Loveless

The opening and closing montages — barren skeletal trees in a grey frozen wasteland — set the film’s emotional tone. As you may (or not) infer from the title, this is a loveless family.

Zhenya felt no love from her still venomous mother. To escape her she married Boris, the man she didn’t love but who impregnated her. Zhenya still resents her 12-year-old son Alyosha and his father. Zhenya and Boris occupy the same apartment as they plan their divorce. Neither wants Alyosha, s troubled, predictably insecure boy, so they plan to send him to an orphanage. 

Zhenya and Boris are already deep in new affairs. They are reunited in rage and mutual recrimination when Alyosha disappears. 

His mystery is never solved. He remains only that streamer still fluttering in the dead tree to which he launched it. Like the boy, it’s a fragile wisp of life and colour once rejected, still haunting. 

Zhenya, ensconced in her luxurious new lover’s flat, may be trying to erase his memory as she stolidly runs on her out door treadmill, in her “Russia” sweats. Her sweaty desperation may be emotional, not physical. 

Boris has a new wife, another suffocating family life, another irritating infant son. He may indeed be fulfilling his new love’s prediction — that he’ll dismiss his second love and family as he did his first. 

  Both parents are jolted out of their complacency when they see the horrible remains of a young corpse that might have been their Alyosha but isn’t. It’s perhaps the only moment we can feel empathy for them. Till we see Zhenya’s response, to assault Boris.

       The film provides some humane — if not comic — relief. The central family’s loathsomeness is countered by some astonishing kindness and care. Alyosha’s young friend is an impressive kid, faithful but caring. His father shows more natural affection than either of Alyosha’s parents or his granny did. The loveless are not the film’s only family. 

The police are … The State. Brusque, officious, they are only as considerate as they can take the time and effort to be. But they do direct Zhenya to a genuinely impressive human community, the horde of volunteers who have trained themselves to seek, to recover and to care for whoever has disappeared. These volunteers embody the lost ideal of socialism, of human collaboration. Boris and Zhenya resist their example.

As in his Leviathan, director Andrey Zvyagintsev provides a scathing view of contemporary Russian life. If the volunteers are a proper, responsible human community, the other characters in the background are idle flirts, drunks and partyers with no accountability or commitment. A pretty young woman on a dinner date freely gives her phone number and name to an unseen jerk who asks for it. Between these ditzes and the selfish central family Russia has lost its humanity.
The TV background news amplifies this theme. Initially the news is about Russian political arguments and jockeying. But at the end it reports the horrors of the Ukrainian civilians suffering under Russian attack. The woman articulates an anger and sense of abandonment that little Alyosha’s silent scream could only suggest, 

Bombshell

The title cuts two ways.

The apparent subject is the Viennese beauty many declared the greatest beauty in Hollywood.That bombshell Hedy became a favourite both at the box office and fan magazines.  The film traces her fast stardom in Austria and her rise and fall in America, her succession of marriages and the astonishing genius she showed in inventing “frequency jumping.” That enabled the navy to radio-control its torpedoes and to send uninterruptible messages. It’s the source of our Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and all our remote connectivity. Hedy invented that between her film shooting schedules. 

The film itself is a bombshell dropped on the American film industry and military for failing to recognize, use and reward this extraordinary woman. Hollywood writers, directors, producers and Hedy’s husbands were enable to venture past her beautiful face to discover her remarkable mind and character. She was too beautiful for men to love. 

She was given roles and films beneath her capacity. When she ventured into producing, the industry closed her out. She was further failed by the drugs and cosmetic surgery she took to extend her career.  

Her radar invention has grown into a 30 billion-dollar industry today. For that she received — nothing! The navy denied employing her invention within her patent period (though they demonstrably did). She died acknowledged but not repaid. She was in need, but not repaid. 

To its own shame, the Navy disdained her invention at the time it was most needed, to repel the Nazi torpedoes. The beautiful woman could not possibly be an inventor, they insisted, so they sent her off to entertain the troops and sell war bonds. 
     Essentially this is the story (i) of a remarkably gifted woman’s success and (ii)of the stupid male systems that undervalued and misused her.    

Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool

When Gloria considers playing Juliet she is not just playing for her lover’s confirmation of her youthful beauty.  She still craves her mother’s approval, unsatisfied despite her huge past stardom. 

The two mothers may center this film. Peter’s working-class Liverpool mum Bella (Julie Walters) works the kitchen and has a fully maternal relationship with her three hearty sons. She dreads the 24-hour stopover in Manilla required for her to see her Asian-posted son for possibly the last time. A close family themselves, they can’t fathom Gloria’s desire not to inform hers of her fatal disease.  

When Gloria’s mother Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) brings her other daughter for dinner chez Gloria and Peter, there is none of that rough warmth. Jeanne’s pride in Gloria drowns in her own eagerness to recite Shakespeare, from Henry V.  Clearly feeling the undervalued child, Gloria’s sister seethes in bitter silence and then erupts in insult. Gloria should have played more Shakespeare, her mother avows, effectively disdaining her entire Hollywood career. 

Jeanne's British snobbery contrasts to Bella’s immediate and unconditional warmth. Indeed the most intimate bed scene here may be the one where Bella lies beside Gloria, drinking tea, embraces Gloria’s casting her as her mother in the last act of her life.   

Only when she sees the family division she has unwittingly cost does Gloria ask for her son to be called, for her fatal flight back to America. 

Given the usually egocentric film star, this Gloria is remarkably careful for others. The narrative leaves us sharing Peter’s suspicion about her morning “meeting” and then throwing him out. We later see she has been protecting him from her mortal diagnosis and pushing him to return to Liverpool for an audition.  

Annette Benning draws her Gloria out of her screen and personal persona. She catches the star’s sultry voice, cheeky manner, resignation to betrayal and abandonment. This Gloria alternates between a cocky coquettishness and a will of cold steel when aroused, between the B-girl she commonly played and the strong woman who fashioned herself a career in an uncompromising industry, between the black-and-white world of most of her films and the colour of real life. 

Peter meets that steel when he opines she should play the nurse not Juliette, the bawdy old woman not the young lover. The passions aroused in that exchange light their love affair. She’s again offended when his “Stella!” quote implies Gloria is a pathetic drunk, all beauty lost. Her insecurity makes her take his jokes seriously.

In their first meeting Gloria asks Peter in to help her practice the Hustle for her dance class. At the tail end of a long career she’s still trying to keep up with the times. And she can, as they prove fine partners. They are decades apart in age and in career. When they meet she’s touring as the gracelessly aging Amanda in The Glass Menagerie; he is a supporter player in a current farce. But offstage they dance and love well together. So she wants to die in his and Bella’s care,  

The narrative structure shifts between Gloria’s last days and Peter’s memories of their past. This allows for a scene’s replay, as in the different perspectives we get on their break-up in New York. But it also catches the doubled lifespan of a film star. The actor may die but the roles live on in celluloid. Film stars don’t die in Liverpool — or anywhere else — so long as their roles replay.

There’s a cost. The star may age as a woman but she stays ever young onscreen. So Gloria needs constant assurance she’s still beautiful. She remains in competition with her past self. Bella may dye her hair but she has none of Gloria’s need for that constant reassurance.  She earlier refused cancer treatment because she needed her hair to extend her acting career. 

Aptly the film’s last image of Gloria is touchingly bathetic. She appears in the grainy black-and-white of the Oscar telecast, receiving from the unblushing Edmund Gwenn her Best Supporting Actress Award for The Bad and Beautiful. That one was in colour, but here we only see her noirs. Her brisk, no-nonsense character is epitomized by her thank-you speech: “Thank you.” Even in that early period, before the current long windy pages of thanks, emcee Bob Hope is still taken aback by her efficiency. 

This film is a worthy, nuanced addition to our pantheon of mythologized aging screen goddesses. This Gloria didn’t ascend to a wealthy marriage like Joan Crawford (Mrs Pepsi Cola) or Grace Kelly (Monaco). She didn’t dissolve into an inculcated addictiveness like the real Judy Garland or follow her faithful supportive wife role in A Star is Born. She didn’t resurrect herself in grand guignol like Bette Davis or retreat into delusions like the Gloria Swanson character in Sunset Boulevard. She wasn’t subverted or overthrown as in All About Eve, nor did she turn recluse like Hedy and Greta.
     Gloria kept her self-respect and independence, risking her life to keep working as she had to, welcoming a new love, then setting him free to protect him. She happened to find through him the mother’s unconditional love she hadn’t known.

I, Tonya

Though this film is set 25 years ago it’s an incisive analysis of Trump’s America. Or as Prince might have called it, the States formerly known as United. Tonya is the rough-hewn have-not who can’t get a break in the righteous snobby style-conscious America now under fire.

She flashes an All-American smile under her tears, make-up and shiner-patch. She becomes a world titlist at the difficult art of figure skating, but she can’t satisfy her mother, her brutal husband or the fickle public. 

Neither the breathtaking grace of her art nor the hard-won height of her success can fill the void with which her birth and restrictive upbringing have cursed her. The skating judges remain biased against her, for that class-loaded criterion “presentation.” As Tonya marvels at the sympathy Kerrigan gets, “Look, Nancy gets hit one time and the whole world shits. For me it was an all-the-time occurrence.”

As befits a film about a performer, the film is organized on the theme of performance. We’re told the story in a  variety of interviews and restagings. The telling becomes as important as the story, especially when the men’s plot against Nancy Kerrigan kicks in. 

The characters are all performers rather than persons. Tonya’s mother is a monster who rejects any tenderness from or to her daughter — and indeed turns away from every peck from the pet bird on her shoulder. She wears it to recoil from it. In her coldness and language she’s an ogre playing the part of a mother with no understanding of her lines or role. So, too, she sexualizes her daughter, to prepare for that sexualized art. Thus her description of Tonya’s supposed failure: “You skated like a graceless bull dyke. I was embarrassed for you. ” Small maternal sympathy, there.

The mother’s defense to her daughter is a classic perversion: “I made you a champion, knowing you'd hate me for it. That's the sacrifice a mother makes! I wish I'd had a mother like me instead of nice. Nice gets you shit! I didn't like my mother either, so what? I fucking gave you a gift!” Her home visit seems tender and supportive, until Tonya discovers her mother is trying to tape her admission/denial of complicity in the Kerrigan plot, presumably for her own profit. “You can tell me.”

Tonya’s husband equally veers between protestations of helpless love and beating her up. His accomplice Shawn is a live-at-home loser who seems to believe his repeated lie that he’s an accomplished international secret agent working against terrorism. This while he directs a terrorist act against America’s best figure skater.

The characters are all poor. Tonya’s mother raises her on a waitress salary, her husband with minor odd jobs. Tonya’s after-skate career is waitressing, women’s boxing and worse. But they feel an entitlement beyond their means: “I’m America's best figure skater! I don't want friggin' Eskimo Pies” — but Dove Bars. Hr husband lures her back — briefly — with a fridgeful.

The Kerrigan “incident” itself is described as the biggest stupidity in a world of stupids. Everyone here is as incompetent, unimaginative, fumbling and self-deceiving as … well, Trump’s White House. There are no ideas or logic, just reflexes. As Tonya’s mother advises, “You fuck dumb. You don’t marry dumb.” In this distortion of democracy there is no respect for knowledge or intelligence. If this story were not so tragic to its modest players and if this were not such an accurate reflection of Trump’s dumbed-down and disintegrating America, this comedy of sad errors would be hilarious. 

More to that point, as Tonya says, “There's no such thing as truth. It's bullshit. Everyone has their own truth, and life just does whatever the fuck it wants.” Her husband says of a scene we’re watching actually happen, “This is bullshit. I never did this!” Time and again Tonya contradicts herself within a sentence and it doesn’t matter. Like she’s the president.

Despite her coarseness and self-unawareness Tonya becomes a very touching figure. Her ice-rink mother determined her life from the age of three and hammered her into it. The public was hungry for someone to admire, then hungrier for someone to vilify: “America. They want someone to love, they want someone to hate.” 

That role proved as reductive of Tonya as her mother’s stardom dream was: “I was loved for a minute, then I was hated. Then I was just a punch line.” This film stops the punch line and returns the bad-joke woman to humanity. And it’s an abused, class-conscious humanity. Hence Tonya’s climactic accusation to the film audience: “It was like being abused all over again. Only this time it was by you. All of you. You're all my attackers too.”

The 15:17 to Paris

  After Sully Eastwood turns to another exemplary American heroism, the three Americans who subdued a terrorist on a train to Paris. 

For a train drama remarkably little happens on the train. The Orient Express this isn’t. Eastwood rather spends the narrative on showing his three All-American lads growing up. 

They come together as mischievous schoolboys. Only one becomes a soldier but none hide behind bone-spurs. Alek’s and Anthony’s mothers reject the school’s recommendation of Ritalin to rein them in. Their adult heroism is thus clearly rooted in their maverick spirits from the get-go. This is the myth of American individualism. The outlaw spirit blossoms into the mature freedom-fighter. 

The film takes one important liberty: it omits the French citizen who initiated the attack on the terrorist, then spurned the French government’s honour for fear of reprisal. Here Carson takes the lead. Eastwood’s motive is not to protect the French guy but to make his Americans the effective heroes.

The film ends up a simple-minded exercise in patriotism. It avoids the moral dilemmas that deepened Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby. Eastwood shows bis usual efficiency in directing, but the whole project seems a toss-off. There’s even a laziness in his casting the real Spencer, Alek and Anthony as themselves. Eastwood didn’t bother to develop complex characters. He lets the “actors” be themselves. As a result, the slick surface lacks depth. 

This film makes no attempt to move from the particulars of a history into the resonance proper to fiction. This is what happened once — good, impressive — but it carries no wider meaning. It certainly doesn’t show even just America as a whole. 

This unimaginative recreation of an event makes Eastwood seem to be working in a bubble. It’s naive enough to have been made in 1935. It shows no awareness of the moral complexity around Carson’s military assignment, nor about the divisive and destructive tensions in current America. 

Eastwood retells his story without thinking about anything. He doesn't want us to either. It’s a knee-jerk repetition of American exceptionalism with no acknowledgment of the nation’s dark troubled waters. 

The three actors play such clean, courteous, idealized men that they seem to have stopped off a Norman Rockwell cover. The story may be true but it in no way represents America today. Odd that a true story can be used so to avoid reality. Eastwood turns a true story with the actual heroes into a fairy tale. 
       A longtime Republican himself, perhaps this is the only way Eastwood can say anything about the current situation: ignore it. Unfortunately, hiding from the nightmare doesn’t stop it.  

The Other Side of Hope

Probably Kaurismaki’s most topical film, this is a paean to the pluck and courage of the immigrant and to the humanity of the citizens who support them. It may cover the same plot and emotional territory of his Le Havre (2011) but the European and American debate over immigration gives it a new urgency.

The title works two ways. The desperate Khaled seems beyond hope when he pulls himself out of a coal bin. He escapes battered Aleppo only to be rejected by the Finnish asylum board. 

But the timely kindness he gets from strangers is also beyond anything he could realistically hope for. Street people magically materialize to drive off the redneck Liberation front determined to kill the “camel rider.” The Iraqi refugee and the blonde worker he befriends at the centre reveal an indefatigable generosity. 

Khaled fulfills is mission to save his sister Miriam (evoking the earlier emigre Moses and his sister Miriam) thanks to the generosity of the truck-driver and Khaled’s own resolve to cling to his fading life long enough to see her through. Like Moses, Khaled doesn’t get to the promised land either.

Khaled’s chief support turns out to be Wikstrom, an unlikely hero in any other vision but Kaurismaki’s. Wikstrom is a traveling shirt salesman whom we meet as he abandons his woebegone wife. Seeking renewal, Wikstrom buys a down-at-heels restaurant which he struggles to revive — along with the downtrodden staff the previous owner had exploited and abused. 

The bond between Khaled and Wikstrom begins when they quarrel over home space. Wikstrom won’t let the Syrian sleep in his garbage area. They exchange nose punches, then Wikstrom feeds him and provides a job, fake ID and a storage unit home. 

Wikstrom’s generosity ends up saving his staff, then Miriam, and ultimately even his wife. His leaving shook her out of her alcoholism and she’s running her own modest business. They resume their marriage and she will be his new hostess. 

So the film traces two men’s unusual transcendence, the immigrant and the salesman. Of course, in Kaurismaki’s usual tone, there are no large emotions or grandiose effects. The faces are all proletarian, plain, appealing in humanity not beauty. Conversations are banal, silent stares long, baleful, empty. The camera rarely moves and very little ever happens — just the quiet unfolding of people with small, tender and moving lives. 
     Wikstrom finances his restaurant purchase at a big stake poker game. In the climactic hand he’s up against four aces — as strong a hand as one can expect. But Wikstrom’s winning straight flush is the lowest denomination you can get: the two, three, four, five and six of clubs. That moment encapsulates Kaurismaki’s vision and style. The lowly, the most unprepossessing and bathetic, they win because they are the bedrock of humanity. 

Land of the Little People

A guerrilla war over land in Israel would normally be waged between Israelis and Palestinians. Here it’s between two deserters from the Israeli army and four young Israeli kids. Their fight is over territory — an abandoned camp and dried well — and arms, specifically one soldier’s pistol. 

The obvious parallel is Lord of the Flies, where an isolated mini-society of children creates its own religion, power structure and savagery. Only the arrival of an adult military restores civilization. The Israeli setting makes this version less about the decay of civilization than about the effect upon children of the continuing presence of war.

Initially the children seem to be playing at being Hollywood savages, with their bows and cross-bows (however upgraded with laser). They whoop in triumph at trapping a field rodent. They’re not playing at being soldiers but at being mythic. 

When they drop the carcass down the deserted well, though, they are playing at something rather more serious and geographically pertinent. They are making up a religion, with their own goddess whom to satiate with sacrifices in order to preserve themselves. 

This turns the children’s savagery away from play and towards the more serious matter, religion. It makes them a more serious parody of the larger forces in their real world. Alternatively, it shows them turning away from the religion that is at real war and finding comfort in an invented ritual. 

The girl seems to have cast their well-dwelling deity as a woman, eschewing the patriarchal tradition. Her goddess may derive out of her father having died heroically at war. She survives. The children’s religious pretence gives them a kind of maturity, as if they are reliving the origin of one of the older faiths of the region.
     Conversely, there’s something childish about the deserters, their bantering, insults, horseplay, petulant excuses for deserting, and their ultimate helplessness. Far from conscientious objectors, they have failed to meet their adult responsibilities.

Israel doesn’t use child soldiers. Here the deserters are soldiers proven immature and the children play at adult missions. Both the real and the play warriors show the effects of growing up in this constant danger. 

The children in particular are at their most vulnerable, most period of life. A prepubescent couple, with two even younger friends, they are pre-sexual. They are verging. 

Sex is there but not for them. The older boy briefly spots a mother having sex then darts away. When the four see two naked swimmers on the beach they watch briefly then scatter them with a gunshot. Fascinated with photos of one soldier with his girlfriend, they use them as bait to draw him into the trees. The wounded soldier quickly assures the boys “I didn’t touch her” when they find him clutching the young girl’s arm. Two of the mothers are distracted by their pregnancy. This heightens the children’s vulnerability even as they assume an adult mission.

A lesser war here is familial. One boy stole and wrecked his older brother’s bike, so is targeted for violent revenge. “He’ll kill you.” He doesn’t help his cause when he urinates on him from a bridge. In another replay of Israel, then, on both sides of the main war there are violent internal divisions, between the brothers as well as between the deserters. The brothers’ battle is stopped by their army fathers’ return. Like the battleship that closes Lord of the Flies.

All this action unwinds under the shadow of an unspecified IDF action against some provocation, unspecified. “Are we at war?”  one kid asks, as planes roar by above. Israel is in an unending state of siege. That takes its toll. That climate is the film’s subject.

     Hence the Theodore Herzl quote that opens the film: People will live and die for a flag — if they’re taught to. Coming from the father of modern Zionism, that is hardly a criticism of Israel. Rather it’s a recognition of the gnawing costs of unending war. The micro embodies the macro. This is the land of little people indeed, small malevolences perpetuating an invented cause, violent games turning fatal. 

Les grandes esprits

The English title — The Teacher — is a serious deviation from the original French: Les grandes esprits. Esprit can mean mind or spirit. The great mind will be open to differences in spirit. The title shifts the emphasis from the students to the teacher, from the fringe immigrant class to the privileged white man, from the great spirits to the conventional disciplinarian. 

In the posh Paris school where we meet him, M. Foucault is equally generous complimenting the good students and insulting the majority.  He carries that insulting manner to his new school, which at first sight looks like a prison but turns out to be an open, generally comfortable institution despite its lower standards and achievement. Teachers even let their classes have tea parties. 

These marginalized kids are the “great spirits” of the title, wild, energetic, undisciplined, yet detached by their inability to escape their expectation of inevitable failure. The classes are predominantly black but the students appear happy, well-dressed, and for the most part obedient. But the school admin and teachers are relentlessly white. 

  The chief lesson in the film is the well-regarded teacher Foucault’s conversion from assuming unassailable superiority to trying to help his disadvantaged charges succeed. He stops judging them to help them. When he leaves his highly regarded Paris school for the disdained suburb -- i.e., The Immigrants -- he opens himself to new growth as a teacher and as a human. Of course, “Foucault” alludes to the seminal thinker in the Left’s current cultural theory. 

      The film’s Foucault gradually mends his ways to get through to his new class. He countenances their cheating and alters his teaching strategy and class topics to let his students feel some success. Once he breaks their expectation of failure they have a chance to succeed. 

Seydou, whom Foucault initially calls stupid, develops a new self-respect, a new interest, a new courage. He ultimately eschews the gang life to return to school.

Foucault’s success with Seydou is at least in part due to his taking a personal interest in him beyond the classroom. He advises him how to impress his romantic interest Maya, then intervenes to reverse the boy’s expulsion. This turns his most antagonistic pupil into a friend. In perhaps the film’s most touching moment, Seydou sits beside Foucault after the choir performance, each bemoaning his own romantic failure.  

Foucault’s strategy alienates some of his more conventional — and self-concerned — colleagues, who think he is courting cheap popularity by his generous grading. Seydou’s expulsion is presumably caused by his antipathetic maths teacher, who resents his girl-friend Chloe’s friendship with Foucault. 

Foucault is given an interesting background. Even the successful teacher still moves in the shadow of his father, a very famous author who may be “the TV guy” a student cites. There’s a chill in the father’s signing his book to his son. Foucault’s sister is an international figure developing an artists’ residence in Tokyo. So the teacher’s reputation and his command of his classroom may still fall short of his family’s status. 

Foucault apparently has no personal life.  He is clearly out of his element at his new colleagues’ party. He seems to be courting the Ministry woman when he suggests more experienced teachers be assigned to the suburbs. He mistakes her lunch invitation to be a personal date and is disappointed when it turns out to be a business meeting — at which he finds himself trapped in the one-year school transfer.  

His romantic hopes are dashed again when Chloe leaves with her lover for Canada. The result is to define him totally as the teacher. Outside that function he is nothing. With heroic selflessness he learns to serve and to liberate the great spirits of his underprivileged students. But he remains restricted in himself.

The film has an interesting political underpinning. Indeed its primary focus may be culture not education. In emphasizing proper French grammar, the classic field trip to Versailles, the teaching of Victor Hugo, Foucault and the film staunchly advocate the promotion of traditional French culture. Foucault has no interest in examining or advancing the immigrants’ own cultural background, nor the current pop scene (staff pot party apart). His and the film’s assumption is that today has to respect yesterday. Immigrants to France have to become French, have to adopt their host culture, and not try to import and advance their own instead. 

The other side is represented by the violent gang Seydou briefly joins. They disdain the community of old France and seek to impose their own will and their own forms of liberty, fraternity and inequality. 
      In this insistence upon preserving their own national culture France presents a strong model for contemporary Europe as its massive immigration challenges their cultural norms. In the rest of Europe the old culture may be buckling to the insistent new. Even France harbours resistant pockets, sealed communities of Seydou's gang. This point is what makes this film especially pertinent today. For this Foucault unapologetically defends French tradition in art, values, civilization and grammar, even as -- in the film's last joke -- he seems to be apologizing.

A Previous Engagement (2008)

This 2008 romantic comedy slipped under the radar without being recognized as a delightful revival of the classic screwball comedy. 

Julia and Alex fell passionately in love in Malta 25 years ago. Then they separated, she planning to become the next James Joyce, he the next Che Guevera. 

They pledged to meet there again in 25 years to resume their ardor. 

And so they do. But Julia arrives lumbered with her dull (insurance claims) husband Jack, further burdened by older daughter Jenny, heartbroken but with new swain Tyler in tow, and then Jill, jealous of being left out. Alex comes with his pretty and embarrassingly available assistant. 

But the old passion has survived. Alex remembers Julia’s mole. They both treasure the beach where they first made love, the best sex either ever had. 

Their old attraction reheats them at first sight, touch, and especially their first embrace whether on or under the (rented) marital bed. As fervid as their love is their anger at any perceived betrayal. 

  Accidents and embarrassments abound, for in screwball comedy -- as in other forms of reality -- the course of true love never does run smooth. That’s what makes this a screwball comedy: the forces of domestic order and conventional decorum are exploded by the irresistible, disturbing energy of love and its madcap spirit.

Also, the dialogue is as nervous and edgy as the action. Fast talk is key to the genre. “I’m a lot sluttier than I look,” fresh divorcee Grace promises the newly available Jack. And for Julia’s obligatory Canadian content: “In Canada they rut like rabbits to keep warm.”  Still, the chastened, briefly restored family will henceforth eschew dangerous Europe for holidays with Julia’s sister in Grimsby. 

Neither lover has realized their dreams. Alex came closer, now editing a literary journal in Montreal, four wives later. Julia is married to a man she doesn’t love, who brings massive jigsaw puzzles to excite him in Malta. Their two daughters are still so selfish they refuse to admit “they’re old enough to know the truth about their parents.”

The film is written and directed by a woman, the accomplished Joan Carr-Wiggin. So the snarl of romantic dreams and domestic bathos takes the woman’s perspective. 

Here it’s the heroine who gets to yell “Fuck!” — at the mirror that reflects her aging and lovelessness, at the dutiful, i.e., unhelpful, hotel clerk, at the Malta hills impervious to her disappointment and despair — and finally, exultantly, when her true love has the courage and confidence to believe she will return to him after all. 

So, too, Grace asserts the woman’s right to have her one-night stand — Jack — satisfy her sexual needs — albeit after his. 

Here the housewife moves past her decision to resume her maternal duty. She leaves her selfish, boring family to live her own life. She passes up the Penguin Ulysses in favour of a blank notebook where she can finally start her own writing. Her lover’s return only adds to her fulfilment.

No-one in her family knows Julia’s true nature and depth. “If people knew who their mothers really were the world would end.” Domestic order, marriages, world peace, all depend upon women suppressing their needs and true feelings. 

  But her dull husband Jack has his own surprising resources too, as Grace discovers in and for him. Julia’s last words to her family are “Keep dancing” — which encourages Jack to make his new life with Grace. Julia’s advice, which taps Jack’s long suppressed physical impulses, runs deeper than the tailor’s reform: “There’s no problem I can’t fix with a really good suit.” The new suit doesn't make the dancer but unleashes him. 
     The soundtrack is especially keyed to the developing emotional situation. For the initially disappointed lovers there’s Phil Ochs’s “There are no more songs.” Alex follows the despondent Jack to the Dixieland “You Dirty Rascal You,” after a paradoxically dispirited, slow “Born To Be Wild.” The lovers’ ultimate resolve is to “give all I can give, cross my heart and I hope to live.” In the screwball ethos, anything else, like self-denial, decorum or exhausted resignation, is to die. 

C'est la vie

This hilarious French comedy was originally titled Le sens de la fete. For some reason, that was translated for the international market to C’est la vie. Who knows why. Perhaps to impose a more reassuring, because familiar, attitude.

For this is life, where the best planned parties run disastrous. A lavish wedding in a 17th Century mansion goes manically awry. The anatomy of a crumbling posh wedding evokes Altman’s The Wedding, of course, but the new film is not as biting. 

This aims for humour rather than satire. It soft-pedals any political themes.  The waiters’ spokesman fails to serve his comrades, when they’re required to wear heavy period costumes and wigs. The union leadership fails. The workers give in but without anger. Indeed, despite the event director’s furious tirade against his staff, the “magic” of the event takes hold and he abandons his plan to sell out and retire. 

Though the groom is an upper class twit, the film ignores class prejudice. The servants slip easily into the guests’ activities when it appears necessary for them to hide from a supposed labour inspector. The groom’s mother has a fling with the photographer with whom she has been squabbling. 

So, too, the romance that erupts between the seedy substitute singer and the director’s angry assistant. Their relationship moves from antagonism to love, with dramatic effect. It's enough to make the groom lose his grounding.

Through the evening even the event director loses then wins back the assistant he has been having an affair with. Happily, his wife calls to suggest they separate because she has her own new lover. It's a wedding, so there's romance -- and the groom -- in the air. The event, through all its chaos and frantic adapting, manages to achieve love on several fronts, to change discord into harmony. 

The ex-teacher waiter who still adores the bride is a familiar French type, the grammatical pedant correcting everyone. For all his punctilious language, though, he slops around in what look like pyjamas (“They’re hybrid”) and encourages the director, his brother-in-law, to leave his marriage. 

France’s immigrant class is acknowledged in the Sri Lankan dishwashers, who periodically joke about their new society but are happy to integrate. Passing references to their having their own band and a confusion between two kinds of flute set up the late-night jam between the booked band and the dishwashers’ that closes the night and the film on a note of high harmony. 
     This is a feel-good film. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Dark River

A Yorkshire farm family lives out a curse as harsh and ineluctable as a Greek tragedy.

The life here is elemental. There are threats of fire and purges in rain. The living quarters are primitive, dark, basic. The men are rough-hewn and violent. The sex is brief, impersonal and urgent. The only modern device is the buzzing shearer. When the guard dog breaks its tether it straightaway mauls a sheep, what it was supposed to protect.  

This is no Wonderland that this Alice ploughs through, stolid and capable. We see her shear and dip sheep efficiently as a man. For dinner she skins and guts a rabbit, but is drawn from its domestic cooking by her brother Joe’s drunken aberrancy. She has to fight off his attempt to burn her Range Rover. As Alice, Ruth Wilson is most expressive in her harrowing silences. 

The primeval sin is the father’s habitual violation of the young Alice. He is all the more sinister for his gentle, tender mien. He didn’t need Joe’s violence. 

In shame and anger,  Alice spent 15 years working sheep farms wherever she could find them, before her father’s death enabled her return. As Joe notes, she is still frightened anew every time she enters a room. Her father haunts her still.

And yet…. She has to return to the land. She draws on her father’s promise to leave it to her, however poisoned it is by her experience. She applies for its tenancy. She fights Joe in an attempt to bring her new savvy to the operation. Ultimately she loses when he wins the tenancy on the promise to sell out to a developer. 

The Joe we see is a drunken incompetent lout with his father’s male authority. He is violent but has no sand. For he is as scarred by his father’s sin as Alice is. He doesn’t realize that until she spells it out: “Why didn’t you stop him?” His rage and self-destruction are based in that guilt. 

Joe gets his redemption at the end. He assumes the guilt for the murder Alice accidentally committed. Finally he protects her. 

  Both are strengthened by this cleansing, the confrontation of their curse. So the film closes on an idyllic shot of the two siblings, as teenagers, walking out of the shadowed barn down into their realm of shining fields. It’s probably not a memory but a metaphor for the relationship they have now snatched away from their father’s shadow.
     The title has no literal representation in the film. It’s antithetic to the waterfall in which Alice twice goes to cleanse herself. Another generation of teens repair there too, possibly without her curse to ablute. The dark river is the family’s secret guilt that has rushed through their lives ever since. The regional folk song plays against the tragedy the way the waterfall does against the dark river.
 

The Swan

The opening shot establishes the film’s primary value: the powerful force of nature. But the film shifts from the untrammelled ocean tide to the more stable, sweeping fertility of the land. That’s what provides the humans with sustenance and grounding. 

The central family’s three generations have different relationships with nature. Consequently, they differ in their self-knowledge and integrity. The oldest, Karl and Olof, live modestly but comfortably off their land and cattle. Their marriage is also easy, tender, solid. They have been taking in wayward kids — like Olof’s niece’s nine-year-old daughter Sol here — in hopes that they will find meaning and maturity in the rhythms of farm work.  

They’ve had better luck with these charges than with their own daughter. Asta has lost their harmony with the land. She’s gone to university, lost her husband, has slept around, and comes home pregnant and having blown her final exams.  She ridicules her parents’ small scale of dairy farming, asserting they will be doomed if they don’t go to larger-scale robotic milking. Of course, automated milking loses the immediacy of the hands-on relationship with nature.  Even the city has failed to steady her restless spirit. She has no patience for Sol. Even Asta’s ardour for the black stallion is intermittent and selfish.   

The itinerant hand Jon is more comfortable with nature but shares Asta’s hunger for something more. She ridicules his dedication to writing and capriciously takes him as an occasional lover. She ultimately drops him, possibly to his death. 

Jon romanticizes Asta and thinks he could free and satisfy her passionate nature if only she would let herself go.  But that is a writer’s fantasy, not an effective response to her mercurial wildness. With no grounding or self-acceptance, Asta takes her husband back for a fervid, disappointing one-night stand.

Jon’s scenes with Sol show him sensitive, caring, understanding. When she comes upon him masturbating in the meadow we see his loneliness, his comfort in nature, but the very weakness and indulgence that will drive him into his drunken stupor at the fair. 

These adult worlds are a mystery to young Sol, whose perspective governs the narrative. At her oceanside home she had stolen and lied. In the fields she encounters the serious cycle of life. She witnesses and is bloodied by the birth of a calf. She is heartbroken at its inevitable slaughter and eating. She witnesses the puzzling to-and-fro of Jon’s relationship with Asta, who constantly denies Sol the connection she craves. 

Asta’s fullest conversation is her frightening story of a monster at the lake who will try to seduce Sol into death. In the climactic scene at that lake, the monster Sol experiences is the magnificent swan that swoops down from the heaven, regally sails toward her in the water, then soars back away. In addition to its beauty and grace, the swan represents a natural integrity lost to the generation that has detached itself from nature. In that model Sol may find the lesson she needs to live a natural, integrated life.

We might be tempted to read the swan in either the Leda or Ugly Duckling contexts, but this film seems rather to luxuriate in the Icelandic mythic force of the land.
     Much of the film’s power and effectiveness derives from Gríma Valsdóttir’s performance as Sol. Her child’s face seems to grow ageless as her experiences deepen her emotional range and expose the aspirations and failings of the generation she is about to grow into. She seems to have the potential to embrace the passion of that wild tide, yet rooted in the soil. 

Newton

This good-natured satire of India’s democracy unfortunately has a wider pertinence. World-wide, the once ascendant democratic movement appears in possibly mortal retreat, eroded by the rise of right-wing tyrannies and oligarchs pretending to populism. This danger appears throughout the Third World, of course, now including the USA.

The hero is an idealistic but incompetent civil servant who against all odds strives to meet the literal requirements of an election poll in a small remote rural community, under threat from Maoist terrorists. He is often framed within the shot as if in a box or an isolated nook. He defines himself by the restrictions he accepts, in contrast to the other characters' assumption of license. 

When Nu Tan Kumar changed his name to Newton he unwittingly assumed the persona of democracy. As his senior manager informs him, the historic Isaac Newton proved the democracy of the physical laws of nature. In physics, he demonstrated, the same laws apply to everyone. 

But not so in the realities of the world’s largest democracy. The citizens are far from equal. Isolated communities are disconnected from the political debates. For knowledge of the voting conditions themselves they are susceptible to misdirection or disqualification by democracy’s enemies or abusers. The new tech stymies them.

The punctilious Newton is at constant odds with Aatma, the commander of his protective military unit. The general’s pragmatism makes Newton’s even modest success possible but falls short of the ideals and principles of the movement. 

Aatma himself is the victim of hierarchy when a senior officer steals his spotlight before the press. Aatma acknowledges his advantage that undermines the democratic ideal: “When spoken wearing a uniform, even a request seems like a big threat.” 

When Aatma fakes a terrorist attack in order to close the polls before night will endanger his troop, he acknowledges the vulnerability of the free and open government system. Equality may be a supreme value but it’s more an aspiration than any reality. 

Aatma’s men pay lip service to the democratic Newton. But frustrated with his simple-mindedness, they are driven to beat him up. Newton himself turned gun-wielding despot to enforce his principles. The scene demonstrates the fragility of the democratic ideal, even among its defenders.  

If Newton falls short on his official undertaking, at least his personal life retains some promise. The idealist offends his family by rejecting an arranged marriage to an uneducated minor. The film closes on a hopeful note. Newton is visited by the attractive, smart, resourceful woman who assisted him on his rural mission. They will go for coffee — but not until Newton spends another five minutes typing something, when his official coffee break formally begins. However vulnerable and doomed, bureaucracy reigns. 

Double Lover

Although this is a riveting, spectacular, wholly engaging thriller, upon reflection we can conclude that almost everything that happens is in heroine Chloe’s mind. 

One key pointer is the surreal museum in which she works as a guard. The ex-model — an object of vision — now watches people. The setting is where people read the art around them for improved understanding of themselves and life. The “Blood and Flesh” exhibition, the monstrous sculpture of overhead roots, the gallery’s vast white spaces, the sculptures that anticipate the fetus-like cysts later removed from Chloe’s womb, all point to the fantasy element in her psychodrama. 

In the pre-credit shot she is having her hair cut. She transforms herself into a more androgynous look. Her hair covers her eyes, then is trimmed to expose them. Her androgyny anticipates her later using a dildo on husband Paul.

The action opens on her medical exam, first with a shot of a vagina, then a close-up of her eye, registering pain, perhaps tears. The establishing shot shows Chloe in the stirrups, her doctor peering between Chloe’s legs. This establishes her central tensions: her sexuality and her vision of herself. When she goes to her first psychiatric appointment she climbs a vertiginous eye-like spiralling staircase. 

The stomach pains her doctor can’t explain turns out to be a psychological issue around her womb. Chloe is a divided psyche, harbouring a profound sense that she consumed the twin in the womb when she was born. For that she is driven to punish herself.The cause isn’t known until she herself is found to have a fetus-like cyst beside the fetus in her own womb.

Her relationship with therapist Paul operates on the level of event. But his twin brother, fellow shrink and more violent, effective and punishing lover Louis is Chloe’s projection. She imputes to Paul the divided and conflicted self she herself bears. That elaborates her admission that “When you look at me that way, I feel I exist.” 

So, too, her mother is doubled by the Madame Schenker she imagines visiting, who discloses the supposed twins’ ruin of her innocent daughter Sandra (whom Chloe also sees as herself).    

Minor doublings abound. The same actor plays Chloe’s gynaecologist and the therapist Dr Wexler she claims to visit. The imagined Madame Schenker is herself doubled by Chloe’s neighbour Rose, another woman with an invalid daughter, the girl’s bedroom frozen in time, with cats both stuffed and statues to echo Chloe’s missing Milo. Louis’ office is a glossier double of Paul’s, unrealistically opening into the bedroom for his advanced therapy. Chloe in particular is often shown with her doubling reflections off windows and mirrors. 

The Christmas party discussion of phantom twins explains Chloe’s sense of having absorbed a sibling in the womb. The background of American pop songs concludes with a particularly pointed lyric, sung by Elvis Presley. Presley himself admitted to a lifelong connection to his twin brother Aron, who died at birth. 
     The film itself has a doubled kind of twin. It’s adapted from a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, which David Cronenberg filmed as Dead Ringers.   

20th Century Circuit Suspects

What a director frames out of his film often illuminates the reasons for what is included. This Iranian documentary about a gang of young thieves is a primary case in point.

Director Hesam Eslami traces six years in the collective life of the thieves he met when they stole his car. Instead of turning them in he befriended them, won their confidence then turned them into the subject of his film. 

We come to it with a firm set of expectations of “Iran.” You know Iran. It’s the corrupt, renegade theocracy that funds international terrorism, plots to become a nuclear threat to the world, vows to destroy Little Satan Israel and Great Satan America, oppresses its citizens, persecutes women and gays, and suppresses any independence.  

  Nothing of any of that appears in this film. There is no reference to religion, to theocratic or misogynous oppression, to sharia law, to anything specifically “Iran.” 

Instead, the story of life on those streets ignores that national context entirely. The gang-life in this Iran could be set anywhere in the world. This film averts the clash of cultures in which Iran is usually viewed and instead discovers the universality of the street-level life. 

Eslami confirms what I overheard an American tourist in Spain (around 1970) observe to her husband: “I tell you Sam, wherever you go, anywhere in the world, people are people.” Easy to say that, somewhat harder always to feel.

The film’s driving thesis is what the director does. Instead of punishing his offenders he wants to investigate their humanity. Instead of packing them off to jail he gets to know them. He keeps in touch with the ones who do get jailed. He follows the gang’s attempts to spring those. And in the case of Ehsan, Eslami gently promotes the young gangster’s shift into honest citizenship.

If there is any religion in this film it’s the Muslim director’s implicitly espousing the Judeo-Christian ethic of self-sacrifice, forgiveness and generosity towards the afflicted. The scarcity of this value in current American Christianity only amplifies the power of this director’s choice.

Of course we can’t ignore the forceful context of the film, even if it’s not cited. Eslami’s example — its character and its albeit limited success — is an instructive alternative to our customary response to “Iran.” Whatever the rhetoric and plotting conducted by our respective governments, their people are not just our enemies but part of our common brotherhood of mankind. This is a counter to our bellicose governments but also a corrective to the citizenry perhaps too eager to buy into their leaders’ prejudices. 

In this light the film’s details resonate meaning. The music embodies the interface between traditional Iranian and global pop. So too the premium placed on stolen car stereos confirms the society’s sire for cultural outreach. 

The film opens and closes on Ehsan’s new job, cutting and securing strips of veneer in construction. What’s the veneer here and what the substance? Is Eslami’s reminder of our brotherhood with Iranian gangsters a deceptive cover over our political gap, or is our leaders’ antagonism the disguise of our shared humanity? The film’s sentimental power supports the latter.

When Ehsan’s wife gives birth to a son she is surprised that Eslami would visit her. In her life, her husband’s friend is still an outsider, a social superior, and she is surprised and flattered by his attention. Perhaps that catches the Iranian citizen’s feeling of isolation from the populations their governments have forced upon them. As Willy Loman’s wife reminded us, too late, “Attention must be paid.”