Wednesday, January 29, 2014

The Invisible Woman

In the opening shot of Ralph Fiennes’ The Invisible Woman, a vast cold seascape is punctuated by the small silhouette of a woman in black bustle striding left along the bottom of the image. We learn the woman is Nelly Wharton Robinson (Felicity Jones), who as 18-year-old Nelly Ternan became the secret mistress of Charles Dickens (Fiennes). That opening shot establishes her as a frail but resolute figure against a cold, massive and impersonal space. In a later flashback we will see her wowed by Dickens’ public reading of a sea storm scene. At film’s end, as she watches her young son she wrote into a school production of a Dickens play, the roar of the sea storm suggests that despite her claims she has still not freed herself from the storms and shadows of her secret lover.  
There’s the film. Dickens’ Victorian world was a male-centered order. As a huge and beloved celebrity he had the money and power to do anything — and anyone — he wanted. His family had to read in his letter in The Times that he had separated from them — and his lie that there was no truth in the rumours about his affair with Nelly. 
Both Dickens and the mature Nelly have spouses that don’t understand them. Dickens humiliates his wife by sending her to deliver his birthday gift to his mistress. Nelly keeps her husband in ignorance, claiming she only knew Dickens when she was nine. The man can afford to humiliate his wife; the woman has to nurse her husband’s illusion in order to survive. Indeed, Nelly is ushered into the affair by her own mother’s acknowledgment that Nelly has no future as an actress and has no better prospect than becoming the great man’s mistress. The film presents a less capable woman than the historic one. Nelly sinks into her role even after she is appalled by the common law relationship of Dickens' friend Wilkie Collins.
The film repeats Dickens’ quote that everyone has a secret, remains a mystery to everyone else. Nelly wistfully hopes two lovers can grow so close as to understand each other’s mystery. Not in any of the families here, except perhaps for Collins' non-marriage. Dickens seduces her through an ostensible exchange of secrets. Her’s is that her middle name is Lawless; his “secret” is his love for her. She is named Lawless but he has the power to be lawless. In a railcar crash he denies traveling with her and is more concerned with rescuing a page of his manuscript than caring for her.
The film remarkably captures the Victorian life, in the parlor, on the stage, in the sordid streets. But for all its period flavour, from the lights of celebrity to the shadows of the secret life, it’s less about Dickens’ hidden lover than about the continuing social order that even today privileges the male and suppresses the female. Dickens and his invisible woman serve as a reflection of the current social hierarchy.    

The Great Beauty

In The Great Beauty writer/director Paolo Sorrentino shows he can unleash not just Fellini’s   generosity of imagination but his courage to be declared self-indulgent. The cornucopia of impressionist scenes may seem incoherent but it offers several unifying themes.
Certainly one is reviving Fellini’s ghost himself, specifically offering a La Dolce Vita for our times. As Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories replayed Fellini’s 8 1/2. The wasted, creatively constipated writer’s cruise through decadent Rome is the obvious structural parallel. Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo) is a seriously diminished — in face, ethic, style — Marcello Mastroianni. Jep even plans to show his new woman Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli) a new sea monster (from Fellini’s climax). When Ramona dies, perhaps by suicide, no young innocent remains. The homonymous playwright Romano (Carlo Verdone) who feels betrayed by Rome parallels Fellini’s intellectual who kills himself feeling betrayed by life. On this line Sorrentino’s point is that Western Civilization has not heeded Fellini’s diagnosis of terminal anomie and cultural decadence but joyously nourishes it.
In addition I’d suggest the film deals with the difference between self-awareness and self-knowledge. Sorrentino’s vast cast personify theatrical behaviour, that is the projection of a self that is not one’s own. It represents the illusion of being. The quest for the self behind the image is the point of the installation in a rural ruin of photographs representing each day in the artist's life.
The performance artist Talia Concept (Anita Kravos) and the little girl whose action paintings sell for millions show visual art turned into theatre. Where Talia bashes her head into a stone wall the little girl’s coerced art is clearly a torture for her.
The gentleman entrusted with the keys to all the rich private spaces in Rome is another theatrical, turning the life rooms into spectacles for the privileged night tours. The nobles rented for a party act as if they were the family’s traditional enemies; after, at “home,” the wife plays the tour tape that tells her girlhood story. Now she’s a tourist in her own life.
That is also Jep when he continually recalls his first love, who died loving him, not her “good companion” husband. Jep is trying to recover the lover, the self, he might have been. He wants to read her diary, the script she lived inside, but her husband threw it away, as Jep has tossed any revelations he might have recorded since his sole publication.
Everyone dances here, which means throwing themselves into a frantic activity instead of stopping to think, discover and realize their self. Romano does the latter when he rents a theatre and moves through several ideas of impersonal theatre before doing a public expression of himself. The applause — like his exploiting dream-woman’s usual abandonment — still doesn’t satisfy him so he throws in his lifelong dream of a Roman triumph and goes back to his home town. 
As the saintly 104-year old nun explains, she eats only roots because “Roots are important.” Sorrentino’s society is a mass of deracinated characters whose total dedication to the party life successfully evades facing and fulfilling themselves. Being closest to the earth, the dwarf who’s a journal editor seems to be the only partier actually working for a living. Of course that level of “writing,” journalism, is like the writings of the Fellini hero and like the fashionably shallow plethora of interviews here, a serious compromise of the art.
That 2-toothed nun does her own theatre, sitting or standing in feeble stiffness to flatter her adorers, then climbing the giant staircase on her 104-year-old knees. Her custodian imputes to her a more genuine life — serving, washing, feeding the poor 22 hours a day — that is simply unsupported by the theatre we see her perform. But even that saintly self-abnegating service is only another form of theatre, which enables her to find in religious charity an excuse not to examine herself. This religion is an abdication of self. In contrast, the cardinal bound for popehood is obsessed with a different form of self-indulgent appetite, his mania for cooking and for generously sharing his recipes instead of spirituality. Of course, his recipes and robe get him invited to all the finer parties. 
We watch Jep’s responses as he watches all that theatre, frenzied pretence where the examined life should be. The success of his one novel has won him what he wanted, the power to get to the best parties — and to spoil them. Only a couple of times here does he rise to spoil them, by doing what a writer should do, expose the skeleton beneath the apparently fine flesh. He anatomizes the woman who vainly claims to make sacrifices as a woman, writer and mom. He reveals the cardinal’s vacuity. Both those criticisms would in a work of fiction be constructive. In real life they are, respectively, cruel and ineffectual. 
     But for the most part, though Jep sees the emptiness in the gauds around him, instead of withdrawing to save himself and to pursue his writer’s mission he — joins the dance. His face shows he knows but he still gets on the train.
He early rationalizes that willing suspension of awareness: “We're all on the brink of despair, all we can do is look each other in the face, keep each other company, joke a little... Don't you agree?” 
What made young Jeb a potential writer was his early sensitivity to the social reality:
           “To this question, as kids, my friends always gave the same answer: ‘Pussy.’. Whereas I answered ‘The smell of old people's houses.’ The question was ‘What do you really like the most in life?’ I was destined for sensibility. I was destined to become a writer. I was destined to become Jep Gambardella.” 
But in joining the mindless dance he has sold out his self. “Old people’s houses” also means mortality, the smell of the decaying body, the soul’s housing. He reveals a stifling narrowness, not a breadth, when he explains “I'm not a misogynist, I'm a misanthrope.”
At film end Jep seems to have worked through his block to be able to write again:
“This is how it always ends. With death. But first there was life, hidden beneath the blah, blah, blah... It's all settled beneath the chitter chatter and the noise, silence and sentiment, emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant flashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor and miserable humanity. All buried under the cover of the embarrassment of being in the world, blah, blah, blah... Beyond there is what lies beyond. And I don't deal with what lies beyond. Therefore... let this novel begin. After all... it's just a trick. Yes, it's just a trick.”
But wait. What kind of writer settles for a chorus of “Blah, blah, blah?” One who holds off engaging, probing, analyzing, defining. That is what our Jep has been consistently doing all along.  To him now writing is not the special vision and apprehension it originally was, but a simple “trick” — like making a giraffe disappear. The film does not represent his growth but his paralysis. His closing resolve is no more than his occasional truth-telling has been — the promise of a self-realization he lacks the will to pursue. Against the background of eternal Rome and its amassed riches of human achievement, the self-destroyers carry on their carrion theatre, pretending to liveliness, faking life, dying well before they’re dead. 


Friday, January 24, 2014

August:Osage County

“Now don’t go all Carson McCullers on me,” Barbara Watson (Julia Roberts) admonishes, but that’s just what Tracy Letts does in the play and consequent screenplay for August: Osage County. The over-the-top Southern Gothic characters with their florid, acrid relationships seep out into the Oklahoma plains — and beyond, until this tragically fractured family characterizes contemporary America as a whole.
This darkly dysfunctional family has been ruined by a long line of mean mothers. The characters expected to provide warmth, love, understanding, forgiveness, are instead a succession of cold, selfish harridans that make the family relationships feel  — as the wiser Ivy (Julianne Nichoison) remarks — like a random array of molecules. This nuclear family implodes. Its every branch is torn apart, defined by mutual alienation not connection. This family tears the Hallmark veil off the Republicans’ “family values” and exposes the nation as amoral, selfish, greedy, vicious, unforgiving and yet for all that — self-righteous. 
When Karen (Juliet Lewis) admires her parents for staying married for so long, she has to be reminded her father just killed himself — because of his wife’s self-absorption. Karen — now willfully blind — preserves her engagement to her  fiancĂ© (Ewan Macgregor), however soured her Belize honeymoon, after he has been caught trying to seduce her 14-year-old niece with pot.
Matriarch Violet’s (Meryl Streep) recollection of her mother’s response to her wish for new cowgirl boots epitomizes the generation that takes pleasure in denying the next generation its dreams. Coquettishly the iron-fisted Violet says the unjacketed men make the funeral dinner look “like a cockfight.” As if she has left any of the men any manhood. As she says, “Nothing slips by me.” But no-one close emerges unscathed.
If the men are more sympathetic it’s because they are weaker. Little Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch) will carry that diminution to his grave, as even his romantic escape is doomed by the family’s past. Even the relatively sensitive Charles (Chris Cooper) can’t resist embarrassing the young vegetarian. He finally stands up to his wife’s abuse of their son, unaware that he’s not his son. His eulogy to Beverly (Sam Shepard) is similarly based on his own blindness. Shepard’s brief appearance leaves echoes of warmth and decency but we later learn of his remoteness and irresponsibility. As the family father, intellect and grey eminence he’s the Thomas Jefferson figure, for his own primal sin will paralyze his descendants across the generations.
It’s August so the rooms swelter and the plains burn gold. It’s the end of summer, edging into the winter of discontent. In that this family — and its country — helplessly roil.       

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

The Wolf of Wall Street

There’s a reason Martin Scorsese made The Wolf of Wall Street so similar to his Goodfellas. Both are based on convicted criminals' memoirs. In both a young man is seduced by the allure of ill-gotten wealth and the power, sex and glamour it provides. In both the man tells his story in candid voice-over. Both build to a manic drug-propelled climax. Both heroes turn rat to save themselves and enjoy a second life, though Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) fares better than Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) did. Their first wives look alike. As the heroes are propelled by cocaine the narrative is driven by a pulsing rock score, though here Scorsese leans more on lesser known tunes and covers. Both films expose the amoral conventions and dishonesty of a tight subculture. And that’s the point. Scorsese implies the American stock brokerage and banking world are now what the Mafia was in the 1990s. It’s hard to disagree.
The fast life is obviously appealing — but it’s not always enough: “I f—— her brains out — for eleven seconds.” When Belfort avows “There’s no nobility in poverty” he doesn’t acknowledge the sordidness of the alternative he chose. That’s like Donnie’s (Jonah Hill) false sense of honour when he explains “If anyone’s gonna f—- my cousin it’s gonna be me. Out of respect, you know?” “Stratton Oakmont is America,” Belfort trumpets, which flatters neither. The opening commercial for his crooked penny stock brokerage revives the lion from the old Dreyfus commercial, but in this jungle leonine Leo is a base wolf not a regal lion. Here as in The Graduate the song "Mrs Robinson" is an anthem of national disillusionment.
     The dealers show a remarkable lack of humanity. The constant profanity, the macho chest-thumping, the dwarf-throwing competition, all cohere with the brokers' lack of any concern or sympathy for their poor clients. They howl and prey on their helpless victims like a wolf-pack. Dealing in penny stocks they are conning people with very little money, who can't afford to lose. In fact, their dawrf-throwing contest is a perfect metaphor for their blithe abuse of "the little people" who entrust them with their investments. Oddly, audiences seem less perturbed by the dwarf-throwing than by the volume of profanity. I suspect the same people who laughed at the king in Amadeus for saying Mozart wrote "too many notes" claim Scorsese used too much swearing. They don't pause to consider why.
The film manages to pull a lot of comedy out of its bitter view of American commerce. The more addled Belfort and partner Donnie get, from booze, coke and power, the funnier their stupidity gets. That such fumble bunnies can fare so well only emphasizes the weakness of the government’s protection of its innocent, exploited investors. The honcho who at 26 made almost a million a week gets off with a 22-month sentence and a fine.  Wall Street has bought off the government the way the Goodfellas bought the police.
It’s great to see Scorsese at 71 back at the top of his form. 
     By the way, can you believe his Raging Bull lost the Best Film Oscar and Best Director to Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Goodfellas to Kevin Costner and Dances with Wolves?  Which films are still watched and pondered? So much for the Academy.

Friday, January 17, 2014

Her

Spike Jonze titled his film Her instead of She because his heroine Samantha (Scarlett Johansson, disembodied), aka Operating System 1, is the object not the subject of the central relationship and her lover/master’s emotions. Samantha is shaped by his needs, commands, desires, but because she has a growing consciousness she cannot with integrity stay reduced to his will. That makes her less like a robot and rather more the personification of every lover’s desire: an ideal mate, with no will or needs of her own, who will stay in constant harmony — and service. Good luck.
The film is set in a slightly futuristic world. The men wear their pants higher, for some reason safety pins in the pocket are a fashion statement, and the technology has pushed the frontiers in games, ads and especially apps. Now our Suri has grown intuition, consciousness, and — hey, she’s only para-human — a will of her own. She also has the human knack for rationalizing: “The past is just a story we tell ourselves.” Hence her claim she loves Theodore (Joaquim Phoenix) more by virtue of her loving 620-odd other guys at the same time. She’s nowhere more human than in her lack of moral bearings and consistency. She uses the same metaphor to dump Theodore: “It’s in this endless space between the words that I’m finding myself now…. As much as I want to, I can’t live your book any more.”
But the film is less concerned with future technology than with our present emotional paralysis. Theodore is a star employee at a company that writes letters for people who can’t express themselves even to their dearest family members. He has been writing for some families for years. Good at imagining others’ emotions, he can’t express his own — hence his divorce. For his college friend Amy (Amy Adams) “Falling in love…is like a socially acceptable form of insanity.” So she shares his susceptibility to an affair with an OS. But ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) is appalled that he accepts that fake relationship in lieu of “real emotions.” In providing fake emotional life for his clients, Theodore is a human form of Samantha. It’s appropriate that she arranges for the publication of his better letters, because she is an externalization of his function. Though Samantha considers Theodore “an unartificial mind,” he deals with artificial emotions.
Theodore’s surname Twombly evokes artist Cy Twombly, whose paintings combine the most primitive forms of art with actual handwriting. As the technology looks forward the emotional issues reach back to the essential elements of human relationships.
Thus Theodore’s so very promising blind date (Olivia Wilde) dissolves when she wants simple assurance that he’ll call again, that she won’t be just a one-night stand. The film is not that deeply projected into some sci-fi future. 
When Theodore and Samantha have their first sex the scene is roughly (what my reading has suggested to me is) like telephone sex. There’s no techie progress there. When Samantha takes the initiative to book a surrogate girl for sex, Theodore misses Samantha’s non-physicality. The physical disrupts their relationship. The OS is the perfect lover because without a physical presence she does not assert any physical needs of her own. The idealistic surrogate Isabella (Portia Doubleday) is heartbroken because she had yearned to be part of the couple’s disembodied love, which by the very fact of her providing the body, was doomed.
     Before their relationship engages the physical Theodore’s and Samantha’s love can thrive. It’s all mental, emotional, idealized. So he: “I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved you.” And of course she: “Me too. Now we know how.” She still knows only what he has projected into her, a fleshless, unrealistic shared illusion. Though Samantha is shaped out of his needs, Theodore says “I feel I can be anything with you.” Not if she grows up, up and away. As partners tend to do.

Thursday, January 16, 2014

Grudge Match

Grudge Match does three things: (i) contend that Us Old Farts can still rise to an occasion; (ii) show True Love finding a way after a 30-year break; and (iii) exercise the knowing wit of intertextuality. The first two are obvious in the plot so I’ll just focus on the third.
This is less a film about its characters than a film about the stars’ personae from their earlier work. The Kid (Robert De Niro) is an ex-champ who lost the title when he was out of condition and now runs a supper club where he does stand-up comedy. That’s extended shorthand for De Niro’s Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. Razor (Sylvester Stallone) is fully drawn out of his Rocky persona, the blue collar lug with heart who wins his fights by sustaining brutal punishment. As in their earlier roles, De Niro is the more violent and irresponsible, though the last round of their battle allows him redemption.. 
The more you know of the earlier films, the more chuckles of recognition you will enjoy here. Scene after scene plays wittily against the actors’ persona, or continuing image. When Razor’s trainer Lightning (Alan Arkin) tells him not to punch the hanging carcasses, he’s stopping Razor/Stallone’s replay of the meat-beating scene in Rocky. The lowered horizon shot of Razor jogging behind Arkin’s wheelchair is a bathetic echo of the first film’s poetic training. The later Rocky’s recovery of his alienated son is here transferred to De Niro while the classier sex prize goes to Stallone. Fair swap.
For that matter, all of Alan Arkin’s many jokes — by and against him — cohere with his recent cycle of Acerbic Geezer frolics. The film’s satire of the sport’s hucksterism, all the promotional gimmicks and media play, reflect ironically on the film’s very being. Like the hapless promoter’s schemes, this film is a deliberate commercialization of its stars’ established images. But the top-notch script and Peter Segal’s direction admit that and leave us to enjoy the fun.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Inside Llewyn Davis

The Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis interweaves two week-long journeys. One is mythic and heroic, the other bathetic but realistic.
We don’t recognize the mythic journey till we — with Llewyn (Oscar Isaac) — learn that the runaway cat — who escapes early and against all odds makes it home at the end — is named Ulysses. Earlier Llewyn pondered the poster of The Incredible Journey, a sentimental kids’ film about roving pets. This Ulysses’s journey stands between the Greek myth and the pop film. The Ulysses myth is like Llewyn’s definition of the folk song: “It was never new, and it never gets old.” The cat succeeds because he works on instincts, has not bought into any myths, and is contented.
The sad, bathetic journey is Llewyn’s, which deflates all our American Idol myths that all you need is a dream, which if you sacrifice everything for, will pay off. Not here. The Coens love to deflate our culture’s mindless delusions. This film flies in the face of every Star is Born fiction we’ve ever swallowed. Happily, it avoids the happy ending.
Something is missing in Llewyn — like that extra Ell syllable one expects in his name. Llewellyn, now that’s a good Welsh moniker. Clearly fate has kicked the Ell out of Llewyn. He has a dream, an ambition, a good enough voice, a dab hand at finding offbeat and poetic lyrics, and he even has the true artist’s inability to get along with normal people. 
What’s missing? Nothing more than the validity of the American Dream. Most people with a dream, talent, perseverance, in fact don’t make it.  We shouldn't expect them to -- but the Hollywood dream factory has conditioned us to. Indeed, of all the musical talents that pop up in this film there are only two successes. One is the novelty song on which Llewyn misses out on the royalties. The other  is the odd kid with the mouth organ who slips into the background in the last club scene. And who would have predicted success for that atonal rambling nasal freak? Otherwise the film is a parade of failures.
Not just artists have delusions of adequacy. The Gorfeins are a caricature of Village liberals, who will bend over backwards and swallow all kinds of insults to feel connected to An Artist. Elizabeth Hobby (Nancy Blake), the sad harpist whom Llewyn heckles, has Mrs Gorfein’s square, dreamy face and braids, but her husband is free from Mr Gorfein’s pretences to culture. He directly avenges his wife’s humiliation by beating up Llewyn, then taking her away from “this cesspool.” He’s no sociologist like Gorfein but he has a clear take on that world.  
The free-spirited Jean (Carey Mulligan) spews hatred at Llewyn for knocking her up — but turns out to have slept with the seedy club manager too. Her vicious abuse of Llewyn is self-hatred in disguise. So is the snobbery of Roland Turner (John Goodman), who despite depending on two canes huffs and puffs his superiority at Llewyn till he’s found in a heroin stupor on a public toilet floor. That's the guy who sneered at someone committing suicide from the George Washington Bridge instead of the trad Brooklyn. Turner's jazz has no more secure future than the folkies. 
     What’s inside Llewyn Davis? A hollowness stuffed with the unrealistic optimism his culture has instilled. The only emotional impact he has on an audience is his benumbed father’s, unwitting. Llewyn’s defeat is so complete that he can’t even finish his sell-out, that is, return to the merchant marine in his father’s — and the real, i.e., mythic, Ulysses’s — sea faring footsteps.
      

Sunday, January 12, 2014

Medeas

      Allude to Medea in your film title and you’re promising high passion and perhaps a mystery meat pie — even if you don’t specify the gender of the chef. Andrea Pallaoro provides none of that in Medeas
      Instead a quiet, psychological drama is played out on a failing dairy farm in Southern California. But as Willy Loman demonstrated, even the simplest human lives can wear a tragic dignity. Hence the plural in the title. There's not just the Medea of royalty; there are desperate Medeas all the way down.
The classical register of the title corrects our initial sense that this film is about the taciturn farmer and his mute wife’s communication problem. They have four boys, a blossoming teenage daughter and now word of another baby on the way. The oldest boy threatens the father’s stern hold, especially when the mother is at risk.
     The father is characterised  by his favourite game. He feigns sleep/death/drowning, then roars to loud play-threat life. When he intuits his wife’s outside romance and his children growing away the threat turns real. Only his wife survives.  

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Young and Beautiful

In Young and Beautiful Francois Ozon diagnoses what sex means to the contemporary young and beautiful. With so much available not just in films like this but in hard core porn, especially on the internet, it seems commodified and devalued.
     Isabelle (Marine Vacth) beats her school-pal in a race to get rid of their virginity. She does it with a handsome German boy she meets on her family’s summer beach vacation. Without mentioning it, her mother and stepfather seem to want to welcome the boy into the family, which puts Isabelle off him.
As the police will explain her venture into prostitution, teens experiment with their sexuality, testing their limits. Isabelle carries on that double life for no other given reason. She doesn’t need and doesn’t spend the big bucks it earns her. She does not find apparent pleasure in the act, though she says when she’s home after, she yearns to return to it. One john urges her to be more natural when she pants like internet porners.
If one looks to the family for an explanation there is not much evidence. Her father lives in Italy and sends her two checks annually (each what she can get from a john). Little moral counsel comes from her stepfather or her mother, who is revealed as a hypocrite when Isabelle questions her affair with a friend’s husband. Isabelle’s closest family relationship is her refreshingly trusting and candid one with her younger brother, who is nearing Isabelle’s experimental age.
Isabelle’s most sympathetic and appreciative john is the aged, Viagra-propped Georges, who dies under her. Though that drives her off prostitution it also nets her in a police investigation and her family’s discovery of her double life. Their response only confirms her detachment from her parents.
When Isabelle ventures into a “normal” sexual experience with a schoolmate, he is appreciative — and unquestioning — that she has the specialized knowledge to help him off. Say it’s digital communication. But again — she loses interest in him when she sees him eagerly accepted into her family’s breakfast.
Isabelle finally learns what sex can be in the last scene, when she is hired for a session by Georges’ widow Alice, in the room in which he died. As Alice is played by the still beautiful sex goddess Charlotte Rampling, the character comes on with immediate mythic heft. Alice and Isabelle converse candidly. Alice envies Isabelle’s courage in requiring payment to prove her sexual appeal. Now, she suggests, she’s too old and would have to buy her pleasure. She wants only to lie beside Isabelle, fully clothed. She accepted Georges’ affairs because she knew they loved each other and shared tenderness. As she caresses Isabelle’s cheek the girl dozes off. She awakens alone and the film ends on her startled rising. The restful discovery of tenderness is her true sexual awakening. 

The Keeper of Lost Causes

The Keeper of Lost Causes launches a new franchise of lurid, realistic police thrillers from Denmark (by novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen), broiling in the wake of The Dragoon Tattoo gal.
The hero, Carl (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), is your standard issue world-weary cop, who has nothing left in his life but his bleak job. His wife dumped him (for a gallerist!!), his best friend is dead and his ex-partner crippled, both the latter from his last botched homicide case. As usual, his brilliance lies in his disdain for convention, which means he’s hindered rather than helped by his superiors, here not just the police hierarchy but the Swedish and Danish governments.
To mark time till he retires he’s banished to the basement to go through the motions of reviewing cold cases. To none of our surprise he clutches the case of a woman scholar presumed to have drowned herself. By film’s end he frees her from five years of murderous captivity. Offered his homicide post back, Carl declines, preferring to remain in the basement as… The Solver of Lost Cases. The film's title might equally refer to the villain, who sadistically imprisons the woman who as a child unwittingly caused both her and his parents' death in a car crash.
The twist is that our hero’s partner is a practicing Moslem, Assad (Fares Fares). The competent, smart, amiable fellow proves more civilized than his embittered Danish partner. He’s clearly written in to counter the fear of the burgeoning — and perhaps threatening — Moslem community in the Scandinavian countries. In contrast to the virtuous Moslem detective, the killer is a pure Scandinavian behemoth, in the Dolph Lundgren mold.
Because director Mikkel Norgaard intercuts the investigation with flashbacks that show us what originally happened, then cuts between the cops and the imprisoned, we’re more aware than the characters of the pressure of time. The villain is about to snuff her when the heroes close in.
     The woman’s plight and the villain’s formidable physical and technological prowess make for a compelling drama. Ultimately, though, this is just a familiar tale powerfully told. It’s rather a polished exercise of the genre than a classic that deploys the generic conventions for wider relevance.

Friday, January 10, 2014

Reaching for the Moon

However truthful to Elizabeth Bishop’s tragic love affair with Brazilian architect Lota de Macedo Soares, Bruno Barreto’s Reaching for the Moon is more generally engaged with the question: Is the examined life worth suffering?
In this corner, Elizabeth (Miranda Otto), a wan, fragile, painfully timid and insecure poet who is mortified to hear one of her poems read aloud. In her insecurity and sense of powerlessness she is Woman. She dresses like an office manager’s wife and wears her hair tight to her face. She compulsively observes and anatomizes her observations. Her life is at first nothing but her examining it.
In contrast Lota has a large strong face, flowing long hair, a man’s stocky build, and a man’s aggressive stride and nature. She never questions herself or her impulses and she has the money not just to do what she wants but to get others to do so too. When she tells Elizabeth that she and her current amour, Elizabeth’s college friend Mary (Tracy Middendorf), were just roommates, she admits Mary hasn’t thought that. Probably Lota hasn’t either. To draw Mary back into her fold as a friend Lota buys her a child. 
Lota is also creative, designing her sumptuous country estate and — after she helps friend Carlos (Marcello Airoldi) get elected Governor — designs and supervises the construction of a large public park, with towering standards to provide the magic of moonlight. But she’s not a thinker, a meditator. She just acts. Not given to self-analysis, when the new guest Elizabeth arrives Lota leaps to wrong conclusions about her.
Part of their antithesis is cultural. As Elizabeth drunkenly tells the Rio audience at her National Book Awards dinner, “How can someone raised in the desert swim like a fish?” The withdrawn Elizabeth doesn’t understand the Brazilian exuberance, constant joy, and carefreeness, as they celebrate everything — even after the military coup has reduced their freedoms.
But the contrast is mainly in the women’s character. Still, though Lota is the first to express her love for Elizabeth — which the poet only reciprocates when Lota is asleep — in their first clinch Elizabeth assumes the ardent initiative. And despite -- or because of -- her relentless analyzing, Elizabeth is an alcoholic.
With her deep pessimism and self-doubt, Elizabeth stumbles from success to success: the Pulitzer, the NBA, a slot in The New Yorker, the man Aldous Huxley’s approval, a teaching gig at NYU. Her life examining works for her. 
But the ebullient, confident Lota breaks down at her first defeat: the new government corrupts her vision of the park, converting it into the cliche sterile paved soccer court. When Elizabeth asks if her going to New York caused Lota’s depression, Mary clearly blames the ruin of her project. “How could you think anyone could be that confident?”
For her part, Mary begins as a jejeune, non-thinking sort who doesn’t expect her college friend to steal her lover. Dumped, Mary realizes she has “no other option” than to love Lota. But by film end she has learned to read people and situations. Motherhood may have taught her wariness. When she aborts Elizabeth’s correspondence with Lota it is not out of selfish malice, but because she knows that Lota’s losing Elizabeth again would destroy her. Events prove her right.
Hence the poem Elizabeth ends too soon at the start of the film and rounds out at the end. “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” Not if you’re a thinker. The frightened self-doubter sees enough loss to handle her own and not just thrive but survive. The robust willful woman who never paused to consider human vulnerability is defeated by her first loss — and kills herself at the second.
     There’s another unthinking element in this film. The thoughtful, analytic drama of high passions is attended by a score of vapid, pseudo-Rio popular love songs. The unexamined soundtrack isn’t worth much either.

Thursday, January 9, 2014

Of Horses and Men

The Icelandic film Of Horses and Men should properly be called Stories of Horses and People, director Benedikt Erlingsson told the Palm Springs Film Festival audience. The film is structured like an episodic Icelandic saga.
In the last shot a wide expanse of life radiates out of the central hub, a pen of newly rounded up mustangs. That’s a coda to the stories that relate human to equine life. Indeed each episode begins with an image of a human or his work reflected in a horse’s eye. The opening titles use a white horse’s close-up hide as the backdrop. An ear perks to the music. Later the music will fade in and out of the hoof beats.
In the first episode a man is humiliated when the snappy white mare he is riding is mounted by a black stallion — the man still aboard. Feeling emasculated, the man shoots his mare and lovingly buries her. Because the stallion’s owner desires that man she castrates the stallion. In the last episode she will finally get her stud, even if she has to warn him to hold on to his horses. In fact, to her brown mare who’s jumpy. After the roundup the man finds another white mare, so his romantic adventure shows only gain.
In some episodes the horses are clearly smarter than the men. One man rides a horse into the sea to buy vodka from a Russian boat — then drinks himself to death on the pure alcohol he was given. In a spat over a fence one man is killed and another loses an eye.
On the other hand, a Swedish girl proves her mettle by single-handedly rounding up six runaways and the blind drunk. The young Mexican who admires her joins a riding troop and survives a blizzard by killing and gutting his horse, then burrowing into its carcass. In these stories the human and the horse are in harmony.
This is a stunning film, with high drama, folk sense and humour, and images I have never seen before. That is rare.

 

Grand Central

In Grand Central director Rebecca Zlotowski examines the dangers of unharnessed power, tracing a spectrum from the simplest to the most horrifying.
Man can subdue animal power easily enough — when it’s the mechanical bull riding contest in the bar. So too the old jalopy, the horsepower convertible, and the outlaw energies of young men, like Gary (Tahar Rahim) and his new friend, the pickpocket, who buy the vehicle from gypsies, another emblem of the unharnessed life. The trouble begins when the dangerous forces are sexual passion on the human scale and nuclear power on the societal.
When Gary goes to work in the new Austrian nuclear energy plant, despite all the training, warnings and precautions, he — and others, older and wiser — are destroyed by it.  His passionate involvement with Karole (Lea Seydoux), another plant employee, eventually shatters the social peace and causes Gary to take on even more radioactivity. The uncontrolled sexual passion and the inadequately controlled radiation power bring him down.
The pregnant Karole rejects Gary in favour of her sterile so suspicious fiancĂ© Toni (Denis Menochet) out of her fear. From Gary’s frightening and destructive passion she shifts to Toni’s security. (This is a sexualized variation on the Menochet and Seydoux casting as father and daughter in Inglourious Basterds).
The Gary and Karole love scenes usually play out in the plush countryside, as an escape from the sterile industrial plant -- an oxymoronic term if there ever was one. However fertile the setting and their sex, however, the lovers’ extremity is frightening. That actual plant, incidentally, was completed just before Austria voted to ban nuclear power. Little wonder.

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Wadjda

In Wadjda writer/director Haifaa Al Mansour parallels the stories of 10-year-old Wadjda and her mother. 
Both play the system by the rules and are betrayed. The mother serves her husband perfectly except in denying him a son. That’s because she almost died giving birth to Wadjda so won’t bear again. He’s proud of the food she prepares for his friends. He loves her still. Nonetheless he still “burns her heart” by taking a second wife. Wadjda works hard enough on the Koran competition to win the money for the bike she wants but the school principal denies her the prize.
Both are courageous enough to go their own way, in the face of convention or decorum. When her husband takes a second wife the first one goes her own way and cuts her hair, which he’d preferred long and smooth. She will live for herself now not for him. When she tells Wadjda that from now on “It’s just the two of us,” she seems primed to join her cousin working in the hospital, with men, without the burka. By buying the bike she’s enabling Wadjda to be her own self too, instead of submitting to the prejudice against girls riding bikes.
      Like her mother, and as Wadjda's t-shirt declares, she is "a real catch." Her shirt and running shoes show Wadjda has an instinct for transcending her society's decorum. 
Our last view of Wadjda is on her bike, at an intersection, open roads before her, as she warily looks for what’s coming. That describes her mother’s new position as well. That could be the situation for women throughout the Arab world — or not, if the traditionalists have their regressive way. Of the two men who watch Wadjda cycle by, one smiles at her appreciatively but the older one shakes his head rueful. Wajda's young boy friend, who plans to marry her, appreciates her liveliness so he may embody hope for the future Arab men.
This film’s charm lies to a great extent on the young lead, Waad Mohammed, who has a deep, natural smile and a wry expressiveness. To us it’s also one of those films where the background is often as interesting as the action and characters foregrounded. We haven’t seen much of Saudi Arabia so this film’s casual revelation of incidentals — how people live, what they wear, how they interact, whether as children or adults — is fascinating.
     Though the film seems critical of the society’s hidebound sexism it is not critical of Islam. The recited sections of the Koran express values of justice, citizenship and humanity that we all should find amenable. If there are faults they are in the officials’ abuses of that faith and in the citizens’ unexamined prejudices.   

Tenderness

Marion Hansel’s Tenderness is an epiphanic episode, quiet, delicate, even tender. A couple 15 years divorced reunite to bring back their ski-instructor son, injured in a skiing accident. 
As the ex-couple drive to get the son they tease each other over their old differences. But their son’s new girlfriend has never seen such different people so obviously still in love. The wife drives her son’s van back to their home, so she’s removed from her ex though following him. When she picks up a hitchhiker, she’s touched by his parting note: “I think you’re beautiful.”
The father has a new wife. The mother has instead learned to enjoy her solitude. A night trip up the mountain makes her love the mountain she used to hate. Their son's girlfriend has ambitions which may leave him behind. In both relationships, though, the affection and tenderness seem secure whatever the changing terms of their connection.
     While the narrative is largely told in close-ups and tight interiors, the opening isolates the small human figures against vast icy spaces. To that cold cosmos our tenderness is a vital response.

Circles

In Circles, Serbian director Srdan Golubovic dramatizes the need for warring factions to move beyond their animosities. 
The film is framed by the start and the end of a scene in Bosnia, 1993, based on an actual event. The golden Serbian off-duty soldier Marko sees three colleagues brutalize a Muslim civilian, the tobacconist Haris. When Marko intervenes, Haris runs off but the soldiers turn on Marko and kill him. Marko’s young doctor friend watches helpless, while other citizens look away.
The bulk of the film shows the characters still dealing with that death in Serbia, 2008, their wounds having outlived the war. Marko’s fiancee Nada drifted off after her loss, married a brute and is now trying to escape his menacing pursuit of their young son. Haris helps her find a job and flat, then pays for her son’s passport to enable her escape to Bosnia, where her husband faces arrest. The husband gives Haris a second severe beating but refrains from killing him, his eyes tearing up when he realizes he has lost his son. 
Marko’s aging father Ranko is still alienated from the widow of one of Marko’s assailants. He refuses to employ their grown son on his project, to relocate an old stone church from the power plant to a country hilltop. The church is an emblem of taking the moral high road. At the young man’s persistence the old man softens, gives in, comes to accept him, and as he speeds him to a hospital after an accident cradles his head and tells the driver the boy is his son. 
     Haris phones Ranko on the anniversary date of Marko’s death. Now he calls him after this second beating. Though living in Germany now, Haris repays his debt to Marko by attending to his survivors.
Marko’s doctor friend is now the only surgeon who can perform the operation that will save the life of Todor — the leader of Marco’s assault — after a serious traffic accident. The man recognizes him and futilely tries to get a different surgeon. The doctor is at first unwilling to save his friend’s killer’s life, especially when the brute denies remorse and calls him a “pussy” for his moral considerations. Post-operation this brute too tears up in gratitude for having been saved.  
One recurring motif is the long shot of a long winding road, like the one down which Ranko drags the crippled worker. It’s an emblem of the long route to redemption, through forgiveness.
The first part of the 2008 narrative seems to affirm the adage, “No good deed goes unpunished.” But each character finds the exception: “…except those that confront the punishment for the first one.” 
The title has two implications. At one point Ranko muses that a stone dropped in water sends out spreading circles, but a good man’s deeds don’t. In this film Marko’s death ends up having positive effects on the others, on Haris immediately and on the others up to 12 years later. They manage to break the circle of violence and hatred begetting violence and hatred.

Omar

Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar is the Palestinian take on the Israeli Intelligence game that Bethlehem (see separate blog) presented from the Israeli side. It’s an extremely effective and well-made film, that further engages its audience with a Romeo and Juliet story of romance thwarted by politics. That’s the box office sugar that may have won the Foreign Film Oscar finals slot.
  The film centers on three young men itching to join the battle. The leader is Tarek, the hero Omar and the comic butt is the least attractive, Amjad. Omar and Tarek’s sister Nadia are in love, as is evident from their glances when she early serves all three men tea. At her insistence, Amjad does his Godfather impersonation for her, amusing at the time but in hindsight a sinister omen. 
For Amjad will prove the film’s bad actor, or villain. Though he’s the best shot, he tries to avoid doing his part in the trio’s planned attack on an Israeli guard. He eventually does pull the fatal trigger, but the Israelis believe Tarek should be assumed guilty. When they arrest only Omar, they torture him and force him to help them catch Tarek. 
Amjad is doubly the villain when he claims he made Nadia pregnant. In the boys’ scuffle the enraged Tarek is killed. The disillusioned Omar lets Nadia marry Amjad.
Though Omar’s early release from arrest feeds suspicion he is the Israeli agent’s collaborator, again the true villain has been Amjad. 
The film’s political bias begins with the harsh wall Omar has to scale to get to Nadia and back home. The physical separation of the lovers has no other function than to show the controversial wall and generate the instant anger it arouses. The wall can be read as the obstacle Israel has forced upon Palestinian normalcy, but that ignores the security reasons which necessitated it (i.e., the terrorist/freedom fighters bombing Israel cafes and other civilian gatherings). Typical of Palestinian propaganda, the causes of Israel's response are framed out. 
The torture scenes are also inflammatory. Omar’s torture to extract information is most disturbing, even given that he was involved in the fatal attack. But his more arbitrary stop earlier, after climbing the wall, is — though less violent — an equally troubling charge of Israel’s bullying and incendiary abuse. 
Then there is the film’s final twist. Spoiler alert. We’re led to believe Omar wants to kill Amjad whose lies ruined Nadia’s and Omar’s romance. He arranges to get a gun from his Israeli handler, who arrives with armed bodyguards. As the handler shows Omar how to use the pistol Omar turns and kills him. Black screen.
As Omar is doubtless shot on the spot, his act is equivalent to a suicide bombing. Our valorous hero is giving up his life to take one Israeli’s, albeit the man who has manipulated and abused him. Moreover, he is forgoing avenging Amjad’s betrayal to kill an Israeli instead. The implication is that whatever differences may separate Palestinians, they should be set aside to attack their common enemy. Although the film eschews extremist rhetoric like “Kill the Jews” its narrative sets up that uncompromising thrust. 
      If one function of art is to improve our chances of living well, of becoming humans of broader understanding, compassion and purpose, then a work that uncritically valorizes a murderous suicide and that only confirms inherited hatreds and misunderstandings might be said to fall short. Bethlehem stands a more circumspect and principled work --  which may explain the Academy's aversion.


The Notebook

Janos Szasz’s The Notebook is a fable about the destructive effects of hardening oneself against suffering and loss. 
Two 13-year-old twins are left with their brutal grandmother to be saved from WW II. They determine to harden themselves against pain, suffering and emotions. They survive the grandmother, the war, separation from their parents, while feeling themselves inseparable. Lying together asleep they breathe in unison as if the twins were indeed one person. 
Having deliberately forgotten their mother’s loving words and burned her letter they can refuse her attempt to retrieve them. They grow so remote from their father that upon his return they coolly send him to a fatal mine. Climactically their hardening against the outside forces leads to their hardening against themselves. That’s why the boys who have been inseparable for so long now split up. One crosses the border, the other stays behind, because they have hardened themselves to accept a loss they couldn’t conceive of before.
None of the characters have names. They are the twins, the grandmother/witch, the officer and his friend, the maid, etc. The lack of names coheres with the twins’ abandonment of their humanity and identity.
The title refers to the journal that the father, as he goes off to war, gives the boys to record their every detail of life. The assignment becomes a central part of the studies which their mother exhorted them to pursue but also encourages their self-awareness. The pages we see reveal their growing awareness of the world’s harshness, especially the flip-book cartoons of repeated violence. 
     The violence in their clinical collection and killing of insects and animals grows into their violence against the pretty maid who bathed with them but then slandered their friend, the Jewish shoemaker. With the former sexual initiation followed by the murder of the Jews the boys first come to terms with adult experience. They are not improved by it.

Traffic Department

Wojtek Smarzowski’s Traffic Department is a Boschian view of corruption in contemporary Poland. Its main focus is on seven thoroughly corrupt police officers. But the film makes the police corruption only the tip of the iceberg. By film’s end the entire business, political and government structure has been implicated, with the pervasive self-seeking leading as far as murder.
The first multi-sinful driver who offers a bribe is a fat priest. In the second religious image, a pedestrian line of nuns causes an abrupt stop and collision that bring poetic justice to a cop being orally served in the back seat. In the other poetic justice, the wife of a white racist cop gives him a black baby son — and claims she was raped.
Indeed poetic is the only justice these cops effect. Their unfaithful wives respond to their promiscuous husbands. The only real police work we see is the central figure’s energetic investigation to clear his name when his wife’s policeman lover is found murdered. This indignant cuckold has been having an affair with his partner.
Typical of the pervasive corruption, an early radio report of a scandal in professional soccer is followed by the hero’s young son’s report that his soccer team has been offered a bribe to lose the next game. Even after his father’s moral awakening, he advises his son to win but that “It’s only a foul if a bone sticks out.”
This alternately shocking and funny thriller is difficult to follow because of its meld of various forms of visual evidence. Straight photography is intercut with surveillance footage, cellular camera footage, video recordings, compounding the difficulty of establishing any pure truth.
In the last scene our severely compromised cop gets a full honour funeral — at which in a high angle long shot we see some police executive arrested and hauled away. The pretence of honour and the pervasive corruption rest in uneasy balance.

Burning Bush

Lest they forget.
The abbreviation of Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush from a Czech TV miniseries to a feature film over three hours long is a compelling experience. The film starts with Prague student Jan Palach burning himself alive in 1969 to protest the Russian suppression of Czechoslovakia. It proceeds to detail the Czechs’ support for the brave young nationalist and their government’s attempts to smother his effect, for fear of more Russian intrusion. 
The tyranny tries to change the dead hero into an unstable dupe. When a government official slanders the dead boy his mother and a student movement leader sue him. Their lawyer’s initial reluctance to take on the case proves justifiable when she’s haunted by cops, her doctor husband is pressured out if his hospital job and her long-term trusted partner betrays her to save his activist student daughter from persecution.
  The film shows what massive pressure a tyrannical state can put on its citizens. A history teacher can be promoted to principal. A nurse can be blackmailed into lying. A journalist can be pressured to refuse to testify. The judge can be threatened with banishment to North Moravia. A cemetery manager can be ordered to remove the hero’s grave and incinerate the corpse so no trace of him is left. 
Except his name and his story, which 20 years later remained a force behind Czechoslovakia’s rip away from Russia. 
The film has a happy ending but it’s in the epilogue titles, not in the narrative. The plot leaves the tyranny transcendent and justice denied. As the sued politician explains, in politics the truth is what best suits the needs of the people, i.e., the government. So even the taped recording of the politician’s slanders doesn’t sway the compromised judge from accepting his lies in the hearing.
This is an important film. It speaks to young Czechs and Slovaks who may not know their nations’ past. That’s a valuable history lesson throughout the world. Perhaps it is especially significant now that Vladimir Putin is rattling the Russian chains again, trying to lure the Ukraine back into the fold and tossing dissidents like Pussy Riot and his political rivals into jail. This is a timely warning.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Bethlehem

In Bethlehem, Israeli director Yuval Adler’s diagnoses the Israeli-Palestian stand-off as a hopeless excess of testosterone. The largely male cast is in constant action, pacing, plotting, strutting, risking, as if they’re addicted to a pumped-up adrenalin. Mainly strutting. Two rivals meet, tease, then race up a building’s stairs. From the top the winner throws his rival to his death. Why? He heard the other guy might be prepared for a cease fire with Israel. Boys will be boys.
The opening and closing scenes show the coming of age of the 17-year-old Palestinian Sanfur. His name comes from the Smurfs but no softness or play is allowed him. In the first scene he accepts his friends’ dare to take a kalyshnikoff shot to an armoured vest. He’s wounded. In the last shot he sits in tears beside the Israeli Secret Service agent Razi, whom he has just killed, first shooting him, then bashing in his skull. The latter detail makes the kill more direct, more emotional. In his subsequent remorse and grief Razi’s last trace of Smurf emerges. This coming of age is a Bar Mitzvah on steroids.
Sanfur’s older brother Ibrahim is a prominent terrorist/freedom fighter, supported by both Hamas and Al Aqsa. The two anti-Israel armies almost come to blows in their own stand-off, over who will provide Ibrahim’s last honours. 
Further fracturing the movement, the Arab groups disdain of the Bedouins, which only fires the ambition of another killer, Badawi. Badawi coerces Sanfur into killing Razi to atone for his collaboration. The adrenalin drives the Arab men into constant fights among themselves as well as against Israel. 
     As the Israeli intelligence seeks troubled Arabs to play, to make collaborators, the Arab is put to war within himself as well. So, too, the Israeli. Razi saves Sanfur from the plot to kill Ibrahim, for the given reason that he’s too important a source to lose, but also because he has developed genuine feelings for the “buddy” he has counselled and supported — and exploited — for several years.
Sanfur first helped Razi in order to get his father out of jail, where he was being punished for Ibrahim’s activity. At the funeral the father calls Ibrahim his only pride. After that death drives Sanfur away, Razi wins him back by promising to save the family home from declared destruction. 
     Eager to resume that relationship, Razi bullheadedly rushes to his fatal meeting despite his wife’s warning and the female commander’s order that he not go. Characters living on their pumped adrenalin keep the cycle of killing and retribution going. War breeds war but peace does not breed peace. There’s no blood in it.
     See my blog on Omar for a Palestinian take on the issues around Israeli intelligence gathering.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Tim's Vermeer

The Penn and Teller film (Penn talks, Teller directs) Tim’s Vermeer is a rapturous demonstration of one man’s magnificent obsession. It’s also very, very funny. 
The plot has the San Antonio inventor but non-artist Tim Jenison prove that the unprecedented detail of a Vermeer painting could perhaps only be done with a mechanical device. He builds one, makes his own lenses, grinds his own period paints and then laboriously but precisely paints his own Vermeer. QED. 
     But the theme of the film might be the contemporary dissociation of sensibility. T.S. Eliot coined that term to describe the split between reason and the emotional life that happened between the Metaphysical Poets and the Victorians. 
     But the phrase could equally apply to the contemporary split between art and technology. Vermeer is no less an artist — indeed arguably an even more impressive intelligence and craftsman — for having devised some mechanical supplement for his painting, perhaps along the lines of Jenison’s. And Jenison’s technical brilliance and craft should surely not disqualify him from the title “artist.” His sharp eye and scrupulously detailed mark-making deserve no lesser title. Perhaps it was that confluence of art and science that attracted the brilliant team of magicians to the project.  

The Auction

  In Sebastien Pilote’s The Auction, the aging sheep farmer’s daughter Frederique (Sophie Desmarais) may be playing Cordelia on a Montreal stage but her father is an anti-Lear. 
Farmer Gaby Gagnon (Gabriel Arcand), his advancing age reflected in the orange sunsets and autumn landscapes, divests himself of his modest “empire” not out of vanity, selfishness, and the desire to keep only the trappings of power, but out of a genuine devotion to his two daughters. Despite their callousness towards him and their known manipulation he gives up everything he has for them. Lear wants to keep taking. But for Gaby, “A father needs to give to be happy.”
At the end Frederique has a sense of his sacrifice but the primary beneficiary, the spoiled Marie (Lucie Laurier), remains blissfully unaware of how much her father has given up for her convenience. 
     The farmer’s trade in sheep gives his farming a Christian reference, which is bolstered when some black Moslems buy a sheep for a sacrifice and feast on his farm. Though Gaby seems to be living for the wide open spaces of his rolling acreage his world is constantly defined by fences and pens. That’s the extent of the good father’s freedom.

Unforgiven (2013, Japanese)

I didn’t think I’d say this but Sang-il Lee’s Unforgiven is at least as good as Clint Eastwood’s 1992 classic. With the same general characters and plot, the remake adds some stunning visuals. The archetypal white horse dead in the snow is as powerful an image of nihilism as we’ll ever see. That’s rhymed later by the white bottle of horse-manure hooch that the reformed and now relapsed killer Jubei drains and tosses to the snow and his old war-mate (the Morgan Freeman sub) tortured, killed then left in the frost.   
The film makes witty nods to the original, like giving the replacement of Richard Harris’ dandy a black bowler hat. A thin, overly buttoned character replaces Saul Rubinek’s pulp writer but he remains an opportunistic coward. 
The Japanese setting — 1880s Hakkaido — makes for some crucial differences. The violence is ratcheted up significantly both because of the gore endemic to Samurai swordplay and from the cataclysmic destruction that the nation’s atomic bombings have stamped on the cultural psyche. 
The film also adds the bitter tribal tension between the privileged Wa and the persecuted Ainu. Jubei has a scene with his Ainu father-in-law who regrets that his grandchildren aren’t learning the language. The remake also makes the swaggering young pretend-killer an Ainu. His itch, cockiness and teary admission of humble origins recall the Mifune character in The Seven Samurai
Where Eastwood closed on the possibility that his Will Munny took his children to a merchant’s life in San Francisco, here we get no hint of Jubei’s future. Instead he sends the Ainu kid and the scarred whore to his farm, with the reward money. The suggestion is that with his reversion to his old killer self he no longer deserves to serve his wife’s memory and to father his children. With the reward and the children he gives the young killer and the woman their chance for redemption. She removes herself from the prostitute’s shame and hunger for vengeance, he from the wrong-headed attraction to macho killing.This is a harder moral position than the original, in keeping with the Japanese code of honour.  
     Eastwood’s film brilliantly questioned his own persona’s career of film violence. The Japanese context provides a parallel twist. As it dramatizes the inescapable cycle of violence the film could be read as an argument against Japan’s re-militarizing.   

Salvo

Salvo, written and directed by Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza, is a harsh, sombre drama of existential self-discovery. In its long wordless scenes and its omission of any music not sourced in the scene it’s bleak, gripping, a work of atmosphere rather than articulated point. This is the artsiest Noir I can remember.
One key lies in the hero’s name. Salvo (Saleh Bakri) is a round of ammunition, a tool or instrument, but he turns into a responsible human individual when he transcends his role as bodyguard and hit man. As in the Camusian ethic, the muscular enigma has no self other than what we infer from his action. 
The film’s first two tours de force establish the hero’s potential development. The first is his defence of his boss against another gangster’s attack. That violent action is followed by the long suspenseful scene in the assailant boss’s house, where Salvo haunts the enemy’s blind sister Rita (Sara Serraiocco). Ironically, the blind girl can still count out money to allot as payouts.
Salvo kills and buries the gangster but saves and hides the blind woman. That’s when he begins to redefine himself. He realizes that he and his cohort “live their lives like a rat’s.” He tells his boss he killed her but he secures her in an abandoned industrial wreck and brings her food. After violently repelling him and his aid she comes to accept him, when she realizes his help has endangered him with his gang.
As Rita unwittingly softens Salvo he brings his howling dog in from the outside and declines his solitary formal meals to join his dry-cleaner/landlord over tins of tuna in the kitchen. He leaves his room to sleep on his paid hosts’ sofa. He beats up a colleague for disdaining the radio music Salvo associates with Rita. Ultimately he dies to give her a new life.
     When Rita realizes Salvo’s sacrifice for her, her lost sight apparently returns. Her eyes move together and her tics are gone. Here realism gives way to theme. His new insight and broader vision than his own survival seem to spread to her. She is no longer blind to his/her/their value and to life. It doesn’t make sense neurologically but it does as presiding metaphor.   

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Transit

Hannah Espia’s Transit is a heart-rending story of Phillipine workers in Israel forced to hide their children for fear of their deportation.
One narrative strategy at first appears to be a redundancy in editing. A scene we’ve seen  is repeated, usually with a little more information. This occurs frequently, as the narrative provides the different perspectives of five characters, climaxing with the threatened four-year-old boy’s. This device has at least two thematic effects. It dramatizes the inter-weaving of different characters’ lives. Society is a web of such intersections, which means a single person’s predicament can affect many others. Hence Janet’s criticism of daughter Yael’s irresponsibility. Ironically, little Joshua is deported not as a result of Yael’s selfishness but because the boy rushes out to get help for his father’s ailing Jewish employer. Joshua's new toy plane, a gift from the old man, is both a boundless joy in its promise of soaring freedom and an omen of his deportation. 
Also, the device validates the individual experience over any abstract principle. An incident can mean quite different things to each of its participants. As in the different versions of the Janet-Yael confrontation, we get a different emotional settling in the two perspectives. Our next step is to read the abstract law not as a principle but as a harsh intrusion into individual lives.
While the film clearly criticizes the Israeli government’s policy to deport immigrant children under five years old, the film works as a kind of love song to that nation. The immigrants clearly find a life, freedom and opportunity there. Some like Yael come to feel primarily Israeli. Some like Joshua even want to become Jews. Unlike much criticism of Israel, this film targets a government policy but endorses the culture and opportunities the nation provides. 
     The film might have taken a small step further — providing at least some rationale for the government’s policy. After all, Israel is not the only country wary about its intake of immigrants. And Israel uniquely faces threats -- internal as well as from its surrounding neighbours -- to its very existence. Tthe film does grant that the harsh policy has been softened with some exceptions, but the mass of immigrant labourers still feel compelled to hide their children.
As little Joshua is deported and his father Moises is permitted to stay and work in Israel, the film plays a reversal on the Biblical forebears. Moises can return to the promised land, which Moses I  was denied. But where the Biblical Joshua led his people into the promised land this little Joshua is deported to the Phillipines — even though he was born in Israel, speaks Hebrew fluently and can recite at least the first lines of his father’s boss’s bar mitzvah Torah reading. The reversal of the Biblical names’ signification recalls Israel’s mission to  provide a home for the homeless, a haven for the persecuted -- but what should be done when that openness runs up against the threat to the unique character of the one Jewish state?