Not Fade Away

Bob Dylan ends +Not Fade Away with “She’s an artist; she don’t look back.” +David Chase is an artist whose first feature film is not just a look back at his coming of age in New Jersey around 1963 but about the ambiguities in the impulse to look back.

As one character quotes The Tibetan Book of the Dead, there is no past, only the present, which contains the past as it does the future. The film’s title comes from a song and a singer (the prematurely snuffed Buddy Holly) we don’t hear in the film because it’s not about that particular song/singer or even that period; it’s about the ineffable presence of the past, our containing what we were. The past is the one thing that doesn’t fade away, the way youth, vim, hopes, love, faith, family, friends, lovers, do. 

Time is the film’s central theme. The early and late TV clips show a trio twisting again, like they did that implicit mythic summer. In the clip from Welles’s Touch of Evil the fat old sheriff harkens to the memories stirred by Marlene Dietrich’s mechanical piano -- and she struggles to find the old Hank in the grotesquely obese one. Ok, all those candy bars and booze don’t fade away either.  

Chase’s hero, Douglas (John Magaro) -- however autobiographic -- is today what he was then. The plot replays the boy’s growing away from his family and the independence he gained first from his passion for rock and roll music and then from his transition to the West Coast and filmmaking. In reverse of the most repeated song in the film, he has time on his side because he’s alive in its flow. It’s time, not the lover, that keeps running back to him.  

As in his TV masterpiece, The Sopranos, Chase reflects upon the tensions in a family and in the professional family (Mafia, rock band) that supplants it in duty, nourishment and devotion. He again uses pop music to propel his themes, especially the pulsing vernacular of rock and roll. There’s also a clip from South Pacific, “Bali Hi,” which begins with the observation that we all live on one island but wish we were on another. Here that works temporally as well as spatially. We’re all enisled on the point of time in which we find ourselves -- the time that maybe God made; we didn’t -- but yearn to be on another, whether the past of a treasured moment or the future of even a hopeless ambition.

The film richly evokes its period. In the last scene the hero’s kid sister contends the US has two great inventions, rock and roll and nuclear power, but we don’t know which will win out. Perhaps its heartening that fifty years later we still don’t know.That harkens back to the “duck and cover” atom bomb warnings of the ‘50s. In the wealth of period evocation perhaps two anachronisms stick out: something “sucks” and “phenomenological.”  But that’s minor amid that wealth of accurate particularities.

The film bristles with an ironic view backward, which gives it more of a Mad Men feel. The black worker is a deacon so he doesn’t share the white boys’ ardor for the Delta blues. The beatnik older sister’s revolutionary spirit now seems so much self-conscious silliness. Her and others’ philosophic apercus float like bricks. Her wealthy father can’t understand or tolerate her revolt so he has her forcefully committed. The more moderate daughter gets away with her own rebellion by being more discrete -- and goes on to pre-veterinary studies. Because the film is pre-feminist -- and the shaping memory is a man’s -- the women are types, not given the attention or sympathy accorded the males. 

For Chase -- again -- the James Gandolfini father anchors the narrative. He begins as the satiric butt of a father angry that his son isn’t growing into his expectations. This turns around when the father, who has learned he’s dying of cancer, suggests a dinner to prepare his wayward son to become the head of the family. He doesn’t get to that topic. Instead he recalls a fiery girlfriend of his own past. Then he reveals that during his recent treatment he fell in love with a West Coast woman and considered leaving his wife for her. Instead of trying to change his son, this recollection makes him understand the boy and realize the constraints he accepted on his own life. He’s embarrassed by his own loving impulse when he shoves a wad of money into his son’s hand as he sees him off for California.

The film is about the 60s because that was the time of the social revolution, that music, the Vietnam protests, the civil rights advances, Kennedy’s death and (the implicit surprise) Johnson’s domestic triumph, but mainly because that was Chase’s time. Give or take four years, it was my time too. But the film isn’t about just that time. It’s about every generation’s discovery of its path, its recoil from old strictures, the shaping vitality of its popular culture, its own discovery of its new frontier -- and the indelible traces the inescapable past will leave.     

Rust and Bone

+Rust and Bone -- 2011, Dir. Jacques +Audriard

More precisely, the original French title is Of rust and bone. The subject is the difference between the vulnerability of metal and the vulnerability of humanity. Two things distinguish the human: the capacity to feel and a moral center. In the film two cripples recover by developing both.

Though the woman has the more dramatic story, the film opens on the man, Ali (Matthias Schoenaerts), who will grow from randomly decent brute to a feeling, whole man. He’s trying to make a life with his five-year-old son (the mother busted for using the kid to smuggle drugs). Ali has good instincts -- caring for his son, sensitive to a young woman’s needs -- but his goodness is intermittent, not centered. When he’s focused on a TV fight he is first negligent, then violent toward his son. Ali takes a job installing hidden cameras  without considering the danger to the workers, especially his sister, who has been putting up him and his son. Ali’s jobs are physical: bouncer, night watchman, management spy technician, then alley brawler. He doesn’t think about the consequences of his actions. 

When his sister loses her job Ali finally acknowledges his responsibility. In a kind of civilizing he leaves the alley brawls to train for a professional career in kick boxing. Going off alone to train is his cleansing purgatory, which climaxes in his visiting son’s accident. To break through the ice to save him, Ali breaks the bones in his right fist, which will painfully impede but not preclude his kick boxing career. His son’s near death releases Ali’s capacity for love, first for his son, then for Stephanie (Marion Cotillard). At that point the man who has suffered so much physical pain can finally cry. Before, he was the man of steel -- unfeeling, cold, hard. Twice his son complains his father’s hands are cold; he breaks the ice to save him. That makes Ali fully human, the man of bone, wounded but feeling. 

At first Stephanie performs as a whale trainer and gets her jollies by dancing provocatively at a disco. Both show her exhibitionism and her pretense to control the forces of wild nature, the whales and the turned-on men. But her power is illusory. She’s controlled by her live-in boyfriend Simon and assaulted at the disco. Nor does she really control the wild nature of the whale, just signals its rote routine. When a whale crashes the wall she loses both legs. As an augur of her doom our first shots of her are of her lovely legs. Like the brutish strong Ali, Stephanie’s strength is also her point of vulnerability. 

Ali’s generous reflex leads him to become her intermittent caregiver. He takes her from her putrefying seclusion into the outdoors, climaxing in her return to the water, swimming. Both crises occur in the water -- Stephanie’s at the marina, the boy’s under the ice -- which is the archetypal origin of life. The underwater shots suggest an amniotic rebirth. Both characters’ redemption begins in the water, when Ali carries Stephanie to the beach and launches her swim. In that act she recovers her will to live and he confirms his virtuous reflex. But it’s still just a reflex, not a firm moral sense. So though he serves her, he can still neglect her and even humiliate her. His abandoning her at the disco is a dramatic contrast to his generous care at their first meeting. Alain’s intermittent humanity rusts without a solid moral core and the willingness to love. 

The Last Stand

+The Last Stand -- director +Jee-woon Kim

His term as Governator over, Little Arnie +Schwarzenegger has resumed his starring film career with an actioneer that’s -- blatently political. It’s a sneaky commercial for the National Rifle Association.

Looking a bit gray and lined, Arnie plays a sheriff who quit the LA drug squad for the leisurely life of a small-town Nevada sheriff. The comfort ends when a big time Mexico drug boss escapes captivity and deploys an army of killers, high tech weapons and a superfast car to tear thru Arnie’s town to Mexico. Arnie won’t let him. 

All the good sheriff has is three deputies (two inexperienced and one a comical Mexican), a jailed drunken vet, and a gun nut who passes off his personal armory as a museum (open three hours a week). The film is a pale echo of Howard Hawks’s classic redemption tale, Rio Bravo, where the strong sheriff was similarly dependent on an odd lot of civilians.  

Arnie’s script plays on his age, his retreat from action, his spending his ostensible day off in slippers. He dramatically disproves the FBI agent’s (Forest Whittaker) assumption of a simple small town sheriff. 

Peer past the relentless action and the film’s politics is obvious. For this society to survive, the FBI and local lawmen aren’t enough. As the bad guys mount an expensive, highly organized, military-style attack, civilization depends on a heavily-armed personal militia. Hence the gun-nut who illegally keeps major artillery that he now can mobilize, with the sheriff’s approval as well as need. In another example of an unrestrained armed citizenry, a granny pulls a shotgun out from her lavender and chachkes to whack a threat to the sheriff.

This fantasy of macho gunfire has two problems. It’s a bubble world with no sense of connection to the real world. First, the sheriff is a loner, no wife, no kids, just the townsfolk, so he has no personal character beneath the cliches the script inflicts on him (e.g., “You can’t buy my honour”). He’s not much more human than his fast-action rifle. 

Second, there are no kids in this town. Not a single young extra. So the explosion of guns and deaths plays out without any injury to the innocent. Even the grown-ups who stay at their breakfast instead of seeking safety don’t suffer. The film pretends that only gunfighters suffer in gunfights. That’s the NRA myth.

Of course recent history has taught us otherwise. Though we don’t see any kids, the climax involves the heroes’ use of a schoolbus. Given all the recent school shootings, this plot device reveals a jaw-dropping insensitivity.

As it happens the film has bombed. I’d like to think that’s because the public has awakened to the real danger of personal militias and uncontrolled weaponry. I fear it’s rather because Arnie has overstayed his welcome in the public eye. 

Dormant Beauty

+Dormant Beauty (+Bella addormentata)

+Marco Bellocchio’s new film is a circumspect anatomy of mercy killing. In the four cases he dramatizes there are different balances between the public and the private interest. One inference is that on this issue there are such pronounced differences that humanitarianism cannot be served by a single template of admissible conduct.

The film begins with the most public case, based on the 2009 controversy in Italy when +Beppe Englaro decided to take his comatose daughter Eluana off her life support system. (A similar scandal roiled the US at the time.) There were angry demonstrations for and against this intervention. Here the Italian parliament is about to debate the right-wing government’s motion to prevent this euthanasia. The other cases lead from this public one to three more private ones.

A senator (Toni Servillo) resists his government’s pressure and resolves both to speak and to vote against the motion. Eschewing the options of absence or abstention, he plans to resign after the vote. In his speech he plans to confess that he himself ended his wife’s hopeless suffering, out of love for her. 
     His young daughter is among the demonstrators against Eluana’s release. She ignores her father’s cellphone calls out of anger, for she thinks she saw him smother her mother. The girl falls in quick love with a young man whose brother has run amok in opposition to the government’s and church’s ban on euthanasia. The wild brother calls the girl a nun for her sanctimonious mien. The “good” brother ends his new affair with the “nun” in order to care for his manic brother.
      Another comatose young woman is being laboriously tended by a famous actress and staunch Catholic (+Isabelle Huppert). The son, an aspiring actor, is angry that their mother has sacrificed her career for her hopeless daughter’s care; when he acts, shutting off the life-support system, he is interrupted by their father. When the mother confesses to some undefined evil, she may be expressing her guilt for having perhaps wanted her daughter to die. As she tells the priest, she is always acting. Extending the daughter’s life has clearly frozen both the mother’s and the brother's.  

  In the fourth plot-line, doctors take different positions towards a beautiful young woman addict who has attempted suicide. The doctor in charge is eager to clear her out of the hospital, to be rid of her as soon as possible. But one doctor opts to save her. He sits by her bedside and when she awakens talks her back to life. His example discovers a scientist with greater respect for life than the government and church have shown.

Eluana’s natural death closes the parliamentary debate, saving the conscientious minister from making the speech that would have ended his career and perhaps led to his prosecution. His daughter tells him that since she has experienced love for the first time, she claims now to understand that what she took as smothering was actually her  father’s loving caress. He gives her the confession he was going to read in parliament. This story Bellocchio leaves hanging. Will the girl revert to her earlier anger? Or will she see that the killing she did see was her father’s act of merciful love? She was right to see the killing but wouldn't it be even more right to see it as loving?

The title points us to several dormant or sleeping beauties here. Most obviously, they are the four comatose women. But perhaps there is an allegorical alternative: the beautiful love that sacrifices one’s own righteousness and safety to bring the beloved relief, whether in taking or in saving a life.

Israel (etc.) at the PSIF

Like other forms of perversity, a film festival makes strange bedfellows. Consider the collision between the Israeli +Fill the Void and the Palestinian +When I Saw You, at the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival. As it happens, both films were debuts by woman directors.  

In Fill the Void (Lemale et Ha'halal) Rama +Burshtein, a secular New Yorker who adopted Hassidism, follows a young Orthodox girl’s wavering over whether to marry her dead older sister’s husband. Her parents encourage the union to prevent their first grandson from being taken away to another marriage.
      Burshtein strains to establish the sensitivity within the rigid, patriarchal Hassidic community. The rabbis are shown to deal as firmly with the men as with the women. Both parents stress that any marriage will be only by their daughter’s choice. Still, the clear pressure for a woman to be married off is evidenced  by a young woman who’s clearly tortured by the continual blessing, “May you be the next one married.” More eloquent still is the heroine’s live-in aunt, who is without explanation armless, the ultimate emblem of a powerless, dependent woman. The film’s strong performances and emotional plotline add to the film’s force as an anthropological study of an extreme religious community. The title, incidentally, is the girl’s rationale for finally agreeing to marry her older brother-in-law, but it may also explain the development and continuation of such a firm religious structure. 

When I Saw You (Lamma Shoftak)  is set in 1967Jordan among the Palestinian refugees from the recent war. Director Annemarie +Jacir uses the sensitivity and spirit of an 11-year-old boy and his struggling mother to embody the Palestinians’ dislocation. Determined to find his father, the boy stumbles upon a refugees’ volunteer military training camp, where he’s embraced as a comrade and where he’s eventually discovered by his mother. After she fails to persuade him to return to the Harir camp, he leads her to break through the IDF patrol to return to the lights of Jerusalem. The boy can’t read but he has a remarkable skill with numbers that enables him to time their escape.

These films from opposing cultures proved surprisingly similar. The Hassidic wedding and the  Palestinian wedding looked and sounded the same. The music and the dances and the male-centeredness were the same. The Palestinian soldiers, mothers, and children looked like Israeli soldiers, mothers, and children. In both films the young leads wavered between helplessness and the hunger to mature to power. The Palestinian film’s yearning to reclaim the lights of Jerusalem recalls the Israeli films of the 50s and 60s. Both films could speak for either culture. 

Of course, one culture says Sholem aleichem and the other Salaam aleikem. Add land to that hair-breadth distinction and you get a war.
       At least these extremists are not 180 degrees apart but 360. Fundamentalists end up on the same spot. 

***

+Sharqyia is a dramatic example of what distinguishes Israel from all its Arab neighbours -- open political debate. Ami +Livne is clearly sympathetic to the hopeless situation of his Bedouin hero and critical of the Israeli government’s claim of authority over lands his family owned -- however sans deed --since the Ottoman Empire. The director has the Israel TV station refuse to air the Bedouin’s plight, but the film itself was funded in part by the Israeli film production fund, i.e., with government support. No other Middle East government would allow such dramatic, explicit criticism of its policy, leave alone help to fund it.

Kamel (Adnan Abu Wadi) is an Israeli military veteran living with his married brother in two tin-roof shacks isolated in the Negev. Livne spends slow time marking the daily ordeal of Kamel’s life, as he plods to and from the bus-stop, to and from and through the boredom of his menial job as a security guard at the central bus station, where even his colleagues’ friendliness smacks patronizing. As he lives one life in the city he is torn back to his family’s more primitive life in the desert. His brother insists Kamel go out to replenish their water supply, which makes him late for his work in town, and leads to the unresolved theft of the brothers’ tractor and tank. With his sideline in repairing abandoned TV sets and DVD players, Kamel also figures a way to play the world of media politics. By faking a bomb scare he gets himself interviewed on TV, but the station fails to report his problem so he can’t marshal public support. 

Kamel is torn between the old and modern worlds, between his family and his government, between the unwritten codes of ownership and conduct and  the harsh written strictures. Inevitably the government orders the family to leave and bulldozes their sad homes. The film is clearly on the Bedouin’s side against the government’s, but Livne doesn’t idealize the Bedouin. Kamel’s brother is unsympathetically traditionalist, refusing to let his wife study for college. He resents Kamel’s modern life, skills, work, until -- forced to rebuild anew -- he realizes they need the income. This very moving drama humanizes Israel’s complex issues over land, history and citizenship. But the press and the arts remain free.

***

How free Israeli artists can feel is represented by the postmodern exuberance of Shemi +Zarhin’s +The World is Funny (Haolam Mat'lik). The title -- and perhaps the Jew’s traditional way of life, in Israel as in the diaspora -- is a satiric troop’s catch phrase, that ends with “and so we laugh.” 

Zarhin interweaves several plots. The two remaining members of the satiric team consider a reunion performance. Three estranged siblings struggle to reconnect. Members of a writing group draw fiction from their lives and start living out  the twists in their stories. The wildly divergent tones, incidents and narrative styles here celebrate the function of storytelling, the impulses and effects of fiction. Israel, of course, is a nation and a tensions of cultures that were born out of lore, histories, stories, to an extent like none other. Despite its frothy feel, this was one of the festival’s richest, most enigmatic and carefully structured films. I itch to see it again, to really come to grips with it.

                                 ***

Then there was +Putzel (that’s yiddish for ‘little putz’ or schmuck). OK, that wasn’t an Israeli film but Jason +Chaet’s coming of age comedy about a Jewish fish deli family on the Upper West Side of NYC. I’d consider the Upper West Side part of Metro Tel Aviv, in cultural and psychological if not geographic contiguity. The defense rests.

Paradoxically, while I yearn to return to the UWS, the film’s hero Walter Himmelstein (Jack +Carpenter, a young Matthew Broderick) discovers his need to get out. Having grown up planning to take over the family fish deli, he is traumatically unable to cross out of the area, either at 116 Street or at Columbus Circle. As his marriage dissolves, his deli dream dies when his Uncle Sid (John +Pankow) plans to sell out and move to Arizona. Walter is saved by his new ardor -- reluctantly reciprocated -- for a footloose dancer, Sally (Melanie +Lynskey), who unwittingly provokes his Uncle Sid to leave his wife (Susie +Essman) for her.

The film is a coming-of-age comedy not just for Walter the putzel but for Sid the putz. Both men break out of their ill-suited lives. The two wives will test their new freedom and the free woman will test-drive relationship, so they too are making new lives for themselves. In comic variations, the Russian delivery boy tests (carnally) his love for smoked fish and the family’s oriental employee turns his fish love into a respectable dealership. In the marriage of smoked whitefish and sushi the true internationalism of Jewish culture emerges. Roe, roe, roe your boat.

This very funny film, with the vulgar energy of a Robert +Klane novel, is an astonishingly polished and sophisticated achievement that shows no evidence of only a $200,000 budget!   

Flying Blind

+Flying Blind (Katarzyna +Klimkiewicz, UK, 2012, 93 min)

     Every film festival offers a dud or two. For me the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival dud was this erotic mystery.

     Helen +McRory plays the 40-something aerospace engineer who has two months to lead her team to solve a Drone design problem or they lose a major contract and all their careers will be ruined. So of course she falls in love with a 24-year-old Algerian Muslim engineering student who’s really a cabbie (Najib Oudghiri), enjoys several erotic encounters with him, wards off growing suspicions about his politics and honesty, goes to pieces, breaks up with him, solves the Drone thing, then reunites with him until he’s arrested and deported. All while making the deadline.

     From all that implausibility the plot buckles. You can't believe a word of this film. The brilliant scientist is incredibly stupid. She ignores compelling evidence. There are no signs her affair involves love, just eroticism. The lovers barely speak to each other. The film's title excuses but doesn't alleviate her implausibility. That's too bad, because in a more thoughtful and responsible script her intriguing character might have worked.

     Worse, the script tosses off serious issues --  e.g., the scientist’s responsibility for the weaponization of his material, racial profiling, the importing of jihadism -- without examining any of them. The film gets by with a list of important topics, sans comprehension or exploration. The Algerian hero gets a speech about the civilian casualties from Drone attacks, but nobody mentions the civilian deaths caused by the terrorists the Drone targets. The heroine makes no argument against the man's charge that she's to blame for the military's use of her science. The film is not just simplistic; it encourages the viewer's narrowness and naivety.  
      Another Palm Springs entry, Marco Bellocchio's Dormant Beauty (see later filing), reminds us how a more thoughtful and insightful filmmaker will treat a complex issue -- with appreciation of its complexity and no pat solution. 

      At the end of Flying Blind we have been led to assume the suspicious lover is an innocent abused. But we’ve been given no evidence. His innocence is a plot device, not organic to the material. Nor has the heroine been given any solid proof that the young man with the suspicious, armed friends wants her and not her military secrets. By this film, suspicious behaviour should lead us to infer innocence. That is irresponsible beyond story-telling. 

      So, the pretense to seriousness, a few semi-explicit sex scenes, some current headline tags -- I’d call this an exploitation film, impure and simple-minded.

The Angels' Share

+The Angels’ Share (+Ken Loach, 2012, 101 min)

  After over 40 years of making Lefty political films, it’s not surprising that when Ken Loach makes a heist comedy it should have a constructive social edge to it.

The language poses some challenges. I could make out the “****," "****,” and “whiskey.” The other 75% of the dialogue was incomprehensible. 

But you can piece together the plot easily enough. A group of hapless Scottish thugs, thieves and all-round losers meet to do their community service time. One, Robbie (Paul Brannigan), gets the idea of tapping off some of a rare whiskey coming up for auction. From the million pound cask he sells a bottle for 100 grand and a job with a distiller. 

The title refers to the evaporation that the distilleries call “the angels’ share.” These little devils make off with it themselves. Robbie is newly driven to improve himself by the birth of a son and the introduction to fine whiskey that his public service supervisor gives him.

This is Loach’s political point. The hapless on the lowest rung of the social ladder may well be as gifted as the toffs are. Robbie turns out to have a rare nose and palate for the spirits. This prompts him to the heist, which enables him to move his wife and infant away from her uncles who want to kill him and her father who tries to buy him off. 

How egalitarian is Loach? It’s not just the scum Robbie who can acquire taste. A wealthy American can too. Or at least win the absurdly expensive auction.

So the film’s theme is the need to develop social mobility. As Robbie’s wife cradles their perfect infant she says the child is half complete. The other half is for them to cultivate. 

That’s the point of the film’s most disgusting scene. At the young thieves’ whiskey tasting they spit the spirits into a tub, to which one adds a gob or two. That bloke is so desperate for a drink that he then scarfs the swill. From that low point Robbie will lead the group to the possibility of improvement.

Loach isn’t dreamy enough to expect a general elevation. Robbie uses the heist loot to move his family out of his turgid trap, to a new career in the city. But his colleagues count their share, then resolve immediately to “get wasted.” But because a social worker helped him out, Robbie discovers his gift and breaks out of the vicious cycle of his slum life. In casting only first-time actors Loach performs and proves that same magic himself.

Hannah Arendt

+Margarethe von Trotta’s new film, +Hannah Arendt (Germany, 2011, 119 min), was arguably the bravest film at the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival. It was a film about thinking. Moreover, it was in favour of it. It so valued thinking that it offered some elegant speeches and debate, sans computer generated spectaculars. 

Barbara +Sukowa portrays the German Jewish philosopher during the period she covered the Adolf +Eichmann trial in Israel for The New Yorker. The film confronts the controversy Arendt raised when (i) she redefined Eichmann not as a monster but as an ordinary nobody, exemplifying “the banality of evil,” (ii) she reported that some Jews collaborated with the Nazis, resulting in more deaths than chaos would have caused, and (iii) she said she loves her friends but not any “people,” in this case, the Jews. On all three counts she was condemned for abandoning her people. Today, at a remove from the heat of that moment, she was clearly correct on all counts.

Not loving the Jews was not being anti-Semitic but refusing to emotionalize her consideration of the issues. Arendt was opposed to the blanket love of any group of people, not based on personal engagement, because such nationalist or other group identification precluded the thoughtful consideration of any issues around them. She most valued a rational, thoughtful approach that was not prejudged or proscribed by any -ism or convention. As for some Jews‘ collaboration, she simply reported facts that arose at the trial. (Indeed, Rudolf van den Berg's Suskind, also at Palm Springs, detailed precisely that collaboration.) Nor was that observation anti-Semitic, for the possibly well-intentioned collaboration in the face of horrid danger is a plausible response among any people. Arendt was pilloried for facing the facts and for rejecting myths. That’s what historians are required to do and apparently what philosophers periodically have to remind them to do.

The documentary footage of Eichmann in his glass cage confirms Arendt’s description of his bathetic representivity. As she realized, it was even more shocking and alarming to see Eichmann as an ordinary, banal citizen than as an abnormal monster. She saw him as a bureaucratic tool who expedited the monstrous genocide because he didn’t think about what he was doing. As he argued, he only followed orders so he could not be held responsible for anything.  

As the film reveals, Arendt’s principled, logical and essential argument caused her the loss of some very dear friendships. The film counters the claims she was cold and unemotional by revealing her ardour in her friendships and the passion in her marriage. Her happy unconcern about her husband’s philandering only confirms her commitment to a rationality that transcends social convention and guards against self-destruction.

Of course, any historic film is more about the time the film is made than about the time in which it is set. Why make a film about the Hannah Arendt story now? The most obvious explanation is that Europe and North America are yet again facing  a dramatic increase in systematic anti-Semitism and -- especially in the conflict between Israel and her surrounding Arab enemies -- an unthinking obscuring of historic realities. That Gordian knot is too often complicated by the adoption of one or the other of the two major parties -- another problematic “love of the people” -- at the cost of demonizing the other and preventing a rational solution to the problem.           

The Last Sentence

Two kinds of evil are analyzed in +Jan Troell’s +The Last Sentence (2012, 125 min), which premiered at the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The first depicts Swedish journalist Torgny Segerstedt’s (Jesper Christensen) crusade against Hitler. As editor of an economic daily he campaigned against Hitler and for Sweden’s going to war against Nazi Germany. Segerstedt contends that acquiescence to evil only nourishes it. We are responsible for what we allow, not just what we do. Despite the Swedish king’s probably correct judgment that Germany and Russia would destroy the Swedish army in a fortnight, Segerstedt sticks to his campaign. His move from Scandinavian concern to the wider European is evidenced when his new bulldog Winston succeeds the poisoned Soren (a Kierke-guard dog?). As we know, Hitler’s early sweep was facilitated by the surrender and compromises of state heads who lacked Segerstedt’s courage and clarity. In this respect the film reflects upon the current debate over how to deal with the rise of jihadist-based anti-Semitism, in which the Scandinavian countries are very much in the vanguard. How “neutral” was Sweden in WW II and what was its effect? What cost neutrality or acquiescence now?

The second moves from the political evil which Segerstedt addresses to the personal evil which he  embodies. This fiery journalist is a surprisingly unimpressive man, an academic still obsessed with having failed his thesis (on the origin of polytheism), who has been essentially made by the women to whose specters he turns after their deaths -- his mother, his wife, his wealthy Jewish intellectual mistress. Despite his open adultery he seems so insecure in his manhood that he keeps two huge mastiffs and the massive bulldog. 

In fact our hero has created himself by exploiting then tossing away the two women who most empowered and influenced him, his wife and his mistress. Bereft early of his mother, Segerstedt never learned how to love. He can only use the women to bolster his potency (which also colours his political aggressiveness). When sucking dry his mistress, he treats his wife “like air,” his daughter observes. When his wife kills herself he rushes to the window to gasp -- for air. His wife and mistress kill themselves, but he imagines them proudly applauding his honours at his 65th birthday celebration, when he rides a large papier mache horse, armed with his pen lance and garlanded.  In this celebration the crusader shrinks to Don Quixote, tilting windmills, futile, self-deluded.To dispel the three women scepters he shoots his cartoon self in the heart. His virginal young secretary is his new instrument of vain self-respect. His last sentence -- before dying of a heart attack -- is “Hitler. Hitler. Is he dead?” Yes, his daughter lies. So our campaigning hero dies deluded. He is equally deluded when he thinks he defeated Hitler and when he thinks he loved.  

Troell shot the film in black and white. That’s the familiar mode for Hitler footage and also for the noirish exploration of the dark, troubled psyche. The beautiful nature scenes, especially the shimmering flowing streams, are an objective correlative both to the turgid flow of human history and to the compromised subconscious. As the dark waters flow, they confirm Segerstedt’s worry that he only wrote in sand, to no lasting effect. Of course fascism continues and new Hitlers arise to persuade new compromisers.

Our Homeland; Barbara

+ Our Homeland (2012, 100 min) Japan. Director +Yong-Hi Yang
      Sometimes even the most personal, unusual story can find a wide resonance.
      In 1960 Yong-Hi Yang's father sent her three brothers to North Korea, where their life prospects seemed most promising. Japanese-born Koreans faced (continuing) prejudice in Japan; South Korea seemed on the skids. Of course, history proved otherwise. Today the men suffer under the North Korean yoke while the South prospers.
      From that experience the director makes a drama out of one brother's permission to come back to his family in Japan for medical treatment. He is under the constant supervision of a party Guide. Suddenly the government peremptorily summons back all its nationals abroad, so he never does get his treatment. Clearly this personal tragedy will speak to North Korea's victims everywhere, but it has points for the rest of us too.
      The film is superbly scripted and performed. It was one of the most moving presentations at the 2013 Palm Springs Film Festival. It plumbed the personal tragedies that abound in a heartless, tyrannical political system. But at two points it transcended the local issues.
      The first is when, facing the probably final loss of her son, the mother buys his intrusive Guide a handsome suit and suitcase full of clothes. Her immediate motive is to solicit the Guide's help for her doomed son. But metaphorically her gesture says even more. She refuses to hate the enemy, to dehumanize him, to submit to her certainly justified anger. Instead she treats that enemy as a human being, caught in his own trap of duty, and she purges her negativity with an act of unexpected, unrequired generosity.
     The second is the last scene of the film, when the doomed man's sister -- the director's surrogate -- wheels away the suitcase that her brother had so admired. "You could go around the world with that," he'd observed. In their parting chat he accepted his forced return to his strangled life in North Korea, where he now has his own family to help. He urges her to make the most of her life, to grab all the opportunities her freedom grants. As in his mother's gesture, he refuses the negative emotions of self-pity, anger, hatred, and seizes upon what sparse positives he can find. In this spirit the title is especially ironic: the vicious government of North Korea hardly justifies the affection and nostalgia usually connoted by that phrase.

      As it happens, a similar political theme is developed in another Palm Springs presentation, the new German film, +Barbara (2012, 105 min), directed by Christian +Petzold. A female doctor (Nina Hoss) is banished from Berlin to a small provincial hospital in East Germany, where she is under constant surveillance. She is attracted to the doctor in charge (Ronald Zehrfeld), but is constantly aware that he too necessarily serves the Stasi. Here again personal liberties, indeed the most essential promptings of the heart, are chilled by a totalitarian regime. In the end Barbara spurns the opportunity to flee to her lover in the West. Instead she grants that freedom to a young patient whose sufferings she has tried to abate. Instead of fleeing to a life of leisure and comfort she opts for the duty and service that the other doctor has adopted. He, too, makes a gesture of generous duty when he eases the death of the cancer-stricken wife of the local, brutish government agent. As he makes a robust, herbed stew out of their gift of vegetables, he makes a new fulfilled life out of his banishment. Barbara will too. She decides to abandon the "separation" she defined from her East German colleagues in her aloofness, Western cigarettes and eye shadow.
      The hero found his model in a quirk in Rembrandt's painting of an anatomy lesson. It's not about the doctors, he tells Barbara, it's about the patient, the victim. That Barbara enacts when she surrenders her chance for freedom to the troubled girl.

+Eagles (Nevelot)

Eagles (Nevelot) -- Israel, 2012, 104 min.

Director Dror +Sabo turns two old cranks, veterans of the 1948 war, into self-righteous killers. Ephraim and Moshka have been best friends since those heady days of the war for independence. Their bond survived their rivalry for the mysterious beauty, Tamara, the enchanting concentration camp survivor. Both men claim to have rejected her in order to sustain their solidarity. Now the once wiry idealists have turned into fat cynics. To the new Israel they are either ridiculous or invisible.

Unknown to the men, Tamara has moved back to Israel from America. Ephraim finds she has been killed in a car accident in front of their favourite cafe. The sight stirs up memories of the men’s competitive romance and the purity of their old war.

The geezers’  first murder is of two brash young men -- images of their old selves  -- as they cavort with a girlfriend on the beach. As one of the men comes at them with a knife, that could be self-defense. Ephraim then kills the man he says ran over Tamara, though his guilt is uncertain. The ostensible “heroes” then whack a mischievous neighbor and a girl who parked her car cavalierly.  At first the men profess to want to recover the purity of their idealized Israel, to remove the present debasement. But their killings increasingly are unjust rather than principled. This turn costs the two grumpy old men our initial sympathy and support.

Climactically Moshka kills Tamara’s daughter, who has been looking for him under the assumption he’s her father. Flashbacks reveal that the two sworn best friends  have been lying to each other about their relationship to Tamara.  The 1948 ethos, then, has been compromised even between these “heroes,” in addition to its improper application to contemporary Israel. The daughter's murder is a kind of self-destruction, which a nation bent upon an obsolete ethos also risks. 

The eagles of the title are an emblem of the men’s heroic pretensions. When the young soldier Ephraim saves Moshka, the company’s corpses attract some circling eagles. The men hope the eagles will see they’re alive but the sniper assumes they’re dead. Their present actions redefine the once soaring spirits as vile predators, especially when the doomed Tamara’s daughter has birds tattooed on her arm, emblems of her and her mother’s spirited natures. The eagle, of course, was also the emblem of the Nazi state, which further shades the two erstwhile heroes' murder on whim of whomever they dislike.

Like the classic postwar American noir, this film deals with death and psychological darkness while trenchantly reflecting on its time and national culture. As a warning of the dangers of valourizing the past, this film makes an important contribution to the current political debates in Israel.  How pertinent to  modern Israel are the strategies and heroes of 1948? Is Israel aiming high or low in sustaining old positions?      
       Full disclosure: I admire and respect this film but I disagree with its politics. Making the champions of 1948 Israel deluded, selfish killers ignores the several ways in which Israel would do well to return to that lost character. Contemporary Israel with its self-serving, corrupt government officials, its burgeoning vicious orthodox extremists, the fragmentation of the originally unified national spirit, would do well to revive those lost values. 

       The film was part of the strong Israeli contingent at this year's +Palm Springs International Film Festival.

+Renoir (the film)

+Renoir (France, 2012, 112 min)

Gille +Bourdos uses the well-known stories of the painter father Pierre-Auguste and the filmmaker son Jean Renoir for a film that is at once breathtaking spectacle and a profound anatomy of the impulses and values of art. The film was one of my highlights at this year's +Palm Springs International Film Festival.

The plot presents the 74-year-old veteran painter (Michel Bouquet) and his ravishing new 15-year-old model, Andree Heuschling (Christa Theret) enjoying their opulent country estate while WW I pounds the humanity outside. Mark Lee Ping-Bin shoots the interiors with classic Dutch light and shadow but the exteriors in the unbridled luminosity of Impressionism. Here Renoir explains that structure comes from colour, not form, and he refuses to use black. That summarizes the painter's Impressionism: it finds reality in what he makes of the outside world, not what it firmly may be. His swirls of rosy chub continues his celebration of the young “velvet” flesh, despite the war’s flensing and destruction of the flesh beyond the estate and his age’s grotesque gnarl and ruin of his bones. His painting days, like his valiant denial of death, are limited.

Son Jean (Vincent Rottiers) returns from the front with a symbol of the reality his father rejects: an open wound. The family has a variety of open wounds, from the loss of the boys’ mother and the favoured model/nanny Gabrielle to the sons’ resentment of their father’s aloofness. The cut to the bone represents the reality Renoir’s fleshy ladies and painted pommes reject. Vincent’s convalescence goes beyond the flesh gap to include winning Andree, who -- a closing title tells us -- married him, starred in many films (as Catherine Hessling), and after their split died alone in poverty. The sins of the father don’t just visit the son but move in with him.

The tension between the painter’s idealized flesh and the its horrific reality are frequently imaged, especially in the eating scenes and in the kitchen where a maid delicately peels a tomato, removing a hide to expose a succulent flesh. The hanging carrion are an implicit reminder of the hunting and killing of the human prey outside. Renoir pere screams from the nightmares he doesn’t have his sunshine, models and pink paints to ward off.  

Around the story of Renoir pere beats a more subtle story of Renoir fils. Like Andree, the film serves both father and son. Unobtrusively Bourdos weaves in the specific sources of Renoir’s cinema. These include his sense that wars shatter natural cross-border fraternities, the harshness of the class prejudices, the increasing disrespect for culture, the necessity for art. Even the quintessential understanding which will become “The terrible thing is, everyone has his reasons.”

In addition to this humanism particular images anticipate the Renoir films. In the brothel where Jean retrieves Andree, an officer with a burned face struts out with the dignity and collar of Von Stroheim in Le grand illusion.  The martinet’s increasing medical armour is also evoked in Pierre Renoir’s arm-brace. Jean’s younger, wild son anticipates the girl in The Southerner. Is that hanging rabbit with the blood dripping down its whisker a forerunner of the spastic prey in the hunt in Rules of the Game? Most certainly the picnic scenes evoke A Day in the Country. For her part, the wild Andree articulates the Rules social critique of the aristocracy and is a perhaps more beautiful anticipation of Michel’s Simon’s anarchic spirit, Boudu. Here is a film that cries out for an annotated edition.

In suggesting Renoir’s sources Bourdos traces back from the films the incidents and also discussions that he may have remembered from his life. Bourdos works into his story the kind of details that Renoir might have remembered from life to transform in his work. This citing of source is implicit, loose, suggestive, like memory itself. It’s not the hard-edged folly we see in Sacha +Gervasi’s +Hitchcock (2012), where in his audition for Hitchcock (Anthony Hopkins),  Anthony Perkins (James Darcy) strikes precisely the pose, posture, hand position, stammer and birdlike stare that we find in the motel scene interview. The implication is that Hitchcock didn’t conceive of the subtleties in Perkins’s Norman Bates, any of his relationships to the other material in the structure, like the theme of domineering mothers and self-denying offspring, birds, self-rationalizing, etc. He just found it all there in the anxiety-riddled actor! For a film intended to honour Hitchcock’s genius this is a jaw-dropping short-shrift. In contrast, Bourdos fills out his world with material Jean Renoir was likely to have drawn out of his life for transformation into his art. The last shot freezes the old visionary painter in another strategy to stop the flesh-eating monster Time. Renoir warms even that dark freeze frame.