Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Paterson

This film is too quiet and uneventful for the conventional film story. This film is a poem. It’s a poem like what bus driver Paterson writes: quotidian images, simple and prosaic, that blossom into a wider but unspecified suggestion of meaning. In general parlance — the image is the light bulb, the poetry the light.
The first poem we watch him write starts with the box of matches beside his breakfast Cheerios. The film teems with matches. The film starts with Laura saying she dreamt of having twins, one for each of them. When he leaves the house he sees two elderly twin men, another match. There are at least two sets of twin girls in the film and a couple of adult twin women. 
In another kind of  match, two guys brag about possible conquests. Two lonely young anarchists are isolated in their idealism. All the little dramas of which Paterson catches snatches in his bus are such matches, individuals connecting. Or splitting, like the couple breaking up in the bar.
Consider all the matches in the one-word title. Paterson is (i) the bus driver, (ii) his home town, (iii) his bus route, (iii) the epic poem by local hero William Carlos Williams, also set there. That poet is here aka Carlo William Carlos, a reversal of the original name, another form of twinning or match. 
The basic match is between the external and the interior life. As Williams explained his objective in his Paterson: "the resemblance between the mind of modern man and the city.” The prosaic New Jersey of Paterson’s world abounds with poetry. Outside a laundromat at night he encounters a rap song in the making, the washer thrumming out the rhythm. A carful of sinister blades produces another rap on dog-jacking. In his neighbourhood bar Paterson encounters the florid “acting” of rejected lover Everett. The bartender's angry wife conjugates “chess tournament” into the threat of “chest tourniquet.”  That’s poetry.
Even the film’s visuals are poetic: prosaic images that resonate into larger moods or themes. A bleak brick wall says “Fire.” The night view of the bar and its plush interior shadows evoke the urban blues. Like the words on the matchbox, the physical details work like a megaphone to project a poetic effect. That’s the essential poetic device of metaphor: a particular evokes something more general. However unpromising Paterson’s world may seem, to the observant, pausing and reflecting eye, it can be poetic. Like the gift of the blank notebook, the ostensibly prosaic world holds limitless opportunity for the responsive imagination.
  The characters also seem to work as figures of speech. We don’t learn much about them, just enough to catch their present function. Bus driver Donnie lists a paragraph of the tribulations that define his life. We get a glimpse into the bartender’s uneven marriage. The Japanese poetry-lover is a walking paean to poetry but a total enigma otherwise.
  Paterson’s Laura is his muse, as another Laura was to Petrarch. But she’s not the passive lady of the muse tradition. She is intensely committed to her black-and-white interior design and fashion theory. She respects Paterson’s poetry and presciently urges him to make a second copy, for posterity. She craves her own fame and fortune as country singer and/or cupcake-maker. In her ambition and craving for recognition she’s Paterson’s antithesis. We don’t see them having sex, but we do see their daily physical intimacy and love. That’s the poetic face of the marriage. 
We don’t know much more about Paterson either. The marine photo on his bedstead tells us he was a decorated hero. That explains his efficient take-down of the gun threat in the bar. But it deepens our sense of his life as a bus driver. He’ s still a uniformed public servant but in a more normal, modest and social circumstance. The ribbons show he was a hero at war. The bar take-down attests to his courage and efficiency now. But he achieves a different kind of heroism in his life of transit poet. When he assumes the responsibility of staying with the young girl until her mother returns, he’s the model citizen. His reward: the kindred spirit gives him the prize of a splendid little poem and shares his love of Emily Dickinson. When the loss of his poems might tempt him to abandon that impulse, his faith in his art and in himself is restored by the encounter with the Japanese Williams fan. That carrying on is also heroism.  
Then there’s the dog. A lot of attention is spent upon Marvin (persuasively portrayed by Nellie). A dog is a dog is a dog. Until it isn’t. For dognappers a prized English bulldog can mean fast big bucks. For a man it can be an excuse for a nightly walk and the opportunity to visit the bar. To a woman it can be the child substitute. To the director it can provide the cheap cuteness or sentiment for a cutaway from the characters, or a set-up for a possible dramatic plot-twist, that disturbs the viewer even if it doesn’t happen.
  Marvin in particular is characterized as a living responsive presence in the family, growling at every physical exchange between his pets (aka masters). He’s also very well trained and obedient, as when he stays sat and still at Paterson’s demand. But that control proves severely limited. Marvin’s daily routine, when he’s on his own, is to run outside and knock-over the mailbox, which Paterson later has to straighten up. In his climactic rebellion Marvin destroys Paterson’s only copy of his poems. 
So this dog embodies our hope or delusion of control over the indomitably uncontrollable. That’s what poetry does too, give us a formal construction through which to explore and harness the uncontrollable facts and mysteries of life and fate. As prose narrows and defines our immediate environs, poetry opens out and unleashes the beyond. The poetry here has largely abandoned the strictures of rhyme, but it preserves the intensity and structure of rhythm and the constant eye for a wider meaning. The light beyond the bulb. 
Paterson is both an exaltation of poetry and — in its discovery amid prosaic material circumstance — its demystification. This is a joy to apprehend.

Saturday, February 25, 2017

Catch Me If You Can (2002)-- reprint

History of Intellectual Culture, 2004

Volume 4, No. 1 

ISSN 1492-7810

http://www.ucalgary.ca/hic

"Passing." Review of Steven Spielberg, Catch Me If You Can (California: Dreamworks Pictures movie, 2002). 
Reviewed by Maurice Yacowar, University of Calgary
Though offered and (well) received as a holiday comic romp, Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can may be his most personal film since Schindler's List (1993). There, as Spielberg has remarked, he for the first time reflected upon his Jewish identity. Consciously or not, Spielberg's saga of conman Frank W. Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) addresses the rest of his own career, when he hid his personal identity behind escapist entertainments - that is, when he "passed" undefined as Jewish. As in Woody Allen's Zelig (1983), the Jew's temptation to disappear behind a false identity broadens to any ethnic identity's hunger for assimilation or Everyschnook's fear of being different in a culture that worships the uniform (Pan Am and up).
The only Jewish characters in the film are the absent Mrs. Roberta Glass, the French teacher, and her victimized substitute, whom Frank turns away. As Frank replaces the Jewish element, Jewishness is consigned to the implicit. For example, when people are eager to be duped, Frank responds "Even better," a phrase more familiar as the Yiddish, "Noch besser." His father's Rotary Club story, which Frank recycles as a Lutheran grace, is a Jewish parable of survival. Two mice are stuck in a bucket of cream. One sinks and drowns, the other struggles until he turns the cream to butter and walks away. Frank Sr. (Christopher Walken) drowns and Frank Jr. struggles eventually to recover his integrity and a more honest success than that predicated on his imposture, or "passing."
Frank's "professions" reflect especially Jewish fantasies. As a French teacher he deploys the power of the word, specifically his mother's language (mamma loshen), against the bullying arch-Gentile "Brad." Frank proposes to Brenda Strong (Amy Adams) as the perfect Jewish catch - both a lawyer and a doctor - and a Lutheran to boot. Noch besser. His most un-Jewish profession, Pan Am pilot, is the wildest Jewish fantasy, especially when he "wears" a uniform of shicksas, eight wannabe stewardi, to evade the dragnet at the airport.
Frank connects to his FBI pursuer, Carl Hanratty (Tom Hanks), through a series of Christmas Eve conversations. Now, you don't have to be Jewish to feel alienated on Christmas Eve - but it helps. Hanratty exults after the first phone call, "You have nobody else to call!" On other Christmas Eves, Hanratty arrests him in France and visits him in prison, discovering his potential as an FBI adviser. The latter begins his conversion from criminal to citizen, Outsider to Insider, fake to self. The film's Christmas release heightened these scenes' emotional import.
Frank's conversion from "paperhanger" (forger) to FBI fraud specialist is a kind of bar mitzvah. The boychick (which in the effeminate DiCaprio's case goes beyond Yiddish) becomes a man. By the time he turned 19, Frank had successfully impersonated a Pan Am pilot, a medical paediatrician, and a lawyer, and cashed almost four million dollars in bogus checks. Spielberg omits the real Frank's stint as Sociology professor (too easy?). The closing titles inform us that Frank has been married for 26 years and lives quietly (i.e., legally) in the Midwest with his wife and three sons.
The film's driving motive is the hero's need to recover his lost family, a Jewish concern even outside the Holocaust genre. Where the real Frank chose to live with his father (and dedicates his autobiography to him), Spielberg's Frank runs away from home rather than choose one parent's custody. His campaign is to recover not just the Cadillac, jewels, big house, and furs ("Everything they took from you, I'm going to get it all back"), but the broken family.
There is a Jewish inflection in the disillusioned American Dreamer, Frank Sr. As a soldier in liberated France, he resolved not to leave without the "blonde angel" who kicked off the community show. Though he marries that dream shicksa, Paula (Nathalie Baye), he loses her to his Rotary Club president/friend Jack Barnes (James Brolin). Frank Sr. smiles at his son's first impersonation and delights in his son's exotic destinations but he seems increasingly bitter at his success. When he orders a toast for his son's gift Cadillac, Walken projects an astonishing mix of anger and frustration over his pride. "The rest of us really are suckers," the failed con whispers to his flashy son. When Frank seeks his father's control, he replies: "You can't stop." The son is living out his father's failed dream of thwarting the government. The father is deluded that his son has the FBI "running for the hills." In prison, Frank Jr. is reduced to his father's last job, delivering the mail.
As in the Jewish matriarchy, the mother is the family's emotional centre. Frank's criminal career begins and ends around his mother. He uses her French to pull off his first con, he is arrested in her home town, Montrichard, France, where he is printing his forged checks, and after escaping through the airplane toilet (a perverse parody of rebirth), he is re-captured outside his mother's new family home. The alienated son stands in the snow, peering in at his mother, who poses as archly as in a Hallmark Christmas card, when the police encircle him behind. Despite their ethnic difference, Frank's parents stand in for the Jewish immigrant family whose son strives to amend their failure and to fit in where they couldn't.
Frank wants the Strong family to replace his lost one. He watches the Strongs do the dishes swaying together to "Embraceable You," to which his parents danced more suavely just before they split. He is as immediately drawn to the awkward braced Brenda as his father was to Paula's beauty, because he identifies with the victimized. He impersonates a doctor after he sees her abused by one. He thinks of marriage to re-unite herfamily, for Brenda was banished when her father's golf buddy's seduction required she abort. The allure of the Strong family harmony is false.
Roger Strong (Martin Sheen) is so eager to marry off his plain daughter he doesn't absorb Frank's confession: "I'm not a doctor, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an airline pilot. I'm nothing, really, just a kid who's in love with your daughter." By supporting Frank's pretence at being a lawyer, Strong proves Frank Sr.'s point that the NY Yankees always win because the other teams are awestruck by their pinstripe suits. Though Frank Sr. failed to impress the bank manager, Frank Jr. mobilizes the power of the uniform, whether the Pan Am pilot's suit, the doctor's frock (which trumps the candy-striper's pinstripes), or the veil of stewardi. As the classic Jewish poseur Groucho enacted, the suit makes the man (bootblack moustache optional).
Frank's inherited faith in the Image explains his compulsion to peel the labels off bottles, another form of appropriating a popular image. The labels represent brand names, Images, cultivations of identity, another form of the Yankees' pin-stripe suits and the Pan Am uniform that hides Frank from the bank manager who earlier saw right through him. Frank Sr. is a Willy Loman, destroyed by the myths of American entrepreneurship. He gives Frank his first check book so "You're in their little club." But the Rotary Club fraternity that gives him an evening's honour seduces away his wife and sends his son after hollow images of success. When Frank Jr. catches Paula with her lover, Barnes admits he'd be "in deep trouble" if he lost his President's pin. The logo makes the man but not a mentsch.
In the film's superb opening titles, the cartoon figures summarize the plot, ending with the FBI agent pursuing the hero across the surface of the globe. The lettering suggests two other themes. The high style embodies both Franks' ambitions. Second, they reach up as elastic aspiration or plunge down to fathom the depths. Confirming the layered realities, the film opens on the resurrected TV set of To Tell the Truth, where Kitty Carlisle Hart and MC Joe Garagiola confront two fake Frank Abagnale Jrs., and the "real" one, our Leonardo. So, too, Frank models himself after James Bond (circa Goldfinger), takes an early nomme de guerre from The Flash comic books, and learns medicine and law from TV. As 1920s Hollywood worked for immigrant America, popular culture teaches the outsider how to fit himself in.
Frank's primary influence is the moral choice provided by various father figures. Frank grows from his father through two surrogates. Roger Strong is a conventionally "successful" version of Frank Sr., appearing respectable. Their moral superior is Hanratty, who lost his daughter, Grace, through divorce. Though fallen from that grace, he succeeds as a father when he properly replaces Frank's. In their one scene together, Frank Sr. tells Hanratty: "You're not a father, are you? . . . If you were, you'd know I'd never give up my son." But whereas Frank Sr. abandoned his son to false idols, Hanratty does not give up on Frank. Where Frank Sr. taught him strategies of deception (fooling himself as much as others), Hanratty teaches him diligence (in his Javertian pursuit) and honesty. "I wouldn't lie to you," he tells Frank, claiming to have a French police force waiting outside his unarmed arrest. When Hanratty enters the printing shop alone, then leads Frank out to the empty square, we suspect Hanratty did lie. But the gendarmes appear en masse; Hanratty is honest. True, he withholds news of Frank Sr.'s death and he claims a four-year-old daughter, her age when his marriage ended. "Sometimes it's easier living a lie," Hanratty admits to the pro. In Frank's conversion, which is not just to legality but to an honest presentation of his self, Hanratty achieves the paternal success his broken marriage cost him. By preventing Frank's marriage to Brenda Strong, Hanratty saves him from a second damaging father, another false life.
Catch Me If You Can is advertised as "The true story of a real fake." But as Frank Abagnale Jr. evades his rootlessness, alienation, and insecurity by professing false professions and by cultivating hollow images of success, he relives the immigrant Jew's attempt to "pass," to hide behind a mainstream respectability. The hero matures by outgrowing the false allure of conformism and WASP respectability.

Get Out

The pre-title scene encapsulates the film. An African-American man is puzzled by the “crazy” layout of the fancy suburb. An expensive white sports car trails him. With classical music on its radio it stops. The driver overpowers and abducts him. “Run rabbit run” now takes over the sound track, supporting the advice of the title: Get Out. This polished, witty horror film is a parable for post-Obama American racism. Not in redneck land, note, but among white liberals.
The central couple is the liberal dream. The young white beauty Rose Armitage brings her handsome black beau Chris to meet her wealthy intelligent parents. Mom Missy is a psychiatrist, dad Dean a neurosurgeon so -- despite Rose’s assurance -- we know they are going to mess with his head. Chris feared his unannounced blackness might mess with theirs. 
     Missy hypnotizes him with the tinkle of her delicate tea-cup, ostensibly to stop his smoking. Gentility disarms. Dean starts to transplant Chris's brain into the skull of a blind art dealer. That mad science exposes the liberal dream as a delusion.  Rose's wacko brother Jeremy — a replay of Annie Hall’s Duane — was the abductor in the opening scene. His specialty is the head-lock, a brutish partner to his parents' head-work. 
That revelation is set up by the family’s arch friends and servants.  All but one of the friends are liberal whites who transparently strain to seem to accept the black guy. The golfer knows Tiger. A portly gent evokes Colonel (finger-lickin good) Sanders. One old wreck’s wife feels Chris’s body hungrily. Their "acceptance" is vulpine.
The one exception is the black Brooklyn jazz musician who was earlier abducted, to be made a much older white woman’s sex slave. He responds to Chris's fist bump with a handshake. No more bro, he. The Armitages’ maid and groundskeeper have already been reduced to smiling subservience, just like on the old plantation. The new Northerners are on a Tara of their own. All the blacks have been drained of their difference, their character, reduced to functions. Worse, they're content to stay that way and object violently to Chris's intrusion into their "peace."
As Dean repeats, he would have voted for Obama a third time had the law allowed. Best pres of his lifetime. But this cheery liberalism is a deception, a lure to enslave another generation of suppressed and exploited blacks. Turns out Rose is a serial seducer for this collective. Before Chris is done with, she’s already on-line trolling for a black NBA prospect. The community uses Rose's sexuality and liberal pretence to attract both genders. She makes the blacks' legendary prowess their vulnerability.  
The African American community is tricked by its impression of progress not to band together. Chris’s security guard friend (Rod!) is sufficiently paranoid (aka realistic) immediately to suspect the sexual enslavement plot -- at first a joke, then harrowingly real. But the three black cops who hear him out erupt into laughter. They’ve come a long way, baby, so they’re not about to believe the ancient prejudice persists. 
      Spoiler alert: It does. In spades. So to speak. As the election campaign and first month of Trump’s supposed presidency confirm. It turns out Obama's election did not signify a post-racist but a neo-racist America. That's this film's point.
The film is written and directed by the COMEDIAN Jordan Peele. Like the classic horror, it bodies forth our desperately suppressed fears. Horror and comedy are closely related, as Hitchcock often observed. The child laughs at our scary "Boo!” and we laugh at our adult nightmare films ever after, however nervously. This is an excellent film, both entertaining and chillingly prescient.
     The film’s last suspense is the flashing police car. We assume it’s the white cop whom Rose earlier cowed with her fake liberalism. Here she calls out to him for help, clearly prepared to hang the killings on Chris and to deny his story. But it’s Chris’s friend so all’s well. The police lights like the camera flashes earlier snap the deadened blacks back to life, from their trance back to reality, from passivity to aggressive survival. Despite its appearance of reform, America remains locked in its insane bigotry.   

Friday, February 24, 2017

Toni Erdmann

So what’s the point of the two most outrageous scenes in Toni Erdmann
In the first, Ines turns a tryst with Tim into her watching him masturbate onto a — green, she specifies — petit-four which she then eats. Finger-licking good. In the second, she decides at the last minute to answer the door naked and require all her friends and work colleagues to strip down if they want to stay for her Sunday birthday brunch. 
First, both her actions are outrageous. That means she’s adopting the manic absurdity of her father, Winfried, a compulsive practical joker who has donned looney wig and fake teeth to pass as her CEO’s life coach, “Toni Erdmann.” Within that liberation she’s stripping off false appearances. The service Ines is trying to sell the Bucharest international is explicitly deception, providing a false front for the company’s inhumane conduct in a merger. 
In the first outrageous scene, a romantic tryst is exposed as not having any romance at all. Ines’s Tim is a junior colleague, excluded from key meetings, an attractive callow young man whom she is sexually using — like a confection. By watching him masturbate she admits her detachment from him even in their normal intercourse. Instead of their usual pretence at “making love” she is literally using him as a delectable to appease her appetite. Her choice of green pastry may be a nod at her eco consciousness — or a reminder that he is that callow junior, green in judgment. 
The second episode has her stripping all the veneers of her corporate image including  the smart dress that is the social equivalent to her business uniform. The dress she is trying to change at the last minute is too tight to serve. Her father’s crazy intervention has revived her own spontaneous spirit — first seen when she responds to his insistence she sing. The too-tight dress reminds her that her professional career, responsibilities, efficiency, pretences, are all restricting her essential impulses and character. The team-building use of her birthday then tests her friends’ and colleagues’ willingness to take her on her own terms. Her nakedness also confronts them with the sexism clearly revealed in her boss and male clients.
So Winfried turns out in fact to be a life coach, if only hers. He is returning his daughter to the free spirit she has suppressed for corporate purposes. He’s reviving her individuality and enjoyment of life. He tries to affect the others he meets as well, like the impoverished worker whose side he takes against the corporate expansion with its murderous layoffs, the worker he tries to save from firing, the family gathering he spikes with song. 
Winfried’s very appearance in Ines' life cracks her efficiency and stability. The distraction puts her off her focus. When she catches her foot on the sofa bed she’s making up for him, the bruise swells up and later spatters her white blouse with blood, just before a presentation. It’s a defloration image, an emblem of her penetration and new consciousness. It sets up the two sexual scenes we’re considering. 
The idea of a two and half-hour German comedy may seem surprising. But the acerbic view of corporate character and strategies and the extremity of the father’s and daughter’s behaviour provide the Brechtian dynamic of social criticism and critical detachment (Verfremdunkseffekt). 
“Erdmann” has two other European forbears: Renoir’s Boudu, a vagrant who disrupts the family and life of the bourgeois bookseller who “saves” him from drowning, and the Czech Josef Hasek’s Good Soldier Schweik whose fumbling and possibly deliberate — or not — incompetence destroys the organizational structures and formalities around him.     
In setting German characters in a Rumanian situation director Ms Maren Ade may be reflecting on her nation’s outreach into the EU. Winfried evokes a German folk figure unleashed upon the international sophisticates — and firmly unabashed. This German will remain proudly Germanic — especially manic — in whatever cosmopolitan situation he finds himself. And he will violate every decorum to return his daughter to her freer potential as well. Significantly, once liberated from her Bucharest posting Ines doesn’t return to Germany but takes her show on the road to Singapore. 
     What will she be in Singapore? That country is even more rigid and constraining than Germany and a further flung outpost for German initiative than the European Union. Will she recover her brisk efficiency there, far enough away from her father, or will she explode its dehumanizing officiousness the way she did Bucharest's?  

Friday, February 17, 2017

The Salesman

In The Salesman the actors starring in an Iranian stage production of Death of a Salesman live parallel tragedies on and off stage. 
The first shot is of a rumpled marriage bed, the setting for intimacy and sexual drama. Those values adhere even when the situation is, as here, a theatre set. The narrative unwinds from a reported sexual scene, where the heroine is somehow violated by a stranger in her shower. 
Using an American classic would normally set off an immediate contrast between the Iranian and American cultures. The Arthur Miller play anatomizes the shallowness and materialism of American capitalism. It establishes a struggling low-born salesman — Willy Loman — in the function of the traditionally high-born tragic hero. America is satirized by its gaudy reduction to the set’s neon Casino and Bowling signs. 
But for this bohemian theatre company, the choice of a Miller play pays respect to the freedom that political theatre enjoys in America. Emad is delayed the night of his wife's assault when he has to stay to deal with the state censors who want to make three cuts in the script. As a literature teacher he’s again frustrated when the school rejects his three texts as inappropriate for his teenage boys class. In ominous anger he has the boxes tossed in the trash.
Despite that culture's puritanism the Iranian society is still riven with sexual temptation. Emad explains that the woman who objected to sitting beside him in the taxi had probably been discomfited, perhaps even molested, by another man on another shared taxi ride. The pictures Emad finds on a pupil’s cell phone are probably like the raunchy stuff on American boys’ phones. At the other extreme the pathetic old man is tempted to sin by the sight of the showering Rana.
That schoolboy’s not having a father joints a pattern of missing or questioned manhood. The supporting actress has a little son but is separated from her husband. The boy’s obtrusive glasses suggest a preternatural vision, lending weight to his line: “If my father phones say I’m not in. I like Mommy a lot more.”  The boy lives his mother’s life completely. He not only attends her rehearsals but joins the curtain call onstage. They also perform who abide in the wings.
The central issue is how Emad and Rana deal with her violation. If Willy Loman’s downfall is his seduction by the American myth of popularity, Emad’s is for the Iranian myth of male honour. He will not stay in the wings.
Because the man is held dishonoured by his wife’s shame Rana is perhaps more traumatized by the old man’s intrusion than an American might be. Not till the end do we realize that she was not raped; she only injured herself by falling through the glass shower door. To avoid further shame Rana determines not to go to the police. She remains traumatized by the experience, too ashamed to return to her professional activity of being watched onstage by men. The supporting actor's upset at a joke reminds us of the culture's problems with sexuality. 
With his honour pre-eminently at stake, Emad resolves upon revenge. He tracks down and traps the villain. When Rana sees him, she tries to prevent Emad’s plan to shame him before his wife of 35 years, his daughter and her fiancé. “If you tell them then it is over between us.” 
Emad seems to accept her decision. As we see in his classroom scenes he is a largely decent man but capable of cruel bullying.  When he sees the old man and his family he relents and seems ready to let him leave. But he has another score to settle. He gives him back the money he left behind, then slaps him. That last action pushes the weak old man over the edge. With his death, Rana’s love for Emad is finished too. His insensitivity to her trauma was bad enough — It’s a guy thing — but  his insistence upon revenge, a fatal excess, is to her unforgivable. 
Like Rana’s shame, Emad’s revenge is based on the Muslim principle that a woman serves her man’s honour. After her initial trauma Emad seems to feel more violated than his wife. After she labours over a special dinner Emad refuses to eat it because it was bought with the intruder’s money. 
At the heart of Emad’s characterization is his early exchange with a student over a Kafkaesque story: “How does a man turn into a cow?” “Very gradually.” Determined not to be a cow, a wus, Emad plunges bullheaded toward a revenge that costs a man’s life and Emad his marriage and his peace of mind. Against the current of both Iranian and American culture, this film emphasizes the woman’s merit as a civilizing, humanizing force. 
      The first scene posits the patriarchal Iran on shaky foundations. A tenement is urgently vacated because it's in danger of collapsing. The first visible damage is cracked window panes, anticipating the shower glass shattering later. As Willy Loman is a failed traveling salesman, the central couple is uprooted to a new and suspect home.
The first Miller scene we see is where his son Biff catches Willy in a hotel room with a local floozy. That costs Willy his son’s respect forever. Emad’s vengeful plan is to similarly expose the old man before his family. It’s as If Emad took his strategy from the play instead of from his wife’s better sense. Conversely, in at least two scenes the actor's personal emotions erupt into the performance of the play. 
The omission of Death from the film’s title points to another key difference. We see Emad as Willy, dead, in his coffin, while wife Linda grieves at the paradox that she has just paid off their mortgage: “We're free!” 
     But the film ends on Emad staring stolidly, vacantly, as his makeup is peeled off. The character is dead -- for now -- but the actor is still alive. But his marriage is dead and cannot be revived. That leaves Emad no longer quite alive. He’s an image of death in life, literally alive but emotionally dead. His revenge killed him along with his enemy. In Death of a Salesman we see the themes and events through to Willy’s death. In The Salesman the death is omitted because at the most superficial level the hero remains — however emptily — alive.

Thursday, February 16, 2017

The Comedian

The philosophic heart of The Comedian may well be the scene in which the aging comedian sweeps the old folks home off into an exhilarating version of the classical ballad, “Making Poopee.” 
The inflection changes a decorous celebration into a free-form vulgarity. Like  Jackie Burke’s filthy wit, the film celebrates the mischievous energy of sexual and scatalogical incorrectness. It also fits the situation where the very old are regressing into infantilism. Aren’t we all. 
Jackie was pulled into the performance against his wishes by his girl-friend’s antagonistic father, Max, who had hoped thus to humiliate him. He seethes, rankled, when Jackie’s act not only wins over the house but becomes an internet sensation. 
Jackie’s speech at his niece’s wedding begins with his famous indecorum, then settles into a sentimentality that befits the celebration. That harmony is broken by his sister-in-law who lets her visceral hatred for her husband’s brother turn her into a shrieking harridan. Which, as it happens, Jackie’s humorous opening predicted. 
That pattern defines the movie. It starts with the socially offensive extreme of insult humour, whether sexual or scatalogical, but then turns into a comforting return to feelings. The film normalizes the comedy’s rebellion against convention but returns to value community and sentiments. 
Fortunately Jackie doesn’t end up with the lovely Harmony. He’s too raucous and uncompromising to live in or with any harmony. He wouldn’t fit into her world, though her handsome classy hubby at their kid’s recital is laughing at their daughter’s inheritance of Jackie’s profane wit. Besides, Jackie is too like Harmony’s father — a point confirmed by the casting of those two familiar sidekicks, DeNiro and Keitel as the two studs jousting over the one woman. Harmony manages her “father issue” by a more appropriate marriage. 
For the comedians here nothing can shake them out of their routine, their acerbic reflexes. When a 90-year-old Friars honouree dies at the head table the MC tells Jackie “You killed.” Jackie’s immediate grief: “I didn’t get to my best material.”  
  The film reflects upon contemporary American culture in two ways. First, its humour is almost exclusively angry and profane. It reflects a society which has abandoned any sense of decorum, manners, restraints. And yet the comedians’ success is based on our memory of those restraints, their continuing hold, and the pleasure the comedy gives us in releasing us from them. 
  Well-known Italians DeNiro and DeVito play Jewish brothers in classically Jewish professions: stand-up comedy and the deli. American comedy was characterized and propelled by the Jewish sense of an outsider viewing the orderly world that excluded him and bringing a sharp, deflating perspective to it. Billy Crystal’s cameo, in which he sends Jackie off with “Schmuck,” effectively gives the cross-cultural casting his blessing. By casting Italians as Jewish comics director Taylor Hackford defines the comedy and its metaphoric resonance as American not just Jewish.  
     Second, the film’s legitimizing of indecorous profanity and rage goes beyond the business of comedy to reflect upon contemporary America in general. The comedians’ tone and content express a society that is seething in anger, frustration, helplessness. The election passed this mood from Trump’s supporters to his opponents. But it still operates, full blast. Jackie’s venture into the RAW-TV network evokes the sadistic sensationalism of the “reality” TV shows that spawned the present so-called president.  

Sunday, February 12, 2017

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki

Spoiler alert: Olli Maki’s happiest day was the night in 1962 when American boxer Davey Moore beat the hell out of him for the featherweight world title in Helsinki. Olli held his own in the first round but couldn’t make it through the second. 
Why the happiest? That defeat enabled the skilled, disciplined but very modest Finnish boxer to withdraw from the high-powered and highly-financed arena of world engagement and settle into the richer rewards of a simple life with his sweetie Raija. 
That’s all Olli ever wanted. He was fine with being European champ, but he’s pushed into the world title match and burdened with the onus of Representing Finland by his windy manager Elis. 
Elis hates Olli’s modesty and simplicity. His ego demands Olli give him glory. His financial straits require he court rich backers and land a big time purse. 
Elis’s marginalizing of Raija drives her back to their “backwoods” (Elis’s term) hometown, to Olli’s frustration and loss of focus. Elis keeps Raija out of the photos and documentary film in order to sell a poster of Olli posing with the stiff and much taller (i.e., incongruously mismatched) Miss Finland. 
The film is as much about Finland as about its historic boxing star. Olli is relieved to walk out of the formal post-fight banquet, preferring to skip stones with his Raija.  Finland can similarly be satisfied with its own cultural and economic life, participating in Europe, but not feeling the need to take on the empty glitz of America and the world arena. 
For such unnecessary aspiration is hubris, which In the fight was Olli’s error: “I couldn’t see him coming at me. I think I held my chin too high.”
In its own modesty the film is shot in black and white, like the documentary we see being filmed, everything low-key and human. Its charm is simplicity and the poignant. Like the dedication on the couple’s wedding rings: just the names and date. Like their engagement, outside the bus that takes Olli away, the couple standing apart and not even touching after her acceptance. It’s even playful, as Raija’s acceptance seems conditional upon him winning the fight — which we know is out of character for both.
Finally, a reminder why you should always read the full credits at the end. 
     In the last scene the young lovers pass an elderly couple holding hands. “Do you think we’ll be like that?” Raija asks. “Old?” “No, happy.” “Of course we will.” The last credit identifies that elderly couple — whose faces we don’t see — as the real Olli and Raija Maki. Their presence confirms this reading of Olli’s happiest day. 

Friday, February 10, 2017

Frantz

The eponymous character is a cultured, pacifist, loving German young man whose doctor father urged him to fight for the fatherland. He gets the title because his spirit haunts the film — as the heroine Anna’s lost love, as the Hofmeisters’ lost son and as the kindred spirit his killer, the French solider Adrien, comes to love through his family and their memories. 
Himself another cultured, pacifist, loving young man, Adrien seeks out Frantz’s grave and family to seek forgiveness for having killed him, albeit in the trenches. As he is so much like Frantz he wins over Anna and Frantz’s parents and in turn becomes properly enamoured with her. Though Frantz and Adrien only met in that fatal trench, the narrative posits them as potentially dear friends, perhaps even lovers. That potential was dashed by the war.
Adrien’s relationship with Anna is based on his lie: that he was Frantz’s dear friend, not his killer. When he tells Anna that truth she hides it from Frantz’s parents, to spare them further pain and disillusionment. They cling to the illusion he will replace their son by marrying Anna and reviving Frantz’ violin. To preserve their illusion Anna stays in Paris and reports living with Adrien. 
In a sane world Frantz and Adrien would have lived the lie to which Adrien retreated: they would have met in Paris and become fast friends. They might've competed for Anna on an equal footing. 
But not in this world. As Frantz’s father reminds his war-mongering compatriots, fathers send their sons off to war. Though the nations blame each other, it’s the fathers’ responsibility when the lads are killed. 
The film’s most obvious theme is how war needlessly fractures the brotherhood of man. After the war the Germans still hate the French, the victorious French the Germans. The hatred renews itself. Set in 1919, the entire drama of renewal and loss plays out under our knowledge that WW II lies ahead. The German discontent and French complacency will shortly reignite with even more catastrophic consequences. If Frantz shadows the scene from the past, the next war looms in the future.
In addition to war, the film is about the equally difficult issues of how to live a full and honourable life. In peace as in war we’re challenged to balance truthfulness with the empathetic lie. 
Thus Anna tells Adrien she has revealed his lie and guilt to the Hofmeisters. But she hasn’t, preferring to save them the renewed pain and another disillusionment. To the end she sustains their illusion that she is living a full life in Paris with Adrien, not wasting away in grief for their Frantz. Where Adrien’s lie served himself, hers serves them.
The last scene promises a happy ending, her lie coming true, when she meets  another version of Adrien, a fragile lookalike, in the Louvre. As young men on either side are interchangeable as cannon fodder in the war, young men can replace each other in civilian life when their mothers send them off to marriage. Tragically, Adrien doesn’t resist his mother’s assignment of Fanny, as Frantz couldn’t resist his father’s dispatch to war. 
But with the spirit of life a heart can survive death and loss. A new love can replace a lost. Until the next war, of course, which could well make her a widow, him a casualty.
But that may be the film’s most compelling theme: the importance of carrying on with hope and life. Hofmeister means master of hope. Through their mutual attraction Anna and Adrien snap each other out of their emotional paralysis, whether from guilt or grief. They bring each other to life. But as any war story inevitably requires compromise here they can’t have each other. They have to settle for other mates. 
From Frantz's letter on to the visits to the Louvre, the film returns to the Manet painting, The Suicide. A pallid thin man flings back across the bed dead, evoking both Frantz and Adrien — and Anna, who tried to drown herself after losing her illusion of Adrien too. In Manet’s image off a despairing passionate death Anna finds encouragement to live.
One of the film’s strengths is its detailed realization of the period, not just in setting and costume but in conversation, tone, values and understanding. Especially in the black and white sequences, the film feels like a document of the 1920s, the period between the great, the terrible, wars. 
     The periodic suffusions of colour serve two functions: they provide an emotional heightening to those particular scenes and they remind us that the film is as much about today as about its historical setting. Perhaps today the bloody fractures involve different nations, and different cultures at war within any of our present nations. But the dashing of hopes and fidelities continues.

Maudie

An Irish director casts a British woman and an American star in the — thus — quintessentially Canadian film about a national treasure, Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis. 
As a woman and as an artist Maud is a heroically resilient figure. She survives life with a brutish husband, accepting a succession of indignities, some outrageous. Gradually she establishes her own rights, identity and even name. Though crippled with arthritis, Maud becomes a famous and esteemed artist. (Now you can add “expensive” — those little five-dollar painted boards go for $9,000 at the gallery.) 
As her craft advances, her domestic status improves. Husband Everett gradually assumes the Womans Work — sweeping, peeling, darning — so she can earn money with her art. 
Maud’s art is gloriously naive. It springs from her wistful imagination more than from her actual environs. It’s the triumph of spirit over perception. If it’s representational it represents the figures teeming in her imagination not those actually outside and around. 
In rough parallel, she stays with vile Everett because she sees more in him, a softer self, than not only we see but that he himself doesn’t sense. She dies knowing he loved her — despite his never having said anything like that, or shown it, or indeed ever acknowledging it even to himself. 
But the feeling does out, even if it’s in the subtle shift from her walking behind him on the horizon line to him pushing her in his wheelbarrow. Love takes many forms. As does art. And marriage.
Perhaps Everett’s most loving act is taking her to espy her daughter, whom Maud’s family took away and sold, telling her the baby had been deformed and died. 
The film’s dominant palette is the grey gloom of cramped unlit interiors and a hard scrabble, penurious life. The fish seller makes so little that five cents for a painted card becomes a windfall. 
     The point about that unrelieved darkness is Maud’s response to it: flowers and animals painted in bright, unmodulated colours, a brilliance that her crippled hand uses to express her indomitable, spirited soul. Because she has spent her life in the shadows — from the shame of a humiliating pregnancy and helplessness to Everett’s abused cleaner — she finds in art the joy and brightness of life. It proves contagious.  

Like Crazy

The original Italian title translates as The Crazy One, which initiates the first question: to which of the two runaway psychiatric institute inmates does the title refer? Is it the yapping name-dropping aristocratic blonde beauty Beatrice or the vulnerable punk with a past Donatella?
As is common in the Cuckoo’s Nest genre, the narrative reverses our expectations when we find characters outside the institution are at least as loony as those within. Here Beatrice’s ex-husband lawyer and Donatella’s mother match the heroines in eccentricity and perversity. At first reading the film sensibly treats the illnesses of depression and manic exhilaration with empathy. On that theme alone the film stands solid and humane.
But it also operates on two broader levels. One is the celebration of a free individualism against restrictive conventions of behaviour. 
In their separate worlds both heroines violate what’s expected of them. Beatrice insists on living large and free, snooping through forbidden files, playing doctor, luxuriating in her ex-husband’s verboten estate, deluding herself that her ruinous pimp loves her. Donatella only wants to keep her baby son, or to have his other-familied father see him, or to give the baby a day of adventure outside The Home. Both women are charged with madness for their emotional needs. Their freedom threatens others. 
When Donatella meets her little son on the beach she is finally allowed to express herself. The boy’s adoptive parents check their fears and let her frolic with him for a while. Their liberalism is quickly denoted by their second adoptive child, a little black girl. When Donatella and her son swim underwater together she can wash away their earlier submersion. Then in despair she tried to drown them together. With this new contentment Donatella on her own returns to the home to be cured. 
An institution is a dramatic setting for this theme. Its values are control, suppression of the wild and spontaneous, conformity. The home here is rather easy, given the cinematic tradition. There’s no Nurse Ratchit and the physical restraint and electroshock are in outside institutions, not here. 
Indeed the happy ending has both women return for treatment instead of being dispatched to harsher alternatives. In the end, untrammelled individualism proves destructive. Social order requires restraint, which sometimes needs to be initiated from without if it’s not working within. 
      In the Italian context the film also plays that tension out on the political level. Italians constantly face the electoral choice between liberty and repression, especially in the context of its Fascist past. The relatively gentle institution here represents a government of order that stops short of that historic extreme, but it is still a system of restraint. In this respect the film addresses the political tension beyond Italy, across Europe and into America. Broadly, today the repressive Right promotes the conformism of nationalism and white superiority, driving the modern experiment of liberalism to retreat.  

Monday, February 6, 2017

The Commune

The film is set in 1970s Denmark, when idealists launched communes as a love-loving, open counterweight to the conflicts of and over the Vietnam war. 
Today the film reflects upon the challenge that human emotions and relationships bring to any theory of social planning. Though set in the 70s it’s clearly about the post-commune age of today as well. However strong the spirit or idea, the flesh, the human reality, may well prove too weak to sustain it. Write in your own contemporary context. 
The commune spirit is personified by Anna. She has the idea of turning her husband Erik’s inherited family estate into a commune so they and their teenage daughter Freja can afford to live there. 
Erik is an architect, a builder, though his professional career still requires him to teach. Anna is a well-known TV news presenter, an observer not a maker of news or structures. In inviting family friend Ole to join she launches the commune over her husband’s concerns. Anna most visibly enjoys the spirited life in the commune. The observer’s venture into building seems at first to work. 
But despite all that new idealism, the old male privilege persists. Erik may extravagantly deny being any “boss” and he signs over his ownership of the estate to the commune. But in the crunch he asserts his authority to admit his new mistress to the commune, at whatever pain to Anna. In her idealism Anna suggested his Emma move in, but her emotion at her loss of Erik and her sense of her own fading beside her young successor defeat her resolve. The modern sophisticated commune proves essentially tribal when its founder Anna has to move out to allow Erik’s peaceful life with Emma. 
The male is so privileged that even the little boy with the heart condition uses his weakness (“I’m going to die before I’m nine”) to hustle women. Including Emma, at first sight: “You want to shag?” His heart finally gives out when his more practical romantic chance, Freja, brings her boyfriend to dinner.  
In her New Age womanhood Anna tries to accept her husband’s affair with the pretty third-year (i.e., really young) student. She even treats her rival warmly. But her valiant effort can’t stand up to her emotional needs. She crumbles on air, then shatters the dinner table peace when she declares her own emotional needs. Erik’s more violent emotional eruptions are excused but not Anna’s. The temperamental male here even gets to faint! Anna is fired for her first freeze. 
Fired, humiliated, shattered, she luckily has her daughter’s trust and confidence — which empowers her to move out of her idealized construction and take on the real world on her own. How she will fare we don’t know, because the film opts for the happy ending of the commune, carrying on without her. 
But there’s still another scene. Daughter Freja leaves the family to go to her boyfriend. He’s older but rather vacuous in looks, character, wit, manner. But he accepted her sexual initiative. In the last scene she finds him lying stoned at a party so she snuggles up. He offers her headphones to join his isolated experience and doesn’t hear her “I love you.” Like her mother, Freja constructs an idealized, romanticized connection and invests herself in it, to her own peril and eventual cost. 
Like Freja later, Emma took the sexual initiative with her professor with the delusion she’s empowered by submitting to the supposedly superior male. She comes to his office disturbed at his humiliation of her male student friend. She even puts up with the prof’s arrogant dismissal of her own project proposal. She needs to plumb her own emotional experience, the up-tight unproven architect insists. Claiming to detect a more sensitive inner guy, she invites his kiss. Mona's "generous with my body" confirms the theme of women pretending to freedom by submitting to male needs.
     The 1970s setting allows for another ironic presence: the swarthy Allon, a broke, jobless, helpless loner, whose testiness at the admission interview provokes Erik’s anger. By crying, Allon converts the commune’s rejection to admission, even though he can’t pay his share and seems incapable of making any significant contribution — until he magically produces the collective’s desired dishwasher! No contemporary representation of a European society could omit the refugee factor. Allon is a vulnerable outsider, anticipating the Muslim refugee issue we recognize today in fuller form. 

Death in Sarajevo

The film is based on French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy’s play, Hotel Europe. In the film, a production of that Levy play is briefly seen on a TV screen. It’s one of the events commemorating the anniversary of the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand which launched WW I, which launched the century of bloody international warfare, which continues where we are today. 
As the film cites its origin — the play — it establishes the theme of the present containing the past, our inability to start completely afresh but instead reviving past responses, past failures. 
Similarly, the radical interviewed on TV here, who gets killed at the end, bears the name of Ferdinand’s assassin. While he shares some of his namesake’s fervour and even politics, his murder is completely unjustified. He’s killed by a coked-up security guard who was irritated by his wife’s insistence on buying a new sofa they can’t afford. Thus a small human quirk can inflect a large current in human history. 
The film’s key phrase is “hysterical dualism” — the radical’s observation that every event in the Bosnia-Serbia history has two radically opposed versions. In one the assassin heroically killed an occupier; in the other a terrorist ended peace. 
So too Hotel Europe. The big event’s host is facing a workers’ strike because they haven’t been paid for two months. One strike leader is beaten up and his successor, a woman who spent 30 years in the laundry, is abducted The respectable management runs a crooked gambling game in the basement. So too the larger Europe for which that hotel is a microcosm. 
In “hysterical dualism” history has been replaced by hysteria. Madness pervades. The irrational has swept into the vacuum created by the abandonment of reason, principle, morality. Nationalism supplants humanity. If the film finds in its setting hotel a representation of the violent and abusive politics of contemporary Europe, North America can’t feel complacent. Not since Trump’s election. 
The film’s most respectable characters are the elegant hotel employee Lamija and the French dignitary who retires to his room to rehearse his speech. We don’t know if he’s a politician or an actor — for that seems no longer a pertinent distinction. He does have a strong political awareness and articulateness, however, but it’s isolated, restricted to his shuttered room, cut off from the human turmoil in the hotel beyond. 
  Lamija is the manager’s devoted, efficient worker, until he fires her to punish her mother’s political engagement. When she returns to beg him to help find her he molests her. Her cries of “Don't, please don't” are heard by her admiring co-worker outside the door, an earnest suitor whose finances leave him living with his parents. Here he has a chance to save his lady fair but he retreats. The poor can’t afford to be noble — except that Lamija’s mother tries. If the governors feel no responsibility to their workers, the workers themselves have abandoned each other out of selfish concern. Practical, but selfish. 
     This action unfurls in a carefully graduated theatre. There is the idea of a Bosnian anniversary of the assassination, introduced by a TV interview, i.e., an event already mediated by a medium. Then there are those public events, including a session of international political figures, the Levy play production and the Frenchman’s speech. Then there is the hotel which will house the dignitaries but with a false appearance of stability and security. Then there is the workers’ suffering and revolt, churning away in the hotel’s labyrinthine wings, offstage. And at the most human level there are the stories of individual needs, desires, passions and failures, the dramas unseen in the political calculations but often key determinants of the history that sweeps over and away human lives. 

Sunday, February 5, 2017

Personal Shopper

So what’s the significance of a “personal shopper” discovering she has the medium’s power to communicate with the world of spirits?
That’s the point when Maureen Cartwright starts sensing ghostly spirits. The first is when she checks her dead twin brother Lewis’s house for his friends who want to buy it. They want assurance that if there are spirits they are friendly not malevolent.  
She feels another alien presence when she finds her tycoon boss savagely slaughtered, another when her sister-in-law’s new man assures her of his friend, her brother, Lewis’s understanding. Lewis sensed she shared his power, as they shared the same mortal heart defect. 
     Visiting her boyfriend in Dubai Maureen encounters another, whose film-ending message is yes, the power is within her.
In a parody of these disembodied voices and influences, her boss’s rejected lover hustles and hassles Maureen with anonymous and unsettling text messages. To him she admits her attraction to and fear of the forbidden. Talking to the dead ranks in there, along with any Frankensteinian presumption to transcend the proper borders of mortal existence. 
There’s a continuum from the characters’ conversations in person, through Skype and cell phone calls, emails, and those mysterious unsettling texts, and on out into the messages from the dead. Her boyfriend’s job is the cognate cyber security. He sets up internet security protocols for the Dubai government. 
  The point of the title and the heroine’s dissatisfying and empty job is that she outgrows it. She abandons the search through the trivial material world and extends herself into the spiritualist. She accepts the challenge and distinction of the woman painter whose spiritualism inspired her abstract paintings before the genre was established.  
     The personal shopper is the boss’s agent or intermediary, searching out and buying/borrowing the clothes and accessories the star needs to flaunt but hasn't the time or inclination to find for herself. In the course of this ghost story Maureen stops finding for her boss and finds herself. From mediating with fashonistas and jewellers she turns to mediating between our material world and the transcending world beyond it. That’s where she discovers her fullest potential as a person. 

After Love

The French title — L’economie du couple — catches the social relevance of the film better than the English version, which narrows to the couple’s emotional state.
A divorcing couple is forced by finances to live together. This may be the most harrowing treatment of a crumbling marriage since Bergman’s TV series and film, Scenes from a Marriage. The film opens in the heat of the couple’s hatred. We fill in the background as the drama proceeds. It ends with the cold impersonal voice of a notary spelling out the terms of their final settlement. 
The incompatibility is apparent. Marie has a job and for years has been carrying Boris, who is a capable builder/renovator but lacks self-discipline. Marie’s mistake was to confuse desire with love. That’s what leads to their one-night stand here, which fails to resolve the couple’s tensions and antagonism. 
Now their anger prevents each from understanding the other’s position. The crux is economic: Boris can’t afford to move out and Marie won’t give him the half share of their apartment’s selling price he demands. 
The split ramifies beyond the family. Boris disrupts her dinner party with some mutual friends and bristles at a possible “suitor.” He manipulates her mother into hiring him for a repair job against Marie’s wishes. 
But the twin daughters become their principal battleground. Because Boris keeps forgetting to buy the one girl’s soccer boots, Marie finally buys them. When they’re “lost” at their first game, Boris buys a replacement. Boris resents Marie’s limits on his access to the girls, Marie the mishaps that occur in his care.
But there’s another issue: class. This is what gives the film a broader scope than marital emotions turned martial. Rugged Boris is working class; Marie was born wealthy and elegant. Her social and economic advantage persists to the end. Even after reluctantly giving him half their home’s selling price, she still will have the money from her father’s bequest, her childhood home that Boris has been hired to repair. 
That makes this psychological study of a splitting couple a reflection of a society — Belgium, France, Europe — that in this century remains as frozen and fragmented by a harsh class structure as it was two hundred years ago. The story of a breaking couple exposes a hatefully fractured social structure. That makes the English title ironic. There probably never was "love" in this relationship: only desire. When that faded the couple had nothing left to counteract their social and economic fissure.