The Roads Not Taken

  The granite-jawed writer is a romantic cliche — that writer/director Sally Potter here incisively anatomizes with a view to freeing woman from that conventional enslavement. She exposes macho romance as helplessness.

Javier Bardem is usually the dynamic force of his film. Here his Leo (the ex-lion)  leaves his bedroom stupor either for a romantic reminiscence or to fumble through the unaccommodating reality of New York City. He takes roads into memories of past romance and failure, then in reality stumbles helpless through the streets.

        As his second wife observes, Leo chooses to live in a dump by the railway tracks. He's off the rails.

His first wife (Salma Hayak) lost him to their grief over a school-bound son killed in a traffic accident. In his trauma he sees his lost son in dogs. His second wife (Laura Linney) escaped when neither could handle her becoming the far more successful. Their detachment still leaves them friends, at least in her view, but he blurs their distance. 

The film centers on Leo’s relationship with their daughter Molly. In the present tense the film follows her laborious caring for him, as she struggles to get him to and through improbable dental and optometrist appointments, a replacement pants purchase, and his survival of a nocturnal wandering. Her attempts at normalcy fail.

When her attention to him costs her an important job she resolves finally to assert her independence. 

The title involves them all. Leo floats to and from fantasies or memories of his lost desires. His pathetic flirtation with a young girl in Greece could be a fantasy temptation or a reworking of his flight from his newborn daughter for a writing freedom in Greece, that he quickly abandoned.

The first wife could not follow him further through his insistent grief. They share road scenes literal and figurative.The second wife sees his present clutch as the road she did well to escape. 

The character who grows through the film is daughter Molly. She comes to realize the costs of her father’s grip and climactically walks away to independence, leaving him with the warmth of her care. And of course a hired caregiver. 

But Molly can’t walk that road away until her father finally recognizes her, finally speaks her name. That acknowledgment enables her split. Literally.  

        Finally, credit Potter with a rich work of technical excellence as well as imagination and commitment, with uniformly fine performances.

The Problem with People

  Christ Cottam’s film may pretend to be a bucolic Irish comedy — like Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero, twice cited. But it takes a major, even controversial, political/philosophic turn. It examines how small familial differences can swell into a serious feud, even violence. Indeed, when the central point of contention becomes ownership of a small seaside strip of land, the film turns into a domestic miniature of the Gaza war.   

The Irish undertaker Ciaran (Colm Meaney) and the American builder Barry (Paul Reiser) are cousins who meet for the first time. Their grandfathers were once-close brothers, until one moved to New York and the other didn’t. Their separation grew into a feud, then fervid animosity. 

On Barry’s visit, Cieran’s initially warm welcome is soured when his father — who demanded the reunion — leaves Barry half his estate. Cieran tries to cheat him out of the property. Barry appears to concede, but then buys the waterfront strip of land beyond it and proceeds to build his obstruction of Cieran’s view. 

The cousins’ reunion had cheered the entire community. Barry is especially popular when he offers to buy everyone in the pub his favourite steak dinner if/when they visit New York. 

Their feud divides it, culminating in a violent donnybrook at their charity football match. 

The village’s burgeoning war subtly evokes Gaza. Co-writer Reiser makes one early joke about Jews. But his persona grows into his daughter’s very Jewish lesbian wedding to Ciaran’s ex-wife at the end. The broken glass and shared tallis seal the deal. The lesbian element affirms the need to transcend convention for personal and collective fulfilment. 

In its moderation, the film omits the extremity of jihadist Islam. Instead, the second historic faith is Cieran’s Catholicism, evoked by the Pope John and JFK photos on his walls and by the community’s young, flustered and ineffectual priest. 

In a lighter version of reviving old familial grievances, one of Cieran’s customers demands her relative be dug up after four years — to change his suit! Thus people would rewrite the past.

To appreciate the courage and ambition of this seemingly light comedy one has to remember the Irish government’s strong anti-Israel statements and the resurgence of antisemitism.  

Hence perhaps the balancing twist in the question of land ownership. Here Cieran has been living on the land that is newly given to his cousin. In the Holy Land, of course, the Jewish occupancy is the oldest. So, too, the violence is reduced from slaughters and the October 7 atrocities to verbal insults, some mischief with sheep, reciprocal slander — which proves very expensive for Barry — and finally that football game. 

Before the marital conclusion, the men reach peace when they’re stuck in the same hospital room with duelling curtain controls. Would that our larger war would be so easily resolved and the ancient Abrahamic brotherhood recovered. 

A Real Pain

    As writer, director and star Jessie Eisenberg has a real winner in this comedy about second-generation American Holocaust trauma.

    Honest. It is funny. 

    But it’s also trenchantly sad. The real pain is representatively borne by two (relatively) safe American cousins. They bear the burden of their grandparents’ generation’s suffering. And as contemporary Judaism only too well knows: the global antisemitism that propelled the first Holocaust looms again. That historic meaning in the title trumps its reference to the two cousins.

    Consider how we find and leave the central duo. Benji (Kieran Culkin) hangs out at the airport. He initially waits for cousin David (Eisenberg), who urgently streams phone messages about his arrival. At the end Benji spurns David’s home dinner to stay there. “You meet the craziest people here.” That’s the in-transit class, unsettled, uncentered, in between, having lost one’s tether..

    Benji is one. The last shot leaves him teary-eyed, alone, softened by the contagion of grief. After his harrowing exposure to the Holocaust site, Benji remains alone, of a persecuted people without the effective supports ceded the “normal.” Like the Beckett Unnameable: he must go on; he can’t go on; e hgoes on.

    Benji nakedly wears the moral compass that in post-Holocaust (or is it pre-Holocaust 2?) America is out of fashion. He skips out on the $12 Polish train ticket  because ”It’s the principle of paying. We shouldn't have to pay for train tickets in Poland. This is our country.” “No,” properly responds David: “it's not. It was our country. They kicked us out 'cause they thought we were cheap.” Since the Holocaust the old line between truth and falsehood has been blurred. 

    So too Benji’s wistful outlaw spirit: “We stay moving, we stay light, we stay agile.” But in life Benji carries the burden of the Survivor conscience. His grandmother lived through it, but both cousins remain branded by it.

Benji’s ethic seems contemporary cliche: ”Man, what's stupid is the corporatization of travel. Ensuring that the rich move around the world, propagate their elitist loins, while the poor stay cut off from society.” And to Marcia: “Money's like fucking heroin for boring people.”

But that formulaic morality is here validated by the shadow that still falls across our present culture: “We're on a fucking Holocaust tour. If now is not the time and place to grieve, to open up, I don't know what to tell you, man.” As the Somali Jew Eloge adds, “Ignoring the proverbial slaughterhouse to enjoy the steak, as it were.” Behind the smile still gleams the skull.

In disclosing Benji’s suicide attempt, David reveals a strength behind his apparent weakness: “our grandma survived by a thousand miracles when the entire world was trying to kill her, you know?... like, how did the product of a thousand fucking miracles overdose on a bottle of sleeping pills?” 

But as the ostensibly stabler David explains Benji’s climactic dinner explosion, he admits his own weakness: “I just, like, take a pill for my fuckin' OCD, you know, and I jog and I meditate and I go to work in the morning and I, like, come home at the end of the day, and I, like, move forward, you know, because I know that my pain is unexceptional, so I don't feel the need to, like, I don't know, burden everybody with it, you know?” Both modern young Jews still bear their grandparents' pain.

That scene ends with that same broken Benji very charmingly playing “Tea for Two” on the lounge piano. The tea is the cousins’ confession. 

Later Benji recalls David’s fragility: “You are, like, an awesome guy stuck inside the body of somebody who's always running late. And I gotta, like, fish that fuckin' guy outta ya every time I see ya.” Where once Benji “used to fucking cry about everything, man. Like…” now he is the modest modern American success story. Well, “survivor” story. He has a pretty wife and a beautiful baby son at home — and a successful career selling online banner advertising. Another salesman ripe for death.

The cousins are forbidden to leave their memorial stones on their grandmother’s front stoop. David has a home, with a stoop, where he can put his stone. Benji has none so, alone in the airport, he wears it inside. 

Despite Benji’s feeling neglected David does “give a shit about you. I just don't understand how you would ever do anything so fucking stupid to yourself.” The image of the suicidal Benji burns into David’s mind like the holocaust images, searing and immediate: ”I, like... I walk around with, like, this terrible fucking image of you in my head…’

The living remain frozen by their memory of their dead, themselves not fully alive either. 

The Room Next Door

  Pedro Almodovar’s first English film continues his consistent Spanish theme — the challenges of being female in a world unsympathetic to ambitious or unconventional women. After his several queer male heroes he here centers on two women whose careers have cost them community, family, close support.

The primary center is Martha (Tilda Swinton) whose imminent death plumbs her into isolation. After her other friends have declined her request to attend her self-euthanasia she recruits Ingrid (Julianne Moore) to share her last days. 

The film’s power derives from Swinton’s off-beat beauty. It stresses her masculine leanness, hair-style, carved face and assertive spirit. As a war reporter she had a male career amid men. The required traveling completed her detachment from her daughter, who even as a child found Martha lacking in maternal comfort. 

Martha had a daughter when, as a teenager, she submitted to her war-bound boyfriend. When he returns broken he eschews his new family to begin anew elsewhere, including marriage. He in effect kills himself by running into an abandoned burning farmhouse, driven by his illusion of hearing cries for help. 

Martha’s death brings her daughter a connection that the journalist’s nature and career had denied them. Hungering for a parental link, the girl told her father’s widow that she had been in that pyre crying for help and he had saved her. That delusion is her only connection until she now meets Ingrid. Here she learns about — and we see — her connection to her mother in character, emotion, and — confirmed by Swinton’s double-casting — bearing. The gulf that separated them in life has been bridged by this death. As the daughter slips into her mother’s mood and reflexes, a bond they were denied in life, the film salvages a happy ending in this drama of women isolated by their own success. 

Subtly, Ingrid parallels Martha despite their antithetical spirits and appearance, Much more the conventionally feminine, Ingrid as a highly successful writer has also lost closeness to her friends and has no apparent family. When Ingrid turns this experience into a book she will be paralleling Ingrid’s  battlefield reportage, its emotional casualties and destruction. Martha frees her to tell the personal story that she was forbidden to tell when she interviewed the male lovers in a wartime monastery. 

Both women had sequential passionate affairs with academic Damien (John Turturro), in whom Ingrid now confides. Despite his sexual reputation Damien seems effeminate, especially in contrast to her hyper-masculine gym trainer. He  sexualizes his session by explaining the company policy not touch their clients. That prompts Ingrid to break down crying at her friend’s condition. The lawyer Damien brings Ingrid is a strong, slender young woman who bristles at the male cop’s belligerent religiousness. The cast is a gender spectrum, that penalizes the feminine.  

Now, to unpack the title. Across the entire feminist discussion looms the liberating shadow of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of Her Own. Martha wants Ingrid to occupy the next-door bedroom in her rented (luxury) flat. Craving more space Ingrid takes the bedroom below. The desired space is both within the room and away from Martha. The shift is a detachment, the need for space even in — or especially at — this situation of such intimacy. The room below also admits the subconscious into the domestic landscape. 

Similarly, the several film allusions within the work extend the characters’ self-awareness to the outer structure. For relief the two women watch Buster Keaton’s Seven Chances, where the hero is assailed with a double avalanche, of boulders and of bolder marriage-craving women. A clip from John Huston’s The Dead materializes the recitation thrice of the closing Joyce lines. The allusions to A Letter from an Unknown Woman and A Journey to italy respectively parallel Martha’s missed marriage and empty relationships. Indeed, the advertising image of the two heroines’ heads evokes that of Bergman’s Persona. There two women briefly merge into one, as the parallel heroines here discover a bond where they initially appeared antithetical.

Auteur Connery: The Offence (1973)

  This 1973 Brutal Cop thriller is an interesting test of the auteur theory. Who is the organizing intelligence behind this genre flick? 

First up is obviously Sidney Lumet, who proved a master adapter from classic O’Neill down to genre novels. 

Or — star Sean Connery? 

Here Connery plays a police detective maddened by his years of dealing with cases of child abuse and murder. He succumbs to the evil he has seen. The key event is his fatal interrogation of one suspect in such a case. As the victim remarks, “Nothing I have done can be one half as bad as the thoughts in your head.” 

That fails to mollify. Addressing one offence, the cop on offence commits his own murderous one.

The film is very much of its time - 1973. The police force is still all white. Women inhabit the fringe, unless they’re victims. But it’s still a powerful drama.

It’s especially interesting as the direct antithesis to the Sean Connery image of the time. He was, remember, James Bond. Licensed to kill even beyond Hollywood cop film convention, if not the law. Suave and debonair and unruffled by anything he has witnessed or done. 

Connery’s cop here is a harsh exposure of the nightmare reality the Bond films glossed over. This Connery hero is broken by his experience. 

In addition to the violence, his character here is antithetic to the Bond as ladies’ man. “Why aren’t you beautiful?” he turns on bis suffering, victimized but still caring wife: “You’re not even pretty.” As his name colloquially confirms, Detective Sergeant Johnson is a prick.

As Connery trails his film persona into this role, so does Trevor Howard, listed as co-star but appearing only at the end as the hardened investigator into the Connery character’s “case.” From such films as The Third Man and Brief Encounter Howard personifies the ethical administrator, the tempted but firm Brit.

The film’s back story favours this auteurship. Connery had wanted to escape his Bond image. He was lured into his last exercise, Diamonds are Forever (1971), with the promise that United Artists would then fund two films of his choice. In genre, tone and theme this film — the first in that deal — was Connery’s escape from his Bond-age.

The second was to be a Macbeth that he would have starred in and directed. Like The Offence, that would have been another profound study off a hero destroyed by the poison of his power and responsibility. Unfortunately, the release of Roman Polanski's version and the box office failure of The Offence stopped that project. So the only Shakespeare Connery we’re left with is his wonderful pre-Bond Hotspur in The Age of Kings TV series. 

With that context,  Connery might well be considered the auteur responsible for this work. It comes from his heart, against his image.  

The Trans Mitzvah

  Little bar mitzvahnik Ruben Singman comes by his first flush of flash honestly. His Buenos Aires parents — the Mosaic Aaron and Miriam — run a showy clothing store that deals in the whole range of upscale style from the elegant down to the athletic. That covers the waterfront. 

Father Aaron is Jewish/moral enough to pause over the propriety of declaring the gift registry and guest dress-style to advantage his store.

Ruben advances that integrity. While preparing for his bar mitzvah he wows his family with a splashy drag version of a Yiddish song. Chirribim. Its cheer and exuberance fade when he rejects his bar mitvzah. To be honest, he contends, that traditional recognition of the Jewish boy’s advent into manhood needs to declare her assertion as woman.  His parents refuse him her bat mitzvah, the initiation rite adapted for a girl. As if to please his father Ruben dons the sad male pale blue suit— but only to cancel the ceremony. Out of the blue he comes out.

A garish montage is our bridge to the adult Ruben — now the internationally famous Yiddish singer and dance phenom Mumy Singer.— played by the fabulous Penelope Guerrero. Get it? Singman sans the man? Now Mumy is what she is, as well as what she does. The real not the assigned. 

She sings that cheery bum song again, now with lavish male dancing accompaniment. As a performer she is now a success of Swiftian substance — that’s Taylor, not Jonathan. Mind you…..

In its energy Chirribim anticipates Mumy’s explanation of her Yiddish success: “I’ve transformed a lament into a party.” “The Kosher Diva” also has a handsome and understanding lover, Sergio. He quotes Lacan, a warning we may be in for some cultural anthropology here as well as all that song and dance. As Aaron warned us, “We’re a culture of symbolism.”

When Mumy brings her spectacular musical show home the song she so sells now, hopefully,  is the King David psalm Hinei ma tov. It luxuriates in the sense of community and warmth. The emotion proves short lived. She easilly reunites with older brother Edouardo. They instinctively fall into an elegant, detached dance across the Claridge Hotel entry hall, before their exuberant embrace. He is now suffering his own marriage’s breakup, his wife’s impatient spurring him to take some advantage of his sister, and his imminent separation from their children. 

Mumy's initially reluctant visit with her parents rekindles their lost warmth but with loss. Her father misses her concert because he is rushed to his deathbed. “This is the second time I’ve ruined your performance,” he quips. “I must need attention.” As her mother does later, Aaron fully accepts his “Mumy” and regrets his earlier rejection of her. He departs with the resonant “My chiquita.”

After her father’s funeral, Mumy's onstage performance of Henei ma tov turns rueful, elegiac. The party reverts to lament. Here Mumy loses her singing voice. It fades into the child Ruben’s voice that opened the film with the line: “Once upon a time there was a childhood. Everyone has one.’ To reconcile with that past child and its overtaking voice Mumy addresses her missed initiation into adulthood. 

But having a bat mitzvah now seems as false to her past as the bar mitzvah felt then. Nor can the rabbi they consult adjust his traditions to her character and needs.

And so — properly to fill the void left by her uncompleted initiation —  Mumy seeks spiritual guidance for a service more fitting for her person. Indeed the eponymous Trans Mitzvah. A service that bends to adjust to the individual beyond the binary of the bar and the bat.

As it happens, this transcendence finds its origin in the most prosaic point in the Singman store — in the safe behind the flash. Merchant Aaron had kept among his grey bookkeeping books an extensive file of Jewish esoterica, steeped in classic numerology, myth, legend, hope, the many archaic Jewish ways into transcendence. 

We’ve had an augur of this spirit. On his deathbed Aaron gave Mumy one of the two silent glass bells she had chosen as the bar mitzvah gift for guests. As Aaron points out now, our music comes from within us, not from any outside instrument. So, too, the two walkie-talkies the children had been given, sans batteries. Their instinctual understanding made the machinery unnecessary. 

So — the reluctant rabbi notwithstanding — has the modern climate changed since Ruben became Mumy that the adult “kids” get those redundant -- but obsolete so treasured -- toy batteries from an old friend. He is now in an openly gay marriage running a fancy wig-store. That store, incidentally, would equally serve the most Orthodox Jewesses as well as drag queens. Again, Judaism draws on a historic range of transcendent spirituality, sexuality, the power that validates and collectivizes individuality. Cue: the upbeat Hinei ma tov.

For Mumy’s climactic trans mitvzvah she and Aaron work through their father’s understanding, not away from him. His esoterica confirms Mumy’s old mentor’s spiritual direction from the gym floor to the family origin in Toledo, Spain. Mumy finally recovers her voice — in service to another young couple’s wedding, isolated in the desert. Her grabndfather echoes in the young shepherd’s citation of his old line, “Feel the merino. It’s the real thing.” This time there is an actual sheep. And in the film’s last shot — which repeats its first —the family store’s neon sign is emblazoned across the Spanish desert.

All this is magic? Special effects? No, not so special.

Not in this context. This is the reality of historic Judaism, a spirituality that drives deeper than social convention, even deeper than religious ritual, indeed deeper than any current reading of that long tradition. It makes convention whether societal or religious not the source of our soul music but the passive, malleable instrument by which to realize our individual own. Like those silent glass bells. Our music comes from within.

When Ruben rejects his bar mitzvah it’s because its form would deny what he is. His service would have been dishonest.  Mumy loses her voice when that gap grows too burdensome to bear. But as she tries to reconnect to her buried Ruben her bat mitzvah seems equally inappropriate. Neither pronoun fits. Mumy's division into two even now harkens back to Ruben's two aunts at the office, who seemed like one divided into two to get the work done. Now Mumy's work is reuniting her selves, as heard in her divided voices.

This film summons up a historic spirituality and openness in Judaism that legitimizes Mumy’s unconventional expression — discovery? — of faith. Fittingly, for that self-realization she has to leave Buenos Aires for the desert. Not Sinai, but her family desert, in Spain. We all carry our own and own people’s histories intact. If not always in tact. 

This is a remarkable film, both in itself and in its time. An unconventional Jew finds affirmation within the breadth of  historic Judaism, beyond but still impelling its current state of global challenge and persecution. Clearly director Daniel Burman is a force to be reckoned with, an artist worth looking forward to. 

Macbeth -- Ashland Oregon Shakespeare 2024

  The Ashland Macbeth was a powerful production especially on the intimate Bowman stage. What lead Kevin Kenerly may lack in bulk he more than made up for in intensity and nuance. Erica Sullivan was a flaming Lady M, sadly broken when the steed she spurred into action ran off without her.

Two details speak to the micro attention this brilliant company gives its texts. 

When Macbeth first takes his seat on the throne we note a telling touch. The top of the left side of the throne is broken off. The broken throne connotes a broken kingship, a broken order, a broken realm. And the king who has yet to realize he is as broken as the symbolic seat of his power. 

It’s easy to miss this on the black-on-black set but it’s there — a reminder of the scrupulous attention this company pays to detail.

If the devil is in the details so are the angels. The other: the mad ranting Lady Macbeth is visited by her concerned doctor. In a glaring anachronism he’s a tall officious man in a 1950s grey overcoat carrying his house call black leather bag. So wrong is so right. He’s the outsider figure of sanity, measure, awareness, discretion, frozen on the fringe of the medieval castle gone mad.  

There are at least two larger inflections in this production. The three weird sisters reappear whenever someone dies. That is, they physically embody the echoes of their predictions. 

I was irritated when their appearance enabled the freshly killed King Duncan (David Kelly) to metamorphose into the Porter. It dulled the dramatic leap from the murder to the — however thematically relevant — comedy. However, their later appearances left the impression of an afterlife, the eternity into which the witches were guiding the newly departed. The evil men do lives after them…. 

As in the Coriolanus production, this Macbeth also turned the wars into dance. If one motive was to amplify the battle register of a very small cast, the primary effect was to amplify the emotional power and the sheer physical beauty of the movements, both individual and en masse. The showdown with Macduff returned to the heavy-sword norm.