Ostalgie (reprint)-Queens Quarterly, Winter, 2003, pp. 587-91

 

Lovers' Tiffs at TIFF 2004 (reprint)-Queens Quarterly, Fall 2004, pp. 432-41

 

Movies of the Moment (reprint)Queens Quarterly Winter, 2004, pp.584-97

 

There Will Be Blood (reprint)Queens Quarterly, Spring 2008, pp. 94-103

 

Compartment #6

  The key to Juho Kuosmanen’s whimsical snowbound romance may lie in the old woman’s advice to Laura: Trust the little inner animal that provides woman’s wisdom. 

Its antithesis is the camera, which provides an alternative approach to living — detached, observing, preserving, reliving — instead of direct engagement. Laura’s camera is stolen by the apparently nice, cultured Finnish guitarist she invites into the compartment she has been sharing with the drunken Russian lout Ljoha. That loss proves liberating. 

Their meeting cute scene is rather harsh. Ljoha is drunk, aggressive, and he sexually assaults her. The aspiring archeologist and the miner are clearly worlds apart, as he realizes when he brusquely refuses to exchange addresses and insincere promises of any future reconnection. 

The old woman is also correct when she tells Laura “You have a good man there.”  The rough Ljoha proves more devoted and reliable than Laura’s Moscow lover Irina. When her camera loss also loses her Moscow she begins her liberation from insincere Irina and the false promise of the academics. 

It may be true that “If you don’t know the past then you can’t deal with the present.” But that academic savvy proves less helpful than the human connection with which the unlikely Ljoha serves Laura when she needs it. 

Laura is on an ill-planned journey to study the famous petroglyphs in Murmansk. When she’s left unable to record them she is freed to their direct engagement, fleeting but fulfilling — like her connection with Ljoha. The experience provides a different richness and intensity than she expected — because it’s completely unacademic. That proper culmination of a relationship could not survive this incident. 

Laura’s inner animal opens her to the crass jerk she initially found repulsive. But his inner animal knows that even if he can now provide her with a wonderful experience any future for them is impossible. Hence the irony in the Finnish lesson he preserves. She told him the Finnish phrase for “I love you” is “fuck you.” As they part that’s her new secret, as intriguing as the petroglyph..    

Rifkin's Festival

  Made in 2019, this is Woody Allen’s 50th feature in 53 years. That deserves an !. (Btw, Hitchcock made his 50th — Torn Curtain — in 41 years, at 67.) Moreover, this is a rich, thoughtful, moving and amusing film that — as usual for Allen — manages to draw freshness out of familiar style and material. Of course, the reworking of the personal familiar defines an auteur. Familiarity should not breed the contempt of the lazy reviewer.

As the title suggests, Allen here examines one man’s personal relationship with that most public medium, film, and its culture. Specifically, an aging man — though not yet nearing Allen’s 86th year  — is inevitably out of step with the contemporary world and its cinema. 

Allen’s films have always exercised the medium’s self-referentiality. Indeed he learned his craft by making parodies, from What’s Up Tiger Lily (1966) through Love and Death (1975). Thereafter his characters have always existed in a cinema culture. Annie Hall (1977) stretched the conventions of film narrative by breaking the fourth wall. Bergman inspired Interiors (1978) and A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982). In between, Stardust Memories (1980) danced between the vision and style of Antonioni and Fellini.

Here Wallace Shawn seems an inevitable choice for an Allen surrogate. A short but plumper nebbish than the Allen persona, in fact he played the wild animal (aka “homunculus”) who preceded lover Isaac in Manhattan. As his character here is named Mort, Rifkin’s failed love story carries a whiff of death. When Rifkin declares his firm aversion to death — whether from illness, old age or a choked bagel —he’s also rejecting the human condition, himself. 

The characters lack of appeal and charm shows the aging Woody’s bemused sense of his current self. Allen again works in the explanation he gave for his controversial (and long-standing) marriage: “Since when did relationships become rational? The heart will have its way.”  

Rifkin  is an ex-film prof now struggling to write a masterpiece novel. Like Allen, his concern for life’s “terrifying questions” beyond politics and genre exercises detach him from contemporary cinema. But his touchstone classics are of no interest or effect in the current climate. The festival may honour Godard and Bunuel but the films are purely commercial. His idea that cinema is an art is itself archaic. As his dream father advises, today “Money talks; shit walks.” 

The film’s opening and closing scenes start with a high angle shot down on Rifkin at a therapy session. This “God’s eye view” may imply a religious world view — or a bird. At the end, after hearing the report we’ve seen, if the therapist has a response to Rifkin’s story Allen doesn’t stay to hear it.

Rifkin accompanied his press agent wife Sue to the San Sebastian Film Festival because he fears losing her to a client, the hot young French director, Philippe. He is riding the crest of his new film, Apocalyptic Dreams. His next feature is modestly intended to solve the Palestinian-Israeli problem.

The  song behind Allen’s opening titles establishes the wider cinematic oneirics: “Just wrap your troubles in dreams and dream all your troubles away.” As Sue remarks, “Films are like celluloid dreams.” Not yet for her the seducer’s apocalyptic. Thus Rifkin finds refuge in living/dreaming parodies of certain classics, in the unfashionable purity of black and white: Citizen Kane, 8 1/2, Jules and Jim, A Man and a Woman (which alone here was largely in colour), Breathless, Persona, Wild Strawberries, The Exterminating Angel and finally The Seventh Seal.  

Having profoundly absorbed these classics he now injects himself into them. His dreams of them enable him to live in the films and escape the marital loss looming in idyllic San Sebastian, even beyond the festival. Indeed the films teach him about his life but now in their parodic form. As an art, film finds its meaning and effect in its interchange with its viewer.

The films connect to each other, as if representing a parallel reality. Kane’s Rose Budnick leads into The Seventh Seal. Rifkin’s love for Doris arises in the Breathless fantasy and is answered in Wild Strawberries. Rifkin lives the film’s title when he says “Why are we under the sheets? I’m suffocating.” The romance of Lelouch’s driving scene is undercut by the flat tire. 

The main references are to Bergman. From the revisioned Wild Strawberries he realizes that his beautiful young wife Sue “fell in love with his mind” but could never stay satisfied with “a cranky little introvert who’s searching for an answer to whether there’s something rather than nothing.” Finally, from The Seventh Seal’s famous chess scene Death teaches Rifkin that just because life is meaningless doesn’t mean it has to be empty. Allen’s Death concludes with sensible health advice, for a longer life.  Art helps too.   

As Alvy taught us, films provide a happy ending that life denies. Rifkin finds solace and affirmation in the classic-film-loving beautiful Dr. Joanna Rojas. He is encouraged by her penchant for marrying assholes. Even if she does not fly off with him, she has renewed his hopes for life, even for a post-marital romantic life, and reintroduced him to pleasure, to the fullness possible in meaningless life. He’s encouraged to abandon his literary fantasy and to return to his strength, teaching classic film. 

There may not be life after death but there can be love after marriage. And small pockets of serious cinema even in the predominant wasteland. Woody Allen remains a blessing.

Being the Ricardos

  Aaron Sorkin’s title packs everything in: Being the Ricardos. It’s not the Arnazes but the Ricardos. They’re not just playing their fictional creations but being them. This film is about our need to posit an aspiration beyond our reality and the tragic gulf that remains between them — even (or especially) when we appear to have achieved it. That works on both the personal and cultural levels.

On their first intimacy this Lucy tells Desi that her one compelling desire is for a “home.” When she and Desi achieve their phenomenal TV success she finds her only effective “home” is the studio set. Only there can Lucy enjoy power, exercise control, work out happy endings.  Outside the studio she and Desi live essentially separate lives. 

In the last studio scene Lucy freezes at Desi’s catch-line, “Honey, I’m home.” She realizes that her “home,” her dreamed success, is an illusion. Her “home,” marriage and achievement are artifices. As she can no longer deny Desi’s infidelities, they end their collaboration and marriage. That sombrely realizes — in reverse — the infidelity theme of the “Guess who” (i.e., which lover) scene opener that Lucy keeps trying to replace.

These Lucy and Desi clearly love each other. Their ardor is as real off-camera as the Mertzes’ mutual loathing. But Lucy is driven by her need for fulfilment and Desi by the Cuban machismo that compels his meaningless affairs. 

Lucille Ball is an icon of woman’s independence and self-assertion. Here Sorkin uses that rep to stress the dominance of male authority in America. His 1950s America exposes the roots of our America in two political veins.

One is obviously the dominance of male authority. Even that Force of Nature Lucille  Ball (she several times says) runs every decision through her husband. She has to believe his denials of infidelity. She has to stand up for his honour more than her own. She rejects a young colleague’s articulate feminism and suppresses and restrains the actress playing Ethel, reducing her to cliche.

The second political theme is American suppression. Desi loves America because it gave him refuge from the Cuban dictatorship. He believes the pretence to freedom, of thought and expression. But that promised freedom is as illusory as Lucy’s successful “home.” The network censors them. In an unwitting confession of its own sterility, it bans the word  “pregnant” even when Lucy/Lucille is/are. 

More broadly, this is the America of the Red Scare. HUAC requires the eight-year-old Rusty Hamer of The Danny Thomas Show sign the pledge of allegiance — and this William Frawley would beat him up if he didn’t. This is a harshly conformist America.

Disaster looms in the allegation Lucille Ball was once a communist. Here Desi saves the day by stepping out from his wife’s shadow and directing his own scene. He stages — on the pre-performance studio set — a live endorsement by J. Edgar Hoover. But at the same time, Lucy finds proof of his adultery. His salvation of her image coincides with the end of her credulous delusion about their marriage.  

This is a remarkably rich and polished fiction that transcends its period of both setting and creation. It doesn’t matter that this Lucy doesn’t look like Lucille; she doesn’t look like Nicole Kidman either. Or that Xavier Bardem isn’t Cuban and a great singer. This drama aspires to be more than a reminder of a popular couple. In anatomizing its characters’ political climate it incisively exposes the dangers in ours.