Black Swan | Movies |
EW.com Owen Gleiberman
Black
Swan -- Film Review - The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
Black Swan
Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Dave Calhoun,
Black
Swan – review Phillip French from The Observer, January 23, 2011
Black Swan
– review Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian, January 20, 2011
Before
Black Swan: ballet and the movies
Sanjoy Roy from The Guardian,
What
Britain's ballet stars made of Black Swan
Judith Mackrell from The Guardian,
First
Night: Somewhere, Venice Film Festival - Reviews, Films ... Geoffrey Macnab at the
Liam
Lacey - The Globe and Mail
Black
Swan movie review -- Black Swan showtimes - The Boston Globe Wesley Morris
Review: Black
Swan - Reviews - Boston Phoenix
Peter Keough
'Black
Swan': A ballet movie with a psychodrama kick - Philly.com Steven Rea from The Philadelphia Inquirer
Philadelphia
City Paper [Sam Adams]
Austin
Chronicle [Kimberley Jones]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Movie
review: 'Black Swan' - Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan,
How
deep is the 'Black Swan' age divide? | 24 Frames | Los Angeles ... Steven Zeitchik at 24 Frames from The LA Times,
'Black
Swan's' risks pay off - Los Angeles Times
Steven Zeitchik and Ben Fritz from The
LA Times, January 16, 2011
Chicago
Tribune [Michael Phillips]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York Times
(registration req'd) Manohla Dargis,
A
Dark Transformation to Strains of ‘Swan Lake’ The New York October 31, 2010
Those
Undulating Swan Arms? Not So Easy to Do
The New York November 28, 2010
Arrabal, Fernando
VIVA LA MUERTE D 57
France Tunisia
Based on the director’s own 1959 novel, “Baal Babylon,” written while in political exile, this is a partly funny, mostly revolting, ultra violent surrealist take on the shocking effects of the Spanish Civil War, as seen through the eyes of a child whose mother informed on the subversive activities of her own husband, believing this would lead to leniency, while in fact it lead to torture and murder. Using graphic surrealist imagery such as dreams, fantasies, erotic visions, much of it colored by tinted videotape, and what seemed like neverending sequences of extreme brutality, including inhumane treatment of animals which was simply a horror show rivaling even THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST for gruesome imagery, this is a way over the top satire on Franco’s regime, beginning and ending with the military proclaiming there will be peace in the country – even if they have to kill everybody, shouting “Long live death!” The film has an unusual opening credit sequence featuring the brilliant hand drawn animation of Roland Topor, who along with Arrabal and Alexander Jodorowsky formed the Panic Movement, and is accompanied by a hauntingly lovely children’s song which repeats throughout the film, and is easily the best part of the film. The music was written by Jean-Yves Bosseur.
Arriaga, Guillermo
THE BURNING PLAIN
The
Village Voice [Aaron Hillis]
The Onion A.V. Club
[Scott Tobias]
Somewhere in Guillermo Arriaga’s three-film run with director Alejandro González Iñárritu—2000’s Amores Perros, 2003’s 21 Grams, and 2006’s Babel— Arriaga’s achronological, everything-is-connected screenplays lost their originality and surprise, and started to become more like shtick. Now absent Iñárritu’s considerable filmmaking chops, Arriaga’s directorial debut, The Burning Plain, sinks into full-on self-parody, slogging through themes of guilt and redemption with joyless, artless determination. Arriaga always rankled at the credit Iñárritu received for their collaborations, but Arriaga’s leaden touch behind the camera is a reminder of how much Iñárritu’s flair for montage and visceral conflict gave the scripts a necessary jolt of urgency and emotional force. Without him, it’s long, dead-eyed stares aplenty.
Holding to the puzzle structure that has long been Arriaga’s
stock in trade, the film’s bifurcated plot turns on a tragedy that echoes
through past and present. The mysteries of “Who’s who?” and “Who did what
when?” are easy to unravel, but Arriaga asks viewers to wait two hours to
confirm what they already know. In the meantime, there’s Charlize Theron as an
icy restaurant maître d’ from Portland who spends her off hours
punishing herself for past sins by engaging in desultory sex and cutting the
inside of her thighs with rocks. Her misery ties into a couple of affairs that
have a devastating effect on the families involved: one between a middle-aged
white woman (Kim Basinger) and a sensitive Hispanic in a
What must it be like to hang out with a Guillermo Arriaga character? Between the crying jags and the self-mutilation, are there some chuckles, too? There’s nothing wrong with Arriaga’s seriousness of purpose per se, but the characters in The Burning Plain are so narrowly defined by tragedy that they reveal no other facets of humanity. Since the revelations hidden within Arriaga’s intricate, multi-pronged narrative are obvious from the first reel, most of the film marks time in the excruciating wait for one extremely large shoe to drop. And once it does, the moment isn’t sad or cathartic or redemptive. It’s more like watching a wounded animal finally get put out of its misery.
The Burning Plain
Melissa Anderson from Film
Comment, September/October 2009
What’s that smell? The plain isn’t the only
thing that’s charred in screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga’s directorial debut;
subtlety goes up in flames too. The Burning Plain, which Arriaga also scripted, follows the same fractured,
parceled-out, time-toggling narrative structure found in his trilogy with
Alejandro González Iñárritu (Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and
The most damaged of the walking wounded in The
Burning Plain is Sylvia (Charlize Theron, also one
of the film’s executive producers), manager of an upscale restaurant perched on
a seaside cliff near
Arriaga’s slice-and-dice storytelling masquerades as
“art” when, more often than not, it can’t conceal the narrative’s egregious
gaps and gaffes. The writer-director clearly feels no need to explain how Gina
and Nick met or what Nick does or how long they’ve been seeing each other.
Maria is 12 but says she’s in the ninth grade. Did she skip two years? Or has
Arriaga’s time banditry become so excessive that he no longer considers it
necessary to remain consistent within his own highly contrived schemas? What
remains tediously constant is Arriaga’s soggy humanism, a universe in which
early psychological wounds are salved by blithe, easy acceptance and
understanding. Cultural, political, linguistic, and economic differences are
collapsed into the realm of the interpersonal.
The roles—for women especially—in Arriaga’s scripts have
often served as showboaty star vehicles for various blondes of varying talent:
Naomi Watts in 21 Grams, Cate Blanchett
in
Digital
Spy [Ben Rawson-Jones]
Movie Shark
Deblore [debbie lynn elias]
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
TIFF
Review: The Burning Plain - The Moviefone Blog Kim Voynar from Cinematical
Slant Magazine
[Fernando F. Croce]
eFilmCritic Reviews Mel Valentin
Film-Forward.com Lisa Bernier
Mark Reviews
Movies [Mark Dujsik]
High-Def
Digest [M. Enois Duarte]
DVD Verdict
(Blu-Ray) [Franck Tabouring]
Blu-rayDefinition.com
- Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Moviefreak
[Sara Michelle Fetters]
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Reel Film Reviews [David
Nusair]
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
curt
schleier, filmsoundoff.com
Georgia Straight
[Mark Harris]
The
Burning Plain - Film - Time Out New York
Nicolas Rapold
The
Burning Plain Review. Movie Reviews - Film - Time Out London Trevor Johnston
Independent.co.uk
[Nicholas Barber]
Independent.co.uk
[Robert Hanks]
Philadelphia
Weekly [Matt Prigge]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Amy Biancolli]
Chicago
Sun-Times [Roger Ebert]
New York
Times (registration req'd) A.O.
Scott
Artenstein, Isaac
BREAK OF DAWN – made for TV
Chicago
Reader (Jonathan Rosenbaum) capsule review
A docudrama about Pedro J. Gonzalez (Oscar Chavez), the first Spanish-language broadcaster in the U.S. and a former revolutionary who defended his fellow Mexicans from racial attacks during the Depression and who was eventually sent to prison on trumped-up rape charges as a means of silencing him politically. Written and directed by Isaac Artenstein, the film, which is largely in English, benefits from its careful attention to period detail (including an interesting use of color archival footage). There's some awkwardness in the two-dimensionality and declamatory acting style of the gringo villains--an unsavory bunch headed by LA district attorney Kyle Mitchell (Peter Henry Schroeder), who bears a striking resemblance to George Bush--but the interest of the story keeps the film watchable. With Maria Rojo, Tony Plana, and Pepe Serna (1988).
The Tech (MIT) (Elif S.
Ozen) review
BREAK OF DAWN is an independent film by writer-director Isaac
Artenstein about the conditions in which Hispanics in the
A former telegraph operator for Pancho Villa, Gonzales comes
with his wife to the
It is not long before the corrupt district attorney, in his
bid for re-election, buys radio time on Gonzalez show. The Spanish
advertisements, read by the now-famous Gonzalez, turn out to be instrumental in
mobilizing the Hispanic vote and ensuring the re-election of the district attorney.
However, as the depression sinks in, the Hispanic community becomes an easy
scapegoat for the right wing. Over half a million Hispanic workers, whose
presence had been crucial in building the Californian economy, are deported.
Gonzalez starts attending rallies and using his radio show to protest the
treatment of Hispanics. Suddenly, he is viewed as a threat by the
establishment, which decides to silence him. Finally, he is framed on a phony
rape charge through the contrivance of the DA and the
Break of Dawn is in many ways a bi-national film. The
cast is led by
So does the historical footage deftly threaded throughout the
movie. Considering that the film was made on a budget of less than a million
dollars (extremely low by
Oscar Chavez' acting is subtle and dignified. Rather than portraying Gonzalez simply as a heroic character in the traditional fashion, the script makes allowances for his fallacies, including his fling with an attractive tango singer. The audience forgives Gonzalez' mistakes since he is sincere in his repentance and is an honest man. Oscar Chavez wisely chooses not to overplay his part. Chavez' beautiful, deep voice and the songs chosen, a couple of which were written by Gonzalez himself, are some of the strongest assets of the film.
Maria Rojo is convincing as the devoted wife. Tony Plana is excellent as Gene Rodriguez, the right-hand man of the district attorney, who does not hesitate to persecute his fellow Hispanics in his quest to become politically powerful. Break of Dawn is interesting in its calm and direct presentation of problems associated with racism. Despite its technical limitations, this film deserves to be seen.
Break
of Dawn Christine List from Jump
Cut, June 1993
Fulvue Drive-in
dvd review Nicholas Sheffo
Arteta, Miguel
CHUCK & BUCK
A comedy about a
gay stalker with a mental age of about 12, this is so not-for-everyone! Shot on
digital video but looking like Plasticine, it beetles straight for the sexual
discomfort zone. Chuck (Weitz) is the straight guy. A record company exec, he
lives in an LA villa with his fiancée Carlyn (Colt), but ventures back to the
sticks, to pay his respects and offer comfort, when the mother of his former
best pal Buck dies. Buck (White) is a strange one. At the funeral, he seems
more unhappy about Chuck leaving again than about the death of his mother. He
comes on to Chuck in the bathroom: 'Do you remember the games we used to play?'
Chuck doesn't - or chooses not to. But Buck doesn't take rejection. He turns up
in LA, at Chuck's home and office. When his old friend sends him packing, he
writes a play instead, and hires a local theatre to stage it. This deliciously
and appropriately odd turn of events lifts the film just when you fear it's
about to fold. But it's the insidiously challenging nature of Buck's obsession
which makes the movie genuinely unsettling and more than just a goof-off.
Film
Threat, Hollywood's Indie Voice review [4/5] Ron Wells
Of all the films to premiere at Sundance 2000, there is one movie that best represented what indie
film is supposed to be. There should be no directorial
shenanigans, no slickness, no audience ass-kissing, and no disruptive
star-presence. There should be a well-written story, three-dimensional
characters, and the kind of subject matter that no studio would touch. The film
that has all this in abundance is "Chuck and Buck".
Buck O'Brien (Mike White) is a damaged adult whose psyche did not really
survive puberty. He's never really had any friends since his pal Chuck (Chris
Weitz) moved away with his family. Chuck and Buck are reunited for the first
time at the funeral of Buck's mother. Buck would like nothing better than to
reenact some of the more unnerving aspects of the pair's relationship, but the
clearly unnerved Chuck would prefer never to see his old pal again. He doesn't
really have that option as Buck, with nothing better to do, follows him back to
Los Angeles
What experience the cast lacks in
front of the camera they more than make up for behind it. Chris Weitz is the
co-writer of "ANTZ" and the producer of "American Pie". In
the role of Sam, a doofus who takes on Chuck's significance in Buck's life is
Paul Weitz, another co-writer of "ANTZ" and the director of
"American Pie". the primary instigator is Mike White who both stars
in and wrote "Chuck and Buck". Previously, he was a writer for both
"Dawson's Creek" and the late, lamented "Freaks and
Geeks" and worked on the film "Dead Man on Campus". Pulling
White's vision together in a movie that's more Dogme-'95 compliant (and
funnier) than Lars Von Trier's "The Idiots" is "Star Maps"
director Miguel Arteta.
This movie is NOT for everybody.
It's not the kind of picture that makes you feel good, it's the kind you walk
away from asking, "What the hell was that?" I like that sort of
thing. It's one of the best films of the year by making what is essentially a crazed
stalker sympathetic, endearing, AND very creepy. After all the crap I've seen
this year, Arteta and White should be praised just for stepping up to the plate
to challenge the audience, much less hitting one out of the park.
filmcritic.com
(Max Messier) review [4/5]
Forgiveness is a thing most people long for in their lives.
Forgiveness represents a silent and indescribable object that opens doors of
acceptance and slams shut avenues of obsession. It is a delicate object that is
difficult to find in people and their actions. What amazes me is how the
slightest gesture, vision, or tragedy can become the main element in the
catalyst of this emotion.
Chuck & Buck is a story of forgiveness, a tale of individuals locked
in obsession, denial, and ignorance. The film revolves around two guys, Chuck
and Buck, who were the best of mates growing up. When Chuck moves at the age of
11, the trauma ends up stunting Buck emotionally. Flash-forward about 17 years
and we encounter Buck, who still plays with Matchbox cars and keeps a glowing
blue orb lamp stuffed full of lollipops. Buck’s mother has just passed away so
he writes a letter to Chuck, whom he hasn’t seen since the departure, asking
him to come to her funeral.
As it turns out, Chuck has become Charles, a straight-laced guy living in LA
with a BMW, a girlfriend, a white-collar job -- the type of guy who put his
G.I. Joes away a long time ago. When Buck sees his new buddy at the funeral, he
becomes newly obsessed, packing all his things up and moving into a hotel room
in LA to try to reconnect with his old best friend. Then things get a bit
weird. Really weird.
Buck stalks Chuck at his office, shows up at his house late at night with a
collage of Chuck as a kid, writes a play about their “relationship,” and
generally provides enough edge to creep the crap out of the audience. The
unusual nature of Buck’s stalking lends a strange ambiguity to the motivations
of the character. To what ends will Buck go to win back Chuck's friendship?
The beauty of the film lies in the script written by Michael White, who also
plays Buck in the film. White creates a very original character that retains
the attitude and motivations of a child with a silent sexual prowess that comes
across innocently aggressive. The script also provides a number of U-turns,
which appear out of nowhere to generally up the spook factor of the film. White
also gives special attention to the supporting cast by creating characters that
are all in looking for answers to their own personal dilemmas.
The film also marks a revolution with the entire production done in digital
video format. Director Miguel Arteta is able to invoke some amazing angles by
climbing into tight spaces with the compactness of the digital video camera.
The lighting is equally excellent.
The only real flaw of the film is that we are never given a clear glimpse of
the characters as children. Their homes, their parents, and the things they did
together as children are never exposed. Dreamy flashbacks give evidence of the
boys’ friendship but don't define the reasons for their kinship.
Chuck & Buck is not a film for everyone. It leaves a strange
uneasiness at the end of the film that sits with you for days. But it's too
real to ignore.
Sight and Sound review Edward Lawrenson, December 2000
A stalker’s odyssey: arrested development, gay desire, and
queer comedy in Chuck & Buck
Carter Soles from Jump Cut, Spring 2007
Nitrate Online (Elias
Savada) review
CultureCartel.com
(John Nesbit) review [4/5] also seen
here: Old School Reviews
[John Nesbit]
Jigsaw Lounge (Neil
Young) review [7/10]
New York
Magazine (Peter Rainer) review
eFilmCritic.com
(Greg Muskewitz) review [5/5]
Film Freak
Central dvd review Travis Mackenzie
Hoover and William Shaw
ReelViews (James
Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Philadelphia City
Paper (Cindy Fuchs) review also seen
here: PopMatters (Cynthia
Fuchs) review
The Village Voice
[J. Hoberman]
Flipside Movie Emporium
(Michael Scrutchin) review [C-]
Xiibaro Productions
(David Perry) review [3/4]
Isthmus
(Kent Williams) review
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Dale Dobson) dvd review
DVD Talk (Heather
Picker) dvd review [4/5]
Reel.com
review [3.5/4] Rod Armstrong
Eye for Film (Angus Wolfe
Murray) review [2.5/5]
CineScene.com (Chris
Dashiell) review
PopMatters (Lucas
Hilderbrand) review
Goatdog's Movies
(Michael W. Phillips, Jr.) review [3.5/5]
Entertainment Weekly
review [A] Owen Gleiberman
Variety
(Dennis Harvey) review
The
Globe and Mail review [3/4] Liam
Lacey
Austin
Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Paula
Nechak
San
Francisco Examiner (Wesley Morris) review
San
Francisco Chronicle (Edward Guthmann) review
Los
Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The
New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
ARE YOU THE FAVORITE PERSON OF ANYBODY?
USA
Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody? Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
Yes, it's directed by Arteta, but this is a Miranda July short through and through. She wrote it, and the bare-bones idea (John C. Reilly holds a clipboard and asks the title question of July, Mike White, and cinematographer Chuy Chávez) is suffused with her moon-eyed, baby doll existentialism. And the truth is, I hadn't realized until seeing AYTFPOA? that Me and You and Everybody We Know has given me a bellyful of July's high-art guilelessness, enough to last me for years in fact. On its own objective terms, it's well-crafted and perfectly inoffensive, but at the same time it seems negligible almost by design. From the Accidental Conceptual Appositeness file: due to a bout of insomnia, I happened to see this short on the Sundance Channel at about 3 in the morning, and watched it without knowing exactly what it was. Only afterward did I discover that it was a 2005 film (it premiered at this year's Sundance) and that, according to my own rules for this site, I was obliged to review it. So, in a way, the film itself sort of stopped me in the street, clipboard in hand, and made a demand on my time, one which then expanded in my own mind long after the actual survey had been completed.
YOUTH IN REVOLT B 87
Directed by the same
person who directed the short film, Are
You the Favorite Person of Anybody? (2005), which is really a Miranda July
short, the performance artist and director of ME AND YOU AND EVERYONE WE KNOW
(2005), and this coming-of-age film bears the same quirky style of Ms. July as
well, even down to using the same cameraman, Chuy Chávez, but especially in the
oh-so-clever snarky dialogue that no humans on the planet actually speak, but
adds an artificial tone of near Coen Brothers subversive humor that dominates the
film. From the curiously interesting
casting, especially the teen leads Michael Cera and Portia Doubleday as Nick
and Sheeni, this film pays homage to Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in PRETTY
POISON (1968), another film where forbidden love goes criminally delusional in
order to stay together, and also BREATHLESS (1960), with posters of Jean-Paul
Belmondo in her room, where the only way they can stay together apparently is a
French gangster love-on-the-run fantasy.
Adapted from a C.D. Payne novel, Youth
in Revolt: the Adventures of Nick Twisp, the film explores the life of
unhappy teenagers whose unbearable burden is thinking they are all alone in the
world, where the thought of love replacing that loneliness may as well hold the
secret to the universe in their eyes.
Nick is a sexually
frustrated and nerdy yet literate teen with an acid tongue whose sole obsession
is getting laid, which might be due to the provocative sexual habits of his
divorced mother (Jean Sharp) with whom he lives, as sex is apparently all she
and her current low-life trucker boyfriend think about. His only friend is weirder and lonelier than
he is, where they exchange books with sexual references. When a group of irate sailors come calling on
the boyfriend after getting ripped off on a damaged car, Nick is more than
happy to turn the rat basterd in and even recommend that they might need to get
rough with him, which leads to an immediate unplanned vacation out of town,
shown though an amusing animation sequence, where they end up in a dilapidated
trailer park, which is actually filmed in the state of Michigan at the Lake
Leelanau trailer park. But it’s there
that he meets his true love, Sheeni, who has a love of all things French,
including an imaginary French lover François, as well as a current boyfriend
who excels in all physical activites, like the lead jock in the
neighborhood. Rather than be deterred,
however, Nick spends time with Sheeni but strikes out due to his own hesitant
nature. Calling on drastic measures, he
invents a new persona, François, a chain-smoking, self-serving swine who shows
no regard for authority but is a hound dog for the women, the kind of guy they
find irresistible, and like the best laid plans, his antics get Sheeni’s
immediate attention. Sheeni’s parents,
however, are religious fanatics who ship her off to a French language boarding
school to save her from this devil worshipper.
The supporting cast is
excellent, with Steve Buscemi taking a turn as Nick’s foul-mouthed father,
while Jean Sharp as his mother is an older and more sexually repressed version
of Kim Cattrall.
The Onion A.V.
Club review [B-] Nathan Rabin
As a nearly 500-page-long exploration of the insatiable sexual urges of a 14-year-old, rife with explicit gay sex, drug use, cross-dressing, and an overflowing, oversized cast of zany supporting characters, C.D. Payne’s cult novel Youth In Revolt poses formidable obstacles for cinematic adaptation. So perhaps it’s no surprise that Miguel Arteta’s well-intentioned film version feels simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked. It’s a manic, sometimes lively, sometimes lumpy mess with too many characters, too many subplots, and too much random wackiness that feels less like a proper adaptation than like a Cliffs Notes version that leaps from big moment to big moment while discarding everything between.
In a challenging dual role, Michael Cera toys with his adorably awkward man-child persona as a hormone-crazed teenager who uses his mastery of language to compensate for his fundamental powerlessness. He’s both the put-upon product of a broken home, and in his sinister alter ego, a suave, mustachioed Frenchman oozing self-confidence and callous disregard for anything but his own desires. When Cera meets the similarly hyper-verbal Portia Doubleday, he becomes obsessed with winning her at any cost, even if that entails cross-dressing, becoming willfully schizophrenic, and constantly deceiving parents and other corrupt authority figures.
Like last year’s Adventureland, Youth In Revolt is being marketed cynically as a quasi-sequel to Superbad when it’s really a broad, ambitious, agreeably wordy social satire in the vein of Terry Southern or A Confederacy Of Dunces. Chuck & Buck and The Good Girl director Arteta opts for a deadpan, unadorned style that undercuts the wackiness, but whenever the film’s tone gets away from him, Cera grounds the shenanigans with his fawn-like charm. Like its protagonist, Youth In Revolt is a little too clever and a little too willfully verbose for its own good, but it’s rare and a little wonderful to see a comedy about the sex lives of teenagers that suffers from an excess of ideas and ambition instead of a dearth.
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
During the first week of the new year the movie business traditionally marches off a cliff, falls into a dead zone and flounders there for months, releasing the unreleasable in the hope that moviegoers will be willing to watch the unwatchable. So much for tradition. This week offers a couple of fine new movies—"Youth in Revolt," an endearing coming-of-age comedy starring Michael Cera, and a remarkable German-language drama by Michael Haneke, plus a genre flick from a couple of brothers who thought that the last word about vampires hadn't been said.
In one way only, but a significant way, Mr. Cera reminds me of Billie Holiday, who achieved subtle marvels within a severely limited vocal range. His voice is breathy, wistful and piping, yet plaintive and emotive. His abstracted demeanor suggests an emotional range that is narrower still, yet his inhibitions are translucent, rather than opaque; directly behind them, intelligence seethes and passion smolders. It's remarkable that such a singular young actor—he's only 21—should have found so many worthy vehicles ("Superbad," "Juno," "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist") in such a short time, but he's done it again as Nick Twisp, the hero of "Youth in Revolt," which was directed with impressive flair by Miguel Arteta and adapted by Gustin Nash from the novels by C.D. Payne.
Nick has intelligence and passion to burn, but nowhere to
burn it. He lives with his divorced mother and her scruffy boyfriend, loves
classic foreign films, uses elevated language to confide his yearnings to a
journal, feigns sophistication with charming haplessness (a casual reference to
that craggy icon of American poetry, Bobby Frost) and lusts after a Lolita-like
apparition named Sheeni Saunders, who is played delightfully by Portia
Doubleday. Her boyfriend, Sheeni says, writes "futurist percussive
poetry," and Nick agrees: "He certainly seems to have a gift for
smashing ungraceful words together and deeming it a poem." From the moment
Sheeni appears in Nick's life, the plot turns on his frantic efforts to follow
her to the ends of
Inevitably, Mr. Cera's new film will be compared to "Juno." Both benefit from his sweet-spirited drollery, both revel in rich vocabularies. (I can't resist quoting one more of Nick's deadpan lines: "Like John Muir, I enter the forest with nothing but my journal and a sense of wonder.") The comparison isn't a fair one, given "Juno"'s dramatic complexity, and Ellen Page's virtuosity. "Youth in Revolt" is basically an absurdist ramble, but a terrifically likable ramble with several stretches of lively farce (an incendiary accident, a faux suicide, a nocturnal flight from a private-school dorm); beguiling spurts of animation; an eclectic score (including a Sinatra soundalike, Brigitte Bardot and Jo Stafford singing "My Romance"), and a supporting cast that includes Jean Smart, Mary Kay Place, Zach Galifianakis, Steve Buscemi, Justin Long, Fred Willard, Ray Liotta, M. Emmet Walsh, Adhir Kalyan, Ari Graynor and Erik Knudsen.
One more thought. If you've been looking for a film whose
hero uses the subjunctive frequently and correctly, "Youth in Revolt"
is it.
User reviews from imdb Author: Chris Knipp from
'Youth in Revolt' adapts the first three volumes of C.D. Payne's six-book
series about Nick Twist, a smart and, in his own opinion anyway,
more-than-usually horny 14-year-old in Oakland ("a large, torpid city
across from San Francisco") who reports in daily journal form on a series
of adventures encountered on the way to losing his virginity, despite the obstacles
set up by his irresponsible divorced parents. Ironically, though pointed at
today's young teens, 'Revolt's' R rating excludes them -- though the books are
far more sexually explicit. Whether somehow this will become a cult movie via
Netflix is hard to say. It's pretty faithful to the books, leaving out lots,
but adding or changing little. Unfortunately Arteta's flat direction, and focus
on the action aspects -- an accident, a fire, a botched fake suicide, invasion
of the girls' dorm of a French-language prep school in Santa Cruz -- excises
much of the self-satisfied wit of the books and Nick's one flourish, his
intellectual and literary showing off. The film necessarily loses the flavor of
a day-to-day-journal, though most of the characters tend to talk in the same
ornate, overly-polite style as Nick's entries.
C.D. Payne is no Salinger. His books serve as page-turners for young readers,
but they're nothing special. There's a curious sense of being out of time. Is
this the Nineties, when the books were begun?-- or the youth of Payne himself,
who was born in 1949? Nick's girlfriend Sheeni (Portia Doubleday)'s fascination
with Belmondo, chanteur Serge Gainsbourg, and the existentialists, -- and the
general innocence of the behavior -- would suggest earlier days, but in the
movie, people have cell phones, and a prevalance of 'shrooms and blunts makes
this post-Breathless (francophile Sheeni's favorite movie). The main point was
to keep the incidents coming, and Payne went on with "The Further Journals"
and finally the adventures of Twist's younger brother.
Young Canadian actor Michael Cera, the star of Miguel Arteta's adaptation of
this movie, who's now twenty-one, was already a TV veteran before he was ten.
Though he appeared in many episodes of the cable series "Arrested
Development," and in retrospect we realize he played the young Chuck
Barris in George Clooney's droll ramble 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,' he
reached a kind of nerdy, adorable mega-stardom only a couple years ago with two
big hits, 'Juno' and 'Superbad,' followed by the equally charming if less seen
'Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist.'
What has Mike done with his stardom? Well, he played opposite Jack Black in
Harold Ramis' slapstick (and generally panned) prehistoric comedy 'Year One'
and co-starred with his now ex-girlfriend Charlene Yi in the poorly received
'Paper Heart.'
Cera has good timing and is adept at delivering lines, which makes him well
suited for comedy. His limitations in other areas appear in this new outing.
He's both the hero and voice-over narrator, Nick Twist and Nick's bolder and
more dashing imaginary alter ego, Francois, who goads him on to bolder action.
There is a certain nonchalance in the flat style. Under ideal circumstances it
might seem elegant. If you could be nerdy and cool at the same time Michael
Cera is it, and girls do find him cute. He rarely appears anything but relaxed.
But the high-pitched voice is inexpressive. The range is from A to B, and this
is highlighted by how little success Cera has in making Francois seem any
different from Nick, despite a little mustache, tight pants, and a lot of
cigarettes (amusingly, puffed on even while running fast through the woods,
while Nick lags clumsily behind). With this new performance, Cera continues to
seem enormously appealing, but for conventional starring roles, cripplingly
limited. He's just too pale and bland and androgynous, and the more he's cast
as a horny guy the more far-fetched that seems. Anything with him in it seems
de-fanged.
Maybe it doesn't matter. You either get it or you don't, and there are plenty
of young readers who insist these are "the best books ever." This is
as good a time as any for some lighthearted teenage adventures. (The adaptation
was co-written by Gustin Nash, the guy who did 'Charlie Bartlett,' a so-so
movie about a young high school entrepreneur starring Anton Yelchin.)
'Youth in Revolt' casts some veritable cult actors, who include M. Emmett Walsh
as Sheeni's born-again-Christian dad and Mary Kay Place as her mom, Steve Buscemi
as Nick's dad, Ray Liotta as a cop who gets involved with his floozy mom (Jean
Smart). But the presence of such memorable thespians only emphasizes how little
developed their characters are. I liked relative newcomer Adhir Kalyan as
Veejay, Nick's erudite school friend and fellow would-be seducer of women: he
gives his lines some juice. Best of all is Justin Long, who slides into the
scene as Sheeni's sly older brother. He is the only unexpected character. Long
can always do a lot with a small part, and when he gets a bigger one, like in
Raimi's recent old-fashioned horror movie 'Drag Me to Hell,' he can be equally
appealing. And there are others, such as comedy veteran Fred Willard as an
excessively good-hearted neighbor.
The director, Miguel Arteta, did annoying but memorable work with writer Mike
White in 'Chuck and Buck,' and the pair made something very droll in 'The Good
Girl.' One wonders if Arteta was the ideal person to do this job. He seems just
to be walking through it.
The Eighties were the time of the movies that celebrated youth and its many
voices, ranging from S.E. Hinton and 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' to the dark
Alpha Girl portraiture of 'Heathers,' and John Hughes' classics. This lacks
their warmth and bite.
But I still like Cera, and as has been said by a preview audience member,
"His fans will be in heaven" with this.
Slant Magazine
review [2/4] Andrew Schenker
Pajiba
(Daniel Carlson) review
Film
School Rejects [Rob Hunter]
Mark
Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
PopMatters
(Cynthia Fuchs) review
Cinematical
(Erik Davis) review
Village
Voice (Robert Wilonsky) review
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [2.5/4]
CBC.ca
Arts review Lee Ferguson
Screen
International (Tim Grierson) review
User reviews from imdb Author: Movie_Muse_Reviews from IL, USA
filmcritic.com
(Christopher Null) review [3/5]
Black
Sheep Reviews [Joseph Belanger]
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
The Land of Eric
(Eric D. Snider) review [B-]
One Guy's Opinion
(Frank Swietek) review [C]
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [D+]
Entertainment Weekly
review [C+] Lisa Schwarzbaum
The
Hollywood Reporter review Sheri
Linden
Variety
(Peter Debruge) review
Washington
Post (Ann Hornaday) review
Where's
the revolution in 'Youth in Revolt?' - SunGazette.com ...
Austin
Chronicle review [3/5]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Amy Biancolli]
Chicago
Tribune (Michael Phillips) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
Keeping
Options Open, Novelist Tows Museum on Road to Dream Jesse McKinley from The New York Times,
Youth
in Revolt Author C.D. Payne Owns a Traveling Oddities Museum ... Amos Barshad from The New York Times,
Miranda July - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
C. D. Payne - Wikipedia, the
free encyclopedia
A history of Youth in Revolt Nick Twist website
CEDAR RAPIDS B 85
The title is a little
misleading, as despite the supposed Iowa location, most of the characters come
from other Midwest states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and even Nebraska, while
the film itself was shot entirely in the state of Michigan. While it’s not easy to wrap yourself around
the semi-comatose happenings of a small town insurance convention, probably no
place on earth one would rather not be, yet for all its attention to Midwestern
detail, this film starts extremely slow but eventually finds a tailwind of
crude comedy that’s actually pretty funny.
Ed Helms is perfectly cast as the ultra ordinary and socially awkward
Tim Lippe, a conservative and near invisible mid 30’s insurance man covering
the farm towns of Brown Valley, Wisconsin, a place where the world changes at a
glacial pace, and where Tim’s once-a-week “pre-engagement” girlfriend is none
other than his 7th grade science teacher (Sigourney Weaver). After the strange death of their leading
sales rep, the boss sends Tim to win the company’s coveted 2-Diamond Award,
which they’ve won three years running, though Tim is strangely apprehensive,
thinking the world is suddenly moving too fast.
His boss has confidence in him, but places extra pressure on him as he
expects results. Honestly, there’s nothing
at this point to suggest it’d be a good idea to remain in the theater unless
perhaps you’re Amish and you skipped school to see it. But it’d be worth your patience.
With little fanfare,
Tim boards a plane for the first time in his life and heads for a thriving big
city metropolis where he immediately lands in insurance convention nirvana, a
place he describes as
After leading the
audience exactly where they think this is going, writer Phil Johnston sends
them on an express train veering out of control, where Reilly’s humor actually
becomes hysterical and the straight-laced Ed Helms becomes the bon vivant man
about town, where his heartfelt earnestness turns him into a chick magnet,
which all but knocks playboy Ziegler off his feet in admiration, immediately
declaring him a best friend for life, even if he just got to know him. The zaniness is crude, but appealing, as by
the end of this picture, despite a series of setbacks and moments of extreme
anguish and despair, a man constantly challenged by unforeseen forces, the
perennially uptight Helms will try just about anything, as he’s at the end of
his rope, yet his inner self is basically so admirable that the fun is seeing
him get mixed up on a road journey with lowlifes and swindlers, all thinking
he’s easy pickings, as he has to somehow navigate his way through this moral
purgatory of lost souls. It’s no less
than a WIZARD OF OZ (1939) journey, as our everyman hero, with the help of his
friends, is forced through his adventures, which include a rollicking ride with
a friendly convention prostitute (Alia Shawkat), to re-evaluate what really
matters in his own life and damn if there’s not a surge of Capra-esque emotion
by the end of this picture—remarkable that something that started so
predictably lame became so irreverently enjoyable by the end, continuing the
bad jokes even over the end credits.
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Directed by Miguel Arteta,
A noisier but arguably less idiosyncratic experience than attending an actual Midwestern business convention, Cedar Rapids is the nominal story of Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), a contortedly straight-arrow insurance agent even by small-town Wisconsin standards, save for the affair he's conducting with a bemused older woman (Sigourney Weaver) who happens to be his former seventh-grade teacher. (Coaxing her for early memories of him, Tim receives the snappish answer, "You were 12.") Dispatched by his brusque boss to the titular Iowa city for an annual industry gathering, Helms's guileless dweeb in baggy sweaters, buttoned-up polo shirts, and a money belt seems like a doofy, contrived cousin to The 40-Year-Old Virgin—a naïf who goes wide-eyed at rental cars and chain hotels, and is oblivious to the come-on of a prostitute despite his carnal adventures with the hometown cougar. Phil Johnston's script sets up Tim as the butt of sheltered-hick humor, and Helms's polite shield of a grin doesn't dispel the burden of his neo-bowl haircut (the resemblance to Dylan Baker's disturbed dad in Todd Solondz's Happiness is striking).
Fortunately, once Tim arrives in Cedar Rapids the arch tone is disrupted, and the movie nearly saved, by John C. Reilly as "Deanzie" Ziegler, a steamroller of an ass-grabbing jokester who recklessly mocks the insurance circle's holy-roller president (Kurtwood Smith) while leading roommate Tim through a series of hotel bacchanals (fairly tepid by wild-man-comedy standards) and counseling him on how to "dance with the tiger" when the neophyte's quest to win an award for his firm appears sunk. It's not Reilly's caveman dialogue that makes him authentic ("That's a pube on your chin! Eating tuna from the bottom shelf?"), but his insistent brio, graceless swagger, and how his puttylike mug captures the glassiness of the shitfaced better than any actor working. Here, his supreme moment comes marching into a pool, clothed, hoisting a cocktail, and helmeted with a bulbous trashcan lid, while Tim enjoys wet foreplay with a coquettish, married insurance vet (Anne Heche). You may long for a reconceived scenario with Reilly as the conquering, mooning hero, but Helms's gullible-hearted innocent and his hard-knocks education take unfortunate precedence.
One wonders what the generally offbeat director Miguel Arteta saw in this job besides a healthy fraction of The Hangover's grosses (or why Fox's Searchlight imprint is on this broadly-aimed project) as the last act of Cedar Rapids settles into a formulaic personal-growth-and-victory pattern. There's a detour to a druggy backwoods party whose feeble gags include casting Rob Corddry as a tattooed thug, and Isiah Whitlock Jr., the Wire actor playing a straight-laced and likely closeted conventioneer, breaking out his Omar Little impression to intimidate the white trash. If Helms has the comedic chops to carry a movie, his WASPy Candide here isn't the vessel; and if the film's restoration of moral order in the goddamn insurance trade leaves a bad taste, at least there's a purgative Deanzie Ziegler cigarette-lighter trick for the end-credits epilogue.
Review: Cedar
Rapids - Film Comment Violet Lucca from Film Comment, March/April 2011
I say with a smirk, a shrug, an ashamed mumble: I am a native of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. And as a native, I could fill a book with its contradictions—somewhere between (sub)urban sprawl and rural scrub, equal parts an oasis of progressive cosmopolitanism and the “real America” of TV news B-roll footage featuring obese people ambling through malls. Instead, I’m confined to judging its representation in Miguel Arteta’s new movie, which posits The Crapids (in local parlance) as Sin City for ineffable dillweeds. In this respect, yes, it’s just like being there.
The cornsilk-thin plot of Cedar Rapids revolves around Tim Lippe (Ed Helms), a bubbly insurance agent and loveable hayseed from Brown Valley, Wisconsin, who is sent to represent his firm at a big annual insurance convention after the company’s star agent accidentally pulls a Michael Hutchence. Golly-geeing all the way, he enters an overbooked hotel full of punning, unnecessary-abbreviation-loving, back-slapping, Old Spice–soaked insurance salesmen. Taken under the wings of superego/id duo Ronald “The Ronimal” Wilkes (The Wire’s Isiah Whitlock Jr.) and Dean “The Deanzie” Ziegler (John C. Reilly), the earnest Lippe undergoes the standard bro-comedy personal makeover: he finally lets loose, get drunk, screws the hottest chick available, and stands up to the corrupt association’s chairman and his greedy boss.
Helms’s physicality and line readings are so flawlessly, casually prepubescent that they put a new spin on an otherwise played-out manchild type. He’s like a nephew in a world full of uncles. Meanwhile, as the Byronic hero, Reilly gets most of the big laughs, notably in a scene in which he gives a wilted Lippe a pep talk, sipping a Bloody Mary and dressed only in boxer shorts and tan socks. The film’s overarching comedic goal is a prolonged sense of discomfort that, at its high points, will make you cringe and snicker in equal measure. To wit: the palpable sexual tension between Lippe and Macy Vanderhei (Sigourney Weaver), his former seventh-grade teacher and girlfriend back in Brown Valley—his loving gazes suggesting at any moment that he’ll finally slip up and call her “Mommy.” Conversely, this aesthetic of comedic awkwardness, combined with the seemingly endless slew of lame, barely-there jokes, leaves the impression that you’re watching an extended auto insurance commercial, with a typically bland protagonist.
While Cedar Rapids peddles a rather myopic portrait of masculinity, its women are surprisingly nuanced. A nearly unrecognizable Anne Heche plays Joan Ostrowski-Fox, a married-with-children insurance agent who effortlessly holds her own with the alcohol intake and arm-punching humor of her male colleagues. She beds Lippe with little remorse, and afterwards advises him that, in spite of the crippling guilt he feels, what happens in Cedar Rapids should stay in Cedar Rapids. I’m not suggesting that gender equality necessarily entails women assuming iniquitous character traits, but it’s refreshing to see a woman, let alone a mother, who doesn’t confuse sexual conquest with consumerism. She does it because she can, because she wants to. The candor with which her post-infidelity phone-call home is depicted is one of a handful of genuine moments in a movie that is otherwise winking in premise and execution. Alia Shawkat (who played Maeby on Arrested Development) is similarly complicated as an insouciant hooker who escorts Lippe to a rural house party and introduces him to meth inside her uncle’s rusted-out Chevy. She’s as hopeless as he is hopeful, yet they manage to learn from each other without exchanging body fluids.
The risks Cedar Rapids takes may not always pay off, but as a general rule, I would advise spending 86 minutes of your life with the movie rather than the city itself.
Movie
Review: Cedar Rapids (2011) – RopeofSilicon.com Movie News ... Brad Brevet
A classic movie trope involves the innocent dweeb introduced into the unfamiliar world of the cool kids only to be picked on until the end of the film, which is typically when the cool kids are made to realize the dweeb isn't as dweeby as they took him to be. In fact, shocker alert, the dweeb may in fact be even cooler than those so-called cool kids, or at the very least they all have something in common. Gasp!
Thankfully, director Miguel Arteta's Cedar Rapids takes this story-telling cliche and goes in the opposite direction, dodging all the pitfalls that would otherwise derail it. The result is a very funny film with a quartet of characters we can all relate to in one way or another.
In this story our dweeb is played by Ed Helms (The Hangover)
starring as Tim Lippe, a stereotypical, naive small town insurance agent
working for BrownStar Insurance. How naive is he? Well, when Roger (Thomas
Lennon), the office hot shot, dies due to an untimely and tragically comedic
death, Tim, against all common sense, thinks it was just an accident. Tim still
believes Roger lived by the code, which encourages BrownStar agents to lead
good natured, God fearing lives, traits that have helped BrownStar win the
prestigious Two Diamonds Award for the last two years from the ASMI Sales
Convention in
Roger's death creates a problem for Bill Krogstad (Stephen Root), Tim's self-centered boss who is now without the smooth-talking face of BrownStar. So not only is Roger dead, he's disgraced himself and the company and Bill must now figure out who he's going to send to Cedar Rapids to clear up the rumors and earn the agency its third Two Diamonds Award. Who he's send is obvious and you would think the comedy that comes as a result would be obvious as well. It is… and it isn't.
Helms's performance as Tim walks a fine line between stupid, self-aware and occasionally pitiful, primarily due to the fact he's a good guy that's just so uninformed of the world around him you can't help be feel for sorry him. This is the kind of character trait that can only be taken so far before you begin to feel he's so stupid he deserves everything that's coming to him. Thankfully, while Tim occasionally bumps up against the edge of doltish senselessness, he never oversteps the boundary. He's also surrounded by a strong supporting cast that includes John C. Reilly, Anne Heche and Isiah Whitlock Jr.
It seems like it's been forever since I've seen Heche in a film
(I don't even remember her uncredited role in The Other Guys), and her
appearance here is a breath of fresh air. Heche delivers a wholly realized and
funny character who lives by the motto "What happens in
Then there's Reilly. John C. Reilly is known for his string of outrageous and funny characters, but his performance here as Dean "Deanzie" Ziegler is an absolute classic. Foul-mouthed and without a filter, Reilly plays Dean to the hilt, and he's a guy we've all known and met. While his introduction had me thinking he was going to be a barrel full of increasingly tedious racial and sex-fueled jokes, he actually turns out to supply just as much a moral center to the story as his three co-stars.
The story also rings particularly true, at least enough to the point a lot of the outrageous behavior that goes on doesn't seem too far featched. In what now feels like a past life, I was a salesman for a little over a year and a lot of the behavior on display at the Cedar Rapids sales convention isn't particularly out of bounds, neither is the lingo. On top of that, first time feature screenwriter Phil Johnston has created characters with flaws not unlike those of you or I. The characters, while sometimes over the top, morally corrupt or downright stupid, remain relatable.
Only once during the film's short 86-minute running time, did I
look upon it as losing a complete grip on its own reality as Tim goes on an
out-of-nowhere drug binge. The moment squeezes out a few laughs, but it didn't
fit the movie or characters even though it did offer a solid farewell moment
between Tim and a
Overall I got a lot of laughs and a solid sense of friendship and
camaraderie out of
The
Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
The Reel
Critic.com [Lisa Minzey]
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Arzner, Dorothy
"Dorothy Arzner" biography from UCLA Film & Television Archives
As a young woman Dorothy Arzner studied medicine but became interested in filmmaking after visiting a movie studio. She held jobs as a script typist, reader and script supervisor, film editor (for films including BLOOD AND SAND and RUGGLES OF REDGAP) and screenwriter. She directed her first film, FASHIONS FOR WOMEN in 1927 and was the first woman to join the newly formed Directors' Guild of America. Her commercially successful career spanned 25 years, ending in 1943 with FIRST COMES COURAGE. After her retirement, Arzner initiated the first filmmaking course at the Pasadena Playhouse, filmed numerous Pepsi Cola commercials at Joan Crawford's request and taught at UCLA's Film Department.
Although Arzner thought of herself as an ordinary working
director rather than a pioneer, her status as one of the first women directors,
and the only one at the time working within the Hollywood studio system, has
attracted feminist attention. By examining the critique of women as spectacle
implicit in the DANCE, GIRL, DANCE (1940) and pointing out the self-determined,
ambitious and independent women in films such as WORKING GIRLS (1932) and
CHRISTOPHER STRONG (1933), critics have reassessed the content and structure of
her films. Although she was working within the constraints of the studio
system, Arzner has stated that because she was not dependent on movies for her
living, she was always willing to give a film to another director if she
couldn't make it her way.
ArtandCulture
Artist: Dorothy Arzner
Dorothy Arzner claimed she didn’t have to rely on directing to keep food on the table. She always insisted she could do what she wanted, how she wanted, and filmmaking was just one area in which she would have her way.
Arzner grew up in Los Angeles where her parents owned a restaurant frequented by "Hollywood types." Perhaps it was this early exposure to the scene that prompted her later film ambitions. But in fact, despite her later confidence, hers was not an instant success. Arzner got her start as a stenographer typing scripts, then graduated to cutting and editing film. With 52 edited films under her belt and nothing to lose, she negotiated a deal to direct a film called "Fashions for Women" (1927) for Paramount. From that point on, nothing could stop her; she directed more than 50 films between 1927 and 1943. And she was the only female director working in Hollywood during those years. Not just for Paramount, but in the entire industry.
Arzner’s films have a knack for capturing and highlighting the ambiguities of life -- in particular, women's lives. She came to be known for directing "women’s pictures" that challenged the social norms of the times. "Dance, Girl, Dance" (1940) indicts the world of burlesque dancing for the empty spectacle it makes of women: quite renegade for the time. “Christopher Strong” (1933) -- Arzner at her finest -- is a high-drama piece that features a woman who must negotiate between her man, her pregnancy, and her career. In a break from most “working girl” flicks at the time, it refuses to domesticate its wayward heroine: she commits suicide rather than conform to the demands of the man she loves.
Some critics have seen a hidden lesbian agenda working in Azner’s films. Azner was in fact a lesbian, and the image of her dressed in men’s clothing with pretty actresses on her arm is understandably compelling. But does “Christopher Strong” suggest that heterosexuality itself is the source of female trouble or simply more general gender inequality? It’s hard to submit a concrete answer, since Azner vehemently refused to be categorized as anything but simply “director.”
In 1943 Azner contracted pneumonia; after her recovery, she
decided not to return to directing features, turning instead to documentaries,
commercials, and teaching. She died in 1979, unknown outside the abstruse world
of early film scholarship. In more recent years, though, film historians and
feminists have rediscovered Arzner and the one-time prominence of female
directors.
glbtq >> arts >>
Arzner, Dorothy profile by
Jacqueline Jenkins
Although not the first woman to direct films in
Arzner had been familiar with the film industry almost her
entire life. Although she was born in
Arzner negotiated her directorial debut at
During this time, Arzner received a substantial amount of media attention as a "woman director" in the popular press; and as a woman, her work and her career were constantly scrutinized. For all this, however, Arzner remained enigmatic, even provocatively so: observers commented on the juxtaposition of her petite figure and her "mannish" dress; journalists reassured readers that this woman gave her orders on the set with a soft and "feminine" voice; and publicity photos regularly romanced her relationship with her female stars, who included such actresses as Clara Bow, Claudette Colbert, Rosalind Russell, Katherine Hepburn, and Joan Crawford.
Arzner's lesbianism seems to have been well-known within the
As with the films of all directors who worked within the creative constraints imposed by the economic and ideological demands of the early studio system, Arzner's films must be read cautiously for signs of her personal politics. Nevertheless, her films are, predominantly, films that convey the varieties of women's experiences and desires, and the tenacity of women's relationships with other women, often within the intersections of gender and social class.
Arzner's films consistently depict controversial topics: extra-marital sex and pregnancy (Working Girls [1931], Christopher Strong [1933]), cross-class relationships (The Bride Wore Red [1937]), prostitution and/or erotic display (Nana [1934], Dance, Girl, Dance [1940]). Some viewers have detected a playful homoeroticism in the schoolgirl comedy The Wild Party (1929).
Even those films that appear most "conventional" succeed in critiquing the actual conventions they participate in; for instance, in Craig's Wife (1936), the very character of Harriet Craig (Rosalind Russell) offers a compelling indictment of the institution of marriage and the social and economic dependency that described the lot of many wives.
Similarly, in an important and much-cited scene, Arzner exposes and deflates the power of the "gaze" (understood both in terms of gender--i.e., male--and social class) that underpins most classical American cinema: in Dance, Girl, Dance, Judy (Maureen O'Hara), a ballet dancer forced by poverty to dance in vaudeville, confronts her audience, and in a role-reversal that anticipates much later feminist criticism and feminist filmmaking, tells them exactly how she and the other dancers on the stage see them.
Arzner left
After her
As a woman "pioneer" in the film industry, and as a lesbian, Arzner has attracted considerable attention recently. She has been recognized for her innovations in using sound and her films, though many are still hard to find outside of archives, have seen a renewed interest both academically and popularly.
Dorothy
Arzner Theresa L. Geller from Senses
of Cinema, April 2003
Filmmakers Who
Matter: Dorothy Arzner
extensive profile written by Jordan Richardson from BlogCritics magazine,
Dorothy Arzner >
Overview - AllMovie bio
from Hal Erickson
Dorothy Arzner bio
page from NNDB
Dorothy
Arzner's Wife: heterosexual sets, homosexual scenes ... Lee Wallace from The Oxford Journal
Dorothy
Arzner's trousers Jane Gaines from
Jump Cut, July 1992
BBC - Radio
4 - Woman's Hour -Dorothy Arzner - Nobody's Woman BBC
Radio 4,
Dorothy
Arzner Find-A-Grave
Dorothy Arzner - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
THE WILD PARTY
A mischievous silent
film featuring Clara Bow
as Stella, a flighty girl with hair of fluff and heart (finally) of gold. In a
transatlantic tale of the Angela Brazil genre, Stella's good-time girl
stereotype is challenged a) by another student for whom studying is a serious
thing, and b) by a heroic professor whose savage heart beats beneath a pocket
of tweed and a respect for learning. Despite the dashing moral ending, it's a
very enjoyable film, and Arzner handles the exposition of and challenge to the
stereotype very astutely, especially in a scene of sexually violent response by
some men in a bar to a deliberately provocative bevy of girls.
"She's a red-haired vamp, a little vixen and the spirit of the jazz age, all in one." Vivacious Clara Bow was 24 and already had made close to 50 films when Dorothy Arzner directed her in The Wild Party. In January 1929, the month she started filming her first talkie, she was the #1 star in America and received 45,000 fan letters; Colleen Moore was a distant second. A year later, Bow was washed up, from a combination of second-rate films, extreme mike fright and fallout from a series of scandals. MGM waited 2 years to put their top star, Greta Garbo, in a talkie. Paramount waited two weeks before Clara Bow went before the microphone.
The Wild Party is about a flirty co-ed attending a college where no one ever studies, and her romantic conquest of a stuffy anthropology professor, played by Frederic March. It capitalized not only on the 1920s craze for college films, but echoed Bow's greatest success, It in its theme of female friendship and Bow's sparing a friend's reputation by taking the blame for a transgression herself. (One of the other girls, Faith Morgan, is played by Marceline Day, Buster Keaton's leading lady in The Cameraman. Her death in February, 2000, breaks yet another link to the silent era.) The story may have fit her "like a wet bathing suit," but Bow said she felt "constant fear" throughout filming; sound recording paralyzed her. According to legend, Arzner improvised by attaching the stationary microphone to a fishing pole to follow Bow around the set, giving her more freedom than had been possible, but often the mike had to be hidden, or her eyes would unconsciously drift towards it.
Her Brooklyn accent was considered a liability in the days when "Kansas City British" was the ideal, but as the New York Times noted, "Miss Bow's voice is better than the narrative. It is not overmelodious in delivery, but it suits her personality." Bow didn't feel that way. "The sound of herself on screen was everything she had expected and worse, and although Dorothy Arzner reassured her, Clara was inconsolable. 'How can I be in pictures with a voice like that?' she wailed. Then she burst into tears." A performance like Ruth Chatterton's in Madame X was considered to be the epitome of talkie art at the time. Ironically, the glacial pace and ghastly artifice of Madame X is greatly inferior by modern standards to the inept enthusiasm of The Wild Party.
Bow's childhood had been impoverished and sordid. She entered a Motion Picture magazine "Fame and Fortune Contest" and visited the office to hand deliver her 2 for $1 photos to a contest manager who wrote "Called in person--very pretty" on them. Waiting at the end of the semi-finalists audition line wearing the slum version of Cinderella's rags, she learned from her rivals' mistakes. Her private miseries allowed easy access to her volatile emotions and on camera she was a wonder. Sixteen year old Clara Bow won the "Fame and Fortune Contest" and went to Hollywood. After she became a huge star with her performances in The Plastic Age, Mantrap and It, the studio ruthlessly began to exploit her fame, as did her wastrel family and a conniving staff. Her salary was the lowest of any major star and bonuses were put in a trust fund contingent on her adhering to the morals clause in her contract. Paramount began to crank out formula films while charging her for incidentals, like 25 cents for each photo of herself she used. Richard Griffith called her "the most uneducated aspirant to stardom ever to make the grade, Marilyn Monroe not excepted." She had no interest in being a phony and had few friends in status-conscious 1920s Hollywood.
When Turner Classic Movies showed The Wild Party as part of their Women Film Pioneers Series, Robert Osborne asked Duke University's Jane Gaines, "Why Dorothy Arzner (as director)?" and she replied "Why not?" which is Talmudic, but unenlightening. Arzner, a darling of 70s era feminists hungry for a role model in the "classical Hollywood cinema" era embraced her, but she is a director without either a commercial hit or, arguably, an artistic masterpiece. She was a skilled editor, having cut both The Covered Wagon and Valentino's Blood and Sand; she then directed four silent films, including Bow in 1927's Get Your Man with Charles "Buddy" Rogers. Arzner admired Bow: "She was just automatically a natural. A marvelous actress, full of animation and projection of her thoughts and emotions…she understood the emotional content of every scene. Whichever way she did it was so right, so alive. It was like a dancing flame on the screen." But, Clara's favorite directors were Victor Fleming and Clarence Badger, and one would think Paramount would have assigned her one of those proven hit-makers. That Arzner directed The Wild Party may be another indication that the studio felt Bow's sound career was doomed.
Clara Bow was a frisky embodiment of twenties hedonism. Her
slight stammer, Brooklyn accent and nerves, coupled with her studio's cavalier
attitude towards her fame would soon take its toll. Her friend and secretary,
Daisy DeVoe was suspected of embezzling from her, and when taken to court in
1931 retaliated by revealing Bow's enjoyment of gambling, sex and booze. A
moral backlash and her growing mental illness swamped her shaky foray into the
talkies and her career evaporated. She married cowboy actor Rex Bell and
retired from the screen. Many years later, when her favorite actress, Marilyn
Monroe, committed suicide, Bow explained, "A sex symbol is a heavy load to
carry when one is tired, hurt and bewildered."
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
(Dennis Schwartz) review [C]
The
New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
CHRISTOPHER STRONG
Chicago
Reader (Dave Kehr) capsule review
Tiresome, conventional 30s melodrama about a stiff Britisher
(Colin Clive) torn between his wife (Billie Burke) and an aristocratic aviatrix
(Katharine Hepburn). Dorothy Arzner's direction encourages feminist sympathies,
only to dash them with a punitive finale that seems harsh even for the period.
As Molly Haskell has noted, the costume design carries the brunt of the
politics--Hepburn's jumpsuit is a revolution in itself (1933, 77 min.).
Early Hollywood movies
(re)claimed for feminist film history sometimes require complex analysis to
explain their relevance, but this teaming of Arzner and Hepburn is absolutely
central to an understanding of women's place within classical Hollywood.
Hepburn plays pioneer aviatrix Cynthia Darrington, courted by Christopher
Strong (though why the title should bear his name and not hers is a mystery).
She plays him along but independently pursues her career, telling Strong 'Don't
ever stop me doing what I want', only to fall into typical Hollywood compromise
and find herself pregnant by her (married) lover in the last reel. Suicide is
offered as the only way out, but even in her dying moments (a high-altitude
record-breaking flight) she rebels against society's required sacrifice and
tries to replace her oxygen mask. Fascinating precisely for the vacillation of
its central (female) character, and for the way in which aviation (itself a
uniquely 20th century activity virtually closed to women) is used as a metaphor
for film-making and women's attempts to gain a foothold in that male-dominated
territory.
Turner Classic
Movies review Margarita Landazuri
Katharine Hepburn had made a dazzling film debut as John
Barrymore's daughter in A Bill of Divorcement (1932). There had never
been anyone like her before in movies, and critics and audiences didn't quite
know what to make of her angular looks and aristocratic speech, her confident
and somewhat mannered acting. She was odd, but she was also strikingly
original. Autocratic producer David Selznick personally disliked Hepburn. He
was annoyed by her independence and constant challenging of his authority, but
he knew a star when he saw one, and he wasted no time in signing her to a
long-term contract at RKO. For Hepburn's second film and first starring role,
Selznick had chosen Three Came Unarmed, the story of a girl raised in
the jungle who comes to civilization. But that project fell through, and
instead, Hepburn starred in Christopher Strong (1933).
Christopher Strong, played by Colin Clive, is a middle-aged nobleman and
politician, happily married with a grown daughter. Hepburn is Lady Cynthia
Darrington, a dedicated aviatrix so consumed by flying that she has no time for
romance. The two fall in love, and their affair threatens Strong's marriage and
career. To direct, Selznick chose one of Hollywood's few women directors,
Dorothy Arzner. Playwright Zoe Akins was selected to adapt Gilbert Frankau's
novel. Most people thought that the character of Cynthia was based on Amelia
Earhart, but Arzner said she was based on British aviatrix Amy Johnson, the
first woman to fly solo from England to Australia. (In the novel, the character
was actually a race car driver.) Actual newsreel footage of parades and famous
flights added veracity to the film version of Christopher Strong.
The combination of three strong-willed women did not always proceed smoothly.
In fact, Arzner at one point threatened to quit the film unless Hepburn stopped
interfering with her direction. Arzner stayed, and publicly, she and Hepburn
expressed mutual respect, if no great warmth. In her autobiography, Hepburn
says that Arzner "was very good....She wore pants. So did I. We had a good
time working together." In the film, Cynthia's mannish wardrobe was
similar to Arzner's. For Zoe Akins, Hepburn had little use. She found Akins
pretentious and nouveau riche, and thought her script for Christopher Strong
was not very good. Nevertheless, one of Akins' plays would be the basis for
Hepburn's next film, Morning Glory (1933), which would win her the first
of four Best Actress Oscars.
Colin Clive, who played the title character, is best known for playing the
doctor in Frankenstein (1931). Most critics thought Clive was stodgy in
Christopher Strong, and had no chemistry with the vibrant young Hepburn, that
he was unlikely to inspire the kind of passion the script suggested. About
Hepburn's performance, the critics were as divided as they had been about A
Bill of Divorcement. She was so unlike any conventional ingenue that they
couldn't agree whether she was beautiful or gawky, brilliant or artificial. But
more and more, they were coming to the same conclusion as the New York
American's Regina Crewe: "that troubled, masque-like face, the high,
strident, raucous rasping voice, the straight, broad-shouldered boyish figure
-- perhaps they may grate upon you, but they compel attention, and they
fascinate an audience. She is a distinct, definite, positive personality -- the
first since Garbo." Whatever the shortcomings of Christopher Strong, it
still proved conclusively that Katharine Hepburn could carry a film. And the role
helped develop the strong, independent feminist screen image that reflected
Hepburn's own.
Christopher Strong informational webpage
Dorothy
Arzner's trousers Jane Gaines from
Jump Cut, July 1992
CineScene.com (Chris
Dashiell) review
That Cow (Andrew Bradford) review
[3/10]
The
New York Times (Mordaunt Hall) review
DANCE, GIRL, DANCE
Arzner's internal
critique of Hollywood ideology (woman as silent object of male scrutiny). It
works within the confines of a stock vaudevillian golddiggers comedy-drama,
tagging along with the old vamp/virgin dichotomy between dancers Ball and
O'Hara until the latter upsets the spectacular equation by turning on her (the)
audience of leering males with her observations.
CultureCartel.com
(Dan Callahan) review [3/5]
While working her way into movies, Dorothy Arzner's sex no
doubt hobbled her progress. She diligently applied herself as an editor during
the silent era, and eventually became the only female director of mainstream
Stylistically Arzner is brooding and depressed; there's a lack of energy in her
movies that makes many of them listless. Underneath every Arzner film, however,
is a probing investigation of what it felt like to be an independent woman
seven decades ago. She worked mainly with female screenwriters like Zoe Akins,
and her collaborations offered insights into women's struggles that still feel
modern today.
In Arzner's best film, Dance, Girl, Dance
(1940), noble ballerina Maureen O'Hara confronts a burlesque house audience and
hurls out a stinging indictment of the male gaze and masculine insecurity. An
astonishing scene, it goes so far that it is as if a feminist studies major has
traveled back in time and inserted a speech into an old movie that she
particularly wanted to hear in this context. It's a real jolt, and alerts us to
the fact that when Arzner is on, which is all too rarely, she's really on.
Dance, Girl, Dance
contrasts two types of women: O'Hara's serious dancer, with her devotion to her
art and her somewhat dull rectitude, and Lucille Ball's splendidly vulgar
burlesque queen Bubbles, who is out for all the cash she can get. Surely we are
meant to side with O'Hara throughout, but her monochrome virtuousness is no
movie match for Lucy's brash fire. Dance
winds up being fairly ambiguous, and it's difficult to tell if this ambiguity
came out of the casting or some larger ambition on the part of Arzner.
At times, Dance, Girl, Dance
does feel like a personal movie. Maria Ouspenskaya's desperate dance teacher
(and former ballet star) is even dressed to resemble the butch auteur herself.
The indispensable Ouspenskaya complains about being reduced to nothing more
than a “flesh peddler” and is killed early on by a car. Nestled deep inside
this movie is dismay at the crassness of mainstream society, and a realization
that money runs everything, killing off life's more lyrical pursuits.
But any anger here is tempered with generosity and even-handedness. Ball's
venal Bubbles falls in with a “capitalist who deals in artificial limbs,” (!)
and thus pays the rent for hard-up friends. Later, though, she thoughtlessly
(or cruelly?) makes O'Hara her stooge, and then goes after her beau, Louis
Hayward, when she learns he's rich.
Yet Ball has such go-getter American energy that Dance suffers when she's off screen, and whenever she's on it,
the audience is squarely on her side. When she's told to, “Give ‘em all you've
got,” before going on stage to bump and grind, she cracks, “They couldn't take
it,” as she sails out. Arzner does not punish her, even after she's been
vicious with O'Hara. Because of this, Dance is a successfully unconventional film that grows out of
the corpse of a failed conventional narrative.
Ball is terrific in Dance,
as she was in many of her early films, but you can see why she never made it
big in the movies. She's too smart, too direct, and too hard-hearted to ever
work her way into an audience's heart. Her best film performance, in The Big Street (1942), is a
nerve-wracking depiction of an utterly selfish, stupid bitch who never gets
redeemed. Bubbles doesn't see the light either, and she walks off with what
she's always wanted: $50,000 (just as Ball herself later walked away with RKO,
buying out the studio that had so undervalued her after becoming a television
titan.)
O'Hara is finally saved not by love interest
Movies are one of the most effective tools of propaganda ever invented, and Dance, Girl, Dance
probably inspired more than a few women to follow their own path. Arzner may
not rank with the pantheon of great film directors, but her place in movie
history is firm and her work will only grow in interest with time.
Senses
of Cinema (Louise Cole) review
August 2004
Dorothy
Arzner's trousers Jane Gaines from Jump Cut, July 1992
Turner
Classic Movies review Felicia
Feaster
Turner
Classic Movies dvd review David
Kalat
A
Film Canon [Billy Stevenson]
Cinepassion.org Fernando F. Croce
DVD Talk [Stuart
Galbraith IV] reviewing the 5-film
Lucille Ball Film Collection
The
New York Times (Bosley Crowther) review
Ásgeirsson, Árni Olafur
THICKER THAN WATER (Blóðbönd) B 85
aka: Blood Bond
Iceland Denmark Germany
An extremely well acted film, shot by Tuomo Hutri entirely under cloudy skies, with the waves crashing against the rocky shores of Reykjavik, usually under a deluge of rain, the optimal conditions to explore the gloomy interior landscape of a shattered marriage. Reflective of the brooding nature of the Icelandic male, much of this plays out in an alcoholic haze of pretense and denial, as after years of an apparently successful marriage, the couple barely knows how to speak to one another. Hilmar Jónsson plays the husband Pétur, who not only has a successful optometrist practice in town, his wife Ásta (Margrét Vilhjálmsdóttir) is expecting their second child, and his sister is about to get married. So the stars are aligned until their 10-year old son faints on the soccer field. Subsequent blood tests reveal Pétur’s not the biological father, causing him to abruptly flee from the scene, living out of a suitcase in a hotel room, unable to utter a word about it to anyone. His son is at a loss to understand why his father doesn’t come home, and instead has to endure the behind the back rumors from other kids at school that leave him completely alienated.
The film has an assured pace and direction with an excellent soundtrack by Jóhann Jóhannsson that hones in on the loneliness of emotional paralysis, balancing the controlled surface of the face people show in public with the underlying tension that eats away at them from the inside. When his sister pesters him with questions about his abhorrent behavior, claiming his actions are similar to their own father’s, the subsequent explosion suggests there is no greater family insult, as he storms out into the rain, kicked out from the comfortable shelter of his sister’s home. Pétur drowns his sorrows in alcohol and takes refuge in the arms of his much younger secretary, and without offering any backdrop or explanation, it appears this is fairly typical male behavior, finding comfort and salvation by exploiting the emotional immaturity of younger women. The film meanders a bit in the midsection, where he wallows excessively in his own self pity, but there’s a beautifully played scene in an empty restaurant between the distant couple that tautly gages their respective positions with a dazzling dramatic precision. Even though the film’s strength lies in its own ambiguity, things fall a bit too neatly in place at the end. Be sure to stay for the closing credits, as it appears at one point that every name in the Reykjavik phone book is listed alphabetically, then every business, followed by a dramatic surge in the music that reminds you one final time that this is a serious work.
Ash
THIS GIRL’S LIFE C 70
USA
This film introduces the lovely Juliette Marquis in the role of Moon, a
website porn actress who speaks directly into a variety of cameras, including
her own handheld palm video that provides close-ups, following her into every
nook and cranny of her lavish apartment.
Entering this salacious world, her friends are a bevy of beauties, a mix
of seemingly strong and intelligent women, which includes her best friend, a
cigar-smoking Rosario Dawson. Moon needs
the money to take care of her invalid father, played by James Woods, who
suffers from the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease. While the film attempts to analyze the sex
industry from the women’s perspective, always idealizing their strengths, as if
porn stars have a unique sense of confidence about themselves, which allows
them to pretty much “play” guys for sex whenever they want, all of this leads
nowhere in this film, as it chickens out on its own premise. Moon mysteriously loses her strength or
powers when confronted by a hotheaded angry man who’s pissed at being
played. Here the film veers into
predictable territory as it portrays her as being totally helpless. He smashes her windshield, yet incredibly, there’s
not even a scratch showing in the very next shot as she drives away. She starts to doubt herself, as if being
human and vulnerable is to deny herself the very confidence that built her
career, and the whole James Woods bit meanders into near irrelevance, as the
film is not really about him. Ms Marquis
is appealing, but seems very controlling and methodical in her role, almost as
if hypnotized. Interestingly, she’s from
the Ukraine Chernobyl
Ashby, Hal
All-Movie Guide bio from Hale Erickson
After briefly attending
Film Reference Ray Narducy
Hal Ashby had a reputation for
showing a light touch as a director; he stated that he preferred to let the
actors develop their characters. During the filming of Coming Home, for
example, he threw out a script when actor Jon Voight envisioned one of the
major characters differently than the screenwriter. The people in his films
generally face choices in situations that reflect major social concerns. In The
Landlord characters have to make decisions involving the issue of race; in Shampoo
they must decide which side they are on in a complex political and sexual
skirmish set in the turbulent summer of 1968; and in Coming Home, the
effects of the Vietnam War force characters involved directly with the war as
well as those at home to deal with unexpected changes in their lives. The
solutions to decisions faced by Ashby's characters are never facile. In Harold
and Maude, Harold gains some degree of maturity but loses the love of his
life, Maude; the military police of The Last Detail give a prisoner a
way to face life, but also deliver him to prison; while George in Shampoo
realizes how empty his life is and appears to want to change it, but at the
same time he has lost what chances he had for happiness.
Ashby's experience as an editor
is evident; he employed a wide variety of editing effects in his films. His use
of both dissolves and rapid cutting to show the passage of time in The Last
Detail serves as an example of his background. His predilection for varying
editing techniques could explain in part an aspect of his filmmaking that Ashby
himself admitted: he did not rely on a distinctive style, but rather attempted
to adapt his style to the type and subject of each film.
Though he has been called a
"maverick director," Ashby's career garnered him a good deal of
respect from the critics, and his films did well at the box office. Shampoo,
Coming Home, and Being There represent his major financial
successes, while the reputation of Harold and Maude was made in a
slightly different manner. After an initial panning and a short general
release, the film caught on in the Midwest ,
running in several theaters for over a year. The film has since become a cult
favorite and has received positive critical response.
TCMDB Turner Classic Movies profile
Senses of
Cinema: Great Directors Darren
Hughes
The Director That
Time Forgot: The Films and Career of Hal Ashby James A. Davidson from Images
Ashby, Hal They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
THE LANDLORD
Ashby's first film as director -
produced by Norman Jewison, whose regular editor Ashby had been - this was
coolly received when first released. Presumably its anarchic satire on the
mores and assumptions of the
All Movie
Guide [Michael Hastings]
Oscar-winning editor Hal Ashby cut his teeth as a director with this counter-culture tale of a spoiled slumlord and the tenants who transform him. Beau Bridges turns in one of his most buoyant, affable performances as the conceited Elgar, whose resolve to remodel his building into luxury living is broken first by a romance, then by a deeper understanding of the people he houses. The project was originally given to Ashby by director Norman Jewison, with whom he had worked on In the Heat of the Night; the two disagreed on The Landlord's tone and eventually parted ways. Instead of merely capitalizing on the material's late 1960s, anti-authoritarian tone, Ashby humanizes all those involved and isn't afraid to explore the messier implications of his characters' behavior. Many hallmarks of later, more popular Ashby films are in evidence here: the penchant for dark satire; the left-wing socio-political consciousness; and the intuitive, "European" style of cutting. The bright, hazy cinematography was one of the earlier efforts by Gordon Willis, and Lee Grant received an Oscar nomination for her work as Elgar's uptight benefactor mom.
Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd)
HAROLD AND MAUDE
USA
Jigsaw Lounge [Neil Young]
A bona-fide cult classic, Harold and Maude has lost none of its power to entertain, charm and surprise three decades on. The unlikely romance between 20-year-old, moon-faced, proto-goth Harold (Bud Cort) and uber-sprightly 80-year-old Maude (Ruth Gordon) remains one of the cinema’s most memorable love affairs – and the film’s idiosyncratic character and atmosphere make it one of the least-dated ‘counter-culture’ titles churned out by Hollywood in the aftermath of Easy Rider.
Though far from perfect (
The humour, however, remains strong - the skilful comic timing of director Ashby and editors William Sawyer and Edward Warschilka milk every laugh out of Colin Higgins’ sly, economic script. Then the last five minutes feature a plot development which, though signalled all the way through, is unexpectedly poignant – a triumph for Gordon, who copes brilliantly with the thankless task of embodying a very hippie-ish form of the ‘life-force.’ Cort, meanwhile, is even more striking in what’s arguably an even tougher role – magnetic even in his many still moments, it’s very much his movie: a unique performance in a unique film.
DVD Times Mike Sutton
Turner Classic Movies Jeff Stafford
digitallyOBSESSED!
DVD Reviews Debi Lee Mandel
ToxicUniverse.com (John Nesbit)
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Original
Harold and Maude Reviews Vincent
Canby's review so irritated Ruth Gordon that she published a rejoinder to
Canby, both are attached, also Variety
interviews Bud Cort
THE LAST DETAIL
USA (103 mi)
1973
Edinburgh U Film
Society [Danny Carr]
A huge hit in '73, The Last Detail was a further boost to Nicholson's already rapidly-rising star. Nicholson plays Navy seaman Buddusky, who has been ordered to take naive young sailor Meadows (Randy Quaid) to prison within two weeks. Meadows stole $40 from a charity box and is sentenced to eight years (the Admiral's wife was a member of the charity).
Buddusky and his fellow-seaman Mulhall (Otis Young) decide to show the kid a good time before delivering him as ordered.
They have two weeks...
Nicholson himself initiated the project, bringing in his friend Robert Towne to write the script from Daryl Ponicsan's brilliant book and getting Hal Ashby (who also made Harold and Maude) to direct.
Ashby coaxes superb ensemble playing from the key players. Funny
and powerful, The Last Detail is a tremendously salty tale of lost
innocence with the young Randy Quaid giving a wonderfully likeable performance.
Predictably however, it is Nicholson's bawdy bad-assed performance that
dominates the film. Classic Jack.
culturevulture.net Scott
Von Doviak
Of the two collaborations between Jack Nicholson and Robert Towne in the early 70's, Chinatown is the more celebrated, and rightly so. Under the directorial hand of Roman Polanski, that film redefined film noir by adding layers of depth and complexity previously unimagined. By comparison, The Last Detail is a far less ambitious effort; a scruffy mongrel that's equal parts road movie, service comedy, and coming-of-age flick. But the film rises above its station thanks to impassioned performances, street-level realism and a razor-sharp - and very funny - script.
Based on a novel by Darryl Ponicsan, Towne's screenplay was completed in 1970. Towne's insistence on retaining the book's salty language resulted in a two year delay, while Columbia Pictures waited in vain for him to tone it down. By 1972, Hollywood's standards of decency had presumably relaxed enough to allow Towne's draft to go into production unchanged (yes, believe it or not, this man of integrity is the same guy who "wrote" the brainless action spectacular Mission: Impossible 2). It is difficult to imagine the finished product without the rough-and-rowdy dialogue that virtually defines its swabbie heroes.
The movie's plot is the barest of skeletons, a framework on which to hang episodic adventures and character-based observational humor. Seaman Larry Meadows, a teenage Naval recruit, is caught with his hand in the church poorbox. Not exactly a hanging offense, except that the charity in question is a pet cause of the base commander's wife. Meadows' sentence: eight years in a military prison and a "D.D." - dishonorable discharge. Lifers Billy "Badass" Buddusky and "Mule" Mulhall are assigned shore patrol duty - they must escort Meadows from their Norfolk, Virginia base to the brig in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Given more than enough time to complete the task, Buddusky initially proposes a plan to hustle Meadows up to Portsmouth and take a leisurely, drunken path back home. But as their journey unfolds, Buddusky's conscience begins to gnaw at him, and he sets about giving Meadows the time of his life before a large chunk of his life is taken away from him.
As if the nickname "Badass" weren't enough of a tip-off, the presence of Jack Nicholson in the midst of his 70's hot streak of rebel roles signals that Buddusky is something of a loose cannon on deck. Nicholson delivers one of the most ferociously energetic performances of his career. His Badass is good-humored but possessed of seemingly bottomless reserves of rage for both the Navy and the world outside of it, and Nicholson nails the scattershot anger that fuels his character's tirades. Mulhall is more of a straight company man; he is devoted to the Navy that, for all its flaws, rescued him from a life of poverty. Otis Young lends a hard-edged dignity to a role that is, by design, the movie's least flashy. Randy Quaid has been saddled with so many oafish roles in recent years, first-time viewers of The Last Detail may be surprised by the sensitivity he brings to the frightened young seaman. As the road trip progresses, Quaid brings his character's latent curiosity and confidence to the surface, gently suggesting that there may be more to Meadows than his escorts imagined.
The loose structure of The Last Detail suits the laid back
direction of Hal Ashby to a tee. Of all the major filmmakers of the period,
Ashby is the least likely to be emulated by today's young turks, mainly because
his contributions to his own movies are difficult to define. His pictures all
have a vaguely counter-cultural air, but one would be hard-pressed to pin down
an Ashby "style"; he certainly was never a visual artist in the vein
of Kubrick or Scorsese. Of his contemporaries, he is probably closest in spirit
to Altman, though not in his league in terms of conveying a singular worldview.
Ashby's best work tends to rely heavily on strong collaborators - Towne and
Warren Beatty in Shampoo, Jerzy Kosinski and Peter Sellers
in Being There - and The Last Detail is no
exception. Anyway, it's hard to imagine any director containing Nicholson. This
is his picture all the way; a showcase for a dazzling star turn from a great
actor in his prime. He is the badass.
Senses of Cinema (Richard Armstrong)
The
Last Detail Beyond the call of
duty, by John Hess and Judith Hess from Jump
Cut
Turner Classic Movies Paul Tatara
DVD Times Raphael Pour-Hashemi
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Jonny Lieberman
Reel.com
DVD review [Pam Grady]
DVD Verdict Nicholas Sylvain
Apollo Movie Guide
[Brian Webster]
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
SHAMPOO
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Jeff Rosado)
For the true movie geek, there's always a mixture of
excitement and fear when you sit down with a critically-acclaimed film from
decades past that you didn't get to see in its original theatrical run or
countless television replays. Will the passage of time dull its effectiveness
or will it be as ageless as Dick Clark?
Fortunately, many of my first time experiences with films on my never ending
"to watch" list have been positive, although every once in a while I
come across a so-called cinematic gem that brought me to the brink of asking
for my rental charges back....like Three Days of the Condor, which
seemed to go on for three days. And don't get me started on Last Tango in Paris.
Made me want to invest in a soap factory.
Since both of those movie originated in the 1970s, you may understand my
hesitance to pop Shampoo into my DVD tray. Again, we have a case of a
critically-acclaimed movie in its day, an impressive cast (Warren Beatty, Julie
Christie, Goldie Hawn), an esteemed director at the wheel (Hal Ashby) and a
script co-penned by perhaps the hottest writer in Tinseltown at the time
(Robert Towne).
One hour and 49 minutes later, I was relieved. More importantly, I wasn't
disappointed.
Shampoo takes place over the course of a day and half during a pivotal
time in American history: the eve of the 1968 presidential election. But
politics are the last thing on George Roundy's (Beatty) mind. A much in-demand
Beverly Hills hairdresser, he's having enough problems juggling one too many
girlfriends, er, customers, butting heads with his salon owner and finding
financing to open his own clip joint as hard as Richard Nixon trying to say "Sock
it to me" with feeling on Laugh-In.
Feeling his pain, loyal customer Felicia (Lee Grant) suggests her husband
Lester (Jack Warden) as a potential investor, a dicey proposition since George
is doing more than trimming her bangs. Yet the fear of never being able to
break out of his current job situation forces him to take a chance. Not two
steps into Lester's office and who should come into view? Old flame Jackie
(Christie), who just happens to be the best friend of George's current squeeze,
struggling actress Jill (Hawn).
Being the major player he is, it doesn't take Roundy long to figure out that
Jackie is in Lester's office for more than financial advice, an assumption
clarified by the seedy businessman who then asks for George's assistance in
escorting his mistress to a election night party for Nixon supporters so that
he can play loving husband to wife Felicia. Considering that girlfriend Jill
has a business date of her own with a
What he doesn't count on is sparks re-igniting between himself and his former
paramour. During a pre-party trim session to straighten out Jackie's curls and
so on, it's not long before they're back in each other's (ahem) hair. But it's
the calm before the storm as our Georgie Porgie and his dalliances past and
present meet head on at the electoral love-in for Tricky Dick. Individual
frustrations come to the fore with volcanic force and a farce-filled evening
rivaling vintage Three's Company episodes ensues with conclusions
you might not see coming.
Considering the amount of press Warren Beatty's personal life got in the years
prior to and preceding the making of Shampoo, his willingness to send up
his own image and allow himself to take on a role that he had to know most of
the audience would interpret as autobiographical took some serious courage.
Although his character's actions are despicable, the emotional intentions
behind them aren't cruel in the least and that's what makes the character of
George Roundy so fascinating to watch. It's not unlike the feeling I had
watching Renee Zellweger's character in
Beatty's performance isn't the only reason to lather up Shampoo. There's
the pleasure of seeing Goldie Hawn turn down the giggly persona of her Laugh-In
past to reinvent herself as a serious actress; Jack Warden graduating from
years of television roles to the big screen and capturing an Oscar® nomination
in the process; Lee Grant's Academy Award®-winning turn as the jilted
wife/mistress and Carrie Fisher in a short but memorable film debut (and one
that certainly caught George Lucas' eye) as Felicia's rebellious daughter.
Trumping them all is the gifted and beautiful Julie Christie as Jackie. Sexy,
dry-witted and confident with hints of vulnerability, one can't help but wonder
why George wastes his time with neurotic and needy women like Felicia and Jill
when it's obvious that she's the best chance for a soul mate he may ever have.
Finally: Although it's an unmentionable moment, the film's comic highlight
belongs to the English actress. After you see it, you'll know why Shampoo
earned a spot in the American Film Institute's top 50 comedy films of all time.
Turner Classic Movies Margarita Landazuri
Shampoo Chuck Kleinhans from Jump Cut
culturevulture.net Gary Mairs
Film Freak Central
review [Bill Chambers]
DVD Verdict Patrick Naugle
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Nora Sayre)
COMING HOME
Edinburgh U Film Society
[Stephen Townsend]
Over the last couple of decades numerous Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War have thrust themselves onto our cinema screens and while there's no doubt that some of them are definitely worth watching, none possesses the emotional intensity, the all-round greatness of Coming Home.
Jane Fonda plays a straight-laced, politically-naive housewife. When husband Bruce Dern goes off to fight for Uncle Sam in South-East Asia, she becomes a volunteer helper at a veteran's hospital. It's there that she loses her innocence. She meets embittered vet Jon Voight and comes face to face with the horrifing after-results of modern warfare. Voight is a wheelchair bound paraplegic, angry at the way he and others are being ignored by the war-obsessed U.S. of A. Fonda begins to sympathise with his pleas for better treatment and soon they become friends and, in time, lovers. Inevitably, matters become complicated when Dern comes home unexpectedly early and learns what his wife's been getting up to.
Coming Home is a sensitive and absorbing film. It's anti-war
message is put across with amazing subtlety and clarity. Voight and Fonda
deservedly won Oscars for their intelligent portrayals. They both successfully
resist the temptation to turn their complex characters into stereotypes - the
performances seem to come from within. Haskell Wexler also merits a mention for
his striking cinematography.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Brian Calhoun)
War films are my favorite, simply
because no other genre is capable of stirring my soul through so many different
emotions. Coming Home takes a slightly different approach by eliminating scenes
of gruesome combat and replacing them with gentle and tender dialogue. It is no
small task to create an anti-war film without also depicting the ravages of
combat, and for the attempt at such, Coming Home should be commended. Yet, the admirable
and unique approach to its subject matter results in a film that feels like an
unfinished jigsaw puzzle. I had not seen Coming Home prior to seeing it on DVD,
and after watching it twice, I am still waiting to see the film that everyone
has raved about.
The film opens with a room of paraplegic Vietnam Vietnam
Feeling a need to rationalize her husband's patriotism, Sally volunteers as a
nurse at a veteran's hospital. Her first week on the job is about as rough as
they come, as she quickly realizes how the war has physically and mentally
abused these poor patients. One of these men is Luke Martin (Jon Voight), a
soldier with a large piece of metal in his back that has rendered him
permanently paralyzed from the waist down. His introduction shows him as an
angry man whose debilitation has not only stolen his mobility but his spirit
and optimism as well. The relationship between Sally and Luke starts out rocky,
yet through time, they come to depend on one another. The two of them have a
tender love affair, and through each other they are able to find a sense of
peace in the midst of a war that seems so senseless. The peace turns to chaos,
however, when Sally's husband comes home with a different outlook on life than
the one he had going into the war.
Coming Home succeeds on several levels and even touches on important issues
that other war films mistakenly ignore. Many Vietnam War movies show an endless
amount of death but often forget about the numerous soldiers that are only
wounded and have to live on with the physical and mental anguish of these
injuries. Without violence, Coming Home succeeds admirably in creating a strong
statement that the war might be over, but the internal struggle is still being
fought.
Both Jon Voight and Jane Fonda received Oscars® for their roles in Coming Home,
and both awards are justified. Voight in particular gives a riveting
performance as the troubled veteran. It would have been easy for him to over
extend his emotions, yet he suitably takes a more subtle approach. His gestures
and dialogue are delivered with a purity that proves the depth to which he
immersed himself in the role. Jane Fonda also gives a wonderfully restrained
performance; never does she allow her strong, real-life opinions of the war
interfere with the fact that she is playing a simple and naïve individual. The
two have good chemistry together, particularly during their love scene, which
appropriately does not resort to "cinema perfect" sex.
I can continue to make many positive comments about the film, yet for all of my
praise, I have equal disappointment. The overstuffed screenplay is essentially
a slew of scattered pieces that never connect with one another. In trying to
bring closure to innumerable issues, the screenplay ends up bringing closure to
none of them. Many scenes have a maddening way of cutting themselves short at
the very moment they seem to be getting to the heart of the matter. Much of the
promotion of Coming Home focused on the aspect of Captain Hyde returning home
from the war, yet this does not happen until 20 minutes before the end of the
film. The resulting confrontation between Dern, Voight, and Fonda is riveting,
but it is too little too late.
The most apparent flaw is that the characters have not been given enough
backstory to generate an emotional response from the audience when traumatic
events befall them. Robert Carradine plays a mentally disturbed soldier who
delves into self-destruction, but his tragedy feels contrived since the
audience has not seen what led him to his unstable mental state. Jon Voight
delivers a fantastic speech to a group of high school kids, many of whom are
looking to join the war effort. Voight drives the words home, and his
performance is fantastic, however, the scene lacks emotion. I simply had not
seen enough of his torturous experiences to break into tears.
Coming Home was released at a time when the world was in a great state of panic
and fear over the decision to fight in Vietnam
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Qwipster's Movie Reviews [Vince Leo]
DVD Verdict Barrie Maxwell
Coming
Home
wheelchair protest Kimberly Safford
from Jump Cut
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Asif, K.
MUGHAL-E-AZAM
India
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Mughal-E-Azam (1960) Naman Ramachandran from Sight and Sound,
December 2002
Mughal India, the late 1500s. The emperor Akbar (Prithviraj) and his queen Jodha (Durga Khote) have a son, Salim (Jalal Agha), after years of prayer. The maid who brings Akbar this news is promised a reward whenever she wants to claim it. Prince Salim (Dilip Kumar) grows into a spoilt teenager and is sent away for military training. Years later he proves himself to be a worthy warrior. Akbar invites him back to the palace and gives him a hero's welcome. Salim soon falls for court dancer Anarkali (Madhubala). Initially wary of his affections because of the difference in their stations, she soon reciprocates his love. Akbar finds out about the affair imprisons Anarkali. Salim threatens him with dire consequences if she is not released.
Akbar persuades Anarkali that her union with Salim is damaging to the empire and asks her to convince the prince she is a gold-digger. The prince initially believes her but later discovers she was lying. This angers Akbar and Anarkali is imprisoned again. Salim fails to secure Anarkali's release and declares rebellion against his father. Before war breaks out Salim's friend Durjan rescues Anarkali. War begins; Salim's troops are no match for the might of the imperial forces. Captured, Salim refuses to divulge Anarkali's whereabouts and is sentenced to death. Anarkali appears from hiding in time to save Salim. She makes a pact with Akbar to spend one night with Salim as his queen before drugging him unconscious and going to her own death.
As Anarkali is being bricked up alive after her night with the prince, her mother - the bearer of the news of Salim's birth - invokes the promise Akbar made years ago and begs him for her daughter's life. The emperor agrees on condition no one find out Anarkali is alive. Mother and daughter leave the empire never to return.
Review
To revisit an acknowledged classic is always a tricky business given the weight of critical and popular approbation that surrounds such films. It's a relief, then, to be able to report that some 40 years after it was released Mughal-E-Azam retains its position as one of India's greatest films. The well-known legend of the love between Prince Salim (who went on to become the emperor Jahangir) and the dancer Anarkali had been committed to film several times in various Indian languages, most notably in Anarkali, a 1953 Hindi version directed by Nandlal Jaswantlal and starring Pradeep Kumar and Bina Rai. But this, K. Asif's epic 1960 film, is widely recognised as the definitive version, and was so successful that Indian film-makers left the subject alone until southern Indian superstar N.T. Rama Rao retold the story in 1978. Of course, the tale of a patriarchal father opposing the union of his son or daughter to a member of an inferior class is a theme that crops up time and again in Indian popular cinema.
The story of the production of Mughal-E-Azam is itself legendary. In the making for over a decade, the film went through several changes of personnel - including a replacement for the male lead when the original actor died. The shooting days alone add up to nearly a year and a half. The huge cast (literally of thousands), opulent sets, intricately designed costumes and extravagantly staged battle scenes made the film - which cost approximately Rupees 15 million - the most expensive made in India at the time. Asif thought on an epic scale, which is perhaps why he made only four films in a career that spanned more than 30 years. Indeed, after making a relatively small film following Mughal-E-Azam, he started on his next big project Love and God, only to die in 1971, leaving the movie incomplete (it was patched together and released in 1986). Asif's associates tended to conceive projects on a similar scale: Kamal Amrohi, one of the writers on Mughal-E-Azam, took years to complete his directorial project Pakeezah (1971), a landmark of Indian cinema.
Despite the many delays, Asif marshalled his resources well, saw to it that there were no obvious continuity glitches and incorporated technological innovations. Though largely in black and white, the film includes a few sequences in colour, notably the breathtaking Sheesh Mahal (hall of mirrors) scene where Anarkali defiantly dances in front of Salim and his disapproving father, the Emperor Akbar.
But despite of all the grandeur, the film has a tender and delicate heart. The romance between Salim and Anarkali is conveyed mainly through glances and expressions. And the merest hint of physical relations provides one of the most erotic scenes in Indian cinema when the prince caresses his lover with a feather as she gasps in ecstasy while the voice of classical singer Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan croons gently on the soundtrack.
Though the love story is the backbone of the film, it is Akbar's dilemma that is placed centre stage as he is torn between love for his only son and the demands of the Mughal Empire. Veteran actor Prithviraj conveys the agonising choice effectively. Though modern-day audiences may find his performance theatrical, his stentorian dialogue delivery adds to the gravitas the role demands. The smouldering Dilip Kumar as Salim and beguiling Madhubala as Anarkali lend him able support.
Apart from its epic sweep, Mughal-E-Azam is also remarkable for its matter-of-fact treatment of religion. Akbar is known to have been the most religiously tolerant Islamic emperor of India. His wife Jodha was a Hindu who continued to practise Hinduism even after her marriage. His trusted chief of armed forces Maan Singh was also a Hindu. The film notes such examples of tolerance but without belabouring the point - and it's all the more effective for it. This unselfconscious display of religious harmony is especially welcome today in a subcontinent that is riven with disturbances between its different communities.
Aspöck, Frederikke
OUT OF BOUNDS (Labrador )
Out
Of Bounds Mark Adams at
The impressively made Out Of Bounds (titled
She won the Premier Prix de la Cinéfondation at Cannes with the short Happy Now (2004), and her new project marks an easy transition into features and benefits from the smart casting of rising talent Stephanie Leon alongside established Scandinavian actors Jakob Eklund and Carsten Bjørnlund.
The film features just three characters and uses their intense psychological drama - juxtaposed with the bleak landscape - to craft a tense chamber piece the deal with emotional conflict and family traumas.
Young Danish couple Stella (Leon) and her journalist boyfriend Oskar (Bjørnlund) visit her artist father Nathan (Eklund), who lives a solitary life alone with his Labrador dog on the remote Swedish island of Gotland. Stella is pregnant and looking forward to the birth of her baby, but Oskar appears to have doubts, and succumbs to Nathan’s provocations and feels bewildered by the relationship between father and daughter. A clash between the two men is inevitable with Stella caught in the middle.
The basic structure is all pretty straightforward, but the strong performances help bring out the best from Daniel Dencik’s economical and subtle script as the much-used plot device of troubled family histories is mined to good effect.
The tough gloominess of the story is impressively reflected in the impressively shot visuals, with cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck making great use of the stark island locations. In truth the film is a suitably streamlined and simple dramatic film - running just over 70 minutes - that makes no attempt to be pretentious or overly directed. It is a sombre melodrama impressively put together…and all the better for it.
Out
of Bounds (Labrador): Cannes Review
David Rooney at Cannes Hollywood
Reporter, May 12, 2011
A 2004 Cannes Cinefondation short film award winner, Danish director Frederikke Aspock makes a confident move into features with Out of Bounds. Dramatically low-key and somewhat leisurely even at a lean 72 minutes, the film nonetheless benefits from its evocative sense of place and striking ability to channel elemental and environmental forces into tricky human relationships.
Aspock calls the film a cinematic chamber play, and with just
three characters, a single setting, and an intense focus on psychological
conflict over physical action, the austere drama certainly fits that
description. Yet while the bleak location and blistering weather plant
expectations of unyielding Scandinavian severity, Aspock (an MFA filmmaking
graduate from NYU’s
The story covers the brief abortive visit from Denmark of Stella
(Stephanie Leon) and her journalist boyfriend, Oskar (Carsten
Bjornlund), to see her father for the first time in some years. A
well-regarded but reclusive abstract painter, Nathan (Jakob Eklund)
lives in a no-frills cottage on the
Oskar has vague ideas of coaxing an interview out of Nathan, but the artist’s unnerving mix of blunt candor and prickly evasiveness quickly nixes that hope. Nathan has chosen to withdraw from the world to this punishing outpost, and Aspock draws considerable texture out of the awkwardness of citified Oskar’s first encounter with his unwelcoming host. The communication shorthand of father and daughter also contributes to make Oskar feel like an outsider, competing for Stella’s affection.
Into this atmosphere of unease, Stella drops the news that she’s pregnant. Oskar has mixed feelings about becoming a father, and Nathan seizes on the younger man’s uncertainty to create friction between the couple. But while Nathan’s wilderness years have given him the suspiciousness and cunning of a lone wolf, Oskar is served by his journalistic instincts. He starts asking uncomfortable questions about Nathan’s late wife and his annual absences abroad, shaking the family tree.
While these revelations might have been pumped into thundering melodrama in other hands, Aspock and Dencik handle them with economy and restraint. The actors skillfully navigate the shifting dynamics among their characters and the director deftly exploits the tension and threat of violence that hang in the air, quite literally so when ravens start circling overhead. The film deserves credit for declining to tie up the experience into a neat takeaway lesson, instead acknowledging that messy, complicated relationships have a way of infecting everyone around them.
This is a modest feature that takes perhaps a little too long to establish a binding tone, but it’s absorbing and dramatically satisfying on its own terms. Aspock has an invaluable storytelling collaborator in cinematographer Magnus Nordenhof Jonck. In a somber shooting style marked by stark compositions, he captures the brooding, lonely landscape, battered by gelid waves, icy winds and snow, as a place where true feelings are harder to hide.
Assarat, Aditya
WONDERFUL TOWN
Time Out
London (David Jenkins) review [3/6]
The whispered
courtship between city-boy architect Ton and bashful hotelier Na unfolds in a
rubble-strewn Thai coastal resort ravaged by the tsunami. Slowly paced and
spare, this likeable, digitally shot debut deftly plants the pair’s
slow-burning romance amid haunting shots of damaged buildings while the setting
pushes us to ponder whether their love is born of boredom.
Ironic title aside, there’s little you could peg as humour, but there are lots
of smile-raising moments. Things buckle about two-thirds in when the film’s
meaning gets submerged in a bizarre gangster subplot, ushered in to draw
proceedings to an awkward close.
This delicate, delightful and nearly note-perfect debut feature from young Thai director Aditya Assarad offers more evidence of the tremendous film renaissance underway in East Asia. Set in a southern coastal town struggling to recover from the devastation of the 2004 tsunami (although the event itself is barely discussed), "Wonderful Town" follows the tentative and then smoldering passion that develops between a visiting Bangkok architect (Supphasit Kansen) and a local woman (Anchalee Saisoontorn) who runs the modest hotel where he's staying. Assarad is both a patient and a surprising director, alive to the most intimate details of everyday life -- folding laundry, changing sheets, drinking coffee -- and also to the dreams people hold closest to their hearts, the ones they can barely admit to themselves, let alone their lovers.
While the plot in "Wonderful Town" is fairly minimal, it's got plenty of suspense. Will the hard-working hotel proprietor let down her hair? Will the architect disappear to the big city? Will the ghosts in the haunted, tsunami-destroyed hotels be appeased, and can a town that lost 8,000 people in a single day be healed? Assarad doesn't address all these questions directly, let alone answer them, but this irresistible picture, engaging from its first shot to its last, kind of sidles up and gracefully embraces them.
filmcritic.com
(Don Willmott) review [4/5]
A subtle and understated love story set against the backdrop
of a Thai coast recovering from the tsunami disaster of 2004, Wonderful Town
is both tranquil and tense. Boy meets girl and falls for girl, but it's
impossible to ignore the eerie sense that ghosts of the tragedy are hovering
nearby.
The only thing architect Ton (Supphasit Kansen) has on his mind when he arrives
in the sleepy village of Takua Pa is the installation of toilets in the new
resort hotel that's being built alongside the ruins of a hotel that was
obliterated by the wave. Choosing to stay at a quiet and somewhat worn out
hotel in town, he meets Na (Anchalee Saisoontorn), the sweet-natured
proprietress who seems to do little more in life than change the sheets and
hang up the laundry to dry on rooftop wash lines.
As the two constantly cross paths at the hotel, they begin a long and almost
wordless dance of attraction that takes most of the film to progress to the
level of a PG-rated kiss. Ton is a lonely city guy who finds peace of mind away
from the smog and noise of Bangkok. Na is a lonely "southern girl"
who is dominated by her brother and other hotel workers whom she is supposed to
be managing.
How will this gentle romance play out? While no obvious impediments are thrown
into the way of a happy ending, the film has a disturbingly ominous tone.
Although southern Thailand is one of the world's most gorgeous sun-splashed
locales, this vision of the region is overcast, humid, and constantly spitting
rain. Construction workers warn Ton not to explore the ruins of the wrecked
hotel because "it's haunted," and there's also the constant presence
of a small gang of bored local boys who do little more than buzz by on
motorcycles all day shooting dirty looks at anyone who dares to glance their
way.
Both Na and Ton have unexplained connections to other people in other places,
but it remains unclear who those people are and how strong the connections may
be. It's one more minor but disturbing threat to the ultimate happiness of the
couple, who would just as soon spend all day sitting on a blanket and staring
at palm trees across the rice paddies.
This "wonderful town" is paradise, but writer/director Aditya Assarat
wants us to sense that it's a paradise lost, at least temporarily, and it's
populated by damaged and haunted souls who may not be able to get what they want
in this life. Assarat's craftsmanship is masterful, generating intense suspense
out of seemingly nothing at all. Laundry drying in a breeze has never looked so
threatening.
Screen
International review Dan Fainaru
from Berlin
Aditya Assarat's first feature, a tragic, melancholy, minimalist love story taking place in what was once a Thai beach resort before the 2004 tsunami hit, offers a poignant portrait of a place grappling with the loss of its main source of income amid the stifling traditions which once might have been considered part of its exotic charm but now only impede its progress.
One of the highest-rated films in the Pusan 2007 selection and co-winner of Rotterdam's Tiger award, Wonderful Town moves at a leisurely, almost somnolent pace - essential for mood, but bound to limit its prospects to mainly festivals and art houses.
Assarat's entire plot evolves around only two characters, with a third added in the second half almost as a trigger for the tale's tragic ending. Ton (Kansen) is a young Bangkok architect sent to Takua Pa, a small provincial town in the south of Thailand which lost 8,000 inhabitants (and whatever charm it once had as a tourist destination) in the tsunami.
His job is to supervise the reconstruction of a beach hotel on the ruins of the old one which was destroyed by the storm. Na (Saisontoorn) is a meek, subdued young woman who spent a brief time in the big city before returning to Takua Pa to take care of the family business - a dreary, dilapidated inn, in which Ton is the only guest.
Their love story proceeds along a predictable course, but does so very carefully, with wary, understated gentleness, displaying a sensitivity which is quite exceptional – but risks coming across as dull.
From Na's early, tentative expeditions into Ton's room while he is away, the script gradually gets bolder as his stay in town is extended. Their timid first contact lead to chaste walks together, followed by more adventurous hikes, and by the time they are finally depicted consummating the relationship, the audience may have decided that the act has already taken place off-screen but the film is too constrained, like the society they live in, to show it.
And indeed, their anxiety is soon justified by the attitude of people around them, most particularly the film's third character, Na's brother, Wit (Yaambunying). A local hard man who rules sway over a nasty gang of teenage bikers, he does not approve of his sister's moral standards and will ultimately be the one to put an end to an affair that seemed too precarious to bloom from the very first moment.
Paying as much attention to context as to plot, Assarat's picture requires constant attention in order to decipher its intentions. He lingers on the washed-out look of the town; the deceptively-peaceful waves of a sea which only recently wrecked the place; the blank expressions on faces that evidently hide a lot more than they reveal.
Although the dialogue is pared down to an absolute minimum, an anguished undercurrent is felt all the way through, belying the general languid mood of the story. Saisoontorn and Kansen are obliged to carry most of the film on their shoulders, but manage admirably given the minute range of visible emotion Assarat allows - before his film finally dares, towards the end, to raise its voice.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Wonderful Town (0)
Tony Rayns from Sight & Sound, April 2009
Bright Lights
Film Journal review Ian Johnston,
August 2008
DVD Savant (Glenn
Erickson) dvd review also seen
here: Turner
Classic Movies dvd review
REVIEW
| Post Traumatic Stress: Aditya Assarat’s “Wonderful Town” Michael Koresky from Reverse Shot from
indieWIRE
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] for Tribune also
see: Senses of Cinema report, May 2008
The
New York Sun (Nicolas Rapold) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie
Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
also seen here: The Auteurs' Notebook
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mellor]
Slant Magazine
review David Phelps
The Village
Voice [Aaron Hillis]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
Movies into
Film.com (N.P. Thompson) review
The
Independent (Robert Hanks) review [2/5]
Time
Out New York (David Fear) review [4/6]
San
Francisco Chronicle (Ruthe Stein) review
New York Times
(registration req'd) Nathan Lee
Assayas, Olivier
Olivier Assayas (born
in 1955) is one of the most widely celebrated filmmakers working today. One of France's most gifted young filmmakers,
French cinema is part of Assayas’s heritage, as his father, Jacques Rémy,
started out as an assistant to Max Ophuls before the Second World War, a
director/screenwriter in the 1940’s who later worked mainly for TV. When it was increasingly difficult for him to
work because of a health condition, Olivier started to help him, first merely
as a secretary, and then ghostwriting a few screenplays for the Maigret TV series. His father directed a film for the Free
French in South America during the German occupation and returned to a
successful career scripting commercial films and “films of quality,” a list of
which is inscribed by hand on a wall in the room that was his father’s study in
a house that Assayas inherited in Saint-Rémy.
Olivier Assayas studied at l'École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Knowing from childhood that he wanted to make
movies, as his father was a screenwriter before the New Wave era, Olivier
believed that literature, painting, and drawing would be better preparation for
making films than going to film school.
Jacques Rémy, the
French cineaste, was also Rémy Assayas, an Italian Jew brought to France by
Ophuls. “I’ve grown up in a multinational family. I’ve never seen the borders of French
culture. My father was French-Jewish
Italian; my mother was Hungarian-Austrian; my father lived in Argentina. Friends of my parents spoke every possible
language…French cinema for me was the associates of my father’s who would come
to the house, guys in suits, smoking pipes.” But at the same time he was a
child in—if not of—the French countryside, connected to the larger world
vicariously. “I was cut off from the center of what was going on in those
years,” he said, referring to the era of his adolescence and early manhood in
the 1970’s. “I fantasized it through the
newspapers, the music, the comics, and I was especially receptive to the
underground culture, the counterculture. I was reading the American alternative
press or the English music magazines, and my mental world was pretty much some
kind of international pop-culture world.”
Punk rock, American horror films, Hong Kong action movies — these set
the terms of his post-May adolescence, where “I was much more interested in Wes
Craven, in John Carpenter, in David Cronenberg.”
Like the founders of
the French New Wave, Assayas discovered the cinema first as a critic writing
for the influential journal Cahiers du cinéma in the early 80’s, after
training to be a painter, when the journal was emerging from a period he
described as “Stalinian,” devoted to celebrating obscure militant filmmakers
and analyzing the speeches of Georges Marchais, the dinosaurlike secretary
general of the French Communist Party.
Throughout the early 1980’s he served on the journal's editorial board
and wrote essays on his favorite European filmmakers, Robert Bresson and Andrei
Tarkovsky, co-wrote a book of interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Conversation
avec Ingmar Bergman, also Éloge de Kenneth Anger, while publishing
extensive studies on American horror films and Hong Kong Cinema long before
Hong Kong cinema became fashionable with Western filmgoers and critics. He also collaborated on screenplays for such
directors as Laurent Perrin and André Téchiné, including two Téchiné films,
RENDEZ-VOUS (1985) and THE SCENE OF THE CRIME (1986), returning again a decade
letter with ALICE AND MARTIN
(1998). His earliest efforts at
directing were four shorts completed between 1979 and 1985, while his first
feature, Désordre won an award at Venice and enjoyed a brief period as a
cult classic after its release in France in 1986. What people responded to in this debut film
was Olivier's portrayal of his characters' emotions and his exceptional
stylization, where according to critic Kent Jones, “He makes an event out of
every shape and spatial configuration that crosses his camera's field of
vision. But each move, each colour, each visual rush is firmly connected to his
characters.”
Like the New Wave
directors, Assayas’s films are inspired both by art cinema and popular culture,
intertwining currents from “high” and “low.”
In place of the Hollywood B-movie beloved by the nouvelle vague, Assayas
channels the gritty energy of punk and post-punk culture and Asian genre films,
mixed with quieter strains of East Asian hip and cool. While Assayas is well-schooled in the venerated
canon of postwar world cinema (Bresson and Visconti, Ozu and Mizoguchi), his
work also gravitates markedly towards the avant-gardist margins (especially
Anger and Warhol) and the perennially young “new waves” of Hong Kong and
Taiwan, where later he would be among the first French film writers to discover
the incipient Taiwanese new wave—filmmakers like Hou Hsiao-hsien, Edward Yang
and Tsai Ming-liang. Their influence, in
particular that of Hou (subject of Assayas’s 1997 documentary HHH), would prove decisive, in part
because of the spirit of contemporaneity their films seemed, almost
effortlessly, to capture. In an elegy
for Yang, who died in 2007—and whose films A CONFUCIAN CONFUSION (1994),
MAHJONG (1996), and YI YI (2000) must figure in any canon of world cinema in
the 90’s—Assayas described him as “a lucid observer, alternately cruel and
sympathetic, of the unraveling of the world in which he grew up and its
remaking by a new world order—new architecture, new forms of urbanism and a new
circulation of capital.”
Assayas is especially
adept at exploring the tensions between the controlled chaos of cinematic
artifice and the less-exalted disorder—where Disorder is his aptly named named first feature. The dynamic eclecticism Assayas would evince
in his filmmaking is already fully legible in his criticism, which focuses with
equal insight on a diverse range of directors from Ingmar Bergman and Kenneth
Anger to Hou Hsiao-Hsien and King Hu.
Though his films enjoyed considerable critical acclaim in France and at
international film festivals, his name was virtually unknown in
English-speaking countries until the release of his 1996 film Irma Vep,
a witty and affectionate homage to silent cinema, a loving tribute both to
Louis Feuillade and Hong Kong cinema.
Maggie Cheung, who he married briefly from 1998 to 2001, plays an
actress starring in a disastrous modern remake of Louis Feuillade’s 1915
classic fantasy serial, LES VAMPIRES.
“Feuillade uses the screen like a stage, very frontally, with a fixed
camera, though he has a great eye. I chose him because I wanted to explore the
roots of French film culture.” In a
filmmaking career now more than thirty years old, Assayas has consistently
conveyed an active imagination and a continued fascination with the dynamics of
love, lust and affection, with misfits and criminals, and with cinema's unique
ability to make them all real. Assayas
makes films about transition and transaction in modern life, with characters
forced to negotiate shifting borders and strange new rules.
Assayas lives with Mia
Hansen-Love, a former actress first seen as a young teenager in Assayas’s Late
August, Early September (Fin août, début septembre) (1998), now a director in her own right, most
recently of Goodbye
First Love (Un Amour de Jeunesse) (2011).
The women (Goodreche, Ledoyen, Cheung, Richard, Nielsen, Chloë Sevigny,
Jeanne Balibar, Asia Argento) in Assayas’s films are complex, imaginative,
vulnerable and sexually combative.
They’re not recessive, manipulative or solicitous like too many of their
counterparts in Godard’s Sixties films.
Assayas is a key figure in the contemporary landscape of global art
cinema, with direct connections to the Nouvelle Vague through his work at Cahiers du cinéma in the
1980’s, developing a complex relationship to the politics of the movement, and
especially its attack on tradition and romanticism. “The whole generation of
the Nouvelle Vague considered themselves to be children and didn’t want to be
fathers … and they especially didn’t want to be fathers to the following
generation—they had no connection with them, they didn’t help them.” In a generation that includes Assayas, Arnaud
Desplechin, André Téchiné, and Benoît Jacquot, they chose Bergman and Truffaut
as models instead of Godard, a move that is important not only for the approach
to dramatic representation that it entails, choosing fiction and character
development over a constant interrogation of the image, but it positions the
whole post-Nouvelle Vague generation in a compelling and transformative
relationship with Truffaut’s own concept of a Cinèma de Papa. The renegades of the New Wave took their cues
from Old Hollywood—the “Hitchcocko-Hawksians,” they were sometimes called, in
recognition of their debts to Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks.
“If you are completely
frank about what you are doing, filmmaking is animated by desire. It’s about
beauty, grace, mystery -- a poetic dimension.”
Like many French directors, Olivier Assayas is a passionate cinephile,
where his own work reflects this expertise and eclecticism. Few others can match his effortless range, from
lavish costume drama, Les
Destinées Sentimentales (2000), to a high-tech
sci-fi set against global internet espionage and pornography in DEMONLOVER
(2002). CLEAN (2004) is different yet
again, a gentle, melancholy drama starring Assayas’s former wife, the Hong Kong
actress Maggie Cheung, as a junkie rock chick struggling to kick her habit and
win custody of her small son, where Cheung was named Best Actress in Cannes for
her performance. Small wonder, then,
that Assayas is highly passionate and articulate about his art. “I’ve always had a fascination with silent
films and the filmmakers who invented the language of cinema. They had no points of reference; they were
not basing themselves on previous films.
They took their inspiration from painting, from literature, from
architecture, and in every single movie they made, they defined new ways of
telling stories, using sets and depicting characters.”
Assayas,
Olivier from
World Cinema
One of
Olivier
Assayas A Retrospective - doc films - University of Chicago Haley
Markbreiter from DOC Films, Fall, 2013
We're pleased to present Chicago's first Assayas retrospective. Born in 1955, in Paris, Olivier Assayas was the son of writer/director Jacques Remy, and grew up helping his dad on shoots. When Remy's health began to fail, Assayas ghostwrote episodes of his father's TV show. Like Godard and Truffaut, Assayas got his training working as a critic for Cahiers du Cinema. He was one of the first writers to champion many of Hong Kong and Taiwan's "New Wave" film-makers including, most notably, Hou Hsiao-Hsien.
Assayas grew up under the shadow of the May 1968 riots, although he was too young to participate; still, the frustration (and pleasure) of youth rebellion would influence the rest of his work, as would the subsequent failure of the New center. Just look at Gilles and Christine's aimless, scared revolt in "Cold Water": they no longer feel like they can change anything. They can only run away. Punk rock and post-punk culture also permeate Assayas's work, from the Sonic Youth soundtracks featured in "demonlover" to an editing style that can jump from long, meditative takes to disjointed, energetic cutting.
For me, at least, Assayas' films stand out for their attempt, not just to confront and record the present, but to figure out what "the present" even means in a rapidly globalizing, increasingly mechanized, and increasingly impersonal world. These themes are present all across his work, from the cool, detached imagery of "demonlover" - in which national corporations fight for control of a 3-D anime porn - to "Les Destinees Sentimentales" - where the dawn of mass production threatens a family porcelain business - to "Summer Hours", which suggests that a connection to one's historical, national, and personal past is perhaps only available to those who can pay for it.
But, despite such a heavy-sounding introduction - Assayas' movies are also just a lot of fun. "Clean" and "Irma Vep" star Maggie Cheung, while "Cold Water" features Virginie Ledoyen in her breakout role. And the party scene in "Summer Hours" will make you hate yourself for not being a French teenager (as if we all didn't already feel that way... )
Olivier
Assayas Retrospective Bridges Worlds and Eras an overview by Nick Pinkerton (from Reverse
Shot) for the Village Voice, January
22, 2008
Plenty of boors will still be grousing over the pace of
today's movies and "MTV aesthetics" when the sun supernovas. But
who'd really presume to talk about the way we live now with a 50-year-old
vocabulary? Enter Olivier Assayas, from the
The eight-film retro at Anthology Film
Archives showcases a virtuosity so unaffected it frequently goes unnoticed, not
to say unsung. Assayas favors stick-and-move moviemaking, with cinematographer-
collaborators Eric Gautier or Denis Lenoir picking out evanescent moments from
complex sequence shots, cutting through warrens of activity that would trip up
a bulkier crew. The paradigm is the controlled anarchy of the all-night rager
in Assayas's fourth film, 1994's Cold Water, the director's recollection
of being young and bored in the early '70s, as detail-right as resin crumbs
stuck on a Uriah Heep gatefold. The party's coda comes at dawn, as girls squat
to pee in a damp field and Nico's donjon-drear voice echoes through the
soundtrack—I've been a convert ever since.
Assayas started off in the practice of
thinking hard about movies; he wrote for Cahiers du Cinema in the early
'80s, where he was an advocate of new Asian cinema— HHH, his 1997
profile of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, is included in Anthology's
lineup. Toward the end of his Cahiers tenure, he was working as a
screenwriter, for André Téchiné among others (their latter-day reunion feature,
'98's
Theory gets practice in 1996's
globalization-cosmopolitan Irma Vep, a film about its own making, for
which Assayas imported
All business, 2002's demonlover is a
cautionary tale of competing corporations, fighting dirty to win the rights to
distribute CG manga porno-violence. Shot in Paris and Japan, with a cast of
bilingual, bisexual BCBG femmes prowling lozenge-smooth
interiors—corporate parks, airport concourses, extended-stay hotels—it's by
default the best movie directly about the Internet age (the competition being
limited to Hollywood's talked-down mishmashes of IT jargon and puerile
"Don't go in your in-box!" J-horror). I've never learned to like
the movie (you're not supposed to), and the "chilling" conclusion
compares unfavorably to Brainscan, but I'll keep revisiting demonlover
while waiting for somebody to follow up on its challenge. . . . Is anybody
there? Is Assayas his own lone contemporary?
Follow-up Clean is warm-blooded,
again; the product is pop music, reissued postmortem; the grounds,
Senses of Cinema
– Olivier Assayas Franck
le Gac from Senses of Cinema, May 2006
Olivier Assayas:
Information from Answers.com
Olivier Assayas -
Explore - The Criterion Collection
A
Portrait of the Artist: Olivier Assayas on Bergman's The Magician ... Olivier Assayas essay on Bergman’s The Magician, Cahiers du cinéma, October 1990
MoMA.org | Film Exhibitions | 2003 | Olivier Assayas including brief film reviews
My Generation. Breaking the Sound Barrier: A Director's Take on
Movies, Music, Adolescence and Politics
My Generation, written by
Assayas (translated by David Ng) from
the Village Voice, August 24, 2004
Interview &
Symposium - Reverse Shot September/October
2003
demonlover | Reverse Shot Touching
the Void, by Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Decoding a
Digi-Demon - Reverse Shot Matthew
Plouffe from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Capital
Punishment - Reverse Shot Capital Punishment, by Jeff Reichert,
September/October 2003
Language
Barriers - Reverse Shot Karen Wilson
from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
daydream
nation: Sonic Youth meets demonlover - Reverse Shot Neal Block from Reverse Shot,
September/October 2003
Blind Ambition -
Reverse Shot Suzanne Scott from
Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
reverse shot :
online : olivier assayas Michael
Koresky from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Basest Instinct
- Reverse Shot Erik Syngle from
Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
The Films of
Olivier Assayas - Harvard Film Archive
January 26 – 28, 2008
New York
Times article on Assayas A New Kind of Cineaste, by A.O. Scott
from The New York Times, September
24, 2010
<em>Olivier
Assayas</em> - Screening the Past
Claire Perkins book review of Olivier
Assayas, by Kent Jones (256 pages), December 2012
Assayas, Olivier They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Olivier Assayas
interview Making Connections Between Cinema, Politics and Real Life, Cineaste article by Steve Erickson from
Chronicle of a Passion, March and September 1996
Film-makers
on film: Olivier Assayas - Telegraph
Sheila Johnston interview, Assayas on Fritz Lang, from The London Telegraph, July 9, 2005
An
Interview with Olivier Assayas | Reverse Shot The
Legacy, an Eric Hynes interview from Reverse Shot, 2008
Olivier Assayas Sam Adams interview from The Onion A.V. Cub, October 15, 2010
Carlos
Director Olivier Assayas on Making a 319 ... John Lopez interview from Vanity Fair, October 19, 2010
Interview
with Olivier Assayas « Film Quarterly
Rob White interview from Film
Quarterly, Winter 2010
Olivier
Assayas' Riot Acts - Page - Interview Magazine Durga Chew-Bose interview from Interview Magazine, 2012
An
Interview with Olivier Assayas | Reverse Shot Back and to the Left, by Adam Nayman from
Reverse Shot, 2012
100 Essential Directors (Pop Matters)
Olivier
Assayas Sight & Sound Poll Top Ten 2012
DISORDER (Désordre)
Reverse Shot Jeff
Reichert
With films like demonlover, Cold Water, and Irma
Vep crowding the field, it’s possible to look back over Olivier Assayas’s
career and miss his first feature, Disorder, completely. True, it did
win the Critics’ Prize at Venice, but it still feels like more of a
footnote than a jumping off point for the work that was to follow. Three
friends, Yvan, Remi, and Xavier form the core of a struggling post-punk band in
need of equipment. Taking a cue from the Sex Pistols legend (but minus Rod
Stewart), they burglarize a local music store, and are caught by the store’s
owner. In the ensuing fight, the owner is killed, and for the rest of the film,
the friends are left to carry their guilt. While not at all under suspicion for
the random act, its weight presses down on them, creating paranoia, and
eventually destroying their friendship. Disorder is cast in an aura of
overall gloom, partly due to a silver retention process used to treat the
footage, but perhaps more because Assayas, even within the constraints of this
simple narrative framework, seems to be channeling Dostoevsky’s sensitivity to
moral quandary into a compressed torch song by Ian Curtis.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Much like the French Nouvelle
Vague of the 1960’s, Olivier Assayas with his first film Désordre -
winner of the International Critics Prize at Venice in 1986 - reclaimed
filmmaking for a new young audience, reaching out and speaking to them about
contemporary subjects that mattered to them in a way that they could easily
relate to. Drawing on the director’s experience as a journalist and film critic
for Les Cahiers du Cinéma, Désordre charts the self-destructive
career of an up-and-coming 1980’s French rock band and by extension examines
the attitudes and behaviour of a particular generation.
One of the most surprising aspects
of Assayas’s approach to the rock music film, is that it doesn’t follow the
rags-to-riches-to-ruin plot path that is typical of the genre. Even before the
band have successfully made a name for themselves or even signed a recording
contract, the seeds of their destruction have already been sown. The film opens
with an attempted burglary of a music store by two of the band members, Yvan
(Stanczak) and Henri (Belvaux), with the assistance of their girlfriend Anne
(Glass). The robbery goes badly wrong and the repercussions of the event
fracture the delicate structure of the band, the relationships between them and
their girlfriends. The promise of a record contract brings the band to London,
but they fail to even make it across the channel intact, with the drummer
Xavier (Martin) having already given his notice to the band in a spectacularly
destructive fashion and Yvan falling for a young photographer who has come
along with them, Cora (Dacla).
Désordre’s plot is relentlessly fatalistic and melodramatic,
encapsulating a whole career of band turmoil, in-fighting and “creative
differences” into a very short, intensive period of time. In doing so, it seems
to sum-up the whole indie 80’s New Wave movement, with New Order, The Jesus and
Mary Chain, The Woodentops (seen in a spectacular concert performance at the
Marquee) and “Les Avions” providing the music that is the driving force behind
the film, and hitting all those key locations of France, London and New York in
Le Gibus, The Marquee and New Rose. More than that, it captures the youth scene
of the time, its aspirations and ambitions as well as its self-destructive
impulses. Each of the characters is searching for their own identity, aligning
their lifestyles romantically to their love of music. Confronted by the
realities of life in their mid-twenties however they realise it is an ideal
that cannot be sustained and the results are disillusionment, betrayal and
suicide.
This is a subject and a recurrent
theme that is common to several other Olivier Assayas films, notably L’Eau
Froide, Fin Août, Début Septembre and more recently Clean.
In comparison to those other films, the dialogue and scripting in this early
film are not particularly revelatory or strong in a conventional narrative
sense, but Désordre retains a strong naturalistic tone, allowing the
modern viewer to look back now at a film that succeeds in being authentic and
representative of its generation at a certain time, and by focussing on a
universal condition common to all generations, manages to do so without
appearing the slightest bit dated.
More than just a rock film, Désordre
is a post-rock film, equating the death of a particular music scene with the
coming to end of youthful adolescence and the dream of being part of a collective
scene, facing up to the realities of life and making one’s own way in the
world. It does this bleakly, unsentimentally and authentically, capturing in
the process all the youthful energy of the mid-eighties rock scene, and
announcing the presence of an important young French director, Olivier Assayas.
The French DVD release of this film is superb in every respect, with a fine
transfer and a stunning array of extra features. Only the lack of English
subtitles makes this unfortunately inaccessible to a wider audience.
WINTER’S
CHILD (L’Enfant de l'hiver)
Reverse Shot Jeff
Reichert
This may sound horribly reductive, but Disorder and Winter’s
Child seem proof positive that most great filmmakers are made, not born.
There’s no sense in this pair that we are watching the work of a filmmaker
completely in command of the medium. Rather, we can locate a certain
fascinating restlessness that results in equal parts rough edges and moments of
near-greatness. How else to explain Winter’s Child’s quiet,
Bergman-esque formalism, which almost feels the work of a different filmmaker?
It’s the story of a love quadrangle, a child, a theater troupe, and a long
winter, that feels like a warm-up to the overwhelming, complicated
intersections in Late August, Early September. Nathalie is pregnant, but
the baby’s father, Stefane, leaves her for Sabine, a set designer for the
theater. Sabine has just left Bruno, an actor in the same troupe. Nathalie
tries to kill herself and is saved by her friend Leni, as Stefane then follows
Sabine on her theatrical tour. If it sounds overly complicated, it is. However,
though it may be tempting to view these early films only as stepping stones on
the path to the filmmaker Assayas has become, to do so would be to ignore small
pleasures offered when taken in their own right.
aka:
Paris s'éveille |
review, synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out Tony
Rayns
This third feature by former Cahiers
du Cinéma critic Assayas is his best to date, and one of the few French
movies about middle-class relationships that is neither precious nor airily
detached from social realities. It's essentially a triangle drama: father
(Léaud, playing his real age, for once), much younger second wife (Godrèche,
fetching), and semi-estranged son (Langmann, son of Claude Berri). Fluently
written and played with palpable enthusiasm by the entire cast, it works
outwards from small details. Everything is precisely judged, from the hang of
an art-class model's scrotum to the bearing of a waitress in a Chinese
restaurant.
My
Generation - - Movies - New York - Village Voice Olivier Assayas, August 17, 2004
When I began making films, I was inspired in part by the
desire to share what I feel when I listen to rock music.
Disorder -
Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert
And yet, it moves. Like Winter’s Child and Disorder, Paris Awakens was shot by Denis Lenoir, and it is here, in the culmination of this rough trilogy exploring rites of passage that their collaboration bears its first ripe fruits. Those who became acquainted with Assayas through Irma Vep (though shot by Eric Gautier) or Late August, Early September were treated to films conceived as perpetual motion machines—the camera as a restless roving eye that forces even the calmest of scenes into a certain level of velocity. In this story of an estranged son who holes up with his father (and what a father—played by Jean Pierre Léaud), and ends up stealing his much younger girlfriend, Louise (Judith Godriche), the camera is in motion from the very first shot. For me, it’s most memorable for what I find the first truly “Assayas” moment in his cinema. Midway through the film, a familiar bass-line snakes its way into the end of a quiet, spinning love scene. We fade to black and cut to Louise who picks up the camera’s rotation through a crowded dance club floor just as the unmistakable guitar riff of The Pixies’ “Debaser” takes up the call. The camera allows Louise to dance well into the song before cutting to Léaud and a few older friends trying in vain to converse over the music. Rock ‘n’ roll, generation gaps, dance as catharsis (look for it again in Cold Water, Irma Vep, Les Destineés, and demonlover)—it all starts here.
Paris
s'eveille - film review / Olivier Assayas / 1991 - French Film Guide James Travers
19-year old Adrien leaves his mother in
Olivier Assayas' third full-length film combines some of the
elements of a noir thriller and a conventional French love triangle but
presents them as a gritty social realist drama. Stylistically, the film is
probably the director's most inspired and satisfying film to date; it offers a
brutally stark, convincing picture of disaffection and solitude in a society
that has lost its moral sense and identity. There is little to distinguish the
forty-something Clément (Jean-Pierre Léaud at his best) from the youngsters
Louise and Adrien (portrayed superbly by Judith Godrèche and Thomas Langmann).
All three are eternal adolescents who seem incapable of self-development, stuck
in a groove from which there is no escape. The outside world offers them
nothing to enable them to grow, and so they are trapped, weak, vulnerable
orphans of an unceasing storm. But appearances are deceptive and the film shows
that escape is sometimes possible, that happy endings (of a kind) do happen,
sometimes. It's a truthful, understated work, with an engaging story and
believable characters, untarnished by the self-conscious excesses that would
mar some of Assayas' later films.
Summer
Hours: A Time to Live and a Time to Die - From the Current ... Kent Jones from The Criterion Collection, April 20, 2010
In 1992, I went to
At that point, cinema was still all but synonymous with the French New Wave, despite the fact that the New Wave was no longer new, and that one of its guiding lights, François Truffaut, had been dead for eight years. For many American film lovers, the wave was still cresting.
I saw as many films as I could, by André Téchiné, Leos Carax, Maurice Pialat, Eric Rohmer, and then something by a relatively young director who, like Rohmer and Téchiné (and, ever so briefly, Carax), had written for Cahiers du cinéma. His name was Olivier Assayas, and the film was called Paris s’éveille. My comprehension of spoken French was, and is, rangy (it all depends on who’s doing the speaking), and there was a lot that I missed in this sad love triangle between a lost girl (Judith Godrèche), her much older boyfriend (Jean-Pierre Léaud), and his son (Thomas Langmann, the offspring of legendary producer-director Claude Berri). However, there was something about Paris s’éveille that instantly separated it from the other films—a realism about how much or how little younger people value themselves, a frank acknowledgment of everyday cruelty, a powerful bond with the actors and a close, vivid sense of their individual physical expressivity, and a sense of speed that was distinctly different from anything I’d seen by anyone else. Not the speed, or the pace, of the film itself, but the speed of life in the film as it was experienced by the characters. With a somber visual palette, Assayas was rendering the blur of existence, the sensation of an individual consciousness trying to catch up with time, of impulse-governed action followed much later by sober reflection. This was something new.
Not long after, Assayas made another film, called Une nouvelle vie, a more extreme and haunting work than Paris s’éveille in which the same ideas of character and experiential flux were carried even further. I raved about these movies to my friend Alex Horwath, who then ran the Viennale (and is now the director of the Austrian Film Museum). He knew Assayas and suggested that I write to him, and when I did, he responded almost immediately. “I was losing hope that my films would ever be understood on the other side of the Atlantic,” he wrote. We began a correspondence, and then we got to know each other. I was half a decade younger, but we seemed to share a generational DNA. This became abundantly clear when I saw Cold Water a year later. This autobiographical film, shot on Super 16 mm, was the highlight of the television series Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge (“All the Boys and Girls of Their Age,” the title taken from a once-famous Françoise Hardy song). Eight filmmakers, including Claire Denis, Chantal Akerman, and Téchiné, were given small budgets to create portraits of themselves at the age of sixteen, and the one rule was that they had to include a party scene. Cold Water, set in the deepest and dankest seventies, featured the greatest one in the series. This lengthy, climactic set piece took place outside an abandoned château, and I still know of nothing else quite like it in movies: the camera is never less than excitingly mobile, but thanks to the visual scheme worked out between Assayas and his DP, Denis Lenoir, every wandering pack of adolescents, every cloud of hash smoke, every form that passes before the camera, maintains an impressive solidity. And as powerful as this somber conflagration is, I’ve always found the scene that precedes it even more remarkable. The teenage boy who plays Assayas’s surrogate, Cyprien Fouquet, walks his bicycle alone through the woods, lights up a Gauloise, opens a Ginsberg collection, and starts reading “Wichita Vortex Sutra” aloud in halting English. The winding path through the woods, tracked by the camera from a series of scintillating distances, the heartbreakingly cracked voice, the adolescent investment of faith in poetry and music, the comfort of unexposed solitude, conspire to make for a passage so acutely realized as to merit the adjective visionary. It is perfectly capped by Fouquet’s arriving at the main road, mounting his bicycle, and riding into the fog, as he continues his awkward recitation.
hurrymay05_2
- GEOCITIES.ws
Senses of Cinema
– Olivier Assayas Franck
le Gac from Senses of Cinema, May 2006
The Films of
Olivier Assayas - Harvard Film Archive
PARIS AWAKENS-directed
by Olivier Assayas
A NEW LIFE (Une
Nouvelle vie)
Reverse Shot Jeff
Reichert
Paris Awakens was a gigantic leap forward—the
apartment that housed most of the film’s action, turned into a battlefield by a
camera constantly prowling its confines, showed a filmmaker coming into his
own. Une Nouvelle vie (not to be confused with the recent, similarly
titled abomination by Phillipe Grandrieux), Assayas’s first film shot in
’Scope, takes these advancements and ties them to a radical formal strategy.
For this, his fourth feature, he wrote and shot a three-hour film. However,
while editing, he removed a full third of the narrative. The result is full of
scene transitions that feel like explosions threatening to rip the narrative to
shreds. If Bresson was a point of reference before, here these elisions and a
persistent interest in character’s midsections and hands announce Assayas as
perhaps his true heir. Tina (Sophie Aubry), stifled at home by her mother, at
work (she drives a forklift) by gender pressures, and in love by her
almost-fiancé Fred seeks a new start by reaching out to the wealthy father
she’s never known and half-sister, Lise (Judith Godriche). She finds in turn,
anger, casual disinterest, understanding, eventual kinship with Lise, and a
lover in the form of Bernard Girardeau’s slick lawyer, Clemintin. Never
released in the U.S., Une Nouvelle vie deserves to rank alongside his
later, more celebrated works—his first true poem of the working world fully and
finally sets the stage for the other Assayas to take over, the one who just may
well be one the leading lights of world cinema today.
COLD WATER
(L’eau Froide) A 99
aka:
Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge... (All the Boys and Girls In Their Time) – made
for TV
(Commissioned by French
television as one part of a series of nine films entitled Tous les garçons
et les filles de leur âge, including other directors: Patricia Mazuy, Chantal Akerman, André
Téchiné, Olivier Dahan, Emilie Deleuze, Claire Denis, Laurence Ferreira
Barbosa, and Cédric Kahn. Released
theatrically, however, before it was shown on TV) France (92 mi) 1994
Janitor of lunacy
Paralyze my infancy
Petrify the empty cradle
Bring hope to them and me
Janitor of tyranny
Testify my vanity
Mortalize my memory
Deceive the devil's deed
Tolerate my jealousy
Recognize the desperate need
Janitor of lunacy
Identify my destiny
Revive the living dream
Forgive their begging scream
Seal the giving of their seed
Disease the breathing grief
—Nico “Janitor of Lunacy,” 1974, written for Brian Jones (1942 – 1969), Nico - Janitor of Lunacy (Peel '74) - YouTube (4:25)
If you ever have a
chance to see this film in a theater, don’t pass it up, as it’s likely to be
the best film you’ll see all year. An
almost perfect film, arguably the stand-out work in this director’s repertoire,
as this film along with Nicholas Ray’s REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955), Truffaut’s
The
400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) (1959), and perhaps André Téchiné’s Wild
Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages)
(1994) from this same commissioned series, may be the most
outstanding coming-of-age films to ever probe into misunderstood adolescence,
while it’s also one of the greatest 60’s counterculture films, even though it
was set it in the early 70’s. In
addition, it features superlative use of handheld cameras by Denis Lenoir, where
the fluidity of motion perfectly matches the restless interior states of mind
of the lead characters, where what immediately comes to mind is the sustained
intensity level throughout, especially in the lead character, 16-year old
Christine (17-year old Virginie Ledoyen’s greatest performance), as if the
weight of the world is literally flooding through her body and soul at every
moment, where her instincts of self-preservation lead to a constant state of
rebellion, where befuddled adults have legal control over what to do with her,
which includes sending her to a psychiatric hospital against her will because
they can’t deal with her. Assayas
beautifully captures the mood, atmosphere, and raw,
unpretentious intensity of anxiety-ridden adolescents caught up in their
own indecisions, the terrible choices they make, how easy their emotions are
sparked and then extinguished, and how eloquently, beyond their own words
(blank piece of paper), this film describes their fatalistic viewpoint about
their all-too-hopeless future, made as part of the celebrated French TV series,
"Tous les garçons et les filles de leur âge" (1994), ALL THE BOYS AND
GIRLS IN THEIR TIME, a collaboration of various directors recalling their
lives at 16, including Chantal Akerman, Claire Denis, and André Téchiné's Wild
Reeds (Les Roseaux Sauvages)
(1994), where one rule was they had to include a party
sequence, all dealing with dramatized stories set during their
adolescence.
This film is set in the
outskirts of Paris in 1972, where the story examines the lives of two defiant
16-year old delinquents from broken homes, Christine and Gilles, played
flawlessly by Virginie Ledoyen and Cyprien Fouquet. Christine has already been sent to the
psychiatric asylum, is caught by the police as a partner in a shoplifting crime
committed by Gilles, a more comfortable middle class kid with little to no life
experience, and is then returned to the asylum by her father, with the consent
of her separated Scientologist mother (Dominique Faysse) and Arab boyfriend
(Smaïl Mekki), while Gilles is expelled from school and is expected to be
shipped off to boarding school by his single father, intelligently played by
László Szabó. These opening set-up sequences
show adults straining to understand the seemingly senseless actions and
motivations of youth, where ironically the best listener turns out to be a
sympathetic police inspector (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), but he is viewed as
untrustworthy like all the other authority figures, where these kids are so
alienated and lost that they often don’t understand their own thoughts and are
afraid to share their innermost secrets with anyone. This is one of the better films at expressing
the vast divide between age groups, where people over thirty are simply not to
be trusted, as their actions even when well-meaning are seen as cruel,
reflective of their own narrow interests, so it’s quite natural for these kids
to rebel against what they perceive to be the source of injustice and such
emotional upheaval in their lives. In
fact, the romance between Christine and Gilles is as much the result of a
shared opposition to authority as it is a mutual attraction. This is also one of the few films to include
a minority, an Arab boyfriend, as among those overly heavy-handed adults they
need to rebel against, which is an interesting twist, considering minorities
are usually perceived to be on the receiving end of social injustice.
Christine escapes and
meets Gilles at a country house where a horde of teenagers are convening for a
midnight party. In one of the more enthralling scenes, Gilles travels
through an unimaginably beautiful green forest walking his bicycle while
spouting (in English) the Allen Ginsburg poetry of his 1966 anti-war poem Wichita Vortex Sutra, taking a winding path
through the woods where the quiet solitude is unmistakable until miraculously
finding a paved road in a blue mist, which appears like an open portal to
another universe, riding and escaping into the mist, while Christine seems on
the verge of a mental breakdown and after cutting off some of her hair, attacks
another girl with a pair of scissors. Rarely
mentioned as one of the key films of the 90’s as it never had an American
release other than festival screenings and has still never appeared on DVD, but
can only be seen in retrospectives, it is nonetheless one of the key films of
the 90’s, where it climaxes with a memorable riotous all-night party in an
abandoned château, which resolves into a 15-minute sequence of American music
with no dialogue, just the passing of a bong pipe, a raging bonfire, music and
dancing, evoking feelings of liberation, starting with Janis Joplin’s “Me and
Bobby McGee” Assayas - cold water
1994, party scene excerpt YouTube
(29:49, unsubtitled, though the dialogue stops around the 4-minute mark), Bob
Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” L'eau
froide YouTube (2:01), Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche” L'eau
froide : slow YouTube
(2:10), reaching a rousing crescendo, ascending to unimaginable heights
with Creedence Clearwater’s “Comin’ Round the Bend” L'eau froide : feu de joie YouTube (2:56), so good they have to play it
again, interspersed with the piercing scratch of the needle ripping across the
phonograph record while abruptly changing songs. With the kids smashing the windows throwing
all the home furniture into the bonfire, it has a feel of storming the
Bastille, where revolt and revolution are in the air. Assayas uses Nico’s “Janitor of Lunacy” L'eau froide : matin blême YouTube (2:56) as the coming down song, an ode
to the Rolling Stone (Brian Jones) that died too young, leaving a foggy
aftermath that dreamily hovers over the proceedings like finding yourself lost
in a wasteland. Much like Cassavetes’
landmark 60’s film Faces
(1968), Assayas uses closeups to brilliantly capture the expression on the
faces of his young characters, using a drifting handheld camera that reveals a
stunning intimacy, showing us their isolation as well as their union. The two escape in the middle of the night to
the idea a better place (freedom) that exists only in Christine's mind, and on
a wintry night, Christine finds herself walking waist deep in an icy cold river
that is pushing or pulling her with unrestrained force and whose decibel level
is ominous, where one feels she is about to throw herself in, but instead
decides to give herself to Gilles that night only to disappear by morning,
leaving little trace of where she’s gone, L'Eau Froide - O.Assayas YouTube
(4:40). In this film, much like the
ambiguous, existential ending to Five
Easy Pieces (1970), there is no definable future, there is only today.
Musical soundtrack:
Avalanche
Written and Performed by Leonard Cohen
Me & Bobby McGee
Written by Kris
Kristofferson
Performed by Janis
Joplin
Up Around The Bend
Written by John
Fogerty
Performed by Creedence
Clearwater Revival
Janitor of Lunacy
Written by Nico
Performed by Nico
Virginia Plain
Written by Bryan
Ferry
Performed by Roxy
Music
Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Written by Bob
Dylan
Performed by Bob
Dylan
School's Out
Written by Alice
Cooper, Michael
Bruce, Glen
Buxton, Dennis
Dunaway and Neal
Smith
Performed by Alice
Cooper
Easy Livin'
Written by Ken Hensley
Performed by Uriah
Heep
Cosmic Wheels
Written by Donovan
Performed by Donovan
L'Eau Froide | review,
synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out
Commissioned as part of a series in which directors went back to
their adolescence, this is a brave, moving film, set in the outskirts of Paris
in 1972. It's a portrait of two delinquents, both from broken homes, and both
about to be packed off to institutional care. Christine is on the verge of a
mental breakdown, and Gilles, who buys dynamite for kicks, is headed for
boarding school. Assayas shoots with a hand-held camera and favours cold, blue
lighting and diagetic sound. He's rewarded with two resolutely natural, unshowy
performances by Ledoyen and Fouquet, and a tremendous emotional pull. The
centrepiece is a marvellously sustained midnight party sequence (a requirement
of the series), where a horde of teens group, groove and get off to the sounds
of Janis Joplin, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Leonard Cohen and Alice Cooper.
Recommended.
Cold
Water | Chicago Reader Jonathan
Rosenbaum, also seen here: Cold Water
Not long before embarking on his comedy Irma Vep,
Olivier Assayas directed this powerful 1994 feature about doomed teenage love
as part of the excellent French TV series All the Boys and Girls in Their
Time, in which various filmmakers (including Andre Techine, Chantal
Akerman, and Claire Denis) dramatized stories set during their teenage years,
scoring them with the pop music of the period. Assayas's contribution, perhaps
the most affecting in the whole series, takes place on the outskirts of
DVD Times Noel Megahey
L’Eau Froide was Olivier Assayas’ response to a request from producer
Chantal Poupaud, who was preparing a series of ten films by ten directors called
Tous les Garçons et Filles de Leur Age. A number of important directors
were assigned to a make film about their youth at the age of 16 – consequently
Jean-Claude Brisseau was lined up to cover the late 50’s, André Téchiné to do
the early 60’s, Claire Denis the mid 60’s etc. Assayas’s film is set in the
early 70’s, a crucial time for a youth growing up in the immediate years
following the
Gilles and his young schoolfriend
Christine (Virginie Ledoyen) attempt to steal some records from a record shop.
Christine is caught, and after an unproductive attempt by a put-upon police
officer (Jean-Pierre Darrousin) to get her to see the dangers of the direction
her life is going in, she is given over into the hands of her father. Unable to
cope with the broken family life – her father is separated from her mother who
lives with a new boyfriend - Christine is unable to bear living with her father
and is send to an institution known as Beau Soleil, which is rumoured to
use electroshock treatments on its internees. Gilles, also a child of divorced
parents, meanwhile finds himself expelled from school. Running away from Beau
Soleil, Christine and Gilles meet up again at a huge party being thrown at
an abandoned château and decide to find a way to escape from their parents and
the lives they are being forced to lead, but Christine is not convinced that
Gilles is strong enough to give her the support and help she needs.
After the lack of success of his
previous films Paris S’Eveille (1991) and Une Nouvelle Vie
(1993), which had seen the director fall into a schematic way of making films,
the proposition to make a film about youth couldn’t have come at a better time
for Olivier Assayas. Adopting the use of a Super-16mm camera allowed Assayas to
shoot in a more natural, laid-back manner, the film simply flowing along
through certain scenes in a way that hadn’t been seen since his debut film Désordre.
L’Eau Froid consequently captures that same intensity of the spirit of
youth, resembling the earlier film in a number of ways, not least in the key
opening sequences where an attempted theft from a music shop sets the direction
for the subsequent fracturing of the characters lives.
Music then, just like Désordre
becomes the key motivating force behind the characters in the film. L’Eau
Froide (Cold Water) is set in 1972, the date set in an early scene
by a radio broadcasting Roxy Music’s Virginia Plain. In one short glance
between Gilles and his younger brother looking over the radio at each other,
the spirit of complicity through a new music that reaches out and connects with
the youth of a particular generation is already established. The early seventies
were a key period for youth in France, following immediately after the student
rebellion of May 1968, and leaving many youths feeling lost and directionless,
particularly those, like Assayas and the characters in his film, who lived in
less prosperous outlying areas of Paris (a legacy which has contributed to
France’s longstanding problem that has exploded recently with trouble in the banlieues).
Assayas captures this
disaffection, again as in Désordre,
with a perfect combination of music and image, particularly in one stunning
wordless sequence at a party at the abandoned château, where the film shows the
preparation and smoking of a cannabis pipe, the camera flowing languidly along
with the passing of the pipe in an almost unbroken swirl, while the music (from
the records Gilles stole from the record shop) plays out in the background -
Janis Joplin’s Me & Bobby McGee (“Freedom’s just another word for
nothing left to lose”), Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Up Around the
Bend and Alice Cooper’s School’s Out - seemingly obvious selections,
but songs whose lyrics have genuine meaning and speak to the young people of a
particular generation. The scene then culminates in a huge bonfire, upon which
furnishings from the house are thrown as the kids dance around the fire. This
sequence captures everything about youth – not in any explosion of anger
directed against authority, but in its desire to be free to be itself, to
stretch out, find its own limitations and make its own mistakes – a note the
film’s ending unmistakably proposes.
Rather like Assayas’s first film, Désordre in 1986, L’Eau Froide succeeds in surpassing the conventions and clichés of the nominal plot-line about disaffected youth, and through his use of music and a fresh, flowing mise en scène finds a way to get beneath the surface and bring out a sympathetic and clearly autobiographical understanding of the circumstances of his characters and youth in general. An important break-through film in the director’s career, it is unfortunate that English subtitles are not provided with this French DVD release, which is otherwise superb.
Cold Water | Reverse Shot Michael Koresky
Cold
Water (1994) Review - Man with a Movie Blog
Olivier
Assayas: Part I - Light Sensitive
Patrick McGavin
The
Book of French Youth by Charles Mudede - Seattle Film - The ... Charles Mudede
itsamadmadblog2:
Into the Deep End: Assayas and "Cold Water" Joseph B.
Summer
Hours: A Time to Live and a Time to Die - From the Current ... Kent Jones from The Criterion Collection,
April 20, 2010
Senses of Cinema
– Olivier Assayas Franck Le Gac, May
2006
The Way We Weren't [REBEL
HIGHWAY] - JonathanRosenbaum.com
November 18, 1994
cinematic
threads Matthew Lotti
SubVerse
» Filmmaker Interview – Olivier Assayas
Joshua Rubin interview, February 10, 2006
Cold
Water - FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW - Movies - The New York Times Janet Maslin
A
Filmmaker's Rebellious Teenagers, Take 1 - NYTimes.com Mike Hale from The New York Times, April 26, 2013
Cold Water (film) -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Believer -
The Last Antiwar Poem Rolf Potts
Wichita Vortex Sutra -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
3-5-0-0
Reference: Wichita Vortex Sutra | hairattheeagletheatre entire poem seen here (pdf format)
IRMA VEP A- 94
France (96 mi)
1996
A student of art and
literature who never went to film school, the son of a screenwriter, claiming
he knew from an early age he would be a director, and a one-time film critic
for Cahiers du Cinéma, Assayas’s
interest in film, largely influenced by Robert Bresson, was how to express life
through a collaborative process, through the experience of making a film, much
of which develops on the set with a particular set of actors. IRMA VEP, a film about film itself, developed
from a point when Assayas was questioning the value of cinema, questioning
whether it was relevant at all, as at least at that point in time in his life,
it appeared to be an age when a majority of people in the world could live
entirely without art in their lives.
So IRMA VEP opens when
a new film is frantically getting started, complete with all the energy,
animosity, and chaos flying in all directions.
Into this mayhem, the placidly beautiful Maggie Cheung arrives from
China, fresh from some Hong Kong martial arts adventure. Much of the film is spoken in the neutral
English language, which just about everyone knows, as she presumably doesn’t
speak French. Jean-Pierre Léaud, a fixture
in New Wave films as an adolescent, plays the grumpy, overly-plagued director,
who has been forced to accept the terms of his production company which
requires that he re-make Louis Feuillade’s silent film serial LES VAMPIRES
(1915), one of the great glories of early French cinema and a favorite of the
Surrealists, which featured a lead underworld catwoman burglar, Irma Vep, who
seemed at the time to capture the mood and soul of Paris. So immediately the director looks outside
France for his lead, searching for the purity and poetry of the original, but
becomes helplessly bogged down in the detailed minutiae of modern day
filmmaking, where he has to deal with the incessant criticism that a Chinese
actress could hardly be worthy of such an iconic French role, to which he
responds definitively, “Irma Vep is France!”
Perhaps Assayas’s only
film comedy, it was written very quickly, in the space of about ten days, and
filmed almost immediately after the point of conception in less than a month,
where this is a film with very quick camera movements from Eric Gautier, much
like painting’s brush strokes, as one might envision different images by moving
your head, a short look here, a long look there, yet another glance, though in
film, all could be realized in one shot, which adds a cinéma vérité,
improvisational feel. Seen mostly
through the eyes of a costume designer Zoë, Jacques Rivette regular Nathalie
Richard, who unexpectedly escorts Maggie around town FF_Vep-2.mov
YouTube (2:38), perhaps serving as the voice of Assayas in this film, and
while overall, there’s a sense that everything is spinning out of control,
there are also small sequences throughout which are simply flurries of
brilliance, with exquisite use of music, as they successfully transcend the
impossible trap set for the film’s director.
One thinks of a brief
scene where the two female leads, French and Chinese, take a free and
liberating ride through a miserably dark and forbidding Paris winter on a
motorbike, while the audience hears guitar music from Mali’s Ali Farka Touré
(“Soukora”) Ali Farka Toure - Soukora YouTube (6:07),
or the film’s tour de force moment, a dreamlike sequence set to the music of
Sonic Youth’s “Tunic” FF_Vep.mov YouTube (7:21) where Maggie inexplicably
slinks out of her hotel room one night dressed in her latex all-body catwoman
outfit, actually entering the hotel room of another distraught traveler
(Arsinée Khanjian) and steals her jewelry, seen later slinking along the
rooftops of Paris wearing latex and heels, on
the rooftops YouTube (1:12). Something of a perpetual mystery, both in the
original and in the Assayas remake, offering considerable confusion about
fantasy and reality, or the power of dreams, with uncertainty and a lack of
closure lingering throughout, the film has a brilliantly ironic closing
sequence, which oddly enough reminds one of Rivette’s ending in LA BELLE
NOISEUSE (1991), which also comically deals with some obsessional human
eccentricities involved in creating art, but also movingly combines the worlds
of silent cinema with the modernistic avant-garde in a glorious finale Irma
Vep final YouTube (6:06).
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
A contemporary French director
(Jean-Pierre Léaud) takes on the assignment of remaking the 1915 French silent
classic Les Vampires—with Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung (playing herself)
as its famously mysterious master thief protagonist, Irma Vep—in this
semi-satirical meditation from director Olivier Assayas. As with all films
about filmmaking, Irma Vep indulges in a good deal of commentary about
the art form, in this case about the gaps between cinematic past and present,
the films of the East and West (specifically France), and the films of America
and the rest of the world. Shot in a seemingly improvised, cinema-verité style,
Irma Vep lets its cleverness remain implied rather than overstated, but
as things unravel—as the audience begins to share Léaud's perception that the
task of bringing the film together is impossible—it becomes clear how much
thought is behind it. A funny and fascinatingly open-ended look at the state of
the art, Irma Vep is well worth a look.
Chicago NewCityNet [Ray Pride]
Olivier Assayas' "Irma Vep"
is an inventive, light-hearted take on French film history. For superficial
francophiles, it's a 1990s "Day for Night"; other audiences should
find it a breezy, bright comedy about work, lust and latex. There are layers
and layers of film references, but there's no need to catch them all.
I find it very difficult to put into words the appeal of this
film. Maggie Cheung is playing herself as a successful
Chinese Cinema Page review Shelly Kraicer
OK, it's a French movie, but it's about and stars Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk, so I think there is room on this page for a review/report:
If you're a fan or an admirer of Maggie Cheung, try to find Irma Vep.
It's a quirky, hilarious new French comedy about a director who hires a
Fading, once-respected director "Rene Vidal" (Jean-Pierre Leaud) decides he can only make his vampire movie if it stars "Maggie Cheung" (played by, of course, Maggie Cheung), who somehow captured his imagination when he saw "Heroic Trio" in a theatre in Marrakesh. So he hires her, she arrives in Paris, and walks straight into a chaotic low-budget production, where she must endure an ill-fitting rubber cat suit ("I never want to see that suit again", she told us after we watched the film), Paris' miserable winter, and pretentious interviewers (when asked if what she really wanted to do was star in a John Woo picture, she pointed out that maybe he worked better with male actors...). The director can't seem to communicate what he wants from Maggie, the (female) costume designer falls for her, she has an adventure in her catwoman costume in a stranger's hotel room, and finally the director loathes his work and has a breakdown, throwing the whole project into jeapordy.
Cheung shines in a film that, among other things, celebrates her face and
her acting (lots of closeups); the camera is always investigating various ways
of shooting Maggie, and believe me, they all work. There's a lot of
As Olivier Assayas said in his opening remarks at the Toronto Film Festival
showing (
Also a blast to watch was Maggie Cheung (the real one) herself, who attended
the premiere in
She stayed with Assayas for questions afterwards. Besides
addressing the rubber suit issue, she talked about other projects. I asked if
she had had any other offers of roles from non-Asian directors. She said that
she had, but up until Irma Vep hadn't been interested, since they were the kind
of "Asian woman stereotype" roles that she didn't want to have
anything to do with. As for her next projects, she mentioned the long-finished
but much delayed Soong Sisters, and a "low budget romantic
comedy", the multi-award winning Peter Chan Ho-San movie Comrades,
Almost a Love Story [Tian mi mi].
Jonathan
Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
"To
Catch a Thief" by J. Hoberman
from the Village Voice
DVD Times Noel Megahey
-maggie the
cat (irma vep) Karen Wilson from
Reverse Shot
Irma Vep Mike D’Angelo
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
Salon.com
[Stephanie Zacharek]
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
New
York Times Holiday DVD’s, Charles Taylor and Stephanie Zacharek, October 31,
2008
HHH – UN
PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN – made for TV B 88
aka: Cinéma, de Notre Temps – TV series
France Taiwan
(91 mi) 1997
France is known for its
Cinéma de Notre Temps television
interview series of famous directors, where for decades they’ve been following
various filmmakers, including the groundbreaking Jacques Rivette interview with
legendary French director Jean Renoir, while one of the best ever American
interviews is with a young John Cassavetes as he’s filming Faces
(1968), an interview that’s included in the Criterion Collection edition of his
5-films. What’s unique here is that the
interviewer is French filmmaker Olivier Assayas, who is obviously as fascinated
by what Hou Hsiao-hsien contributed to the Taiwanese New Wave in the 80’s and
90’s, which are still in full swing at the time this film is being made, along
with Edward Yang, Tsai Ming-liang, Chen Kuo-fu, and screenwriters Wu Nien-jen,
and novelist Chu Tien-wen, where Chu, often interviewed alongside the director,
collaborated on all of Hou’s screenplays for over twenty years. Filmed in the late 1990’s, this serves as a
time capsule into the still young life of the Taiwanese director. At 50 years of age, he’s in fine form
throughout, often seen chewing gum and recalling what a recalcitrant child he
was, often getting himself into trouble by hanging out with the street gangs,
but he matured after entering the army and performing his military service,
where he decided he was interested in film, something he attributes to his
childhood vantage point spending time in trees, which both stimulated and
altered his spatial conception. After
directing a couple of successful comedies starring pop stars, he collaborated
with two other directors on THE SANDWICH MAN (1983), generally regarded as the
first film of the Taiwanese New Wave, where the intent was to alter the
uninspired direction of the nation’s old-fashioned cinema, making it connect
more with real life people and their situations. But it was Hou’s THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI
(1983), the only film of Hou to use Western classical music, a remarkable story
of the director’s own awkwardly troubled adolescence, where he is searching for
a distinctly Chinese way of telling the story, the first to display what has
become the traditional Hou style, minimalist dramas with extended long takes
and a fixed-camera angle that heightens the sense of real time.
His next series of
films, his coming-of age trilogy, each written by a different screenwriter reflecting
an autobiographical segment based upon their own lives, was highly successful,
especially the one written by Hou, A TIME TO LIVE, A TIME TO DIE (1985), which
Wu Nien-jen is heard calling the greatest Taiwanese film ever made, the story
of his family’s move from mainland China to Taiwan, thinking it would only be
temporary before they moved back, as his elderly grandmother thought the
mainland was just around the corner, where they often went searching for the
(non-existent) dead ancestor’s graves.
While a critic at Cahiers du
Cinéma, Assayas was one of the first to recognize Hou’s profound talent,
meeting him for a Cahiers article in 1984, having a marked influence on his own
work, so in this film he follows Hou around various locations in Taiwan,
meeting in Taipei before returning to the provincial town of Fengshan where Hou
grew up under the nickname Aha, recognizing a few old friends, reminiscing
about how they used to be street punks and raise hell on these same streets,
causing quite a commotion when he arrives with a French filmmaker’s camera
following his every move, becoming something of a cause célèbre. Assayas remains behind the camera for the
most part, though occasionally we see an interpreter in his ear, but the
television interview format is to observe and listen to the filmmaker, as Hou
shows us the modest teahouse where he writes his screenplays, while also
showing various set locations that he
used, including an old abandoned gold mine where the accompanying structures
remain largely intact, preserving its original look. For Hou, who filmed historical dramas, he was
looking for sites that maintained their original look, where in outlying rural
areas, people still live and dress much the same way as they did 50 years
ago. In something of a surprise,
especially considering how lyrical and gently flowing his films are, Hou has
something of a swagger to him, where in his youth he wanted to be a pop star
before becoming a filmmaker, but developed stage fright onstage, and he also
felt he was too short.
One of the more
interesting interviews was with Chen-Kuo-fu, director of THE PERSONALS (1998),
but he originally worked as a film critic, and he gives an excellent appraisal
of the untapped inspiration and furious energy on display at the dawn of the
Taiwanese New Wave era, where everyone often met to share ideas, recalling how
they’d all gather at Edward Yang’s home, an old Japanese structure, where they
fed off each others rampant enthusiasm, where they all loved what they were
doing. It’s quite apparent he misses
those days, that they were the best years of his life, which wonderfully
comments upon an era that spawned a rebirth in Taiwanese cinema. While Assayas doesn’t get into it, Hou
remains something of an enigma. While
his films are acclaimed abroad, he has not received an enthusiastic reception
at home, where theaters continue to screen primarily American films. While Hou had a hand in actually shaping the
history of his country, coming after the lifting of restrictions in 1987
imposed by martial law, which had remained in effect since 1947, making what
are arguably his greatest films, a history trilogy beginning with A
City of Sadness (Bei qing cheng shi) (1989), a powerful film that traces
Taiwan’s history from the Japanese defeat in World War II through the retreat
of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949. The
film had a major impact in Taiwan, as certain previously forbidden subjects
were touched upon, very carefully Hou explains, and objectively, not
criticizing anyone, followed by The
Puppetmaster (Xi meng ren sheng) (1993), that examines life under the
Japanese occupation covering the years 1909 to 1945, while the third, Good
Men, Good Women (Hao nan hao nu) (1995), covering the period of 1949 to the
present, tells the story of a small band of communist intellectuals that travel
to mainland China to help fight the Japanese, only to see their leader executed
later by his own countrymen. What was
never discussed was the relationship between the mainland Chinese filmmakers
and the Taiwanese Chinese, once the doors opened, as these are collectively
some of the best and brightest directors working anywhere in the world today,
where one is curious how they felt about each other.
Assayas describes Hou’s
personality, “His manner of slipping from grown-up rationality to childish
laughter is intact, as is his way of moving between intellectuals and
small-time Mafiosi’s in a sort of
studied uncertainty, hazy with grass, alcohol, or bin-lan (a plant-based kind
of speed). But here where only instinct
matters, theory and philosophy assume a growing importance; and it isn’t simply
a matter of a notion about perception—generally interesting only to
filmmakers—but also the classical Chinese tradition, with the gravity and
intensity peculiar to autodidacts.” We
see some of that personality emerge as he questions a local teahouse proprietor
whether the watermelon seeds used for tea are fresh, then proceeds to display a
ritualistic method of preparing tea, first pouring it into tiny teacups, then
one by one pouring that tea over the teapot, creating a pool of tea underneath
that continually gets recycled in this manner.
When Hou lets loose with a few friends in a karaoke house, he’s not kidding,
as he takes this endeavor quite seriously, where he happily wails away singing
old popular ballads that have a way of unleashing his soul.
User reviews from imdb Author: matthew wilder
(cosmovitelli@mediaone.net) from los angeles
...Hou Hsiao-hsien walks around his native
HHH:
A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-Hsien Movie on CinemaMontreal.com
Hou Hsiao-Hsein examines questions of identity and "native land," as he returns to the places of his youth to talk to childhood friends and discuss his films. His work is inseparably linked with the recent history of Taiwan and the emergence of the Taiwanese "Nouvelle Vague," an intellectual movement that united Taiwanese writers, journalists and filmmakers at the end of the 1970s; a movement that only became possible with the end of censorship and the advent of free discussions, through film and literature, about Taiwan's society.
HHH-Portrait
de Hou Hsiao-Hsien | Stockholms filmfestival
”HHH - Portrait de Hou Hsiao-Hsien” is Olivier Assaya's
first documentary. It is part of a series of film portraits made for Cinéma de
notre temps produced for the French-German cultural channel ARTE. The idea
behind the series is that one film maker portrays another film maker. This
makes it more personal rather than journalistic and each film differs from the
other. Similar to other portraits, Assayas bases his documentary on interviews
of the director and experts from his movies. It was during his years at Cahiers
du Cinéma that Assayas discovered Hou Hsiao-Hsien. He wrote an article about
the Taiwanese director and gave him great recommendations, leading to a
breakthrough in the West for the Asian director. Parallel to his career as a
director, Assayas has taken a closer look at Asian film. In 1984 he signed a
special issue of Cahiers du Cinéma with Charles Tesson, called Hong-Kong
Cinéma. In connection with a trip to the capital of Taiwan, Taipei, Assayas got
to know Hou Hsiao-Hsien, but also Edward Yang, Chen Kuo-Fu and the Australian
film photographer Christopher Doyle (who photographed Wong Kar-Wai's movies and
strongly contributed to their very special visual effects).In the documentary
Assayas comments that the 50 year old Hou Hsiao-Hsien belongs to ''one of the
most significant directors of his time''. He compares him to Antonioni of the
1960's, but also to Maurice Pialat, who, like Assayas, also was inspired by the
new wave of French film making. -The first time I saw one of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's
films, I was struck by the naked truth in his inspiration and of the
truthfulness of his pictures, writes Assayas. -The film”, An Unforgettable
Summer” (1984) caught me. Tthis story about petty thiefs from the South coming
to the big city, certainly has autobiographical values. He's taught himself and
has, in time, reached a level of modern and ambitious film language, thanks to
the spontaneous expression and the honest, straight forward way in which he views
the world.Footnote: The project Cinéma de notre temps has been going on since
1964. Since 1989 over 25 films have been produced in this series. ”Citizen Ken
Loach” by Karim Dridi will also be shown at this years festival.Marie
Berthelius
HHH
– Un portrait de Hou Hsiao-Hsien (1997) - Cinema of the World
Description: “The acclaimed filmmaker of the masterpiece Flowers of Shanghai, Hou Hsiao-hsien has been called “the figure of the decade” by critics such as J. Hoberman and Amy Taubin, and is considered by many to be the greatest Taiwanese filmmaker of all time.
Does he consider himself a Taiwanese or a Chinese film director? Examining the questions of identity and “native land,” Hou Hsiao-hsien returns to the setting of his youth to talk to childhood friends and discuss his films. His work, like the films A Time to Live and a Time to Die (1985) and The Puppetmaster (1993), is inseparably linked with the recent history of Taiwan, and to his own evolution.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s generation was born in Taiwan, or at a young age immigrated there, after the liberalization of the government following the 1975 death of Chiang Kai-shek. It is to this generation that the question of a Taiwanese identity is posed.
Hou Hsiao-hsien’s body of work, and the emergence of the Taiwanese ‘Nouvelle Vague,’ must be located within the context of an intellectual movement that united Taiwanese writers, journalists and filmmakers at the end of the 1970′s. This movement became possible only with the end of censorship, a prerequisite for free discussions, through film and literature, about Taiwan’s society.
Olivier Assayas, the director of HHH – A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN, whose most recent film Demonlover has just been released, was an early champion of the now world-renowned Hou Hsiao-hsien. Like many of the filmmakers from the generation before him, Assayas began his career as a film critic for Cahiers du Cinema. A film fanatic, he was instrumental in dissecting such genres as American Horror, Hong Kong Cinema and the new Tiawanese cinema. After writing screenplays for fellow Cahiers critic Andre Techine, Assayas pursued his own directing career, most notably with Irma Vep.”
In HHH – A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN, another installment in the Cinema, Of Our Time series (distributed by First Run / Icarus Films), two equals discuss the art of filmmaking.
“The 21st century belongs to Asia, and Hou is its historian, its prophet, and its poet laureate.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
“Highly recommended for inclusion in film and popular culture studies collections, this video provides a fascinating look at both an industry and an individual.”—Educational Media Reviews Online
“A successful work. This is extremely valuable information that should interest not only critics and fans of Hou’s films, but also film historians who wish to trace the development of Taiwanese cinema or find patterns shared by independent filmmaking with distinctive regional or national identities. [The film] helps us understand the autobiographical elements in… his early films, as well as the melancholy yearning, hidden beneath the childhood innocence, for a home and nation forever lost.”—Professor Gang Gary Xu, University of Illinois at Urbana, for the Asian Educational Media Services ‘News and Reviews’ ”
侯孝贤画像HHH
Portrait De Hou Hsiao Hsien | HAFF
2013
HHH:
A PORTRAIT OF HOU HSIAO-HSIEN BY OLIVIER ASSAYAS ...
LATE AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER (Fin août,
début septembre) A 95
France
After writing film
criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma
between 1979 and 1985, much like the New Wave directors had done in the 50’s, Olivier
Assayas emerged as a prominent filmmaker
during the second half of the 1980’s.
Not only learning to articulate cinematic ideas and choices, Assayas
also experimented with short films while writing screenplays for André Téchiné,
like RENDEZ-VOUS (1985), SCENE OF THE CRIME (1986), and ALICE AND MARTIN (1998),
where the critical success of his first screenplay is how he was able to get
his first feature financed. Like many
great artists, Assayas has been able to keep a close circle of artistic
collaborators with him throughout his career:
Denis Lenoir and Éric Gautier (cinematography), Luc Barnier (editing),
William Flageollet (sound mixing), Françoise Clavel (costume design), and
François-Renaud Labarthe (art direction/production design), all of whom worked
on this film, except Gautier, who collaborated on eight other films beginning
with Irma
Vep (1996). Similarly, a stable of
recurring actors has followed as well, including Virginie Ledoyen, Nathalie
Richard, and Jeanne Balibar seen here, also in minor roles Elli Medeiros, Alex
Descas (still working with Claire
Denis), and Arsinée Khanjian (married to Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan). The stellar ensemble cast assembled for this
film is a coterie of young French actors that later became major French film
stars, but these are their early years, very much like the parts they play in
the film, Parisian friends in their 30’s, most all at a midway point in their
lives, where they are at an age when they’re settling down and becoming
respectable, a time when money and a career are a necessity, as they can’t pay
rent on youthful idealism. The story
revolves around the lives of six people, where money is a constant worry, but
especially for Adrien (François Cluzet), the only one to reach forty, a
critically respected writer who has already written three novels, but none were
a success, becoming unfailingly critical of his own failings. He develops an unknown sickness that nearly
costs him his life, where the film plays out like THE BIG CHILL (1983), where a
group of friends grow increasingly concerned, but it’s not his death, but their
own mortality that is suddenly challenged, beautifully conveyed with a probing,
novelistic density.
After becoming familiar
with the work of Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien, Assayas, in a 1999
interview in ArtForum,
believed he has “a particular way of describing time, of describing the
progression of action: you’ll have
fragments of the same reality, and sometimes time is not moving.” In this case, the center of the film is an
ailing man, but the narrative structure is developed from eliciting a series of
personal reactions to his sickness, including characters sharing thoughts and
recollections, who are also involved in their own personal connections, both
present and past, all of which add complexity to their lives, as the audience
is able to develop a greater understanding of all the characters through a
series of interconnected relationships.
The film is divided into six chapter headings that only slightly advance
the story, such as a week later, or two months later, reflecting a passing of
time, yet the connections between the characters are only slightly altered, yet
over time, this change, both in time and subjectivity, becomes more
significantly noticeable. Gabriel, Mathieu
Amalric, always nervous and insecure, is a book editor that admires Adrien and
looks up to him, who undergoes a pronounced change when the usually stoic
Adrien starts revealing personal feelings about himself and his life, such as
his illness. Gabriel has a highly
volatile but extremely attractive younger girlfriend, Virginie Ledoyen as Anne,
but he’s not yet ready to commit, which only angers her, often disrupting
things for the worse. Gabriel is selling
his former apartment with his ex-girlfriend, Jenny, Jeanne Balibar, exposed and
vulnerable. In a case where truth is
stranger than fiction, these two in real life were involved romantically at the
time, and their scenes together as ex-lovers couldn’t feel more natural, as you
can sense their still thriving but not acted upon attraction, though both are
two of the most gifted actors working in France. Adrien also has a secret teenage love with
the 16-year old Vera, Mia Hansen-Løve, currently married in real life to the
director, and a director in her own right, though only 17 at the time, while
Arsinée Khanjian is his old flame, still bitter about their breakup.
The film is shot on
16mm and blown up to 35mm, where part of the artistic vision is achieved by the
masterful hand-held cinematography by Denis Lenoir, much as he did in Cold
Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), using long, unbroken takes, where the constant
camera movement reflects the continuing restless anxiety of the
characters. The episodic structure,
divided into segments like chapter titles, emphasizes the effect of time and
the way people drift in and out of each other’s lives, where often weeks or
months pass between visits, yet the viewer has a deep sense of each character,
where it’s interestingly a time when writing letters was how absent lovers
expressed themselves, where a passage of time would have to occur before there
was a response. The film often skips a
step and jumps ahead, where the relationship has already shifted, expressed by
a glance, or a few words, such as the advancing illness of Adrien, where the
change has a noticeable effect on each one of them. Much like the Ozu title suggests, the movie
is filled with ordinary moments, yet when strung together it leads to
remarkable lives. Without an ounce of
sentimentality, we get a sense of changing seasons and time passing, where
throughout Assayas scrutinizes personal relationships and changing
perspectives, including the role of sex, family, career, and friendships, not
to mention how each of us responds differently when facing mortality. The film is an impressionistic mosaic of
interconnecting lives, where the social drive for honesty and truthfulness with
one another is a surprisingly tender notion often lacking in modern era films,
which, despite the improvements of social media, are more often defined by
alienation and distance. This is a film
that beautifully expresses the subtlety in relationships, where Gabriel and
Anne visit his brother (Eric Elmosino) and wife (Nathalie Richard) at their
home in the country with family and close friends, including Gabriel’s ex-lover
Jenny. As they all try to come to terms
with the seriousness of Adrien’s condition, they are intensely expressing their
grief while the younger Anne, still seen sitting off to the side, quietly
withdraws into herself, completely excluded from the intensity of this adult
world, literally unable to comprehend this entire chapter of Gabriel’s
life. Similarly, the way Adrien’s
friends discuss the teenage girl Vera after he dies is heartbreakingly cruel,
where she’s largely seen on the periphery of the screen, saying little, where
she remains an entity unknown to them, so she is excluded from what rightfully
belongs to her when dividing up Adrien’s artworks and personal possessions, as
she’s not viewed as a mature person.
Unknowingly, they are disconnecting what we already understand to be a
loving relationship. The beauty of the film, however, is the ease in which
relationships form and split apart, only to reconnect again in a completely
unexpected context, becoming a brilliant character study where relationships
are never static, but continually adapt to the changing world around them.
CINE-FILE: Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
Before establishing himself as the preeminent stylist of
globalized paranoia, Olivier Assayas penned a handful of screenplays for André
Téchiné; this exceptional ensemble drama—cast with a Who's Who of up-and-coming
French actors circa 1998—feels like Assayas' tribute to his mentor. The
fascination with weather and changing seasons, the chaptered narrative, the
prickly and self-destructive characters, the focus on cycles, departures, and
interpersonal relationships—nearly all of Téchiné's pet themes and subjects are
present and accounted for; the big giveaway that this is un film de Olivier
Assayas and not de André Téchiné is the style: jittery, kinetic,
slightly disorienting, with a motile camera that is pretty much the opposite of
Téchiné's plaintive-but-unsentimental visual classicism. Look out for Cine-File
favorite (and future Mrs. Olivier Assayas) Mia Hansen-Løve in a small but key
role. (1998, 112 min, 35mm)
Late
August, Early September | Chicago Reader
Jonathan Rosenbaum
What's unexpected as well as moving about this 1998 film by Olivier Assayas, at least in relation to his other recent features (Cold Water, Irma Vep), is how sweet tempered most of it is. Split into six chapters, with several weeks or months separating one section and the next, it follows a group of close friends—mainly a novelist who has just turned 40 (Francois Cluzet) and is becoming ill, a writer-editor in his 30s (Mathieu Amalric), and their current and former lovers (Virginie Ledoyen, Jeanne Balibar, Arsinee Khanjian, and Mia Hansen-Love). What we don't know about these characters—and what we don't see in certain scenes—is often as interesting and as important as what we know and see, and Assayas's sense of how relationships evolve between people over time is conveyed with a rich and vivid novelistic density. With Nathalie Richard and Alex Descas. In French with subtitles.
Late
August, Early September | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out
From the Ozu-like
title, referring to a timespan of a little over a year, one might divine that
writer/director Assayas is interested in mood, character and maturity. In the
wake of their break-up, Gabriel and Jenny (Amalric and Balibar) attempt to sell
their flat; Gabriel moves on to the sexy Anne (Ledoyen), while Jenny seems to
want him back. Their mutual friendship with the writer Adrien (Cluzet) affords
contrasting perspectives on their progress, especially when Adrien falls ill,
forcing his younger companions to deal with their dependency on him. Assayas
has a recognisable vision of a world - late twenty-somethings running around,
stumbling into careers they're unsure of, falling into relationships they're
not committed to - but he lets the story happen offscreen. Chapter headings and
fade-outs bookend brief, elliptical snatches of apparently mundane activities,
posting oblique updates on matters of life and death. It's a bit like a Woody
Allen film without the kvetching or the wisecracks, but younger and more vital.
The Onion
A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
A former editor and prominent
contributor to Cahiers du Cinema, the celebrated journal that sparked
the French New Wave and the current surge of young auteurs, Olivier Assayas
pulled off the decade's most dazzling feat of film criticism with 1996's Irma
Vep, which picked apart and reinvented the country's chaotic film scene. As
if braced for an anticlimax, his eagerly awaited follow-up, Late August,
Early September, settles into the modest, familiar design of a
character-driven French roundelay. Early on, there's a self-conscious scene in
which book editor Mathieu Amalric defends unpopular author François Cluzet from
charges that his novels have no story to draw the reader into his vision.
Amalric's response, "Can stories describe the world?," neatly
encapsulates Assayas' loose, deceptively casual meditation on mortality, which
gathers minor details en route to an unexpectedly tender conclusion. Late
August, Early September concerns a group of thirtysomething Parisians who
experience early midlife crises when it's discovered that their mutual friend
Cluzet is dying of an unspecified illness. Amalric, who led another fine ensemble
through My Sex Life...Or How I Got Into An Argument, plays his most
devoted friend, a tortured intellectual unsatisfied with the course of his
life. News of Cluzet's condition causes him to reevaluate his commitment to his
job and two very different women: Jeanne Balibar, a melancholic old girlfriend
he's in the process of leaving, and his younger, more impetuous lover, A
Single Girl's Virginie Ledoyen. With steady assurance and empathy, Assayas
examines a crucial period in his characters' lives when the reality of death is
suddenly thrust upon them and they can no longer justify their youthful
aimlessness. Late August, Early September is a resolutely minor work, a
quiet departure from the brash showiness of Irma Vep, but it's crafted
with the sure hand of a major director.
BFI | Sight & Sound | Late August, Early September (1999) Chris Drake from Sight and Sound, September 1999
Paris. Gabriel Deshayes and his
ex-girlfriend Jenny are selling their flat. Gabriel - involved in a new
relationship with the volatile Anne - arranges for a television documentary to
be made about his writer-friend Adrien Willer. Jenny calls Gabriel from
hospital when Adrien unexpectedly collapses. One month later, Adrien, out of
hospital, travels with Gabriel to Mulhouse for the filming and admits that his
attack signalled the return of a dormant and dangerous disease. Anne shows up
uninvited which leads to a row with Gabriel.
Three months pass. Returning to
Paris, Gabriel and Jenny dine together and argue. Adrien is admitted to
hospital for an operation whose seriousness he admits only to Véra, his teenage
girlfriend whose existence he conceals from his friends. Gabriel takes Anne to
visit his family where his brother tells him he's a fool for splitting up with
Jenny. Gabriel accepts a job editing the literary section of an encyclopedia
and, with Adrien out of hospital, offers his friend some work. Adrien asks for
time to consider.
One evening Gabriel and Anne have
an argument when she discovers that he doesn't want them to live together. A
phone call from Jérémie, Adrien's agent, informs Gabriel that Adrien has died.
Adrien's posthumous book is critically well received and Gabriel, having
completed a ghost-writing assignment, admits to Anne that he's almost finished
a novel. Jenny and Jérémie are now a couple.
Review
In many respects Late August, Early September can't help but be seen
as a follow-up to Olivier Assayas' 1997 cult success Irma Vep. While
Assayas could be said to have returned to subject matter more characteristic of
his previous films (Une nouvelle vie,
Late August is more concerned with Adrien's social death than his physical death, more interested in unravelling the tangles of dependence and independence that mark friendships inflected with artistic ambitions. The territory of Late August, Early September is familiar, not only from Assayas' previous films, but also as a larger strand of French cinema for which the refined and psychologically acute depiction of urban middle-class manners is a mainstay. At its most superficial, this delivers works such as Portraits chinois where the privileged milieux of fashion, art and the media are the film's flimsy substance rather than its pretext and in which the characters' angst seems part of an aspirational package. But Late August is closer to the world of Comment je me suis disputé (ma vie sexuelle), an impression partly reinforced by the casting of Mathieu Amalric and Jeanne Balibar.
Amalric is a sympathetic presence as Gabriel, clever but not necessarily very smart, shading the character with intimations of ambiguous power play centred on his probably exaggerated respect for Adrien's achievements. One feels that Gabriel admires the fact that Adrien writes rather more than what he writes. His attempts to 'help' Adrien after a major operation are contextualised with cruel comedy. It transpires that it's Jenny, Gabriel's ex-girlfriend, in whom Adrien confides most. Blessed with an unusual ability to express at least three conflicting emotions at any one time, Jeanne Balibar gives Jenny a skittish presence – all nose, eyebrows and gangling limbs – focused by blazing looks and off-beat smiles. The intensity she brought to the damaged young philosophy student in Comment je me suis disputé is muted here. She and Amalric (who are a couple off-screen) are becoming the modern face of the thirtysomething urban French couple and since Late August, Early September they have played opposite each other again in Jean-Claude Biette's Trois ponts sur la rivière.
Late August has the sensation and impact of a brilliantly executed meditative flurry. It used to be said of French art cinema that there was too much talking, and Assayas seems to have come up with a simple solution to this cliché. His characters expound with the best of them but he keeps them moving or surrounds them with an incessant motion that suggests the speed of the life encircling them and which won't relax to make a reckoning with mortality any easier. Denis Lenoir's camera is almost always on the move, shoulder-borne, shuddering or looking for blurred close-up detail to put to use in the film's transitional sequences.
There's at least one moment of terrific formal control when Anne, Gabriel's new girlfriend, rides off in a taxi after an argument and buys a lottery scratchcard. It's nothing more than a transitional moment, but it works gently to shift the film's gears. Assayas can handle the elegant, Téchiné-style anatomisation of emotions while still being capable of stylistic legerdemain.
Likewise, the film's organisation into four 'chapters' gives Late August
what might be called a cubist structure – Gabriel may be the privileged
protagonist, but the information that we get from his perspective is
contextualised, questioned and offset by the perspectives of the other
characters – a multifocal narrative structure that leaves much for second and
third viewings.
Soundtrack:
"Cinquante Six", "Goye Kur", "Hawa Dolo" by/performed by Ali Farka Touré; "Altar" by/performed by Elli Medeiros; "Contre le sexisme" by Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Steve Shelley, performed by Sonic Youth
“Late August, Early September”
- Salon.com Charles Taylor, July 7,
1999
Review:
Late August, Early September (Assayas, 1998) | Cinema ... Catherine Stebbins from Cinema Enthusiast,
also at Criterion Cast, seen here: CriterionCast
| BAM Retrospective Review, Post-Punk Auteur ...
loves, labor,
loss (Late August, Early September, Les ... - Reverse Shot Saul Austerlitz from Reverse Shot
LATE
AUGUST, EARLY SEPTEMBER - Film Journal International Daniel Eagan
Late August, Early September
(1998) DAK from culturevulture
eFilmCritic Reviews Matt Langdon from iF magazine
Late
August, Early September (Fin Aout, Debut Septembre) - BoxOffice Shlomo Schwartzberg
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
Late
August, Early September : The New Yorker
Bruce Diones
"Late August, Early
September" - New York Magazine
Peter Rainer
The
film that changed my life: Mia Hansen-Løve | Film | The Observer Octavia Morris interview Mia Hansen-Love, June 26, 2010
Late August, Early
September Review | Movie Reviews and News ... Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly
San
Francisco Examiner [G. Allen Johnson]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
New York Times (registration req'd)
Janet Maslin, also seen here: New
York Times
LES DESTINÉES SENTIMENTALES B+ 92
aka:
Les Destinées
France Switzerland
(180 mi) 2000 ‘Scope
One of the more
ambitious works of this often modern and experimental filmmaker, making what
amounts to an homage to Jean Renoir’s THE GRAND ILLUSION (1937), a lengthy,
old-fashioned costume drama that depicts turn of the century French aristocracy
on the decline, as seen through the eyes of those few inheriting family
fortunes, who are radically effected by World War I, as afterwards they’re
forced to watch their wealth and privilege disappear before their eyes,
replaced by a new emerging social order that pays little attention to
class. Much like Renoir’s film, the
story is advanced through an examination of relationships, suggesting mankind’s
common experiences should prevail above economic or political divisions. Adapted from Jacques Chardonne’s 1934 novel
by the same name, supposedly beloved in France, as by the end it carries some
melancholic, Proustian reflections about what constitutes a valued life, the
film is divided into three one-hour chapters examining three decades in the
life of a wealthy porcelain manufacturing family.
As the 19th
century draws to a close, the film opens with a funereal solemnity, as we see a
horse-driven cart carrying the casket of a porcelain magnate with a line of
workers following behind as they proceed to the burial site, a picture of unity
and common purpose that will be split apart over the next few decades. While the film has an epic sweep, with
sumptuously beautiful cinematography by Eric Gautier, Assayas creates an
impressionistic journey of how many of the characters react to their changing
lives, where the atmospheric style is maintained throughout, but the storyline
as adapted by Assayas grows weaker as the film progresses, where the weight of
the ambitious demands of a three-hour film are simply not met, leaving gaps and
holes where too often very little happens, lulls that simply can’t match the
surging moments occurring elsewhere.
Jacques Chardonne’s own
family comprises the source material for his trilogy Les Destinées
Sentimentales, where he was raised Protestant in the small town of Barbezieux,
which even today has fewer than 5000 inhabitants, but is in the heart of the
cognac wine growing region, where his father came from a family of cognac
traders, his brother-in-law was part of the Delamain cognac dynasty, while his
American mother was a Quaker and heiress to the Haviland
porcelain dynasty. Chardonne’s
social conservatism supported the Vichy government during the war where he was
denounced and imprisoned as a Nazi collaborator, where he was afraid of being
shot as his literature was banned for a short period after the war and
scrutinized for its “Frenchness.”
Francois Mitterrand, French President for 13 years, who actually worked
briefly for the Vichy regime during the war, was born in a nearby region of
Jarnac, and Chardonne was his favorite writer, anchored in French tradition,
particularly the extremely conservative, highly classical style, with its
descriptive focus upon regionalism and being tied to the land. The film itself is a long and sprawling work,
a detailed-oriented period piece that spans several decades from the early 1900’s
to the years between the World Wars, tracing the impact of changing times both
culturally and economically on a single family, while following one particular
romance. The film follows Jean Barnery
(Charles Berling), born into a porcelain manufacturing family in the Limoges
region of France, where the ruling families in the region make china and
Cognac, transferring power within their own families in the traditional way
from one generation to the next. Their
porcelain factory caters to only the wealthiest tastes, creating a handcrafted,
exquisitely designed china, much of it shipped to affluent Americans. Over time, they are eclipsed by modern
factories that can mass-produce products more cheaply, undercutting their
profits, challenging their working methods, and eventually their very
survival. The film contrasts the wealthy
bosses living lives of luxury and ease while the factory workers continue to
live in poverty, which interestingly remains out of sight throughout the entire
film. Instead, what the viewer witnesses
is only the most aristocratically resplendent wealth on display.
Jean Barnery initially
defies tradition, leaving the family business to become a Protestant minister,
where he’s seen as an overly severe intellectual prone to self-criticism in a
region that is isolated from Catholics who outnumber them 10 to 1 in
France. While he gives voice to the
spiritual needs of the community, he represents an ingrained religious
traditionalism, the picture of austerity, like the keepers of the gate guarding
any and all trespasses. Accordingly, he
is completely inflexible when it comes to what he suspects is his wife’s
infidelity, seen throwing Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert) and their daughter Aline
out of the house, sending them off to exile in a smaller estate, all in
response to vicious rumors casting aspersions on her character, where
appearances matter more than reality.
Nathalie resolutely denies any wrongdoing and stubbornly refuses to
forgive him afterwards, forbidding him from ever seeing or speaking to their
daughter. This crack in the façade of
moral certainty has never stopped the self-righteous, where marriage is about
responsibility and obligation, with little thought for happiness or love. Surprisingly then, Jean develops a growing
affection for a member of his congregation, Pauline (Emmanuelle Béart),
divorcing Nathalie, giving her all shares to the business, while he resigns
from the clergy and marries Pauline, retreating into his own self-imposed exile
where he lives a luxurious life in Switzerland while receiving monthly stipends
from the family business. This segment
couldn’t be more luxuriously beautiful, even idyllic, almost like a mirage,
living on a pristine mountainside overlooking a tranquil lake, where he is the
picture of Gustav Mahler retreating to his mountainside summer villas to
compose music, but Jean has no such aspirations, where he and Pauline are
simply happy and in love, where they haven’t a care in the world. The idea of living in such extravagance
without having to work is a bit mind-altering, and even today, one-hundred
years later, it remains hard to comprehend.
How was this all possible? And
indeed, we never see the workers that struggle in the factory each day to make
it all possible. From this dreamlike
interlude, war strikes, sending a jolt of reality into this harmonious picture
of love without hindrance.
While Jean and Pauline
represent an idealized and mostly unattainable love, Pauline is a thoroughly
modern woman who isn’t remotely religious or concerned about what others think
of her, but then she’s allowed to live in a vacuum completely shut out from the
rest of the world. This kind of ivory
tower existence only exists for a few, completely absent any real work or
responsibilities, where love seen in this light is little more than a fairy
tale. Pauline dreads returning to the
factory in Barbezieux, knowing what kind of small-town mentality exists there,
where everyone meddles in everyone else’s affairs, proclaiming if they go, “This
is the end of our love.” Unfortunately,
this film is filled with swooning proclamations like this one, which are simply
overexaggerated gestures that suggest the dream is over, but hardly the
love. Jean is quickly ushered back to
take over as head of what has become an ailing company under poor leadership,
where he has the backing of his family and the workers, at least initially,
until the stock market collapse wipes out the American market, initiating a
series of ongoing struggles with the constantly striking workforce that will
drag on for years. Of interest, the
socialist journalist writing on behalf of the worker’s interests, who also
served at the front lines during the war, remains a trusted and valued friend
of Jean, even socially, perhaps because he so clearly delineates the
opposition’s point of view. What is
clear is that the family business becomes more than an obligation, but a reason
for being, a philosophic ideal largely built upon old ideas about privilege,
yet it also ties into the director’s concept about art, providing a near
documentary detail about the workings of the factory as it goes about the
production of what they hope is the most exquisitely perfect piece of
porcelain, elevated to an artform, where nothing less is acceptable. By the end, years fly by and Jean, weakened
by a medical affliction, ruminates about his life, contending “Everything I've
done is worthless. I was always wrong.” Again this kind of cheap melodrama takes the
focus away from what is a superbly directed film, given a novelesque sweep of
grandeur and noblesse, showing some beautiful patience in this epic document
that in the end cherishes those small, seemingly insignificant moments that
stay with us forever.
Les
Destinées Sentimentales | review, synopsis, book ... - Time Out Geoff Andrew
Assayas' adaptation
of Jacques Chardonne's novel - about the heir (Berling) to a devoutly
Protestant porcelain dynasty in Charente, and his life-changing encounter in
1900 with the non-conformist niece (Béart) of a family friend - is typically
intelligent, elliptical, and beautifully acted. It's also, perhaps a little
surprisingly given Assayas' earlier work, a little dull and banal, rounding off
its survey of some four decades of personal and societal change with an
over-extended, trite conclusion that love is all important, and never quite
letting us forget that the protagonist is for the most part a selfish,
sanctimonious bore - even his embittered but absurdly faithful ex-wife,
immaculately played by Huppert, is more sympathetic. (Is the protagonist's
eventual devotion to the ceramic arts an apology for cinematic obsession and
craftsmanship on Assayas' part? Who knows? The character's still a bore.)
Ambitious, efficient, sensitive, but a little disappointing.
DVDBeaver.com - Graphic Review [Gary W.
Tooze] from Olivier Assayas
"What attracted me in the first place was to explore a world. It was enthusiasm and curiosity to do something new. But when I finally did the film, I realized that what interested me was that I had had totally absorbed the novel -- it was alive within myself, and I did not have to recreate it. On some strange level, it was easier to render emotions. When you write your material, you have more insecurities and doubts about your own writing than someone else's writing. You come up with a scene or a character and you hope that you're right, that you'll be able to communicate effectively with your audience. But you don't have this 100 percent security about it. When you read a novel and you react to it, you know it works. So at least you have the security of knowing that if it worked on you, it can work on someone else. I think you start becoming a filmmaker when you start forgetting about the technique, form, and abstract ideas. I just felt it happening within me. When I was making my short films before starting at Cahiers, I had these theoretical ideas about how things should be done. At some point, when I started making my first feature, I realized that I didn't care how this movie was made or what theoretical ideas were behind it. What I cared about was whether I could recreate my own emotions, what was specific about my own vision of the world. It's something that's essential in the process of becoming an artist." Olivier Assayas
The Village Voice [J. Hoberman]
A more genteel family saga, Olivier Assayas's Les Destinées is an impressively coordinated enterprise that lasts three hours, manages a large cast, and covers a period of 30-odd years while successfully unfolding as a series of scenes from the life of a single character. Indeed, given the restrained force of Charles Berling's performance, the movie could almost exchange titles with The Komediant.
Adapted from a three-volume novel by Jacques Chardonne, Les
Destinées is unlike anything Assayas has previously done; no less than its
protagonist, it's eminently, if ambivalently, respectable. Jean (Berling), a
Protestant pastor whose family operates a
Shot by Eric Gautier, Les Destinées feasts on the
dappled landscapes of the old
By the time Les Destinées reaches its graceful conclusion,
most of the surviving characters can no longer remember who they once were. The
movie has a quiet gravity. You may not feel the earth move when Jean drifts
off, imagining himself back in the garden, but you can sense it turn.
loves, labor,
loss (Late August, Early September, Les ... - Reverse Shot Saul Austerlitz from Reverse Shot
Work, that great uncovered topic of the American cinema—reified, made pretty, ignored, but never truly wrestled with. Olivier Assayas, however, following the great French tradition of depicting man’s quotidian existence, regards work with a sideways glance, while simultaneously delving into the characters’ emotional, sexual, and social lives. Two of Assayas’s recent films, Late August, Early September (1998) and Les Destinées (2001), while appearing to be diametric narrative opposites, reach similar conclusions about the nature of work and humanity. Late August, set in contemporary Paris, follows the lives of a number of young Parisians’ professional and romantic travails, while Les Destinées is an historical epic about a family of porcelain-makers, and the tortured path of one family scion toward assuming the mantle of company stewardship. However, the films both feature thirtysomething layabouts as their protagonists, men who slough off the burden of doing nothing and become worker bees. Jean (Charles Berling), the protagonist of Les Destinées, leaves his ministry and life of leisure, to take over the family business. Gabriel (Mathieu Amalric), protagonist of Late August, abandons his vague dreams of glory as a novelist to take a position with a literary publishing house. Both Jean and Gabriel choose to reject their youthful passions, and throw themselves whole-heartedly into their new endeavors, thriving in new unfamiliar realms.
Both Late August and Les Destinées use as starting
points the relationships of the protagonists to their personal avatars,
iconoclasts who encourage their aversion to the trivial workaday world. Gabriel
is mentored by Adrien Willer (François Cluzet), a novelist who encourages his
flighty artistic immaturity, and dissuades him from settling down. Similarly,
Jean’s second wife, Pauline (Emmanuelle Beart), takes him to Switzerland, where
they live a quiet life with their children, away from the tumult of the family
business. Adrien and Pauline are spiritual guides to the men, sharing their
no-work ethic, and encouraging the pursuit of a life outside of the
constrictions of daily routine.
Each plot centers on the groundless wandering period of these two men, unsure
of their next step, positioned between past and future. In Late August,
Gabriel chooses a new life as a ployee, complete with Thai boxing regimen. The
security of the office job energizes Gabriel, but Assayas’s sympathies are
(mostly) against him. Gabriel is seen sobbing inconsolably in the office
bathroom when Adrien unexpectedly dies, but what he is truly crying for is the
death of the part of him most like Adrien—the willful, adolescent, impulsive,
brilliant streak he has destroyed. Assayas, Renoir-esque in his generous
spirit, allows Gabriel a measure of redemption. Sitting at a cafe with the aide
to the politician whose autobiography he has ghostwritten, he is distracted
from their small talk when he notices Vera (Mia Hansen-Love), the elfin
adolescent with whom Adrien spent his final days. Last glimpsed, Vera had been
swallowing her secret sadness, unable to share it with friends or parents; in
the back of a car on the way to the beach, she appeared lost in her world of
private turmoil. Gabriel sees Vera outside the cafe, kissing a boy her own age,
and the realization sinks in: for Vera, Gabriel, and the rest of the film’s
characters, there is no choice but to keep living, changing, molting, becoming
someone else over time—it is what makes us recognizably human, and it is what
allows that demon, hope, to continue onward. The only stop to the endless
shape-shifting is that of death. Gabriel tells the politician’s aide that he is
working on a book of his own, “something more personal.” She asks if it’s a
novel, and he responds, “I don’t know. We’ll see if I make it to the end.”
Gabriel, too, goes on, and the hope remains that in his own haphazard,
shambling way, he is pursuing his dreams as well.
At the beginning of Les Destinées, Jean finds himself at a
critical junction of his own making. Having divorced his mentally unstable
wife, Nathalie (Isabelle Huppert), he marries Pauline, and finds that his
interest in the life of the clergyman has waned. He leaves the church, and
moves with his wife to Switzerland, where he does…nothing. It is essential that
Jean’s happiest moments occur when he is in Switzerland, an idyll that exists
only in its disconnect from work. Jean sacrifices his entire stake in the
family firm as a payoff to his ex-wife. This act, clearly marked as
unnecessary, is a way of morally excusing his actions. Switzerland, in Les
Destinées, is the un-France, the place where the threat of work is not a
constantly overhanging burden, and in which life can be pursued with something
other than careerism at its heart. This is not to be at all understood as a
place corresponding to the geographical boundaries of the real Swiss nation; it
is rather a state of mind, a location outside the cruel functionality of
capital. Being a position untenable in, and unknown to, our contemporary world,
this sojourn is depicted in a highly abstract visual language. We are told
little about their lives in Switzerland—precisely where they are, how they fill
their days, the stuff and essence of daily existence. Yet it is the happiest
period in Jean and Pauline’s lives.
It is only in the absence of work that their joy begins to flower.
Consequently, Jean’s downfall is his decision to return and take over the
family factory in France. Pauline, in contrast, sees work as joy’s death, and
begs Jean to reconsider. She pleads, “Why not accept happiness? Why do we have
to join the fray like everyone else? It sickens me.” Jean rejects happiness
because it appears so effortless, so weightless. He opts instead for the
vigorous perpetual motion of the proto-CEO, a decision which forces him
essentially to abandon his wife and family and dedicate himself body and soul
to the firm. Following one of Assayas’s trademark fade-outs, the next scene is
back in France, and Jean has become an entirely different person—cold,
calculating, brusque, he has shed his casual clothing, philosophic and other,
for business attire. Jean discovers his calling in Les Destinées, but it
comes at the expense of everything he has known and loved.
On his deathbed, after dozens of years of service to the firm, Jean asks
Pauline to read to him. She reads of an Italian gardener, raking the pebble
garden outside a glorious estate, who pauses from his work, anguished, and
cries out in his mellifluous dialect, “How futile work is!” Assayas begins the
scene with an image of a gardener outside Jean’s window enacting a similar
raking motion, and the scraping sound is overlaid throughout. Les Destinées
deliberately fudges the traditional gap between fiction and reality here,
allowing some of the story which Jean is reading to bleed into his
surroundings. As a result, the cry of the gardener becomes something more than
a mere narrative ploy; it is an outward expression of the emotion Jean cannot
release. Pauline panics, on completing the story, when Jean does not respond to
her calls. Finally, in the last shot of the film, he opens his eyes and looks
around in a leisurely fashion, puzzled and happy. In response to Pauline’s
pleas, he says, “I was just out in the garden.” It is there that Jean can
achieve a respite from the unrelenting toil to which he has subjected himself,
and cry out at the utter senselessness of his choices. The garden is the flip
side of Switzerland, the locus of accepting the fullness of work’s demands.
Like Gabriel, Jean comes to grips with his sacrifices, and accomplishments, and
is ready to proceed onward to the next stage of existence. What the two
protagonists share is an understanding of the complex role work has played in
their lives, serving both as savior and torturer. In the garden, they are able
to acknowledge what they have made of work, and what it has made of them. In
the garden, there is knowledge.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
Les Destinées (2000) |
PopMatters Elbert Ventura
Les Destinees Arthur Lazere from culturevulture
MovieMartyr.com Jeremy Heilman
Shadows on the Wall by
Rich Cline
Combustible
Celluloid [Jeffrey M. Anderson]
BBCi
- Films Jason Korsner
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington Post
[Ann Hornaday]
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los
Angeles Times [Kevin Thomas]
New York Times
(registration req'd) A.O. Scott
DVDBeaver.com -
Graphic Review [Gary W. Tooze]
DEMONLOVER A 95
France
Something of an
artistic retort to the plodding, classical French tradition of his previous
period costume drama Les
Destinées Sentimentales (2000), which was almost a caricature of a French
production, Assayas follows that with a cyber thriller that captures a
startlingly contemporary look at the modern globalized world. It’s a remarkable film with awesome power,
truly creepy, and brilliantly conceived, where the film has a spectacular look
to it, often leaving one bewildered and enthralled at the same moment, with the
capacity to genuinely shock audiences.
It received a chilly reception at Cannes from French critics and then
bombed at the box office, causing Assayas to make 10-minutes of cuts from his
original print that have never been restored.
And while the controversial subject matter includes a gladiator style
corporate struggle to gain control of a Japanese 3-D porn website, while also
controlling the X-rated comic book industry, Assayas has further censored some
of his X-rated animé sequences in order to obtain an R-rating, intentionally blurring
or pixilating the genital areas.
Actually, the censorship on display in a film that explores the extreme
reach of the Internet, is a puzzler, as it’s originally designed to shock the
audiences with the graphic nature of the images, which of course, are then
toned down—all part of the befuddlement.
Another surprise, especially as the years progress, is how much any film
that focuses on the latest developments in the computer world is going to be
outdated almost immediately, as that’s the one industry that is advancing into
the future in leaps and bounds, making much of this experience resemble the
equally outdated TRON:
Legacy in 3D at IMAX (2010), a follow up to a 1982 film, where the state of
the art features (at the time) already appear old-fashioned. Nonetheless, the film has a sleek, futuristic
design as clean and sterile as the paranoid conspiracy movies of the 1970’s,
where most of the film takes place in common areas of transience, like
airplanes, airports, hotels, restaurants, cars, modern offices, or night clubs,
all featuring spacious and luxurious accommodations.
Assayas is one of the
few artists that examines the extreme effects of the Internet, which includes
not only desensitizing, but dehumanization, combining the deep-seeded
ramifications of this soulless Internet entity to the ruthless nature of
capitalism. From the very outset, the
first images we see are in a luxury first class area of an airplane,
reminiscent of similar scenes by Kubrick in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), but
what’s different is that none of the passengers are paying any attention to the
TV monitors that are a constant barrage of fire and explosions. In fact throughout the film, irrespective of
how vile or horrific the material is found on Internet porn sites or seen on TV
(where we even see President George W. Bush on CNN), no one seems the least bit affected by it and displays little
reaction. What Assayas then proceeds to
do is create a fast-paced, modernistic thriller that establishes original
themes of corporate espionage, back room deals, cutthroat capitalistic
competitiveness before delving into the mysteries of virtual reality through
Internet connections, where the audience is dragged into a sadistic torture
porn website that literally becomes the new nightmarish reality, as we’ve
literally entered into an alternate mindset.
The casualness with which Assayas manages to make this transition is a
bit awesome, as the viewers initially have no idea how they got there. But that is the ease of the Internet, which
is simply a series of clicks and you are there.
How long you stay there is completely up to you. Assayas beautifully sets this all up with his
cinema of detachment and distance, exquisitely filmed by Denis Lenoir, where
the characters themselves couldn’t be more sterile and empty than the
blood-sucking, corporate world where they work, an investment company that
seems to squeeze all the life out of the major players, where the film follows
the statuesque and robot-like Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen), seen sabotaging
someone’s drink to keep them out of the game for awhile, quickly stepping into
their shoes where she has more influence.
Little do we know she’s a spy working for another company, sent there to
undermine their effectiveness.
Diane’s dispassionate
nature makes it hard to empathize, where in a futuristic setting like Blade
Runner (1982) she would be a completely programmed robot (or replicant)
sent to carry out a company’s mission, a completely disposable entity void of
any human compassion. Initially this is
the mindset she conveys, where there is little difference between her business
and private life, never revealing her real character, as she is an amorphous
mask. She works for Hervè, Charles
Berling, completely unrecognizable from his compassionate priest portrayal in Les
Destinées Sentimentales, as here he plays a corporate brute, a
hard-drinking, sex-driven, chauvinistic business executive used to the finer
things in life and getting what he wants, so if Diane works for him, he expects
sexual reciprocity. This, of course,
puts her at a distinct disadvantage, where the complexity of the situation is
balancing her secret spy mission with maintaining a professional demeanor, always
having to remain an inscrutable asset to the company. So she has to perform in the bedroom and the
boardroom. The film is a continuing
series of back room dirty crosses, where in this world, no one is to be trusted. Enter Chloë Sevigny as Elise, who’s an
equally slippery character, but one with excellent behind-the-scenes
connections. When seen on her own, she’s
naked in her hotel room bed furiously playing video games like some hot-wired
adolescent teen, but she’s on to Diane, who first has to survive a catfight
with Gina Gershon, an American porn distributor for a company called Demonlover
that wants to buy the rights of a major Japanese animè producer in order to
annihilate all competition. Diane’s job
is to sabotage any deal, but is undermined by Elise, who has Diane kidnapped
and drugged, forcing her into becoming a submissive work slave, making her do
whatever she tells her. This loss of
power and loss of identity coincides with the discovery of a particularly
sadistic interactive torture website, the Hell Fire Club, where Diane’s weakened
vulnerability leaves her subject to an altered reality, a terrifying underworld
secretly run by the Russian mafia that is accessible via the Internet to
ordinary suburban households and their consumer habits. Assayas scores the film with original music
from Sonic Youth, which becomes especially impressive as Diane loses control,
where the music literally takes her place where by the end all we hear is the
music raging.
We were all weaned on
the corrupt business practices of THE GODFATHER (1972, 1974), where a mobster
betrays his mafia family and sells him out to another crime family, as this was
all routine in the ways of business and capitalism, eventually replaced by
corporate takeovers, where Assayas examines this supposedly faceless world of
globalization and corporate mergers, all but obliterating any sense of personal
loyalty. DEMONLOVER is ultimately a
nightmarish fantasy about the moral abyss of big business, beholden to no one
but itself, ruthlessly wiping out all competitors in an attempt to build a
monopoly as the ultimate goal. Assayas
is right on the money in trying to pinpoint just who's running the world here,
just a bunch of loner, blood-sucking vampires that buy and sell sex, behind the scenes
creeps that would just as soon kill someone as lose money,. Obviously it's all about power, power,
POWER, and those that have it, don't keep it forever. Eventually, through a series of
betrayals and murders, à la Richard III, he who was once top cock on the block
becomes yesterday’s news in this corporate chessboard game where multiple
pieces are ruthlessly sacrificed so that ONE body, only ONE business, can
stay ahead of the game. Intriguing from start to finish, despite the
inherent creepiness of the characters, all of whom resemble replicants, where
one can’t help but think that at any time they were going to pull their masks
off and underneath would be mutant, flesh-eating reptiles. Apalled by how
easily sadism has crept into the modern age, Assayas melds personal greed and ambition
with an oppressive murk of suppressed paranoia that can't stop itself
from feeding on new blood, new dollars, with rampant consumerism
effectively portrayed here as ever new indulgences of the flesh, particularly
the sado-masochistic variety, with the Russian mafia dominating the field
of international corporate terrorizers, where nothing stands in
their way, certainly not the age-old laws of supply and demand,
where only the most brutally ruthless survive, and survive they do,
like chameleons, like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956, again 1978),
blending right into the best neighborhoods—simply an outrageous vision.
DEMONLOVER is also a
continuation of an improvisational style that began with Irma Vep
(1996), both filmed very quickly in a painterly style, as if using brush stokes
to quickly advance the material as hastily as possible. The film bombards you with an explosion of
surface sensualities, much of it degrading, yet the characters are wearing the
latest fashions, drive the most expensive cars, and represent the consumer age
like there's no tomorrow, so why not add sex and corporate espionage as one and
the same thing. Fuck before you get fucked. It's like political
negative ads. They're ugly, they're demeaning, they're filled with lies,
but they work. The film language is
unbelievably expressive, very painterly, as Assayas pointed out in the Q &
A afterwards, and in his view his best effort so far in making the screen look
and feel like he creates in his head, with an underlying sound language that's
equally hypnotic, providing layer after layer of more than what most people can
actually comprehend or endure, much of it told with lightning quick, rapid fire
imagery that accentuates the violence all around us. Assayas indicated
this is how he views television imagery, commercial films or
advertisements. They're just an assault
on your senses that urge you to consume, consume, consume, and just be a slave
to the wishes of commerce, with no moral accompaniment, no balance of power,
all power is in the hands of the entrepreneurs.
They are non-stop money machines with absolutely no moral
conscience. Assayas indicated he attempted to make a subversive
film, subverting the interests of commerce by utilizing their methods, and uses
commercial film techniques to lull the viewer into what he wants them to
consider.
Demonlover | review,
synopsis, book tickets, showtimes ... - Time Out
Background is a three-cornered fight for international control of Japanese anime. Nielsen is a stonily efficient industrial spy, poisoning her way to a position of influence, until one day she finds a note: 'You forgot something...' Thereafter the picture of who is working for/ against whom shifts several times over until, after a welter of incident (disappearing corpse, abduction, car chase across Mexican desert), Assayas reaches his destination and the Mr Big in Nielsen's life has become a 14-year-old nerd who'll probably be the death of her. Up to about halfway, this is an efficient thriller acted with conviction by the three female leads. But then the script goes a twist too far and the final impression is of a silly, oddly disagreeable movie.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - Cine-File.info Ben
Sachs
One of the key films of our time, Olivier Assayas' DEMONLOVER also remains the most thoughtful in its consideration of how the Internet has affected communication and our perception of the world. The movie collapses usual boundaries of culture and geography for the sake of its global narrative, which has something to do with espionage and sexual power-plays among rival companies who produce bondage porn websites. It's arguably Assayas' most immediate film (after COLD WATER), as well as his most cerebral: The underlying formal strategy is a near-ceaseless run of complicated tracking shots that reflect the streamlined, constantly-updating logic of the Internet itself. This is a film at once tapped into the zeitgeist and critical of it, much like Godard's provocative masterpieces of the mid-60s. And like Godard, Assayas uses the movie to advance a critical theory on other filmmakers, synthesizing Michael Mann's procedural thrillers and David Cronenberg's technological allegories into a grand landscape of modern power (and powerlessness). demonlover is as morally unsettling as anything by those directors at their best, in large part because it connects the terrifying world onscreen to consumer habits at large. The cast is uniformly excellent at underscoring this theme, basing their characterizations on the refined opacity of late capitalism. (The underrated Gina Gershon, doing a turn on her efficiency expert character in Mann's THE INSIDER, is worth singling out.) (2002, 115 min, 35mm)
Seattle Post-Intelligencer [Sean Axmaker]
Confrontational, provocative and daring, Olivier Assayas' ("Irma Vep") most ambitious work to date opens as a nasty corporate thriller set in a world of antiseptic board rooms, impersonal hotels and (in the opening scene) the anonymous interior of a passenger jet.
It's here that coldly ambitious Diane (Connie Nielsen, all masked emotions and chilly resolve) drugs a co-worker and puts her through an unnerving invasion ordeal to steal an account: the negotiation to purchase a Japanese anime porn producer.
The ice princess isn't merely a brass-knuckle corporate brawler, she's a business spy and a saboteur jousting with competitive associates (conniving Charles Berling and contemptuous Chloe Sevigny) and rivals (a surly and sassy Gina Gershon).
Her ruthless subversions and brutal violations (legal, moral and personal) are strictly amateur hour in the predatory big leagues of corporate conspiracy. That's where Assayas steers the film off the map. The more Diane peeks into the shadowy corners of hidden alliances, the less sense anything makes, as if "the conspiracy" is not merely unknowable, but indefinable.
Even the story seems to evaporate the closer we get to it, just as the animated images produced by the anime porno outfit dissolve into giant pixels as Assayas zooms deeper and deeper into them.
That incoherence doesn't make "Demonlover" much of an audience pleaser, but then Assayas isn't out to reassure. His characters are so inured to the omnipresent violent imagery around them that they're numb, which makes Diane's tour through the outlaw Internet pornography site Hellfire Club so unsettling. Whether she's appalled or excited by its "real" scenes of torture, it shows just what it takes to crack her frozen indifference.
"Demonlover" tackles nothing less than the relationship between the overwhelming effects of cultural imagery, the new international economy and consumer complicity in the commerce of brutality. With more passion than lucidity, perhaps, but with an alienated, voyeuristic style and a ruthless eye for hard, disturbing images.
From the first voyeuristic peek into the ruthless world to the haunting, accusatory, unforgettable final image, it's a brilliant, stunning piece of work, perhaps not Assayas' best, but certainly his most fearless and impassioned.
The Onion A.V. Club [Scott Tobias]
Poised seductively at the remote
intersection of sophistication and sleaze, the techno-thriller Demonlover
moves on the sleek, impermanent ground of a William Gibson novel, where cities
are wired like a circuit board and humans have the hearts of their machines. A
cult classic by design, complete with a hip international cast, a Sonic Youth
score, and references to cutting-edge anime and cyberporn, the film dignifies
its silly plot with a cool, hypnotic tone and a beautifully textured slant on
the modern world. At its best, French writer-director Olivier Assayas' gorgeous
muddle recalls Nicolas Roeg's 1976 science-fiction masterpiece The Man Who
Fell To Earth, another self-consciously arty film that gets lost in
ill-defined corporate intrigue, yet gains in mood what it forfeits in
coherency. In lieu of anyone as transfixing as David Bowie, Assayas settles for
an even more inscrutable substitute in corporate mole Connie Nielsen, a leggy
ice queen who changes loyalties as quickly as she changes beds. Either a heroic
villain or a villainous hero, depending on the viewer's perspective, Nielsen
finds the right home in a cutthroat media environment ruled by duplicitous
power-brokers in search of the next big thing. After poisoning and
incapacitating her immediate superior, Nielsen takes a decisive position at
VolfGroup, a powerful French conglomerate that's preparing to sign a merger
with TokyoAnime, a Japanese company set to hit a lucrative market with
pornographic 3-D manga. Once the merger goes through, two Internet rivals,
Mangatronics and Demonlover, begin battling for exclusive rights to VolkGroup's
images. Working as an operative for Mangatronics, Nielsen tries to undermine
the competition from within, exposing its connection to an interactive torture
web site called "The Hellfire Club." At every turn, her ruthlessness
is matched by a sleazy business partner (Charles Berling), a well-connected and
antagonistic assistant (Chloë Sevigny), and Demonlover's straight-shooting
American executive (Gina Gershon). It may take multiple viewings to make sense
of Assayas' convoluted yarn, which would be complicated enough without so many
maddeningly opaque characters to pin down. Rather than sweat the details, the
best approach to Demonlover is to read it like a Raymond Chandler story,
with the twisty and nonsensical plot serving as a mere passageway into Assayas'
evocative, image-crazed underworld. Adding another curve to his exceptionally
versatile repertoire—with credits that include delicate character pieces (Cold
Water; Late August, Early September), an audacious movie-movie (Irma
Vep), and the austere three-hour period piece Sentimental Destinies—Assayas
excels at painting vibrant, enveloping worlds for the camera. Though it takes
itself a bit too seriously (hip collegians will find plenty of grist for their
Jean Baudrillard papers), Demonlover may be Assayas' airiest work to
date, an intriguing trifle that leaves its considerable pleasures to lounge
around on the surface.
Movies
of the Moment: demonlover | Film Comment
Serge Kaganski, September/October 2003, also seen here: demonlover
- Film Comment
Much maligned and misunderstood, poorly received at the 2002
Cannes Film Festival, as well as by the French press and public, demonloversuffered
a triple failure (critical, popular, and financial) in proportion to the hefty
size of director Olivier Assayas's investment (artistic, symbolic, and
financial). But the film is now enjoying a certain rehabilitation with its
recent dvd release in France and upcoming U.S. theatrical run.
And that is only fair, as this elegant cyberthriller captures a certain state
of the contemporary world with the acuity, sensitivity, and precision of a
seismograph registering the planet's tectonic shifts. Following François
Truffaut's adage, Assayas seems to have made demonlover"against"
his previous film. Les Destinées was almost a caricature of a French
superproduction, set in the past with period costumes and decors, inspired by a
novel by Jacques Chardonne (François Mitterand's favorite writer, Chardonne
possessed a superb but highly classical style and a very conservative,
"tied to the land" vision of France), anchored in the French
tradition of historical, psychological, and literary cinema-in short, so very
French. demonlover, conversely, is a film conjugated in the present,
international and perhaps even extraterrestrial in scope, based on an original
screenplay by Assayas, engaged with contemporary themes, and aligned with a
coolly observational and behaviorist tradition that seems more Anglo-Saxon or
Asian than French. To exaggerate a little, Les Destinées would be
Flaubert, and demonlover, Baudrillard: the former a product of an
ultraclassical culture folded back on its temporal and geographical territory,
the latter an object belonging to contemporary, borderless, globalized
modernity.
demonloverbegins in the first-class section of a commercial airliner.
Businesspeople sleep or discuss their contracts. We see Westerners and
Easterners, and we hear several different languages, as violent images silently
unfold on the cabin's video screens. From these initial shots, all of the
film's aesthetic, thematic, spatial, and sociological risk-taking is set in
motion: transitional spaces, anonymous locations, movement and networks (the
images and the airplanes), the significant presence of women, the superficial
chilliness of the social theater, the international aristocracy of modern
capitalism.
Among these demigods of the business world, we discover Diane (Connie Nielsen,
as goddess of the hunt?), Karen (Dominique Reymond), Thierry (Charles Berling),
and their boss, Monsieur Volf (Jean-Baptiste Malartre, as the wolf?). Barely
three minutes into the film, Diane goes off to the toilet to secretly drug
Karen's Evian. Thus, the worm is in the apple from the start, suspicion is
injected, and the film has been primed to go off like a hand grenade. Gradually,
we discover that all of these characters work for companies involved in new
media (erotic Japanese manga, pornographic animation, Internet sites devoted to
sadomasochism), that these companies are in a pitched, merciless battle for
market domination, that our "heroes" sometimes work for several camps
as double agents, that everyone observes and suspects everyone else, that those
who spy are spied upon in turn, that behind its temperate, well-policed
appearance, neocapitalism wages violent, covert dirty wars in which the end
justifies every means.
This is the political-thriller aspect of demonlover, and if we stay with
this single facet of the film, it can be regarded as a simple update and
reinvention of the classic spy drama or war movie, which would already be a
plus in itself. But for Assayas, this story of industrial espionage is only a
frame of reference (forging a link to genre cinema), a pretext for a scenario,
a fictional anchor point. The filmmaker doesn't attempt to detail his
characters' psychology or motivations, he doesn't try to clarify every plot
twist-which is why certain critics have reproached him, getting a little lost
in what they found to be a foggy scenario. Assayas doesn't offer the thousandth
variation on a spy story; to give his film an air of a thriller, it is enough
for him to insinuate suspicion, paranoia, and a sense of the characters'
duplicity-just as it is enough for Diane to inject a few drops of a sedative
into her colleague's water to eliminate her. For the filmmaker, it matters
little who is spying on whom and why, or even to separate the good guys from
the bad. What matters is to plunge into a world of opacity and false
appearances, where from moment to moment anyone could be good or evil, innocent
or guilty, victim or executioner. If Assayas somewhat neglects the pure
narrative thrust of his material, it's because he considers it secondary. What
is essential to him is to capture the condition of the contemporary world-a
scent, an atmosphere-to see what effect this state has on individuals, and to
devise a form that is itself contaminated by that condition, a style that is at
once a product, a reflection, and a critique of the epoch rather than a
mise-en-scène that simply assembles a series of lectures on the matter at hand.
Assayas has been criticized for either denouncing new media too readily or for
not viewing this new universe with a sufficiently critical eye. He presents
extracts from pornographic anime or scenes from an Internet torture site, but
without extending the duration of these shots toward voyeuristic obscenity,
proving that he is at once fascinated and disturbed by certain contemporary
mutations of images and their commerce. Consequently, he aims neither to
denounce nor to blindly endorse porn mangas, sadistic websites, or mercantile
cynicism: He confines himself to depicting an existing reality while leaving
the spectator free to reflect, and to inventing a form that best suits that
reality.
That's why he sets most of his scenes in transitional spaces (airplanes,
airports, hotels, cars, offices) with high-tech decors, emphasizing neon
lights, corridors, glass surfaces, transparencies, and reflections, and why he
juggles countries, languages, and time zones. The film's protagonists no longer
have a home country, no longer have families, no longer have ways of
distinguishing day from night. They are denied all spatial and temporal
anchorage, as if they themselves exist in the digital realm. The cold violence
of business, the luxurious spaces within which these people operate, the world
of images they deal with, and the deprivation of any reference point seem to
cut them off completely from reality, emptying them of their emotions and their
humanity. They are pale, incapable of feeling or expressing feelings, ready to
kill one another (metaphorically or literally). They are modern vampires,
maneuvering in a world of illusions, reflections, and trompe-l'oeil effects.
Their translucent offices belie their opaque transactions and motivations.
Vampires infecting one another, they have themselves been vampirized by the
images of sex that they sell and consume. The more omnipresent sex is, the more
obsessional and violent in visual form, the less these characters make love;
their libidos have been drained.
As cold and stylized as a fashion magazine, Assayas's mise-en-scène harmonizes
with his subject: The fluidity of his camera movements, the precise composition
of his frames, the cold, bluish tint of his lighting, and the score by Sonic
Youth (an integral part of the film's mise-en- scène, as well and its
narrativity, soundscape, and interconnectedness) work together to express the
cold, repressed violence of our contemporary universe, camouflaged by a veneer
of sophisticated civilization. It may perhaps be a fact of modern sociology
that women occupy a preponderant position in this world without pity, from the
top (the power elite) to the bottom (sex slaves). But it's even more certainly
a sign of Assayas's dark desire: One feels strongly that, in this icy choreography
of predators and prey, the director finds the most intense pleasure in filming
the fights between women, whether they are physical or rhetorical, expressed or
repressed.
At once illness and antidote, wound and knife, chilling and fascinating-in
short, demonic and loving-demonlover is a beautiful and disturbing
contemporary filmic object, concentrating within itself most of Assayas's
obsessions (Feuillade, Bergman, Kenneth Anger, women, New York rock music) and
in which the filmmaker seems to say to us, "To denounce monstrosity is
only a form of hypocrisy, because we are all fascinated by the monstrous and
distressing. We are all responsible for the times we live in, for better and
for worse."
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Stop Making Sense Jonathan Romney
from Sight and Sound, May 2004
Olivier Assayas'
Demonlover - The Film Journal...Passionate and ... Jason Shawhan from The Film Journal
“demonlover” - Salon.com Charles Taylor
Interview &
Symposium - Reverse Shot
September/October 2003
demonlover | Reverse Shot Touching
the Void, by Michael Joshua Rowin from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Decoding a
Digi-Demon - Reverse Shot Matthew
Plouffe from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Capital
Punishment - Reverse Shot Capital Punishment, by Jeff Reichert,
September/October 2003
Language
Barriers - Reverse Shot Karen Wilson
from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
daydream
nation: Sonic Youth meets demonlover - Reverse Shot Neal Block from Reverse Shot,
September/October 2003
Blind Ambition -
Reverse Shot Suzanne Scott from
Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
reverse shot :
online : olivier assayas Michael
Koresky from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Basest Instinct
- Reverse Shot Erik Syngle from
Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Beyond
Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in ... Rosanna Maule (pdf format)
Slant Magazine Ed Gonzalez
ToxicUniverse.com (Jeremiah Kipp)
Not Another Teen
Neophyte [Vadim Rizov]
d+kaz . intelligent movie
reviews [Daniel Kasman]
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Rich Rosell)
indieWIRE Peter
Brunette
Close-Up Film
[Angus Macdonald]
Film Freak Central
review [Travis Hoover]
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
demonlover Review
- hosted by Neoseeker Joshua Tanzer
An
Interview with Olivier Assayas | Reverse Shot Jeff Reichert (2002)
demonlover -
Reverse Shot interview with Assayas
from Reverse Shot, September/October 2003
Power Games Assayas talks to David Thompson from Sight and Sound, May 2004
Austin
Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration
req'd) Stephen Holden
DVDBeaver.com -
Review [Gary W. Tooze]
DVDBeaver.com
[Henrik Sylow] a comparison
The
Conspiracy Thrillers of the 1970s: Paranoid Time - Article ...
CLEAN B+ 91
France Canada Great Britain
A break-up picture, very much reflective of the personal separation of the director and his ex-wife, leading lady Maggie Cheung, who parted and went separate ways. This is a character driven film, with a terrific international cast, but not always a seamless feel. Don McKellar is Canadian, Nick Nolte is American, Maggie Cheung is Chinese but multi-lingual, and the rest of the cast is French, including the likes of Jeanne Balibar, Rémi Martin, and the always superb Béatrice Dalle. As the film is in English, it occasionally feels somewhat unworldly, yet that is the distinct intention of the film. There is a marvelous soundtrack, a trademark of Assayas, this one driven by the imagination of Brian Eno, which also includes a stab at singing by Cheung with the recording of the song, “Down in the Light” clean.wmv YouTube (2:49), very much within her character, hushed, quiet, with very spare music underneath, sounding like the personalized, early music of Nico from the Velvet Underground. This film could be her biography.
One is reminded of another film that centered around the what-about-me people in the music industry, featuring a dominant lead performance, Frances McDormand in LAUREL CANYON (2002), a film that didn’t live up to the strength of her performance. While a lot didn’t feel right here, namely any sense of naturalness in the actual sound of the words, yet overall, it was quite intense and emotionally affecting, with bits and pieces that were superb. There’s an in-your-face feel to the opening segment which lures you right into the muck and mire of the music business, a back-stabbing world of self-centered stars who believe the world revolves only around them. But the music is hypnotic, as is a live opening act performance in a dream-like Annie Lennox mold, featuring Emily Haines, a Canadian indie phenomenon, the lead singer for Metric singing the song “Dead Disco” Dead Disco - Metric - Clean - YouTube (4:33). But things fall apart instantly, leading to a momentary disconnection between a heroin-addicted couple, a fading rock star and his Yoko Ono-like-blame-her-because-she’s-pulling-you-down girl. There’s a beautiful widescreen expanse where she drives alone at night and sits in her car shooting up facing a lit up giant industrial plant in Hamilton, Ontario spewing its toxic waste into the air 24 hours a day, a metaphor for the effects of her own poison, both internal and external. When she returns, the rock star has overdosed, his career instantly takes off, accomplishing in death what he could never accomplish in life, while she’s blamed for his death and immediately sent to prison for 6 months. They have a young son, currently living with his grandparents, Nick Nolte and Martha Henry in Vancouver, and due to the potential added pain of her presence in the boy’s life, she is asked to stay away for a few years, so she flees penniless to Paris.
Eric Gautier is the cinematographer, and his hustle and bustle street shots in Paris are just filled with energy and life, the camera is never still, it keeps moving, as does Cheung at that time in her life, continually looking for anything to get her life, her career, back on track, with absolutely no success. This leads to two of the better scenes in the film, as Cheung tries to re-establish old contacts, first shooting pool with Dalle in a packed bar, as Cheung brings her a demo tape she made with another inmate while incarcerated, where the fluidity of motion is completely in balance with her fluctuating world, and the next is a near surreal, out of body experience, as she’s sitting in the waiting room to see Balibar, a cable TV executive where Cheung got her start, and her personal secretary, in a gutty and powerful appearance by Laetitia Spigarelli, starts recounting the story of Cheung’s life, including all the vivid details of an obvious infatuation. What’s brilliant about this scene is how it creates such an exact picture in our imaginations, and then takes us elsewhere. Yet the secretary’s bluntness is unforgettable, as is one of her later scenes where we see evidence of the secretary’s sexual domination of her boss. All of this leaves Cheung out in the cold, where we hear the chilling effects throughout her emotional turmoil in the repeated refrain from Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” CLEAN (4:10), heard earlier in the industrial complex scene, a hauntingly spiritual ascension that became mesmerizing to listen to, but Cheung is startlingly and incomprehensibly rescued first by Dalle providing her a room, then by Balibar who pulls some strings to get her a low level sales job in a department store.
Meanwhile, the family in Vancouver London
The Chicago Reader: Jonathan Rosenbaum March 17, 2006
After a fading rock star dies of a drug overdose in Canada, his strung-out widow (Maggie Cheung) leaves their little boy with his paternal grandfather (Nick Nolte), cleans up during a six-month prison term, then tries to reassemble her life in Paris. Cheung and director Olivier Assayas previously collaborated on Irma Vep (before they married and divorced); this 2004 French feature marks their creative reunion, but it's a disappointment. Weak, self-absorbed, ill-tempered, and devoid of glamour even in her casual bisexuality, the protagonist is a systematic inversion of the hot star Cheung played in the earlier movie, and despite her skilled acting (which was honored at Cannes), she can't make the woman very interesting in her own right—the most compelling performance here is Nolte's. With Jeanne Balibar, Don McKellar, and Beatrice Dalle. In English and subtitled French.
Clean Review. Movie
Reviews - Film - Time Out London
Oscillating from dynastic period epic in the stately ‘Les Destinées
Sentimentales’ (2000) to wireless global dystopia in the self-immolating
‘Demonlover’ (2002), Olivier Assayas narrows his scope to a muted, wintry study
of the needle and the damage done. In ‘Clean’, former VJ Emily Wang (Assayas’
ex-wife, Maggie Cheung) arrives in bleak Hamilton, Ontario, where her past-it
singer-songwriter husband has a gig; after an argument, he dies of an overdose
and she’s jailed for possession. Upon her release, Emily faces a bewildering
mountain of challenges: stay away from smack, repair her Courtney Love-like
reputation, place her prison-recorded demo into the right hands and, above all,
restore her relationship with her young son, Jay (James Dennis), now in British
Columbia with his paternal grandparents.‘Clean’ moves restlessly from Canada to
Paris to London, tracking the peripatetic Emily’s encounters with a rare
supportive pal (Béatrice Dalle) and an executive ex-lover (Jeanne Balibar), her
waspish smile curdled with schadenfreude. The film’s path can appear as
shapeless and desultory as Emily’s, and creates ripples of perhaps
unintentional ambivalence: maybe little Jay would be better off if his flaky
mum kept a respectful distance, and maybe Emily should forge a different
comeback trail than the sub-Mazzy Star heroin dirges we hear in ‘Clean’.
(Maggie sings!) The film locates its heart muscle, however, in its
performances: Cheung won the Best Actress prize at Cannes in 2004, and Nick
Nolte excels as Jay’s gentle granddad, silently ravaged with grief but, when it
comes to his scattershot daughter-in-law, heroically keeping a firm, tender
grip on the benefit of the doubt.
Clean Jonathan Romney in Cannes from Screendaily
Like his film’s heroine, French
director Olivier Assayas returns to the straight and narrow in Clean, an
emotionally fluent drama that is a world removed from his last film, the
experimental cyber-thriller Demonlover. Another predominantly
English-language venture, Clean sees Assayas working again with Asian
star and ex-wife Maggie Cheung for the first time since 1996’s Irma Vep. Cheung’s tough, vanity-free
performance – which won her the Best Actress prize in Cannes
Cheung’s profile, a relatively
linear storyline and an overall cachet of alternative-rock chic should make Clean
an appealing prospect for buyers prepared to venture a little (but not too far)
off-mainstream. Assayas’s festival following might wonder why he has abandoned
the headier left-field climes of previous work, but despite a mixed Cannes
Another typically cosmopolitan
venture for Assayas, Clean starts in the unwelcoming industrial
landscape of Hamilton , Ontario Johnston
When Lee dies of an overdose,
Emily has a spell in jail, then visits her father-in-law Albrecht (Nolte), who
proposes that her and Lee’s young son Jay (Dennis) will be better off staying
with his grandparents. Emily returns to Paris
On paper, Clean could
almost be a made-for-TV weepie, but it takes its distinctive edge from
Assayas’s intelligently detached stance and refusal to join the narrative dots.
Significantly, we never see the withdrawal sequence that would have been a
dramatic high point
The film convincingly demystifies
the marginal rock milieu where artists of moderate talent exist precariously on
the hope of patronage. After Lee’s death, his record company cashes in on his
old material, but the resulting revenue will only be enough to settle Emily’s
debuts and pay for her fare home.
A telling sequence has her trying
to make contact with British musician Tricky (briefly seen in concert) and
getting a chilly brush-off. Also playing himself is American musician David
Roback, while Emily Haines and her band Metric contribute an abrasive concert
sequence.
Clean thrives on a set of brief but telling performances
from a diverse cast – including Don McKellar as Lee’s disenchanted manager, an
unusually warm and low-key Beatrice Dalle, and newcomer Laetitia Spigarelli.
Cheung, looking haggard and altogether unglamorous, pitches her Emily as
troubled but sane, and nothing like the diva we initially perceive. The
standout presence, however, is Nolte’s, as Emily’s simpatico father-in-law, his
most tender and controlled performance in years.
Eric Gautier contributes hard,
unshowy cinematography that just occasionally takes on a heightened poetic
slant - notably, an industrial skyline on which one chimney suddenly spouts
flames as Emily shoots up. In a soundtrack of mixed rock material, Assayas uses
vintage Brian Eno songs as effectively as Nanni Moretti did in The Son’s
Room.
Review: Clean - Film
Comment Howard Hampton from Film Comment
The impressive fluidity of
Olivier Assayas’s Clean, which is much indebted to the
right-hand-in-glove fit of DP Eric Gautier and how he seems to catch actors on
the intimate fly even when they’re sitting still, makes the film appear more
naturalistic than it really is. Operating in a strangely agreeable area between
highly plot-driven family drama and semi-plotless observation, Clean
defamiliarizes a host of contemporary clichés: rock-and-roll lifestyle follies,
junkie blues, the uneasy road to recovery, and child-custody issues. One false
move and the movie would be plunged into some Sid & Nancy-cum-Kramer
vs. Kramer morass of needlepoint bathos. But Maggie Cheung and Nick Nolte
not only give two beautifully modulated performances here, they also serve as
emotional compass points—there’s something very exact and indicative about how
they locate inchoate feelings and make them resonant, palpable. Nobody in
movies today can say lines like “He’s been faithful to their friendship” with
the absolute simplicity and believability of Nolte here.
Characteristically, Assayas
sidesteps the obstacles presented by the schematic setup with his small-scale
immersion in human ricochets, everyday atomization, and attentively restrained
poignancy. But what really makes the film click is a more basic throwback of a
conceptual gambit: having a difficult, frequently unsympathetic figure portrayed
by an actor who has great audience rapport and maintains a huge reserve of
goodwill. As the strung-out walking disaster area Emily, Cheung stays well
inside the woman’s downcast frame of mind, making no concessions to waifish
glamour or latent virtuousness. But still, she has an aura of likeability that
can’t be dissipated no matter how immersed she is in little miseries and petty
bitchiness.
After the OD of Emily’s longtime
boyfriend (a fading rock star given the name Lee Hauser) and her arrest for
heroin possession, the story turns toward her pursuit of a responsible life
after years of rock-parasite status. The couple’s son is being cared for by the
boy’s Canadian grandparents, and when she gets out of jail, Emily is contacted
by the grandfather, Albrecht (Nolte). With sincere best-for-all-concerned
consideration, he asks her to bow out of the parental picture. Of course she
eventually wants to see her son again, and a bit more unexpectedly, Albrecht
agrees and arranges an awkward, crucial reunion.
Clean is loaded with incidents, complications,
coincidences, and expectation-reversals. Yet the film is just as rooted in
cityscapes (the forlorn industrial parkways of Hamilton , Canada Paris
The one-two combination of
Nolte’s essential generosity and decency as an actor with Cheung’s innate
levelheadedness nicely gets around the customary trumped-up “conflict” movies
over-rely on. And if levelheadedness seems out of character for a junkie, Clean
reminds you that sometimes the levelheaded are the ones who go out of their way
to lose themselves in disorder. The only minor problem the movie has is with
the superfluousness of the Lee Hauser subplot and the flat-footed stab at rock
pseudo-authenticity—really, do rockers backstage talk exclusively in carefully
delineated plot points? All that stuff about the cover of Mojo and the cameo
insertion of “this fellow Tricky” (as Albrecht deferentially refers to him) has
a routine, warmed-over quality that gives off more purple haze than credible
light.
The reticent loveliness of the
film is encapsulated in the chance encounter between Emily and Albrecht, when
she is trying to spirit her son away to California Taking Tiger
Mountain San
Francisco
Reverse
Shot: Nick Pinkerton There’s Always Tomorrow, July 13, 2006
Nick's Flick
Picks: Nick Davis
The Village Voice: Michael Atkinson April 25, 2006
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] also seen here: Film Lounge: Neil Young
Slant Magazine
[Eric Henderson] also seen
here: Slant:
Eric Henderson
Stylus Magazine: Josh Timmermann
Clean
| DVD Review | Film @ The Digital Fix Noel Megahey
Film
@ The Digital Fix - Clean Gary
Couzens
Filmbrain Like Anna Karina’s
Sweater
BeyondHollywood.com James Mudge
european-films.net Boyd van Hoeij
CLEAN
Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Strictly Film School: Acquarello
The
Georgia Straight: Mark Harris
Girish Shambu's blog: Girish Shambu
The New York Observer: Andrew Sarris May 15, 2006
Austin Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
L.A. Weekly: Scott Foundas (pdf file)
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
New York Times (registration req'd) Stephen Holden
Film Comment: Manohla Dargis July/August 2004 (capsule review, pdf file)
Clean (film) - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Clean Soundtrack - She Can't Tell You (Maggie
Cheung) YouTube (5:17 )
BOARDING GATE
D-DAY Erica Abeel from Filmmaker magazine
Inspired by a news brief about a French financier murdered
during an S & M session, Boarding Gate from Olivier Assayas
elaborates the sordid portrait of global financiers explored to ill effect in
his 2002 Demon Lover. The plot of Boarding beggars description.
Essentially we watch Asia Argento, slut assoluta (that's a compliment) play S
& M games with wide-body financier Michael Madsen, kill him, then escape to
Hong Kong with the help of another lover, who may have set her up.
In the press notes Assayas claims that due to budget constraints, he shot the film on the cheap, adopting an appropriate B-movie esthetic. Guess he achieved his goal. Assayas is fascinated, rightly, by the skanky underbelly of the global economy. But his lurid, even romanticized image of kinky financiers seems to reflect more private obsession than reality. Most financiers I know get off on 80% return on investment or winning at doubles, not playing “snuff” and getting garotted by their own belt, while Asia Argento ... oh, never mind.
Screengrab Mike D’Angelo
The
last time Olivier Assayas attempted a thriller, his fluid, sinuous camerawork
and the cast's intense performances were very nearly swamped by a surfeit of
philosophical, theoretical, technological and psychosexual implications. Unlike
Demonlover, however, Assayas' latest film, Boarding Gate, doesn't
seem to have much of anything on its mind. Asia Argento, more restrained than
usual, plays Sandra, a young woman with a history of masochistic behavior; as
the film opens, she visits her former lover, Miles (Michael Madsen), a business
tycoon who used to regularly send Sandra out to ply information from clients
and competitors, using, shall we say, whatever means necessary. If only Boarding
Gate itself were even half that sordid. Instead, Assayas serves up a
surprisingly lackluster series of betrayals, chases and narrow escapes,
distinguished only by his sharp eye for color and his penchant for letting half
the visual field remain out of focus. The action moves from Paris to Beijing,
several characters wind up dead, and Kim Gordon makes a self-conscious cameo as
some sort of mysterious fixer, all of which would be sufficient were this some
straight-to-vid throwaway starring Misty Mundae and Gary Busey…or, hell, Asia
Argento and Michael Madsen. But Assayas never seems remotely invested in this
nonsense — not even in a subversive, strictly intellectual way. Should I annoy
my friend Zach by suggesting that this is one flight you're better off missing?
Boarding
Gate Lee Marshall from Screendaily
Maverick French director Oliver Assayas gets lost in transit
with Boarding Gate, a transglobal thriller of dirty business deals and
dirty sex that he has previously mined in Demonlover, with equally
underwhelming results.
Assayas has declared
that he set out deliberately to make an English-language B-movie: but the
director of poised, perceptive films like Clean and Les Destinées
Sentimentales just doesn't have the trashy creative soul to make it work.
Unevenness is a mark of the B-movie, sure, but rarely to the extent that we
feel we're watching two different films shot in two different styles.
Film one is about
company director Miles (Madsen in typical smooth-but-vulnerable mode) and his
former lover, Sandra (Argento). Prowling close-up camera angles and dialogue
that sounds a little like David Mamet run through an automatic translator
reveal that Miles used to loan Sandra out to his clients for the night and
force her to recount her experiences afterwards; it also becomes clear from a
scene in Madsen's plush Parisian apartment that they both enjoy slave-master
games.
Film two kicks in when
Sandra flees to
There are moments when
Boarding Gate wakes up and seems about to go somewhere interesting –
particularly in some of the Madsen-Argento scenes. Now that she can play
world-weary, tired and fragile, the daughter of horror meister Dario is turning
into a more mature actress, going beyond the on/off modes (sexy minx or
wiped-out druggie) of most of her previous roles.
DoP Yorick Le Saux (a
frequent Ozon collaborator) squeezes what he can out of the material, setting
up nice contrasts between glare and penumbra in part one that act as metaphors
for the dodgy world of international import-export scams. But he too is forced
to switch register in part two, opting to shoot Hong Kong through Sandra's eyes
as a threatening, garish, overcrowded metropolis – sort of Lost in
Translation with guns.
Boarding Gate Patrick Z. McGavin
French director
Olivier Assayas' new work, "Boarding Gate," playing as a Midnight
program out of competition in the official selection, is riveting to watch.
Sculpted in a free and innovative matter that uses the camera in a particular
interesting and fascinating way to create a stylistic fluency, Assayas works in
a deliberately lower-grade subject form that some critics will dismiss as
(Euro) trash.
At the 1996 Cannes Festival, Assayas unveiled "Irma Vep," his
beautiful, electric portrait of filmmaking and relationships that was arguably
the first artistically significant work by a significant Western filmmaker to
acknowledge the intensity and verve of Asian cinema, preceding even those
contributions of the Wachowski Brothers and Tarantino.
Presented in competition at Cannes in 2002, "Demonlover," deepened
his formal and technical connection to Asian cinema. A former critic with the
seminal French film journal Cahiers du cinema, Assayas marks an important
intellectual tradition with the New Wave directors Truffaut, Godard and
Rivette.
Assayas has three interesting periods: the early French works about young
people and relationships, summarized by the tender, erotic and beautifully
shaded autobiographical "Cold Water"; the middle period of
adult-themed personal reflections and adaptations signalled by Les destinees
sentimentales"; and now the Asian influenced political, sexual and
corporate studies of "Irma Vep," "Demonlover," and
"Clean."
In his new film, Assayas animates the redemption of sleaze, sharply etching the
dark poetry of the contemporary global marketplace that yields a perversely
revealing multilingual setting of duplicitously twisted internecine corporate
politics, sexual maneuvering and cultural dislocation that colors his
B-thriller with a grubby tension, style, unpredictable plotting and memorably
drawn characters.
"Boarding Gate" has a tantalizing two-part structure, unfolding
between Paris and Hong Kong. Asia Argento dominates the film as Sandra, a
sexually lethal provocateur who turns up at the Paris offices of her former
lover, Miles Rennberg (Michael Madsen), to broker a new deal with some friends
who run an upscale import furniture business.
Suffering bad losses from currency deals and oil machinery transaction that
exposed his financial holdings, Miles is also reeling from the collapse of his
marriage. Her reappearance stings Miles, the sight of her instantly conjuring
up their previously explicit sexual transactions.
It also reveals the one-upmanship of their relationship and how Miles deployed
her to sexually service his clients in an effort to extract important inside
information. Sandra is a thrill seeker and rule breaker who uses her position
inside the import company to broker drug deals. She uses her sexuality to wield
special influence, sleeping with Lester (Carl Ng), the owner of the import
company with his wife, Sue (Kelly Lin).
Sandra is first viewed in a reverse angle shot of her alluring neck that is
tattooed with the number 23. (“In Rome, the number means good luck,” Argento said
at the press conference). She’s a brilliant survivalist. Assays has always been
exceptional with actors, and he does impressive work with Madsen. The actor is
softer and less threatening than usual, and Assayas denies the actor’s
trademark sleek machismo and bleak efficiency to project a quiet and vulnerable
defeat.
The shocking conclusion to their relationship ruptures the movie’s first part,
setting up the vivid, tense and dream-like second half. The action is suddenly
shuttled to Hong Kong, and Sandra is enlisted on a dangerous and ill-defined
mission under the control of Lester and his wife. The speed and temp is
suddenly altered, the portrait of Hong Kong one of fractured perspectives and
spatial incoherence.
Paris' darker textures have been replaced by a luminous and intoxicating blue
light that suggests an outlaw culture where everything is permitted and nothing
denied. Sandra is the exile, though her survivalist instincts serve her with
distinction. Assayas’s position of the outsider is marked by that of Sandra’s.
Assayas makes the daring analogy that her playful, aggressive and uninhibited
sexual liberation is a telling and effective means of thwarting off pain and
violation.
From Virginie Ledoyen, Maggie Cheung to Connie Nielsen, the women of Assayas’
films are shaded and complex women whose thrust for autonomy has always meant
their being alone. Argento is a great presence, her body voluptuous and tough;
she has a speed and alertness that seems directly wired to her conscious,
giving her the instincts and imitative that ensures her survival. The movie’s
other women, Kelly Lin (the star of several Johnnie To movies) and Kim Gordon
(speaking Cantonese), are no less formidable. Their scenes off of Argento
provide a propulsive kick.
The yarn's second half marks Assayas’s most stripped down and visceral
filmmaking. The first half is marked by ambiguity and misdirection, the
portrait of Sandra a lovely and fascinating meditation on her body. Working for
the first time with the excellent French cinematographer Yorick Le Saux,
Assayas works in disparate movements, the action jumping from the sleek, high
powered French corporate offices to suburban Paris warehouses to the movie’s
bravura closing sequences in the vertical, crowded spaces of Hong Kong.
"Boarding Gate" is a movie of sharp edges and disruptive tension that
remains open to various possibilities and multiple scenarios. The tone is
percussive and dreamy, switching almost imperceptibly from day to night and
encompassing revelation and nightmare. Assayas has always been a gracefully
observational, and his penetrating, alert feel for the interlocking rhythms of
cities has yielded new and unexpected depths to his work. It’s alive, creative
and intelligent filmmaking that makes no apologizes or regrets for the origins
of the material. Best of all, the ambiguous closing shot suggests a character
who remains to fight another day, another time.
Village Voice J.
Hoberman
Slant Magazine David
Pratt-Robson
indieWIRE Michael
Koresky from Reverse Shot
not coming to a theater near you Cullen Gallagher
The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie Reviews (Daniel Kasman)
The New York Sun (Steve Dollar)
stylusmagazine.com (Brad Luen)
filmcritic.com (Chris Cabin) also seenhere: Reel.com
[Chris Cabin]
DVD Talk theatrical
[Jamie S. Rich]
New York Magazine (David Edelstein) Page 2
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
Los Angeles Times (Kevin Thomas)
The New York Times (Manohla Dargis)
SUMMER HOURS (L’Heure d’été) B 87
aka:
Summer Time
We’ve all heard of the
fall of the Roman Empire, well this film smacks of the fall of the French
bourgeoisie, an Eric Rohmer-like riff on the gorgeous summer tone poems like
Bertrand Tavenier’s A SUNDAY IN THE COUNTRY (1984), an impeccably sunlit ode to
a perfect summer’s afternoon in the French countryside. But in this version, there are undercurrents
of gloom about an impending death of the aging matriarch Hélène (Edith Scob),
who on a celebration of her 75th birthday with the family is busy
worrying about what will happen to all the original artwork scattered about the
family home, much of it by revered French painters such as Corot and Degas,
even Odilon Redon, but also the original sketchbooks of her famous
brother-in-law, the artist Jean Berthier (who is all but reduced to a distant
memory in this film), all of whom collectively form a piece of French art
history. Of her three children, only the
oldest Frédéric (Charles Berling) remains nearby, while Adrienne (Juliette
Binoche) has a designing career in New York and Jérémie (Jérémie Renier) spends
much of his time managing a shoe company overseas in China where he admittedly
exploits cheap labor for cheap manufacturing costs. When we see how little time or appreciation
they have for the house, the artworks, and even their mother, the role of the noble
servant is played by the loyal housekeeper Eloise (Isabelle Sadoyan) who takes
care of Hélène as well as the house. The
subject of death and family legacy is so prominent that it’s reminiscent of
Bergman’s CRIES AND WHISPERS (1972), where a dysfunctional rich family barely
knows how to express love and affection towards one of its own, stricken with
emotional paralysis the moment they’re in trouble, leaving small details like
feelings to the servants and housemaids.
Here as well, no one except Eloise takes Hélène seriously until it’s too
late, as a short while later she passes away.
In the aftermath,
Frédéric assumes his siblings will want to keep the house and its contents for
the children’s sake, but spending so much time away from France has given them
little reason to return, especially if their mother is gone, so the detached
sense of ingratitude on display is haunting.
Within this family itself lies the seeds of dismantlement of French
culture, making way for American and Chinese capital interests, apparently the
heir money managers of the French future.
What’s clear in this film is how easy one disconnects with their own
past, both the people in it and the circumstances connected to every piece of
family furniture which over time loses all of its meaning. In the same way, French history, even within
its own borders, is giving way towards trends of international finance, where
more and more France is seen as part of the European Union, or part of the
larger global community. This style of
French country home is beginning to resemble De Sica’s THE GARDEN OF THE
FINZI-CONTINIS (1970), the last of the aristocracy before new forces of
modernization rule the day with a depersonalized emphasis, much like a few
wealthy corporate conglomerates taking over the running of the family farms. With meticulous detail, Assayas shows us the
meetings with the funeral home and family visits to the grave, the smug museum
curators who visit the home to make their appraisals, then meet among
themselves inside the Musée d'Orsay to
decide its worth in the current market, where one cynically believes most will
end up in storage. While the film itself
does a good job maintaining separate personalities for all the characters,
including the wives and children, where all are inherently warm and decent
people, yet what they’re doing or what they allow themselves to do is barely an
afterthought in their lives, where family heirlooms filled with a uniquely
personalized history may end up in a museum where in the view of Frédéric, “It
looks like it’s caged in.”
The civil and discreet tone of the film alters radically near the end and becomes less a charming nostalgia piece balanced against capitalistic interests, where one affectionately holds on to one’s past with a certain reverence, and instead turns into a cold-hearted break with the past, where spoiled, disaffected children think only of themselves. This is the weakest element of the story, as it’s the least developed, yet it clearly delineates a line of demarcation drawn in the sand where kids live only in the present, all too easily losing any contact with their past. That’s what they have parents for, yet in this film, everyone’s looking out for their own self-interest, where who they are and where they came from hardly matters to anyone any more, certainly not their ungrateful children. A sense of sadness pervades this film, yet there's some wonderful musical tracks that delicately lead us through the various chapters of the story, all told as an intimate chamber drama of manner and charm, heralding an end of an era. Yet this is a Chekhovian chamber drama without Chekhov’s ascerbic wit to scathingly satirize everything that’s come before. Assayas isn't making a case about the future if he never questions the injustices of the past. Privilege is privilege in any era, and it usually means someone stepped over somebody else to get there, so it doesn't sit well in this film to just blindly accept that the past was one rosy idealized era. This family has servants for christ's sake, and they're presented like the slaves in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939). They don't ever want to separate themselves from their so-called masters. I mean really, what world are these people living in, what reality have they ever had to face, and why all the outburst of acclaim for this film?
Independent.co.uk
[Nicholas Barber]
Summer Hours is the kind of film
that could only have been made in France, not just because the houses are so
enviable and the clothes so elegant, but because it's an uncompromising,
grown-up drama in which educated, middle-class people consider a complex moral
issue with barely a cross word, let alone a gun battle or a ravenous zombie. It
flags towards the end, but for much of the time Olivier Assayas's film is so
mature, humane and unshowy that you can almost forgive French cinema for
Asterix at the Olympic Games.
Charles Berling, Juliette Binoche
and Jérémie Renier star as three siblings who have to decide what to do with
their rambling family home when their mother dies. Their great uncle was a
well-known painter, so the question is whether they should honour him and their
own heritage by keeping the estate together, or whether to sell off the house
and its contents piecemeal. Berling believes they should preserve everything
for their children, but Binoche and Renier both now live abroad and so for them
the house, like France itself, belongs in the past. Partially funded by the
Musée d'Orsay, Summer Hours debates the value of art and the purpose of
museums, but it's also a touching universal story of loss, and a detailed
portrait of a family that's close but not as close as it once used to be.
Lessons of
Darkness [Nick Schager]
Three adult siblings reunite for a final visit with their mother, and then to manage her estate once she’s passed away, in Summer Hours, a superior family drama that, despite its apparent dissimilarities from his recent work, finds French director Olivier Assayas once again charting the effects of globalization on human consciousness and relationships. Frédéric (Charles Berling) is an economist who thinks lowly of the global economy (dubbing it a “religion”), and that conviction, coupled with his desire to continue residing in France with his wife and children, puts him at odds with sister Adrienne (Juliette Binoche), an individualistic art dealer in NYC, and younger brother Jérémie (Jérémie Renier), a businessman stationed in Asia for work. International finance is the force that separates them, both from each other and – once their mother (Edith Scob) dies, and Adrienne and Jérémie vote (against Frédéric’s wishes) to sell her beloved summer house and donate their great-uncle’s art collection to the Museum d’Orsay – from their memories. Assayas’ story grapples with the way places and spaces function as vessels for personal pasts, and how those locations also hold within them dreams of the future. With a sly, deft touch marked by elegant fade-outs between his vignettes, as well as sustained takes that give conversations room to naturally stretch, mature and evolve, Assayas expresses the melancholy of childhood’s ultimate end as well as globalization’s reconfiguration of traditional notions of self, family and history through the creation of a mobile, geographically and culturally untethered citizenry. Nonetheless, Summer Hours is first and foremost enlivened by its cast’s superbly artless performances, with Binoche in particular expressing, with amazingly versatile, engaging naturalism, a complexity of emotions and motivations blessedly free of actorly personality-trait underlining or character-summarizing statements and gestures.
Critic's
Notebook [Robert Levin]
“Summer Hours” – which stands diametrically opposed to the globe-trotting B-movie tributes that have recently preoccupied writer-director Olivier Assayas – only serves to reaffirm his filmmaking range. It’s an intimate motion picture steeped in nostalgia, one that explores the ways our memories strangely bestow inanimate objects with great personal significance. With its idyllic views of the French countryside, piercing study of sibling relationships and ethereal renderings of the detritus of modern aristocratic life, the film looks and feels like something Eric Rohmer might have made.
It follows three siblings as they struggle to come to terms with the death
of their mother and the question of what to do with her country estate and its
rare, artistically valuable fittings. Of the three, only Frédéric (Charles
Berling) still lives in
The project began as a commissioned short from the Musée d'Orsay in celebration of its 20th anniversary. Although funding for it in that form fell through, one can clearly see the reasons for Mr. Assayas’s fascination with a story about the museum. His screenplay confronts nothing less than the meaning and purpose of an art museum and the ways those change when objects meant to serve an everyday purpose – for example, a desk or a lamp – are removed from their natural habitats and placed on display. “Summer Hours” does so not in an archaic, overly formal way, but by introducing everyday characters, presenting them with a set of everyday concerns and lending the decisions they make a gravitas that even they don’t quite understand. It’s compelling real-world stuff with profound implications.
Summer Hours Michael Sicinski from The Academic Hack
Apparently this film is now disavowed by the very Musée d'Orsay commission project that spawned it (the same one that gave us Hou's Flight of the Red Balloon), and if this is in fact the case, it's not without good reason. Inevitably critics and audiences are going to praise the very fine Summer Hours as a return to form for Assayas, or even a return to reason, following alleged follies like Boarding Gate and demonlover (a film about which I myself am very ambivalent). Visually, Hours has the "look" of great French cinema al fresco, sun-dappled and bustling with so much boisterous life and casually sculpted chatter that the frame can barely contain it. This looks more like a Téchiné film, really, but operates in a highly writerly register, not unlike Sentimental Destinies and especially Late August, Early September (with which it almost shares a spot on the calendar of life). Summer Hours is "about something," it is a film with a capital-T theme, and virtually everything that happens in the film, and certainly everything that's overtly discussed, is relevant to the exploration of that theme -- cultural versus familial legacy, and whether art objects that have a function, even if only as sentimental family heirlooms, become existentially damaged when they turn into cultural commodities. In a family of three adult siblings, only the stodgy intellectual (Charles Berling) wants to retain the family's holdings. The designer (Juliette Binoche) and the venture capitalist (Jérémie Renier) are in favor of selling.
But there's a little more going on than meets the eye, since Assayas is in essence taking museum money in order to critique the basis of museology and its object-fetishes. By the end of the film, we are asked to bear witness to a "death" of precious, meaningful things, the material residue of both love and intellection. It's to Assayas's credit that his commitment to taking vases and furniture as seriously as the fine art of Corot and Degas results in a wide-ranging consideration of the emotional stakes in the problem. Summer Hours is more like Statues Also Die and, yes, Toy Story 2 on this front than, say, an essay by Bourdieu. But even more than this, Assayas seems to turn the tables on his own place within the project, since he is making another kind of precious object. Part of the narrative structure of the film's inheritance question hinges on whether or not he family's children will even want the old summer house, these old paintings from two centuries ago, this clunky old furniture. That is, the issue isn't will we pass culture down to the next generation, but which one do they want? (It's not for nothing that the film opens with a direct citation of Cold Water and eventually finds the young people treating the old place, and this rather tasteful Assayas film, as a hip-hop party zone.) And so, this sigh of relief that Assayas has returned to the fold is very much missing the point. He has, in fact, produced the outward shell of a particular format, the pastoral bourgeois French film. It, too, is a museum piece of sorts, and by the time we've moved through Summer Hours, its cozy use value has also begun to feel rather like cottage best closed down.
Twitch
(Michael Guillen) review
The sermon of the inanimate is
such that objects of art speak through the memories emotionally invested in
them. And yet the shift of objects from daily usage to museum display via
estate bequest is a transition rarely recorded in film. In their museum
settings, empty vases thirst for water and flowers; paintings recall
affectionate placement on the walls of homes and their daily dalliance with
shifting angles of window light; artist notebooks plead not to be torn apart
and auctioned off a page at a time. The circle that is the art of
collecting holds its breath at being broken and then resigns itself to the
cursory glances of museum crowds. In a surprising turnabout from the
Hollywood B-movie homage of Boarding
Gate, Olivier Assayas offers up in L’Heure d’été (Summer Hours) a film that
feels distinctly European, unquestionably French, imbued with refined, cultured
nuance. As Michael Hawley mentioned in his recent “tabulation of deprivation”, along with Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, L’Heure d’été was commissioned to
celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Musée d’Orsay, where transitional scenes
in the lives of these objects are administratively staged.
After siblings Adrienne (Juliette
Binoche), Frédéric (Charles Berling) and Jérémie (Jérémie Rénier) return home
to the countryside for their mother’s (Edith Scob) 75th birthday, an unexpected
event threatens family unity and forces them to face up to their past.
Her passions well spent, Edith Scob—in a performance that glows with the beauty
of diminishing embers—anticipates death, sadly aware that she will take with
her memories, secrets and stories that no one cares to listen to anymore.
She knows that her children’s lives will lead them far away from their
childhood home where she has raised them; a home decorated with accumulated
treasures of art: the “detritus” of a life well-lived. She has no
illusions that her home will need to be sold and has prepared for this likely
event by making an inventory of what is valuable and museum-worthy. More
than anyone, having lived her life fully, she is aware that nothing can remain
the same in order for the new to thrive. Her house of breath is
dismantled—not board by board—but by one meaningful memory at a time.
Her eldest son Frédéric deems her
morbid; but, she is lucid and sensible. Her daughter Adrienne (Juliette
Binoche sporting a blonde wig) and youngest son Jérémie (Jérémie Rénier,
looking one hundred times foxier than the addict in Le Silence de Lorna) have chosen lives that have no need for
their childhood home. It is only the eldest son Frédéric who had hoped to
hold onto the estate to share with his children and the film registers his
initial disappointment and eventual resignation to the wishes of his siblings.
In one of the film’s final
sequences, Frédéric’s daughter throws a party for her friends in the empty
house, filling it with blasts of rock music, dope smoking, and drinking.
Youth cannot bemoan the past; it must celebrate its passing in order to come
into its own. Assayas has rendered an evocative portrait of the turning
of generations and the manner in which beautiful belongings return to the
world.
not coming to a theater
near you (Jenny Jediny) review
The opening scenes of Summer
Hours act almost as a prologue, setting the stage for the aftermath of
foreseeable death, as a family deals with the loss of a parent. Oliver Assayas’
latest depicts a chapter in life nearly all of us must deal with at one point
or another, with such subtle grace that the feelings of grief slip in and out
throughout the film, only fully forming in the final passages. There are tears
in Summer Hours, but there is also the quiet acceptance of the passage
of time, and the sense that no matter how hard you may hold on to the past, it
will eventually fall away from your grip.
Three adult children – Frédéric,
Jérémie, and Adrienne – discuss their mother’s estate, and its potential sale
after her death. The house, an incredibly beautiful country home outside of
Paris, is at the heart of Summer Hours, its value, both monetary and
emotional, conveyed from the very beginning. The adults have returned home (two
of them after many months, and from many miles, as they now reside in New York
and Shanghai) to celebrate their mother’s birthday. Hélène (portrayed by the
radiant Edith Scob, once muse to the director Georges Franju) is alive in the
opening scenes of Summer Hours , but already contemplating her death, and
she pulls aside Frédéric, the only child still living in France, and details
the eventual breakdown of her possessions. It’s discomforting, despite Hélène’s
calm and unhurried nature, and Frédéric will remain in this disquieted state
after her death; his responsible nature (oldest child, of course) drives his
need to preserve his mother’s memory through her estate, while his siblings
wish to sell it off.
This may sound like a bit of a
bore – selling antiques and rare art – or the potential for bad drama –
siblings fighting tooth and nail over who-gets-what – but neither exists here.
Mainly, there is the slow realization of how memories form—that a familiar desk
typically covered in books, papers, and a mother’s handwritten notes can
suddenly feel like a stranger when the clutter is removed, and it now sits
polished, empty, and very lonely. The objects in Summer Hours are not
typical in that they are extraordinarily rare and expensive, the family’s late
uncle having been a famous artist, but this aspect matters little in Assayas’
vision. There is a moment in which the housekeeper, having returned to see both
the house and the children, finds them with appraisers rummaging through
Hélène’s possessions. Frédéric offers her any object in the home to remember Hélène;
her choice, a glass vase, is selected for its value in her memories – a vase
she used over and over for flowers, to make the house more cheerful for
Hègrave;ne – but we know the vase is a rare and expensive work of art. The way
Assayas pulls apart the idea of value is keenly felt and ripples throughout, as
Hélène’s children see their physical memories become, quite literally, just
objects.
Although quite melancholy, Summer
Hours slowly finds its way back to the living, in the youthful forms of
Hélène’s grandchildren. Our first glimpse at the start of the film is their
scavenger hunt on the house grounds, and they remain present, only given full
attention in the closing scenes of the film. Returning to the now empty house,
they invade with a swarm of friends, blasting French pop and hip hop music, and
enjoy this brief interlude before the new owners arrive. The mood is light and
ebullient, swinging the story full circle as a new generation moves in, however
briefly. But the past is not forgotten; walking in the woods, Hélène’s
granddaughter recalls her memories of this house and of her grandmother with
passing sadness to a friend, before taking swift flight over a stone wall to
escape the crowd. This last gesture is a lovely one, suggesting history is not
forgotten with the young; only that it will be remembered and retold in new
ways.
Review: Summer
Hours - Film Comment Frédéric Bonnaud from Film
Comment, March/April 2009
Summer Hours is an extremely French film that seems to have been made in direct reaction to Boarding Gate, its predecessor. After having gone completely international, Olivier Assayas has taken advantage of a commission by the Musée d’Orsay (an exemplary museum of 19th-century art) to explore territory that’s close to home. Boarding Gate (07) was his version of Abel Ferrara’s New Rose Hotel, with an American actor (Michael Madsen), an Italian star (Asia Argento), Hong Kong, and Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: arty deterritorialization pushed to the extreme. With Summer Hours, the movement is inverted. Assayas returns to the local, to family, and to a France reminiscent of the one found in Les Destinées sentimentales (00).
But if the earlier film was a sumptuous adaptation of a thick bourgeois novel by Jacques Chardonne, Summer Hours is a light novella, with a hint of the nouveau roman in its relationship to inanimate things. And it takes care to remain light, to avoid emphasis and overt pathos. That is the film’s gamble. It refuses to weigh itself down while handling rather weighty material (specifically the question of heritage, a French specialty) and staying grounded in a concern as essential as it is uncomfortable: how to live with the vestiges of the past?
As Truffaut’s Madame Jouve puts it at the start of The Woman Next Door: a house can be the main character of a story. That’s also the case here, and it’s the film’s most striking achievement. Assayas succeeds at making this house live so well that we have the impression that it watches its inhabitants as they abandon it. Its resident will die, then its inheritors will sell it. Through the sheer grace of his mise en scène, Assayas gives us the point of view of this soon-to-be deserted place: it’s a perspective of very sweet indifference, a sadness tinged with fatalism.
In achieving this tour de force, Bergman’s disciple can be proud of himself. How magnificently he films a Félix Bracquemond vase or the Louis Majorelle furniture placed on display at the Musée d’Orsay. The objects themselves seem to admonish the characters for their betrayal and brutality. The inheritors believe they are contemplating them for the last time when in fact they are the ones who are being looked at reproachfully. One recalls the words of Paul Valéry that André Malraux had engraved in gold letters on the front of the Palais de Chaillot: “It depends on those who pass/ Whether I am tomb or treasure/Whether I speak or am silent/The choice is yours alone/Friend, do not enter without desire.”
Is Summer Hours an autobiographical film? Yes, but not in the way one might suppose. Nothing is more universal than stories of families and their succession, and it is uncertain whether Assayas drew on his own personal reservoir in order to tackle these themes. On the other hand, it’s evident that he’s also dealing with his own position as a filmmaker: shared—hyphenated, even—between the local and the global, between the experimental rupture of his chosen visionaries (Kenneth Anger, Guy Debord) and a more classical French cinema, between the Bergman of Persona and of Fanny and Alexander. At the point where these paths intersect, Assayas claims the freedom to borrow from one and then the other and to grant himself the right to such alternation. In the family of Summer Hours, the sister (Juliette Binoche) lives in New York, one brother (Jérémie Renier) lives in China, and another (Charles Berling) lives in Paris—the whole forms a fragmented portrait of the filmmaker as a globalized artist.
All that remains to be said is that Summer Hours is Assayas’s best film set on home turf—the one that best puts things in perspective and loudly proclaims that one must know how to shed dead skin to go on living. And it makes perfect sense that for this beautiful exercise in seeing patrimony with absolute clarity Assayas invokes, both at the beginning (the Edenic house of a painter) and at the end (youth and its imperious desire, at water’s edge), the supreme figure of French cinema: none other than Jean Renoir.
DVD Times Noel Megahey
CineScene.com (Chris
Knipp) review
Floatation
Suite [Sheila Seacroft]
The Auteurs' Notebook Daniel Kasman at Cannes
cinemattraction (Sheila Cornelius)
review
SpoutBlog
[Karina Longworth] at Cannes
Eye for Film (George
Williamson) review [3.5/5]
Slant Magazine
review Akiva Gottlieb
Future Movies (Coco
Forsythe) review [8/10]
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
Exclaim!
[Travis Mackenzie Hoover]
ViewLondon
(Matthew Turner) review [3/5]
Screenjabber.com [Michael Edwards]
Reverse Shot’s
Best of 2009: “Summer Hours” and 9 More
indieWIRE
Tiscali
UK review Paul Hurley, which
includes an interview with Juliette Binoche during the making of CHOCOLAT: View Interview
Variety review Derek Elley
Time Out
London (Geoff Andrew) review [4/6]
The
Guardian (Xan Brooks) review
The
Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) capsule review [3/4]
DVDBeaver
dvd review Gary W. Tooze
CARLOS – Made for French TV A- 93
France Germany
Ultimately I realized that the disconnected images I had
of Carlos had an interesting, even fascinating connection that somehow
paralleled the evolution of Western leftism in those years. So I felt it was
the fate of one man and, in a certain way, the story of one generation, plus a
meditation on time, history, fate and issues more universal than the specific
history of Carlos.
—Olivier Assayas to The
New York Times
This 5 ½ hour
made-for-TV French biopic of a famed international terrorist from the 70’s is
divided into 3 sections with no break between sections 1 and 2, an intermission
at 3 ½ hours coming after section 2, and the credit sequence coming only at the
end, so this is something of an endurance test for the audience. Without question, section 2 is the strongest
and could easily stand alone, while section 3 is the weakest, as the tightness
of the film falls apart and becomes sluggishly slow and even indifferent, reflecting
the state of mind of a man who is no longer relevant in an ever changing
world. Édgar Ramírez,
onscreen for nearly every shot, plays Carlos, whose cover as a Peruvian playboy
suits him perfectly even though he’s a Venezuelan, the child of Marxist parents
who had their son educated in Moscow until he was thrown out of school for
unruly behavior. While his political
sympathies always favor the Palestinian cause, his revolutionary sentiment is
on the side of all oppressed people who must overcome the systematic capitalist
inequities imposed by the imperialist powers on poorer nations insuring the
world’s resources stay in the hands of the most wealthy nations, which reflects
a 60’s mindset when there were various student and radical organizations around
the world spouting similar rhetoric.
This was
during the Vietnam War when the United States was seen as an interloper, where
the CIA’s political agenda against communism led the nation to interfere in
another country’s determination of its own future, much like the recent failed
Bush era agenda against radical Islam which led the nation to actually invade
Iraq without provocation, hoping to alter the balance of democracy in the
region. In each case, the American
intervention led to the opposite of its intended effect, as it drove any hopes
of democracy out of the region altogether, allowing radical movements that rail
against Americanism to rise to power.
Similarly, the leftist student demonstrations of the 60’s that tried to
stop the war and advocate for racial justice, which included the violent
terrorist bombing acts of the Weathermen, the armed struggle of both the Black
Panthers and the Indian AIM movement, eventually led to a right wing law and
order crackdown, creating instead a much more self-centered and conservative
society. What this suggests is how hard
it is to positively influence history, despite one’s best intentions.
While
none of this historical backdrop is included in the film, this is nonetheless
an integral theme of the film, as the terrorist acts on display rose out of the
disgruntled radical movements of the 60’s and 70’s, feeling they didn’t go far
enough, including a Communist offshoot of the radical Red Army Faction in Germany known as the
Baader-Meinhof group that simply fell in love with armed guerilla warfare. Originally using a Communist inspired
revolutionary tone to their actions, they soon veered off script whenever the
moment served them. Similarly, Carlos
was soon justifying his own wayward actions, claiming he had to improvise on
the ground based on what knowledge he had, quickly using mafia style
assassinations, which certainly lost whatever sympathy he might otherwise have
generated. Carlos ended up becoming more
of an incendiary mercenary for hire, selling himself to the highest bidder,
with a tendency to create a bloodbath of terror and chaos, and with it
international headlines, becoming a terrorist rock star in the process rather
than a man discreetly carrying out his intended mission.
This film documents
some of his more legendary acts, spending one entire episode (Part 2) on
perhaps his most audacious mission, where in 1975 Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein, though some evidence points to Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, provided
the intelligence, the weapons, and the financing, as after a fierce firefight he
kidnaps a group of oil-rich OPEC ministers during their annual meeting in
Vienna, thinking they could perhaps persuade the Saudi’s to break their support
of United States policies and create a more unified Arab front. Looking back
from today’s perspective, it’s clear they would never hire an outsider, a
non-Arab for such a mission with such sensitive, overriding implications, but
this rainbow coalition of German, Japanese, South American, Russian, and Arab
partners is simply eye opening in its international reach, as what they were
able to get away with in weapons accumulation and distribution alone is truly
mind-boggling. But like every idealistic
vision, Carlos is soon undercut by a series of unforeseen catastrophes, all of
which undermine his effectiveness, until the Cold War is over and eventually no
country wants to have anything to do with him, becoming a dinosaur, an
insignificant, aging player who is so terribly out of step with the times that
all he can do is rest upon the laurels of his memories, recalling the brighter
days when he was a significant force in the world.
After such a riveting
opening leading through the end of the second section, this felt like one of
the best films of the year, especially the fluid camera movement, the
documentary style authenticity, the ambitious tone, the searing performance, the
exquisite pacing, the ratcheted up intensity, the attention to detail, the
effective use of punk music, but it quickly falls apart by the end where he
becomes a shell of his former self, a pathetic, self-indulging lounge lizard
who smokes and drinks too much and has an inordinately high opinion of himself
even as the rest of the world has moved on and forgotten all about him. Assayas does a brilliant job reassembling
certain highlights of his life, reminding viewers why he was a major player for
a brief instant in time, as he was a gun runner with tremendous organizing
skills, but he’s also like a kid that never grew up, remaining selfish, vain,
crude, chauvinistic, and arrogant, the picture of a bloated, alcoholic
Westerner who eventually succumbs to all the diseases of decadence and pleasure
while supposedly maintaining his allegiances with the poor and the
dispossessed, eventually becoming that petit bourgeois hypocrite he loathed and
railed against for so much of his life.
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review Page 2
Billed as “two decades in the life of a notorious terrorist,” Olivier Assayas’s Carlos is five and a half hours of border-hopping, bombings, botched attacks, a brutal but bungled hijacking, and many, many short scenes in which bearded men and beautiful, impassive women sit in small rooms and strategize how best to advance the Palestinian cause and defeat the imperialist capitalist world order. In retrospect, it’s a bit of a blur, and you might opt to see Assayas’s condensed version (alternating in some theaters), which clocks in at a trim two and a half hours. I say go for the whole shebang. Shot by shot, scene by scene, it’s a fluid and enthralling piece of work. I wasn’t bored for a millisecond.
As Carlos “the Jackal,” born Ilich (after Lenin) Ramírez
Sánchez in
Both in flashy globe-trotting thrillers like Demonlover
and in melancholy meditations on impermanence like Summer Hours, Assayas
returns to this theme: the unbearable lightness of internationalism. Speaking
many languages, moving from
Plume Noire
review Moland Fengkov
Through the portrait of a media figure, of a still living
generational myth (although still behind bars), Olivier Assayas embraces three
decades of international geopolitics and delivers a movie marathon as explosive
as a charge of C-4 explosives. Carlos
is destined to be a television series, totaling 5 and a half hours and divided
into 3 parts. But this complex portrait of one of the biggest terrorists of the
late 20th century can be appreciated on the big screen. Presented in full at
the 63rd
Cannes Film Festival, Carlos
could be watched like an extremely long feature film benefiting from movie-like
budget and production quality, thus sweeping, with a blast, the false debate
about its presence at
In a nervous rhythm, we discover the young Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, a
pro-Palestinian Marxist revolutionary in his accession to international fame. A
reputation forged by terrorist acts. Through his journey, a light is shone upon
the major political upheavals of the last 30 years of the 20th century which
the film exposes with impressive clarity. Elusive, complex, the character is a
reflection of his era. Embodied by the chameleon-like body of Edgar Ramirez,
Carlos occupies the space and the frame of the film, his charisma invades the
screen, brightening his many contacts in high diplomatic spheres and seducing
women and men. This warlord, Assayas makes of him an almost "rock and
roll" figure, burning through his life as that of his enemies. He is
extravagant, ambitious, idealistic, mysterious and profoundly human. Throughout
the film, we observe how these weapons serve his ambitions, and how they
contribute to his decline.
In the first part, the attacks and hostage-takings multiply, old-style (since,
we've had September 11 and suicide bombers), via rockets fired from the landing
strip at Orly, via rigged cars, or man to man, gun in hand. Carlos is one of
the first terrorist's who understood how to use the attacks as an effective
mode of communication. His portrait, universal in nature, is that of the end of
a world, that of the Cold War, and the start of another. A real metaphor for
the struggle of collective causes combined with personal ambitions. Clearly,
the story of how the revolutionary becomes a mercenary funded by Big Business,
before becoming an outdated tool once the
The Onion A.V. Club review
[A-] Scott Tobias
(Note: The following review is of the full, five-and-a-half hour cut of Carlos, which will be broadcast on Sundance Channel and exhibited in a multi-part “roadshow” edition in theaters. A shorter, 165-minute theatrical cut will be released concurrently and on IFC’s On Demand service.)
If there’s a common thread to many Olivier Assayas films, beyond their general excellence, it’s their forward-thinking cosmopolitanism, born of an interest in how different cultures coalesce and clash in a world of increasingly porous borders. Whether following a Hong Kong actress baffled by the French film industry (Irma Vep) or staging an international corporate thriller with vipers at every port (Demonlover), Assayas is like a man without a country—or at least a director whose interests are far from parochial. For that reason, there’s no more ideal filmmaker to bring the story of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (a.k.a. “Carlos,” a.k.a. “The Jackal”), a Venezuelan terrorist/mercenary whose violence in the 1970s and ’80s on behalf of the Palestinian cause (among other pursuits) made him a global outlaw. Produced for French television, though dazzlingly cinematic, Assayas’ three-part epic Carlos follows Sánchez for about 30 years as he travels the globe, a nomadic revolutionary who’s unmoored from any one person or place—and eventually, from his principles.
Opening in 1973, Carlos begins with the 23-year-old
Sánchez eagerly aligning himself with the international revolutionary cause in
general and the Popular Front For The Liberation Of Palestine (PFLP) in
particular. He enters into a complex relationship with militant leader Wadie
Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour), who appreciates his protégé’s courage and ruthlessness,
but grows wary of Sánchez’s narcissism and refusal to follow orders.
Nevertheless, he spearheads a number of deadly missions in
Played with appropriate magnetism by Édgar Ramírez, Sanchez
is smart, brave, charismatic, persuasive, seductive, vain, sexist,
hypocritical, mercenary, and monstrous, at times galvanizing in his mission to
dismantle capitalist and Zionist power and at other times a pathetic, corrupt,
recklessly violent thug who’s all too willing to sell out. All of those
qualities come together for the film’s bravura hour-long centerpiece, a
December 1975 raid of an OPEC conference in
City
Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul (Rob Nelson) review also seen here: The
Village Voice [Rob Nelson]
An auteur as chameleonic (and cool) as they come, French director Olivier Assayas has cruised through the costume melodrama (Les Destinées), the surrealist noir (Demonlover), the rock doc (Noise), the country soaper (Summer Hours), and whatever you'd call Boarding Gate (perhaps an ash- and lava-spewing vehicle for the volcanic Asia Argento). It turns out all that genre diddling was actually foreplay for the big bang: Justly feted at Cannes, named for the globetrotting Venezuelan "revolutionary"-turned-killer capitalist also known as "the Jackal," Carlos is Assayas's gangster movie—or serial, if one takes into account its five-and-a-half-hour running time, which likely strikes a few of its many fans as being much too brief.
Most blatantly in this hefty, three-part edition (a cut half as long is also making the rounds; both will be showing at St. Anthony Main), Assayas's immensely skillful and thoroughly immersive biopic adopts the classic rise, peak, and fall structure of old-style gangster drama. And it bids to be the speediest 330 minutes in cinema history. Damned if this relentlessly globalist epic, which winds up wasted in Sudan, isn't like a drug, in that it keeps one's pulse quickened for an unnervingly long time.
Steeped in period detail, but sonically youthful when the mood suits, Carlos
kicks off in 1973 Beirut with a Feelies tune(!) that establishes the crazy
rhythms of one Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (Édgar
Ramírez), 23-year-old soldier for Wadie
Haddad (Ahmad Kaabour) and the Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. Sporting chin-length sideburns and no shortage of
'tude, Sánchez incrementally earns the right to rename himself
"Carlos"—first by shooting the VP of the British Zionist Federation,
later by raiding the French Embassy in
From the start, this stylishly outfitted architect of Euro and
More than an up-close inspection of a militantly suave sex-and-death machine, Carlos is a history of pre-9/11 terror in microcosm, equal parts psychological character study, geopolitical survey, and intellectual action movie. Ultimately, Assayas's film seems critical not of terrorism per se so much as murderous power-mongering vaguely disguised as ideological zeal, a view that comes completely to light about halfway through.
Part Two—in which the Jackal and his tiny squadron seize control of the 1975 OPEC summit meeting in Vienna (on orders from none other than Saddam Hussein)—forms the thumping heart of the movie. Assayas's intense, seemingly real-time mastery of the hostage-drama scenario builds to a virtual freeze-frame explication of that infamous photo of Carlos smiling triumphantly on the Algiers airport tarmac. Hired to terminate the oil ministers of Iran and Saudi Arabia, the revolutionary gets what he wants in the movie's midsection—and it's no radical victory except for his coffers.
Exit the lean anti-imperialist; enter the opportunistic glutton. Carlos's increasingly conspicuous consumption may be a bit bluntly stated in the home stretch (he gives his post-grad girlfriend a Benz), but Assayas makes every kind of excess irresistibly entertaining. Indeed, the director means to catch us in the guilty pleasure of digging (or at least ogling) the hip killer, even when he's sporting (or screwing) the benefits of his heinous crimes.
The film's final part (i.e., the Fall) seems to have garnered the least critical admiration, but it's Assayas's strongest section—wearying, yes, but no less compelling for it. After the buzz of episodes one and two, withdrawal sets in. Displaced to Budapest (and then Amman and finally Khartoum), nominally protected by yet another government (this time Syria, at least for a while), Carlos gains about a hundred pounds and loses most everything else. The viewer, too, pays a certain price for the film's addictive properties; basically, like the Jackal, we want it to be over.
Kaleidoscopic, spanning two decades, a dozen countries, and more than a hundred speaking parts in a handful of languages, Carlos is nevertheless a movie that one can somehow remember vividly for months. Much of that power is due to the whiplash widescreen cinematography, the hopped-up editing, and, not least, Ramirez's aptly arrogant, fully transfixing, Method-style turn.
Is there any "operation" that Assayas can't execute? As jet-setting Carlos ended up watching the world spin from behind bars, Carlos suggests that the genre-hopping Assayas could maximize his own ambition even within the tight confines of a prison drama. Part Four, anyone?
Carlos Jonathan Romney at Cannes
The life, times and decline of a notorious figure are depicted in
forensic detail and massively ambitious scope in Carlos, a hugely compelling if
unwieldy three-part fictional biography of Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the terrorist
and revolutionary. Better known under his nom de guerre Carlos and - though the
name is never used here - the media sobriquet ‘the Jackal’, Sánchez was a
legendary headline-grabber in the 1970s, notably for taking hostage the
delegates of an OPEC conference in Vienna and for a number of killings, for
which he is currently serving time in France.
Based on extensive research, the film nevertheless advertises itself in its opening titles as a fiction - partly because grey areas remain in Carlos’s biography - but comes across as a serious attempt to explore the career, motivations and personality of a figure who not only stands as an icon of a certain period of terrorism, but also represents many of the contradictions and complexities of modern international politics.
In
It has definite potential for theatrical exposure, following extended two-part dramas on similar iconic figures (Steven Soderbergh’s Che, Jean-François Richet’s Mesrine), but might profitably be rejigged for cinemas - trimming and rearranging as a two-parter could be done without overdue compromise. In its full version, Carlos should find international television sales and ancillary success, plus festival exposure as one of the year’s major screen events.
The film shows Assayas switching with brio from his more familiar intimate mode (such as Clean, Summer Hours), without overtly playing the genre games of Demonlover or Irma Vep. Carlos comes across as a detached imaginative reconstruction, somewhat in the vein of The Battle of Algiers and Paul Greengrass’s United 93.
A hugely complex internationally-shot undertaking, the film not only skips locations with happy-go-lucky verve - Paris, London, Budapest, Beirut, Khartoum et al - but features dialogue in several languages including French, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hungarian, all apparently delivered with equal fluency by lead actor Edgar Ramírez.
Despite the three-part structure, the film is more of an
organic whole than Che. The first section covers the rise of Venezuelan-born
Sánchez in the 1970s, his enlistment with the PFLP (Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine) and a series of exploits including his involvement in
the Japanese Red Army’s assault on the French Embassy in
Compellingly serious, Carlos presents us with a very different era, politically and culturally, but never adopts the somewhat ironic, stylised attitude to the recent past that marked Mesrine and the 2008 German film The Baader-Meinhof Complex. Assayas and co-writer Dan Franck, using research by Stephen Smith, treat Sanchez’s career with journalistic seriousness, rather than adopting genre trappings - although the action scenes, executed with brisk urgency, exude thriller panache. There are incidental low-key comic touches, as the film deals with a now unimaginable period of casual security - a time when it was possible to waltz into OPEC headquarters unsuspected, while dressed in full Che Guevara regalia, beret and all.
A virtuoso editing feat of editing, the film skips propulsively between locations, using on-screen captions to introduce its multifarious dramatis personae - better-known figures including then-KGB chief Yuri Andropov, Sheikh Yamani and notorious lawyer Jacques Vergès.
Alongside Carlos, key figures include his sidekick Johannes Weinrich (Scheer) and the latter’s girlfriend Magdalena Kopp (von Waldstatten), who becomes Carlos’s mistress. Christoph Bach also impresses as ideologically and morally conflicted cell member Hans-Joachim Klein, aka ‘Angie’, with Ahmad Kaabour as Carlos’s PFLP boss Wadie Haddad, a constant in a labyrthine narrative of shifting allegiances.
The film never romanticises Carlos, although it depicts his
own increasing tendency to romanticise himself: Sanchez appears as a complex,
authoritative figure, horrifying but ultimately unknowable. His polyglot skills
and protean appearance - from 1970s hipster to Che clone to paunchy mustachioed
businessman - emphasise his elusive nature. Strictly covering two decades,
early 70s to early 90s, the film doesn’t pretend to offer a back-story,
although in a brief interview scene, Sanchez claims that he inherited Marxism
in his blood. The film explores the applications of his adaptable, pragmatic
Marxism, which variously takes in allegiances with the KGB and Saddam Hussein,
while would-be freedom fighter Weinrich is happily in bed with
At the film’s centre is an extraordinary performance by Ramirez, who plays Carlos as a charismatic, authoritative and deeply dangerous figure, plus a hardcore womanising macho. It’s a reserved, tightly controlled performance, Carlos only starting to lose his cool when his OPEC exploit starts going wrong. In part 3, living in permanent nomadic exile, his frenetic shoutings-down to his circle wax positively Hitlerian.
There are only a few awkward moments: notably, the initial
bedroom encounter between Carlos and Kopp, when the film momentarily slips into
the generic spy-sex mode that Assayas explored in his meta-genre exercise
Boarding Gate. The film slightly runs out of steam in Part 3, where the drama
is slowed down by excessive exposition and little decisive action - although it
is part of the narrative logic to show Carlos’s life getting mired in stasis.
The final build-up to his apprehension in
Carlos ultimately comes across less as a character study than as a history lesson in the best sense, and proves one of the most achieved docu-fiction undertakings in recent cinema. Archive TV material is used sparingly, to good effect, as is punchy guitar-based rock, notably by Wire.
Slant Magazine
(Nick Schager) review
Critics
at Large (Susan Green) review
Critics
at Large (Shlomo Schwartzberg) review
which includes an
indieWIRE
(Todd McCarthy) review at
When
Biography Becomes Legend, Print the Legend: Carlos and The Social Network Todd McCarthy from Deep Focus,
CineScene.com (Chris Knipp)
review
DVD Talk (Jamie S. Rich)
review [4/5] theatrical release
Movieline
(Stephanie Zacharek) review [9/10]
EyeForFilm.co.uk [Anton
Bitel]
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
Screenjabber review Doug Cooper
Cannes '10:
Day Eight Mike D’Angelo at Cannes May 20, 2010
Movie Martyr (Jeremy Heilman)
review [4/4]
Phil on Film
(Philip Concannon) review
ReelTalk
(Donald Levit) review
Carlos Patrick McGavin at
Richard Corliss at
Cannes from Time magazine, May 19,
2010
Cannes
Gets Political; Jafar Panahi Not Released... J. Hoberman at
Nick James at
The
House Next Door [Matt Noller] at
Blu-rayDefinition.com
- UK Blu-ray [Brandon A. DuHamel]
Cinema
Viewfinder (Tony Dayoub) review
RopeofSilicon (Brad
Brevet) review [B]
Film-Forward.com Adam Schartoff
Georgia Straight
[Mark Harris]
Alone
in the Dark (Paul Greenwood) review [2/5]
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review at Telluride
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
capsule review
Fabien Lemercier at
Cannes
2010. Olivier Assayas's "Carlos"
David Hudson at Cannes May 20,
2010
'Carlos
the Jackal' on trial for 1980s bombings in France CNN
News, November 7, 2011
Carlos: five hours of
the Jackal David Thomson interviews
Assayas from Sight and Sound,
November 2010
Entertainment Weekly
review Owen Gleiberman
Time Out London
(David Jenkins) review [3/5]
Geoff
Andrew at
Carlos
the Jackal sneers at Al-Qaeda killers John Follain from The London Times, July 15, 2007
Charles Bremner at
The
Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review [4/5]
The
Globe and Mail (Liam Lacey) review
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Tim
Robey,
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5]
Sukhdev Sandhu at
The Boston
Phoenix (Peter Keough) review
Cannes
'10 Day 8: Terrorized Wesley Morris
at Cannes Boston May 20, 2010
San
Francisco Chronicle (David Lewis) review [4/4]
Los
Angeles Times (Betsy Sharkey) review
Cannes 2010: Carlos
the Jackal flashes his teeth Steven
Zeitchik at Cannes May 19, 2010
Revolutionary
Militant as Thug Manohla Dargis at Cannes May 20, 2010
Cinematic
Change and the End of Film Manohla
Dargis at Cannes May 21, 2010
A
Sweeping Tale of a Terrorist and His
Larry Rohter interviews the director from The New York Times,
A
New Kind of Cineaste A.O. Scott from
The New York Times, September 24, 2010
Anatomy
of a Scene: ‘Carlos’ A.O. Scott from
The New York Times on Carlos via YouTube (3:51 )
SOMETHING IN THE AIR (Après mai) A- 94
With a love a madness
for Shelley
Chatterton Rimbaud
and the needy-yap of my youth
has gone from ear to ear:
I HATE OLD POETMEN!
Especially old poetmen who retract
who consult other old poetmen
who speak their youth in whispers,
saying:--I did those then
but that was then
that was then--
O I would quiet old men
say to them:--I am your friend
what you once were, thru me
you'll be again--
Then at night in the confidence of their homes
rip out their apology-tongues
and steal their poems.
—“I Am 25,” by Gregory Corso, from Gasoline, 1958
This is an elegiac and
largely autobiographical account of Assayas’s own youth, a companion piece to
his earlier work COLD WATER (1997), arguably his best film, where both
beautifully capture the mood, atmosphere, and raw,
unpretentious intensity of anxiety-ridden adolescents caught up in their
own indecisions, the terrible choices they do make, how easy their emotions are
sparked and then extinguished, and how eloquently, beyond their own words,
the films describe their fatalistic viewpoint about their all-too-hopeless
future. The French title, After May, is
much more apropos, as the film is a collection of leftover remembrances after
May 1968, a historical moment in French history that nearly brought
revolutionary change, a combined student and worker protest that involved nearly
a quarter of the entire French population over a period of two continuous
weeks, initiated as a student rebellion, but eventually spreading to workers
across the nation who joined the students, ultimately quelled by the forcible
actions of the police who literally clubbed and beat the protesters into
submission. The film won the Best
Screenplay award at Venice, opening with blistering footage of these protests,
as the streets are aflame with police in riot gear with clubs literally
attacking the students, with the guys wearing jackets and ties, or sweaters,
but also helmets, who are seen running for their lives through the tear gas,
many of them hauled off to jail APRÈS MAI
[SOMETHING IN THE AIR] OLIVER ASSAYAS - clip YouTube (1:03). There is scant evidence of rebellious long
hair, jeans, sandals or beards. The
Assayas film views this period as a rite of passage, an intensely personal account
of developing political idealism through a radicalization process initiated in
high school, where teachers, interestingly enough, were actually teaching
students about Marx, how he challenged socialists as small thinking utopians,
advocating instead a complete overhaul of the economic system. In the high school segment, various factions
are still arguing many of these same theories about how to best implement a
radical change.
Set in 1971, Clément
Métayer as Gilles is a stand-in for the director, a somewhat moody kid who
draws and paints and sells leftist newspapers on the street while getting
instructions from older Trotskyites. He
and a small clan of students initiate a clandestine night raid spray painting activist
political messages directly onto their school building, where the school ID of
one of the activists is found on the scene, where the authorities
unsuccessfully attempt to get him to name names. Also in the clan is Gilles’ girlfriend
Christine, Lola Créton (where interestingly Gilles and Christine were the names
of the protagonists in COLD WATER), perhaps his best friend Alain (Felix
Armand), a fellow artist, who has a visiting American girlfriend Leslie (India
Menuez), the implicated student Jean-Pierre (Hugo Conzelmann), who works at his
father’s socialist printing press, while Gilles is also secretly seeing another
woman on the side, Laure (Carole Combes), a free spirited soul with wealthy
parents who’s about to leave the country for an extended summer excursion. Her absence brings Gilles closer to
Christine, where they also travel together to Italy during the summer, where
Christine hooks up with a leftist film production, Gilles visits art museums
where he continues to draw and paint, while Alain studies painting with an
artist in India. While they all undergo
radical interior transformations, which includes rampant drug use, art, music,
travel, experimental film, more open sexual relations and frequent displays of
nudity, this group filters out in various directions around the world where
their radical views evolve, with each developing a unique view of what they can
contribute, while continuing their education and artistic development. Gilles remains the central character, but
becomes distressed at his need for individualized artistic expression, which
goes against the grain of radical Marxist sentiment which accentuates the needs
of the collective by submerging individualism.
Much of this pays
tribute to Bresson’s 60’s films, including the youthful impressionism of the
budding painter in Four
Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d'un rêveur... (1971) and the
disenchantment with radical politics of The
Devil, Probably (Le diable probablement) (1977). The Grandaddy of post May 1968 films is Jean
Eustache’s The
Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la Putain) (1973), often viewed as the
end of the French New Wave and the best expression of the end of the 1960’s
hope and optimism. Like COLD WATER, the
defining scene of the film is a spectacular party sequence with music and
dancing, beautifully shot by Eric Gautier, where Laure has become a drug
addicted bohemian living at a palatial country estate, where bonfires are set
and the musical choices are simply sublime, in perfect synch with the moment,
expressing a kind of trippy psychedelia from Syd Barrett and the Soft Machine,
Nick Drake, and the Incredible String Band.
Assayas integrates music into his films as well as anyone else alive,
where the unspoken fluidity of this sequence speaks volumes, offering an
elegiac poetry to the expression of the counterculture, which has since faded
from view. It should be noted that many
of the wordless sequences from this film are among the best Assayas has ever
done. As Gilles tells his father, however,
a television screenwriter (as was Assayas’s), he felt the writing on the show
was “too strained.” This aptly describes
much of the forced political positions which are squeezed into this film, where
there are more ideas than the film knows what to do with, where perhaps the
weakest element of the film is a lack of development of the characters, none of
whom, outside of Gilles, are sympathetic or really very memorable at all. This unfortunately detracts from the overall
impression of the film, which bears a similarity to Lou Ye’s SUMMER PALACE
(2006), where the vitality of the youthful counterculture and freedom movements
in each film are literally off the charts, expressed with dazzling camera
virtuosity, where youth is like a bright flair burning in a sea of societal
indifference, where once it burns out, all that’s left is the
indifference.
cine-file.info/forum Tristan Johnson
Olivier Assayas’s latest is a free-spirited and evocative
tribute to youth, following a cast of characters who are coming of age in the
latter days of the Parisian student riots. SOMETHING IN THE AIR hits the ground
running, and the film opens with all the violence and idealism associated with
the era cascading toward you, assuring a swift and total immersion into the
world these characters inhabit. Central to the story is Gilles, an aspiring
artist and activist who after his girlfriend Laure departs indefinitely for
The
House Next Door [Jordan Cronk]
Thematic preoccupations are what make individual filmmakers so intriguing as one steps back to examine certain artist's entire careers. Restless French auteur Olivier Assayas himself has multiple career-long engagements, one of the more intriguing of which is his relationship with the revolutionary ideals of the post-May of 1968 youth protests. Assayas not only lived through the nascent uprising, he's returned many times over his two-plus-decade career to this time period and to the lives, including his, which it altered. Assayas's 1994 masterpiece, Cold Water, while not in direct discourse with the revolution, is indicative of the adolescent mentality that spread in its wake. A thrilling evocation of youth and independence, the film remains one of the cinema's best portraits of French rebellion. A spiritual successor of sorts to Cold Water, Assayas's new film, Something in the Air, is a more literal interpretation of the times, a semi-biographical tale of ideological youth meeting reality head-on.
Set in a similar era (the early '70s) and featuring two leads with the same
names (Gilles and Christine) as the central couple in Cold Water,
Assayas's latest sketches the travails of a group of discontent youths spurred
on by the spirit of the day, as they stage acts of localized rebellion as
outgrowths of their perceived repression. When a prank at their school leads to
legal involvement and ultimately arrests, the group splinters, sending Gilles
(Clément Métayer) and Christine (Lola Créton) to
This maturation has yielded rewards in the past (Summer Hours is one of the better examples of the modern classicist style, while Carlos bridged these two styles with a swagger missing from most biopics), but here the refined style feels a bit more ill-fitting. The subject matter itself doesn't necessarily require a rebellious aesthetic (see Philippe Garrel's Regular Lovers for an example of a thoroughly lived-in style reflecting the same era with an appropriately intuitive passion), but something about Something in the Air feels oddly disinterested in engaging with the motivations behind the rebellion. Assayas seems more concerned with the characters themselves, and how their lives coincide and speak to the consequences of the revolution. Unsurprisingly, the film's best scene updates a similar sequence in Cold Water where an outdoor party lit by bonfires and soundtracked by psych-rock obscurities plays out as passions flare and the landscape literally ignites with emotion. The sequence accentuates the lack of noticeable verve present elsewhere, where Assayas seems content allowing the characters to mingle and develop without outside agitation.
Cinemablographer
[Patrick Mullen]
There's something in the air in the summer of 1971. It's been three years since the events of May 1968 and the French youth are itching for an uprising. The youth movement explodes in the spectacular opening sequence of Olivier Assayas's Something in the Air, which sees a student protest beat down by the excessive force of the French police. Peace signs and good vibes can't hold their own against Billy bats and tear gas, so violence begets further violence until the police go too far and beat an apolitical young bystander to a bloody pulp.
There's a hint of Do the Right Thing in Assayas’s provocative realization of a blow for blow encounter between the public and the law. Like the pointless death of Radio Rahim in the Spike Lee joint, the boy becomes a martyr for the youth movement and the students retaliate. They fight back with Molotov cocktails and graffiti, and make the city take notice of their plight.
What the students are fighting for, however, never really becomes clear. The ensemble of students -- a choral protagonist, really -- embodies that period of life where youth feel ridden with angst as if life is tearing them apart. They're rebels looking for a cause, taking up a fight that isn't really their own.
The main fighter through whom we see the battle is Gilles (Clement Metayer), a shaggy haired boy rapt in the excitement of youth. In the summer of '71, Gilles's attention is divided between getting his comrades mobilized and getting himself laid. Like most idealistic boys his age, Gilles knows little about the machinery of the world and knows even less about how to affect change through political radicalism. Gilles is one of those dream-headed teens who gets all his ideas from Proust and Truffaut. That's fine, for books and films provide a wealth of knowledge and are essential tools that shape one's identity. However, if all one knows is literature and cinema, it's best to stick with that. Gilles knows a little about the ways of love, too, but he's as inexperienced a lover as he is a revolutionary. The same goes for the group of emerging Bohemians with whom Gilles spends the summer hours, yet they're all in the process of shaping something even if it isn't radical change.
Something in the Air is supposedly the most autobiographical film to date from writer/director Olivier Assayas, the French auteur behind films such as Carlos and Summer Hours. A beautiful epic, Something in the Air has the scope of Carlos, even if it tells a far more intimate story. The film also moves at the languid pace of Summer Hours and employs Assayas's assured observational approach to the lives and legacies of his countrymen. Assayas has a remarkable ability to pull a collective struggle out of an individual experience.
With Something in the Air, Assayas shows how one can be politically active through means other than agitprop and protests. Gilles and his comrades all undergo a revolution as artists, and the best of them learn how to channel their anger into the artistic process. Instead of becoming ruffians on the street, Gilles et all start a revolution by aligning themselves with Proust, Truffaut, and others whose work nurtured their coming into being as artists. The film has a striking endnote on Assayas's entry into film, for Gilles begins as a painter, but he then goes to work on film sets and learns the tools of the trade before ultimately walking away from the derivative shit of the studios to find his own voice.
The unique voice that Assayas displays in full force in Something in the Air is what one character refers to as the
'revolutionary syntax' of the cinema. After films like Carlos, Summer Hours, and
Something in the Air, Assayas has
clearly found a niche from which to articulate the anger that began in the
summer of '71. Personal, provocative, and beautifully shot, Something in the Air is a wake-up call
for intelligent, radical cinema. If only it spanned the six-hour runtime of Carlos.
Après mai (Olivier Assayas, France) Andrew Tracy from Cinema Scope
As one is virtually a companion piece to the other, it is only natural to begin discussion of Après mai (Something in the Air) with Olivier Assayas’ 2002 memoir A Post-May Adolescence, just published in an elegant English translation by the Austrian Filmmuseum to accompany their new, Kent Jones-edited anthology on Assayas. Eloquent and thoughtful, Assayas’ remembrances of coming of age during the long, dispiriting hangover from May ’68—the “years of lead” during which the radical left lost its momentum in the face of a reinvigorated mainstream consensus, its massed forces drifting away while the remainder responded with an ever more divisive ideological rigidity or, at the furthest edge, the nihilistic impotence of terrorism—is nostalgic absent the accompanying sentimentality. This allows Assayas to not only speak hard truths about the time, but to avoid the knee-jerk condemnations of the leftist movement so common from recanted soixante-huitards (or post-soixante-huitards). Self-confessedly something of a coaster on the receding waves of revolt (“my largely anecdotal career as a Leftist,” as he says), Assayas attests to the power of image—in some cases a decidedly reactionary kind of image—in attracting youth to the movement. He recalls his admiration for the tough, non-ideological militancy of the Katangai squatters, and even now professes “a certain, instinctive sympathy” with the Red Army Faction and its analogues, for at least having the “lucidity” to grasp that action was the sole remaining proof of life for a movement that had reached its point of disappearance.
Lucidity, indeed—though of a considerably more productive order—is one of the two poles of Assayas’ intellectual and aesthetic position. Fuelled by the not-yet-canonical Homage to Catalonia and Orwell’s brand of anti-totalitarian Leftism and relentless moral clarity, Assayas reserves his greatest scorn for those Stalinist and Maoist adherents who refuse to acknowledge the evident truths about the regimes to which they adhere, deriding Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago or Simon Leys’ 1971 exposé of the Cultural Revolution as CIA propaganda. (Assayas has his onscreen vicar reading the Leys book in a scene midway through Après mai, eliciting just such a charge.) “I have never hated anything as much as I loathe wilful blindness to reality, the denial of fact, ideological madness and the distortion of the world,” he writes. Curious (or appropriate?), then, that his other intellectual position is premised precisely upon a transformation of that reality; or, rather, an unveiling of the actual real behind that surface we are conditioned to call “reality.” “[There is] a moment when oneself is not much more than a tissue of intuitions and potentialities in search, less of a template that would allow us to read reality, than an angle, a point from which to see it in such a way that it renders up the meaning we knew without knowing[,] opening for us where previously it had only been closed,” writes Assayas. “Situationism was to be this point for me.” For Assayas, the Situationist notion of art as social practice is embodied in the process of filmmaking, which itself is “a double movement: the one the embodiment of writing—more intimate, the part where meaning takes shape—the other of action, where, precisely beyond meaning, through day after day of shooting, the fragments of a total art practice inextricably entwined with reality take shape.”
While one should always take filmmakers’ readings of their own practice with a healthy dose of scepticism, Assayas’ eloquent pronouncement may indeed help account for the elusive, light-fingered nature of his auteurism, a distinctiveness that is at least partially defined by self-effacement. Accordingly, Après mai’s nostalgia trip is oddly free of self-indulgence: from scene to scene, Assayas strikes a remarkably sustained balance between bittersweet remembrance and distanced reportage. The almost inescapably teleological imperative of all autobiographical fiction is balanced here by a curious yet disinterested observation of people in the moment. So many narratives of the radical era depict it as a delimited region of time, a fixed temporal entity to be grown into or out of; for Assayas, it is an impress that indelibly marks its eager young material, but also adheres to their own particular contours.
Certainly not the makers of their time, Assayas’ alter ego Gilles (Clement Metayer) and his proto-militant cohorts—the dispossessed heirs of an almost-revolution, fighting to prolong its dying reverberations—are neither its passive symptoms. While the film’s early movements adhere, competently if unremarkably, to the template of other circa ’68 tales—a street battle against les flics, cell meetings, and leaflet distributions, all anchored to our young hero’s blossoming relationship with the idealistic young Christine (Lola Créton) after he receives a Dear Gilles missive from his vacationing girlfriend, the moneyed, long-tressed goddess Laure (Carole Combes)—it begins to reveal its true, fissiparous shape after Gilles and company hit the road for summer vacation, following a serious incident during a confrontation with the school’s “fascist” security guards. Heading down to Italy, meeting and crashing with fellow travellers along the way, the expanding and contracting group begins to feel out the diverse possibilities afforded them by the combinations of their political convictions and personal inclinations. Assayas, while still keeping Gilles as the locus of his story, begins to disperse his subjectivity, and his sympathies, along these variously diverging paths: Gilles’ increasing, distressingly “bourgeois individualist” commitment to painting and illustration, allowing Assayas to pay brief homage to Bresson’s Quatre nuits d’un rêveur (1971); a journey of spiritual self-discovery in India undertaken by Gilles’ fellow artist friend (echoing Assayas’ own teenage sojourn there); Christine’s collaboration and eventual cohabitation with the leader of a militant filmmaking collective; the progressively harder-line militancy of another comrade, who tries to recruit Gilles for an act of political terrorism. Adjacent to these ideological iterations is Gilles’ nocturnal reunion with the returned Laure, who has fallen into a world of apolitical, hard drug-fuelled bohemianism that yields another of Assayas’ lyrical party sequences in a palatial country house—though this one with an unexpectedly conflagratory conclusion.
With none of these threads does Assayas identify the “correct” or “incorrect” response to the legacy of May. Without scanting the anomie and lack of direction that the restitution of “normality” wrought on those too young to participate in the original upheaval, Assayas intimates that the true “outcome” was precisely the sum of the innumerable individual trajectories that trailed away from that moment of extraordinary, revelatory collision. As with Philippe Garrel in Les amants réguliers (2005)—the obvious/inescapable point of comparison—Assayas in Après mai is concerned to show the persistence of the post-May moment (for what is life but persistence), and that the dissolution of the movement was as much a transformation of its impetuses as it was, perhaps, a defeat. Yet while it’s easy to commend Assayas’ lack of editorializing, it also contributes to a certain lack of affect. Whereas Garrel’s dreamy yet rigorous formalism in Les amants created and sustained a narcotic thrall throughout its lengthy running time, Assayas’ clipped, elliptical briskness keeps his young devils (probably) at a remove that, this time, is more pictorial than dramatic; they’re objects to be regarded rather than the scattered, imperfect, overflowing beings that, as much as anything, is Assayas’ signature.
But just as L’heure d’été (2008) gave the appearance of a polite French art-house export while subtly evolving into something more complex and irresolvable—a cunningly modest form of Situationist détournement, one could say—Après mai grows larger, and closer, in the rearview. As the film enters its final movements, with Gilles working on a film set in London and haunting avant-garde screenings in his off hours, Assayas refuses his young vicar a conclusion (or even a definite direction) to his sentimental education. Even as his path becomes clearer, Gilles remains bound to a yearning extraneous to his “natural” progression and self-realization. It was this inchoate longing that drove both May and the long post-May, and as Assayas elegantly attests in his final sequence (the film’s one rupture from realism), it is a longing both impossible to encapsulate in fleeting material reality and impossible not to see as such, beckoning just outside of one’s grasp.
Venice
Review: Olivier Assayas' 'Something In The Air' A ... - Indiewire Oliver Lyttelton
The
Film Stage [Jared Mobarak]
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
TIFF 2012
MUBI Coverage Roundup on Notebook | MUBI
Fernando M Croce at Mubi, also here:
#3
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Sound
On Sight Tom Stoup
Egalité!
Liberté! Sexualité!: Paris, May 1968 - Europe - World - The ... John Lichfield from The Independent, February 23, 2008
May
1968 - a watershed in French life - The New York Times April 29, 2008
May 1968
protests in France - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
France - The
meaning of May 1968 International
Viewpoint
CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA A 96
His best film in years,
known only as SILS MARIA in France, Assayas stunningly returns to peak form in
this modernized twist of his earlier film Irma Vep
(1996), a film about the making of film, this time starring Juliette Binoche
instead of Maggie Cheung, written by Assayas specifically for her in a project
he describes as “A Juliette Binoche movie about Juliette Binoche with Juliette
Binoche” in a film about an international theatrical star Maria Enders
(Binoche) who is asked to perform in a film adaptation of the play that made
her famous twenty years ago, but this time switching roles, no longer playing
the beguiling 18-year old rising star actress in the part that made her famous,
but the older leading lady, a tired, middle-aged business woman having an
affair with the manipulative young female ingénue who eventually drives her
weak-willed boss to suicide. Partially
financed by Chanel, which supplied the actresses with clothes, jewelry, accessories
and makeup, this also allowed the director to shoot this sumptuously looking
film on 35 mm. Shot on location by
cinematographer Yorick Le Saux in the mountainous Swiss Alps towns of Sils Maria
as well as Zurich, Switzerland, Leipzig, Germany and South Tyrol, Italy, the
locations are an integral part of the story, as Wilhelm Melchior, the author of
the aforementioned play Maloja Snake, is a creature of those spectacular mountains, filled with their own
secrets and mysteries and naturally occurring phenomenon which begin to take on
human characteristics while also offering its own commentary on the changing
nature of time passing, which is visibly seen in a fog-like cloud formation
that drifts through the valley between the mountains in the form of a
snake. Melchior becomes an unseen
central force in the film as Maria, at the height of her stardom but also in
the middle of a contentious divorce, is accompanied by her more laid back American
personal attendant Valentine, Kristen Stewart in Converse shoes, while
traveling to Zurich by train to accept an award on behalf of Melchior, where on
route they learn of his sudden death.
Assayas immediately shows us the back side of a famous artist, the side
we never see, as Maria seems terribly dependent on the expert social media
skills of Valentine, who meticulously plans everything out for her ahead of
time, but also acts as a human receptacle for her more candid comments that the
public never hears.
While Maria is obviously shaken by the unexpected death, this doesn’t
stop her from doing a planned Chanel dress photo shoot once she arrives at the
hotel, where her immediate transformation from ordinary train passenger to
international diva is a bit stunning.
Much to her chagrin, they have also invited actor Henryk Walk, Hanns
Zischler, a self-centered, autocratic older man in the manner of Erich von
Stroheim who took full sexual advantage of the young actress at the beginning
of her career, which she has never forgiven, to provide his commentary about
Melchior, as they were also close personal friends. After the Awards ceremony, she meets an in
vogue German movie director, Klaus Diesterweg (Lars Eidinger), considered
hot property due to his series of successful films, who offers her the older
role of his adaptation of Melchior’s play.
While she initially expresses no interest, Val talks her into taking the
role, suggesting she would reach an entirely new audience, and with this
decision comes the title card announcing “Part 2,” which takes the audience
completely by surprise, as there was never any “Part 1.” This idea of an actress reaching a point in
her career (Binoche is 50) when she is no longer considered young and desirable
for leading roles, but becomes thought of only for less desirable parts as a
character actor, is considered the death
of their careers to some actresses, and has been explored before by John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands (in her
late 40’s) in Opening
Night (1977), one of the gutsiest films about theater ever made, right
alongside Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952) and Desplechin’s ESTHER KHAN (2000). All are dialogue-driven vehicles featuring
extraordinary performances, where Rowlands (whose name Binoche amusingly
appropriates when disguising her identity) was pathologically reticent to take
the part, not yet ready to cross the threshold, while Binoche is clearly more
comfortable as an aging actress, partly because she has continued to work with
all the best directors and still receives scripts that are written with her in
mind. She couldn’t appear more natural
in a film while still playing a role, always seen as warmhearted and
charismatic, but the real surprise is Stewart, who matches her scene for scene
throughout the entire film by completely underplaying Binoche’s theatrics. What’s particularly interesting is how
quietly reserved and contemplative Binoche is in English, as if always holding something
back, while saving her more extroverted outbursts for French language
scenes.
Some of the best scenes
in the film are reserved for Binoche and Stewart who work brilliantly together,
retaining a hint of the sexual undercurrent expressed in Melchior’s play while also expressing their
own unique feminine personalities quite differently, as they retreat to the
Melchior estate in the mountains to prepare for the role, which the
playwright’s widow Rosa (Angela Winkler) has graciously offered, as she needs
to get away to avoid all the constant reminders of his presence. As they read through the play’s scenes,
offering fresh extemporaneous comments as they go, Assayas intelligently
dissects the present through the past, with both women displaying strong-willed
characters with probing intelligence and an acerbic wit, but also an
affectionate side where they’re simply happy to be in each other’s
company. As they weave in and out of the
play, while also preparing elaborate meals or taking long walks through the
picturesque mountainside, it’s impossible to tell where the play ends and
reality begins, as they seamlessly intersect with a surgical precision. While both women have their own star power,
which is beautifully utilized by Assayas, it’s curiously deferred to the ideas
of the play, as if they are mere players in the world of art, expressed without
an ounce of pretension. This honesty is
then contrasted with the director’s shrewdly calculating choice to play the
ambitious young girl, Chloë Grace Moretz as Jo-Ann Ellis, an actress Maria has
never heard of. As Val thumbs through
Google searches, hilarious YouTube videos, and even more demented celebrity
interviews where Ellis comes off as a teenage prima donna and a full-time party
animal whose center of the universe is never far from herself, Maria finds this
ghastly while Val is impressed by her ability to hold the audience through each
of these arrest records and real life disasters, where she remains exactly who
she is without any hint of compromise.
The fact that she’s a walking disaster in real life means nothing, as
she knows how to command the screen.
This contextualization couldn’t be more hilariously insightful about
what Hollywood is today, while the scene of the film that takes one’s breath
away is the appearance of the snake, which finally appears at a crucial stage
in the film, expressed through the eloquence of Arnold Frank’s 1924 ten-minute
silent short film CLOUD PHENOMENA OF MALOJA (Das Wolkenphänomen von
Maloja), which is an awesome declaration of the artistic significance of cinema
in its purest form, literally dwarfing what we see today, given such a
beautifully sophisticated articulation by Assayas who has made another truly
exhilarating film.
Which
movies to see—and which to skip—at the 50th Chicago International Film Festival Ben Sachs from The Reader
Clouds of Sils Maria As with Irma Vep and Clean, French writer-director Olivier Assayas transforms a backstage drama into a meditation on the state of cinema, capitalism, and popular culture. Juliette Binoche plays a movie star who reluctantly agrees to perform in a new production of the play that launched her career three decades earlier; most of the story transpires at the isolated Alpine home of the recently deceased playwright, where the actress goes to prepare for her role, and centers on her relationship with her young personal assistant (Kristen Stewart, who more than holds her own against the star). This recalls Ingmar Bergman's chamber dramas in the intensity and psychological complexity of the central relationship, yet the filmmaking is breathtakingly fluid, evoking a sense of romantic abandon no matter how pessimistic the cultural critique becomes. With Chloe Grace Moretz. In English and subtitled French and German.
In Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria (2013),
audiences follow actress Maria (Juliette Binoche) as she struggles to
accept her own reality. Maria began her career in a play about a young
woman who seduces her older female boss. Now, Maria is asked to act in
the same play – but as the mature character. Inevitably, life begins to mimic
art in this complex psychological drama, making it impossible to distinguish
one from the other. In a film based heavily on conversation, it is crucial for
the relationships to feel genuine and maintain interest, and this feat was
achieved due to a sharp screenplay and strong performances from both leading
ladies. Binoche delivers a multifaceted and subtle performance, while Kristen
Stewart adds energy as Maria’s assistant Valentine. Watching
these two characters interact is fascinating, as they adopt parallel roles to
rehearse the play, and the audience faces the challenge of determining what is
real and what is acting. In each scene, Assayas builds tension and causes the
audience to expect a dramatic moment before allowing it to drain away as the
screen fades. An arresting score and breathtaking scenery are also paired as
the majesty of the Swiss Alps is captured. Challenging yet accessible, this
peek into the complex minds of two women is a film to be enjoyed as well as
meditated upon.
Cannes
Film Festival 2014: Part Two - Reverse Shot
Jordan Cronk
Another
Much of Clouds of Sils Maria is given over to rehearsal scenes between Maria and Valentine, and in these moments much of the latter’s unspoken reverence for her boss’ stature is most deeply felt. Valentine is casual but professional, respectful but opinionated; Maria’s possible attraction to—or at least unspoken interest in—Valentine seems due at least in part to the younger woman’s resistance to indulging Maria’s ego, a far cry from Jo-Ann’s exalted proclamations of her elder. Where the film takes on greater intrigue and resonance is in its suggestion of dual personas and alternate states of awareness. There’s a late scene that seems to collapse multiple realities, effectively eliminating a significant character with a simple move of the camera—it’s something right out of L’avventura (the cloudy canyons amid the eponymous Swiss countryside even betray an eerie calm worthy of Antonioni). In an instant Assayas’s many texts fold into one another, leaving Maria and the audience, whom up to now have been led to sympathize with her guarded compliance, with the cold realization that each new step in life must ultimately be taken alone.
Here is a film that feels its age, the age of its maker. But this doesn't
mean a young hotshot's film or that of an old master—though
Yet it's not about him, the auteur, it's about a woman, an actress, a veteran: Juliette Binoche as an actress of Binoche's age (50), caliber and reputation. After the death of the playwright and director who made her acting name as the young girl in a psychosexual play opposite an older woman, she is moved to star in a theatrical revival now in the part of the older woman. Binoche's personal assistant, played by a very American Kristen Stewart, acts as a sounding board for the actress's worries swirling around the death of her mentor and a self-evaluation of her life, as well as a rehearsal partner for the old-new play. The relationship of the two clearly echoes that of the two women in the play, which sounds vaguely like Alain Corneau's Crime d'amour, where an older professional becomes dependent on—psychologically, professionally, sexually—her young protégé. To complicate things further, the young actress in the play’s revival, played by Chloë Grace Moretz, is envisioned as a new generation of actor, a hybrid figure of professional training, a Kristen Stewart-like pop genre career in the movies, and the tabloid candy public life of someone like Lindsay Lohan.
This final figure in the triangle, and Clouds of Sils Maria is indeed structured in three parts, is definitive in expanding the scope of the film's inquiry into womanhood, acting, artistry and aging. Despite its staging of this swirl of female self-questioning in the majestic Swiss retreat of Sils Maria—a world away from the world, where the deceased author lived and after which his play is named, a kind of mythical-natural origin point, not to mention where Nietzsche spent some time—Assayas confronts Binoche's clearly Bergmanian persona crisis with the techno-pop world within which her work and life now exists. Though well integrated and true-feeling, Assayas reveals his age by his foregrounded interest in Skype calls to agents, the PA juggling iPhones and Blackberries, the seriousness and integrity (or not) of comic book movies, Google Image searches, wonderful simulated press conferences and an actress paparazzi freak-out, and the flattening of celebrity culture and acting. In a highlight, this attention to modern culture even lets the film exuberantly and joyfully stage a scene from a sci-fi superhero movie starring Grace Moretz and then have Bincohe and Stewart debate its artistic merits after the screening.
In other words, unlike Bergman's more abstract, interior, psychosexual Persona, Assayas sticks to the interwoven surface of the acting world which would inspire any actor of any age to continually question their work and themselves, on the inside. The beautifully unshowy relationship between Binoche and Stewart is at the film's center and is emblematic, a blended dynamic touching that of employer/employee, peers, friends, lovers, and actors. In Binoche's confident but erratically worried and self-doubting actress, we find the position of the film’s director: she's at the height of her powers and sense of self, but inextricably aware of a rapidly aging world whose renewing, complexly layered youth are not only unavoidable in life and profession but necessary.
Yet the film is hardly as heavy as Bergman's psyche-probes, or, say, Jacques Rivette's theatre conspiracies, both of which Clouds of Sils Maria lightly touches upon. It moves with a direct clarity, introducing its ideas outloud and letting its excellent actresses move and articulate the mise en scène. The actresses—and a very particular sense of atmosphere to the Swiss setting, sun-drenched windows, open to the outdoors, necessary drives from town to chalet, the mountain hikes. It actually calls to mind the terrible English title of Assayas' last film, Something in the Air. The thin mountain air and characteristic lighting of this origin point, of this staging ground, of this retreat, suggest both a fragility and a serenity. As if, the closer to the top one gets, the older, the greater the vision and understanding, but also the greater the danger.
Clouds
of Sils Maria (Olivier Assayas, France/US)
Andrew Tracy from Cinema Scope
“Ingmar Bergman once said that he makes a film with full consciousness that it will be shown on a screen that showed a Western the week before and will show a romance the week following, and that he likes this situation,” wrote the late Stanley Kauffmann in 1981, apropos of Spielberg’s nostalgia-plundering Raiders of the Lost Ark. “But that isn’t a matter of worship, it’s a recognition of lexical community and common humanity: it’s not to make Westerns and romances.” For his part, Olivier Assayas—who has often referred to his turning to Bergman as a dramatic cum humanistic tonic to the metacinematic japery of the nouvelle vague—has done a not at all bad job of not making the contemporary equivalents of Westerns and romances (let’s say, superhero pictures and tony adaptations of airport thrillers) whilst still engaging with the cinephilic pleasures of film history and the currents of contemporary film culture.
Since Irma Vep (1994)—which rolled together Hong Kong action cinema (in the divine person of Maggie Cheung) with the New Wave and its outriders (in Jean-Pierre Léaud’s presence as René Vidal, a Garrelian burnout of a director) under the saintly aegis of silent cinema (the film’s fictional remake of Feuillade’s 1915 Les vampires)—Assayas has repeatedly and pointedly placed differing kinds of culture with differing degrees of cultural capital alongside one another, astutely noting their points of intersection without likening or equating them each to the other. Absent the Hanekean wrist-slapping of Funny Games (1997), both demonlover (2002) and Boarding Gate (2007) are constructed as plays to, and then sabotages of, audience expectations, adopting the outer shape of slick sexy thrillers only to progressively undo their slick sexy thriller mechanics as they proceed. Less assertively and more successfully, from its title on down L’heure d’été (2008) functioned excellently well as a pleasant, well-constructed bourgie French family drama, whilst that selfsame well-constructed drama brought the very values that the genre is based on (both cultural and financial) front and centre, in its tale of a surfacely pleasant bourgie family faced with the dilemma of preserving or profitably divesting themselves of their ancestral house and contents. Without the conceptual and narrative pyrotechnics of his meta-thrillers, Assayas here managed to interrogate his chosen form—its class basis, its star politics, its own status as cultural product—even as he worked skillfully and unobtrusively within it.
Though adhering very much to this latter mould, the airily titled Clouds of Sils Maria is also beholden to the explicit self-awareness of the former, though “invisibly” within its scenario rather than aggressively in any overt narrative or stylistic ruptures. That double consciousness begins with Assayas’ L’heure d’été star Juliette Binoche playing a character very much like “herself”: one Maria Enders, a world-renowned, middle-aged stage and screen actress who has split her time between “serious” projects, cheque-cashing Hollywood ventures (“I’m tired of acting on wires in front of a green screen,” she gripes of her excursions into comic-book-movie pablum) and miscellaneous transnational product promotions. And the meta gets even meatier with the presence of Binoche’s gamine co-stars Kristen Stewart as Val, Maria’s personal assistant and perpetual troubleshooter, and Chloë Grace Moretz as Jo-Ann Ellis, the Hollywood It Girl du jour with big-time personal problems seeking artistic cred by co-starring with Maria in a revival of the play that had made Maria’s career: a Sapphic, vaguely Strindbergian melodrama called Maloja Snake, with Ellis now slated to essay the sizzling young temptress that Enders once embodied, and the elder actress taking over the role of the middle-aged career woman who lets herself be destroyed by this callow yet charming young minx.
The scenario of an aging star performing a work about youth conquering age is so fundamentally, elementally simple that its dramatic, narrative, and interpretive possibilities are almost limitless, and the various mirrorings at work—both Maria-Val-Jo-Ann in relation to Maloja Snake and Binoche-Stewart-Moretz in regard to Sils Maria itself—are so evident that metatext becomes, simply, text. (Another lesson from Bergman: even in his most assertively modernist manoeuvres—the projector running out at the end of Persona [1966], the interviews with the actors in The Passion of Anna [1969]—the intention is to enhance the dramatic agon of the work rather than distance the viewer from it.) Overlaid on this situation is another perennial theme, more pointed than the former: the question of the continuing viability of “serious” art against mass-market Hollywood juvenilia, a question at least partially bound up in that same generational dynamic.
As stated above, Assayas is certainly no puritan on that point. When he placed an encomium for Hong Kong action cinema in the mouth of a boorish young journalist in Irma Vep, it was both a joke on his own fondness for the genre and an example of that film’s prismatic view of its chosen cultural forms: the meathead contingent of HK-movie fandom as represented by the journalist counterpointing the reverence accorded HK icon Cheung by her directors both on-screen (Léaud’s Vidal) and off (Assayas, who would wed the actress after the film). In Sils Maria, interestingly, the situation is reversed: a sympathetic and intelligent character—Stewart’s Val—advocates for the serious-movie credentials of Hollywood superhero pictures (to Maria’s tipsy chortles), whilst Assayas himself undercuts her with an extended, laborious on-screen spoof of same. (The risible film-within-the-film is Jo-Ann Ellis’ latest mutant-hero sci-fi epic, the kind of project she is purportedly fleeing from to seek seriousness on the stage.)
If Assayas, from the evidence here, has little love for comic-book blockbusters and even less conviction that they can storm the citadel of cinematic art, the problem is that their counterpoint—the high-art fabrication of Maloja Snake—receives a similarly pallid representation. The dynamic tension between cultural forms in Irma Vep derived from Assayas’ knowledge of and investment in those forms, to the extent that he could evoke an entire artistic tradition in fictionalized miniature: e.g., Vidal’s Letteristic-style defacement of his Les vampires footage that takes over the final moments of the film, which is simultaneously an event in the film’s narrative and a conceptual challenge to the audience, an implicit question of what is a “legitimate” way to remake a cinematic classic—or, indeed, what is it to make cinema in the first place.
Apart from the fact that nothing like that same urgency attaches to the revival of Maloja Snake in Sils Maria, the fictional play itself is less fully realized than that snippet of fictional film created for the conclusion of Irma Vep. (It’s perhaps telling that the only moment in Sils Maria that commands the same autonomous space from the narrative proper as Vidal’s vandalism in Irma is a clip from a 1924 short by Arnold Fanck, about the atmospheric phenomenon that gives Maloja Snake its name.)
Medium-specificity plays a certain role here, of course: it’s easier to evoke a cinematic tradition through a few italicized stylistic tendencies than it is to convincingly fabricate a modern masterpiece of European drama through a few lines of dialogue. But as the thematic crux of a film, we can’t evaluate the relative worth of this imaginary work the way we can L’heure d’été’s objets d’art, or demonlover’s 3D hentai and video games, or Irma Vep’s cinematic mash-up; where those others can convincingly be represented as types, a “type” of stage classic just doesn’t fly. Where the interpersonal dramas of L’heure d’été and Irma Vep were informed and inflected by (and inextricable from) the cultural collisions those films so astutely set up, Maloja Snake is merely an echo chamber for Sils Maria’s drama, the means for its (sometimes over-)articulation. And while that drama is nicely turned and intermittently affecting, it lacks that driving, aforementioned question that is implicit in Assayas’ past efforts, to greater or lesser lengths: What is it to make cinema, here, now? While Assayas has succeeded in not—or not just—making the type of easy-watching art-house drama that Clouds of Sils Maria could have been, here that question remains unasked rather than provocatively unanswered.
Jessica Kiang The
Playlist
David Jenkins Little
White Lies
Film-Forward.com
[Kent Turner]
Day
9: Life and art / The Dissolve Mike
D’Angelo
Olivier
Assayas's 'Clouds of Sils Maria': An Actress' Insecurity Maya Corn from Film Comment
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
Daily
| Cannes 2014 | Olivier Assayas's CLOUDS OF SILS ... David Hudson from Fandor
Clouds
of Sils Maria - The Hollywood Reporter
Todd McCarthy
Cannes
Film Review: 'Clouds of Sils Maria' - Variety Peter Debruge
Xan Brooks The Guardian at Cannes
Barbara Scharres at
Cannes from The Ebert Site
Clouds of Sils Maria -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
PERSONAL SHOPPER B+ 90
France Germany
(105 mi) 2016 ‘Scope Official
site
It’s important to
remember that Assayas was a painter before he became a filmmaker, where the
remarkable fluidity of his film style may be attributed to his ability to
visualize ahead of time the exact look he wants onscreen, where a rush of
images resemble an improvisatory style of painting, perhaps accentuating the
spontaneity of the moment, using a contemplative, stream-of-conscious narrative
that comprises a radically modernist film style, at times somber and
reflective, while at other times feeling like an assault to the senses. Here he resorts to an old-fashioned, haunted
house genre, conjuring up dead spirits and ghosts from the past, which at times
is amusing, like an homage to Hitchcock, a filmmaker having fun and playing
with the art of his craft, yet also delves into the horror genre, where fear
and existential angst create an absorbing interior dread. At the center of the picture, and in nearly
every shot, is the young protagonist Maureen (Kristen Stewart, who seems to
inhabit the role), an American in Paris, a psychic medium who believes she is
capable of communicating with a spirit world.
Some in the audience will giggle, constantly whisper amongst themselves,
and simply never get past this point, as they will find the premise too
preposterous, too far-fetched and unbelievable, especially the use of cheesy
CGI effects in an otherwise realistic film.
While the film was booed at Cannes, this is largely because a prominent
French filmmaker made a film starring a tabloid celebrated American actress
where the predominate language spoken is English, yet others, to be sure, are
among this camp of ardent disbelievers.
Assayas, however, has always been on the cutting edge of new technology,
prominently featuring an iPhone as a secondary character, where the narrative
is advanced by rapid text conversations from someone identified as “Unknown,”
which gives the film something instantly recognizable, while also adding an
element of mystery and intrigue. Using a
film-within-a-film device, Maureen becomes riveted by watching a documentary
piece on her phone about Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint (1862 – 1944),
(Hilma af Klint - A Pioneer
of Abstraction (eng.sub) - YouTube, 22:01), who claimed to be a
clairvoyant, who was told by spirit voices to paint “on the astral plane,” whose
work is derived from mysticism and the awareness of higher levels of
consciousness, an aspect that is currently being marginalized in an
increasingly materialistic world. Af
Klint is another psychic believer who conducted séances with other artists,
whose occult-inspired paintings were among the first representations of
abstract art, so she refused to publicly show these paintings during her
lifetime, knowing they would not be understood, as they were believed to be
decades before their time, released twenty years after her death, as stipulated
by her will, where in an interesting parallel, the creativity behind these
paintings was inspired by “unknown” forces.
Like the last Assayas
film, 2014
Top Ten List #3 Clouds of Sils Maria, the director’s first
collaboration with Stewart, she plays another disaffected assistant to an
overbearing star. While she played a
secondary role in the earlier film, here she is the centerpiece, where we see
everything through her eyes. While the
film is comprised with on-the-street, cinéma vérité moments of Kristen Stewart
zipping around Paris and London on a moped picking out ultra chic designer outfits
and Cartier jewelry for an haut couture fashion model star who is rarely ever
seen, Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), whose domineering reputation precedes her,
where the selfish conceits of her narcissistic boss are unnerving, making her a
pain to work for, placing her in a fully subservient and demeaning role, yet
the idea of having the freedom to work with designers, choosing their latest
creations, and having them at your beck and call, as her boss is too busy and
too recognizable to perform these duties herself, offers a kind of titillating
luxury most of us will never know, flittering in and out of the high life,
dropping off accessories, having access to often empty upscale apartments where
she’s free to imagine herself in a parallel existence leading a life of
pampered indulgence. But the film is not
about class difference, though in stark contrast, Maureen runs around in jeans,
T-shirts and old sweaters, instead one of the visceral thrills she gets is
secretly trying on her boss’s clothes, something she’s explicitly forbidden to
do, but operating completely on her own, almost never running into her boss,
she sets her own boundaries. With
occasional skype calls from a boyfriend abroad (Ty Olwin), who is consumed by a
high tech security instillation in Oman, Maureen makes frequent visits to her
sister Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz), who seems to keep her grounded. When not shopping for Kyra, she spends her
free time communing with the dead, hoping for a sign from her recently deceased
twin brother, Lewis, as both share the same congenital heart condition, which
caused his sudden death, and both are psychic mediums, having made a pact that
the first one to die would send a recognizable sign. This aspect of the film has sinister
implications, especially when the wrong spirits show up, as they are often
angry and incensed at finding themselves summoned by strangers, where the idea
of wandering endlessly in the spirit world does not sound inviting. Because she is a medium, however, she’s able
to understand these mix-ups, a skill viewers may not share, leaving them
perplexed by the cinematic trickery involved, where the baffling weirdness of
ghosts onscreen is still relatively shocking in arthouse cinema.
Assayas shared the Best
Direction prize at Cannes with Romanian director Christian Mungiu for Graduation
(Bacalaureat) (2015), two very different styles of film, yet both are
eerily distinctive at tapping into modern era anxieties and discontent, where
Maureen is not only trying to come to terms with her brother’s death, exposing
herself to phantoms of the spirit world, but leads such a detached existence,
disconnected from her own employer, always missing each other, instead leaving
each other notes, rarely having any contact, she is also targeted by an unknown
caller on her smartphone, all but contaminating an indispensable part of her
existence, who seems intimately familiar with her every move, initially
suspecting it was her brother from beyond the grave, but it leads to more
menacing implications, as if someone is stalking her and watching her every
move, where an unsettling relationship, of sorts, develops over a prolonged
sequence of text messages that leads to a great deal of confusion and fear,
feeling completely exposed, even ashamed, where there are dangerous forces on
the loose. This powerful sense of
emptiness and loss follows her everywhere, which may be associated with her
enveloping grief, but is further exacerbated by her entry into the supernatural,
where all the forces align in painting a complex portrait of contemporary
unease, becoming a meditation on loss, but also jealousy, identity, and desire,
where Maureen loses all sense of herself.
One of the more bizarre sequences finds Maureen alone in Kyra’s
apartment, as she is away on business, allowing her to try on various outfits,
changing places with her employer, perhaps reminiscent of Jean Genet’s The Maids, yet the eerie music on the
soundtrack is Marlene Dietrich singing a bleak Viennese folksong about how
Death doesn’t differentiate, as it cuts down the rich and poor alike, Marlene Dietrich "Das
Hobellied" 1952 (Feathers 2/2). - YouTube (2:02), which opens
the door to darker, more ominous forces that creep ever closer, brilliantly
conveyed by a series of unread texts unraveling in waves, that develop a more
threatening tone with every new line, instantly filling her with dread, feeling
exposed, as if she is on the precipice of the abyss. With the phone itself becoming an instrument
of horror, violence ensues, though not as one might suspect, as technology is a
tool that seems to have robbed our souls of greater meaning in life, leaving us
even more disconnected and alone, a vulnerable and precarious position, to be
sure. Caught in a labyrinth of fear, she
makes her escape, scampering off to Oman, where the specifics of her detailed
instructions out into the hinterlands lead her farther and farther away from
any recognizable signs of civilization, where she may as well be in an
altogether different universe, like a portal to the unknown (where there is
probably no cellphone connection).
Maureen continually places herself in haunted space, contemplating her
experience afterwards, though by the end whether she is liberated or not
remains an open question, yet there are inevitably lingering doubts, larger
existential questions that go unanswered, but viewers are likely to be caught
off-guard while the film searches for answers about the unknown mysteries of
the modern world, including a driving, often irrational need to fill a void of
emptiness in our human existence.
Cinema Scope: Blake Williams September 06, 2016
Upon its premiere in Cannes last May, Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper quickly became defined by its centerpiece SMS marathon, in which Maureen (Kristen Stewart) engages in a days-long texting back-and-forth with what might be her dead twin brother’s ghost (all while travelling from Paris to London and back), and the scene is indeed probably the pinnacle of that idea—the culmination of more than a decade of attempts, delivering something from the curiosity of what cinema can become as basic human interactions become increasingly virtual. But this exchange is but a piece of Assayas’ hazy impression of life in the age of physical absence, which finds room for a digression into art history (via a documentary primer on Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint’s spiritism—viewed on an iPhone, naturally) and an oblique murder subplot that is presented so prominently it feels like a lark.
Rolling in like a fog and evaporating before our eyes, Personal Shopper is the latest in what could be called a tradition of industry-insider ghost movies that seem to make themselves up as they go along (Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars [2014] being the most recent, Lynch’s Inland Empire [2006] the best). The film, which is essentially about Maureen’s attempts to summon her brother’s spirit, is as light and ephemeral as it is genuinely mysterious and moving, and constitutes a stream of inklings of active ideas—mostly regarding mediation, grief, jealousy, identity, and desire—which just so happen to have emerged in the form of a motion picture. It all comes and then goes, always disconcertingly mellow considering the nerviness of its images, as though it means to evolve into something truly bug-fuck but instead sits there sombre and stone-faced. A genuinely radical piece of filmmaking, if only for its conspicuous eagerness to disappear completely.
Film Comment: Amy Taubin July 03, 2016
Jarmusch went home unacknowledged by the competition jury, although Nellie, the English bulldog who played Marvin, the third party in the marriage of Paterson and Laura, received the annual Palm Dog award. Nellie’s hangdog face made her the quintessential Jarmusch actor, but she also benefited from Jarmusch’s perfectly timed editing, just as Kristen Stewart’s riveting non-performance in Personal Shopper resulted from the collaboration between the actor and the director Olivier Assayas, whose timing and shot selection is impeccable. The only deserving film to win a nod from the competition jury (Assayas shared the directing award with Cristian Mungiu, whose Graduation is solid but hardly as adventurous as his three earlier features), Personal Shopper is as ephemeral as the ghost that haunts the imagination of Maureen (Stewart), whose recently deceased twin brother had mediumistic powers. In the opening sequence, an intricate construction of sound/image relationships, Maureen, alone at night, walks through her brother’s old country house, looking and listening for traces of his presence. Later Assayas serves up a Hitchcock-worthy sequence in which Maureen is terrorized by text messages that follow her from Paris to London and back again. Personal Shopper proved surprisingly controversial; critics in their twenties scorned Assayas for his “recent discovery of smartphones.” What some of us oldsters understood is that smartphones have rendered the classical who-knows-what-and-when-do-they-know-it construction of thriller plots inoperable. In response, Assayas creates suspense, not simply by having Maureen plagued by texts from an unknown source, but by blinding her to the possibility that the sender is very much alive and dangerous because she wants to believe that the messages come from beyond the grave. In the end, Personal Shopper, whose lineage stretches backward through Chris Marker’s Level Five to Vertigo, is about existential loneliness and the failure of connection in a connected world.
CINE-FILE:
Cine-List - Cine-File.info
Alexandra Ensign
PERSONAL SHOPPER continues to explore themes that run throughout Olivier Assayas' oeuvre, especially CLEAN (2004) and CLOUDS OF SILS MARIA (2014). Much like CLEAN, which starred Maggie Cheung, the film centers on an isolated, inward-facing character recovering from trauma in the city of Paris Much like CLOUDS, the film stars Kristen Stewart, who plays a personal assistant (specifically in this case, a personal shopper) to a glamorous actress entrenched in the world of celebrity and fashion. Unlike CLOUDS, however, PERSONAL SHOPPER delves into the world of the assistant, and the single-name celebrity, Kyra (Nora von Waldstätten), is seen rarely. Kristen Stewart commands almost every second of screen time, much like Maggie Cheung does in CLEAN. Drawing comparisons among these three films is helpful in finding more depth and meaning in PERSONAL SHOPPER, which suffers in some ways from a meandering, underdeveloped screenplay that elicits accidental laughs and does too much juggling of tone to strike a resounding emotional chord. Assayas called the movie a "collage," but unfortunately the collage is uneven in execution, despite an incredibly impressive performance from Stewart. Apart from the unevenness of the screenplay, the movie has many interesting aspect, and one of the most inspired is allowing Kristen Stewart to do things without being highly sexualized and without speaking. She emotes in a subterraneously explosive manner, indicating the enormous tension within her character without overtly emoting. It's surprisingly captivating. PERSONAL SHOPPER vacillates between several genres, from dark comedy to coming-of-age to psychological thriller, and lastly to horror. The reason the film vacillates so much is due in part to the actual plot: Maureen (Stewart) is a personal shopper by day, and a medium on nights and weekends, mourning her dead twin brother who said he would send her a sign from beyond. She is in Paris for an indefinite amount of time, putting off her own life, and existing as something of a ghost herself, just waiting. Because the movie accepts the existence of ghosts as a given, it turns into a psychological thriller (revolving around an exchange of text messages with an unknown number who may or may not be Maureen's brother...it gets old, fast, watching text messages pop up on a screen), and then a spooky horror (by far the weakest element of the movie), while exploring elements of Maureen's character in quieter, sadder, less suspenseful scenes, hinting at depths the movie never quite reaches. Critics have disagreed widely in their reviews of the film, and it is easy to see why, but it is still highly recommended to see the film for yourself and wonder what this could have been with a stronger screenplay, given how fascinating it is to watch already.
Kristen
Stewart: Hiding in Plain Sight - Film Comment Nick Davis interview, July 3, 2016
Recently, some epigrammatist on Twitter pronounced: “I love Adele, because you feel like she could be anybody. I hate Katy Perry, because you feel like she could be anybody.” How might this commentator assess Kristen Stewart, another superstar consecrated by the same generation of pop consumers, tilting young and female? With her frank and frequently neutral gaze, her stammers and trapezoidal slouches, her quick and casual diction, Stewart’s performance style is even more quotidian than Adele’s virtuosic channeling of universal laments or Perry’s lavishly synthetic shtick as the roaring Everygirl.
Such apparent lack of varnish, echoing Stewart’s mellow personality, has made her a polarizing performer. While she has enticed advocates throughout her career, probably neither her Twilight (08) fans nor high-placed devotees like A. O. Scott of The New York Times predicted her recent spike in critical cachet. Two years ago, Stewart premiered new films in three major festivals: at Sundance, Camp X-Ray (14), as a female guard at Guantánamo who develops a vexed sympathy with a male detainee; at Cannes, Clouds of Sils Maria (14), as the assistant who coddles and needles the star thespian played by Juliette Binoche; and at Toronto, Still Alice (14), as the prodigal daughter of Julianne Moore’s fading Alzheimer’s patient. Each movie elicited considerable praise, as did Stewart’s contributions, culminating in several U.S. critics’ prizes for Clouds of Sils Maria and her breakthrough as the first American actress to win a César, France’s equivalent of the Oscar.
Now, two years later, Stewart has sustained similar feats. Kelly Reichardt’s ensemble drama Certain Women impressed Park City, with Stewart drawing good notices as a night-class instructor befuddled by one student’s wide-eyed reverence. At Cannes, she headlined both the opening film, Woody Allen’s ’30s-set dramedy Café Society, and a buzzy Competition entry, Personal Shopper, a tender yet terrifying story of grief, covetous desire, and signals from the afterlife. Olivier Assayas, who also guided Stewart through Sils Maria, built the newer movie more tightly around his still-rising star and won a Best Director award. If anything, her reviews were stronger than his, yet even effusive responses to Stewart sometimes credit her achievements to others, her concise but nimble artistry registering as serendipity, careful management, or late-breaking surprise.
Café Society finds Stewart making forays into comedy, pastel palettes, and period romance, and thus marks a near-antithesis to another Stewart vehicle bowing the same day in U.S. cinemas: Drake Doremus’s Equals (15), a shivery blue-and-white parable set in a world where feelings have been banished. It’s nothing new for a young female star to anchor an Allen script or a sci-fi dystopia, but these contexts ramify pointedly for Stewart. One challenges her reputation for no-frills sangfroid, while the other embeds that typecasting in its premise. Certain Women and Personal Shopper less obviously flex Stewart’s range: Reichardt’s affinity for quiet pilgrims perfectly suits this actress, and Personal Shopper, however defiantly odd in many respects, also revisits moods and tropes that Assayas and his star have explored in past projects. Far from redundant, though, these films underscore how Stewart’s consistencies are as interesting as her departures, particularly since her technique remains uncommon, her persona as elusive as ever.
If Stewart’s talents take people aback, no matter how often and variously proved, one probable reason is her commitment to a low-fuss, conversational directness that is rare among modern film performers, particularly in roles that accommodate flashier approaches. Instead, she has persuaded film culture to meet her where she lives—in a laconic, minutely expressive, barely laminated register of acting that’s confusable with “just being.” Actors and filmmakers seem inspired to emulate her non-flamboyance, rather than obligating Stewart to limber up, open out, or reveal capacities for wild emotion and strenuous articulation. I would not deny that Stewart’s abilities have deepened, but in a parallel triumph, she has stretched other people’s definitions of fluency and screen presence.
Kristen
Stewart Has Always Been a Great Actress
Kevin Lincoln from Vulture,
March 8, 2017
“Personal Shopper” and “Frantz” Anthony Lane from The New Yorker
Reverse Shot: Chris Wisniewski October 07, 2016
Finally, a Movie That Nails the Anxiety You Feel Texting Angela Watercutter from Wired magazine, March 10, 2017
Brooklyn Magazine: Scout Tafoya October 07, 2016
Personal Shopper Is an Unusual Postmodern Ghost Story David Sims from The Atlantic
Time:
Stephanie Zacharek May 17, 2016
Cannes
Review: Kristen Stewart and Olivier Assayas Deserve Better ... Eric Kohn from indieWIRE
Personal
Shopper :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste - Paste Magazine Tim Grierson
PERSONAL SHOPPER Steve Erickson from Chronicle of a Passion
Olivier Assayas's Personal Shopper Is Maddeningly Elusive But
Beautiful David Edelstein from Vulture
Sight & Sound: Nick James May 18, 2016
Cannes
2016. Olivier Assayas' "Personal Shopper" on Notebook | MUBI Daniel Kasman, May 19, 2016
'Personal
Shopper': Cannes Review | Reviews | Screen - Screen Daily Lee Marshall
Reverse
Shot: Jordan Cronk June 07, 2016
The Village Voice: Bilge Ebiri May 18, 2016
The House Next Door: Sam C. Mac May 17, 2016
The A.V. Club: Mike D'Angelo May 17, 2016
Little White Lies: David Jenkins
Toronto
2016 Review: PERSONAL SHOPPER ... - ScreenAnarchy Kurt Halfyard
The
Cinemaholic [Matthew Passantino]
Flickering
Myth [Chris Haydon]
Observations on Film Art: Kelley Conway October 13, 2016
Senses of Cinema: Daniel Fairfax July 10, 2016
n+1: A. S. Hamrah December 12, 2016
Cinema
Perspective [Garry Arnot]
JLT/JLT: Josh Timmermann October 15, 2016
Movie
Mezzanine: Tina Hassannia
A
Seat in the Dark [Sheila Seacroft]
20th
Chicago European Union Film Festival (March 3-31, 2017), Report No. 1 (THE
DEATH OF LOUIS XIV, PERSONAL SHOPPER, and JUST DROP DEAD!) Scott Pfeiffer from The Moving World
Sight & Sound: Nick James 5 Picks from London Film Festival, October
04, 2016
Sight & Sound: Geoff Andrew Top 15 at Cannes, May 24, 2016
Auteur
Olivier Assayas on His New Film Personal Shopper | AnOther Carmen Gray interview, October 13, 2016
Oliver
Assayas Discusses "Personal Shopper" - Mubi Daniel Kasman interview, October 5, 2016
'Personal
Shopper': Cannes Review | Hollywood Reporter Todd McCarthy
'Personal
Shopper' Review – Cannes Film Festival 2016 | Variety Peter Debruge
Personal
Shopper review: Kristen Stewart's psychic spooker is a must ... Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian
Kristen Stewart reveals herself in ghostly thriller 'Personal
Shopper' Jen Yamato from The Los Angeles Times, March 10, 2017
Review:
Kristen Stewart Is Entrancing as a Haunted 'Personal Shopper' A.O. Scott from The New York Times, March 10, 2017
The New York Times: Manohla Dargis May 20, 2016 |
Hilma
af Klint: Painting the Unseen | Serpentine Galleries
Hilma af Klint - 24 artworks -
WikiArt.org
Hilma
af Klint | Moderna Museet i Stockholm
Hilma
af Klint: a painter possessed | Art and design | The Guardian Kate February 21,
2016
Giving
a Swedish Pioneer of Abstract Art Her Due - The New York Times April 29, 2013
Decoding
the Spiritual Symbolism of Artist Hilma af Klint | AnOther Maisie Skidmore, May 16, 2016
Atamanov, Lev
THE SNOW QUEEN (Snezhnaya koroleva)
User reviews from imdb Author: wonderproductions
(wonderproductions@hotmail.com) from
This is one of the best-loved animated features in
User reviews from imdb Author: Galina from Virginia,
USA
"Snezhnaya koroleva' (1957) aka "The Snow Queen" directed by
Lev Atamanov is a beautiful animated movie of my childhood that I'd seen dozens
times back in
The film was released on DVD by the company "Films by Jove" with the
original Russian soundtrack and English subtitles and is available from the
company's site. Four more excellent films by Lev Atamanov are included on the
DVD: "Golden Antelope", the Indian fairy tale and three short
animations, "Bench", "Cyclist", and "Fence"
adapted from the cartoons of Herluf Bidstrup, celebrated Danish artist, famous
for his comics, humorous drawings, series of graphical anecdotes, and
caricatures.
User reviews from imdb (Page 2) Author: djnau29 from
The Snow Queen is based on Hans Christian Andersen's fable about a
cold-hearted queen of the frozen north who steals away young Kay and takes him
to her ice palace. Kay's (Anna Komolova)friend Gerda(Yanina Zheymo)gets worried
when Kay does not come home, and so she sets out to find him. Along the way,
she meets an eccentric flower woman (V. Popova), a prince (Vera Bendina)and a
princess(T. Linnik), a magical reindeer (Alexey Konsovskiy), a talking court
raven(Yelena Ponsova), and many other fantastic characters. Once Gerda
discovers that Kay is in the Snow Queen's (Mariya Babanova) palace, she has to
find some way to save him in spite of the formidable queen.
A Russian animated foreign film produced by Soyuzmultfilm studio is a lavishing
and magical overlooked gem that is very poetically written. The story is one of
the most beautiful love story I've ever seen with a compelling female
protagonist Gerda, very determined and strong-willed young girl not going to
just wait for someone rescues and save her best friend Kay cursed and kidnapped
by The Snow Queen a Heartless cruel person who make Kay forget everything in
his past. The Snow Queen is the most beautifully drawn villain I've ever seen
and one of my favorites. Ol Dreamy the narrator of the movie who uses his
magical umbrella to cause Han to sleep and dream wonderful stories, which he
then writes as fairy tales.He really reminds me a lot of Jimmy Cricket from
Pinocchio.
The Score by Artemiy Ayvazyan has composed such a lush and wonderful score
evokes the beauty of the movies. The animation is also gorgeously drawn and
very fluid in movement that feels dated but still a work of art.Although the
sound effects is rather poorly done and low key. The character voices overs are
all very good but the standout being Mariya Babanova (The Snow Queen)who brings
such dimensions to the very isolated villain. Other worthy voice overs are
Vladimir Gribkov (Ol Dreamy) Alexey Konsovskiy (Deer), Sergei Martinson and
Yelena Ponsova (The Raven & Court Raven), and Yanina Zheymo(Gerda).
So overall this is a masterpiece one of the most beautifully told fairy tale
I've ever seen up their with Beauty and the Beast. The Characters are so
compelling and engaging.Soyuzmultfilm have produced a classic gem for all ages.
The Snow
Queen (1960) - Notes - TCM.com
The working title of this film was The Snow Princess. The opening credits read: "Universal-International presents The Snow Queen from the story by Hans Christian Anderson, Cartoons, animation and screenplay by Soyuzmultfilm Productions." Hugo Grimaldi's credit reads: "Dialogue supervision and editor." The opening cast credits read: "Starring Art Linkletter in the prologue." The remaining cast credits are proceeded by the phrase "Also featuring the voices of." The film was a Russian production which Universal bought, then added English-language dubbing and a live-action prologue. The animated character "Ol' Dreamy," voiced by Paul Frees, reappears throughout the story to provide narration.
On
In a June 7, 1959
Soyuzmultfilm Productions, the Russian production company,
entered the film in the Vancouver Film Festival on
Mr.
Satanism's Video Picks for Perverts
Fantastic Movie Musings and
Ramblings Dave Sindelar
"Walt
Disney Animation Gives ‘The Snow Queen’ New Life, Retitled ‘Frozen’ – But Will
It Be Hand Drawn?" Peter
Scrietta from SlashFilm,
"Disney’s
"Frozen," Formerly "The Snow Queen," Will Be CG Rather Than
Hand-Drawn" Russ Fischer from Slash
Film,
"Snow Queen" Wizart Animation (may take awhile to load)
The
Snow Queen - Movies - New York Times
Bosley Crowther, also seen here: The New York Times
Lev Atamanov: The Snow Queen -
Снежная
королева (1957) may be seen in its entirety at Russian Film
The Snow Queen - Wikipedia,
the free encyclopedia
Atchinson, Doug
AKEELAH AND THE BEE B+ 92
USA
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We are born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." —from the novel by Marianne Williamson, "A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles"
A Starbucks and Mark Cuban production, which is the only thing not to like about this film, as much of it felt like SEARCHING FOR BOBBY FISHER, even using the same mentor, Laurence Fishburne, and while much of the material may not be new, it still packs a wallop. Obviously overly optimistic, completely improbable, where everything happens the way it does so it all works out in the end, with bouncy urban music that makes you smile or tap your feet, perhaps resembling the black films and culture of the 70’s, where black social consciousness erupted onscreen accompanied by message music from artists like Marvin Gaye or other Motown groups that were previously commercial hit machines, in this case excellent use of the Spinners (“Rubberband Man”), Aretha Franklin (“Think”), Staple Singers (“Respect Yourself”), and movie theme music by Harold Melvin and the Bluenotes (“Wake Up Everybody”), with Deborah Cox singing “Definition of Love” over the end credits. Still, despite the formulaic style, and the stereotypical characterizations that served the story’s purpose, there was something very appealing here in the not so subtle way it attempts to make everyone accountable, each of us to one another. It uses stereotypes humorously, but then embraces the humanity inside each person, for instance, even the wino, who inadvertently shows her the spelling card when he's trying to help. I found that hilarious because he was being helpful, not because it fit some kind of stereotype. Part of the appeal of this film is the way it attempts to analyze the distorted misconceptions of one another, and how this feeds an unhealthy view of ourselves. So long as the wrong message continues to generate more wrong messages, it leaves a society reeling in impotence and discontent. There’s always an excuse for why we can’t succeed, afflictions of the worst kind that force us to accept less than our best. Except for the pampered super-rich, the road to the future is rarely a clear path. So this film finds adversity in the kinds of things that force us all to stumble, in the universality of failure, but suggests no one’s happy with that view of themselves. They simply accept it as they see no other way. But when someone from the neighborhood succeeds, especially while retaining ties to the neighborhood, the entire community pulls for them much like Joe Louis in the 1940’s, as they become an emblem of racial and community pride.
The film follows the fortunes of a young 11-year old girl Akeelah, Keke
Palmer, who lives in the economically deprived Los Angeles
Atef, Emily
THE STRANGER IN ME (Das Fremde In Mir)
The Stranger In Me (Das Fremde In Mir) Lee Marshall
at
One of the most powerful surviving social taboos – a mother's rejection of her new-born baby – is turned into a small but resonant drama in Emily Atef's second feature, which was one of the highlights of this year's Critic's Week in Cannes. With a subject (and budget) that might have made for a worthy TV drama, The Stranger In Me is lifted by a finely-structured script of surprising thematic depth, a sure feel for cinematic composition and lighting, and above all by a strong cast led by a magnetic Susanne Wolff, who makes us sympathise with a woman whose behaviour is, by most people's standards, repellent.
But this is the film's market dilemma: that however sensitively the subject of post-natal depression is treated here, it will be a turn-off for many distributors, despite the film's redemptive ending. It's the very soberness of Atef's approach that makes this such a powerful drama, but this may limit the film's chances with the sort of hardcore filmbuffs that pride themselves on their ability to take uncomfortable themes. The Stranger In Me is one of those commercial paradoxes: an unpretentious issue film that will work best with a wide, socially mixed audience it will almost certainly never get.
Rebecca (Wolff) and her boyfriend Julian (von Bulow) are young German thirtysomethings, living in a city apartment whose upmarket-bohemian decor seems determined more by their social milieu than by any act of volition. Rebecca is pregnant, and there's an air of happy anticipation – which is dispersed seconds after birth when we see a shocked mother recoiling from the sight, and touch, of her baby, but also horrified by her own alien feelings (hence the film's neat, double-edged title).
The assumption that a mother must love her baby is so strong that neither Rebecca's well-meaning but emotionally dim husband nor the other family members that surround her notice anything more than a touch of tiredness or stress. We are let into Rebecca's secret, but it's an uneasy complicity: one of the film's most interesting manoeuvres is the way it pushes an initially sympathetic audience into reproducing, through sheer force of involuntary emotional revulsion, the social censure that eventually rains down on the 'unnatural' mother when she goes off the rails and abandons the family nest.
But The Stranger In Me is not a Rosetta-style descent into despair; the second half is about a difficult healing process, and the way it can be blocked by society's readiness to brand the unmaternal mother as a monster, and ostracise her. It's at this point that the script turns the initially rather flat husband into a character who becomes as interesting in his own way as Rebecca.
Henner Besuch's cinematography is measured but intimate, just handheld enough to bond with its subject and suggest the desperate loneliness of her situation. But respect dominates over voyeurism – something also underlined by the delicate soundtrack of pared-back, bittersweet piano trills.
Athale, Rowan
WASTELAND
aka:
The Rise
Great Britain (108 mi)
2012
Chicago Reader Ben Sachs
This British heist picture is familiar but energetic genre
filmmaking, more interesting in its particulars than in its overall conception.
Luke Treadaway, the charismatic lead of David Mackenzie’s Tonight You’re
Mine, plays an ordinary young man who gets framed for drug possession by a
criminal outfit based in his town. When released from prison he decides to get
even by robbing the gang’s tightly guarded headquarters. First-time
writer-director Rowan Athale shows a knack for location shooting, grounding the
material in a vivid sense of place. His sense of character isn’t nearly as
accomplished, however; everyone here is just a sketchily realized noir
archetype. With Timothy Spall, Neil Maskell (Kill List), and Vanessa
Kirby.
NewCity
Chicago Ray Pride
Yorkshire-set cat-and-mouse heist caper “Wasteland” draws knowingly from that great raft of lad Brit pics of recent decades, with roundelays of chewy filth bantered about by its four would-be robbers getting even with a hard man who sent one of them down for a year by framing him for a drug crime. The widescreen landscape of this cold, spent north is of fallen industrial advantage turned to wrack and ruin, and in it, the quartet speak of the other world, of “twats” and “flash bastards” who keep them down. We’re decades past the Kitchen Sink school, this kitchen’s sunk. The dialogue is more convincing than the stylized likes of early Guy Ritchie, and the actors—Iwan Rheon, Gerard Kearns and Matthew Lewis—mostly keep to wry naturalism. The scarily devoted quartet conspires to rob Roper (Neil Maskell), a burly skull skulking in a too-tight down vest, a drug-running princeling who lives by threat more than true power, pretending to care not: “You can call me all the twats under the sun,” he says, hoping all curs might cower (as well as fume and plot behind his broad back). There are parallels to the “Oceans” series as well as to the knottiness of “The Usual Suspects,” which “Wasteland” resembles in its scrambled, perhaps not entirely forthright flashback structure, with Harvey (Luke Treadaway, “Attack the Block”) telling D. I. West (Timothy Spall) his version of what they’ve done. “There is certainly authenticity to what you say,” Spall intones sonorously but cheerily after hearing one part of the planning. So far, so-so, it seems, as the deliberately paced proceedings feel stock yet still engaging at that point, and that’s when writer-director Rowan Athale springs his finest surprise: The plot turns. It turns again. Oh, it turns again. Then? It’s click-clack cheeky delirium all of a sudden, and again. “Complicated” would be wild understatement. There’s a terse, tart romance too, and it’s not only between these put-upon young men of the North. Beware the trailer: it’ll wreck most, if not all, of the fun. With Vanessa Kirby. 108m. Widescreen.
Compared to Ocean's Eleven by first-time feature
director Rowan Athale, scrappy and mostly redundant British crime film Wasteland
is indeed a caper of sorts, only its build-up and payoff are far less palatable
and remarkable than anything it could possibly be compared to.
Worse is that it features quite possibly the dullest hero ever captured in a
film of this nature — a smug, floppy-haired hipster — droning on and on about a
plan of revenge that could likely get all his supposed best friends killed.
Stepping back, the reason our protagonist with the fitted plaid shirt, Harvey
(Luke Treadaway), is so pissed is that he was framed for a drug bust by local
bad guy Steven (Neil Maskell) and subsequently did time.
Since the events surrounding his arrest are unnecessarily convoluted and
partially nonsensical, as he describes them to police detective Inspector West
(Timothy Spall) — in a familiar flashback confessional framing device, trying
way too hard to reference The Usual Suspects — he too decides to come up
with an over-the-top plan for revenge, with requisite musical montages and
deliberately obscured motivators.
When with his handful of friends that plan to help him carry out this plan,
which in itself is the sole excuse for this bland movie to exist, they mostly
exchange banal dialogue laced with profanity in an effort to draw a broad idea
of male bonding.
At no time are we made to care about any of the characters, even when Harvey
spends quality time with his jaded girlfriend, Nicola (Vanessa Kirby), who
tries to talk some sense into him, as is the standard for female characters in
nonsense like this.
But being sensible or practical wouldn't be cool now, would it? Hipster Harvey
merely exists as a vessel for the poseur underdog as prescribed by the existing
formula. Had any part of the formula been negated or manipulated, it's possible
that the overly stylized climax might have held some interest.
But, as it stands, it's impossible to care if they manage to pull off their
robbery scheme without a snag.
Slant Magazine [Tina
Hassannia]
The title of Rowan Athale's directorial debut feature, Wasteland, describes the characters' homeland: a desolate, decrepit Yorkshire with little to offer its young, ambitious denizens. The reference is the first of many socially conscious signifiers in the film, yet Wasteland is at heart a heist movie, snappy and dry in its humor, clever in its elaborate robbery scheme, and somewhat bloated and unspooled in its storytelling. But unlike the gritty Guy Ritchie template, it follows the aesthetic of Drive, pushed to a maximalist color and lighting scheme in its interior scenes that's then neatly balanced by ashen, barren landscapes.
In flashback, a bruised, bleeding Harvey (Luke Treadaway) tells a stern but curious D.I. West (an underused Timothy Spall) a frank, ridiculously detailed story. Harvey's face gleams more from a self-satisfied smirk than the shiner on his eye, yet his countenance betrays his tale. After being framed by local drug pin Steven Roper (Neil Maskell), whom the police have been unable to link to any serious crimes, Harvey leaves jail with two goals: restart his life and exact revenge on Roper. The plan, a nearly impossible scheme to pilfer ₤50,000 from Roper's safe in a working men's club, is carried out with the help of friends Dodd (Matthew Lewis), Dempsey (Iwan Rheon), and Charlie (Gerard Kearns). Harvey's story ends with the group's heist gone astray and a fight with Roper, whom the police soon catch red-handed with drugs and stolen quid from the club's cash registers. West marvels at the coincidence, only to find a secretly recorded tape from Harvey outlining how cleverly the boys pulled off the perfect crime, killing two birds with one stone.
Athale explicitly codes his film with references to the characters' once-bright futures that have since faded away: Harvey, who entered prison without ever committing a crime, lost his one shot at a management-training program. Similarly, a perfectly qualified Charlie can't find work as a welder. In many heist films, criminals reserve their jackpot for retirement or luxury purposes. For these lads, the money is an investment for a real future, one outside the British boondocks: a partnership in a friend's successful Amsterdam coffee shop. These kids aren't pursuing crime professionally, but they recognize the system is a rigged one. They're willing to bend a few laws to get theirs. Wasteland mollifies the messy moral questions at play here, namely by writing in a scapegoat in Roper and zeroing in on the heist. Unlike The Angels' Share, which starts off as a social drama and turns into a heist film halfway through, Wasteland at least knows its genre. But the film tries so hard to look trendy—much like its supposedly low-income, Puma-wearing leads—that it fails to truly provide any significance or value for its topical social backdrop.
Review:
Brit Heist Flick 'Wasteland' Starring Luke Treadaway | The ... Kevin Jaggernauth from The Playlist
Film-Forward.com
[Dionne King]
Screen Daily Allan
Hunter
WASTELAND Facets Multi Media
Director interview
The Moveable Feast, August 2013
Hollywood Reporter
Michael Rechtshaffen
Review:
An entangled 'Wasteland' loses its way - latimes.com Robert Abele from The LA Times
Athié, Francisco
VERA B 86
Mexico France Germany USA
A variation on ORPHEUS
DESCENDING, a free-form, somewhat surrealistic, transcendental drama
filmed in near total darkness about finding meaning from a man's soul before
the body dies, shown here with a Mayan spirit that resembles a visitation
by an extra-terrestrial, the androgynous character Vera, who helps transport
the man into the world of the dead. Very slow and much too somber
overall, but an innovative and daring artistic attempt, particularly at
the end, the scenes of the spirits dance of death and the actual transport
itself are visually stunning and quite memorable. Terrific use of
raw, primitive music.
Attenborough, Richard
YOUNG WINSTON
A frightfully Boering
biopic chronicling the adventures of 2nd Lt Winston Churchill, and ending with
his election to the House of Commons. It comes across rather like an episode of
the Antiques Road Show on location at Blenheim. Well, here we have a
very fine example of John Mills
that has been handed down over the generations, in perfect nick, about £10 at
auction. Simon
Ward, as the British bulldog pup, fetches rather less than Jeffrey Hunter
as Jesus.
The young Winston Churchill overcomes a bad family life and early
military mistakes to launch his political career in the 1972 screen biography Young
Winston. It was Richard Attenborough's second film as a director and was
based on Churchill's own memoirs, My Early Years.
As expected, the film was much more popular in its own country than the
The critical response in the U.S. was equally favorable even if the boxoffice
receipts were not overly impressive. Richard Cuskelly of The Los Angeles
Herald Examiner wrote, "Director Richard Attenborough has recreated
with great skill the final halcyon days of the British Empire - a time of rigid
morality, ultra-conscientious self-discipline and unsurpassed elegance."
User comments from imdb Author: GulyJimson
(GulyJimson@aol.com) from Los Angeles, CA
"Young Winston" released in 1972 was a no expense
spared, beautifully mounted, all star, "thinking man's epic"
recounting the childhood and early manhood of one of history's great statesmen,
Winston Churchill. It was among the last in a long honorable line of historical
epics whose golden era began with Robert Rossen's "Alexander the
Great" (1956) followed by "A Night to Remember" (1958) and
"Spartacus" (1960) and for many reached a zenith with David Lean's
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962). The era continued with "The Longest
Day" (1962) "Cleopatra" (1963) "Zulu" (1965)
"Khartoum" (1966) "Is Paris Burning?" (1966) "Charge
of the Light Brigade" (1968) "The Battle of Britain" (1969)
"Cromwell" (1970) "Tora, Tora, Tora" (1970)
"Patton" (1970) "Waterloo" (1970) "The Red Tent"
(1971) and "Nicholas and Alexandra" (1971). It was Richard
Attenborough's follow up to his spectacular film version of the stage hit,
"Oh! What a Lovely War". He would follow up "Young Winston"
with the equally spectacular "A Bridge Too Far" (1977). Attenborough
was at home mixing the grand with the biographical, and in addition to
"Young Winston" he made an epic film on "Gandhi", (1982)
for which he won the Academy Award for Best Director, with the film winning for
Best Picture and Ben Kingsley for Best Actor. This he followed with a somewhat
less successful film, "Cry Freedom" (1987) notable mostly for Denzel
Washington's charismatic portrayal of Steve Biko, and an even less successful
film followed this on the life of "Chaplin" (1992) again, notable for
the remarkable performance by Robert Downey Jr. in the lead. The following year
Attenborough returned to form-sans epic aspirations-with another adaptation of
a stage hit, "Shadowlands" with Anthony Hopkins wonderful as C.S.
Lewis.
Among Attenborough's chief attributes is being especially good at getting great
performances. This is not unusual since he is himself a marvelous actor and
coming from a theatrical background he knows dramatic material when he sees it.
He also has a fine eye for period detail. "Young Winston" excels in
all these departments. Carl Forman's screenplay, adapted from Churchill's
memoirs is a veritable Boy's Own Adventure yarn. Charmingly narrated by an
unseen older Churchill, (an uncanny vocal performance by Simon Ward) recounting
his early life, it moves sprightly along following the young Churchill from
childhood to boarding school, his travails with his parents, to his escapades
in the Sudan as soldier and the Boer War as war correspondent and climaxing
with his winning his father's seat in Parliament. And it is Churchill's need to
win his father's love and approval that thematically dominates the film. Lord
Randolph Churchill was by all accounts an imposing figure and the part is well
served by Robert Shaw in what is certainly one of his finest performances. The
scene where Shaw, coping with the ravaging onset of syphilis, attempts to
express his love for his son, is in the opinion of this commentator, the finest
piece of acting he ever did. Shaw was never a vulnerable actor, and this is one
of the very few times we glimpse a tender side to his personality. It is an
extremely moving scene, beautifully played. Anne Bancroft as Jenny Churchill
captures all the vivacious charm and steely fortitude as his mother, the other
dominating influence in his early life.
Attenborough wisely choose to go with an unknown for the pivotal role of
Churchill. It was a fortuitous decision that brought spectacular results.
Simply said, Simon Ward is Churchill. Not only does he look like young Winston,
he is by turns sensitive, haughty, dashing, and always winsome. His embodiment
of Churchill's physical gestures and vocal intonation are truly amazing. In
what seems to be traditional for the historical epic, the supporting cast is
first rate. Along with Shaw and Bancroft, Jack Hawkins, John Mills, Pat
Heywood, Ian Holm, Patrick Magee, Anthony Hopkins, Edward Woodward, Laurence
Naismith, Robert Hardy, and Colin Blakely all have effective cameos. Hawkins is
especially good as Mr. Welldon, Headmaster at Harrow. in a subtle comic turn
and without saying a word Hawkins uses his very expressive face to register his
total perplexity as to how to grade a blank piece of paper young Churchill has
turned in. Equally good is John Mills. Mills made a cottage industry at playing
stiff upper lip types, such as Scott of the Antarctic. As Lord Kitchener he is
at his most stiff upper lipped. He is perfect as the Great Man with the steely
blue eyes, (Kitchener's face was used for the British equivalent of the Uncle
Sam, "I Want You!" recruiting poster in WWI) who personified the
Victorian soldier hero. "Young Winston" is a grand, rousing
historical epic beautifully capturing the pageantry of Britannia at the height
of Empire while never losing sight of the young man who one day would become
one of her greatest sons. Rule Britannia!
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
The
New York Times (Vincent Canby) review
CRY FREEDOM
Great Britain (157 mi)
1987 ‘Scope
Donald Woods (Kline), editor of the Daily Dispatch, following the publication of a critical article on black activist Steve Biko (Washington), is challenged to meet him, and is won over. After Biko's brutal murder by the South African police, Woods refuses to accept the official cause of death (hunger strike) and campaigns for a full public enquiry. Viciously persecuted along with his wife and family, he finds that flight is the only answer. The initial stages of this epic movie are somewhat stodgy, but once Attenborough achieves his momentum there's no holding him. The performances are excellent, the crowd scenes astonishing, and the climax truly nerve-wracking. An implacable work of authority and compassion, Cry Freedom is political cinema at its best.
User comments from imdb (Page 2) Author: rowmorg from Eel Pie
Island
It's sad to view this film now that we know how the ANC got shafted by international capitalism. Biko died for nothing much. Woods achieved little. Yes, outright apartheid was abolished, but all the apparatus of power was reserved by the minority whites, leaving the ANC government more or less impotent. As Naomi Klein writes in The Shock Doctrine, in the talks between the black and white leaderships "the deKlerk government had a twofold strategy. First drawing on the ascendant Washington Consensus that there was no only one way to run an economy, it portrayed key sectors of economic decision making --- such as trade policy and the central bank --- as "technical" or "adminsitrative". Then it used a wide range of new policy tools --- international trade agreements, innovations in constitutional law and structural adjustment programs --- to hand control of those power centres to supposedly impartial experts, economists and officials from the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT and the National Party --- anyone except the liberation fighters from the ANC." The statistical results are horrifying, with not much change accomplished, and AIDS flourishing. Viewing Cry Freedom in this light is deeply ironic --- actually tragic. The ANC has transformed itself from being the solution to being the primary problem.
Washington
Post (Rita Kempley) review
Sir Richard Attenborough is a chivalric filmmaker with a passion for great men, and "Cry Freedom," the storyof South African activist Stephen Biko, is a heraldic pageant about such a hero. There's an elegiac quality to this epic biography, which depicts Biko, martyred in 1977 while in the custody of the South African security police, as a monument to the justness of his cause. Like "Gandhi," it's less a portrait of the real person than the canonization of a modern saint.
This version of the story serves as not only a stirring salute to Biko's sacrifice, but also a scathing condemnation of apartheid. Though Attenborough is heavy handed in his treatment of the ruling whites, his seems a just and mighty anger. These racists hide behind black hoods instead of white sheets, relishing a climate of supremacy that inevitably breeds brutality. Clearly, the Afrikaners are Attenborough's Nazis.
"Cry Freedom" is based on "Biko" and "Asking for Trouble," books by Donald Woods. The movie shapes itself around the friendship between Woods, a smug white liberal journalist, and Biko, the gentle intellectual who expands Woods' cozy horizons. At first, Woods attacks Biko as a black supremacist, but he revises his opinion when he meets with the activist. The first half of the movie traces the friendship, concentrating on Biko's career, but the second concerns Woods' escape from South Africa with Biko's contraband biography.
Attenborough has been criticized for the second half, an action thriller that tags a white hero onto what some felt was a black hero's story. But that's a little like whipping Paul Simon for introducing Ladysmith BlackMambazo to American audiences. In both cases, the ends justify the means. And here that end is to expose the spiritual and physical genocide of apartheid. South Africa hides behind a press blackout; "Cry Freedom" exposes it in the bright and persuasive light of Biko's consciousness.
American Denzel Washington, a regular on "St. Elsewhere" and costar of "A Soldier's Story," plays Biko. He gives a zealous, Oscar-caliber performance as this African messiah, who was recognized as one of South Africa's major political voices when he was only 25. Biko was unflappable, logical and witty in life, and Washington conveys that solidity onscreen.
"Why call yourselves black?" asks an Afrikaner judge. "You people are more brown than black."
"Why do you call yourselves white? You people are more pink than white," Biko replies.
Ashistory shows, laughing at the bully boys is a good way to get yourself crucified. Nothing makes cowards madder, and Biko relished taunting them. Eventually he was made a banned person, forbidden to travel outside his home district, to write, even in his own journal, or to be quoted by name in the media. But he wrote on, hiding the pages in his baby's diapers, and spoke to an audience ostensibly assembled for a soccer game.
In a perfect counterpoint to Washington's performance, the chameleon Kevin Kline takes on the part of Woods. With a softly clipped accent, he seems as accustomed to the character as a Londoner to his umbrella. Unlike Biko, Woods evolves over the course of the film. Through his association with Biko and his increasing activism, Woods also becomes a banned person, an example to other whites who would side with the black cause.
"CryFreedom" also shows us a South African SS, secretive and sadistic in its effort to keep Woods in line. Woods even suspects the agency of sending his children T-shirts soaked in an acid that burns their eyes and skin. Frightened of the government and determined to get Biko's story published, the Woodses flee the country. And while we miss Biko's spirit, we're involved in Woods' adventure.
The proficiency of the actors powers the movie despite a stiff script and Attenborough's preference for choreographed crowd scenes over intimacy. He's a Cecil B. De Mille disciple and doesn't know it. The movie's most moving moments come from a heavenly perspective, as we overlook the sea of mourners at Biko's funeral.
That stateliness serves Biko's story well. But it doesn't spark
the suspense thriller that is Woods' escape from South Africa. "Cry
Freedom" does get us all choked up with its good intentions and the vast
visions of both its heroes.In the best of all possible worlds, Attenborough
would have focused on Biko as he did on Gandhi. We can be picky, even petty, or
we can congratulate him for telling the story. "Cry Freedom's"
strength, oddly, is its own fusty noblesse oblige.
not coming to a theater
near you (Eva Holland) review
Hollywood's
apartheid: 3 films Nicholas
Wellington from Jump Cut, May 1991
Movie ram-blings
(Ram Samudrala) review
Edinburgh U Film Society
(Ben Stephens) review
Washington
Post (Desson Howe) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [2.5/4]
Siskel
& Ebert (video)
The
New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
Aubier, Stephane
A TOWN CALLED PANIC (Panique Au Village)
Belgium France
Luxembourg (75 mi) 2009 co-director: Vincent Patar
Peter Brunette at Cannes from The Hollywood Reporter, May 22, 2009
CANNES -- There's really very little to say about this film
beyond that it's absolutely brilliant. First-time Belgian feature-length
filmmakers Stephane Aubier and Vincent Patar, prodigiously gifted, have come up
with something truly special here. Though Cannes has begun to notice animation
in recent years ("Shrek") and even chose the delightful "Up"
for this year's opening film, "A Town Called Panic" is the first ever
stop-motion animated feature film included in the official selection.
The main characters are Cowboy, Indian, and Horse, who improbably live together
in a town called Panic. They are plastic toys, twisted into impossible
positions, which rest on little stands, and it's this fact that provides a
great deal of the film's novelty. Various bizarre and even surrealistic things
happen to them, as they journey to the center of the earth, get stuck in something
that resembles the North Pole, and discover a parallel universe of water that
is populated by pointy-headed bad guys who wear diving suits and goggles and
look really, really weird.
The jokes come fast and hard, and part of the humor arises from the American
accent (in French) and the American slang that the characters use. But nothing
much will be lost if an enterprising U.S. distributor jumps on this property
and records an even funnier English-language soundtrack that won't require
reading subtitles.
Even better are the imaginative visuals that are paraded non-stop before the
viewer's dazzled eyes. The filmmakers have also solved the usual problem of
full-length animation by producing an insane level of continuous action and a
constant change of fascinating locales. Even if you don't normally like
animation, you should give this film a look.
A
Town Called Panic (Panique Au Village)
Allan Hunter at Cannes from Screendaily
And now for
something completely different. A blast of freewheeling inventiveness, A
Town Called Panic is the feature version of the widely screened
television series from Belgian animation duo Aubier and Patar. Imagine the Toy
Story franchise infused with the mischievous sensibility of South Park
and crafted in meticulous stop-motion animation and you begin to get the
measure of a film that seems tailor-made for cult status.
Defining the
potential audience will be the challenge for any distributor. Many adults will
find that a little of Panic goes a long way whilst it may be too offbeat
for children more accustomed to Pixar fare or the cosy antics of animation
stalwarts Wallace and Gromit. On the other hand children seem happily
attached to SpongeBob SquarePants so the world of Panic may not
be too much of a stretch.
The 2003
television series ran to 20 short episodes. Aubier and Patar attempt in the
feature version to sustain their bubbling invention over a much longer
running-time and largely succeed without recourse to a conventional narrative. Panic
remains a cardboard rural world in which anything can and does happen.
Using generic
plastic toys as the basis of their characters, the duo create a string of incidents
around the lives of Cowboy (voiced by Stephane Aubier), Indian (Bruce
Ellison) and Horse (Vincent Patar) who all live together beside Steven
the farmer (Benoit Poelvoorde) and his wife Jeanine (Veronique Dumont). Cowboy
and Indian decide to celebrate Horse’s birthday by building him a barbecue but
a mistaken internet order for 50 million bricks rather than 50 begins a surreal
adventure that takes them from the centre of the earth to a parallel underwater
world where they do battle with pointy-headed creatures and barracudas.
Panichas all the make- believe and absence of
logic found in the games one played as a child. The humour lies in the human
emotions given to these plastic toys with Horse turning all shy and bashful
when confronted by attractive music teacher and mare Madame Longray (Jeanne
Balibar). Longray has a foxy orange mane and Horse signs up for piano lessons
just to win her heart. It is surprising just how expressive the plastic
toys become.
Then there are the
voices that Aubier and Patar describe “as if their very air contains both
amphetamines and laughing gas”. Aubier’s Cowboy is more reminiscent of
the late Michel Serrault at his most camply hysterical in La Cage Aux
Folles.
Panicbelongs to a long tradition of inspired
silliness that stretches from Lewis Carroll to the Goons and Monty Python.
There are echoes too of the eccentricity in Sylvain Chomet’s BellevilleRendez-Vous.
Panic is less consistent than any of these comparisons and unrelentingly
manic in a way that eventually becomes tiresome. The screen is filled with
Heath Robinson-style contraptions, fireworks, a rock’n’roll number, cows
parachuting in the sky, giant snowballs and towers of bricks but there is still
a point at which even the most charmed viewer will decide that you can have too
much of a good thing.
Todd Brown Twitch
Cannes
'09: Day Nine Mike D’Angelo at
Cannes from The Onion A.V. Club, May
22, 2009
A
Town Called Panic David Hudson at
Cannes from The IFC Blog, May 22, 2009
Leslie Felperin at
Cannes from Variety, May 22, 2009
Audiard, Jacques
David
Thomson on Jacques Audiard David
Thomson from The Guardian, January 7,
2010
In Cannes last year, Jacques Audiard's Un Prophète did not win the Palme d'Or. Instead, that prize went to Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon – and some observers murmured that it was because the Audiard picture was too gripping, too entertaining, too much like an old-fashioned prison drama. It's a dilemma that might amuse Audiard, the fond son of a seasoned screenwriter who wrote some of the big French movies of the 1950s. But Un Prophète marks 15 years in Jacques Audiard's career as a director, and if he is not exactly established yet, or consistently in character, it's about time we saw fit to place him in the company of such distinguished French directors as Julien Duvivier, Jacques Becker and Jean-Pierre Melville.
His first film, in 1994, was Regarde les Hommes Tomber, and it won a César for best first film. It was a fairly conventional noir story – the sort of thing you might expect from someone raised as a dinner-table screenwriter – with good performances from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Mathieu Kassovitz. It was a cunning tale of two stories that gradually tied themselves into a pretty knot.
Two years later, Audiard surprised everyone with his next
film. In A Self-Made Hero, Kassovitz plays a dreamy would-be writer, unfit for
war service, who gently writes himself into the history of the French
Resistance. It is authentic, if unexpected comedy, with Trintignant again as
the much older man looking back on the audacious escapade. Comedies about the
Resistance are never going to be common in
There was a gap of five years then before Read My Lips. Emmanuelle Devos is an office worker who is deaf. She hates her job, she is enclosed – as much by her personality as her impairment. She needs help, so she hires an assistant – an ex-con, played by Vincent Cassel with very little attempt to hide his past. I'm not sure the association is ever fully plausible, but it uncovers the damaged psyches of both parties. The plotting is elaborate and cunning, and it is a film in which you have to hear what people "say" and still read their lips – even if it may be a failure ultimately.
The danger in Audiard's choices was only accentuated by The
Beat that My Heart Skipped – a remake of James Toback's Fingers, in which
Harvey Keitel played a minor
There is a sentimental streak in Audiard, I think, and a feeling that loose ends in a screenplay need to be tied together. Yet Audiard's most interesting vision may lead to a determination to let untidiness prevail. Fingers was never anywhere near a commercial success, but it has become a cult success largely because its extremism frightens and astonishes. The Beat that My Heart Skipped was a tidy success wherever it played, and Audiard knew exactly when and how to make it sexy, violent or comic. But Fingers was a Freudian fairytale, a textbook study in infantilism, whereas Audiard seems reassured by the idea of good entertainment. There is a minor feeling against Un Prophète that for all its suspense and comradeship – not to mention its violence – it is a picture that wants to make us feel good.
Audiences will decide and I hope they'll enter into an Audiard retrospective. He is a large talent, probably in his prime. It is up to him how challenging he wants to be, or how comfortable.
Jacques Audiard:
Facts, Discussion Forum, and Encyclopedia Article biography from Absolute Astronomy
Cinema Scope » Currency
| Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, France)
Richard Porton from Cinema Scope
(Undated)
Dangerous
liaisons: Why Jacques Audiard is the French Scorsese ... Kaleem Aftab from The Independent, January 20, 2010
Jacques
Audiard's films reflect reality - SFGate
Ruthe Stein from The SF Gate,
February 10, 2010
Audiard, Jacques They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Guardian
Interview (2002) All That Glisters, by Peter Lennon from
the Guardian,
indieWIRE
Interview (2002) by Andrea Meyer,
indieWIRE
Interview (2005) by Liza Bear
Fabien Lemercier Interview with Audard
by Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa, May 16, 2009
Interview:
Jacques Audiard | Film | The Guardian Jason Solomons interviews Audiard from The Observer, December 5, 2009
Jacques
Audiard Matthew Power interview from
Underground Republik, January 16, 2010
INTERVIEW: Jacques Audiard Guy Lodge from In Contention,
Interview
with Jacques Audiard, director of A Prophet
Aseem Chhabra interview from Passion for Cinema,
Jacques
Audiard: 'I wanted to give migrants a name, a shape… a ... Jonathan Romney
interview from The Guardian, April 3,
2016
Jacques Audiard -
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
SEE HOW THEY FALL (Regarde les
hommes tomber)
Time
Out review Geoff Andrew
The first feature of the screenwriter Jacques Audiard is a clever thriller that fascinates as much for its ingenious, elliptical structure as for its noir-derived insights into obsession, loyalty and betrayal. Yanne's the salesman whose mid-life crisis coincides with his inadvertent involvement in the murder of a cop; as he sets out to trace the killer, his life begins to fall apart. At the same time, we witness the faltering growth of the friendship between seedy, aggressive con-man Trintignant and slow-witted innocent Kassovitz. Inexorably, but in surprising ways, the two stories gradually converge. And because it ends up admitting to the homo-erotic dynamics of the Trintignant-Kassovitz relationship, it's also, finally, rather more moving than the enigmatic early scenes lead one to expect.
User reviews from imdb Author: writers_reign
This was the first film by Jacques Audiard whose father Michel wrote more than 120 screenplays, mostly pedestrian though he did work, for instance on Les Tontons Flinguers. Jacques himself eased his way into directing via writing and won a minor writing credit on Toni Marshall's Venus Beaute though it's difficult to imagine exactly what he contributed given that the world of his four feature films - he followed this with Un heros tres discret, Sure mes levres and this years De battre mon couer s'est arrete - is light years away from that of Marshall. On balance it's not a world I care much about though usually there's at least something to admire - Manu Devos for example - in each one with the possible exception of the last. In this debut he got to work with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Jean Yanne and an elliptical plot that emerges like Kafka being proof-read by Faulkner. It takes a while but eventually we realize that Marx (Trintignant) is addicted to gambling but not, alas, to winning. To get out of the hole he reluctantly agrees to 'hit' someone but finds he can't do it so a younger man, Johnny (Matthieu Kassovitz) with learning difficulties, who has attached himself to Marx, volunteers to deputise, thus do people bond. Somewhere along the line Johnny wastes an undercover cop Mickey (Yvon Back) which disturbs Michey's friend Simon Hirsch (Jean Yanne) so much that he sets out on an individual crusade to track down the killers. Would that it were as simple as I've described it here but it seems that Audiard doesn't do straightforward we're fed information via an eye-dropper whilst incidentally exploring the world of homo-eroticism. Bulle Ogier, a major selling-point for me has a blink-and-you'll miss it cameo and that's about it. I'm glad I saw it but wouldn't necessarily go back for seconds.
Variety
(Lisa Nesselson) review
"See How They Fall," a deft interlocking tale of two small-time hoods and an unlikely avenger, is morally ambiguous and dosed with irony in the noir tradition. Dark, compelling helming debut by veteran scripter Jacques Audiard should do nicely at Gallic wickets and rack up healthy tube sales.
Carefully layered flashbacks, navigated via the sparing use of voiceover and lightly mocking title cards, propel this gritty character study-cum-thriller.
Simon Hirsch (Jean Yanne), a salesman having a bout of midlife apathy, reluctantly agrees to monitor a stakeout for his dashing younger pal, Mickey, a cop. When Mickey is rendered comatose in a cryptic shooting that the police have no interest in solving, Simon abandons his job, his wife (Bulle Ogier) and his routine to get to the bottom of the hit, finding a low-key vitality en route.
Story covers three years, but this fact will be lost on all but the most attentive viewers due to the pic's elliptical, not unpleasing editing.
In a narrative realm pegged onscreen as "Well Before All This," Marx (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a grizzled gambler and confirmed loner, ends up with adoring simpleton Johnny (Mathieu Kassovitz) in tow. Marx fails at turning him into a tough guy who can help him shake people down, but Johnny's limited grasp of complex moral issues makes him an ideal hit man.
As Simon pursues his investigation in the present, Marx and Johnny forge their deadly partnership in the past. The two stories run parallel to each other until Simon's sleuthing leads him to the dubious duo, whereupon the time frames converge.
Lead thesps, particularly Yanne, couldn't be better in a script marbled with sardonic humor. Narrative structure is rich in telling, faintly ominous details. Photography is solid. Composer Alexandre Desplat's sometimes jaunty, sometimes eerie themes are fitting.
Pic's unsettling (but well-supported) moral appears to be that -- depending on the circumstances -- killing people can make one into a better-adjusted member of society.
The
New York Times (Caryn James) review
A SELF-MADE HERO (Un héros très
discret)
Time
Out review Geoff Andrew
Audiard's marvellous follow-up to his impressive Regarde
les hommes tomber is a deliciously inventive comedy about a shy, cowardly,
none-too-bright nobody (Kassovitz, director of La Haine) who through a
mixture of luck, determination and downright lies manages to pass himself off
as a WWII Resistance hero. It may be seen as a sly satire on
Austin
Chronicle (Russell Smith) review [3.5/5]
If hard work and virtue are really all we need to live our
dreams, why are so many of us busting our humps as cabbies, waitresses, and
freelance writers? Truth be told, merit and opportunity are doled out
haphazardly, leaving deceit as many people's best hope for a piece of the good
life. In this distinctive, thought-provoking film, Jacques Audiard (Confessions
of a Crap Artist) suggests that society not only tolerates but actually
encourages the use of sham credentials as get-ahead tools. Audiard's case in
point is Albert Dehousse (Kassovitz), a draft-evading country nebbish who, during
World War II, fabricates a heroic background as a French Resistance fighter.
Albert's weak, eager-to-please nature makes him unusually susceptible to the
idea, pushed on him by his mother, friends, and employer, that truth is less a
straight-edged razor than a versatile Swiss Army Knife. Shortly after the war
ends, Albert leaves his wife and, on a whim, hops a train to
San
Francisco Examiner (Barbara Shulgasser) review
IN THE FINAL months of a war he hasn't fought in, Albert Dehousse (Mathieu Kassovitz) decides to become a hero, or at least to give the impression that he is one, and so invents a life he didn't live. This is the terrific premise of "A Self Made Hero," writer-director Jacques Audiard's brilliant French film.
The under-subject is even more sly. Audiard and co-writer Alain Le Henry, working from the novel by Jean-Francois Deniau, slip Albert into a circle of former Resistance fighters at the end of World War II and use the metaphor of a man prettying up his biography to parallel the reinvention of post-World War II French morality. "A Self Made Hero" is a powerful but not preachy indictment of French-Nazi collaboration and anti-Semitism.
Kassovitz, who wrote, directed and starred in "Cafe au Lait," is a riveting presence. His somber face and bland manner make it easy for him to assume a persona similar to that of "Being There's" Chance Gardiner, but with a vaguely malevolent twist. Kassovitz's Albert insinuates himself into the hearty reunions of the Resistance fighters with such ease that you begin to think of the possession of scruples as a severe impediment to living a good life. Of course, this is exactly what the film is about.
In discussing the film, Audiard has referred to
Audiard wants to cleanse French history of the Charles de Gaulle-manufactured fiction that in the war, "we were no longer defeated, we were conquerors; we were no longer collaborators, we were Resistance fighters."
Some of the best scenes involve Albert rehearsing his new self, the suave self who knows how to speak English, the one who knows the history of the war, who is calm in the face of danger, who knows how to talk confidently to women, who can be charming in the way an undercover operative would have to be.
Albert is not the first liar in his family. The lies began when his mother
told him that his father had died valiantly in World War I at
Audiard is working with wonderful material, and he extracts the most out of it through the use of imaginative cinematic techniques. He frames the story - set in a period from 1944 to 1945 - with a present-day narrative delivered straight to the camera by veteran actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, who, it becomes clear, is Albert today looking back on his deception.
Intercut throughout the film are moments in which the young Albert, in his underwear, mugs for the camera, growing up enthusiastically before our eyes as if buoyed by the canny imposture he will one day commit. Somehow these audacious moments don't take us out of the story but only add to our understanding of the character. This movie is a pleasure, an entertainment and an admirable artistic achievement.
ReelViews (James
Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
Pedro Sena retrospective [4/5]
Film Scouts
(Karen Jaehne) capsule review
Urban
Cinefile (Australia) Andrew L. Urban
and Louise Keller
Edinburgh U Film
Society (Stephen J. Brennan) review
Variety
(Lisa Nesselson) review
The
Boston Phoenix review Tom Meek
Philadelphia
City Paper (Sol Louis Siegel) review
San
Francisco Chronicle (Peter Stack) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The
New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
READ MY LIPS (Sur mes lèvres)
Time Out
review Geoff Andrews
Carla (Devos) does a bit of everything for a property
development firm that takes her loyalty and talent for granted, and she does it
well. But while the boss agrees to her hiring an assistant - she selects scuzzily
good-looking but clueless ex-con Paul (
A sexless tale of love from two marginal people in French society might not
sound like a thriller or a trip down
Emmanuelle Devos is Carla, a half-deaf office drone who's completely ignored at work. Full of complexes and anguish, she also uses her deafness to her advantage, clicking off her aid when it's convenient and reading lips for sport. She hires a male assistant, Paul (Vincent Cassel) who's just been sprung out of prison for robbery. Though he has no visible office skills, Carla takes him on and helps him readjust to life. He in turn gets her to let her hair down and use her lip reading skills to steal another thief's treasure.
Though there are no wild sex scenes, Audiard (Self-Made Hero) is a
master at creating sexual tension. Whether it's Devos looking at herself naked
in the mirror (a preview of the freer person she'll become) or talking on the
phone with breathy excitement as
At a recent screening of the film at the American Cinematheque in
While her lip-reading brings her much needed adventure, what she reads isn't always pleasant. Unbeknownst to her coworkers, she's privvy to what they say about her. In some lighter moments, she can drown out sound, such as when a friend's baby is wailing.
The characters undergo transformation but they never let go of their essential identities. Respect is central to this film. Though these two are disregarded in society, they connect with each other and find much needed respect. What's more, they bow to no one.
The acting is of course impeccable.
A far cry from an American romantic comedy, Read My Lips delivers romance and humor instead.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: Read My Lips (2001)
Richard Falcon from Sight and Sound, June 2002
Read My Lips combines a workplace romance with a
neo-noir thriller centred on a deaf femme fatale
After his accomplished
French-resistance drama A Self-Made Hero (Un Héros très
discret, 1996), Jacques Audiard's Read My Lips (Sur
mes lèvres) returns to the neo-noir of his debut See How They Fall
(Regarde les hommes tomber, 1993). It demonstrates how discreet
but ambitious aesthetic daring and an eye for nuance and detail can produce
intelligent, absorbing and resonant European genre cinema. As the strapline on
the film's French posters - "She taught him good manners, he taught her
bad ones" - suggests, the opening scenes, detailing the heroine's daily
office drudgery, seem to cue a comedy of manners. Secretary Carla's isolation
within office life is fluidly invoked by a sense of claustrophobia - her
environment is both blandly oppressive and recognisably everyday, another
contribution to French cinema's current preoccupation with the world of work
and its discontents. The film's initial premise - Carla (Emmanuelle Devos) is a
wallflower with a hearing impairment having to contend with misogynist
colleague Keller - is reminiscent of Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men
(1997), but Audiard reverses the angle to focus on Carla's needs and desires.
The film's success as both drama and thriller rests with its ambiguities about
how dark and complex these could be.
At the film's start Carla has
learned to use her disability in a similar fashion to LaBute's heroine at his
film's end: to refuse unwelcome incursions from the outside world. At the
office or as she dampens out the screams of her baby-sitting charge, Read
My Lips crafts its soundtrack around Carla's perceptions, drawing us
into her world without needing too much exposition. The emphasis is on gesture
and expression, caught in tight close-ups with a foregrounding of hands and
objects that verges on the Bressonian. The opening close-ups of Carla placing
her hearing aids discreetly behind her ears, covering them with her hair and
scooping water into her mouth from a bathroom tap bind us to her sensory
impressions. As the movie progresses, it matches this visual and aural
immediacy with a deliberate and teasing reticence about Carla's history and
motivations, preventing us from reaching easy judgements or being able to
predict her actions.
Emmanuelle Devos, veteran of a
number of relationship dramas directed by Arnaud Desplechin, is terrific in
subtly impressing on us Carla's outsider status, soliciting our identification
while preserving a sufficient edge of creepiness to keep us worried about
what's going on in her head. We are unsure, for instance, whether Carla's
colleagues know of her disability - whether it's a factor in their mistreatment
of her is unclear. To add to the ambiguity, Audiard furnishes us with an early
sequence, opaque to non-signers, in which Carla impatiently waves away a deaf
man distributing sign-language leafiets in a café, alerting us to a possible
ambivalence in her relationship to her own hearing impairment as well as making
us wonder about the psychological roots of her social isolation. This is
intensified when we see her alone later in the movie 'rehearsing' dialogue for
a date with an almost Travis Bickle-like air of disconnected, candid intensity
("So... you go with prostitutes?").
In a more formulaic movie Carla
would be a victim, an underdog heroine or an outright villain, femme-fatale
status usually being denied characters defined as conventionally unattractive.
In Read My Lips she is either all or none of the above. As she
sits in the office cafeteria with Vincent Cassel's Paul and reads the lips of
the arrogant Keller ("He's saying, 'A dog like me is lucky to get a guy
like you'"), Audiard uses her disability - and his adept blending of
everyday office horrors and the crime thriller - to give a new wrinkle to the
paranoia at the heart of film noir. Carla's disability, through the skill of
lip reading, leads her to know too much about her surroundings, not too little.
With genuine savvy, the bridge to the thriller elements in the film's
_nail-biting second half - as implausible as these may seem on cold refiection
- is built on her eventually being able to employ this skill to get what she
wants.
What she wants (after a comic
trip to recruit him as her new assistant at the employment exchange, which she
treats as a dating agency) is Paul: Vincent Cassel as the kind of French
small-time roughneck played in the 1970s by Patrick Dewaere - inarticulate,
perhaps none-too-bright, prematurely worn down, but tough and resourceful.
Cassel inhabits his character so fully that no backstory beyond Paul's debt to
gangster Marchand - Olivier Gourmet as the kind of outsmarted small-timer
patented by Elmore Leonard - is required. When Paul jumps Carla, believing that
she must have found him a temporary fiat on one of her firm's building projects
in return for some rough sex, she fends him off, later patiently explaining, as
if to a child, his mistaken motivations.
Alone in front of the mirror,
trying on sexy shoes, Carla experiments with hitherto impossible identities, a
self-made heroine. When she becomes enmeshed in Paul's violent demi-monde, and
starts to dress more sexily at the club, Paul has to rescue her from being
raped in the carpark. Shot again from Carla's POV (the film's violence is more
effective for occurring mostly off screen, allowing Audiard to manipulate the
elements of cinema to powerful effect), this is less a reassertion of macho
values or a punishment of Carla than a reminder of the harshness of Paul's
environment. Carla's true self-realisation comes through the thriller
resolution, when the shifting balance of power lands in her favour at a moment
of extreme danger.
When Keller early on falls prey
to Carla's use of Paul's criminal skills to exact professional revenge, her
exultation in the moment is presented as almost sexual, just as her pose as
Marchand's mistress allows her to parrot comically her friend Annie's boasts
about her own active sex life ("like a mindless piece of meat"). And
as Paul, beaten and helpless and handcuffed, turns to Carla as his last hope,
watching through binoculars from a nearby rooftop she reads his lips with
increasing excitement ("Yes... yes"). This ambiguous consummation -
she is now needed like never before - allows this smart French thriller to
redefine the third-act climax.
If Read My Lips'
thriller and relationship elements come together at the end with a neatness
many a well-doctored Hollywood screenplay would envy, the film nevertheless
leaves us with a deliberate, nagging inconclusiveness. A subplot involving
Paul's middle-aged parole officer Masson apparently worrying about his missing
wife is left dangling, as we see him being led away by police, presumably
charged with killing her. "He's saying he loved her," says Carla,
reading his lips.
The film's unsentimental
worldview is strangely encapsulated, though, by the unexplained intermittent
sequences of Masson bereft, alone and suicidal - as bleak a character as Gaspar
Noé's desperate middle-aged butcher in Seul contre tous. These episodes point
perhaps to a wider malaise, beyond the instrumental concerns of thriller
plotting, in which work, sex and love are driven by unknowable solitary
fantasies and steered by hard-headed negotiations and survival ploys dictated
by an at best indifferent, at worst hostile world.
Slant Magazine
review Ed Gonzalez
New York Observer (Andrew Sarris)
review
culturevulture.net,
Choices for the Cognoscenti review
Arthur Lazere
Village Voice (J.
Hoberman) review (Page 2)
The Nation
(Stuart Klawans) review (Page 2)
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie
Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
click here Neil Young from Jigsaw Lounge
Movie-Vault.com
(Avril Carruthers) review [9/10]
Read My Lips Ron Cotton from 10kbullets
Film Freak Central review Walter Chaw
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
PopMatters (Elena Razlagova)
review
The Onion A.V. Club [Keith Phipps]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
filmcritic.com
(Pete Croatto) review [2.5/5]
Qwipster's Movie Reviews (Vince
Leo) review [3.5/5]
CineScene.com (Chris
Dashiell) review
Xiibaro Productions
(David Perry) review [1.5/4]
Isthmus
(Kent Williams) review
Mark R. Leeper review [+1 out
of -4..+4]
The Land of Eric (Eric
D. Snider) review [B-]
One Guy's Opinion (Frank
Swietek) review [B-]
Movie Habit (Marty
Mapes) review [3.5/4]
The Wall Street
Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
eFilmCritic.com
review [3/5] Thom
Lessons of
Darkness [Nick Schager]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
The Village Voice
[Leslie Camhi] All About Their Mothers,
TV
Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3.5/4]
BBC
Films review Tom Dawson
The
Boston Phoenix review Peter Keough
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
Washington
Post [Michael O'Sullivan]
Washington Post
[Ann Hornaday]
Austin
Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [4/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review William
Arnold
The
Seattle Times (Moira Macdonald) review
San
Francisco Chronicle (Mick LaSalle) review
Los
Angeles Times [Kenneth Turan]
Movie
review, 'Read My Lips' Michael
Wilmington from The Chicago Tribune
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3.5/4]
The
New York Times (A.O. Scott) review
THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED (De
battre mon coeur s'est arête) B+ 92
France
There’s a monkey on my back
A French update on James Toback’s 1978 debut film FINGERS, a film considered by Jonathan Rosenbaum as little more than “macho braggadocio,” however, the hyper-kinetic style alone in this updated version rocks, mixing the in-your-face, cinema verité, hand-held camera work of Stéphane Fontaine with the immediacy of French New Wave quick cut editing, where the attention span is a mere few seconds, creating a nervous tension in the way the film is presented that matches the mood of the lead character, Romain Duris, who could be the poster child for the word angst, a sensitive thug who plays techno-rock on his headset, thumping away with his fingers to the beat, including the wrenching sounds of The Kills “Monkey 23.” He’s the son of a deceased classical pianist and an overweight, over-indulgent slumlord father, Niels Arestup, who could be a stand-in for Toback, whose mannerisms resemble late Brando. He takes care of the dirty family business for dad, retrieving, by any means necessary, the hard to collect overdue rent, usually through an improvisational violent assault that includes a near death experience. He collaborates with a couple other dirtbags-in-suits who specialize in get rich quick real estate schemes, also including a mix of Mafioso-style legalese and plenty of muscle, stopping to have an affair with the alluring wife (Aure Atika) of one of his best friends, who he usually sees when he brings his friend home drunk, making sure the Toback influenced sex and violence explode off the screen.
Duris, however, has another interest on the side – his continued interest
in being a classical pianist, which leads him to an audition later in the
month, which requires intensive training.
He hires a recent émigré from China
The
Beat That My Heart Skipped David
Denby from the New Yorker
The jumpy young hero
of Jacques Audiard's new film, Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris), works at sordid
real-estate schemes while dreaming of a career as a concert pianist. As Tom
tears around
Jacques
Audiard (‘A Self-Made Hero’, ‘Read My Lips’) translates to modern-day Paris
the dilemmas of James Toback’s 1978, New York-set ‘Fingers’ – the story of a
young man caught between art and crime, between his own ambitions and those of
his father – in an audacious move that reverses the old chestnut that you
should ignore the remake and hunt down the original instead. In place of Harvey
Keitel’s Jimmy Fingers, Audiard gives us 28-year-old Thomas Seyr (Romain Duris),
an archetypal slick and streetwise Parisian – always immaculately suited and
booted – and a man who is in perpetual conflict with himself as the victim of a
dual, contrasting inheritance from his wheeler-dealer father, Thomas (Niels
Arestrup) and his late concert-pianist mother, Sonia. When we first
encounter Thomas, he is very much his father’s boy – he works as a heavy-handed
employee of a dodgy property firm – but a chance encounter with a piano
teacher, an old acquaintance of his mother, leads to an offer of an audition
and a decision by Thomas to turn his back on the manhandling of wayward tenants
and instead prepare himself for a career in music. Thomas hires a Vietnamese
piano teacher, Miao Lin (Linh Dan
Pham), but his impatience and brash manner mean that he approaches piano
lessons as he does real-estate – as a hustler.‘You gonna make dough from
pianos?’ asks one of Thomas’s sceptical colleagues. ‘Not pianos. The piano,’
Thomas snaps back, yet his new ambition never really convinces. Rather, like
the ill-defined sexual encounters that Thomas enjoys with his friend’s wife,
the piano is an experiment, a means for Thomas to attempt to redefine his place
in the world. Audiard’s nuanced (and very well-performed, especially by Duris)
character study is ultimately about fathers and the shadow they throw over
their sons’ lives. The film’s opening scene depicts a friend of Thomas
analysing his own relationship with his ageing dad (‘You wake up one morning
and you’ve switched places’). In retrospect, it stands as a prologue to
Audiard’s intelligent study of Thomas’s own life.
The Beat That My
Heart Skipped
Michael Sicinski from the Academic Hack
I
haven't seen Fingers, the James Toback film
that Audiard has remade or, as many more informed reviews have put it, riffed on,
playing it again like a classical composition. Given the hoary genre tropes and
hairpin transitions that comprise The Beat, and having some familiarity with Toback's unhinged style, I expect
that the original Fingers plays like feral Mozart,
the constraints of genre (the classical) barely containing their outlines under
the pressure of chaotic execution. But then, I don't know for sure; I'm just
guessing. What I do know is that Audiard manages to toggle back and forth
between the two main themes -- reluctant-gangster and raw-musical-passion --
without ever really achieving counterpoint. Part of this has to do with
Audiard's firm commercial instincts, which never let him get too close to
Thomas (Romain Duris), his affably schizotypal protagonist. Although Audiard
does wonderful things with the music, letting it evoke Thomas's swoony moods
and bad-ass hyperactivity, he also can't resist filling the tensest scenes with
a useless background score, or prodding Duris into fits that telegraph creative
frustration in the most cartoonishly outsized terms. (There are moments when
Thomas is pitched somewhere around Geoffrey Rush in Shine, and then spikes the lunacy even higher,
recalling the composer
character on Sesame
Street,
banging his head against those cruel, cruel keys.) Even the film's visual
style, which is so promising in the opening fifteen minutes -- whooshing
headlights and swirling neon, a nod to the Nighttime School of Urban
Alienation, East Asian Campus --, soon becomes programmatic, with the camera
literalizing Thomas's jitters and the like. These are the same things that
irked me about Read
My Lips,
and while I do have to concede that this is a better film in every way, I guess
I just don't think the way Audiard does. While it's admirable and correct to
take Toback's outlandish premise and play it for straight pathos, the strategy
ultimately highlights Audiard's deficiencies as a director. [POSTSCRIPT: I saw Fingers a few days after The Beat, and there's no comparison. Some notes on
the Toback film can be found here.]
Reverse Shot [Saul Austerlitz] Summer, 2005
In a moment of willful confusion, Jacques Audiard’s latest
film begins with a viciousness that could perhaps give the wrong impression.
Three men enter a dingy apartment building carrying a sack, and open it to let
loose a flurry of rats, before entering an apartment and roughing up its
inhabitants. Who are these tough guys? Some may be aware that The Beat That
My Heart Skipped is a remake of James Toback’s minor classic Fingers,
in which Harvey Keitel stars as a man torn between the piano and the Mafia, and
assume that similar underworld shenanigans are at play here. They would be only
partially right, as Tom (Romain Duris) is a real-estate mogul in training,
working under the steady tutelage of his father (Niels Arestrup) to make a buck
by any means necessary, including shady ones. Tom is an angry, confused
man-child, one moment a hard-nosed wheeler-dealer, the next petulantly baiting
his father’s latest conquest (Emmanuelle Devos). It is only a chance encounter
with Mr. Fox, a musical impresario, that reminds Tom of the internal debate
that has been percolating unnoticed inside him between his father’s grinding
thuggishness, and a half-remembered dream of his mother’s musical life. Fox
offers him an audition, on the basis of his teenage proficiency, and suddenly
his entire life is called into question.
The rest of Beat consists of watching Tom’s two worlds slowly but
irrevocably head toward collision. He takes piano lessons with Miao-Lin (Linh
Dan Pham), a Chinese music student who speaks no French, prepping for his
audition while also conducting his scurrilous daily business. Tom is
twentysomething angst and confusion come to raging life, a ball of
contradictions whose lack of direction causes him to lash out in surprising
ways. Repeatedly threatening his father that he refuses to execute his dirty
work, wanting to punish him for his mother’s untimely death, he still comes to
his aid again and again, almost killing a recalcitrant restaurant owner who
threatens his father, and attempting to approach a Russian gangster who owes
him money. Music, though, pulls him away, reminding Tom of what has been
missing from his life. In interviews, Audiard has described his desire to craft
“a modest picture,” and The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a well-crafted
entertainment that harks back to the pre-New Wave French cinema of Marcel Carné
and Julien Duvivier. Its characters are the focal point, and they simply exist
rather than illustrating some projected social viewpoint. In their confusion,
we recognize our own lives, and their similar lack of a straight-arrow
Audiard enjoys keeping us on our toes, never providing an opinion about his
characters’ actions. How nefarious is the work that his father has Tom do? Is
Tom any good as a pianist? Does he have any chance of succeeding at his
audition? We never know, and part of Beat’s impressive storytelling
efficiency is its rigorous desire to leave things unsaid. Beat closes
with a coda that takes place two years after the events of the film and finds
Tom in a world very different from the one he had started in. Has Tom changed
for the better? Has the sickening violence of his past been put away for good?
Audiard allows us to make up our own minds about these questions, and many
others. The Beat That My Heart Skipped makes nothing easy for us,
refuses to simplify a thing—and ultimately, that is its gift to us.
BFI | Sight & Sound
| Film of the Month: The Beat That My Heart ... Philip Kemp from Sight and Sound, November 2005
Boston Review (Alan A. Stone)
review
The Nation (Stuart
Klawans) review
DVD
Outsider Slarek
stylusmagazine.com
(Dave Micevic) review
Slant Magazine
review Nick Schager
The Lumière Reader Catherine Bisley
Cinepassion Fernando F. Croce
The
New Yorker (David Denby) review
The Onion A.V. Club review Noel
Philadelphia City
Paper [Sam Adams]
The New York Sun (James Bowman)
review also seen here: James Bowman
review
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
Floatation
Suite [Sheila Seacroft]
Village
Voice (Michael Atkinson) review
Salon (Stephanie
Zacharek) review
d+kaz. Intelligent Movie
Reviews (Daniel Kasman) review [B-]
DVD Times Noel Megahey
DVD Verdict
(Brendan Babish) dvd review
Epinions DVD review
[Stephen O. Murray]
Jigsaw Lounge
[Neil Young] Edinburgh Film Festival
The
Cinema Source (Alysa Salzberg) review [A]
FilmJerk.com
(Edward Havens) review [A]
Film Freak
Central review Walter Chaw
A
Nutshell Review Stefan S
Georgia Straight (Mark
Harris) review
One Guy's Opinion
(Frank Swietek) review [B+]
The
Land of Eric (Eric D. Snider) review [B-]
also seen here: Eric D. Snider
VideoVista review Jonathan McCalmont
The Wall Street
Journal (Joe Morgenstern) review
PopMatters
(Lesley Trites) review
filmcritic.com
(Christopher Null) review [4/5]
Talking
Pictures (UK) review Patrick Bliss
and Howard Schumann, also seen here: CineScene.com (Howard
Schumann) review
Eye for Film
("Chris") review [4/5]
A
Persistent Vision [Vernon Chan]
Bitchin' Film Reviews [Blake
Griffin]
MovieXclusive.com
[Justin Deimen]
Eye for Film (Scott
Macdonald) review [3.5/5]
The
Spinning Image (Graeme Clark) review
DVDActive
(Paul Greenwood) dvd review [7/10]
DVD
Talk (Svet Atanasov) dvd review [4/5]
eFilmCritic.com
(Peter Sobczynski) review [3/5]
Siffblog
Review [Kathy Fennessy]
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review
TV
Guide Entertainment Network, Movie Guide review [3/4]
Variety
(Eddie Cockrell) review
BBCi
- Films Matt McNally
The
Guardian (Peter Bradshaw) review
The
Observer (Philip French) review
The
Independent (Anthony Quinn) review [4/5]
Austin
Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [2.5/5]
Seattle
Post-Intelligencer review Gianni
Truzzi
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
Movie
review: 'The Beat That My Heart Skipped'
Michael Wilmington from The
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
DVDBeaver
dvd review Henrik Sylow
A PROPHET (Un Prophète) A- 94
Audiard has created a
gripping prison drama that is unflinching in its near documentary portrait of
prison life, following for an entire film a single prisoner, Malik (Tahar
Rahim), who straddles the racial divide inside the prison, as he’s immediately
pounced upon by the Corsican crime boss on the inside, Niels Arestrup as Luciani, to either kill another Arab
prisoner to keep him from testifying or be killed himself. This effectively keeps him hated by both
groups, Muslims and Corsicans, but Luciani, despite detesting his ethnicity,
will keep him alive for small favors and as an errand boy, believing he is a
valuable commodity because of his ability to operate in both worlds. The intense violence of the picture is
immediate and wrenching, drawing us into the impossible choices awaiting prison
inmates, where life or death choices hit them in the face before they have a
chance to breathe and there is no easy out, where the actual hit is remarkably
suspenseful in the lead up to the actual event, where Malik has to learn how to
conceal a razor blade in his mouth, rehearsing endlessly as he spits blood into
a sink, but he’s not prepared for the gentle calm and quiet that precedes the
horror, which is shown with no embellishments.
It’s a bloody and horrific ordeal, kill or die, where Malik is visited
by the ghost of the deceased throughout the remainder of the picture, at times,
his only remaining friend. With scars on
his back as the only reference to his past, this young 19-year old is serving a
6-year sentence in an adult facility for unspecified crimes, with grim
corridors and a sense of fear awaiting his every step.
The choice of character is unusual, as audiences are not used
to seeing Arab gangsters, but as everyone else in prison is seen in an equally
deplorable light, Malik’s quiet appeal is somewhat idealized, as he’s portrayed
as a young innocent, unable to read or write, seen as a victim of circumstances
precisely because we don’t know his past and have never seen any victims from
his alleged crimes. Instead, what’s
startling is that he’s a kid in a man’s world, used as a servant boy for the
Corsicans who openly despise all Arabs, but they tolerate him because he did
what they asked. Silently, he serves his
time. But the audience grows curious
about his dual ethnicity, an Arab despised by his fellow Arabs because he’s
protected by and receives favors from the Corsicans, who are ethnic Italians
born on what’s considered French soil.
When a large group of Corsicans are freed, Luciani has fewer bodyguards,
leaving him largely outnumbered by Arab inmates. What may seem puzzling to viewers is the
degree to which prisoners continue to have full access to the premises, where
smuggling drugs into the facility is routine, as is walking the grounds
whenever they please, or running operations outside the prison, and where some
prison cells are rarely even locked. This
is what gives Luciani power over his competitors, as he owns the guards, but
over time, the balance of power shifts, changes that Malik is keen to
observe. The subtle interplay between
these two characters gives the film depth, as Luciani was wise to choose Malik
initially, but continues to bully and deride him, even as he matures,
underestimating what attracted him in the first place, his ability to expand
the limits of Corsican movement both inside and outside the prison.
The length of the film
gives this a near epic stature, as much like a novel, it continually builds and
expands into new territory while maintaining the meticulous attention to detail
offered from the outset, keeping the focus on how Malik sees the world, as
despite his criminal connections, it’s essential for the audience to view him
sympathetically. That’s the beauty of
the film. Despite being immersed inside
the intensely grim and brutal world of prison, the last place an audience would
choose to be, viewers will be captivated by Malik’s understated performance and
his ability to adapt to the circumstances, sometimes on the spur of the moment
when things could easily turn badly, but especially after he’s served more than
half his time and Luciani arranges 12-hour leaves for him to conduct business
on the outside. Just like in prison when
he’s asked to perform Corsican dirty work, people are surprised to see an Arab
kid, where he seems to have a guardian angel protecting him as he miraculously
escapes from some tight spots with guns pointed at his head, but here as well,
he’s expected to prove himself worthy, which is the heart of the film. Audiard does an excellent job altering the
rhythms and style of his filmmaking, adding slow motion, dream sequences, a
touch of surrealism, or contemporary music, continually keeping the audience
off balance, never knowing what to expect, but never for a moment sacrificing
the authenticity of the gritty material.
The director and Thomas Bidegain adapted a screenplay initiated by Abdel Raouf Dafri and Nicholas Peufaillit, deciding to set
the entire film inside the confines of a prison, with only brief flourishes
outside, as in much the same way we’re locked inside the mind of Malik,
intimately connected to his innermost thoughts as he evolves along a journey
from being a kid to a man. Though it’s
set in a prison, the cultural reach of this film far surpasses our
expectations, as it reveals a multi-ethnic side of
Hippies and mobsters Hippies,
Bullies and Mobsters, by Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 18, 2009
For sheer muscle and sweat,
nothing has so far beaten Jacques Audiard's terrific prison-gangster movie, A Prophet, which calls to mind
old-fashioned French thrillers by Jean-Pierre Melville and Jules Dassin's
Rififi. Niels Arestrup plays a malevolent Corsican gang boss running his outside
business from a prison cell. Tahar Rahim is Malik, a new inmate hoping to keep
his head down. But the mobster makes him an offer he cannot refuse: whack a
troublesome inmate or be whacked himself. There is a terrifying sequence as the
trembling Malik learns how to conceal a razor blade in his mouth. But slowly
the power relation between him and the boss begins to change. The film shows
Audiard to be the biggest beast in new French cinema.
The
Wall Street Journal (Joe Morgenstern) capsule review
While many movies at Telluride were meant to entertain, Jacques Audiard's masterful "A Prophet" stretches the concept of entertainment by taking us into the brutish world of a French prison—for 150 minutes—and into the seizing mind of Malik, a young Muslim prisoner played by Tahar Rahim. I've never seen a performance like Mr. Rahim's, or a character like Malik, who starts out as a frightened, illiterate kid, takes in survival skills as a shark takes in prey (Alexandre Desplat's score makes room for "Mack the Knife") and, instead of merely surviving, finally prevails over his aging Italian mentor, protector and chief rival, a fellow prisoner played brilliantly by Niels Arestrup.
The
Auteurs David Phelps at
As in most
gangster movies, character interest and plot interest are the same in A
Prophet: a man’s identity is the moves he makes. Which is why the movie
holds on as an investigation into who the main character, Arab prisoner Malik
El Djebena (Tahar Rahim), is—every move he makes is ordered by a prison
mobster, while his one or two stabs at autonomy and power are intended only to
free him from slavery, and only tangle him deeper in the system. There are all
sorts of frameworks here, a patricidal Greek tragedy, a microcosm of the Arabs’
rise to power in France, a Burt Lancaster melodrama of a old man deluding
himself of his power, a Rousseau-ian political allegory of men in chains from
nature, and a Nietzschian religious allegory about pretending man-made
structures are the dictates of god—and about the prophets who deliver the
dictates. They’re all just scaffolding for what really counts, in a world
where relationships are only economic, as if every man were a nation-state: the
rules and procedures and schemes of people staying alive in prisons and mobs in
Where Art Trumps
Industry Manohla Dargis at
Upstairs in the two grand theaters where much of the main lineup is presented — now increasingly in digital, as in the market theaters — creativity rather than commerciality dominates the conversation and sometimes the screens. Midway through the 62nd festival a few critical favorites have emerged, notably “A Prophet,” a sensational prison film and moral history from the French director Jacques Audiard that could just as easily be titled “Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Criminal.” The newcomer Tahar Rahim plays Malik, an illiterate innocent who, while in a French prison, comes under the brutal protection of a Corsican gang leader, played with animal ferocity by Niels Arestrup. (Mr. Arestrup played another paternalistic criminal in Mr. Audiard’s previous film, “The Beat That My Heart Skipped.”)
Sweeping and precisely observed — in one scene a gunman stares transfixed at a pair of expensive shoes in a shop window before committing a multiple hit — the film tells the story of one person that eventually becomes a story of an entire world ordered by violence. Using an occasional surrealistic flourish — a ghost makes regular appearances, at one point engulfed in flames — Mr. Audiard tracks Malik’s descent into this underworld with transparent compassion but none of the sentimentalizing that softens and cheapens too many mob stories. You see how violence is inscribed on Malik’s body, in old scars and new wounds, some of which he opens himself, some of which the Corsican inflicts. Prison takes care of the rest.
Review: A Prophet
- Film Comment Amy Taubin from Film
Comment, January/February 2010
Among the great acting moments in recent memory, I would place near the top of the list the following sequence in Jacques Audiard’s immersing organized-crime thriller, A Prophet: newcomer Tahar Rahim, playing the young, resourceful antihero, Malik El Djebena, stands on an airport escalator unable to totally suppress the waves of excitement, confusion, and childlike surprise flooding his face and body as he realizes that he is about to take his first plane ride—as if he were a free man like any other. Audiard has always built his movies on his male protagonist’s charisma—Mathieu Kassovitz in A Self-Made Hero (96), Vincent Cassel in Read My Lips (01), Romain Duris in The Beat That My Heart Skipped (05)—but here, he took a gamble on an unknown, inexperienced actor, and it pays off brilliantly. We have the sense, perhaps, that the actor, like the character, is making it up as he goes along, and that one miscalculation or momentary loss of concentration could lead to disaster—for the character and the film itself. Seemingly effortless, it is a prodigious high-wire act, and it should have resulted in as many awards for Rahim as the film itself has already received. The focus of every scene, he leads us through the thickets of the plot as if nothing matters except how he manipulates everyone else to ensure his own survival.
Like the strangely alluring The Beat That My Heart Skipped, A Prophet is a genre movie that mixes lyricism and violence with a detailed depiction of the little-remarked underbelly of an institution that the kind of people who go to Audiard movies—at home and abroad—would rather ignore. Here, it is the rise to power in France of an Arab mafia, vying for turf with the older established Corsican and Italian criminal organizations. The film has been compared to The Godfather; its depiction of a youth of decidedly non-royal lineage working his way up the underworld ladder is, in fact, much closer to Goodfellas, and in one rock-accompanied, hyperbolically edited passage, Audiard pays homage to Scorsese’s mastery of the moment when things spin out of control. But with its lush Alexandre Desplat score, deeply shadowed compositions, and fluid, understated camera movement, A Prophet is distinctly an Audiard construction.
Born to one Arab and one Caucasian-French parent, El Djebena is already the consummate outsider when he’s arrested for a petty crime and sentenced to six years. Cesar Luciani (Niels Arestrup), a Corsican mafia kingpin still running his organization from his cell, notices Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), an Arab prisoner who is about to testify in an organized crime trial, sexually proposition El Djebena. He recruits the street-savvy, seemingly fragile kid to murder his wannabe lover, telling him that if he refuses, he will be killed himself. El Djebena does the dastardly deed, but guilt and repressed sexual desire cause him to incorporate his victim into his psyche. Reyeb becomes a kind of ghost guide, appearing to El Djebena both in his sleep and while awake, and his last living words of advice—that the boy must find a way to leave prison with more education than he had when he came in—are followed to the max.
As a reward for the favor El Djebena has done Luciani, he’s given the protection of the Corsicans, but as an Arab, he’s treated with contempt. Eventually, Luciani wrangles the authorities to grant El Djebena, who has become a model prisoner, some time on the outside so he can ensure that he has a job when his sentence is up. Entrusted by Luciani to carry messages to his allies, El Djebena begins to do his own deals and to play various factions against one another. His reputation is enhanced when, aided by a vision of Reyeb, his senses go on high alert (this is the rational explanation) and he’s able to avert a deadly car collision. “What are you?” inquires the awed mobster who has him in handcuffs. “A prophet?” I don’t think he—or Audiard—means it ironically.
“Prophet”
Portends Pleasure in Audiard’s Arty, Coming of Age Mob Film Anthony Kaufman at Cannes from indieWIRE
If James Toback’s petty-criminal tale “Fingers” inspired Jacques
Audiard’s previous “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” it’s Martin Scorsese’s
“Goodfellas” that looms over his latest “A Prophet.” Successfully balancing
art-film portraiture with a gangster picture’s plot, the film may be one of the
more conventional movies in this year’s
“A Prophet” chronicles the criminal education and identity formation of an 18-year-old Arab kid sent to prison for a 6-year-sentence. When we first meet Malik El Djebena (excellent newcomer Tahar Rahim), he’s a scared and ignorant kid, with an 11-year-old’s education, unsure of how to navigate the overwhelming new realities of prison life. Audiard skillfully captures Malik’s confusion with a wandering handheld camera and his limited worldview with a masked lens that only reveals a small circular portion of the frame - a closed-off perspective that will inevitably widen by the films’ conclusion.
Utterly isolated, with no family or friends in or outside the prison, Malik struggles to stick to himself and keep a low profile, a strategy that only works for so long. Soon Malik finds himself in the protection of the Corsican mafia—headed by the white-haired patriarch Cesar (played by veteran Niels Arestrup, reprising his complicated father-figure from “Beat That My Heart Skipped”). Malik’s safety comes with servitude: His first task for the Corsicans is the murder of new Arab inmate Reyeb, a harrowing assignment involving the delivery of a razor blade hidden in his mouth to the target’s jugular. With this first major set piece, Audiard sets the stage for the film to come: a mixture of bloody violence - a la Scorsese - with the interior struggles and ambitions of his protagonist.
Audiard charts Malik’s rise through an array of characters: some important, a Muslim friend Ryad, who helps Malik learn to read and eventually offers him his only sense of real family; others somewhat extraneous, Jordi the Gypsy, a drug dealer who fuels Malik’s underworld career. Title headings and character names printed on the screen provide a guide for those who will play a role in Malik’s development, but don’t really add much to the proceedings. Other stylistic flourishes work to lesser and greater degrees: a pair of slow-motion dream sequences may distract from the more urgent verite visuals; while surrealist sequences involving Reyeb’s return to Malik’s guilty conscience offer depth to Malik’s state-of-mind and internal battles with his Arab identity.
At two and half hours in length, “A Prophet” doesn’t feel slow, showing Malik’s growth in step-by-step stages that naturally evolve—while never losing sight of the fact that he remains an innocent. A scene involving Malik’s first plane trip provides a welcomed and lighthearted reminder that the character, now a major player navigating both Corsican and Arab gangs, is still a kid at heart. Newcomer Tahar Rahim gives Malik the right combination of tough bravado and naivety; watching him evolve is one of the film’s chief pleasures; and while the actor may not have the eyes of Emanuelle Devos (Audiard’s “Read My Lips”) or the energy of Romain Duris (“Heart Skipped”), he’s got plenty of boyish charm.
In fact, “A Prophet” is best seen as a portrait of a young Arab man in search of his identity. Whatever not-so-subtle Oedipal conflict emerges between Malik and Cesar, the bond doesn’t have the emotional weight or dramatic satisfaction to sustain the film. What audiences will most remember about “A Prophet” is not Malik’s troubled relationship with this father figure so much as the sight of a man come of age, finally standing tall with his fellow Arab brothers.
A
Prophet (Un Prophète) Jonathan
Romney at Cannes from Screendaily, also seen here: Screen
International (Jonathan Romney) review
When it
comes to hard-bitten crime cinema, Jacques Audiard has few equals in Europe,
and his violent, gripping prison drama A Prophet shows him extending his
range with unimpeachable command. The story of a gauche young inmate who rises
through the criminal ranks to become a formidable player, A Prophet
works both as hard-edged, painstaking detailed social realism and as a
compelling genre entertainment.
The only
thing that might hamper commercial prospects is a labyrinthine, sometimes
perplexing narrative, but otherwise the film – to be released in France in
August - should have the same international appeal as last year’s Cannes crime
hit Gomorrah. Its unapologetically testosterone-laden tenor will give
the film a resonance way beyond the international art-house constituency that
embraced Audiard’s last film, The Beat That My Heart Skipped. Expect
this stimulating film also to be much discussed in the French media in terms of
its topical backgrounds, the national prison system and France’s Islamic
population.
Set largely
within prison walls and featuring an almost exclusively male and
non-professional cast, the film details the prison career of Malik el Djebena
(newcomer Rahim), a 19-year-old man of North African origin but estranged from
the Muslim community. Sentenced to six years on an unspecified charge, Malik is
chosen by Cesar Luciani (Arestrup), feared kingpin of the prison’s reigning
Corsican gang, to kill a prisoner named Reyeb (Yacoubi) who initially offers
Malik drugs in exchange for sex. Malik commits the bloody murder, and – thanks
to Luciani’s near-total control of the prison’s internal workings - gets off
scot-free. This makes him a lieutenant in the prison’s Corsican gang, initially
entrusted only with menial duties and disparaged as an Arab outsider.
Haunted by
visions of a ghostly Reyeb, and determined to get on, the illiterate Malik not
only learns to read, but teaches himself Corsican, surreptitiously learning the
ins and outs of Luciani’s business. Another inmate, Ryad (Bencherif), becomes
Malik’s friend, later his ally on the outside. When Luciani arranges periods of
leave for Malik, entrusting him with various criminal missions, Malik takes the
opportunity to do some business of his own, setting up a drugs trade with
Ryad’s aid. Life gets increasingly dangerous for Malik, both inside and outside
prison walls, but he seems – partly through Reyeb’s benign, unearthly influence
- to lead a charmed life. Powers of prophecy are attributed to him after
surviving a bizarre car crash – an incident presaged in an enigmatic fantasy
sequence.
Immensely
detailed both in its accounts of prison life and of the politics of organized
crime, A Prophet comes across as both a realistic film and a deeply
cynical one: it is extremely matter-of-fact in depicting a dog-eat-dog world.
Audiard fans
may miss the subtler psychological shadings of his earlier films, as well as
some of his more fabulist story-telling tendencies and stylistic flourishes.
Shot by Stéphane Fontaine with a brutally restricted iron-and-cement palette,
this is a business-like film, with a cinematic language as punchy and
stripped-down as they come: only a few stylistic frills (the aforementioned
fantasy sequence, a blurry iris-style effect evocative of Malik’s
claustrophobic existence) break the general tenor, and even the occasional
visitations of the dead Reyeb are assimilated perfectly, barely compromising
the overall realism. Chapter titles and captions identifying key characters
help us keep a tab on the film’s complexities.
Newcomer
Tahar Rahim carries an extraordinary weight, on screen practically in every
shot, and proves a mesmerising centre to the film, limning Malik as an
unformed, seemingly weightless figure at the start, who gradually acquires
considerable depth, forging his personality and mind through hard conscious
struggle. Rahim’s quiet, seemingly artless charisma makes Malik immensely
sympathetic, even though this ruthlessly lucid film makes no bones about the
amoral lengths he goes to in the name of survival. A largely unfamiliar cast –
very few of them the central-casting plug-uglies usually seem in prison dramas
– give the film a flesh-and-blood plausibility, while the weather-beaten Niels
Arestrup (who also appeared in Audiard’s The Beat…) is formidable and
menacing, eventually even vulnerable as the old-guard don.
A Prophet |
Film review | Film | The Observer
Philip French,
Born in
All his films are elaborately constructed, deeply ironic stories about crime and character. However, in what is still in some ways his most subversive work, A Self Made Hero, a devious young man takes advantage of the social chaos of the last days of the Second World War to reconstruct himself as a hero of the Resistance.
His new film is a violent prison drama, set in contemporary
César gives Malik the choice of either killing Reyeb, a gay Arab who's shortly to give evidence in a mob trial, or be killed himself. The boy discovers there is no possible appeal to the indifferent, corrupt authorities. Reyeb treats him decently but in a terrifyingly protracted killing Malik cuts him up with the safety razor he's been taught to conceal in his mouth. He's learnt his first lesson and is taken under the bat-like wings of the brutal César, becoming his eyes and ears when he eventually reveals that he's secretly learnt Italian and Corsican.
Over the next six years of claustrophobic incarceration, Malik is given
increasingly greater responsibility and through string-pulling with the
authorities César gets the boy special 24-hour leaves. These are ostensibly to
prepare him to take his place again in everyday society but in fact they're to
run criminal errands. Meanwhile, Malik has found two other mentors. The first
is Ryad, an Arab prisoner with terminal cancer, who encourages him to study
languages and economics, and they remain in touch when the older man is
released. The other teacher is Jordi, a gypsy who handles the prison's drugs
and controls a gang smuggling hash into
To the violent fury of César, who expresses his anger by nearly scooping out the boy's right eye with a spoon, Malik also works with Jordi in his brief absences. But there's no stopping him. Malik steadily leaves his mentors behind as he learns to play both sides against the middle, to manipulate racial tensions, to engage in the financial long game, to act as ruthlessly and decisively as his enemies, but always to postpone revenge until it helps advance business.
Eventually, he's smart enough to get himself deliberately put in solitary
for 40 days while everyone on the outside and inside is tearing each other
apart. To Audiard, the film's title is intended to suggest that Malik is a man
of the future, but in a quite literal way an Arab gangster heading an
underworld mob in
The movie has an intense, gut-tearing reality and we see Malik change mentally and physically as the months and years pass. He develops and matures in this school for criminal education rather than moral rehabilitation, a place that is a paradigm of modern society and of capitalism at its most nakedly competitive.
This is an outstanding contribution to a great tradition of prison movies that goes back 80 years to MGM's original The Big House. It's the second fine French example this past year, after the two-part Mesrine, though, unlike the heroes of that picture, no one here bothers to escape as they know they can just as easily conduct their business from inside.
A Prophet, with its series of social and political lessons learnt and put into practice, resembles a play by Bertolt Brecht from which the ideological signposting and scaffolding have been removed. It is thus fitting that the final credits are accompanied by "Mack the Knife", Brecht and Weill's great song from their allegory of crime in Victorian England, The Threepenny Opera. But it's not the upbeat concert version of Louis Armstrong or Bobby Darin. It's a tough, harsh performance by the country singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore, one of the best I've heard.
Currency
| Un prophète (Jacques Audiard, France) - Cinema Scope Richard
Porton from Cinema Scope
For certain film critics, the encomium “well-made” has
near-talismanic powers. While it would doubtless be condescending to damn a
novel with faint praise by saying it’s, say, “well-structured,” a number of
commentators seemingly believe that film craftsmanship today is so slipshod
that merely acknowledging a basic level of competence adds up to a huge
endorsement. Or perhaps paeans to “well-made” films belie a nostalgia for a
“tradition of quality” or a yearning to recapture a pre-modernist linearity
that is even on the wane in mainstream art cinema.
Since its premiere at last summer’s Cannes Competition where it was awarded the
Grand Jury Prize, Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète has been consistently extolled
as a well-made film par excellence. In films such as Sur mes lèvres (2001) and
De battre mon coeur s’est arrêté (2005), glib pastiches of American thrillers
seems to be the dominant aesthetic. Since prison films are not an especially
well-established French genre, Un prophète resembles an unwieldy amalgamation
of Goodfellas’ (1990) narrative template and the efficiency of Jacques Becker’s
Le trou (1960), a jailbreak piece whose pyrotechnics exemplify a sleek strand
of professionalism within the history of French cinema.
Audiard’s film is, alas, much more pretentious and, in the final analysis much more disingenuous, than Becker’s eminently “well-made” pseudo-classic. Armed with loftier ambitions and nurtured by the unwarranted affection given to his unremarkable earlier films, Audiard, as he observes in a press-book interview, is interested in nothing less than reshaping mythic archetypes and redefining the French gangster/prison film. At the film’s outset, Malik El Djebena (Tahar Rahim) enters prison for a six-year term for assaulting a cop. Malik’s origins as a child of French and North African parents has great narrative significance inasmuch as he functions as an intermediary between the Arab criminal subculture and a rival Corsican milieu.
All too often, a symptom of supposed craftsmanship in traditionally “well-made” films is a pronounced mechanical, or schematic, quality. This orientation becomes clear early in Un prophète with the meeting of Malik and a Corsican crime boss with a portentous name, César Luciani (Niels Arestrup), who appears to operate his empire seamlessly from prison. Recognizing Malik as a potentially valuable underling, as well as an emissary to the Arab underworld, César recruits him to kill an Arab prisoner named Reyeb whose homosexual advances have already angered the putative hero. Just as a series of high angle shots function as tedious short hand to establish the prison’s oppressiveness, the cementing of the master/slave relationship between César and Malik sets in motion a series of narrative dominoes that determine the characters’ fate. In a few brief, almost subliminal, shots, Malik murders Reyeb with a smuggled razor and earns César’s protection and tutelage. Although Malik’s decision proves pivotal, it’s difficult for viewers to care since Malik himself is not an intriguing chameleon but more or a less a cipher.
An implicit liberal humanist who employs Zolaesque determinism to bludgeoning effect, Audiard’s fondness for a malleable, if bland, protagonist undergirds the film’s novelistic aspirations. Illiterate as well as a tabula rasa, Malik’s brutal initiation into the rites of prison is followed by his immersion in French classes and a fortuitous alliance with Ryad, an Arab prisoner untainted by associations with the influential prison factions. These sequences possess a rote-like quality; like everything else in the convoluted plot, Malik’s unsentimental education happens to him with a clunkiness tied to its inexorability. There is none of the frisson of acquiring language skills that animates the Taviani Brothers’ Padre Padrone (1977). (Admittedly, this is not a sexy subject for a commercial movie.)
The largest quandary facing Audiard is his insistence on “universalizing” Malik’s experience and ignoring the emphasis on ethnic identity reiterated in the work of “Beur” directors such as Abdel Kechiche and Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche by choosing an opaque hero whose identity might be deemed either embryonic or misshapen. Un prophète’s not unreasonable proposal is that action, not static identity, is the defining crucible for Malik and his destiny. In concrete terms, this takes the form of numerous forays into drug running, and machinations involving conflicts between Arab and Corsican mobs, that Malik participates in during various leaves for good behavior that enable him to travel beyond the prison walls. During these sequences, Malik encounters a dizzying array of minor characters—thugs and factotums from various milieus—that both threaten and cajole him. But since the routine transfers of hashish, near-fatal encounters, and internecine quarrels are so boringly conveyed—a mere accretion of calamities and epiphanies without much emotional payoff—it’s not unfair to wonder if Audiard’s mechanistic view of character robs his enterprise of the cumulative power that either a Beur director, or one attuned to those communities’ history and struggles, might have brought to the project.
At times, Audiard leavens his anemic classicism with a few gratuitously poetic touches. During one of his forays into the countryside on behalf of the Corsicans, Malik is saved from almost certain death by the collision of a car with a wayward deer, an image redolent of bargain-basement surrealism. He is also intermittently haunted by the ghost of the slain Reyeb—a gimmicky intrusion that is doubtless intended to assure us that he is nothing like amoral gangsters such as Scarface’s (1983) Tony Montana. In countless interviews, Audiard enshrines Un prophète as an antidote to De Palma’s film; ironically, what his plodding film lacks is the dynamism and cinematic invention that Scarface gleefully exudes. Goodfellas, the tale of a novice initiated into a crime syndicate who eventually betrays his tutors, is more directly referenced. But Audiard lacks Scorsese’s cinematic flair—and Un prophète’s drab script (written with Thomas Bidegain) fails to come up with an equivalent to the American movie’s mastery of street vernacular or its use of snappy voiceover.
Alain Masson in Positif also made much of the literary propensities of Audiard’s prison epic, invoking Balzacian allusions with alacrity. There is something peculiar about juxtaposing Un prophète’s supposedly superior craftsmanship with a profusion of literary baggage, however. In the 20th century at least, the most notable French prison literature fused deeply personal concerns with political commitment. In Miracle of the Rose, Jean Genet converted his years of incarceration into a highly idiosyncratic form of poetic reverie while Victor Serge’s prison agonies, fictionalized in his novel Men in Prison, provide a framework for understanding his libertarian socialism. Audiard, on the other hand, favours an impersonal, neutral style that does not suggest, to say the least, a cinematic corollary of Balzac or any other major writer (although, as suggested earlier, the tone of crude determinism recalls vulgarized Zola.)
If Audiard’s many champions are correct about anything, it’s their assertion that the immodest director has a gift for directing actors. He does indeed elicit a remarkably visceral performance from Tahar Rahim as the pliable Malik. And the scenery-chewing Niels Arestrup does make for an arresting César, at one moment pontificating like a more malevolent version of Brando in The Godfather (1972) and finally sulking petulantly as his protégé betrays him. Unfortunately, Un prophète is not a venture in which acting can be savoured without reference to its narrative incongruities.
Adhering, perhaps unwittingly, to an all-things-to all-people agenda, Audiard can both claim that his film is a pure thriller, without sociological or political import, while inspiring pained inquiries into the “disgrace” of France’s overcrowded prisons, personified by an October 2009 New York Times article that practically handed it a Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar four months early. Numerous critics have pondered whether the film’s conclusion, which ends with Malik’s release from prison and the promise of life with a new family, is “redemptive.” Yet this prospect ultimately carries little weight in a film that is sabotaged by its own contradictions—contradictions that are the product of authorial sketchiness instead of salutary complexity. Audiard does not have the courage (or the talent) to be either straightforwardly pulpy or an unabashed social realist. Consequently Un prophète, despite near-universal critical acclaim, languishes in an aesthetic no man’s land.
The best
films of 2009 | Sight & Sound | BFI
Jonathan Romney, #1 Film of the Year
according to Sight and Sound,
February 2010, also seen here: The
films of 2009 | Sight & Sound | The films of 2009: top ten - BFI
Jigsaw Lounge /
Tribune [Neil Young]
The
Village Voice [Rob Nelson]
Un
Prophète Gerald Loftus from
Avuncular American
filmcritic.com
(Chris Cabin) review [3.5/5]
Eye for Film (Anton
Bitel) review [4/5]
A
Prophet | The Harvard Crimson Andrew
F. Nunnelly
"Lost
Boys: Jacques Audiard's A Prophet and John Hillcoat's The Road" Luke Davies from The Monthly, February 2010
New York Magazine (David
Edelstein) review
A
Prophet Review :: Movies :: Reviews :: Paste Sean Edgar from Paste magazine,
The
Age review Philippa Hawker
Confessions
of a Pop Fan [Jamie S. Rich]
PopMatters
(Jesse Hicks) review
ReelViews
(James Berardinelli) review [3/4]
RopeofSilicon
(Brad Brevet) review [A+]
Eye for Film (Val
Kermode) review [4/5]
The Onion A.V. Club
review [A-] Noel Murray
FilmJerk.com
(Brian Orndorf) review [B+] also
seen here: Briandom
[Brian Orndorf] and here: DVD Talk
Global
Comment [Mark Farnsworth]
theartsdesk.com
[Anne Billson]
CineScene.com (Howard
Schumann) review also seen
here: OhmyNews
[Howard Schumann]
ScreenComment.com
[Saïdeh Pakravan]
Electric
Sheep Magazine [Toby Weidmann] Toby
Weidmann and Virginie Sélavy
Screenjabber review Justin Bateman
CHUD.com
(Devin Faraci) review
Confessions of a
Film Critic [John Maguire]
Daily
Film Dose [Alan Bacchus]
Ruthless
Reviews ("potentially offensive")
Matt Cale at Telluride
DVD Talk (Jason Bailey)
review [4/5]
Cinematical Eric Snider, also seen in a shorter version
here: The Land of Eric
(Eric D. Snider) review [B+]
CompuServe
(Harvey S. Karten) review
Cinema
Autopsy [Thomas Caldwell]
The
New Yorker (Anthony Lane) review
(Page 2)
Cannes,
Day Four George the Cyclist, May
17, 2009
Little
White Lies [Dan Brightmore]
Tiscali
UK review Paul Hurley
Combustible
Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson) review [3/4]
A Prophet 2009: Movie and film
review from Answers.com
Karina Longworth at
Cannes from SpoutBlog, May 19, 2009
Patrick
Z McGavin at Cannes from Stop
Smiling magazine, May 19. 2009
Cannes
2009 Review: Jacques Audiard's Un Prophete
Alex Billingham at Cannes from First Showing, May 16, 2009
Cannes
Breakthrough: Introducing Tahar Rahim
Eugene Hernandez at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17, 2009
ROUND
UP IV: “A Prophet” Sets The Bar; “Antichrist” Goes Too Far? Peter Knegt at Cannes from indieWIRE, May 17,
2009
Cannes
'09: Day Four Mike D’Angelo at Cannes
from The Onion A.V. Club, May 17,
2009
Cannes 2009: Pilgrim’s
Progress (“A Prophet,” Audiard)
David Phelps at Cannes, May 19, 2009
"Audiard's
"Prophet" Hailed by Critics, Bloggers as Best of Cannes" indieWIRE, May 27, 2009
Cannes.
"A Prophet" David Hudson
at Cannes from the IFC Blog, May 16, 2009
Fabien Lemercier
Interview with Audard by Fabien Lemercier at Cineuropa, May 16, 2009
BFI | Sight &
Sound | Within a closed world Ginette
Vincendeau interview from Sight and
Sound, November 2009
Interview:
director Jacques Audiard Jason
Solomons interviews Audiard from The
Observer, December 6, 2009
Interview:
Tahar Rahim on his role in A Prophet
Jason Solomons interviews Tahar Rahim from The Observer, January 17, 2010
Entertainment Weekly
review [A] Lisa Schwarzbaum
Peter Brunette at
Justin Chang at
Cannes from Variety, May 16, 2009,
also here: Variety
(Justin Chang) review
Dave
Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out London
Time Out London
(Dave Calhoun) review [5/5] [4/5]
January 21 – 27, 2010
Time
Out New York (Joshua Rothkopf) review [5/5]
February 25 – March 3, 2010
David
Thomson on Jacques Audiard David
Thomson from The Guardian, January 7,
2010
A Prophet |
Film review | Film | The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw, January 21, 2010
Blog:
Anthony Worrall Thompson is the secret ingredient in A Prophet Michael Hann from The Guardian, January 22, 2010
Blog:
Why has A Prophet won so much acclaim?
David Cox from The Guardian,
January 25, 2010
My
outside scoop on Audiard: Haneke's better
Jonathan Jones from The Guardian,
January 25, 2010
UK
box office: A Prophet shows arthouse muscle, as Avatar reigns supreme Charles Gant from The Guardian, January 26, 2010
Blog:
A Prophet shows us a multilingual future for cinema Phil Hoad from The Guardian, January 28, 2010
A
Prophet sweeps the Césars Chai Hong
Lim from The Guardian, March 1, 2010
The
Independent review [4/5] Anthony
Quinn, January 22, 2010
The
Daily Telegraph review [4/5] Sukhdev
Sandhu at Cannes, May 16, 2009
The
Daily Telegraph review [3/5] Sukhdev
Sandhu, January 21, 2010
The
Globe and Mail review James Adams
Cannes
'09 Day 4: How to make an exit
Wesley Morris at Cannes from The
Boston Globe, May 16, 2009
Boston
Globe (Wesley Morris) review [3.5/4]
March 5, 2010
San
Francisco Chronicle [Mick LaSalle]
"Jacques
Audiard's 'A Prophet' has a buzz building" Kenneth Turan at Cannes from The LA Times, May 19, 2009
Los
Angeles Times (Kenneth Turan) review
February 26, 2010
France's
'A Prophet' offers a new kind of gangster: a Muslim Chris Lee from The LA Times, February 7, 2010
Is
'A Prophet's' Tahar Rahim the next Al Pacino? | 24 Frames | Los ... Chris Lee from The LA Times, March 2, 2010
Chicago
Tribune (Alexis L. Loinaz) review
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [4/4]
The New York
Times (Manohla Dargis) review
February 26, 2010, also seen here:
Jacques
Audiard's Drama of an Arab in a French Prison - The New ...
A Prophet - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
The
Social Contract - Corsican Capers - Island Separatists ... Gerda Bikales from The Social Contract,
Winter 2003 – 2004
The Trouble with French
Identity -- In These Times G. Pascal
Zachary from In These Times, November
19, 2005
UNHCR
| Refworld | World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous ... Refworld, Minority Rights Group
International, June 2008
French
Minorities Riot The Fire This Time, A Commentary on the October/November 2005 Race
Riots in
RUST AND BONE (De rouille et d'os) B 88
France Belgium
(123 mi) 2011 ‘Scope
Another savagely brutal
film, where it seems directors have to ply ever deeper into extraordinary
realms of violence to find new avenues of exploration for a public that
apparently never grows saturated. Part
of the problem with elevating levels of violence is alienating an audience from
the characters, who are often overly alienated themselves, creating a moral
abyss or a human void, where characters onscreen are often numb to the world
around them. While Audiard has
previously created vividly interesting characters, a gangster who plays
classical piano in The
Beat That My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coeu... (2005), or a prison
inmate lured into a larger criminal underworld as an act of self preservation
in 2010
Top Ten Films of the Year: #10 A Prophet ... (2009), here his script lets
him down with two lead characters so disconnected from the world and so
completely repressed emotionally that it’s difficult to care about people who
care so little for themselves. Without
offering any background information, Marion Cotillard plays Stéphanie, a
trainer of Orca whales at the local French Marineland, while Matthias
Schoenaerts, so unbelievably compelling in Bullhead
(Rundskop) (2011), returns as Ali, a physically imposing, bulked up martial
arts kickboxer who appears to be slumming it as a nightclub bouncer. When Stéphanie gets her nose bloodied at a
nightclub brawl, Ali politely drives her home where both get a good look at one
another, but nothing comes of it. Ali
apparently left Belgium and is living with his always harried sister Anna
(Corrine Masiero), who works as a check out clerk at a grocery store, and also,
it seems, is the designated parent of Ali’s 5-year old son Sam (Arman Verdure),
with no mother in the picture and a derelict father who takes momentary
interest but then mostly ignores his responsibilities.
Ali drifts to another
job, installing black market security devices intended to spy on company staff
instead of the public, as due to union protections this is often the only way
to fire incompetent staff, becoming very popular with employers. While we get a glimpse of both of them at
their jobs, just brief sketches are provided, as neither employer is explored
with any detail, where instead Audiard creates a sense of personal detachment
simply by not taking more of an interest himself. After what amounts to an audience feel-good
music video by Kate Perry Katy
Perry - Firework - YouTube (3:54) of synchronized Orca whales jumping in
formation out of the water, all mysteriously goes haywire in a disaster that is
never really shown, only suggested in a Jane Campion-style abstract underwater
rendering that instead follows the devastating aftermath where Stéphanie wakes
up in a hospital missing both legs below the knees. While she’s psychologically traumatized,
alone and alienated in a stunning reversal of fortune, Audiard also intercuts
scenes of Ali watching YouTube video tapes of memorable martial arts fighters,
where he’s offered extra money if he’ll participate in a few street brawls,
which are little different than dog or cockfighting, as they’re brutally
repellent illegal enterprises that make gads of quick money on high stakes
betting. With no one else to turn to,
Stéphanie turns to Ali, calling him out of the blue, where he actually rises to
the occasion, refusing to show pity, offering her instead some well-deserved
consideration. It should be noted that
in the process, he continually ignores his own kid and often abuses him as
well, so Ali is hardly a sympathetic character, turning this into a variation
on the Beauty and the Beast story,
where interestingly, Stéphanie might appear to be the beauty, but internally
she feels as grotesque and disfigured as the beast, and similarly Ali might
seem to be the beast, but in her eyes, with his physical prowess intact, she
gazes longingly at the beauty in his physique and body movement, even if much
of it is displayed in brute fashion.
Much of the problem in
this film is the way Audiard just skims over the surface, treating his leads
like isolated planets revolving around themselves, never connecting to a
universe around them, fast forwarding Stéphanie’s recovery without ever showing
how difficult it is to recover from such an impactful injury. In this film, she’s able to leglessly (and
gracefully, in perhaps the most gorgeous scene in the film) swim in the sea or
miraculously walk without wobbling just days after receiving two prosthetic
legs, hardly realistic, as normally the recovery time is in months and years Stryker
soldier learning to walk on two prosthetic legs | FOB Tacoma . 5-year old Sam doesn’t age a bit, and of
course takes to Stéphanie right away, so you’d think there’s a chance Ali might
change his ways, but he stubbornly remains just as troubling with him as
always, showing little patience for the difficulties children exhibit learning
new things. Cotillard and especially Schoenaerts
are both superb and work well together, but the predictable material lets them
down, so instead this is a performance generated movie, where the complexity of
their damaged souls is actually a mirror image of one another, where they can
seek solace in what each must overcome. Perhaps
the problem is attempting to combine into one narrative a series of collected
short stories by Canadian writer Craig Davidson, so rather than a series of
vignettes, Audiard attempts to link them all together, which might explain the
disjointed and contrived narrative elements.
In this film, their developing love (without actually loving) just
happens out of the blue, much like Stéphanie’s recovery, without showing the
difficulty of the enormous personal investment needed. Somewhat reminiscent of Alejandro González
Iñárritu’s 21 GRAMS, where a freak accident causes a chain reaction, this is a
painful film about loss and disappointment, leading to a kind of unadmitted,
internalized desperation that plays out like open sores. The finale, though beautifully expressed in
the winter snow, feels horribly contrived, as Ali suddenly takes an interest in
his son, something he hasn’t done throughout the entire movie, kind of wrapping
the whole picture up in a bow. Despite
using a completely unsentimentalized approach, a story of love without romance,
fueled by two immensely damaged and heavily guarded characters, the performances
alone are not enough to suggest that shared personal misfortune can somehow
overcome human inadequacy, as the redemptive breakthrough at the end hardly
feels naturalistic or well earned.
Digital
Spy [Stella Papamichael]
A love story without romance strikes a deeper chord than you
might expect. French filmmaker Jacques Audiard brings just as much brutality to
this one as his astounding 2009 prison drama A Prophet, and again
teases an extraordinary performance out of his star.
Marion Cotillard doesn't benefit from any soft-focus close-ups as Stephanie, a
surly type who might be mistaken for a hardnosed hooker when Audiard introduces
her in the gloom of a nightclub. In fact, she trains whales at a marine park in
the south of France and her nocturnal exploits seem like an extension of her
need to exercise power over hulking beasts.
The club bouncer Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is just her type, muscling in when
she gets into trouble one night. He then turns to bare-knuckle fighting for
extra cash, ostensibly putting himself at risk to support his young son, but he
admits to rather enjoying it too. As well as violence he has a great appetite
for sex, taking it where he can find it, before promptly leaving. Stephanie
only calls him after a devastating accident in the whale pool - arrestingly
shot - which results in both legs being amputated at the knee.
For a while she scrabbles around, feeling sorry for herself, but Ali refuses to
indulge her. Instead he picks her up and carries her into the ocean where she
strips off and begins to feel more like herself again, throwing off shame and
fear.
The sight of Cotillard naked, without her lower legs, is provocative, not least
for Ali who sneaks a peek while she sunbathes. Soon, their relationship becomes
physical, but Ali refuses to get involved emotionally, instead offering his
services like a physiotherapist to an anxious patient. She accepts his
tactless, brutish ways - that is until he leaves her in a nightclub to take
home someone else.
Even among bloody scenes of bare-knuckle fighting, Ali's dismissive behavior
towards Stephanie is gruelling to watch and yet Cotillard gives a deeply
powerful performance that does not beg sympathy. She takes the blows and comes
back fighting, asserting her position with Ali and forcing him to confront the
fact that he too is crippled, albeit emotionally.
Ali's relationship with his son (Arman Verdure) is also punctuated by moments
of rapture and rage, and offers him an obvious route to redemption when the boy
finds himself in mortal danger. At the same time Audiard lets the film lapse
into conventional melodrama at this stage, and the longer Cotillard is absent
from the screen, the more frustrating this is.
The flow isn't seamless, instead undulating to the different rhythms set by its
two lead players, but it does all come together with a satisfying equilibrium
when, finally, both parties meet each other halfway. It is a love story that is
altogether raw, animalistic and achingly human.
CANNES
2012: Jacques Audiard's RUST AND BONE | Press Play Glenn Heath Jr. at Cannes from indieWire
Press Play, May 17, 2012, also seen here:
Glenn Heath Jr.
Jacques Audiard only knows how to pummel us. The French director of The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet wouldn’t know a subtle musical cue or composition if it were staring him in the face. Though such rigorous formalism isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Audiard’s overtly heightened style is problematic because it reflects a lack of interest in mining deeper territory and a thoughtless flair for obvious symbolism. This is a cinema of blunt force trauma, of momentary awe, and all the stylized violence and lens flares merely reinforce a lack of heft in the gracefully repulsive scenarios Audiard creates.
Rust and Bone, Audiard’s latest study in physical weathering and emotional repression, only further confirms his ongoing obsession with surfaces: skin, sunlight, ice, blood, and cement are all key motifs in the story of a perpetually violent ex-fighter who develops an unexpected relationship with a former Orca trainer recently crippled by a devastating accident. Both characters are deformed, one externally and the other internally, but they share an unspoken bond created by mutual rage and momentary quiet. In many instances their two experiences overlap, most strangely when the brutish Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts) is resurrected during a brutal street brawl after watching the legless Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard) use her newly acquired prosthetic limbs to walk toward him. In typical Audiard fashion, the inane reversal of fortune is heightened to the point of melodrama in super slow motion.
Strangely, the central relationship between Ali and Stéphanie, often the most interesting thing about Rust and Bone, is often left in limbo as Audiard cuts away to a number of convoluted subplots involving minor fringe characters. Lingering behind are many fascinating moments, as these two tortured characters attempt to communicate through instinct despite a lot of emotional static. There’s a stunning sun-drenched sequence where Ali carries the legless Stéphanie into the ocean, letting her swim freely as he watches from the beach. Wading in the shallow waters, Stéphanie takes off her shirt and swims into the current, regaining a sense of empowerment. Her transition in this scene feels organic, as opposed to being a product of jarring aesthetics.
For both characters, freedom is often found when engaging with nature. Rust and Bone’s defining image is of Stéphanie standing in front of a giant glass tank, her small body nearly overwhelmed by the giant Orca engulfing the frame. Her tender interactions with the whale hint at the character study Rust and Bone could have been. If sunlight and water allows Stéphanie the opportunity to realize her own self-worth, piercing ice enacts a similar wake-up call for Ali. But the film’s shameless denouement, a snowy set-piece far from the film’s primary setting in the south of France, bungles the chance for his character to attain the same level of resonance. Unlike Stéphanie, Ali’s coming-of-age moment is screenwriting 101, and steeped in sentimentality.
“We continue but not like animals.” There’s admirable resolve in Stéphanie’s telling words to Ali after their first sexual dalliance, but whether or not he understands (or cares) is ultimately a moot point. Throughout Rust and Bone, there’s never any doubt that Audiard will propel his protagonist to the finish line, a little more broken and but all the wiser, cliché be damned.
theartsdesk.com [Emma
Simmonds]
Considering that his last film was set in a prison, it’s perhaps appropriate to say that Jacques Audiard has an arresting track record. The French director has made a handful of very impressive features (Read My Lips, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) but it was when he donned a knuckle-duster for his unflinching tale of prison life, A Prophet, that Audiard really knocked many of us sideways. Expectations are then high for the film that follows. Whilst little could match the impact of his previous picture, by taking things down a notch Audiard has delivered something really quite strange and soulful.
The winner of Best Film at the 2012 London Film Festival features an extraordinary but not unbelievable premise. Matthias Schoenaerts (pictured below right with Armand Verdure) plays Ali, a man who has recently taken on custody of his young son Sam (Armand Verdure). The pair move to Antibes into the home of Ali’s cantankerous but big-hearted sister Anna (Corinne Masiero). Ali is – to put it bluntly – a meathead, and lurches unthinkingly between sexual encounters. Whilst working as a bouncer he runs into the beautiful and flirtatious Stéphanie (Marion Cotillard). It’s a brief, unconsummated encounter which at first comes to nothing.
Stéphanie leads a more charmed albeit unconventional life - we see her working as the head trainer at a water park (pictured below left). However, before long she is horrifically injured during a public display. Sometime later, lonely and isolated and remembering the man who had once chivalrously assisted her, she calls Ali. At first it’s simply an unlikely friendship, between an elegant woman who thinks she’s been robbed of her profession and sexual allure and a willing but insensitive hulk of a man.
Audiard and his co-screenwriter Thomas Bidegain were inspired by the style and content of a short story collection from the American author Craig Davidson, entitled Rust and Bone, and the resulting film is an invigorating, atypical romance. It’s delightfully non-judgemental; though perhaps you’d expect no less from a director who turned a man who lies about his war exploits into a likeable protagonist (A Self Made Hero) and who repeatedly finds honour amidst criminality.
The recent success of the London Paralympics has helped disabuse archaic notions regarding the limitations of disability and Audiard’s latest helps grind them into dust. Stéphanie’s dramatic disability is astonishingly rendered but this is a film that, for example, chooses to examine its impact on Stéphanie’s sex life rather than drowning in her self-pity. Don’t be fooled by the stark title: Rust and Bone teaches us tough lessons with considerable charm, striking a fine balance between beauty and brutality. And yet it also remains undeniably bonkers, swerving wildly every time it approaches anything resembling a cliché, confounding our perhaps more sentimental expectations at every turn.
There’s an aesthetic and narrative freshness that flows through this film and you really have to admire the way it incorporates a Katy Perry song without (quite) wanting to make you gag. When Ali picks Stéphanie up and carries her from the sea the moment is gorgeous and uplifting but it’s the pair’s wonderfully improbable reinvention that really stirs the soul. Like its heroine, Audiard’s sixth film succeeds against all the odds; Rust and Bone is heartfelt, rare and deliciously vital, and Cotillard in particular is sublime.
Times
[Richard Corliss] at Cannes, May 17,
2012, also seen here: Richard Corliss
The
Playlist [Kevin Jagernauth] at
Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 17, 2012, also seen here: Kevin Jagernauth
DVDTalk.com -
theatrical [Jamie S. Rich]
Surrender to
the Void [Steven Flores]
Slant
Magazine [Jesse Cataldo]
Paste
Magazine [Shannon M. Houston]
Rust
and Bone | Review, Trailer, News, Cast, Extras | SBS ... Lisa Nesselson
Sound
On Sight [Josh Slater-Williams]
Eric Kohn at Cannes
from indieWIRE, May 17, 2012
Drew McWeeny at
Cannes from HitFix, May 17, 2012
Rust
And Bone Lee Marshall at Cannes from
Screendaily
Smells
Like Screen Spirit [Anna Bielak]
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Merlin Harries]
The
London Film Review [Rosanagh Griffiths]
The Film Stage
[Raffi Asdourian]
Film
Freak Central Review [Angelo Muredda]
REVIEW: Rust and
Bone « Marshall and the Movies
The
A.V. Club [Mike D'Angelo] at Cannes,
May 17, 2012, also seen here: Cannes
'12, Day Two: The latest from the director of A Prophet, plus Michel Gondry
gets on the bus
Ronald Bergan at
Cannes from Bright Lights After Dark, May 18, 2012
Simon Dang at Cannes from the indieWIRE Playlist, May 17,
2012
Guy Lodge at Cannes from HitFix, May 17, 2012
Fabien Lemercier at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 17, 2012
Alex Billington at
Cannes from First Showing, May 17, 2012
Post
Sarkozy Cannes 3 at Cannes from Filmjourney, May 17, 2012
Melissa Anderson
at Cannes from ArtForum, May 17, 2012
Film-Forward.com
[Dionne King]
PlumeNoire.com [Moland
Fengkov]
Cinetalk
[Katherine McLaughlin]
Reel Film Reviews [David Nusair]
Adam Woodward at Cannes from Little White Lies, May 17,
2012
Anne Thompson at
Cannes from Thompson on Hollywood, May 17, 2012
DAILY
| Cannes 2012 | Jacques Audiard’s RUST AND BONE » David Hudson at Cannes from Fandor, May 17,
2012
Fabien Lemercier interviews both Audiard and lead actress
Marion Cotillard at Cannes from Cineuropa, May 2012
The
Hollywood Reporter [Todd McCarthy]
at Cannes, also seen here: Rust
and Bone: Cannes Review
Variety [Peter Debruge]
at Cannes from Variety, May 17, 2012,
also seen here: Peter
Debruge
Dave
Calhoun at Cannes from Time Out
London, May 17, 2012
David Fear at Cannes
from Time Out New York, May 17, 2012
Peter Bradshaw at Cannes from The Guardian, May 17, 2012
David Gritten at Cannes from The London Telegraph, May 17, 2012
Austin
Chronicle [Marjorie Baumgarten]
Karina Longworth at
Cannes from LA Weekly, May 17, 2012
Michael Phillips at Cannes from The Chicago Tribune, May 17, 2012
DHEEPAN B+ 91
France (109 mi) 2015 ‘Scope
Winner of the Palme
d’Or at Cannes in 2015, yet a divisive choice, where there was a feeling at
Cannes that the director was “owed” the prize due to a festival oversight by
only awarding the Grand Prize (2nd Place) Award for 2010 Top Ten Films of
the Year: #10 A Prophet ... in 2009, awarding the
higher prize to Haneke’s WHITE RIBBON (2009), with a jury headed by Isabelle
Huppert who previously worked with Haneke, where over the passage of time many
believe Audiard made the superior film.
As no other festival films leaped off the screen screaming top prize
this year, though there was a contingency supporting Hou Hsiao-hsien’s The
Assassin (Nie Yinniang) (2015), the consensus of opinion among the jury
headed by the Coen brothers awarded Audiard’s film the top prize, though it
does not rank among his best work.
Despite the controversy, DHEEPAN is another powerful work by this director,
who seems to specialize in outsiders, outcasts, and themes of extreme
alienation, featuring characters on the fringes of society that border on the
hopelessness of the human condition.
Dheepan (Jesuthasan Antonythasan, an actor and author) is a Tamil Tiger
guerilla fighter in Sri Lanka caught up in the ravaged onslaught of the
nation’s bloody civil war, where after a 26-year military campaign, the Sri Lankan military defeated the Tamil
Tigers in May 2009, bringing the civil
war to an end. Eventually losing his
home and entire family, Dheepan is in dire straits trying to get out of a
cramped refugee camp, using a fictitious wife, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan),
who is searching for a parentless daughter to call her own, 9-year old Illayaal
(Claudine Vinasithamby), as together they have a better chance of finding a
better life in England, where one of her cousins lives. Traveling on a fake passport, they are
fortunate to make it to France, where Dheepan is seen selling cheap trinkets on
the streets of Paris, which is initially lit in abstract lights, set to what
sounds like medieval church music, where the sumptuous harmonies may as well be
a calling out to Heaven, but the colorful lights reveal themselves to be those
cheap luminescent headbands that light up in the dark. Nonetheless, they are eventually sent to an unfinished
cement block housing project in a banlieue
region called “Le Pré.” Given
instructions in French, which they don’t understand, he’s assigned as the unit
janitor, where he’s expected to keep the entire building clean and in working
order.
While the subject of
the hardship of refugees couldn’t be more timely, considering the current
refugee crisis exploding throughout Europe, Audiard’s skill as a social realist
filmmaker is his most pronounced attribute, creating a gripping atmosphere in
an already tense situation, using a near documentary style to advance the
story, where Illayaal is shunned by the other students at school, and by her
makeshift mother as well, who makes no attempt to help her through the
transition, feeling no connection to this stranger in her home. Dheepan isn’t exactly embraced with open arms
either, as across a small field is another gang-run building complex that is a
haven for selling drugs, packed with the constant presence of cars arriving,
people hanging out in doorways, and security teams on the roof, where they
exist in a world entirely their own, outside all known rules and any police
presence, described by Yalini as they watch the constant activity out their
window, “How strange, like being at the movies.” Continually called all number of racial
insults, Dheepan and his family are at the absolute bottom of the social scale,
consisting of Arab castoffs and uneducated white French citizens, where Yalini
also needs to find work, eventually assigned as the caretaker of an elderly
grandfather suffering from dementia in a building across the way, where she has
to pass through the pit bulls and mass of assembled male humanity blocking the
entranceway. Still unable to understand
or communicate in French, she is late in discovering the apartment where she
has been assigned to work is the home of the local drug lord, Brahim (Vincent Rottiers), recently released
from prison, where the old man she cares for is his ailing father. Doing business out of his living room, which
is off limits to her, she sees people constantly coming in and out while she’s
basically confined to the kitchen, but she’s earning real money. The home situation is weird, keeping up
appearances, as there’s no real emotional connection with any of them, where they
just pretend to be a family, actually spending little time together. When Yalini and Dheepan actually have a
conversation together, she expresses how nice it is, for a change, as there’s
so little of that in their lives.
Audiard beautifully stages the moment they finally sleep together, preceded
by Dheepan grabbing quick looks as she dries off in the shower, unable to
conceal his sexual interest. But he
waits until she’s the one that drops her nightdress, leading him nakedly into
her bedroom where the screen discreetly fades to black.
In a bizarre scene that
suggests the surreal, and perhaps a blurring or fantasy and reality, Dheepan’s
old military commander wants to put the unit back together again, but when
Dheepan refuses, claiming he has lost everything and the war is over, he is kicked
and beaten to a pulp, left on his own to recover, drinking heavily while
singing war songs of rage and fury.
Making matters worse, all hell breaks loose when a gunfight erupts right
in front of their home, sending a terrified child screaming to the ground,
bringing back scarred war memories of what they were escaping back home,
leaving each of them even more traumatized, literally fearing for their
lives. Yalini makes a run for the train
station, setting out for England on her own, but Dheepan drags her back in a
tearful state, unable to comprehend the ways of this new world, which are
juxtaposed with images of an elephant quietly moving through a thick forest in
Sri Lanka, perhaps the only peace they’ve ever had in their lives, now uprooted
and entirely alone in a violent society that makes no sense. Richly observational in tone, the film
downplays any political message and instead accentuates the personal aspects of
the immigrant experience, providing an immediacy to their everyday lives, where
harrowing circumstances are always pressing up against them, as if thwarting
their progress. In one of the many tonal
shifts, the three of them get dressed up for a visit to the temple, each
wearing brightly colored attire, a quiet moment where the music adds a
contemplative counterbalance matching the religious ritual being performed,
breaking out into family picnics afterwards, providing a momentary lull before
the storm. By all indications, the film
gets the first 90-minutes right, revealed without a hint of artificiality,
unfolding with a natural dynamic that accumulates intimacy and a familiarity
with the characters over time. But
something snaps, changing the entire look of the film, becoming a
wish-fulfillment revenge fantasy using a heavily stylized atmosphere of sheer
violence, as if happening in a fog, or perhaps a dream state, once again
blurring the lines between what’s real and imagined, where the director’s
decision to go full-blown Hollywood with the ending is simply baffling. While it doesn’t ruin the film, as everything
that comes before is so vividly expressed, but it completely shifts the tone,
providing a hauntingly peaceful look afterwards that resembles the final scene
in Gaspar Noé’s IRREVERSIBLE (2002, actually told in reverse), where the world
is revealed as sunny and light, while here unexpected happiness breaks out
replacing the psychological horrors of war and forced exile. It’s a stretch, to say the least, requiring a
leap of faith from the viewers, and one that Audiard doesn’t earn but simply
forces upon us, feeling false, as if arriving out of thin air. It’s a bit more magic than one anticipates,
something his other films have carefully avoided, so one wonders why he’s
resorted to the purely fantastical in this case, leaving us in the realms of
fairy tales and dreams, which suggests perhaps none of this final coda actually
happens, but is only imagined. Perhaps
only in Heaven.
What
to see at the 51st Chicago International Film Festival ... Tal Rosenberg from the Chicago Reader
Writer-director Jacques Audiard ingeniously advocates for
France's most marginalized citizens by obliquely addressing their struggles in
his suspenseful films. In this immigration drama the focus is on Sri Lankans
affected by the fallout of the civil war between the country's government and
the independent faction known as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (or the Tamil
Tigers). Dheepan (Sri Lankan author and actor Antonythasan Jesuthasan); his
wife, Yalini (Kalieaswari Srinivasan); and their daughter, Illayaal (Claudine
Vinasithamby), are the false identities of three Sri Lankan refugees. They
immigrate to France, where Dheepan finds work as caretaker of a squalid rural
housing project that's mostly become an open-air drug market, a setting that
gradually unearths his concealed past as a Tamil soldier. Though it takes a
jarring left turn at the end, this bears the same immaculate plot construction
and tonal consistency of Audiard's previous films, augmented by sensitive,
superlative performances from Jesuthasan and Srinivasan. With Vincent Rottiers,
riveting as a quietly seething kingpin, and a hypnotic score by electronic-music
whiz kid Nicolas Jaar. In Tamil and French with subtitles.
Sins of
Omission - Film Comment Gavin Smith,
July/August 2015
Final validation of the festival’s Social Problem theme came when the Golden Palm (the only award that really counts) was bestowed on Jacques Audiard’s characteristically workmanlike and absorbing Dheepan, which ostensibly takes on the evergreen issue of migrant integration. Led by the titular protagonist—a former insurgent seeking to wash the blood of the Sri Lankan civil war from his hands—three Tamils gain asylum in France by passing themselves off as a family. Audiard, however, isn’t interested in foregoing either his genre instincts or his fascination with rough stuff and violence, and so the trio, who speak no French, find themselves stranded in a dismal housing project ruled by drug dealers. Hired as a caretaker, Dheepan (impressively played by Jesuthasan Antonythasan) cleans up the building—and then cleans out the vermin, putting his combat skill set to good use. So what initially comes on like a less commercial and more risk-taking venture than Audiard’s last Competition entry, Rust and Bone, ends up delivering the safer if genuine pleasures of a small-scale thriller in the guise of un film social. The film pays only lip service to the asylum-seeker problem and questions of cultural assimilation, which nevertheless furnish a novel backdrop and characters for Audiard to play with.
There’s nothing shameful in any of this, but the ambitions of Dheepan are nonetheless pretty meager. Though it sounds churlish to say, the festival doggedly selects its favored directors for Competition over and over until finally it’s their turn for the Big One. As with past winners (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, von Trier), four-time Competition contender Audiard finally got what he wanted and perhaps felt entitled to. It’s just a matter of time for Paolo Sorrentino, Xavier Dolan, Andrei Zvyagintsev, Alejandro G. Iñárritu, and even Maïwenn, if she plays her cards right. Meanwhile, after a last-minute invitation, 2010 Golden Palm winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul wound up in the company of such prominent filmmakers as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Brillante Mendoza, and Corneliu Porumboiu in Un Certain Regard. Once nominally intended to be the section for promising up-and-comers and new discoveries, for some years now the section has been doing double duty as a dumping ground for filmmakers on their way down, not quite ready (or too challenging) for prime-time, or in a holding pattern pending another invitation to the main event.
Cannes
film festival 2015 review • Senses of Cinema Daniel Fairfax, June 2015 (excerpt)
Alas, the same can not be said for the film that was awarded
this year’s Palme d’or. To be frank, crowning Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan
was a mystifying decision from the jury, which was this year presided over by
the bicephalous creature that goes by the name of the Coen Brothers. In all the
frenzied media speculation about potential prize-winners in the lead-up to the
awards ceremony – which, in time-honoured fashion, begins in earnest with the
announcement of the competition line-up several weeks before the beginning of
the festival, and builds in intensity as each competition title makes its bow
on the Croisette, before reaching fever pitch on the last weekend of the
festival, in anticipation of the Sunday evening announcement (ironically most
festival-goers have physically left Cannes by this point, but this does not
dampen their febrile conjecture) – in all this speculation, then, I did not
once hear Audiard’s name bandied around as a favourite for the palm. In the wake
of its near-unanimous critical adulation, Todd Haynes’ Carol appeared to
have the inside-running, while other films also had their proponents:
Sorrentino’s fans (he does, it seems, have them) were quietly confident this
would be the year he came home with the trophy for Youth, the more
purist cinephiles were holding out for a surprise run from Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Nie
Yinniang (The Assassin), and those wishing for a fresh entry into
the Pantheon had their hopes pinned on debut-feature Sauls fia (Son
of Saul) by the Hungarian László Nemes. In spite of the strong French
presence in this year’s competition (five titles in all, plus both the opening
and closing night films), few were predicting a victory for the host nation,
not least because two of the last three palms had gone to films made in the
Hexagon. Would Cannes really dare to engage in another bout of cinematic
self-congratulation? Of course, like all good regimes, those in power on the
Côte d’Azur – namely, ebullient director Thierry Frémaux, and president Pierre
Lescure, succeeding Gilles Jacob after the latter’s decades-long stint at the
helm of the festival – can exercise a healthy degree of plausible deniability:
the decision was not theirs to make, but that of an indisputably
independent, impartial, equanimous panel of jurors. Who are we, then, to take
umbrage at this process?
There remains the fact that Dheepan was an inauspicious choice for Palme d’or, a relatively minor film from an unexceptional filmmaker, who would doubtless have been better served had his earlier Un prophète (A Prophet) received the prize back in 2009 (unfortunately, that film was up against Cannes juggernaut Michael Haneke’s Das weiße Band [The White Ribbon]). This is not to say that Audiard’s latest film is particularly bad per se, more that it is a middling work, devoid of any remarkable features – and this, one would think, in the cauldron of hype that is Cannes, is what should have consigned it to a form of cinematic purgatory, overshadowed by the more noticeable triumphs and flops that hoover up most of the festival’s available attention-capital.
It can at least be said that Dheepan is a change of direction for Audiard, but this comes from a director whose whole career consists in nothing but changes of direction, and whose auteurist signature could best be defined with Macbeth’s description of life: “full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.” (1) This time around, the focus is on a Tamil Tiger guerrilla fighter, the eponymous Dheepan (played by a former Tiger cum novelist, Jesuthasan Antonythasan), who, as his militia is crushed by a ruthless Sri Lankan state, manages to flee to France on a fake passport, but has to bring with him a fake wife (Yalini) and daughter (Illayaal) in order to convincingly pull off the subterfuge. After selling trinkets in the tourist hotspots of Paris, Dheepan finds a job as a caretaker of a decrepit tower block in a part of the banlieue known only as “Le Pré”, and begins to establish a life for his phony family. Violent gangs, however, control the project’s unfinished building across the courtyard, and here we have the singular, presiding idea of Audiard’s film: that France’s cités, bastions of economic privation and internecine tribal skirmishes, are warzones no less vicious and harrowing than genuine conflict areas such as Tamil Eelam. Such a parallel is, at least, a stimulating proposition, but the film mainly trains its focus on the contours of Dheepan’s psyche, as, beginning to blur fact and fiction, he comes to view Yalini and Illayaal as his genuine kin.
Oh sensitive reader, I know you may find it incommodious to hear tell of a film’s denouement – a widespread predisposition that in the digital age has come to be redressed with the shorthand warning signal “spoiler alert” – but I feel it is impossible to adequately discuss Dheepan without an adumbration of its concluding moments. Is there anything more unreasonable to ask of a film reviewer than that he should avoid discussing a film’s final reel? Such a demand is about as ludicrous as prevailing upon an art critic writing about a portrait to withhold from discussing the subject’s nose. In any case, Audiard closes his film with the protagonist embarking on a bout of vigilante-style retribution, in order to rescue his mock spouse from the clutches of the ominous gang-members marauding around the estate. Suddenly, Dheepan’s guerrilla skills, which had lain dormant while he had focussed his energies on custodial work, come flooding back to him, who dispatches his adversaries and rescues the damsel in distress with consummate ease, in a scene which inevitably recalls Taxi Driver in constituting an indiscernible zone hovering between diegetic reality and wish-fulfilment fantasy. Perhaps, however, the film’s most incendiary image – if subtly so – comes at the very end of Dheepan: having successfully escaped the unabated inferno of outer Paris’ migrant belt, the new family is welcomed into the paradisiacal surrounds of suburban Britain. Are the receptions that transcontinental refugees find in the two countries so wildly disparate (and to the disfavour of France in comparison to its Anglo-Saxon neighbour)? Audiard seems to suggest so.
Cannes
Roundtable #2 - Film Comment
Gavin Smith: Well, we just learned that Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan won the Palme d’Or. What are your reactions to this bombshell?
Charlotte Garson: I’m surprised, but I have to say I don’t hate the film as much as my French colleagues, so I’m not very representative of the French critics here. I think I like it better than Alex, maybe he should start just destroying it, and I will try to compose a vague defense … because there were so many French films in the competition, it’s quite strong in terms of an outmoded form of realism that’s still classical, and organically it works in terms of recreating some form of fluidity of life. I believed in the characters, I believed in the story, even though it seems a little silly to talk in these terms. And I actually thought that the way he describes the suburban housing project, and life there is stylized but also well-documented. My French colleagues were absolutely outraged but I don’t think it’s a caricature. Audiard’s fascination with physical force, which was really a problem for me in his previous films, has toned down a little. And I know that there’s a twist where finally the guy becomes a warrior again and becomes more of a strong man.
GS: Where he reverts to who he was before he left Sri Lanka.
CG: It’s not ridiculous that a guy who’s lived through war would project it onto situations that are very foreign to war, so I didn’t think it was too broad a political statement; it makes sense for this man to think that way, it’s pretty well-written into it. I will accept that the ending is a bit of a problem.
GS: Audiard wound up very lazily opting for a Death Wish kind of ending: the title character has been cleaning the place as a janitor, and finally he gets to work on cleaning out the vermin … and then he leaves France for the lovely, tolerant suburbs of England, where people of color are greeted with open arms.
CG: I think the ending is about the fact that he is a communitarian, he’s got more of an idea of communities nourishing their own people, which is not at all the way we think here in France, where there is a failure of integration politics. Politically I don’t agree with his idea that you’re better off within your own group … what has happened with integration policies in these past few years in France are such a disaster, so that’s how I understand the ending.
GS: It does show the school that the child is sent to as being a well-meaning institution that’s trying to do its best, I mean you see his teacher is a little bit helpless, but that girl does get an education, so that’s one positive aspect of the French welfare state.
Alexander Horwath: Which is why this should not be discussed in terms of the film as such. Right before the Palme d’Or was announced, Gavin and I were saying that it’s hardly imaginable that a film like Dheepan could receive the top prize. I would more or less agree with Charlotte that it’s not a film that I would hate, or that I would say I actively dislike. On the other hand, it’s a film of such limited, simple virtues that I find it mind-blowing that it received the Palme d’Or, which makes me think that there are other, more ideological reasons, and that the jury either involuntarily or willingly fulfilled the theme that Cannes gave out this year: that we should all care more about social injustice and the ecosystem. Even in the press conference a month before the festival, certain themes were being fed to the press. Films about women, of course, was one, and the other was choosing an untypical opening night film—so the jury also chose an untypical Palme d’Or, I guess, both films showing how the French—though probably the most aggressive class-ridden society in all Europe, in my view—show their soft side, their pro-integration side, after the events of January. When Charlotte and I met in a line a few days ago, I spoke of the social democratization of a certain notion of French cinema: Emmanuelle Bercot’s Standing Tall, Stéphane Brizé’s The Measure of a Man, or the Audiard film. Films by directors who were not much known for going in that direction. For me, Guillaume Nicloux’s Valley of Love was the best French film, but it was perceived as an absolute outsider here, maybe because it belongs to a more art film-oriented, self-reflexive, minimalist tradition. Very few people seemed to like it, and despite the fact that Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu starred in it, it didn’t receive much notice. So I think a certain tendency was prescribed for this festival, and the opening film and the choice of the Palme d’Or confirm it. As opposed to Charlotte, I’m quite a fan of Audiard’s work, and I love it when he’s virile, or when he’s physical. He does violence between men better than almost any other European director I know, from See How They Fall to The Beat That My Heart Skipped to A Prophet—he could’ve easily deserved a Palme d’Or for any of those, especially for A Prophet, which was in competition here. This is clearly the weakest, the most simplistic, the most “decent” in a not very interesting way of his films, so it just feels so wrong and weird that this is the film for which this director is given his biggest honor so far. Audiard has been around for a while, and like at the Oscars you feel certain prizes are given because finally it’s his turn. It’s just really for the wrong film. So I’m not against this guy having a Palme d’Or in his resume—he deserves one, but not for this film.
Nicolas Rapold: In another way, it does seem like the film for this year’s festival, because most people are okay with it. It’s a decent film, and for a lot of people that was the overall experience of the festival—it was a sort of mediocre, average festival. I don’t know how the jury really works, but when I see a movie like this win, it suggests that maybe there was a split between two other movies that had very strong camps. Three obvious candidates would be The Assassin, Son of Saul, or Carol, and that’s how you get a result like this. I do think there were interesting ideas in Dheepan beside the social realism aspect. It starts out a bit differently from a lot of films like this in the sense that the main character is kind of sketchy. He’s a guerilla fighter, he has to deceive the authorities in order to make his way along, and I was really taken by that idea that they are playing roles—they have to pretend to be family members, they have to work their way into society, so there are legitimate and illicit ways in which to become a part of society, which seems more real than a lot of situations in movies about illegal immigrants. An interesting comparison is Mediterranea, a film in the Critics’ Week, which was good, and actually in some ways better. In that one, you’re definitely starting with people you don’t have any ethical qualms about in terms of their identity—the main character’s a hardworking, decent guy.
GS: Unlike some of the protagonists of other Audiard films, the protagonist of Dheepan is somewhat opaque as a character—it’s hard to read who he is, or what he really believes in. We know that he’s rejected violence at the start of the film because he’s obviously disgusted by what he’s had to do as a soldier in Sri Lanka, and he’s escaping from that. There’s a scene in which another Sri Lankan immigrant, his former commander, tries to inveigle him again into being involved in getting arms to the Tamil Tigers and it sets up the expectation that the film’s going to be about him being pulled back in—but in fact it’s completely extraneous, it doesn’t pay off in any way. It’s a red herring.
CG: I think he’s as ambiguous as the previous characters in Audiard’s films, the ones in The Beat That My Heart Skipped and A Prophet. It’s the same idea: cynical men who can adapt to situations and are not very morally sound.
GS: That’s true, but there’s more psychology in those films, and there’s much less psychology in this film it seems to me.
AH: I don’t really see why the film is called Dheepan, as if it were really a portrait of this one man. This is very much about three people who immigrate to form this fake family because it’s easier for them to come into France as a family even though they are unrelated. The film’s title could easily have been the name of the woman. I think if you measured screen time, she’s equally as present.
Jacques
Audiard’s movies are the kind Hollywood should make Tal Rosenberg from The Reader
Blogs.indiewire.com
[Oliver Lyttelton] The Playlist
VanityFair.com
[Jordan Hoffman]
'Dheepan'
Looks Beyond the Banlieues - WSJ
Lanie Goodman from The Wall Street
Journal
Cannes
2015: Dheepan – Articles | Little White Lies David Jenkins
Cannes:
Dheepan Review - Next Projection
Corina Rottger
Film
Freak Central Review [Bill Chambers]
Cannes
Diary, Day 9: Seriously? Vengeance ... - Grantland Wesley Morris
ScreenDaily.com
[Allan Hunter]
TwitchFilm/Filmfest.ca
[Jason Gorber]
TIFF
2016: 'Dheepan' + 'Green Room' | PopMatters
Piers Marchant
EyeForFilm.co.uk
[Richard Mowe]
TIFF:
Did Dheepan deserve its Cannes win? - Blog - The ... Nathaniel Rogers from The Film Experience
Day
9: Twist endings / The Dissolve Mike
D’Angelo from The Dissolve
Cannes
2015: Dheepan Review - A Totally Unconventional ... Alex Leadbeater from What Culture
Cannes
2015 awards, and reaction | Sight & Sound | BFI Nick
James from Sight and Sound, June 1,
2015
Black
Sheep Reviews [Matthew Hoffman]
Daily
| Cannes 2015 | Jacques Audiard's DHEEPAN - Fandor David Hudson
HollywoodReporter.com
[David Rooney]
'Dheepan'
Review: Jacques Audiard's Gripping Immigrant Drama ...
TheGuardian.com
[Andrew Pulver]
Dheepan (2015), directed by
Jacques Audiard | Film review Dave
Calhoun from Time Out
Independent.co.uk
[Kaleem Aftab]
TIFF
2015: “Son of Saul,” “The Lobster,” “Dheepan” - Roger ... Brian Tallerico from The Ebert site
Review:
'Dheepan,' About Sri Lankan Refugees, Looks Like a Prophecy A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Dheepan - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Auer, John H.
HELL’S HALF ACRE
User reviews from imdb Author: bmacv from Western New
York
Hell's Half Acre (habitués just call it `the
Stateside, widowed young mother Evelyn Keyes hears a recording by a songwriter
from the
All too briefly, Hell's Half Acre features Marie Windsor, as the wife of
fish-and-poi slinger Jesse White (she's two-timing him with sinister Philip
Ahn). The crummy rooms Windsor and White occupy in the
Hell's
Half Acre (1954) Mark Harris from
Patrick Murtha’s Diary, January
22, 2011
I watched this Hawaiian noir last night through my Netflix
streaming service. It is an underrated film, probably because few have seen it.
Director John H. Auer, screenwriter Steve Fisher, and cinematographer John L.
Russell (Hitchcock's DP on Psycho) make a good creative team here. There
are many points of interest:
Gender -- The two key women in the film, Evelyn Keyes and Elsa Lanchester
(playing one of her patented flakeroos), are exceptionally proactive and form
an instant collaborative sisterhood. You only see that occasionally in movies
of the era. A good comparison is the pairing of Grace Kelly and Thelma Ritter
in Rear Window (which Wendell Corey made back-to-back with this film).
Race -- Hawaii has long been one of the most poly-racial places on earth, and
that is reflected and indeed openly discussed in Hell's Half Acre (Keye
Luke's police chief gently suggests that all Orientals might look alike to
Keyes). We learn through the dialogue that Corey's girlfriend Nancy Gates is
mixed-race; Korean-American actor Philip Ahn is romantically paired with Marie
Windsor; Eurasian actor Leonard Strong (so creepy as "The
Hitch-Hiker" in the classic Twilight Zone episode) plays a key
supporting role. There was a growing fascination in the Fifties with Eurasians
and mixed white-Asian romances: think The King and I, Love Is a
Many-Splendored Thing, The World of Suzy Wong, House of Bamboo.
This sociological development was inevitable after World War II, the American
occupation of
Wendell Corey -- Corey, with his ordinary guy looks, seldom got to play lead
roles, and is effective here precisely because of that ordinary quality. (By
the way, I love the Chet Chester character's composition "Polynesian
Rhapsody," one of those overblown spoken-word pop suites that were the
rage at the time. It actually plays an important part in the plot.)
Location filming -- As you know, I am a sucker for location filming. Hell's
Half Acre uses its Hawaiian locations well, and in that respect is a worthy
precursor of the television series
Because there was no law against prostitution at that time, there were many
houses of ill repute in the A'ala,
The end of the war also brought an unparalleled boom to the A'ala district as
elsewhere, with the night life especially enjoyed by many. Huge crowds attended
Japanese movies, several dance halls sprouted and other night businesses in the
area flourished....in later years, the beloved A'ala district...[was] finally
demolished for modern housing and development. Only fond memories remain today
of what was once a busy and bustling area of the city.
http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2001/Sep/23/il/il15ahawaiiways.html
Edginess -- Hell's Half Acre is pretty pulpy. Movies were starting to
push up against the boundaries of the Hays Code at that time. This film
features not just "miscegenation," specifically forbidden by the
Code, but also the drugging and beating of women, and a quite nasty attempted
rape. It's really a little scuzzy!
[SPOILER ALERT]
Denouement -- But perhaps the most unusual plot element in Hell's Half Acre
is that Corey commits suicide at the end by setting up his own ambush. Granted
that this might be considered his comeuppance for earlier criminal activity,
and that his removing himself from the scene guarantees that his son will never
know that his dad was a minor crime lord and not, as he thinks, a war hero;
still, it caught my attention as an envelope-pusher. Are there other noir films
in which a key character unmistakably commits suicide? I can think of Val
Lewton's and Mark Robson's off-genre noir The Seventh Victim, with its
double suicide ending (and I still don't know how they got away with that).
What else?
UPDATE: A correspondent at The Blackboard pointed out that Van Heflin stages
his own death in Act of Violence. I should have thought of that one, and
indeed, it is a very similar situation: the protagonist is not who he seems to
be, his identity shift is related to what happened during World War II, and he
comes to grief over it. (Don Draper's dual identity in Mad Men, also
war-derived, has a pedigree in noir.)
honoluluadvertiser.com Albert Onishi from The Honolulu Advertiser, September 23, 2001
August, Billie
Bille
August Rob Edelman from Film
Reference
Since the retirement of Ingmar
Bergman from film directing in the mid-1980s, Bille August has become Scandinavia 's premiere international filmmaker.
August's debut feature, In My
Life, the story of a seemingly bright and optimistic middle-class Copenhagen
In Zappa and Twist and
Shout, August examines the distinction between characters from separate
social classes. This also is the case in the feature he made after The World
of Buster. This work, the career-defining Pelle the Conqueror, is a
wonderful, universal film about desire and disappointment, dignity and dreams.
Along with Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, it was the first Scandinavian
film since the heyday of Bergman to earn a high international profile.
Set at the turn of the twentieth
century, it is the story of Lasse (Max von Sydow), a humble old widower who has
emigrated with his son Pelle from poverty-stricken Sweden Denmark
Pelle the Conqueror is a subtle film, the kind in which the characters'
quick glances reveal volumes about what they are thinking and feeling but
never, ever could articulate. Its multi-faceted narrative presents a landscape
of villains and victims, a world in which any hint of true love is stifled, and
an environment in which the well-heeled but repressed upper classes use and
abuse their power by brutalizing the lower classes.
As the seasons turn and the plot
unfolds, Pelle begins to transcend the mysteries and fears of childhood. It
becomes clear to the boy that if he is ever to get beyond the stifling
existence of Stone Farm, he will have to part with his loving, well-meaning, but
weak father and set forth into the world. Indeed, the force that holds the film
together is the relationship between Pelle and Lasse. There is a poignant,
life-sustaining bond between the boy, whose experiences here clearly will shape
the course of his future, and his father.
August never overplays the
story's melodramatics. His direction is sure-handed as he weaves the tale,
allowing the viewer to come to know Lasse, Pelle, and the other characters. As
much as anything else, Pelle the Conqueror is a film about physical
presences, such as the great ship that brings Lasse and Pelle to their new
land, the rural landscape of Stone Farm, and the everyday details of farm
labor. The images, stunningly captured by cinematographer Jorgen Persson, are
as beautiful as they are loaded with drama and emotion.
Unlike dozens of filmmakers from
across the world who have impressed with films not nearly as striking as Pelle
the Conqueror, August has refused to go Hollywood
Upon the success of Pelle the
Conqueror, August was the logical choice to be selected by Bergman to
direct the latter's autobiographical script, The Best Intentions, a
follow-up to Fanny and Alexander. The Best Intentions is the story of
the courtship and marriage of Bergman's parents; the end result is a film of
which the master could be proud. The third film in the trilogy, Sunday's
Children, was directed by Bergman's son, Daniel.
After Pelle the Conqueror,
August had attempted to film The House of the Spirits, based on Isabel
Allende's best-selling novel, but could not obtain adequate funding. He
eventually got the film made on an estimated $27-million budget. The film was
his first major foray into international filmmaking, but it also proved to be
his first major failure. The House of the Spirits charts forty-five
momentous years in the lives of the South American Trueba family. August
directed a notable cast that included Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close,
Winona Ryder, Vanessa Redgrave, Armin Mueller-Stahl, and Antonio Banderas.
Unfortunately, the result was wholly unsuccessful, with many of the actors
miscast and seeming out of place in the setting.
A
Conversation with Bille August by
Stan Schwartz
PELLE THE CONQUEROR (Pelle erobreren)
Denmark Sweden
In Bille August's "Pelle the Conqueror," Max von Sydow is so astoundingly evocative that he makes your bones ache. This is a performance that comes from the joints and ligaments; it's conceived in marrow.
Von Sydow has so completely entered the body of this old man, who has come
from
In leaving home, father and son may in fact have fallen on even harsher conditions. The servitude that the old man -- whose name is Lasse -- has entered into entitles him and his boy to treatment little better than that given to the animals. (The animals, in fact, probably endure less abuse and get better feed.) The elements become a vivid character in the drama; the emotions are keyed to the seasons and the changes in the landscape. The triumph of Jorgen Persson's cinematography is that it conveys not only the pewter skies and melancholy beauty of the Danish countryside, but its unrelenting rawness as well. When the wife of the farm's owner howls in the night over her husband's philandering, her wails mix with the rampaging winds and the lowing cattle.
August gives this coming-of-age story a ritualistic quality. Soon after Lasse and his son arrive, the farm's manager trainee humiliates the young boy with insults, whipping him and driving him out into the courtyard. Tending the boy's wounds, Lasse promises a violent revenge, but when confronted by the trainee he backs down. The sight of Lasse's impotence marks a turning point for Pelle; the father seems to shrink before him, to become even older, and the pain of seeing him diminished is even greater than that of the whip.
If August had been able to enter into it to the extent that von Sydow has entered into Lasse, the movie might have been a classic. Instead, the film's drama feels far away. Though Lasse and his son are the protagonists, August introduces us to other characters and other stories, and none of them has the resonance of the central one. The boy, too, has an intelligent, open face, but it's not memorable or especially expressive. There are moments to marvel at and stunning images -- like the ghostly shot of a boat with its passenger frozen dead on board -- but there are common elements to all immigrant stories, and August doesn't have the talent or the empathy to transcend the familiarity. Watching, we feel as if we've seen too much of it before.
It's for von Sydow, primarily, that the picture is notable. Von Sydow's
face, long familiar to movie lovers from his work with Bergman, now looks like
that of El Greco's Christ. He gives Lasse's insignificance a touch of grandeur
-- and of comedy. When he calls on a local woman whose husband has been lost at
sea for a year, he suddenly seems younger. His posture changes and he takes on
a sort of shabby courtliness -- he becomes a gent. The full extent of Lasse's
dream of a happy life is a cup of coffee in bed on Sundays. But Pelle's dreams
are grander -- he wants to conquer the world, which within the context of the
movie means leaving his father and going to
eFilmCritic Reviews slyder
digitallyOBSESSED!
DVD Reviews Dan Heaton
DVDTalk.com review
[Holly E. Ordway]
Film as Art Danél Griffin
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
THE BEST INTENTIONS (Den goda viljan)
Sweden Great Britain Italy France Denmark Finland Iceland Norway
The
Best Intentions Michael Sragow from
the New Yorker
It boasts the
built-in interest of a script by Ingmar Bergman, dramatizing the courtship and
early married life of his parents. Bille August directed, and Jorgen Persson
did the cinematography; their square filmmaking has an antique sheen. But
they've made an orderly movie about disorderly conduct. At three hours, the
drama, about the mismatch between a tormented, self-denying pastor (Samuel
Froler) and a coddled bourgeois woman (Pernilla August), is one prolonged,
unrevealing study in frustration. Of course we know that these two won't live
happily ever after; they did give birth to Ingmar Bergman. With its inexorable
depiction of increasing marital woe, this film is the cinematic equivalent of
predestination. Except for the expressive Max von Sydow (in the role of
Bergman's maternal grandfather), the actors don't operate in a climate of free
will; they register carefully prescribed dollops of anguish. Stefan Nilsson's
music relies on a piano theme that is meant to be ineffably tender and
melancholy, and is repeated so often that you feel like shooting the piano
player. In Swedish.
Austin Chronicle [Marc Savlov]
Working from Ingmar Bergman's highly personal script,
director Bille August (Pelle the Conqueror) gives us a glimpse into the
lives of Bergman's parents, from their hesitant first meeting in 1909, to their
move to
Washington
Post [Rita Kempley]
The New York Times (Janet Maslin)
MARIE KRØYER C 75
A picturesque but
utterly conventional costume drama, based on the 1999 Anastassia Arnold novel The Passion of Marie, the film is the
director’s first Danish production in 25 years.
Set in the northernmost part of Denmark known as Jutland, the nation’s
largest fishing community, Skagen was also a haven for open air painters in the
late 1870’s to the turn of the century due to its proclivity for quality Nordic
light, where P.S. Krøyer (Søren Sætter-Lassen) became Denmark’s most famous
painter. As his wife Marie (Birgitte
Hjort Sørensen) was the subject of many of his paintings, the most famous is
likely Summer
Evening at Skagen Beach – The Artist and his Wife, she became known
as “the most beautiful woman in Europe.”
Shot by Dirk Brüel on locations in Skagen and Marstrand, the couple
becomes the epicenter of the nation’s cultured society, where all the great
figures wish to be painted by Krøyer.
Under the surface, however, we soon discover he has disturbing fits and
spells where he is prone to violence, brought on apparently by manic depression
and syphilis, not mentioned in the film, but the same illness that likely
killed Baudelaire, Frederick Delius, Gauguin, van Gogh, Nietzsche, Franz
Schubert, Bedřich Smetana, Édouard Manet, and Toulouse Lautrec, among
others. Rather than focus on the genius
of the painter, who we learn very little about, the film instead focuses in the
unfulfilled inner life of his wife, who also attempted to paint, but her
husband never thought she had sufficient talent. While Sørensen is attractive, she remains
coolly aloof throughout, properly distant, apparently, rarely expressing any
genuine emotions, which is how women of the era are typically portrayed,
usually overdressed, wearing collars covering their necks, where they are
literally suffocating in corsets. But
this film fails to live up to the standards set by the German Effi Briest adaptations, both the
Fassbinder 1974 version and the updated 2009 adaptation by Huntgeburth.
This change of course
to ignore the lead artistic character, perhaps the point of interest for most
viewers, and follow the sexual exploits of the wife leads to a seemingly
predetermined path, as her husband is constantly the center of attention, but
due to his disturbing illness, where his moods can swing in an instant, he’s
becoming a scandalous embarrassment, where Marie feels as if all the life is
being choked out of her trying to protect him.
As she has a daughter to think about, she often feels their life
together is slipping away. All that
changes when she meets Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén (Sverrir Gudnason), seen in
a gallery taking an interest in her husband’s work, meeting again sometime
later in Italy while her husband was undergoing treatment, where he can’t take
his eyes off her. Falling madly in love,
she finally wants out of her marriage, which her husband refuses to grant, where
Alfvén actually makes wildly unorthodox official visits to their seaside estate
with the husband desperately hoping their desires will soon cool, but they end
up running off together to live in Sweden.
Marie believes she’s finally found happiness, sacrificing her daughter
and her reputation in the process, shifting much of the scandalous attention to
herself, as her husband refuses to allow her to leave with her mother. As Denmark’s most celebrated woman, she pays
a huge price in marital disgrace, becoming the nation’s most despised woman (a
small detail largely left out of the picture), especially after moving to
Sweden of all places. Much of her life
is depicted as Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s
House, where her own life is one of stifling restriction and involuntary
sacrifice, a far cry from the unlimited freedoms enjoyed by her more infamous
husband. While the film is gorgeously
photographed, there’s little spark generated between the characters, where
their lives literally feel glossed over, never getting under the surface. While always attempting to portray Marie in
the most sympathetic light, as if she was staunchly independent for her time,
but what we see onscreen remains a relatively unsympathetic
character.
Marie Krøyer - Film - SF
International
MARIE KRØYER was married to the great, Danish painter P.S. Krøyer. At the
peak of their marriage, very much marked by easy living and high social status,
Krøyer’s mental illness is getting more severe and their dream of sharing a
life as artists is crumbling and turning to frustration and sorrow.
For Marie, it is the frustration of being torn between her roles of wife, mother and artist; of not being able to express herself through her art, and the sorrow of seeing her beloved husband slowly changing and slipping further into insanity. To get some peace and regain strength, mother and daughter take a vacation where Marie meets and falls head over heels in love with Swedish composer Hugo Alfvén. Marie boldly leaves her husband for her new love, knowing only little of the world-shattering choices that lie ahead of her.
Marie Krøyer Alfvén Skagens Museum
The exhibition puts focus on works and designs by Marie
Krøyer Alfvén, and for the very first time ever her work as an artist, designer
and interior designer will be on show together in one exhibition. In this way
it is possible to gain a thorough insight into her artistic activities. The
exhibition is arranged in collaboration with Leksand’s Konstmuseum in
Education
Marie Martha Mathilde Triepcke was born in 1867 in
Copenhagen of German parents. At the beginning of the 1880s she began her
artistic education. She was tutored in drawing and painting at private art
schools because women were not allowed to study at the
The meeting with
Krøyer
In December 1888 Marie travelled to
Marie Krøyer as a
designer and interior designer
It was also Marie that supervised most of the interiors in
the family’s home both in Skagen and in
After the marriage to Krøyer, Marie became his favourite
model and she is represented in a large number of his works from the 1890s. The
marriage was problematic, and from the beginning of the 1900s Krøyer was
hospitalised several times because of psychological problems. On a journey by
herself to
Alfvénsgården
After the divorce Marie moved to Dalarna in
Hugo Alfvén and Marie Krøyer were married in 1912 and divorced in 1936. After the divorce Alfvénsgården went to Marie and remained in her possession until she died in 1940. Hugo and Marie’s daughter, Margita, inherited the house and lived there until she died in 1962, after which it was inherited by Vibeke Krøyer, who sold the house and it is still privately owned.
SF
Film - Interview. Bille August om "Marie Krøyer" Nanna Frank Rassmussen interview from the
Danish Film Institute May 24, 2012
August, Pernilla
BEYOND (Svinalängorna) B+ 90
Sweden
A wrenchingly dramatic
take on family dysfunction and death and dying, as expressed by Bergman
actress, now first time feature filmmaker Pernilla August, in what might be a
variation on the FANNY AND ALEXANDER (1982) story had their parents been
trailer trash alcoholics. A two-tiered
story that slowly unleashes unpleasant truths about a woman’s miserable
childhood, where Leena (Noomi Rapace) becomes consumed by her past, something
she’s spent her entire life trying to forget, literally forced to relive
various flashback moments from her traumatized past after she receives a call
that her dying mother may only have a few hours left to live. Despite the fact she’s had no contact in
years, her two children are surprised to hear about a grandmother they never
knew existed, so at the urging of her husband, Rapace’s real life husband Ola,
they make an obligatory family visit.
While this plays out, a parallel story unearths the horrible tragedy
that spells out Leena’s unfortunate childhood when she was forced to witness a
continuous series of brutal beatings of her mother (Outii Mäenpää) by her
abusive father (Ville Virtanen), both Finnish immigrants forced to take the
lowest paying positions to survive, continually ending up drunk, making life
miserable for young Leena (Tehilla Blad) and her even more troubled younger
brother Sakari (Junior Blad), both of whom must find a way to survive. Interestingly, Blad and Junior’s sister Alpha
plays one of Leena’s two daughters, while one of August’s own daughters
provides the inner narration of Leena making entries into her diary, which
offer some of the most insightful personal observations in the film.
Adapting a Susanna
Alakoski novel, August’s film is a master class of dramatic acting performances
all around, nominated as Sweden’s Best Foreign Film, where despite the big
names in Swedish and Finnish theater, Tehilla Blad steals the show, providing a
heartbreaking performance, where her lone determination to succeed and save her
family is otherworldly, showing wisdom beyond her years, even if it ends in
utter disaster, something she can never forgive herself for. Rapace was the traumatized child survivor in
the Millenium Trilogy (2009), another
vulnerable character shrouded in secrets that operates with utmost conviction,
offering another blisteringly intense performance. Beginning with early optimism from their
initial move into the housing project, seen as an upgrade from their tinier
residence, everyone’s initially on their best behavior until slipping back into
the devastating blur of events of soon forgotten memories, though you’d have to
be drunk to forget, otherwise imprinted into the shell-shocked lives of two
young kids who deserve better, where it gets so bad Sakari stops eating and
speaking. In one sequence, young Leena
lists in her diary all the profane and horrible names her father calls her
mother in the heat of anger, where this sequence of vivid reminders of a man’s
contemptuous and vile view of women is hard to forget, especially at an
impressionistic young age, where living with these hellish parents is
equivalent to serving in combat.
As Leena reluctantly
comes out of her adult shell, nudged by her husband and family, it’s scandalous
what she’s been keeping locked up inside for so many years, but perhaps only
because she remembers it so well, as her fiercely deterministic attitude to
overcome it as a child is met with the force of physical brutality and
emotional indifference, where her mother would continually forget just how bad
things really were. Outii Mäenpää is no
great prize as a mother, but she’s a force to be reckoned with onscreen, where
her conflicting emotions are continually ripped into smithereens, leaving her
available as a battering ram for her Neanderthal brute of a husband. Yet near death, she recollects these years
fondly, still clueless what any of this really meant to her children, thinking
only of herself, the devoted wife who yearns for that man, wishing to be close
to him even in death. This is a
mercilessly punishing work, where the seeds of wrath have lifelong
ramifications that remain hidden, out of sight, where women have bore the brunt
of this kind of savage marital treatment for centuries on end. Yet while it was happening, in the midst of
this nightmarish fiasco, young Leena is continually adding poetic reflections
into her diary, observing the world around her with a keen sense of
intelligence and sisterly obligation, as if it’s her responsibility to clean up
her family’s embarrassing disasters, one day following the next, where it
always falls upon her young shoulders, where she must somehow find a way to
make things all right. Off course it’s
never enough, as people with this degree of damage and self loathing would
never listen anyway. While this may be
too graphically raw and bleak for some, in this searingly graphic portrayal
August takes us into the heart of domestic violence, a turbulent hurricane of
destruction that wreaks havoc on anything it touches, laying waste to human
lives, who in the end are only so much collateral damage.
User reviews from imdb Author: swefilmlover
(filmlover@hotmail.se) from
This is a drama that almost sets you in a mode of physical pain throughout
the whole film session. The director Pernilla August lets the viewer become a
part of the private lives of the people you get to know in this film in a way
that's almost embarrassing. You just stand there, watching their lives falling
into pieces while the alcohol takes over the control and you cry, not by
sentimentality but a painful cry by pity and compassion. You are not even able
to hate the dreadful father (Ville Virtanen) and the mother (Outi Mäenpää)
letting this happen to her children whom she loves.
Seeing these things through the grown up woman Leena (Noomi Rapace) gives you
the distance that you need to be able to suffer this emotional torture. She has
hidden these experiences deep inside of her, but a phone call from her dying
mother confronts her with her dark past.
The young Leena is played by Tehilla Blad and she carries this film with the
same depth and intensity as her elder alter ego Noomi Rapace does. Rapace is
the star actress in this film but Blad's performance in this film is the
biggest remaining impression I carry with me when I leave the theater. ALL the
actors make an outstanding work. The acting in Beyond goes beyond many good
films and there is no weak link, not even the young children. The continuity
between the girl Leena and the women Leena is exceptional. Not primarily for
their look but for their expression and how you can read their feelings and
thoughts in their faces.
The
MovieHamlet [Stefan Hedmark]
It’s a beautiful thing to watch someone make their first movie and it turns out to be a knockout. In Pernilla August’s case, her experiences and status in the filmmaking community likely made her feature film directing debut easier, but also raised anticipations. We did expect someone who had been directed several times by Ingmar Bergman, and once married to Bille August, to have picked up a few things about the crafts of storytelling and filmmaking. Beyond turns out to be a confident, deeply moving experience that lifts ingredients from Susanna Alakoski’s best-seller and molds them into a film that stands on its own.
The story begins with a phone call that Leena (Noomi Rapace) initially
refuses to take. It’s her mother Aili (Outi Mäenpää) calling from the hospital
to let her know that she’s dying. Leena, married to Johan (Ola Rapace) and
herself a mother of two young daughters, hasn’t talked to her mom in years and
wants nothing to do with her. Johan nevertheless talks her into driving down to
southern
Alakoski’s autobiographical novel was told from the perspective of a child, but August also wanted to explore how an adult person with that kind of horrible background is able to build a life of her own and go on living it without dealing with caged-up emotions until the day outer circumstances force her to let them out. At first, we have no idea just how bad Leena’s childhood was; the early memories of life in Ystad are relatively sunny and serve as a way of making the audience get to know the real personalities of her parents before the booze dehumanizes them. The adult Leena’s aggressive behavior and reluctance toward seeing her mom seem strange at first… but we realize that this is how the child of an alcoholic would behave. Leena is still trying to cover up for her folks, still cleaning away bottles and other shameful traces of her parents’ illness. Well directed and starkly photographed, this is an unsettling therapy session that ultimately offers hope for the “patient”. The 1970s vision of life in a Swedish apartment complex is convincingly recreated by Bergman’s veteran production designer, Anna Asp. The reality of alcoholism is gut-wrenchingly conveyed; a few very effective shots of the parents “partying” look so shadowy from young Leena’s perspective that they might as well be straight out of a horror movie; the dancing looks more eerie than “fun”.
Noomi Rapace was widely praised for her iconic performance in the Millennium movies, but this one is emotionally stronger. In the flashbacks, Mäenpää and Virtanen are equally memorable as the irresponsible, pathetic and dangerous parents, victims in their own right.
Pick 'n' Mix Flix [Colin
Harris]
It was the call Leena least expected. ‘It’s your mother’, the voice says. Leena immediately hangs up. A second call, this time from a hospital, informs her that her mother is dying – a matter of hours, they say – and would like to see Leena one more time. There’s a good reason the two haven’t seen each other for years, and a small matter like the death of one of them might not be enough to reunite them one last time.
Reluctantly, and on the urging from her husband, Leena (Noomi Rapace) packs her two daughters in the car, gives her husband the keys and the four head off on their long car journey. This time spent idly watching the world go by gives Leena ample time to reflect on her childhood, and what a miserable upbringing it was. We’re talking alcoholics, here, those soulless people who can see no further than the bottom of a bottle and never mind who gets to suffer the consequences.
It’s time for the first of many extended flashbacks. Young Leena (brilliantly played by little Tehilla Blad, whose sister Alpha plays the daughter of the grown-up Leena – nice touch) is a happy little child. At twelve, the family have moved into a new flat and the future looks bright. Her parents (Outi Mäenpää and Ville Virtanen, both excellent) are Finns, migrants who have to accept the first jobs they get. She cleans, he works in construction. The housewarming goes well. Leena’s dad is offered a drink but he refuses. He’s three months sober, and not about to throw it all away now things are looking so rosy.
The early scenes are important, showing that there was once a decent family here, one that will eventually be ruined by alcohol. Modern-day Leena is reminded of the bad days wherever she looks, especially when she finally meets her mother, bed-bound and all tubed up, demanding one more cigarette. She asks her daughter to go back to the flat, the very same one Leena escaped from many years ago, and all the old memories come flooding back. There’s the tub she used to bathe her brother in, for example, while her father was knocking lumps out of her mother. There’s the next door neighbour’s flat, the one where you could hear quite clearly all the insults being hurled by a drunken father; and there’s the place where the Christmas tree stood, the one her father fell from while decorating, dead drunk, and where he turned his embarrassment into a full-on fist fight with his wife.
It’s not pleasant, obviously, but mercifully we’re spared too much on-screen violence. Were this a British film I dread to think what we might have seen, but director Pernilla August, an actress making her directorial debut, knows that implication is often more effective than explicit depictions which have a tendency to alienate. Besides, what could be more depressing than watching a young boy and girl living each day in such surroundings? I always get dreadfully uneasy about such things, and the sight of the juvenile girl cleaning up after one of her father’s all-day benders (while her baby brother sits and watches) was harrowing.
Yes, the early, happy scenes do not last. It was the first emotion to have to budge over and make space for alcohol. There are ominous signs for us viewers. Where, for example, is the brother now? Her husband wants to know, too, but the taciturn Leena still can’t open up. Her upbringing has had a terrible effect on her, memories that she’d tried to forget have now returned, and she’s unable to communicate them. Who can blame her.
Noble and worthy though Beyond is, I can’t honestly say I enjoyed it. It’s not really a film to ‘enjoy’, anyway, more like one to endure, and as such I had difficulties with it. I absolutely hate the idea of children having to go through the things the young girl and boy lived with, and I need no reminder of such unhappiness in the world. Technically this film is excellent, shot on grainy desaturated film and boasting excellent performances (most notably the young Tehilla Blad), with superb award-winning direction, but its subject matter was not to my tastes. Domestic violence dramas have never been my thing, and thus I remained alienated and detached from the tremendously sad on-screen events. My relatively low 6/10 mark reflects this, but should not dissuade you from watching if you enjoyed movies such as, say, Nil By Mouth.
Beyond (2010) Jennie Kermode from Eye for Film
User reviews from imdb Author: JvH48 from
User reviews from imdb Author: Amin Jacoub from Croatia
User reviews from imdb Author: filmbuff1000000 from United States
User reviews from imdb Author: johno-21 from
The
Hollywood Reporter [Natasha Senjanovic]
Variety Reviews -
Beyond - Film Reviews - - Review by Boyd van Hoeij
The
Miami Herald [Rene Rodriguez]
Aurel, Jean
LES FEMMES
aka:
The Vixen
Les Femmes is a Brigitte Bardot romantic comedy which came near the end of La Bardot's career. It is not one of Bardot's better films, but has been difficult to obtain and is now available in Region 1 as part of a newly released 5 film set cleverly called "Brigitte Bardot 5-Film Collection."
A famous author, who has written many popular books about his
relationships with women, is stuck on his next project. That fact that he is
engaged to two different women is probably adding to his stress level. His
editor decides that what he needs is a road trip with a new woman, and hires
Bardot to accompany him, to type as he dictates, and to do whatever else he
might request of her -- "anything a woman can do for a man." They
take the train to
Les Femmes Mark Deming from All Movie Guide
An older woman uses a younger woman to satisfy both his personal and professional needs in this offbeat sex comedy. Clara (Brigitte Bardot) is beautiful young woman who has been hired by Jerome (Maurice Ronet), a middle-aged novelist, to work as his secretary and take dictation. However, Jerome has been suffering from a severe case of writer's block, and what he needs most at this point is inspiration. Clara's beauty fires his imagination, if not necessarily for literary matters, and as he dictates to her, he shares stories of his sensual past and fantasies of his future. Through his words and actions, Jerome seduces Clara, though it seems obvious this as much her doing as his; however, while Jerome is strictly the "love 'em and leave 'em" type, Clara has a more stable relationship in mind.
digitallyOBSESSED.com (Mark Zimmer)
This disc features one of the last films that Brigitte Bardot
made, an exploration of the psyche of a man who loves many women (if not all
women) but can't bear to be tied to any one of them. Set in late 1960s
Writer Jerome Herve (Maurice Ronet) is a womanizing playboy who writes his
passionate but transient relationships into his best-selling books. About to be
married to two different women, he has his publisher arrange for a new
secretary to accompany him to
The succession of girlfriends represents a number of different sides of the
feminine personality: Anne de Montfort, his first conquest, represents the
emotional and the innocent. Marianne (Christina Holm) is the purely physical,
and Helene (Annie Duperey) is the defiant, competitive and unattainable. All of
these qualities are combined in Clara, and not surprisingly she is the most
challenging of all. In part, Herve is himself to blame: he has influenced
women, both in his relationships and his novels, to desire freedom as much as
he does himself. The result is that when he is ready to commit, not only is it
difficult to find a woman who will do so, but in a dream sequence at the end
his greatest fear is made clear: that women will discover that they much prefer
the company of each other to that of men.
Ronet gives a good performance as the would-be Don Juan who ultimately is
manipulated by the feminine forces that he thinks he controls. Bardot is
outstanding, aided by a script which makes her a character full of cryptic non
sequitirs that Herve cannot begin to understand. Her fascination for the
mysterious man with a moustache on the train as well as her stated commitment
to a man only briefly glimpsed seeing her off and about whom we learn nothing
more, help underlie the themes of the film. The extensive use of a handheld
camera (especially in the sequences on the train) gives a sense of verismo to
the proceedings which helps ground things; a typical Cinemascope presentation
would merely get in the way of the message.
DVD Savant (Glenn Erickson) reviewing the 5-film Brigitte Bardot
Collection, also seen here: Turner Classic Movies
CRITIC'S
CHOICE; New DVDs Dave Kehr from The New York Times
Autant-Lara, Claude
LOVE IS MY PROFESSION (En Cas de Malheur)
aka:
In Case of Emergency
Considering she was operating at a time of such constraint, when 24 frames of exposed nipple constituted at least a month's ration of cinematic erotica, it's surprising how potent a sexual presence the vintage Bardot remains 40 years on. She's offset here by Gabin at his most world-weary and Autant-Lara at his most sardonic: when the director finally permits the audience to ogle BB's bare breasts, they're soaked in blood, after she's been butchered by a deranged ex-lover (a shot widely censored at the time). Essentially this is bourgeois nightmare - successful lawyer seduced away from marriage and career by proletarian pussy - but presented non-judgementally and with icy control.
En Cas
de Malheur Hal Erickson from All
Movie Guide
En Cas
de Malheur, literally "in case of accident," is better known by
its American title, Love
is My Profession. By any name, this Brigitte Bardot
vehicle ran into stiff opposition from the Catholic Legion of Decency, severely
limiting its
User
Reviews from imdb Author: ironside
(robertfrangie@hotmail.com) from
The phenomenal success of the Bardot myth, like that of James
Dean which just preceded it, was very much the immediate response of the youth
public to a need they felt in themselves and which Bardot was the first young
girl to realize on the screen…
In Claude Autant-Lara's film, Bardot came off as more than a sexual image, her
persona giving life to the character she portrayed... The film contained of the
most erotic scenes of her career: Brigitte was called on to raise her skirt in
order to convince a skeptical lawyer to represent her case!
In her frank demand for sexual pleasure Bardot is without any feminine guile,
and the film contrasts her 'honesty,' for what it is worth, with the
sophisticated behavior of the 'woman of the world' played by Edwige Feuillère…
Gabin and Feuillère, dubious at first of appearing with her, claimed
subsequently to have found her charming and intelligent, but at the same time
nervous, full of self-doubt, and uncertain both of her talent and her beauty…
The New York Times (Bosley Crowther)
Auteuil, Daniel
THE WELL DIGGER’S DAUGHTER (La fille du
puisatier) B 87
France (107 mi)
2011
Katherine, Katherine
Why these bitter words
Why words that pierce my heart
I have given you my whole heart
Katherine, don't forget
Katherine, Katherine
What have you come to say
These words that are breaking my heart
You have no idea of the pain you cause
You are not thinking of it
Because you, yourself, have no heart
Ungrateful Heart
You are taking away my life
All is over now, between us
And I shall not think of you any more
Salvatore Cardillo’s “Core ‘Ngrato (Ungrateful Heart),” 1911, Enrico Caruso - Core 'ngrato YouTube (5:27)
Daniel Auteuil captured
the world’s imagination 25 years ago in Claude Berri’s skillful cinematic adaptations
of two Marcel Pagnol novels taking place in rural Provence, where two cynically
scheming farmers attempt to defraud a newcomer out of their property starring
in JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING (1986), shot together in what were
at the time the most expensive French films ever made, doing much to promote
tourism in the region. Auteuil, in his
first feature film as a director, returns to the same pastoral region in the
south of
A remake of a beloved,
near three-hour 1940 film made by Pagnol himself, this is a simplistic and
often overwrought melodrama, but the cast is superb, especially the two
fathers, Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin as wealthy store merchant Mr.
Mazel, as their economic perspective on their own children couldn’t be more
different. Mazel has an oversensitive
wife, Sabine Azéma (current spouse of Alain Resnais) who’s afraid to lose her
son, finding women’s attention to him purely economically driven, while Auteuil
listens to a lushly romantic operatic piece by Caruso that used to make his own
wife cry, Salvatore Cardillo’s “Core ‘Ngrato (Ungrateful Heart)” Enrico Caruso - Core 'ngrato YouTube (5:27). This heavily dramatic music interspersed
throughout is a beautiful touch of period nostalgia, as it reflects not only
Auteuil’s feelings about his deceased wife, but also, as it turns out, his own
daughter. Jacques is immediately called
off to war as a fighter pilot before realizing Patricia is carrying his child,
sending his own mother with a written note to meet her at a designated location
instead, but the mother burns the note and never utters a word, leaving
Patricia in a state of abject despair, believing she’s been humiliatingly
rejected. Forced to tell her father, his
sense of honor requires that he dutifully round up all his daughters for a
formal visit to Mr. and Mrs. Mazel, revealing their son is the father of
Patricia’s expectant child, which the Mazel’s feel is little more than an
attempt at forced bribery, sending them away at once. Auteuil’s indignant response is to suggest
Mazel may be a seller of tools, but he certainly doesn’t know a thing about how
to use them. Auteuil immediately
considers his daughter a lost child and sends her away to live with his sister,
refusing to think of her as his daughter anymore. This kind of devastating humiliation and
shame go hand in hand with the pride of the lower class, who want no favors
from the rich, who believe they have to handle their own problems themselves
without the interference of others.
Auteuil’s views on women are less than respectful as well, as he’s
wildly paternalistic, ruling with an iron hand instead of any real
understanding, which likely reflects a rural farmer’s view, where daughters are
still thought of as prospective wives rather than as worthy individuals.
When Jacques is shot
down behind enemy lines, presumed dead when his plane goes up in flames,
Auteuil reveals little sentiment, where pride can be a difficult thing, more
far reaching than he realizes, as it’s a wall between himself and his most
favored daughter, becoming more of a game he plays than any resemblance of true
feelings. Nonetheless, he goes over the
top in fury when his next oldest daughter secretly pays a visit to Patricia in
exile, having delivered a healthy son which, without a father, has been given
their own family name, something Auteuil takes very seriously. Fuming like a man possessed, he decides to
pay her a little visit of his own, but after a bit of righteous indignation,
largely for show, he’s instead swept off his feet at seeing his first grandson. Even the Mazels come around and pay Patricia
a visit as well, hat in hand, largely apologetic about their earlier
dishonorable rush to judgment, also taken aback by a newborn grandson who may
help fill the void of losing their son.
While Auteuil continues to mistrust their intentions, feeling the rich
haven’t a clue of what’s actually useful and instead indulge this child with an
excess of things he doesn’t need, feeling all along their secret intentions are
to gain custody of this child for themselves, Patricia is glad for their help
and is happy for their involvement in raising her child. This being a war drama, rapidly changing
events on the ground lead to a surge of victory, which also expresses itself in
melodramatic twists of fate, with predictable results. While there is no sign of war anywhere in
this film, instead signs are shown via smoke churning locomotives and tearful
train station scenes of departing and arriving soldiers, where life in the
idyllic, pastoral countryside has an inherent charm of its own that feels
timeless, where the land is larger than the people who inhabit it. Nonetheless this film explores a few of the
characters, including their fiercely individualistic attitudes toward each other,
often antagonistic, but ultimately humane.
While
The
Well Digger's Daughter Review. Movie Reviews ... - Time Out David Jenkins
Daniel Auteuil’s inauspicious but cheerfully populist directorial debut sees him waltzing headlong into Marcel Pagnol’s Provence of the 1940s with this sun-bleached tale of salty, lionised bumpkins, dastardly shop owners, sexually inexperienced daughters and fighter pilots whose morals are as loose as their flies. Looking as if the negative has been dipped in liquid neon to get brightness levels just below the point where sunglasses would be a medical must, Auteuil’s unembellished depiction of the French countryside hardly demonstrates a sharp eye for landscapes. And, in dramatic terms, envelope-pushing this is not, especially for someone who has collaborated with Michael Haneke. Yet there’s a broad appeal to be gleaned from its antiquated charm, modest focus and a clutch of ripe, old-school character turns, especially from Auteuil in the lead and French stalwarts Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Sabine Azéma. Suffice to say, fans of ‘Jean de Florette’ and ‘Manon des Sources’ will be in hog heaven with this one.
Village
Voice [Michael Nordine]
In one of The Well-Digger's Daughter's most telling
scenes, 18-year-old Patricia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) spends several minutes
on the verge of tears as she defends her honor to a would-be inamorata (Nicolas Duvauchelle) whose lewd advances she
has just spurned. An appropriate response, to be sure, but one that plays out
in a way that's too stately and reserved to get under either character's skin—a
problem the film runs into time and again. In one of many acts of restraint,
co-writer/director Daniel Auteuil elides the offending act itself and
leaves it to us to imagine the particulars. Here and elsewhere, though, this
tale of an unwed mother doesn't give us much reason to assume that what we don't
see is much more scandalous than what we do. There's some striking
imagery—late-afternoon sunlight peeking through wheat stalks, a quiet stream
running through the French countryside, bright interiors—and an airy, evocative
score courtesy of Alexandre Desplat, but the characters' dealings
with one another (whether romantic, businesslike, or otherwise) are too routine
to live up to the formal elements encasing them. Stirrings of dignified outrage
via the eponymous well-digger eventually go a long way toward energizing the
film, which improves markedly once it shifts its focus from the World War I–era
milieu toward how quickly a naive young girl can turn into a fallen woman and
the ways in which that fallout affects her father, her family, and apparently
most importantly, her name.
There's nothing egregiously wrong with The Well-Digger's Daughter, which marks the debut of veteran actor Daniel Auteuil as a writer-director in a remake of a 1940 film by Marcel Pagnol, who with both pen and camera served as the Dickens of early 20th-century southern France. In revisiting the oeuvre of this humanist author of page, stage, and screen, Auteuil reconnects with his own worldwide breakthrough in the mid '80s in Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, a diptych based on a novel by Pagnol. But while also leading a solid ensemble cast as the middle-aged well digger Pascale, a loving though instinctively moralistic widower in World War I-era Provence, he hasn't sufficiently reimagined or given new weight to the material. It plays as a serious comedy of the Old World, perhaps most truthful in how traditional patriarchs anchored their legacies with male children and were primed to be disappointed in daughters, but director of photography Jean-François Robin's golden images of the bucolic landscape notwithstanding, it seems scripted, shot, and acted as it might've been 70 years ago. (Alexandre Desplat's middling score does add contemporary string-based flavor, though his title theme curiously suggests the Rosemary's Baby lullaby.)
In counterpoint to his signature key of harried urbanity, Auteuil inhabits this unshaven peasant role with visceral authority, entertaining the suit of his genial assistant, Félipe (Kad Merad), to marry Pascale's second-eldest daughter, Patricia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, an ingenue who delivers noble suffering with a minimum of contrivance). Scandal is launched when the girl is seduced by the prosperous local merchant's son, Jacques (Nicolas Duvauchelle, cleaning up real nice for a bland part), who's promptly called to military duty and goes missing in action before Patricia becomes pregnant. Auteuil's adaptation is an hour shorter than Pagnol's original film, and its middle third is crowded with a series of "big" scenes as Pascale is wounded by his child's crisis, presents her to no avail to the soldier's parents (Jean-Pierre Darroussin and Sabine Azéma), reluctantly but coolly sends her to live with an aunt in order to avoid shame (declaring that society has judged her "a lost girl"), and then reconsiders the estrangement after one look at his burbling grandson. Merad and Darroussin are particularly fine as men who fill their social roles with lightness and stolidity, respectively, but The Well-Digger's Daughter ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Pagnol's tale new life.
Ciné-vu Noel Megahey
Twenty-five years after he made his name acting in Claude Berri’s adaptations of two of Marcel Pagnol’s most famous novels, Jean de Florette and Manon des sKad Merad)ources, Daniel Auteuil returns to the world of simple country life in the Provence region of the south of France (and the place of his own childhood) for his first feature film as a director.
The nostalgic and somewhat idealistic view of the past evoked in the works of Marcel Pagnol is not a fashionable subject for French cinema, but it remains a popular one when handled well, as in the aforementioned Berri films as well as in Yves Robert’s adaptations of the Pagnol autobiographical films La gloire de mon père and Le château de ma mère. While there is inevitably some idealisation of living close to nature in both sets of films, seen from the romanticised perspective of a fairly well-off family, Pagnol’s work doesn’t hesitate however to show the bitterness of family feuds in the provinces, greed and poverty, the mistrust of city folk, the ostracisation of outsiders and even those from within their own community who fail to live up to certain religious conservative standards. All of which are subjects that traditionally make for great melodrama and great cinema.
If La fille du puisatier (The Well-Digger’s Daughter) is not great Pagnol (it was originally made as a film by the writer himself in 1940), and certainly not epic Pagnol in the tradition of his larger interconnected works, it at least mostly avoids the trap of idealisation of the Provence region, or at least it doesn’t make it the primary focus. Rather, the story operates more as a character drama, focussing on the people of the region, their beliefs, their sense of class, work ethic and tradition, and how they cope when an incident threatens the stability of these inviolable principles. In La fille du puisatier, it’s an old story, that of an unmarried girl, Patricia (Astrid Berges-Frisbey), the daughter of the well-digger Pascal Amoretti (Daniel Auteuil), who gets herself pregnant just after turning eighteen.
What complicates matters – as if this event were not shameful enough in itself – is that the father-to-be, Jacques (Nicolas Duvauchelle) is not around to acknowledge his part in the affair, having been called up as a fighter pilot in the war which has just broken out, and has gone missing, presumed dead. Since he is also the son of a wealthy businessman, Mr Mazel (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), the chances are that since the young couple were only together on two occasions, neither the boy nor his family – and certainly not his mother (Sabine Azéma) – are likely to admit to having anything to do with the pregnant daughter of a humble well-digger.
The film doesn’t really extend much beyond this in terms of plot. There is the further complication of Félipe’s unrequited love for Patricia – sensitively played by comedian Kad Merad – and his willingness to do the right thing by her, but the film is (surprisingly) less concerned with melodramatic twists of fate or chance, and is rather more concerned with exploring the characters and the attitudes of the society they live in. It’s marvellously played by all the principals, Astrid Berges-Frisbey the picture of youthful innocence and stoicism in the face of terrible injustice, Auteuil adopting an Italian-Provencal accent and slipping fully into character. The film is also beautifully shot in the glorious sunshine of the south of France without becoming too picture-postcard picturesque and, best of all, it’s superbly scored by Alexandre Desplat, who makes fine use of early 1940s period songs to heighten the nature of the situation.
La fille du puisatier is a creditable effort from Daniel Auteuil as a first-time director (and he has plans for further adaptations of Pagnol’s famous Marius, Fanny, Cesar trilogy), in touch with the material and the characters, without ever feeling the need to overstate, but the film also consequently never hits the emotional core of the situation in a way that would lift to the next level. Its very simplicity however may also in the end be its true charm.
The
Well Digger's Daughter: Scandal in the ... - Entertainment - Time Richard Corliss
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Avery , Tex
Tex Avery's Screwball Classics Review
Tex Avery is a man who needs no introduction to even the most casual animation fan. His frantic, zany, bizarre cartoons for Warner Brothers, MGM, and Walter Lantz are among the most influential ever filmed. MGM/UA has released four volumes of Tex Avery's Screwball Classics, each containing a healthy dose of Avery's work at MGM. After years of seeing shopworn copies of Avery's cartoons on TV, it's a pleasure to see his work in crystal-clear prints, with razor-sharp sound to match.
Avery told Joe Adamson in Tex Avery: King of Cartoons that he designed his cartoons for adult audiences. Children will enjoy the slapstick of Avery's cartoons, but they also contain extreme cartoony violence, mental illness, racial stereotypes, and suicide. Parents may wish to exercise a judgement call. Watch the entire volume first *before* letting Tex Avery be your child's babysitter.
If I could recommend only one of the four volumes, it would be the second. Volume two simply contains a greater concentration of Avery's funniest and/or most important cartoons. These include Red Hot Riding Hood, the first of Avery's series of cartoons in which a wolf hilariously overreacts to the sexy antics of a dancing girl; Northwest Hounded Police, an odd caper in which an escaped con finds that Officer Droopy seems to be everywhere at once; Slap Happy Lion, a weird parable about a King of the Jungle who is terrified of a mouse; Happy Go Nutty, perhaps the logical extension of the Looney Tunes in which Screwy Squirrel is actually the inmate of an asylum.
Avery's characters are a motley crew of misfits. Wolves which strongly resemble the Disney version of the Big Bad Wolf lust after semi-realistically drawn redheads and are pursued by semmingly insignicicant but actually omnipotent Droopy Dogs. Screwy Squirrel is literally insane and makes life miserable for hunters and dimwitted bloodhounds. All of the characters in Avery's MGM cartoons are drawn in a highly distinct style. They don't quite look like the Warner Brothers characters, are far more rubbery than those of Famous Studios, and owe quite a bit in elegant spare curves to Walt Disney (Preston Blair, Avery's chief animator, was responsible for the Dance of the Hours segment of Fantasia). Their double and triple takes are bug-eyed slack-jawed marvels to behold.
Words can't describe how funny the gags in these movies are - you have to see them to believe them. And then you'll probably have to watch them again just to make sure you didn't miss anything. They're incredibly silly productions, the type of cartoons that simply aren't made anymore.
If seeing this compliation leaves you wanting more, here are a few facts about Avery: He created Daffy Duck and Droopy, defined Bugs Bunny as we know him, was nominated for four Academy Awards, and was sadly underappreciated by the masses before his 1980 death. He never lived to see the Avery style of animation become so influential in TV advertising, let alone the Who Framed Roger Rabbit film. If there's a Toontown in the afterlife, you can bet that Avery is keeping the angels in stitches.
All-Movie Guide bio from Hal Erickson
A descendant of both Daniel Boone and Judge Roy Bean, Fred
"Tex" Avery enjoyed on-the-job art training when he was assigned to
illustrate his high school annual ("The only guy there who could handle a
pencil") Avery left his home in Dallas to take a three-month course at the
Chicago Art Institute, then headed for Hollywood, to look for work in the
animation field. Contrary to previously published reports, Avery did not get
his start at Terrytoons or Van Beuren, instead, he "met a fella who knew a
girl" in charge of inking and painting at the Walter Lantz Studio. From
1929 to 1934, Avery animated scenes for other directors, and also dabbled in
gag writing. Seeking out a better-paying job, Avery wangled a job with Warner
Bros. animation producer Leon Schlesinger after convincing Schlesinger that
he'd directed two cartoons at Lantz. He hadn't, but that didn't stop
Schlesinger from appointing Avery head of his own unit at "Termite
Terrace," populated with such animation wizards as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett
and Bob Cannon. At the time, Warners' Looney Tunes
and Merrie Melodies
cartoon series were dying because the animators were attempting to emulate
industry leader Walt Disney. Reasoning that he'd never be able to match Disney
in terms of technique, Avery decided to simply concentrate on making his
cartoons funnier. During his six-year (1936-41) tenure at Warners', Avery sped
up the pace of the studio's product, stepped up the gag supply, and sharpened
and defined the personalities of such characters as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and
especially Bugs Bunny. Many of Avery's Warners efforts--Porky's Duck
Hunt, The Shooting of
Dan McGoo, All This and
Rabbit Stew--are among the best cartoons ever made. It is no
exaggeration to say that Avery poured his heart and soul into his work, not to
mention his voice (that inimitable, gut-deep guffaw!) and his idiosyncratic,
off-screen catchphrases ("What's Up, Doc?", "I can't do it! I
just can't do it!" etc.) On the debit side, many of Avery's Warner
cartoons are repetitious--notably his "spot gag" travelogue
parodies--while his seeming fascination with the character of Egghead (a
cretinous precursor to Elmer Fudd) bogged down many an otherwise excellent
film. When producer Schlesinger insisted upon altering the ending of Avery's
1941 Bugs Bunny effort Heckling Hare,
Bright Lights Film
Journal: Tex Avery Gary Morris
As if radically
rethinking the Hollywood cartoon weren't enough, our boy Tex can also be
thanked for inventing or perfecting Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and perhaps the
greatest character in animation, Bugs Bunny
Images - The Fairy Tales of Tex Avery Gary Morris
Avery, Tex They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They
Tex Avery “Tex Avery:
Don’t Heckle with his Heckling Hare,” from Fortune City
Tex Avery The animation of Tex Avery from KeyFrame
The
Compleat Tex Avery a review of the
Laser disc release
Tex Avery a Tex Avery profile, including several images
Tex
Avery - Bad Luck Blackie Cartoon “Bad Luck Blackie,” an unknown 1942 WWII
cartoon, “The Tex Avery Show,” and “All This and Rabbit Stew,” online cartoons
Tex Avery from Wikipedia
Avildsen, John G.
ROCKY
Growing up in
Of course there's a lot more to Rocky than just the setting, but for a kid growing up in Rocky's own neighborhood, the flick always had a very special appeal. And it only got better as I grew older and learned a little bit about how movies were made. Several years and gradually worsening sequels later, it might be easy to forget what a fantastic movie the original Rocky is, but I guess that's why we re-watch the classics over and over. And if you happen to be a fan of sports movies, Rocky might not have been the first, but it sure as hell turned out to be one of the most influental ... even if most copycatters don't have the stones to stick with Rocky's fantastic ending.
You want simplicity in plot? Here you go: Rocky Balboa is a
Five sequels later, he's still trying, dammit, but there's nothing as sweet as that first big battle.
Written by actor / second-time screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, Rocky should stand as the eternal retort when someone implies that Sly is a dummy. Say what you will about the guy's late-career movie choices, but I firmly believe that the guy who wrote Rocky is a pretty intelligent person. Plus the flick went on to be nominated for ten Oscars (winning three, including Best Picture) while earning untold millions for MGM and inspiring and inviting new fans all over the planet. Find me someone who doesn't love Rocky. (The first one, not necessarily the sequels, though I do have a soft spot for Rocky 2.)
In every way a quintessential '70s flick, Rocky is supported by John Avildsen's gritty-yet-strangely warm visual style, Bill Conti's stunningly rousing score acts as the absolute backbone of the piece, the performances (from Sly and the timid Talia Shire to the grizzled Burt Young and the lovably crotchety Burgess Meredith) are aces across the board... and the ending. A thing of unexpected beauty it must have been back in 1976, and it still moves me every time I see it. Frankly it turns a perfectly watchable underdog story into a thing of cinematic beauty.
And then came the sequels...
Turner Classic Movies Richard Steiner
Sports Illustrated (H.R. Coursen)
Rocky Two faces of the American dream, by Ira Shor
from Jump Cut
Rocky Rocky’s Racism, by Michael Gallantz from Jump
Cut
City Pages, Minneapolis/St. Paul Rob Nelson
James Berardinelli's
ReelViews
The Greatest Films - comprehensive
analysis of classic US film Tim
Dirks
Old School Reviews [John
Nesbit]
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eFilmCritic.com Slyder
Reel.com
DVD review [Jeffrey Wachs]
DVD Verdict Norman Short
Roger
Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times
The New York Times (Vincent Canby)
Avnet, Jon
FRIED GREEN TOMATOES
Southern housewife
Evelyn (Bates) has had enough of her couch-potato husband (Sartain). Their sex
life is dying, and even wrapping her naked body in cling-wrap merely provokes
further apathy. Then, at a nursing-home, she meets old-timer Ninny (Tandy), who
launches into a rambling recollection of long-gone friends and family: tales of
feisty Idgie (Masterson) and Ruth (Parker) who once ran a café in Ninny's small
Alabama home town. Gradually, Evelyn finds strength in the bravery of these
two, and solace in Ninny's evocation of simpler times. With director Avnet, Fannie Flagg
co-scripted this adaptation of her novel; but while the book deftly juggles
separate narratives, the device proves clumsy on screen. More dizzying than the
jumps between past and present is the speed with which consciousness-raised
Evelyn swaps caricatures, evolving from Frump to Fighter. Essentially, the film
is about fine performances - with Tandy securing an Oscar nomination - but it
wins no prizes for subtlety.
Washington
Post (Rita Kempley) review
A Southern reminiscence with Kathy Bates and Jessica Tandy, "Fried Green Tomatoes" is decidedly traveling in the same circles as "Driving Miss Daisy." Real picky folks might even say the good old genre has gotten itself into a rut -- all sassy belles, servile blacks and nostalgia sticky as grits. Lordy, if time don't put a fine patina on most everythin', even Dixie during the Great Depression.
Why the way nursing home resident Ninny Threadgoode (Tandy) remembers it, the family home in the now-shuttered town of Whistle Stop, Ala., was practically Tara. A gifted storyteller, Ninny brings her family history to life for Evelyn Couch (Bates), a bored Birmingham housewife who is uplifted by the octogenarian's tales about an engaging pair of women who ran the Whistle Stop Cafe in the '30s.
In Fannie Flagg's novel "Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe," Idgie and Ruth shared a love that dares not speak its name. But in this movie by "Risky Business" producer Jon Avnet, they are not lesbians, just really, really good friends. And Idgie just happens to be fond of brogans. Avnet, debuting as a director, isn't about to let these heroines out of the closet and into the mainstream.
But blond spitfire Mary Stuart Masterson, as Idgie, keeps us guessing. One of Hollywood's best young actresses, she fairly sets off sparks as the tomboy next door, a distaff Huck Finn. Mary-Louise Parker, also currently starring in "Grand Canyon," shimmers pretty as a firefly as Idgie's demure pal Ruth. And the actresses clearly enjoy a deep rapport.
"Fried Green Tomatoes" is actually two good movies in one -- the better one concerns the bittersweet misadventures of Idgie and Ruth, who are bonded by their love for Idgie's late big brother Buddy, who was also Ruth's fiance. A politically correct heroine, Idgie rescues the pregnant Ruth from her abusive husband and the two raise the child together. Later Idgie and her loyal manservant Big George (Stan Shaw) stand trial for murdering the brute.
Meanwhile, back in the '90s, Evelyn is so fired up by Idgie's escapades, she begins to take control of her life. She gives up her candy bars for aerobics, stops trying to please her lug nut of a husband and begins a career as a cosmetics saleswoman. She also becomes as passionately devoted to Ninny as Ruth was to Idgie, again in friendship. (Ninny is, after all, in her eighties.)
Avnet, who wrote the adaptation with Flagg, doubtless played it safe in turning the story into a parable of platonic devotion. And in doing so, he might also have assured the movie's stars the wider audience they deserve. (Bates has already won a Golden Globe nomination for Evelyn's transformation from dutiful wife to self-actualized career woman.) The film also features Cicely Tyson as Ruth's fiercely devoted seamstress, and Flagg sends up a self-help group leader in a cameo role.
A drama about strong, giving, funny women, "Fried Green Tomatoes" seems plucked from the same patch as the play-turned-movie "Steel Magnolias." It's not exactly a successful hybrid, but you could get a craving for it anyway.
Turner
Classic Movies review Andrea
Passafiume
Two story lines of past and present are skillfully woven together
by director Jon Avnet in his charming 1991 feature debut Fried Green Tomatoes. Adapted from the best-selling novel Fried
Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe by Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes spins a memorable
southern yarn about friendship, food and murder.
Kathy Bates plays Evelyn Couch, a frumpy doormat of a woman who strikes up a
friendship with spunky Alabama nursing home resident Ninny Threadgoode, played
by Jessica Tandy. Ninny entertains Evelyn during her visits with stories about
her hometown of Whistle Stop, Alabama during the Great Depression and the
colorful adventures of young Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and Ruth
(Mary-Louise Parker) who ran a cafe by the railroad tracks.
The character of Idgie was based loosely on author Fannie Flagg's great aunt
Bess Fortenberry who had once owned a railroad cafe in Irondale, Alabama.
"The novel began for me when I was handed a shoebox full of little things
like a menu, a picture, a lock of hair, an old Easter card, etc.," recalls
Flagg in a 1999 interview. "This was all that was left of the sixty-nine
years of my Aunt Bess, who had been such a vital and loving giving person while
she had been alive. I wanted to recreate a life from that shoebox."
Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe was the second novel
written by native Alabaman Flagg. It was a bestseller and was honored with a
Pulitzer Prize nomination in 1987. The famous red-headed author had already
established herself in Hollywood during the 1970s as a television comedy writer
(Candid Camera), actress (Grease [1978]), and frequent panelist
on TV game shows like Match Game. However, writing was her true passion,
and she found a whole new career with the success of her books.
Before its publication, Associate Producer Lisa Lindstrom read a review of
Flagg's forthcoming novel and was intrigued. She got a copy of the manuscript
and liked it so much that she sent it to Jon Avnet and asked him to read it
immediately. Avnet, a successful producer who had been looking for a project to
direct, loved it and secured the rights with his own money. When Fannie Flagg
heard that her book was going to be made into a movie, she was both stunned and
thrilled.
Avnet spent four challenging years trying to bring his vision of Fried Green Tomatoes to the big screen.
He shopped the project around Hollywood, gathering some early financial support
from legendary television producer Norman Lear. Writer Carol Sobieski (Annie
[1982], The Toy [1982]) penned a first draft of the screenplay, but her
version didn't meet Avnet's expectations. He then asked Fannie Flagg to help
work on the screenplay, and she obliged. Eventually, however, Avnet himself
took over the screenplay. He was so passionate about the characters from
Whistle Stop that he spent three years writing and re-writing draft after draft
until he finally had the version he felt would do justice to the story.
Avnet then assembled the top-notch cast of Jessica Tandy, Kathy Bates, Mary
Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker for the central roles. Tandy and Bates
were both recent winners of the Academy Award for Best Actress. Tandy won hers
for 1989's Driving Miss Daisy and Bates won her Oscar® for Misery
(1990). The distinguished Cicely Tyson, who herself had been a Best Actress
nominee for her work in Sounder (1972), was cast in the small but key
role of Sipsey, a cook at the Whistle Stop Cafe. The actors all felt an instant
rapport, and that camaraderie translates memorably onto the screen.
Production Designer Barbara Ling needed to find the perfect location to be the
town of Whistle Stop, which is as much a character in the story of Fried Green Tomatoes as Idgie or Ruth.
An hour south of Atlanta, Georgia, Ling came across the rural town of Juliette
and knew instantly she had found Whistle Stop. It was a tiny veritable ghost
town by the railroad tracks seemingly forgotten by time. The buildings and
storefronts stood abandoned, covered in kudzu and falling apart. The production
team worked their magic on the town, cleaning up the area and transforming an
old antiques store into the Whistle Stop Cafe. The only thing missing for the
location set was a train depot. After a little searching, however, the original
train depot of Juliette, GA turned up in a most unusual place. "I
discovered this building in the middle of the woods that must have been there
for fifty years," recalls Barbara Ling. "Trees had broken through its
floor and windows, but when I saw it, I knew it would complete the look of
Whistle Stop." The depot was fixed up and transported to its rightful spot
by the railroad tracks. When the cast and crew finally descended on Juliette to
shoot the film, it was like going back in time and jumping right into the pages
of Flagg's vivid book. On the negative side, however, Juliette also offered up
plenty of authentic heat, humidity, bugs and snakes to go along with the
authentic buildings and trains.
The success of Fried Green Tomatoes
at the box office was a triumph for Jon Avnet. It was most unusual for such a
small character driven film from a first time director to do so well. "The
strength of Fried Green Tomatoes,"
says Avnet, "is that its core is the art of storytelling. And, as anyone
knows, what makes a movie good is its ability to, quite simply, tell a
story." The movie resonated with audiences and critics alike who praised
the strong acting performances as well as the lovely cinematography by Geoffrey
Simpson that helped evoke the feel of a bygone era and make Whistle Stop come
alive. The film was acknowledged at Academy Award time with nominations for
best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress for Jessica Tandy.
The town of Juliette, Georgia also benefited from the popularity of Fried Green Tomatoes. The citizens of
Juliette and the surrounding area turned the Whistle Stop Cafe movie set into
an actual restaurant, and tourists came from far and wide for a taste of
southern hospitality and delicious fried green tomatoes. Today, Juliette
continues to be a thriving attraction spot for visitors hoping to perhaps catch
a glimpse of Idgie, Ruth and Sipsey. And in the film, you can catch a glimpse
of author Fannie Flagg in a cameo appearance as the workshop teacher of a
women's seminar that Evelyn attends.
not coming to a theater
near you (Adam Balz) review
FRIED
GREEN TOMATOES Excuse Me, Did We See the Same Movie? by Lu Vickers from Jump Cut, June 1994
PopcornQ review Judith Halberstam, placing the film in
context with BASIC INSTINCT
ReelViews (James
Berardinelli) review [3.5/4]
411mania.com
- Anniversary Extended DVD Review [Chad Webb]
Linda
Lopez McAlister (c/o inforM Women's Studies) review
Epinions.com [Eric-Robinson
Lowe]
digitallyOBSESSED.com
(Jeff Ulmer) dvd review [Extended Anniversary Edition]
DVD
Talk (Holly E. Ordway) dvd review [3/5] [Extended Edition]
DVD Verdict
(Jennifer Malkowski) dvd review [Extended Anniversary Edition]
DVD MovieGuide dvd review
[Extended Anniversary Edition] Colin
Jacobson
FulvueDrive-in.com
[Chuck O'Leary]
Exclaim!
dvd review [Anniversary Edition]
Monica S. Kuebler
Edinburgh U Film
Society (Neil Chue Hong) review
Entertainment Weekly
review [B-] Oweb Gleiberman
Austin
Chronicle (Marjorie Baumgarten) review [3/5]
Chicago
Sun-Times (Roger Ebert) review [3/4]
Siskel
& Ebert (video)
The
New York Times (Janet Maslin) review
88 MINUTES
88 Minutes is a film that sat on the shelf for a while (it is copyrighted 2007), and is one of those “real time” movies with a rather severe deadline for its hero: shrink-prof Al Pacino has been given 88 minutes to live by the proxy of a serial killer (Neal McDonough) he helped convict. Suspects and friends who help or hinder him in his short term quest include Alicia Witt, Leelee Sobieski , Amy Brenneman, William Forsythe, Deborah Kara Unger, and Benjamin McKenzie.
88 Minutes is an enjoyable little thriller with a terrific cast that is probably best suited for the small screen, where director Jon Avnet has his roots, and whose style he cannot throw off, despite making five features thus far. In its emphasis on the partnership of unlikely allies it is consistent with his earlier output but lacks the visual distinction or originality that the material invites.
Combustible Celluloid (Jeffrey M. Anderson)
Al Pacino stars in 88 Minutes as high-profile forensic
psychologist Jack Gramm, whose testimony was almost solely responsible for the
conviction of accused murderer Jon Forster (Neal McDonough). Forster is going
to the chair, while maintaining his innocence, and while identical murders are
still being committed throughout
Inanity and incompetence form an imposing tag team in 88
Minutes, the current favorite for 2008's dumbest movie. "Narrative is
based on fact. Based on logic," declares FBI forensic psychologist and
Seattle professor Dr. Jack Gramm (Al Pacino) early in the film, and irony must
be what director Jon Avnet and writer Gary Scott Thompson were after, since
this thriller is guided by a desire to flip off realism and plausibility at
every turn. Gramm is a hotshot whose testimony single-handedly sent serial
killer Jon Forster (Neal McDonough) to death row, though a series of new
murders afford him a stay of execution at just the same moment that Gramm
receives a phone call informing him that he has 88 minutes to live. Why 88? It
has something to do with the slaying of his little sister years earlier, but
trying to piece together the film's puzzle is like trying to drunkenly run
through a brick wall: futile, and apt to give one a headache. Every character
goes out of their way to glance about shiftily, though Alicia Witt's
performance as Gramm's teacher's assistant is a thing of particular
unsightliness, her turn so gawky and unnatural that it's unclear if the actress
is trying to convey suspiciousness or simply social (mental?) retardation.
Pacino, meanwhile, offers up innumerable Pacino-isms with such lethargy that it
seems he's thinking about the quickest route to the bank so he can cash his
checks, resulting in a general dearth of energy that's not improved by Avnet's
penchant for zooms and slow-motion effects that wouldn't pass muster in an
intro cinematography course. After lots of yelling, phone calls, diving out of
the path of a speeding fire engine, and being forced to converse with that
blond lunkhead from The O.C., Gramm solves the crime and then suggests
that maybe he did originally lie under oath to secure the (clearly
guilty) Forster's conviction because, well, "Justice and truth—where do
they intersect?" Wha?!? Still, for sheer silliness, nothing in 88
Minutes tops the fact that Witt's English ex-con husband boasts the
ridiculously fanciful name Guy LaForge, presumably because "Fakey
McMake-Believe" was already taken.
The Village Voice [Ella Taylor]
Jon Avnet's cheesy new thriller, 88 Minutes, is 105 minutes long, and going in, I feared that 100 of them would be eaten up by Al Pacino chewing the furniture. Alas, it's worse than that. Pacino plays a Seattle forensic psychiatrist in symbiotic thrall to the serial killer he helped put away nine years ago, and though his hair looks like Mount St. Helens preparing to blow, he's going for the other self-parodying bit of business that continues to foul up his legacy—world-weary, heavy-lidded sighing ennui, as befits a fallen hero oppressed by his past, barely functioning in the present, and careless of his future.
But for a man who's all but given up on life, Jack Gramm sure keeps busy. While profiling serial killers for the FBI and the local police, he hectors a college class, in which sharp-witted nymphs are disproportionately represented, twists the night away with strange women half his age (though naturally: "I never sleep with my students"), and keeps tabs on the killer, Jon Forster (a suitably cyborgian Neal McDonough), who, on the eve of his execution, mounts a high-tech publicity campaign against his nemesis.
Talk shows mutter of procedural irregularity, cars go up in flames, and generic voices whisper "Tick-tock" into Gramm's cell phone while counting down the minutes to his demise, timed to coincide with Forster's. Dark secrets flow out of Gramm's past in perfect parallel with the blood that pours out of the lovely young female victims of the copycat killer who bedevils his case against Forster. If Gary Scott Thompson's laughably expository screenplay and Pacino's eye-rolling weren't enough to flag Gramm's blooming paranoia, a thumping score gilds the lily, along with endless cutaways to pretty faces frozen in attitudes of studied ambiguity.
With Forster safely behind bars, someone is setting Gramm up, and almost everywhere we look, suspicion falls on firm young female flesh that's barely over the age of consent. Could it be the surviving twin (Tammy Hui) of the gruesome murder that put Forster away, who comes bearing cookies to celebrate his pending death? A go-getting graduate student (Leelee Sobieski) with unusually advanced knowledge of legal-defense arguments? Gramm's teaching assistant (Alicia Witt), who shows her devotion to the life of the mind by removing her top in the professor's sleek pad? The dean of students (Deborah Kara Unger), a blonde looker at least a decade younger than anyone working her way up the college-administrative ladder could possibly be? Or could the perp be Gramm's faithful lesbian assistant (Amy Brenneman), who is, not insignificantly, the only woman he can bring himself to kiss on the lips? And as if poor Jack didn't have enough on his plate, lissome young corpses pop up at gruesomely regular intervals, drugged, trussed, and hung upside down as they bleed to death.
With its lumbering efforts at black humor and phony pretense to moral complexity, 88 Minutes is an ugly specimen on just about every front, and I've half a mind to spill the beans on how this disreputable excuse for a thriller ends—not that there's much reason to care.
There is one way, however, in which, all unawares, the movie works like a charm—as a twisted, self-torturing essay on the aging man's fear of and desire for the young female body. We may have to sit through worse films to come this year, but with any luck, there'll be none as guilelessly, idiotically misogynist as this one.
ReelViews (James Berardinelli)
It's always a shock when a movie turns out to be this bad. It's an even bigger
shock when it features an actor of the caliber and reputation of Al Pacino. 88
Minutes is one of the dumbest thrillers to arrive it theaters in a long
time, so it's no surprise that it has been lingering on
There's a certain compulsion that accompanies watching something as moronic as 88 Minutes. You know the experience is causing brain rot but you need to keep viewing to see just how ridiculous things will get. To the extent that this sort of masochistic exercise is the reason to sit through the movie, the ending does not disappoint. 88 Minutes saves the worst for last. And when I write "worst," I mean "worst." This movie doesn't settle for the mere mediocrity into which so many thrillers lie; it careens into a free-fall early in the proceedings and doesn't hit bottom until the end credits are ready to roll.
Pacino plays Dr. Jack Gramm, a world-renowned forensic psychiatrist who acts more like a cop or a P.I. than a shrink. He's frequently engaging in foot chases, waving around his i.d. like a badge, and being called in for consultations by the FBI. Typical psychiatrist stuff. He's also a party animal, having sex with any woman who smiles at him as long as she's not his gay assistant (Amy Brenneman), a student, or a patient. That rules out his T.A. Kim (Alicia Witt) as a bed-partner, even though she has the hots for him. So instead of sleeping with him, she spends the entire movie trailing after him asking inane questions and making obvious observations. Dr. Watson she is not. More like Ms. Plot Exposition.
The story revolves around a death row inmate named Jon Forster, who's
getting ready to die by lethal injection as a result of Gramm's testimony. We
don't actually hear the testimony but one can surmise it contained a few
hoo-has since the jury convicted based almost exclusively on it. There's really
no question of the man's innocence, though, since he's played by Neal
McDonough, one of those actors who always gets the wacko/creep part. However,
while Forster is behind bars figuring out what to order for his last meal, a
copycat is at work on the streets of
To be fair to Pacino, he's an arresting presence even when he's not trying - and he most definitely is not trying here. Still, not even he can pull off some of the lame dialogue he's saddled with. However, compared with the lines Alcia Witt has to deliver, Pacino is spouting Shakespeare. Witt does what one might reasonably expect from a competent actress under these circumstances: say the words without choking on them or laughing out loud. It's hard to write too unkindly about her performance when she is so spectacularly outshone in the bad acting department by Deborah Kara Unger, William Forsythe, and Leelee Sobieski. (Between this and her appearance for Uwe Boll, one has to wonder what happened to her career.)
Even though the plot is littered with more red herrings than a fish market, it's not difficult to figure out who the surprise secret villain is. The story's clumsy attempts to hide his/her identity serve only to highlight the guilty party. I suppose someone who has never seen a thriller/mystery might be shocked by the climactic unveiling. In his desperate attempts to confuse things and include as many twists as the running time will allow, screenwriter Thompson has left behind so many holes and dead-ends that the movie never seems to make much sense even when it's trying to be straightforward.
If it wasn't for Pacino's involvement, 88 Minutes would have landed directly on the DVD shelves, bypassing movie critics and theaters altogether. Columbia Pictures is banking on Pacino being a big enough draw that people won't care much about the lobotomized screenplay, the plastic acting, the incoherent direction and editing, and the overlong running time (88 minutes + a 20 minute prologue). Judging by what's been making money at the box office recently, the cynic in me must concede that they may be right.
The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps
Movie House Commentary Johnny Web
smartcine.com Cine Marcos
Film Journal International (Doris Toumarkine)
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune Colin Covert
Chicago Tribune (Michael Phillips)
The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Axelsson, Óskar Thór
BLACK’S GAME (Svartur á leik) B 87
Showing the direct
influence of director Nicolas Winding Refn as executive producer, this is a
film that plays it fast and loose, where the stylistic aggression pulsates a manic
energy throughout the film, targeting a youth-driven market. Initially this in-your-face style is offbeat
and humorous, where the edgy subject matter, an exposé of the underworld drug
scene in
Apparently passing the
test, Stebbi is invited into the gang, paid a handsome salary, where he is also
given free access to huge amounts of drugs that they distribute, but also use
on a regular basis to party hard, where he is also introduced to Dagný, María
Birta, a voluptuous blond coke head who has the run of the place. His entry into this criminal underworld is a
thrill ride, an action packed movie featuring a battle of wills with rival
gangs competing for the same turf, where violent mayhem pretty much describes
the mood, where Tóti and Stebbi Psycho simply get more crazy and fucked up than
the other guys, revealing a makings of a drug trafficking network that is only
expanding. Shot in ‘Scope by Bergsteinn
Björgúlfsson, the film mixes in gorgeous wintry landscapes with slow motion,
quick cuts, and the use of split screen to dramatize something that is a part
of Reykjavik history, as small time operators were quickly moved out by a more
organized criminal element, where drugs were literally pouring into the city,
becoming a coke-fused wonderland. When
they join forces with a psychotic gangster from
user reviews from imdb Author: Mondo_Giallo from
Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
After spending a night in the cells for a violent encounter, a young guy
called Stebbi (Thor Kristjansson) bumps into an old school friend Tóti
(Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson). The latter is now a gangster and he invites
Stebbi into his world. Things become more complicated, however, when they join
forces with a psychotic gangster called Bruno (Damon Younger). They take over
the territory of the old-guard and set up a complex drug trafficking system but
things begin to spiral out of control.
Pusher and Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn is the executive producer here.
Black's Game is a film that does show his influence. It's a stylish crime-thriller
with a prominent electronica soundtrack. It's based on a best-selling novel and
it includes re-enactments of some real events. Set in the last days of the 20th
century, its historical setting is intended to reflect the growth of the
Icelandic crime underworld at the turn of the millennium. In many ways it's a
fairly routine crime film, what really makes it distinctive is its Icelandic
flavour. The dramatic landscape and the cultural details set this gangster
flick apart from others. Otherwise it uses lots of stylistic touches now
familiar to the genre like split-screen, slow motion and jump-cuts, although
these are always quite welcome and they are well done here. As you might also
expect for the genre, it is violent and disturbing at times too. But it also
has space for a little sensuality as well, with the gorgeous María Birta, who
plays coke-head Dagný, a very welcome presence indeed.
Black's Game may not exactly break the mould but it's a very good
crime-thriller nevertheless. If you enjoy the new wave of north European crime
films, such as the recent Headhunters, then this one should offer you something
too. It wraps the genre up in the unique ambiance that northern European films
do.
SCREENED AT THE 2012 FANTASIA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Is it weird to call "Black's Game" kind of fun? It is, after all, a movie about gangs and the cocaine trade that doesn't exactly go the hip black comedy route or make its characters cool through their disdain for authority or hyper-capability. But there it is, grabbing my interest and making its characters worth a little affection despite otherwise being a fairly typical crime movie.
Not that "psycho" Stebbi (Thor Kristjansson) starts out as a
gangster, though he does get in some legal trouble. An encounter with old
acquaintance Toti (Johannes Hakur Johannesson) yields the promise of a great
lawyer if Stebbi will retrieve something hidden from a crime scene. When Stebbi
does so even after having to deal with a thug after the same loot, Toti brings
him into the inner circle with partner Sævar K (Egill Einarsson) and girlfriend
Dagny (Maria Birta). They're joining forces with Bruno (Damon Younger) to take
over Rekjavik's cocaine business, which in 1999 is about to explode.
Black's Game is a slick piece of work, with screenwriter/director Oskar
Thor Axelsson seemingly taking as many cues from executive producer Nicolas
Winding Refn as original novelist Stefan Mani. The cast is young and
good-looking without being pretty-boy criminals; the soundtrack contains a fair
amount of electronica, and it uses a combination of on-screen titles,
narration, and quick-cutting to move the story forward very quickly, though it
still manages to avoid seeming rushed.
It is the sort of movie that fans of the gangster genre and native Icelanders
might get a little more out of than the rest of us; there's a fair amount of
exposition and information specific to the time and place. Axelsson does a good
job of keeping the story straight, but there are, inevitably, a lot of
characters with more or less the same motivations and similar positions.
Something that might have been interesting, the difference between Old Crime
and New Crime, could use a little more focus, especially since the bits where
the filmmakers show Stebbi and company going about their illegal business are
fairly enjoyable as they show the audience how things work. Details count.
Though I mention some of the secondary characters running together, the guys
who are front and center impress. Thor Kristjansson remains believable
throughout as a guy who can believably straddle the legitimate and criminal
worlds; his Stebbi is a slacker with a hibernating vicious streak, and as he
sinks further into the crime business, it actually becomes oddly encouraging to
see him succeed at something. Part of that comes from watching him with Maria
Birta's Dagny; there's something kind of sweet about this particular pretty
addict the gang uses to get their product into high-end parties and the
affection they seem to have in the middle of all the cruelty. Meanwhile,
Johannes Haukur Johannesson brings a lot of charismatic energy to Stebbi's old
friend trying to move up in the world, while Damon Younger is a welcome jolt
toward the end as the guy who recognizes that, contrary to the usual gang movie
platitudes, this isn't just business, but crime.
"Black's Game" is
unusually entertaining; its central characters remain human for much longer
than is typical for the genre. As gang movies go, it probably won't take its
place among the great, indispensable epics, and maybe trades some depth for
being so approachable, but it's not nearly the sort of grind that this sort of
movie can be.
Entertainment
Maven [Matthew Hodgson]
The focus for my Fantasia festival has been horror, animation, and Asian cinema. Therefore, I’m utterly clueless how an Icelandic drug dealing movie worked it’s way into my schedule, but I’m glad it did. Although Black’s Game may not be the most original movie at this year’s festival, I think that scores of filmmakers could learn from the plentiful excitement and the near-perfect pacing on display.
As a young man, sometimes during a night out you can have too many beverages. Sometimes when you have too many beverages you can do something stupid. Sometimes when you do something stupid the consequences can be devastating. This is exactly the path that young Stebbi (Kristjansson) finds himself on after he drunkenly breaks a glass on a young man’s face and finds himself with an upcoming court date which could land him in prison for a few years. Purely by chance, Stebbi runs into his old friend Tóti (Jóhannesson) who claims he can set Stebbi up with a lawyer to get him off the aggravated assault charge. Stebbi takes Tóti up on his offer and as a result a reciprocal favour, finds himself a part of Tóti’s inner drug-dealing circle. Not only that, but a particularly violent incident with a baseball bat sees Stebbi renamed Stebbi Psycho, and it’s not because of his batting average. The rest of the story follows these young men as they get immersed in the world of the Icelandic drug trade.
It’s hard for me to get excited for a drug movie because they seem so
mundane. Drug traffickers are constantly on the news. In high school everyone
was familiar with who had their hand in the pocket of this particular
‘business’. And most importantly, there are a ton of drug movies. The concept
is very accessible for independent filmmakers, but
From start to finish Black’s Game is paced almost perfectly. We begin with a fairly stupid and brash version of Stebbi, someone who is easy to identify with because of his youth. Stebbi gets sucked into Tóti’s world, and not totally against his will, an aspect that ensures Stebbi stays a multi-dimensional character and not simply a frightened prop to be moved from scene to scene. There is always something happening on the screen in Black’s Game, whether it be violence, sex, double-crossing, revenge, or fraud, and it never seems like overkill. Add to this some of the most excellent pacing that I have seen at Fantasia 2012 and the 100 minute run-time feels short.
While Kristjansson does a great job as Stebbi, a fairly regular guy who makes some bad decisions and becomes enamoured with the flashy world of drugs. However, my favourite performances came from the supporting cast filled with scumbags, murderous madmen, and rats. Jóhannesson (Tóti) and Younger (Bruno) as particularly captivating as sociopaths who absolutely ooze criminality and violence. These men made me uncomfortable sitting in my seat – even that was too close to these guys.
Finally, the cold and unforgiving Icelandic landscapes are the perfect setting for Black’s Game, mirroring the heart of the drug trade world. Perfect for fans of the genre, but also accessible and enjoyable for those who only watch a drug-themed movie every now and then. Black’s Game is an often violent, sometimes obscene, but always stylish view of the Icelandic underworld of the 90′s. Stebbi Psycho and company are like a young pack of werewolves; the theatre screen is as close as you will want to get to this unsavoury group.
Sound
On Sight Michael Ryan
Filmstalker Richard Brunton
Fantasia
2012 Review: BLACK'S GAME Andrew
Mack from EFilmCritic
Horror Movie Diary [Maynard Morrissey]
The
Hollywood Reporter [David Rooney]
Ayer, David
END OF WATCH B- 80
USA (109 mi)
2012
Television and the
movie industry have been at odds ever since the widespread convenience of
owning televisions in every American household became a reality in the 1950’s,
where for literally decades television has been in a catch up mode following
behind the latest technological and artistic advancements which separate the
two mediums, but in the last decade, certainly since the advent of cable
channels which don’t edit language, violence, or sexual content, television has
actually been leading the way when it comes to the popularity of cops shows,
consistently utilizing better scripts, actors, and quality of content. While occasionally films rise to
unprecedented heights, such as HEAT (1995), SE7EN (1995), LA CONFIDENTIAL
(1997), THE DEPARTED (2006), or ZODIAC (2007), they are countered by The Sopranos (1999 – 2007), The Wire (2002 – 2008), The Shield (2002 – 2008), Dexter (2006 – present), or Southland (2009 – present), all of which in a dozen or so episodes annually play out
like an extended mini-series, where the dramatic interest is sustained over a
considerable length of time. Certainly
it is the substantial success of these shows that is pushing the development of
this adrenaline-laced style of film, from the writer of TRAINING DAY (2001) and
THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS (2001), resorting to a Starsky and Hutch (1975 – 1979) portrait of likable cop partners, Brian
Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), sent out in their
squad cars on a daily basis to catch the bad guys, all set in the hyper-kinetic
and crime-infested world of South Central Los Angeles. It’s a gritty portrayal of cops on the beat,
expressed through constant motion with quick edits, continuously frenetic
hand-held camera movement and a machine-gun style of profanity-laced, rapid
fire dialogue, often finding humor in the ridiculous predicaments they get
themselves into, where they specialize in patrolling the worst ghetto
neighborhoods. If much of this feels
contrived, like the lawlessness of the Wild West, it attempts to use the
pervasive presence of violence to amp up the tension, creating a poisonous
atmosphere of gangbangers, malicious killers on the loose, and even the drug
cartels from the Mexican underworld, as unlike the daily grind of real cops
where the routine can become suffocating, much of it spent in the mindless task
of filling out paperwork, these are cocky gunslingers looking for action, where
every hour of every day is spent seeking out new adventures.
Gyllenhaal and Peña
work extremely well together, where you get a good sense of increasingly
developing interior character, as both can be goofballs often playing pranks on
their fellow cops, where their swaggering attitude differentiates them from
other teams of partners, often singled out for their efforts in the field by
their more hardened commanding officer Frank Grillo, bringing a military SWAT
team style to their everyday practice of policework. This two man tandem have a reckless feel
about them, where they’re still young and just starting out, where their
confrontational practice of rubbing elbows and getting in-your-face with notorious
outlaws and gangsters seems too edgy, likely not the practice of officers with
longevity on the force who exercise more restraint. These guys come off as Reality TV cops, each
with cameras pinned to their vests watching every move they make, where Gyllenhaal
in particular is always talking to his camera in man-on-the-street interviews
or pointing it in someone’s face, where what’s on the screen often parallels
this raw police footage, often feeling unedited and rough-edged, a cop cam
providing a stream-of-conscious viewpoint.
In typical Hollywood vernacular, the bad guys are given picturesque
names that describe their personalities like Big Evil (Maurice Compte), Wicked
(Diamonique), or Tre (Cle Shaheed Sloan), the latter a hot-headed, two-time
felon who prefers taking the risk of standing up to cops rather than backing
down, actually going toe-to-toe with the shorter, but more bulldog-like Mike
(without badge and weapons), which actually earns his respect, where fighting
cops barehanded, win or lose, is “gangsta.”
And therein lies the problem here, as the film is more interested in
establishing visceral, in-your-face action sequences than delving into the
mysteries or social dynamic of this deeply entrenched, poverty stricken world
around them, though Tre does express his concern that black neighborhood gangs
are being pushed out by Hispanic gangs.
This movie elevates cops to the status of sheriffs in the Wild West,
always seen as noble heroes, where the moral line is never crossed or in
question, as people are instead good guys or bad guys. Unlike BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991), for example,
the audience learns absolutely nothing about growing up in the South Central
neighborhood where every day is a moral dilemma.
The film has a token
use of women, where the one-dimensional Anna Kendrick is Brian’s girl, whose
best scene is a PULP FICTION (1994) dance tribute, while Natalie Martinez as
Mike’s wife has a fiercer attitude, where they are written into the script as a
softer counterbalance to the feverish intensity of the streets where these guys
are close to action figures. Overly
reverential towards the police, giving them a stature in the community they
don’t deserve, as LA cops are notoriously abusive and corrupt, this film never
questions their moral actions or duties, giving instead a fairly adolescent and
somewhat fantasy view of what it is to be a cop. So it’s the script, written by the director
who spent his teenage years in South Central, that ultimately falls short,
failing to connect gangsters and drug lords to the world from which they came,
instead exploiting their nastiness as hideously murderous and grotesque, often
making them larger than life foul caricatures, even as several of the gangsters
onscreen are played by actual LA gangbangers.
The near screwball comic timing of these two knuckleheads in the patrol
car can be outrageously funny, accentuating their close rapport throughout,
often making fun of each other’s distinctively different white and Mexican
cultures, as it’s their personalities that really carry the picture, along with
a few of the gangsters, especially Tre and Big Evil. The director maintains a
fluid and kinetic flow throughout, turning much of this into an exhilarating
thrill ride, but that’s hardly the life of a real cop, as these two prima
donnas flaunt their cowboy personas in the face of their fellow cops, not
exactly endearing camaraderie or admiration.
The director also uses horror elements to accentuate fear, like walking
into dark and empty corridors just waiting for something to jump out at them,
where despite their arrogance, he uses these two officers as innocents walking
into the lair of the beast, continually discovering something they haven’t
anticipated. While the film’s aesthetic
is gripping and tense, where danger lurks around every corner, this is also a
trigger happy exposé on how cops disregard humanity and destroy community
relations while ironically spending a lot of talk about loyalty and
heroism. These guys are military style
killing machines that routinely trample on the rights of others, busting in
with guns flailing, continually pointing their guns in people’s faces, making
threats, attempting to match the hostility of their adversaries, all of which
represents a very short-sighted view of policework, much of which depends upon
the cooperation of local residents, never once considering the long term harm
of their actions, as inhabitants of any neighborhood, rich or poor, would soon
loathe their disrespecting commando recklessness.
The prospects of a gritty cop movie in the context of the
found footage genre makes sense when one considers that the reality series
"COPS" helped solidify the vernacular associated with the format. But
"End of Watch" only uses the first person approach to frame the
familiar dramas of two hackneyed characters, cocksure young officers Taylor
(Jake Gyllenhaal) and Zavala (Michael Peña), as they uncover the dark
underbelly of the drug trade in south central L.A. Taylor's obsession with
filming their exploits provides a handy excuse for the constant shaky cam, but
director David Ayer often abandons the device for more conventional
storytelling, an arbitrary decision made worse by a trite screenplay that mainly
revolves around the two smarmy men trading barbs as they chase down bad guys
and complain about their problems with the opposite sex.
While Taylor struggles between his commitment to duty and the pressures of
settling down with his newfound love (Anna Kendrick in a one-note role), Zavala
waxes poetic on the benefits of family life. Their world grows increasingly
claustrophobic, the danger quotient rises, and everything explodes in a hail of
bullets. Overlong and blazingly unoriginal, the movie only manages to thunder
forward because of its two committed leads, whose struggles maintain a certain
ferocity even though we've seen them before. By virtue of its style and high
stakes scenario, "End of Watch" is impressively tense, but then so
are most episodes of "COPS," which don't suffer from the forced
melodrama found here.
End of Watch, the new film by David Ayer (Training
Day, Harsh Times, Street Kings), is a pastiche of spy cam,
camcorder, and cellphone footage. It does little to push forward the genre,
what could only be described as hyperrealism (a la Paranormal Activity, Quarantine,
and perhaps Jarhead), but by the same token it's subject matter is
rather fitting for its style. Meaning, there is actual motivation behind Ayer's
decision to shoot this film from the immediate perspective of its two cop
heroes, Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Zavala (Michael Anthony Peña) ―
besides budgetary concerns, that is.
Taylor and Zavala are partners, which in the world of South Central, L.A.
― where director Ayer was raised ― means they are also brothers. In
fact, if you are not part of a brotherhood, whether that be a gang or the
police force, then you are shit out of luck. Officer Taylor is trying to escape
that life, so it seems. Story has it that he carries around a camcorder because
he is studying to become a lawyer, a degree which allegedly requires an art
elective: filmmaking. Zavala, on the other hand, has never tried his hand at
college, or anything outside the box really, besides allowing his wife to stick
her hand up his ass during coitus.
What's more, Zavala claims to have joined the police force because his (then)
soon-to-be-wife hounded him at his work, and told him he'd make better money
patrolling the streets than replacing mufflers, a tale which Taylor triesto
take in stride; But ultimately he fails to do. Taylor, blowing off his
scholarly pursuits (although he keeps filming), opts to dive headlong into his
police work, and before you can say "boo," gets hitched to a young
'hydraulics' student by the name of Janet (Anna Kendrick). All choices
(ill-conceived) which end up leading to his unit's demise; in roll the AKs,
esses, gangstas, and cartel decapitations.
And so, if you're looking for a wild ride through the gritty street-life,
fictional or not, of South Central, L.A., then look no further. And if you're
looking for a disguised meditation on the invisible walls surrounding the
ghettos of America, then look no further again. The reason why Ayer refuses to
frame anything but the immediate action inside South Central is simple. It's
because there is no 'outside' of South Central for its inhabitants. It takes no
more than a few words between friends to get sucked in, and once you're in,
you're as good as dead.
Paste
Magazine [Christine N. Ziemba]
David Ayer is best known for penning the action films U-571, The Fast and the Furious, S.W.A.T. and Training Day. In his latest offering, End of Watch (which he also directed), Ayer mines the familiar territory of the police drama, but turns the genre on its head—delivering a film with heart, humor and pathos in between moments of violence.
The film opens with a car chase through the streets of South Central Los Angeles (which, by the way, Hollywood, officially changed its name to South Los Angeles in 2003). The scene is captured from external and patrol car cameras, giving a real-time documentary feel that persists throughout the movie. The chase ends in a gunfight between suspects and LAPD officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña).
The two officers are cleared in the shooting and are welcomed back to Newton Division, located in one of the toughest, gang-infested neighborhoods in Los Angeles. We get a glimpse of the daily routines of LAPD personnel back at the station, both good and bad. It’s a testosterone-dominant atmosphere, filled with rookies and jaded veterans, where frat-boy antics and pranks are not uncommon, and women cops (played by America Ferrera, Cody Horn) seemingly have to be twice as tough as their male counterparts. But above it all, we see a close-knit community who step into the line of fire every day, trusting their partners to help them make it through each shift to log in another “end of watch” on their daily reports.
At its core, End of Watch is a buddy cop movie between Gyllenhaal and Peña, who are each at their top of their game. The Taylor-Zavala relationship comes across as a natural friendship that’s evolved through countless hours of patrol rides and bonding over the horrific crimes they’ve encountered. Some of the best scenes in the film are quieter ones in the squad car, filled with brotherly banter, humor and poignant discussions about life and death.
The two officers couldn’t be more different: Taylor, from an upper-middle class Midwestern family and former marine, is trying to get into law school while navigating the waters of his first real relationship with Janet (Anna Kendrick). Father-to-be Zavala is a local kid who married his high school sweetheart (Natalie Martinez) and has a huge Mexican family that counts Brian among its members. In return, Taylor’s present at every birthday, wedding and quinceañera, only too happy to put away home-cooked Mexican fare any chance he gets.
We believe these guys are real cops, from the ease in which Gyllenhaal calls in crimes to dispatch to Peña’s rescue-first-think-later performance as their characters run into a burning house to rescue three trapped kids.
Throughout the film, which switches seamlessly from character study to taut thriller, Taylor and Zavala cross paths several times with members of the Sinaloa drug cartel. The brutality is unparalleled, dabbling in human trafficking, drug trades and cold-blooded massacres, and the two local cops don’t know exactly what they’ve uncovered until it’s too late. The final shoot ’em up scene is a little over-the-top, but it exemplifies, Hollywood style, the violence that LAPD personnel are up against every day.
Ayer chooses to capture many scenes through the use of footage from various police car cameras, surveillance videos, hand-held cameras of gang members and other found-footage-feel mediums. For the most part, this technique works, but the one instance where it clearly doesn’t is in the hands of Officer Taylor. He’s taking an elective film class and uses the camera to document everything, even during his shift. It’s a device forced upon viewers who know all too well that filming while on duty is verboten by the LAPD.
Yes, End of Watch is an action film, but it’s also a terrific three-dimensional portrait of police officers’ daily lives and the city for which they’re responsible. Ayer, who grew up in South Central, chose to film real locations and real Angelenos (including current City Councilmember Eric Garcetti and local news reporter Serene Branson) to provide an even greater sense of authenticity. The attention to detail, coupled with the excellent lead and supporting characters, pays off because End of Watch stays with audiences long after the end of the film.
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Ayoade, Richard
SUBMARINE B 87
Taking your shirt off can lead to an atavistic response. —Lloyd Tate (Noah Taylor)
Don’t get cocky. —Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige)
Something of a deeply
melancholic, male anguished, brooding teenage view of the Brave New World, as Oliver (Craig Roberts), a glum and morose but
independently bright kid shares his daily experiences as he enters into his
first relationship with the opposite sex, plunging ahead, as it were, without a
clue how to use the rudder. With parents
who have the worst social skills of any couple in recent memory, the ever dour
Noah Taylor and the usually perky Sally Hawkins, where they haven’t had sex in
seven months, barely speak, and are on the verge of separation, which is
happening simultaneously to his discovery of first love. While the dialogue is above and beyond the
teenage years, it hardly matters due to the continual self-deprecating humor
where this friendless teen is as detached from the rest of the world of kids
his age as he can get, where his lifeline is the equally moody and downbeat Jordana,
Yasmin Paige, something of a revelation.
While this is pretty much seen as an all-in, all or nothing gamble, as
if his entire future depends on it, this over-the-top drama is essential, as
all teenagers feel they are drowning in a world of dysfunction and social
misfits, which adds color and bit of flair to his otherwise humorless
life. Set in
Adding to the home
drama is the presence of Paddy Considine, a psychically gifted, self-help guru
with supposed mystical connections to a non-existent, feel good transcendental
world, something of a hoax, a phony and a fraud, like the Patrick Swayze role
in DONNIE DARKO (2001), but also an old flame of his mother who moves in next
door. When she starts taking an
interest, with his Dad feebly pretending not to notice, Oliver quickly takes up
the reigns as the aggressive interloper, a sleuth with intentions to drive them
apart. Simultaneous to his intoxicated
love interest, where he’s literally out of his head, he’s also attempting to
stay grounded by holding his parent’s together, something he can’t share with
Jordana, as her parent’s problems trump his own. While the film provides plenty of observation
of small town life, people who keep to themselves and mind their own business,
where over the years the repressed layers of holding it all in only leads to
the inevitable medical breakdown, it also reveals an unusual tenderness from
his parents, especially when they learn he has a girlfriend, which may be more
significant than graduating high school or even going to college, as his
self-absorbed life was leading them towards thoughts of a serial killer or a
potentially abusing Catholic priest. His
father lovingly makes him a mixed tape of the songs that mattered to him when
he fell in love, cleverly adding some breakup songs at the end, just in case. Well, of course, these songs inevitably
comprise the inner themes of the film, composed by Arctic Monkeys
singer/songwriter Alex Turner, always seemingly playing in the background while
he spends endless hours at the beach, bringing Jordana along to share his
favorite spots, but oftentimes alone commiserating on life’s futility.
The couple share a kind
of smart ass relationship, where their shrewd sensibility continues to uplift
them from the mediocrity of the tedious world around them, even as it is
heavily dosed in miserablism. Not sure
if this coded sarcasm is enough to survive, as when a few real life issues come
their way, both are ill-prepared to handle what life offers, as they’ve spent
the majority of their lives burrowing their heads in the sand. Quirkiness is one thing, and this film has
plenty of it which it handles with aplomb, but there’s also this thread of
reality where unlike the separation issues in many teenage angst pictures,
these kids still feel connected to their parents and are afraid to let go. Oliver feels perfectly happy reading the
dictionary, discovering new words, while Jordana seems to delight in lighting
things on fire, where she constantly reigns in a noticeable aggressive streak. Their passive-aggressive relationship does
not exactly set the world on fire, as both barely ever reveal any feelings
whatsoever, as they have to learn to survive in this closed-in world where no
one shows emotions and all the town’s citizens are endlessly suffocating. In this atmosphere, the arrogant and pompous
Considine stands out, offering a delusional elixir of magical potions
guaranteed to show you the light.
There’s a comfortable, nostalgia-tinged setting of the 1980’s, where
kids pass notes instead of text, take Polaroid snapshots and keep diaries
instead of posting messages on Facebook, where there’s an interesting Super 8
dream sequence, the use of cassette tapes, and even a few messages sent by a
typewriter. Despite the timelessness of
this self-contained world, filled with irreverence and self-conscious mockery,
there’s an unsentimentalized tone throughout, not even a trace of glitz or
glamour, where these two kids are fairly grounded in their separate
worlds. The age-old boy/girl question lurking
in every era is wondering if they will connect. And here, the film does not disappoint.
Here is a rare thing: a British comedy debut that’s surprising,
witty, hugely accomplished and fully capable of finding an audience worldwide.
Richard Ayoade, previously best known for his TV roles in The IT Crowd
and The Mighty Boosh, directs his own adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s 2008
novel with confidence and style, suggesting a glowing film career lies ahead.
It’s no incidental detail that Submarine is presented in association
with Red Hour Films, Ben Stiller’s production company.
In a nameless Welsh village, at an unspecified moment of the late 20th century,
we meet Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), a 15-year-old schoolboy with a briefcase
and a tendency to be ridiculed by his peers. But in his mind – the perspective
Ayoade most often presents to us – Oliver is a supremely intelligent outsider,
the ultra-cool star in the film of his own life. Oliver has his sights set on
two goals; to lose his virginity before he turns 16, hopefully with his
gorgeously aloof classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige), and to save his parents’
marriage after he sees his mum (Sally Hawkins) chatting up their neighbour,
new-age motivational speaker Graham (Paddy Considine).
There’s a similarity to Wes Anderson’s Rushmore in the precisely crafted
way that Ayoade shoots Oliver’s life, as well as his eye for comic details, but
the film has a style of its own that keeps it from feeling like an imitation.
Tonally, Ayoade treads a fine balance between poignant emotion and detached
comedy, and his young leads serve him well in this regard. Paige is
particularly good, equally convincing as the cool object of Oliver’s fantasy
and the emotionally complicated, real girl he gets to know. The icing on the
cake is the soundtrack, a surprisingly tender set of new songs by Arctic
Monkeys’ Alex Turner.
X-Men:
First Class | Submarine | Beginners | Surprise: A Newly ... Joe Morgenstern from The Wall Street Journal
Richard Ayoade's phenomenal debut feature tracks the coming of age of 15-year-old Oliver Tate, a precocious English schoolboy living a life of befuddled passion inside his head while he fumbles with the realities that surround him. The film, adapted from Joe Dunthorne's novel and set in an unspecified but not too distant past, is wonderfully funny and subversively affecting. Beyond portraying the familiar pain of adolescence—Oliver imagines his own death, steeped in bathos, in order to imagine his glorious resurrection—"Submarine" provides a highly original investigation of how kids that age are trapped in the synaptic coils of self-reference.
Oliver, as played to perfection by Craig Roberts, can't see his would-be girlfriend Jordana (a remarkably confident performance by Yasmin Paige) for the tentative child she is because his insufferable narcissism brings out her edgy petulance; she could pass for a dominatrix in training. Sally Hawkins is Oliver's mother, Jill, a ramrod-rigid neurotic who wanted to be an actress until someone said her tongue was too big for her mouth. (Her son's mind is too big for his skull.) Noah Taylor is Oliver's father, Lloyd, a marine biologist and marital jellyfish. (Drowning in depression, Lloyd treats his son like a valued but distant friend.) Just about every member of the cast flirts with perfection, but the one who woos and wins it most spectacularly is Paddy Considine as the Tates' next-door neighbor, Graham, a two-bit New Age guru whom Oliver sees as a superstar instead of the fatuous peacock that he is.
Mr. Ayoade, the writer-director, is anything but self-referential. He seems to have taken inspiration from such diverse sources as Danny Boyle, Richard Lester, François Truffaut, "Amélie" and "A Taste of Honey." (Ms. Paige's Jordana reminded me of Rita Tushingham's poignantly spunky Jo.) Still, "Submarine" is one of a kind. The twin prongs of its plot consist of Oliver's efforts to save his parents' marriage from the threat of Graham's adulterous allure, and to woo and win Jordana. But the film's singular essence is its evocation of the scintillating intellect, the immature judgment and the emotional maelstrom that constitute Oliver's inner life.
Submarine | Film | Movie
Review | The A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
The precocious lead in Submarine, adapted by actor-writer-director Richard Ayoade from Joe Dunthorne’s 2008 coming-of-age novel, sees the high-wire drama and dark comedy of his adolescence in largely cinematic terms. As played by Craig Roberts, his Technicolor imagination transforms the dingy raw material of his tumultuous teen years into dazzling French New Wave fantasies in which he plays the romantic hero. He’s a man out of time, a moon-faced, hyper-verbal dreamer in the finest Rushmore tradition.
Submarine traces Roberts’ rocky evolution from innocence and naïveté to hard-won wisdom as he romances Yasmin Paige, a tough, troubled, attractive, but maddeningly enigmatic girl. Roberts finds Paige’s sexuality seductive as well as terrifying. She ushers him into the complicated world of adult sexuality in a way that plays havoc with his fragile psyche. Meanwhile, at home, Roberts suspects his mother (Sally Hawkins) has begun an adulterous affair with a motivational speaker, played by a scene-stealing Paddy Considine. As a teenager, Roberts is at the mercy of forces beyond his control. He’s powerless before the callousness and selfishness of the adults around him, but in the cinema in his mind, he can craft the narrative of his life however he sees fit.
The surface wackiness of Considine’s mullet-sporting, van-driving narcissist alone might threaten the film’s delicate, bittersweet tone, but Considine plays the role for drama rather than comedy, as a pompous but ultimately real human being rather than a glib, misanthropic caricature. Submarine is the film Youth In Revolt should have been, an achingly sad yet ribald account of a hyper-verbal oddball’s ascent/descent into manhood. Ayoade’s astonishingly assured directorial debut, which owes a debt to both Wes Anderson and J.D. Salinger, chronicles the emotional terrain and heartbreaking emotional intensity of adolescence with uncommon grace, humor, and understated power. It’s easy to imagine Submarine rocking the world of its own movie-mad protagonist; there’s a beautiful symmetry in a novel about a movie lover being transformed into an exquisitely literary, novelistic film.
SIFF
2011: SUBMARINE Review Charles Webb
from Twitch
Young Oliver Tate, the lead of Submarine as played by Craig Roberts, is terrified that his parents are going to break up. Try as he might, he just can't quite get to the root of their mutual dissatisfaction, and takes to spying on them and contriving circumstances to get his mother and father back together. I suspect that having a son like Oliver might create frissures in even the strongest marriage.
Writer-director Richard Ayoade's (The IT Crowd, Man to
Man With Dean Lerner) filmmaking debut is an assured, funny, and
occasionally brilliant study of a beautiful loser in 1980s
Ayoade's direction is dry and terribly droll. By extension, so is Oliver who seems intent on making his way through life by being both bulletproof and clever. He is less of the former than he is of the latter. While the movie relies on a few too many pop cues and slightly overlong montages set to sad songs, the tone is just right for a character like Oliver who is almost defiantly in his own head. As Oliver, Roberts is pitch-perfect for the character, investing him with that tenuous balance of charm and teenage insufferability that's just right for the role. With his big, round eyes, skinny frame, and cracking voice, Roberts looks like a ready target for life's little disasters and self-inflicted calamities.
Ayoade surrounds Roberts with a terrific supporting cast, including Noah Taylor as Oliver's marine biologist father, Lloyd, who's going through a terrible bout of depression. Lloyd can't seem to get things going, which is distressing to his wife, Jill (Sally Hawkins), who's realizing that she's tired of being miserable and might be better of spending time with her former flame Graham (Paddy Considine), a new age guru who has in order of importance to his character: a new trite age philosophy based on energy and color, a penchant for martial arts, and a sweet van. It's obvious to everyone that Graham would really like to get Jill into that van. Considine is the movie's secret weapon.
Of course the key to this kind of movie is "the girl." With her bangs and bob, compact body and half-smile, Jordana makes a great foil for Oliver. If I were Oliver, I would think there's something startlingly appealing about Jordana who is quite clearly trouble because she happens to know quite clearly what she wants. She wants to be even more bulletproof than he is, but makes the mistake of needing him. Teenage boys, as a rule, are very difficult to rely on when it comes to the heart, but she can be forgiven for believing that Oliver is as together as he pretends to be. I think that Ayoade's script "gets" that about Oliver and by extension young men of a certain age trying to figure out who they want to try to be.
Submarine is the kind of movie that could fall apart under the weight of quirk, but thankfully, Ayoade has discovered the correct alchemy of script and cast to make the movie work. I would love to see this director unleashed on more material in the future--I suppose the best compliment that I could pay the film as a whole is that I could say the same about really any of the talent associated with it.
Eye for Film :
Submarine Movie Review (2010) Andrew
Grant
The coming-of-age film is easily one of the riskiest genres in which a filmmaker can dabble. That there’s no shortage of them isn’t as big a problem as the simple fact that there happen to be a fair number of great or at least highly memorable titles in the canon. And just as it’s impossible for a novelist writing about those wonder years to avoid the inevitable comparison with The Catcher In The Rye, so filmmakers often suffer by comparison, though the “reminiscent of…” pool is a bit larger.
With the exception of teens in extreme situations (eg Carrie, Mysterious Skin) the varieties of experience in most coming-of-age films are usually limited to some combination of first love, social awkwardness, insecurity, rebellion and the hormonal effects of puberty. The challenge for filmmakers is how to present these in a way that, if not unique, is at least memorable or resonant. In the best of these films, it usually comes down to a strong central character – think of the young men featured in Gregory’s Girl, Harold And Maude, Rushmore, or even The 400 Blows, to name but a few. With Submarine, Richard Ayoade has created a coming-of-age film that ranks among the best, an even more impressive feat considering it is his first narrative feature film.
Based on the novel of the same name by Welsh author Joe Dunthorne, Submarine’s greatest strength is its richly developed lead character Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts), an offbeat, imaginative and unreliable narrator who leads us on a journey through his own love and loss, as well as his concerted efforts to save his parents’ marriage. A keenly observational type, Oliver keeps detailed mental notes of everything from the behavioral tics of his classmates to the frequency of his parents’ sexual union.
Entranced by the aloof and seemingly unapproachable Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige), a cynical pyromaniac in a pageboy haircut, Oliver sets out to win her heart, though she detests anything that even hints at romance. His newfound feelings of love and lust clash with the situation at home, which finds his parents’ (Sally Hawkins, Noah Taylor) lifeless but stable marriage threatened by a flash new-age guru (Paddy Considine) who moves in next door. It’s a difficult balancing act further complicated by Jordana’s own familial crisis, and the film’s honest and direct approach in depicting the emotional limitations of a teen is a perspective that’s become something of a rarity in coming-of-age romances, which far too often pad their lead characters with a psychological complexity that doesn’t match their age.
Though it boasts a sharp, beautifully written screenplay and stellar performances by the entire cast, the film doesn’t forge any new ground thematically. However, Ayoade’s aesthetic choices as well as his many cinematic nods make the film a genuine treat for the cinephile set, but not to the extent of alienating those who may not grab the references to Bergman, Roeg, or the French New Wave. From its unquestionably Godard-inspired opening credits, Bergman-esque repeated use of fading to red, and implied or explicit odes to Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, Dreyer’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, or Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge, Ayoade has peppered the film with auteurist references to those who clearly were an influence on him.
Though the film has its fair share of quirk, is highly stylised and draws great attention to its period-piece-setting, it keeps those elements in check, and consistently secondary to its emotional core and ensemble of fully fleshed-out characters. A perfectly realised entry in the genre, Submarine more than earns its place alongside the handful of greats that came before it.
Sight & Sound
[Isabel Stevens] April 2011
Digital
Fix Noel Megahey
Submarine:
From Teen Angst to Pure Delight - TIME - Time Magazine Richard Corliss
REVIEW:
Submarine Borrows, Coyly, From the Coming-of ... - Movieline Stephanie Zacharek
Submarine - Talking
Pictures Jamie Garwood from Talking
Pictures
Moviefreak.com
[Sara Michelle Fetters]
Slant Magazine
[Jesse Cataldo]
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Entertainment [Don Simpson]
notcoming.com | Submarine Victoria Large
Submarine
- Film School Rejects Landon Palmer
Submarine : DVD Talk
Review of the Theatrical Jason
Bailey
Filmcritic.com Chris Cabin
NextToTheAisle
[Jamie Garwood]
Submarine reviewed: a funny and fresh
white-boy coming-of-age - Slate Dana
Stevens
Battleship Pretension [Kyle
Anderson]
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[Philip Concannon]
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Submarine
Review | Whimsiquirkilicious with a Twist of ... - Pajiba Dustin Rowles
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Submarine
- Reelviews Movie Reviews James
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FILM
REVIEW: Submarine Eli Glasner from
CBC.ca Arts
The Film
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Movie
Review - Submarine - eFilmCritic Jay
Seaver
Mark
Reviews Movies [Mark Dujsik]
Submarine David Perilli from Sneersnipe
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Eye for Film : Submarine
Movie Review (2010) Leanne McGrath
Toronto Screen
Shots [James McNally] which includes
an audio only interview with the director (
Boxoffice
Magazine [Ray Greene]
Moving
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SLUG Magazine
[Jeanette D. Moses]
Screenjabber.com Jenny Priestley
Richard
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Henry Barnes interviews from The
Guardian, March 15, 2011
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Entertainment Weekly
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Submarine –
review | Film | The Guardian Peter
Bradshaw,
Philip
French's review The Observer, March 20, 2011
Submarine
plumbs the depths of self-satisfaction
David Cox from The Guardian,
Submarine:
Deeper than it first appears - The Globe and Mail Jennie Punter
Submarine
(15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent
Anthony Quinn
Writer/director Richard
Ayoade sinks plenty of himself into the ...
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Pioneer Press
'Submarine'
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Chronicle
Submarine
Movie | 'Submarine': Movie review - Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Submarine
:: rogerebert.com :: Reviews Roger
Ebert
Movie
Review - 'Submarine' - 'Submarine,' With Craig Roberts ... A.O. Scott from The New York Times
Ayres, Tony
CUT SNAKE C 71
Australia (94 mi)
2014 ‘Scope Official
site
“The novel angle it takes is the best thing going for this film, and it is a smart twist to an rote story.”
Facets :
Cinematheque Schedule: Cut Snake
"Mad as a cut snake" is an Australian expression for either extreme anger or total craziness, and in Cut Snake, it's hard to tell the difference. This film is a tense, psychologically driven crime thriller in which one man discovers his biggest enemy to putting the past behind him may be only himself.
Set in Melbourne in the mid-1970s, Cut Snake tells the story of Sparra Farrell (Alex Russell), an ex-convict who is trying to make a new life for himself in a new city. He has found honest work and even becomes engaged but the prospect of this new life is challenged when his foreboding and charismatic cell mate Pommie (Sullivan Stapleton, Animal Kingdom) tracks him down upon his own release. Sparra is not at all pleased to see Pommie, as Sparra has yet to tell Paula that he has a criminal record in his past. As he juggles both Pommie's and Paula's expectations, Sparra finds him caught between two worlds of extremes, fitting into neither, and as his desperate desire to build a new present collapses under the weight of his past, his journey takes a dramatic turn. Each character is prepared to fight to extremes to keep up the fragile illusions that give their lives purpose. Sparra finds himself enigmatically drawn back toward a world and a man that he was certain he had wanted to leave behind.
In the skilled hands of three very talented stars and director Tony Ayres (The Home Song Stories), this is a thriller where contradictions confound expectations, where the rugged becomes embroiled with the sensitive in a fatalistic grasp. "I've been passionate about making Cut Snake for many years now. For me, it's the combination of it being a thriller and a relationship drama which makes it so exciting."—Tony Ayres.
From the onset it seems evident in which direction Tony
Ayres' Australian crime thriller Cut Snake is heading - and
you would probably be right in predicting the film's conclusion. However, in
getting there Ayres presents some innovative twists and narrative substance
that proves engaging throughout.
Blake Ayshford's screenplay takes place in 1970's Australia where Sparra
Farrell (Alex Russell) is going straight after spending time in prison
and is settling down with girlfriend Paula (Jessica De Gouw). However,
the arrival of Sparra's old prison cellmate Pommie (Sullivan Stapleton)
draws him back into the criminal world and brings some complicated feelings
back to the forefront of Sparra's life.
As soon as we see the antagonistic Pommie reunited with Sparra we know that Cut
Snake will take on the traditional narrative path of questioning whether
someone gone straight will revert back to a life of crime. Whilst this is the
basic trajectory of Ayshford's tale, the writer injects it with some
fascinating twists that challenge the expectations of the period crime film. In
these twists Cut Snake provides some fascinating food for thought
surrounding gender roles and the concept of masculinity - particularly in the
blurred lines between machismo and homoeroticism.
Place these constructs within the heart of a seventies-set crime tale and you
have a watch that feels edgier and fresher than the average genre fare. As well
as this narrative twist, there are also several wonderful set-pieces impeccably
shot with an evocative and suitably tense atmosphere by director Ayres.
Multiple raids on a nightclub and the gritty aftermath of this crime make up
most of the action scenes, with Ayres often capturing a hard-boiled, clammy
edge in this violent and gritty picture. This hyper-masculinity (seen through
aggressive fights and chest-puffing) makes Ayshford's twist all the more
fascinating, whilst giving these action scenes an emotional depth.
There's a lead performance brimming with ferocity from Sullivan Stapleton who
sways between rough diamond charm and heightened bouts of aggression. Yet there
is a vulnerable side to Pommie that Stapleton excellently taps into in the
latter half of Cut Snake which makes a fascinating dichotomy with his
nasty brawler persona. Alex Russell brings a boyish charm to the fold and
provides an enigmatic quality - we're never sure if Sparra's motivations and
emotions are genuine - whether with fiancé Paula or old prison buddy Pommie.
Jessica De Gouw is equally sensationally and captures a tough emotional depth
in this role of a spouse finding out revelations about her apparently straight-laced
partner.
Cut Snake may veer into conventionality in its final sequence, but it
provides us with enough originality through its game-changing narrative shifts
to ensure we stay engaged throughout. This is a stirring piece of Australian
cinema.
[TIFF Review] Cut
Snake - The Film Stage Brian Roan
Relationships are the kind of experience dependent on context. Environment and circumstance dictate the way people deal with one another and respond to one another as much as actual connection and chemistry does. Friendships forged at bars, colleges, camps, and other places that seem separated from real life are much different than those wrought through work or the average social scene. Cut Snake is a film that takes this simple maxim and applies it to the kind of connection two people might make while serving time together.
Sparra (Alex Russell) is a doe-eyed young man with a mop of thick brown hair that covers his eyes doing his best to create a life for him and his fiancée (Jessica De Gouw) that is free of the burden of owing other people. He wants a life apart, and she is more than happy to be with a man who wants to make sure that they only have to rely on one another. However, when Pommie (Sullivan Stapleton), a mate of Sparra’s from his as-of-yet-undisclosed time in prison enters his life, the simple clockwork mechanism of Sparra’s simple life begins to get wound up too tight and burdened with one too many extra parts.
It is an uncomplicated story – a man with a past struggling to leave it all behind and make a new life when suddenly the past catches up with him – and Cut Snake doesn’t try to dress it up with too many other baubles. As such, the plot of the film can feel a little threadbare to those just looking for a crime yarn. However, beneath this veneer of simplicity is a deeper emotional tale that really begins to scratch and gnaw it’s way out of the strictures of it’s plotting. Pommie is a bad influence on Sparra, but for all his talk about wanting to start something new and better, it seems incredibly hard for him to kick his old friend to the curb.
Pommie is a spectacular cinematic invention, and as acted by Stapleton he becomes the true center of this film. Anyone who ever had a certain kind of “bad seed” friend will know the type of man Pommie is: a bit too gruff, a bit too forceful, but capable of remarkable acts of consideration and kindness when he can feel the tension brought on by his presence. He’s the good-time guy that goes a bit too far, but in this case his criminal bent makes his intrusion not just burdensome, but dangerous — especially given his toxic influence on Sparra.
The dynamic between the two men – one a silent pretty boy and the other a bruising thug – has been played out in films before, but both Stapleton and Russell add silent shading to their characters that serves the emotional core of the story well. Their relationship is never so much a secret as it is an unspoken fact, and the depth of their friendship is easy to guess not because of awkward telegraphing, but because both men act the parts so well that every scene feels as though we were intruding upon two men in the middle of a heated debate, both trying hard to mask their previous conversation through pleasantries and smiles. But the eyes hold the key, and both of these actors could deliver a line of exposition with just a glance.
As directed by Tony Ayres, Cut Snake is, like many Australian films, a work of compelling ugliness. The story takes place in 1974, but the period details are kept to a quiet minimum, lending everything an air of timelessness that helps to better draw attention to the story at hand. Scenes of violence erupt with sudden and brutal results, but artful stylistic flourishes are kept to a minimum, and always serve a purpose. On the outside, they seem to be saying, these men share nothing except for these poetic moments of unbridled and unhinged viciousness.
If there is a weak spot in this film it is the same kind of weak spot most films of this ilk have: the female characters. Sparra’s girlfriend Paula is serviceable, but ultimately becomes a kind of token of victory or redemption, which is something that holds the movie back, especially towards the end. Thanks to the strength of the two lead performances and the well-honed direction, however, this is still a film to anticipate outside of festivals. It’s a minor story with minor ambitions, yet it manages to deliver a fully satisfying and moving experience.
Cut
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'Cut
Snake': Melbourne Review - The Hollywood Reporter David Rooney
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Snake review - The Guardian Luke
Buckmaster
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review: Cut Snake (2014) | afr.com
John MacDonald from The Australia
Financial Review
Review:
Sullivan Stapleton's coiled performance the best ... Robert Abele from The LA Times
Cut Snake - Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Ayyari, Kianoush
BEYOND THE FIRE (Ansuyeh Atash) B 84
Iran
A surrealist tale of the ultimate dysfunctional family who has sold their land to the Oil Companies only for the mother to now be living in a broken down bus, while one son lives in a tin shack, sending the other brother to prison for cheating him of his share, and now the cheating brother returns, relentless in his pursuit and hatred towards his brother, yelling and fighting against a backdrop of flaming oil wells, where garbage is strewn near the fires, no one can venture near the heat.
THE ABADANIS (Abadani-Ha) B+ 91