Thursday, July 30, 2015

The Bothersome Man (2006)

Jens Lien’s dystopian dream is as Kafkaesque a film as I can recall. The solitary hero Andreas moves through an inexplicable world, sterile, corporate, irrational, and his physical suffering — a lopped off finger, several run-overs by the subway — disappear magically. 
The urban landscape is grey, concrete, a world stripped of taste, colour, smell, any sensual engagement. The sex is easy but empty. He assumes ardor where there is only bemusement. He has an easy success at work as well as with women, nice office, sports car, nice flat, easy affairs. But his dissatisfaction reawakens when he remembers sensations, when he misses children. 
The corporate and Ikea-furnishing city is a kind of penal colony. Escape is impossible. When he digs a tunnel into a colourful kitchen in the outside world, he’s dragged back with but a mouthful of -- Danish.”Everyone here is happy,” he is admonished, before he is brutally carried out and dumped into the more problematic but enlivening reality.
     The opening shot is of a couple in a subway station kissing ravenously. Andreas watches them, unsettled not so much by their passion — we will later deduce — but by their disengagement. Their mouths work as if sucking out lobster but their eyes keep springing open as if even that pretence at passion can’t make them feel alive.
     The film excoriates the welfare state which provides the basics in a deadeningly easy way but stifles individual assertion.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

Mr Holmes

Who better than the legendary Sherlock Holmes to measure out not just the power but the limitations of man’s reason.
      At 93, Ian McKellen’s Holmes is fending off senility. The most brilliant intellect stays mortal. He has exiled himself to the Sussex countryside, stung — or bitten? — by his failure to have saved a woman from suicide. His logic was enough to understand her but his emotional detachment cost her life — and left him burying the incident too deep to remember. Now he’s trying to recover it by writing up his last case more truthfully than Dr Watson did.
The film can be summarized in the two lead faces. McKellen’s is a battleground of deep crevices where memories and emotions have been interred. His nose extends and hooks from a life of probing. The face of brilliant Milo Parker’s young Roger is an intense, unmarked, open flare of feeling. As the boy learns deduction from the old master, Holmes learns emotions and engagement from the lad. The relationship teaches the old man as much as the boy.
In the last shot Holmes plants stones in memory of the departed, then marshals their spirit. The famed epitome of Reason adopts a Japanese ritual and spirituality. The god’s eye view establishes his new arena of awareness. 
Holmes’s conversion to emotion was prompted by young Roger’s almost fatal dedication to Holmes and his bees. His feelings for the boy lead to an understanding of the boy’s lost relationship to his dead pilot father. That prompts Holmes to write his Japanese contact a consoling lie: that Holmes remembers the man’s father, was indeed responsible for his failing to return home, and that he made an exceptional contribution by his service to Britain. 
It also prompts Holmes to give his homemaker, Roger’s mother, the emotional support she needs and to will her and her son his estate. Having failed one woman Holmes will not fail this one. As he recovers the case he had suppressed, he’s freed to connect emotionally to others, both the close and the distant.   
The reason vs emotion split has a parallel in Holmes: the film plays him as a real person often at odds with the fictionalized version created by Watson. Here Holmes is a real man quite at odds with the Holmeses that have proliferated since Watson’s. He’s bemused by he contemporary film version he watches, whose Holmes has an utterly empty, vacuous and unlived-in face, compared to McKellen’s. His Holmes lives at a different address than Watson declared, spurns the deerstalker and finds the pipe now reduced to abhorrent prop. 
Both sets of antitheses define the human condition as in tension between opposing natures, ever in need of balance. Its emblem is the gift crystal that freezes both the productive and social bee and its enemy wasp. 
As modern man epitomizes science and reason, it’s in the charred ruins of Hiroshima that this Holmes finds the prickly ash he hopes will revive his memory better than the royal jelly did. Neither works, because the human condition can not be approached or addressed by reason or science alone. What these human powers fall short of is the spiritual that this Holmes addresses at the end. Perhaps his doctor has his number when he cites his “ashley prick” — not a bad emblem for the initially irritable and lifeless Holmes here, before an emotional attachment saves him. 

 

Monday, July 27, 2015

Antares (2004)

The interlocking sexual relationships here find their unifying metaphor in a minor incident shown in long shot, without emphasis. A man trains his dog to fetch, to heel, to leap up and wrestle for a stick. The man’s relationship with his dog replays the issues of control in the three human stories. But the human relationships are all complicated by the power of sexuality. That’s why — as the old man with a mysterious disease remarks — people make fools of themselves.
The nurse’s husband finds his passion in classical music. So she’s ripe for a wild affair with a -- less handsome -- traveling salesman, where they experiment with blindfolding, exhibitionism and an increasingly daring pleasure. Both lovers are overwhelmed by heir sexual  connection; they hardly speak. The lover’s pleasure in his erotic photos of her contrasts to her husband’s walls of classical CDs. They are symptomatically different collectors. His control threatened, the husband erupts when her ostensible night duty interrupts their planned concert, then when a real estate agent stands them up. Their young teen daughter has her own music, to which she practices sultry dancing, exploring her approaching womanhood. 
The young blonde cashier exercises a different power, faking pregnancy to win her Yugoslavian boyfriend’s commitment to marry her. Her fits of anger and jealousy appear to bring him to heel. In fact, he walks her dog as a way to meet his more amenable mistress. But the girl is more damaged and controlled by her moods than her fiancĂ© is, even if he does return after her suicide attempt. 
His mistress is herself struggling to remain free from her violent, obsessive ex. Swaggering, boastful, pleading love and claiming superior understanding, the real estate agent forces himself on her and punches out his rival. Mercifully, he kills himself in the traffic accident that pulls the separate stories together. He’s destroyed by his delusions of manly power, as the blonde is by her manipulative moods that damage her more than her guy. Only the nurse succeeds because — as a healer — she has found what she needs to live fully and follows her prescription. Like her dancing daughter, the nurse uses her sexuality to fulfil herself. 
     The stories are set in an ugly dense housing complex in Vienna. All the stories of animal vitality and the struggle for control play against that dehumanizing setting. Indeed the classical music fan wants to move out, perturbed by the genital graffiti on the elevator walls. His wife finds at least an emotional escape. The violence in all three stories is limned in the title, which suggests the anti-Ares, an opposition to the god of war, the passion of sex and love, which can be as destructive yet more fulfilling. Beats having an obedient dog.

Southpaw

Southpaw reminds us that the pleasures of a genre film lie less in originality than in the quality of the performance of familiar elements. Being old-hat is a challenge not a disqualification.
The plotline is familiar: a boxer is a single father who fights back to regain his child, title, fortune and especially self-respect. He has to fight and win in the social arena as well as in the ring. In Red Skelton’s The Clown the dad was a — spoiler alert — clown not a fighter but in The Champ he’s a fighter not a clown. Different jobs, same story. Different make-up, same emotions.
However familiar the plot, characters, even speeches, this film still packs a punch. Credit the strong supporting cast, especially Forest Whitaker as the second trainer, Rachel McAdams as the winning doomed wife and especially Oona Lawrence as the tough but needy little daughter. Of course, Jake Gyllenhaal is no mug in the leading role. He persuades us both with his rage and his vulnerability. Odd the film wasn’t called Raging Poppa
The fight scenes are almost in the same heavyweight class as Scorsese’s incomparable Raging Bull. Much of the film’s dramatic and emotional wallop comes from the crimson clashes, shot in intense closeup with sharp jabbing cuts and our disorientation matching the fighters’. The plot pours the violence out of the ring into the extra-arena showbiz, where another fight causes the wife’s death. 
Billy Hope’s redemption lies in his overcoming his rage and emotional excess. He needs to do that to get back custody of his daughter. He also has to harness his anger to win the climactic fight. He almost loses it — and also the fight — when he lets his opponent’s marital taunt enflame him. 
But he recovers and wins on the strength of his change not just in character but in tactic. First, his new coach trains him to block punches instead of absorbing them in his version of Ali’s rope-a-dope. He also cultivates his surprising left hook — hence the choice of title. Going southpaw is a metaphor for Billy Hope’s radical change of character that redeems him. 
Billy (nee William) toughens his Will to succeed in his Hope, to recover his family. This is prefigured when he has his daughter spell ‘dismantle’ and ‘hopelessness.’ Billy recovers his Hope by dismantling his old character and developing a new strong reach. That’s the new wine this film pours out of the old bottle, its genre source.
     The film’s full use of scantily-clad ring-number beauties leads to another theory. Why are male-centered sports, like basketball, football, and especially boxing, always accompanied by sexy broads?
      There’s an erotic element in watching impressive male specimens groping each other and joining in emotional violence, especially when they’re stripped down as in basketball and boxing. (Hockey doesn’t count here.) The spectacle therefore provides exposed beautiful women to provide a hetero relief — and perhaps save us from acknowledging the homoerotic potential in macho sports. That’s why in bromances — whether Starsky and Hutch, Butch and Sundance, even down to the Ted flicks — one guy always has a girlfriend.
     Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Tangerine

To the list of Great American Christmas Eve romantic comedies now must be added Sean Baker’s brilliant Tangerine.
“Los Angeles is a beautifully wrapped up lie,” the Armenian immigrant tells the cabbie she’s hired to catch her cabbie son-in-law in flagrante delicto. This film explores the underbelly of LA life, not the usual yule flick sentimentality. 
The film opens and closes on two best friends, who happen to be transvestite prostitutes. Sin-Dee is fresh out of jail, having taken a possession rap for her pimp Chester. She buys friend Alexandra a (sprinkled) donut for Christmas and is about to announce her engagement to Chester when Alexandra blurts out his infidelity. 
The narrative intercuts three storylines. The main is Sin-Dee’s quest to track down Chester and his new girlfriend Dinah. Alexandra agrees to accompany her, on Sin-Dee’s pledge not to get dramatic. Alexandra is also promoting her singing gig that night at a bar, where she performs a very touching rendition of Toyland, a Christmas Eve metaphor — like the film’s seasonal fruit title — that is turned to express the growth away from childhood, simplicity and illusions. Of all her friends, only Sin-Dee — dragging along the unwilling Dinah — makes the performance. All the sadder then Chester’s revelation that in Sin-Dee’s absence he’d not only banged Dinah but Alexandra (once) too. 
The third plot follows Armenian cabbie Razmik. He suffers the rigours of his job, including vomiting drunks and a garrulous old man irked by having a woman’s name (veteran Clu Gallagher).  At home Razmik has a pretty young wife, baby girl, dog — and an Old World mother-in-law intent upon destroying the marriage. He finds his own release in going down on transvestite prostitutes, where he can satisfy his homosexual needs under cover of the feminine. He rejects a prostitute when he finds she’s a woman. Even in free America he’s forced to be furtive.
The Armenian cabbie and the trannies share their exclusion from mainstream America, struggling to make a living by servicing the legitimate society. The prosaic cabbie seems drawn to the trannies’ exotica. The film focuses on these fascinating characters, with their colourful, often indecipherable language.
     El Lay is defined by dark streets, active alleys, and colourful signs that suggest this most iconic of American cities has to be read in isolated phrases, not passed through as blithely as mainstream films have accustomed us. All the central figures grab our sympathy, if not all our identification, but the more we see them the more easily our judgmental reflexes slip aside.  We’re in Paul Morrissey country here, where irregular characters struggle to sustain their self-respect and forge genuine relationships.
We’re so drawn into these characters’ world that it comes as a shock when their bubble is broken by a car of larking boys. The real world, the outside LA, intrudes in the form of lads luring Sin-Dee to their window, then dumping a mess of urine on her face and clothes. The girls’ broken friendship resumes in the laundromat as Alexandra helps both to clean Sin-Dee and  to recover her dignity. As the dryer whirrs behind the credits this film asserts the dignity of the LA underclass, usually omitted from your perhaps more traditional Christmas fare.
     Astonishingly, this film was entirely shot on a cell-phone with adaptive lens. Astonishing. Not a line rings false, not a shot falls dull, not a scene but that finds and warms our uncommonly common humanity.

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Self/less

Two phrases encapsulate the theme of Self/Less
Obviously, the title is the first. A self grows into selflessness. A rampaging egotist — Ben Kingsley as geezer Damian — discovers the virtue and satisfaction of submitting to the well-being of others. The very selfish real estate mogul surrenders his own character to preserve and to free the young man whose body he has taken over (Ryan Reynolds as young Damian).  
Ironically, the last scene is on an island in the Bahamas, where Damian has freed his body to resume the young man’s family life with his wife and the daughter he sacrificed his life to save. The setting evokes Donne’s “No man is an island.” The geezer has learned community and social responsibility.
Which brings us to the second phrase: The Community Coalition is the non-profit public service organization the geezer’s alienated daughter Claire has founded. The original Damian had no time for his daughter because he was too consumed with building his personal empire. When he tries to connect it’s too late. His checkbook fatherhood won’t work. The extension of his life enables him to make an emotional connection — sans checkbook — that he couldn’t in his lifetime. That’s his young body’s last service to him, which he reciprocates by giving up his character’s life for the young man to resume his.
The minor characters replay the theme in slighter ways. The gunsel the villain scientist keeps resurrecting grows more loyal with every new life he’s given. Damian’s longtime partner Martin introduces him to the Frankensteinian “shedding” in gratitude for his success.  Where Damian uses the new science to preserve himself, the ever more generous Martin used it to revive his dead young son. He’s appalled to learn that came at the expense of another family’s loss of their son. The villain scientist claims to be animating a new combination of tissue, but he’s really ending one life to use the body for another. That’s where good science goes bad. That’s also where good politics goes bad: when the innocent are forced to make the sacrifice for the powerful. 
This is a fascinating new take on a classic horror/sci-fi tradition: man’s burgeoning scientific powers enable powers previously the province of the gods. That infernal presumption is imaged in the villain’s death by flamethrower. 
Damian’s last name is “Hale” — unfitting for a man whom we meet when he is far from hale and hearty. His healthy generosity at the end earns his name.

Monday, July 20, 2015

Trainwreck

Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck is a romantic comedy that stakes out a new position in the feminist reworking of American film.
Most obviously, Schumer’s comedy has a candour and profanity traditionally reserved for men. Like her TV show and standup, her riffs are transgressive bawdry. Her candour about cunnilingus, tampons and erections are tabu-turning cases in point.
The three women of Snuff magazine establish the spectrum. Boss Dianna (Tilda Swinton) is the woman executive taught that success requires her to be like a man. Amy seems feminine in comparison, soft, recessive, but still stronger than Nikki, whose nerves — outside the women’s toilet stalls — reduces her to a girlish titter. Nikki apologetically backs into the editorial promotion when Amy is fired for supposedly molesting an underage masochistic male intern. On  this spectrum Amy struggles to find her integral balance of male and female. The two male writers reflect the same contrast between macho and effeminate. 
Naming a men’s magazine Snuff clearly plays with the idea manliness kills. Hence Amy’s line to the super endowed man: “Have you f... before? Where is she buried?” Amy is limited by her masculine traits. She was brainwashed by her father’s conviction that “Monogamy is unnatural.” Where her sister outgrew that mantra to become a fulfilled wife and mother, Amy stuck at promiscuity and insecurity. She has the conventional male fear of commitment, urge to leave after sex, need to control the relationship. 
She reduces her men’s sexuality to her immediate needs. The super-endowed pickup is thwarted when she falls asleep after her brisk orgasm. When her “ice sculpture” boyfriend gets into a quarrel at the cinema she feeds him lines that make him seem gay. 
Amy is saved from her insularity by her interview assignment with sports doctor Aaron (Bill Hader). He’s idealized by his work for Doctors Without Borders and his fame as a major sports surgeon. Here the man plays the nurturing healer role, domesticating the uncontrolled sexuality of — completing the reversal — the woman. Hader’s lunch scene with Lebron James is a male parody of he Women’s Lunch, from their discussion of relationships and emotions to their careful parsing of the check. 
When Dr Aaron is served with an intervention he faces a range of sexual license. The soft, caring Lebron is joined by the very sensitive Matthew Broderick (married to the star of the seminal feminist Sex and the City), the lesbian Chris Evert and — to provide the play-by-play — by the erstwhile cross-dresser Marv Albert. Amy’s intervention is an arranged scene with her step-nephew, who educes her affection for her lost Aaron. 
     Amy wins Aaron back by performing a number with the Knicks’ cheerleaders. She proves her new discipline and her desire to make their relationship work by performing the athletic ritual she initially disdained. She now accepts sports on Aaron’s terms, as an agent of community.  She also performs the persona of female sexuality, the antithesis to her Snuff work. The muscular hunk climaxed when he admitted that from behind she looked “like a dude.” That went with her male life-choice of promiscuity and flight from emotion. To recover her relationship with Aaron she embraces the female role as cheerleader and her new pool of emotions and commitment. Once an emotional trainwreck, she goes on track and pulls into a station.

Friday, July 17, 2015

Magic Mike XXL

Magic Mike XXL is just like those old Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland flicks. Some neighbourhood kids decide to put on a show. The slight difference here is that the kids are “male entertainers” and the theatrical climax — so to speak — is at the male strippers convention.
Still, it’s a celebration of Americana, post-feminist style. Hero Mike left the strip biz to design and make furniture. He rejoins the troupe when he’s lured to the wake of a still-alive (but absent) old colleague. That’s Mike’s resurrection.
The narrative covers the gender-role spectrum. The film first focuses on the male entertainers, as they catch up on their separate lives. Their MC is the most maternal, with his yogurt food truck. They move through a show at a drag queen bar, then the trad campfire romance, then a womens’ sex club, then a private visit to some wealthy frustrated women and finally The Big Show.
For once the film addresses the female gaze. That is, men are displayed in sexual postures and exposure for the satisfaction of the women in the audience. That goes against the groin of Hollywood film. So, too, the reversal of the Cinderella story, where the overly-endowed male —  who hasn’t found a woman who can accommodate him — finally finds “the glass slipper” who can. She’s Andie MacDowell.
The film corrects the assumption that sex is for women to satisfy men. In all three main shows, the men simulate sex for the gratification of women. As they spell out their ethic, they do what the women’s husbands don’t: ask what they want then give it. Revolutionary.
Significantly, the women here are not uniformly beautiful. Some strikingly large women are serviced as selflessly as the young and beautiful. Its not just the abs, pecs and etceteras that are XXL here. But these men celebrate the women’s beauty that transcends their physical appearance.
Our heroes conscript one of Mike’s old flames to replace their convalescing MC. She owns the club that makes its female clients all feel they are queens — at least for the night. She similarly calls the shots for the men’s big show. She articulates their function — to idolize and fulfill the women’s fantasies. The men find their magic in serving the women, not themselves.
     Because this reversal strikes at the heart of American show-biz the big numbers are attended by tsunamis of dollar bills. The women show their enthusiasm — and power — by throwing  money at the men who are faking sex with — and for once mainly for — them. Here women have the right to be celebrated, worshipped, asked their desires and gratified, and for once they have the money and power to be served. Both in real and in reel life, that’s revolutionary.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Ted 2

The obvious theme of Ted 2 is the expansion of civil rights in America. The film opens and closes with come-to-life teddy bear Ted marrying full-size sexpot Tami-Lyn. Between those ceremonies Ted is stripped of his legal status as a human. He is defined as property, therefore disqualified for a job, credit cards, bank accounts and marriage. He can even be abducted and cut open without legal recourse. The plot aligns Ted’s fight for recognition with America’s stuttering battles over civil rights, from reluctantly accepting the humanity of blacks and women to accepting gay marriages.   
The film’s structural theme is the celebration of pop culture. As Ted wins acknowledgment of personhood, the film exercises the recognition of popular culture as a valid form of artistic expression, an art as capable of serious statement (e.g., civil rights, the triumph of personhood over objectification) as is traditional high art. In art and in life the film is egalitarian. 
The spectacular pre-title Busby Berkeley musical number and the climactic chase through a comic convention clearly establish pop culture as the film’s arena of interest. Ted’s neophyte lawyer Samantha is characterized as woefully ignorant of pop culture, whereas Ted and friend John at least have the verbiage to play at being lawyers. Ted and villain Donny are drawn out of hiding by their reflex responses to pop songs. Cameo appearances by Liam Neeson, Tom Brady and the Saturday Night Live crew confirm the  focus on pop culture. And after all, pop culture is as American as the — ever unending — campaign for civil rights.
Ted’s relationship with John replays the bromance genre in American film. The two love each other but are careful to exclude any homosexual implications. Both have women in their lives, John the spectre of his ex-wife and Ted his Tami-Lyn. They’re repelled by Samantha’s phallic glass hash-pipe — a schlong bong? — but Ted weakens. He adopts Rocky opponents as his surname and his adopted child’s name. John’s fake death is guy-play, an insensitivity to emotion, that Samantha properly finds horrid.
But despite that macho pretence— and Ted’s and John’s swaggering sexual profanity — there’s a curious innocence in Ted’s marriage. He and Tami-Lyn love each other despite his not having a penis. That only becomes an issue when they try to save their breaking marriage by having a child. Deploying John’s semen, they are thwarted by Tami-Lyn’s sterility. 
Love without sex — that innocence evocative of Andy Hardy and the decades of romantic abstinence — puts this raunchy vulgar romp into the tradition of antique Hollywood. Significantly Ted is pantless through most of the film because — like Donald Duck and his Disney-mates — he’s asexual. When Ted starts his legal fight for personhood he wears a green tie. That’s the bud of his human clothing. At his triumphant trial, when he’s declared human, he’s wearing a full suit. He has adopted the ritual wardrobe of the human, however in his case unnecessary.
Their pro-bono lawyer Samantha, in her first case, comes on as too hip for the law. At their first meeting she’s swearing and smoking her water-pipe — an augur of her fit with these irregular clients. Though she loses the trial, she is validated by what she is, a caring, feeling person. The good woman is a good lawyer even though she lost, as the unbeaten lawyer opponent is ridiculed for being too slick to care. Similarly, the civil rights champion (Morgan Freeman) who initially refuses Ted’s case because Ted hasn’t done anything for anyone, changes his mind when he sees the love between Ted and John. That’s the crux of the civil rights controversy in America: people deserve full rights not because of what they have done or how they are classified but because they are human beings. 
     This film should be required viewing for Judges Scalia and Thomas. Not that it would help them. They’re impervious to even popular culture.  

Friday, July 10, 2015

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

The “Me” in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl defines hero Greg as the object of his life, not the assertive willful subject — which would be “I.” A self-absorbed teenager, he survives high school by making himself invisible, casually connecting with each of the various groups at his school but remaining insecure, self-deprecatory, unassertive. 
The film itself is his final act of self-assertion. He tells the story of himself, the dying Rachel and his longtime friend Earl as his attempt to explain his drop in grades, hoping to revive his admission into university. Rachel is Jewish, Earl African-American and Greg whitebread bland — so even there he remains invisible while touching upon more vivid subcultures.  Greg is so wary of friendship and commitment he introduces Earl as “co-worker” not friend.
Greg and Earl have been making modest parodies of classic films (e.g., 2:48 pm Cowboy, Vere’d He Go?, The Turd Man), another way to brush up against established character without revealing yourself. Greg is ironic about everything, as teens tend, because he lacks confidence, has no clear sense of himself, is puzzled by the mysteries of life and fears growing up. His stop-action animation clips are another form of imitating life without living it, another form of arrested development.
At first reluctant to engage with the lukemia-stricken Rachel, Greg slips into a very warm and rewarding relationship with her — to the point of wasting his term at school. He withdraws angrily when she ceases her chemo, because he can’t accept dying. Ostensibly to ease our minds, he twice tells us she won’t die, but that’s a replay of his denial. His history teacher provides the key lesson: Even when someone dies you can keep learning about them. That is, the people we know stay alive in our memories and in our feelings. The teacher knows that in two ways: (i) from his experience after his father’s death; (ii) he’s a history teacher so he knows to learn new lessons from the past.
In contrast, Greg’s father is a sociology professor: someone focused on the social structures of the present. He’s tenured, which means he spends all his time at home, in his robe, grizzled, nibbling weird snacks he has made, obsessed with foreign films. That film link defines both Greg’s connection to his eccentric father and his extreme detachment.
After Rachel’s death Greg makes surprising discoveries about her. She returned his emotional connection, while slightly less reticent. More dramatically, the books he so cursorily noted on his first visit turn out to be sculptures she made, 3-D carvings into the pages with small figures sometimes glued in. They’re the equivalent of his little films in their creativity, miniaturizing real life and compulsive but ironic self-expression. Because Greg found himself caring for Rachel she stays alive in his broadening consciousness. Her death leaves her a richly intense open book, not a sealed fate. So this brilliant, touching romantic comedy is really about the meaning of death — which is the meaning of life and the function of human engagement.
The minor characters support the theme of Rachel’s unfolding enigma. Both her and Greg’s mothers are strong, odd characters that their friends may only come to understand after they have passed. So too the two teachers, the eccentric sociologist who seems to live in suspended animation (aka “tenure”) and the macho high school history teacher with his tattoos, equally curious cuisine and tradition of letting students watch foreign films in his office at lunchtime. A rich diet of foreign foods and foreign films make the two rather different teachers enigmatically connected. Like Rachel — and as Earl and Greg will have — when they finally pass their survivors will have interesting backstories to unfold.



Suite Francaise

The story of the discovery of the source novel is more dramatic than the film, Suite Francaise. But the film still manages a rare bleakness even for a WW II romance. We’re used to  films where war corrupts good people and disrupts the essential brotherhood of man. The point here is that people are naturally vicious, vengeful, murderous, awaiting only the excuse of war to reveal their vile selves.  Any humanity and possibility of love are the exception in this venal image of non-community.
The German forces occupying the French village are conventionally evil, rapacious, sadistic, arrogant and murderous. Hero Bruno is the exception because he has delayed personally killing anyone, plays classical piano, composes the titular opus for the French heroine Lucille, and tempers his Nazi duties out of regard for her.
The twist is in the characterizing of the noble French peasantry. It isn’t. The class system is as callous and bitter as the division by war. Upon the Nazis’ arrival the village erupts in personal vendettas, as the citizens spy and report on each other. No good turn is left unstoned.  
In this evil world the only good emerges out of evil. The occupation brings Bruno to Lucille. As she loses her illusions about her POW husband Gaston’s fidelity, she’s freed into an adulterous ardor and an even more dangerous political engagement. In Lucille Bruno finds a reminder of his better self, the sensitivity and virtue that alienate him from his soldier comrades. Fortunately, the central passion is not consummated. It’s aborted when Lucille sees Bruno kill the mayor in retaliation for the farmer’s murder of the Nazi planning to rape his wife. In a landscape of flawed humanity the brave farmer is crippled and the one humane Nazi officer is — a dutiful Nazi officer. His final service to Lucille betrays his duty and could explain why he “disappeared.” This is the tragedy of Iron Star-crossed lovers. 
The three central characters find redemption. Mousey wife Lucille grows independent enough to confront her mother-in-law, to at least open the possibility of an affair with the Nazi officer, and finally to reject him and his people in preference for work in the resistance. Madame Angellier moves from hard-case callous bitch to a kind of angel, briefly harbouring the Nazis’ prey, encouraging Lucille’s underground work and ultimately hiding and tending to the orphaned Jewish girl.
     Sad to say the film is packaged as a softcore romance rather than an incisive work of art. The romance is mush. The exposure of small-town evil is not as harsh as Clouzot’s Le Corveau. Worst of all, the film backs away from art by — though allowing the German characters to speak the requisite German — having all the French characters speak classy English. From that artifice the film never recovers.

Friday, July 3, 2015

For My Father (2008)

Dror Zahavi’s For My Father is a thoughtful and moving Israeli film that balances the Jewish and Palestinian perspectives. As the title suggests, the two central characters take opposite positions vis a vis their duty to their respective fathers. 
Tarek agrees to become a suicide bomber to restore his father’s reputation in the Palestinian community. His father was assaulted when discovered to have served the Israelis in order to facilitate Tarek’s travel for his promising football career. His parents don’t know his plan but beg him to return home safely. 
The beautiful 17-year-old Keren revolted against her father’s orthodox Judaism and lives banished from her family. This mother too begs her child to return home. Their respective fathers’ positions prevent them. Though we don’t see Keren’s father, his grip is personified by the young orthodox vigilantes who physically threaten Keren if she doesn’t abandon her secular independence and submit to her father — and them. A lasciviousness and cruelty undermine their ostensible righteousness.
When the now ambivalent Arab terrorist and the Jewish beauty meet, both are outsiders in their own communities. Each is pressured to submit to the will of their respective forbears, their societies’ traditions — i.e., fathers. Having originally dismissed Terek, Keren comes to appreciate him, especially after he drives off her tormentors. Karen shows the strength to persist in her independence. But Terek cannot free himself from the dynamite strapped under his shirt. He can’t join her in her nocturnal swim. 
After their brief idyllic escape, her tormentors have their way. They persuade the neighbourhood deputy that Tarek wielded a knife against them (a lie) and that he must be the terrorist known to have snuck into Tel Aviv (the truth, but with an asterisk: he’s no longer certain about his suicidal and murderous mission).   
The pivotal supporting character is old man Katz. He initially appears as a madman, opening the public mains to waste the water. We learn he and his depressed, indeed suicidal, wife remain in despair over the loss of their soldier son. He died when the army, trying to toughen up their young men, denied him water. This father confronts the traditions that waste the lives of their youth — on either side of the Jewish-Palestinian divide.
In Katz Zahavi demonstrates how enemies can bridge their differences, hatreds, cultural inheritances. He figures out why Tarek needs to buy a new detonator from him. But instead of turning him in — as the jealous Jewish vigilantes do — he takes a fatherly interest in the young man and tries to talk him out of his mission. 
     Tarek, who during his enforced weekend in Tel Aviv has experienced the Israeli’s humanity, has already modified his mission. He leaves on the beach the nails that would have created massive losses when he blows himself up in the market. His bomb and the army snipers kill only him and wound Katz. To the madness of the continuing 1948 war Katz has lost his new substitute son as well as his own. Karen has lost a potential lover and witnessed another reminder of the extremists’ mortal futility — that freezes both sides.