I have always thought Philippe Noiret was a pretty good actor, but I never realized just how good he was capable of being until I watched him in Claude Chabrol’s Masques. Perhaps that’s because, as an actor who has been in well over 100 films, he is not always at his best in every one of them. If your only exposure to Robert De Niro were films like the recent The Score and The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle you might rightly consider him a hack. Likewise, unless you have seen the rare film where Noiret really puts his heart into it, you might be forgiven for overlooking his talent and considerable charm. In Chabrol’s film, he plays a kindly, jolly television host in the Arthur Godfrey vein of a program that is something like American Idol for senior citizens. He is a beloved national icon. This being a Chabrol film, though, he also has a devastating secret. To say too much more would be to give away too much. Chabrol’s films are always twisty and intriguing and reveal their secrets in minutely measure portions. They are almost always satisfying, even if what was required was no more than a temporary diversion. Masques is more so because it is a satisfying mystery featuring a rich, darkly comedic turn by an actor who works often, but not often enough at the peak of his abilities.
by Matt Bailey | Source: Home Vision Entertainment DVD
31 Oct 2004 7:54 PM | Submit Comment
Another classic that somehow eluded me through the years, The Wolf Man has finally fallen under my radar, and subsequently taken its rightful place among the horror films I most admire. Far from being the endless string of comical werewolf attacks I envisioned, The Wolf Man is a film about superstition, belief, and the power of the mind to influence reality. Lon Chaney’s iconic character endures because he is so much more than a guy who turns into a wolf and kills people. He is a victim of a terrible curse, an unwitting participant in a string of nefarious deeds that he would give anything to stop. The evil here is beyond anyone’s control, including Chaney’s, leading to a unique horror scenario in which even the source of the horror is terrified of what might happen next.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Turner Classic Movies broadcast
27 Oct 2004 12:06 AM | Submit Comment
For some reason, I was under the impression that this early horror classic was a corny tale featuring a man wrapped in robes stumbling about trying to kill people. Thankfully, I was able to view the film recently and get my facts straight. Far from being corny, The Mummy is engrossing and terrifying, an intriguing tale of mummies, curses, eternal love, ancient Egypt, and the afterlife. And it crams it all into a relentless seventy-five minute film, each scene building constructively on the last and working toward the inevitable, but still exciting climax.
Of course, what makes the film work, and what gives it its terror, is Boris Karloff. A mere glimpse at his face is enough to give you chills, and the moment he enters a scene, your eyes are riveted on his every move. It is astonishing how much terror and fascination the mere presence of the man commands. It was a refreshing change, in this age of one-dimensional and personality-less antagonists, to watch a true horror villain at work: a character at once abhorrently evil and genuinely pitiable, a monster to be sure, and yet also a man capable of human feelings and failings. All in all it is a tremendous effort by a horror legend, and I’m glad I can finally say I’ve witnessed the magic of The Mummy.
by Thomas Scalzo | Source: Turner Classic Movies broadcast
26 Oct 2004 1:28 AM | Submit Comment
With M. Hulot prominent in the cast, Trafic is careful effort by Jacques Tati, made during his late, insolvent career. In his previous Hulot films, Tati’s interests are progressively collective and observant instead of narrative (in Playtime, the cumulative film in this progression, M. Hulot is sometimes unnoticed in the film’s periphery). Both Mon Oncle and Playtime contain scenes that satirize a workday commute on a crowded highway; Trafic is essentially an extension of one of these scenes. It’s familiar, and nonetheless spirited and inventive.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Home Vision Entertainment VHS
23 Oct 2004 1:50 PM | Submit Comment
Panama Hattie is my kind of movie. It’s under 90 minutes in length, it’s got a wisecracking dame, a stuffy English butler, a snooty rich bitch, simple-minded sailors, and international intrigue, all capped with a jaw-dropping musical number performed by the incandescent Lena Horne and, my new favorites, The Berry Brothers—an elastic-limbed trio of dancers who think nothing of leaping off a balcony and landing in splits on the dance floor below. There is also a war-time finale that has the whole cast singing about how the U.S. will “slap the Jap right offa the map.” I am always amazed at how much cheerful racism one could easily get away with during World War II.
Though this musical was one of the earliest produced by the Arthur Freed unit at MGM, it was significantly better than I expected. The songs are pretty good (even though they’re mostly Cole Porter throwaways) and the dialogue is crackling. One particular exchange that had me in stitches (though I can guarantee I cannot quote verbatim) was when the English butler, dismayed by the sight of his master’s drunk and boisterous girlfriend (the always excellent Ann Sothern), announces to no one in particular, “I’ve a feeling this is the beginning of a very obnoxious friendship,” to which she replies, “No more of your fancy talk or you’ll be wearing a cuspidor as a snood.” Well, I thought it was funny.
by Matt Bailey | Source: Turner Classic Movies broadcast
22 Oct 2004 1:14 PM | Submit Comment
I’ve never seen a Michael Moore film before I watched Fahrenheit 9/11. This is not because I don’t agree with his political opinions (I do, for the most part), but out of sheer laziness. They were always something I thought I’d get around to eventually. I can’t say that I’m a better person now for having watched one. I can’t even say I’m particularly better informed. The film, while it has its heart in the right place, is a terrible mish-mash of bleeding-heart sentiment, conspiracy theories spun out of tenuous threads, and political diatribe. Forsaking the strength of picking one point and hammering it home, Moore tackles pretty much everything the Bush administration has done (or not done) in the last four years. Parts are affecting when there is real tragedy involved, but the film makes no persuasive arguments—only imprecise assertions and smarmy wisecracks.
by Matt Bailey | Source: Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment DVD
21 Oct 2004 9:16 PM | Comments (2)
NYFF COVERAGE – Miles may be a loser, but he is also a wine snob. A lonely public school English teacher with a few unpublished novels and an ex-wife he still pines for, he can still tell the difference between a pinot and a cabernet, sniff the bouquet correctly, and tell you about the oak barrels. For Miles, a wine makes more sense than real life: if the grapes are given the constant care and attention they demand, the peaks and declines of a wine’s life will be more or less predictable.
Jack, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. Charming, gregarious, overconfident, and oversexed, he is a TV soap opera and voiceover actor who never fails to impress with his impromptu recitations of APR financing information and prescription drug side effects. Together, the two old friends embark on a week of wine, debauchery, and bile in the lovely Santa Ynez Valley, California, for one last week of “cutting loose” before Jack’s wedding. But naturally, with Miles’ manic depression and Jack’s need to sew his wild oats, circumstances go horribly awry, and each man is confronted with his own weakness and morbid self-absorption.
The fourth feature film from director Alexander Payne, Sideways, is as brutally incisive as it is hilarious. A relentless and painfully funny critique of masculine pretense and selfishness (of which wine fetishism is the apotheosis), Payne’s film never fails to turn a comic situation into a tragic one, and vice versa. His characters lurch and stumble toward self-discovery, revealing the pathos and absurdity of their childish sexual and emotional needs.
This mixture of comedy and tragedy is encapsulated by the performance of Paul Giamatti as the almost farcically miserable Miles. Reticent, pessimistic, and completely ensconced in his own problems, he is content only when he is wallowing in his own lack of success with writing, women, and money. Like Payne’s other stuffy schoolteacher, Matthew Broderick’s character in Election, Miles is someone to whom the whole world – and particularly his own needs and desires – seems a cruel joke. What distinguishes Sideways from Payne’s previous collaborations with screenwriter Jim Taylor is that it allows its characters a small glimpse of optimism, in keeping with the film’s slightly sunnier tone. The steady accumulation of his literary failures, his attachment to his ex-wife, and his difficulties in courting a beautiful woman brings about a resolution that, while not at all triumphant, suggests that Miles’ crippling petulance will be overcome.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Fox Searchlight Pictures 35mm print
16 Oct 2004 10:46 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – Since the release of Ingmar Bergman’s “last” film, Fanny and Alexander, in 1984, the director has kept busy with an array of projects in print, in the theater, and on television. This last set of works, the handful of TV movies that Bergman has directed or written in the last twenty years, has offered some of the most personal insights into the life of an already confessional artist. Through his novels and screenplays for Private Confessions, Sunday’s Children, and Best Intentions, Bergman has mined his family history, and films like After the Rehearsal and In the Presence of a Clown map the often perverse, but cathartic process of artistic work. What emerges from these films is the image of an arguably self-indulgent, but always self-revealing filmmaker, almost masochistically exposing his fears and flaws to his audience.
Saraband, which is reportedly Bergman’s last filmed work of any kind, is an excoriating and revelatory experience, scrubbing away yet another layer of skin from the image that the director has created for himself. Once again, the subject of the film is tortured family relations, particularly between parents and their children. This has been Bergman’s focus since the very outset of his career. Early films like Frenzy and Crisis portray young characters in opposition to the repressive attitudes of an unsympathetic patriarchal society (mirroring Bergman’s own fraught relationship with his strict clergyman father), and later, such films as Wild Strawberries and Through a Glass Darkly explore the other side of this equation, specifically the inability of parents to live with their own children (echoing his own much-publicized marital and parental deficiencies). Saraband further explores the great distances between parents and children, as well as their ever-conflicting desires of clinging and turning away.
The film reunites Johan and Marianne, the alternately combative and mutually dependent couple at the center of Bergman’s 1973 television film, Scenes from a Marriage. After some thirty years of separation, Marianne suddenly feels a desire to seek out Johan, who lives in quiet seclusion in his “lair” in the “deep, dark forest.” Staying with Johan for a few weeks, Marianne soon becomes embroiled in her ex-husband’s strained relationship with Henrik, his son from an early marriage, and Karin, Henrik’s daughter. Henrik’s obsessive, destructive and not altogether paternal relationship with his daughter, and his humiliating, financially dependent association with a father he loathes (“I’d happily watch him die of some horrible disease”), threaten the lives and sanity of all involved, tearing open the old wounds of the family. And in the background, the specter of Anna, Henrik’s benevolent, long-dead wife, looms in the characters’ memory, a painful reminder of a slightly sunnier past.
Like much of Bergman’s late work, Saraband explicitly refers to early films from the director’s career. Scenes from a Marriage is an obvious point of reference, though it is deceptive (Bergman has altered some significant details about the characters’ lives, notably their ages). So are Hour of the Wolf (with the book-ending device of Liv Ullmann’s direct address of the camera) and Fanny and Alexander (with its scenes of Helena, the grandmother, poring over the mounds of photographs that narrate her life with her husband).
But Saraband is foremost a confessional work, and more importantly it is one that plays with the lines between the director’s life and career, and between real life and artistic work in general. Arguably, the film is the work of a man much like Johan, who has “ransacked [his] past” and found that “it has been shit.” But even Johan’s bitterness and defeatism is stripped naked and exposed as the fumblings of an old man: as Marianne tells him, “Sometimes you are like a forgotten character from some stupid old film. You’re not quite real.” Ultimately, Saraband further reinforces the sadness and pain of Bergman’s principal theme, the difficulty of living with, communicating with and depending upon lovers, children and parents. Dedicated to Bergman’s wife, Ingrid, who died in 1995, the film also mourns the loss of those people (for Bergman, nearly always women) who, like Anna, “existed in this world to make life less unbearable.” Finally, Saraband laments the difficulty of living and of traversing the distance between people, the exertion necessary to touch even one’s own child.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Sony Pictures Classics 35mm print
15 Oct 2004 7:06 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – From the appearance of the 1950’s vintage Shochiku logo before the opening credits, Hou Hsia-hsien’s Café Lumière announces itself as an ode to the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. And through its fixation on trains, its geometrical compositions, and its extended scenes of sitting around the dinner table, Hou takes up and individualizes aspects of Ozu’s dependable style to create a portrait of Japanese life a century after the master director’s birth.
For the viewer familiar with Ozu’s work, it will be easy to spot the differences between the Tokyo of today as presented in Hou’s film and that of the 1940’s and 50’s found in the older director’s films. Hou’s heroine, Yoko, is not an office girl awaiting a marriage proposal, but a writer researching the life of a Taiwanese composer, Jiang Wen-Ye, who lived in Japan in the 1930’s. She is an independent woman, able to tell her parents with blithe self-confidence that she is pregnant and will raise her child without the help of her mama’s-boy Taiwanese boyfriend.
But in spite of her modernized social politics, Yoko has much in common with the more self-possessed of Ozu’s heroines. The Noriko characters portrayed by Setsuko Hara in such films as Early Summer and Tokyo Story have the same certainty about their fates that Yoko has, though they exercise it within a more rigorously defined social order. In Café Lumière, the last remnant of this hierarchy is found in Yoko’s family home, in her mother’s domestic labor and her father’s authoritative taciturnity. And it is here that Hou retains the hallmarks of Ozu’s visual style: low-angle compositions and the violation of the 180° line.
Elsewhere, Hou plays with the rigorous conventions of Ozu’s cinema, illuminating aspects of each director’s style. Both Hou and Ozu manipulate off-screen space, but whereas Ozu’s films do so through dialectically precise compositions which seem to control the amount of narrative information in a scene, Hou’s long takes are far more relaxed, even seemingly accidental, absorbing the action and dialogue of a sequence almost as a fly on a wall. Hou’s characters have a freedom of movement within the compositions that Ozu’s characters do not have, and in turn, Hou’s attitude towards Yoko is far more equivocal than the way in which Ozu depicts his Norikos.
For all the obvious differences in the styles of the two directors, Hou has clearly inherited the older director’s equanimity in the face of his characters’ familial tribulations. The long takes, open-ended scenes, and calm observation of the mundane are all characteristic of Hou’s style, but here the viewer senses how closely the film’s quiet rhythm matches that which is found in Ozu’s films and how this suggests a serene outlook on the characters’ problems. Like Ozu, Hou is content to simply watch the problems of interrelation sort themselves out. And like Yoko’s friend, Hajime, who wanders through railway stations collecting train sounds with his MD recorder, the film looks for small connections and fragments of significance in the comings and goings of everyday life.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Shochiku Films Ltd. 35mm print
12 Oct 2004 10:41 PM | Comments (1)
NYFF COVERAGE – Todd Solondz’s latest provocation is Palindromes, yet another uncomfortable fable of suburban dysfunction, puberty, and statutory rape from the director. Once again, Solondz’s subject is the furtive, agonizing path of a young girl to sexual maturity, and again there are many awkward sexual trysts, jabs at moralizing ideologies, and gags that tow the line between morbid perversion and hilarious gross-out comedy. How many films would feature a thirteen-year old girl asking, “Can you still get pregnant when it goes in there?” and elicit both cringes and laughs from the audience? There are not many, but at their best, Solondz’s films have the rare power to charm even as they anger and annoy.
Much of this blend of irritation and sweetness comes from Solondz’s casting, which seems to privilege a certain ingenuous, amateurish quality in the films’ heroines. In Palindromes, the director has found eight different actresses to play the protagonist, Aviva, and each of these (from an obese black woman, to a skinny teen, to Jennifer Jason Leigh) gives a variation on the same wide-eyed, soft-spoken performance. In each of her various incarnations, Aviva confronts the prejudice and weakness of the world with a child’s innocence and confusion.
Aviva’s only desire in life is to have a baby, a child that will provide the unconditional love she so sorely lacks at home. When the son of a family friend impregnates her, Aviva’s liberal Jewish family refuses to let her keep the child. As her sniping, neurotic mother explains, “It’s not a baby – not yet. It’s like it’s just a tumor.” But as a result of complications during the abortion, Aviva is given a hysterectomy, destroying her dream of ever bearing children. Apparently distraught, the girl runs away from home looking for the affection and understanding she been unable to find elsewhere. Making her way out to the heartland, she meets a family of born-again Christians, disabled children and saccharine do-gooders who eat “Jesus’ tears” cookies and freedom toast for breakfast, perform Christian rock, and assassinate abortion doctors.
Solondz’s satire of Aviva’s New Jersey liberal family and the evangelical “Sunshines” occasionally threatens to upend the film with spiteful stereotyping. But for all of its prurience and unsubtle politics, Palindromes demonstrates such pity and affection for its characters’ foibles and shortcomings that it is difficult to consider the film wholly malicious. Through the character of accused pedophile Mark Wiener (also a character from Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse), the film expresses a deterministic attitude, viewing its protagonists’ search for change and fulfillment as the futile scramblings of humanity. Like Aviva’s name, we are palindromes, “backwards and forwards … always the same.” And like Aviva herself, no matter how much we seem to change, we always arrive at the same basic desires and weaknesses. As Aviva’s middle-aged, evangelical sniper boyfriend asks himself, “How many times can I be born again?”
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Celluloid Dreams 35mm print
12 Oct 2004 10:37 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – One may quite safely state that Ousmane Sembene’s Mooladé is among the most exuberant films ever made about female circumcision. Indeed, for a film that takes as its subject the slow march of progress in rural Africa, it is a surprisingly vitalizing piece of work, generously portraying the many social strata of a Senegalese village and the ways in which they balance Islamic tradition and innovation. Sembene’s film develops a subtle and sympathetic relation to its characters and their viewpoints, asserting the need for social progress in Africa without resorting to scare tactics, polemical bombast or stereotypes.
Moolaadé opens with four little girls who have fled the “purification” ritual and taken refuge at the home of Collé, whose first daughter died as a result of circumcision. A rare opponent of purification, Collé has insisted that her second daughter remain a bilakoro, or uncircumcised female, even though such women are disdained and considered undesirable by the wider community. The film’s title loosely translates as “protection,” but the term refers more specifically to that spirit or power which Collé invokes to protect the girls from the circumcision rite. In the community’s tradition, it is considered mortally dangerous to combat moolaadé, and the power can only be dispelled by the utterance of “the redemptive Word” by Collé herself.
Much of the film is structured around different interactions amongst the members of the community: the children’s confusion about the need for traditions, the women arguing for or against circumcision, the patriarchal elders reasserting these traditions and worrying over the corruptive influence of the world outside. This external force of progress is symbolized by the radios that the women listen to while working, and in an effort to protect the community’s traditions, the village elders confiscate these radios.
These issues of progress and tradition come to a head with the return of the village patriarch’s son, Ibrahima, from “France, where the money is printed.” Ibrahima returns home bearing money and gifts – a television, coffee pot and silk pajamas. Wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase, he embodies the African continent’s furtive bids for growth and participation in a global economy. As he notes, “We cannot cut ourselves off from the progress of the world.” Ibrahima’s worldliness and optimism is thrown into relief by the cynicism and iconoclasm of the local traveling salesman, nicknamed Mercenaire, who sells rubbers, shoes and loaves of bread, while dispensing colorful aphorisms, like “Africa is a real bitch.” Mercenaire combats the traditions of the community, playfully seducing his female customers and comparing Ibrahima’s arranged marriage to his 12-year old cousin with pedophilia.
But Mercenaire’s jaded dismissal of tradition is surely more extreme than the film’s general tone, which seems to assert a respect for progress within tradition. Moolaadé endorses a kind of synthesis, symbolized by the film’s final edit: cutting from the spire of a mosque to a television antenna. And whereas many may find the film’s conclusion stirring and inspirational, it does not represent an overcoming of oppression, but rather a broadening of perspective. Crucially (and perhaps surprisingly, for some Western viewers), the issue of female circumcision is not simply one of a patriarchal society’s suppression of women’s rights. Indeed, the purification rite is performed by a group of women (the salandina) and is pervasively supported by the male and female traditionalists within the community. The achievement of Sembene’s film is to address a complex cultural dilemma, not through propaganda, but through dialogue. As Sembene himself has said:
For the Third World filmmaker, it is not a question of coming to overwhelm the people, because technical prowess is very easy, and after all, cinema, when you know it, is a very simple thing. It is a question of allowing the people to summon up their own history, to identify themselves with it. People must listen to what is in the film, and they must talk about it.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: New Yorker Films 35mm print
11 Oct 2004 9:08 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – Cramped in the back of a tiny motor home, beset by gauchos, tooth aches and engine trouble, squabbling and making love, sweating and hungry, Emilia and her “rolling family” trundle through the highways, dirt roads, farmlands and jungles of Argentina. Pablo Trapero’s film documents these comic and painful trials in uncomfortably tight compositions, evoking the nervy claustrophobia of a family road trip and the difficulty of putting up with one’s relatives.
Emilia, the grandmother and family matriarch, has been invited to a wedding in her hometown of Misiones in the north of Argentina, near the Brazilian border. Excited by the prospect of a family reunion, she insists that her extended family join her: her two daughters, their husbands, children, pets, and problems. With their enforced proximity, troubles old and new rise to the surface and threaten to pull the family apart, as their ancient mode of transport begins to deteriorate from the sheer weight of their gathering.
Rolling Family sets up a familiar dichotomy: traditional values and common sense, combined with a sense of nature and the country, are contrasted with urban sophistication, neurosis, and selfishness. The bustling, Europhilic Buenos Aires contrasts with the simple, indigenous Misiones. These two extremes are best represented by Emilia, on the one hand, and by her son-in-law, Ernesto, on the other. The wise, old grandmother has maintained a rural oasis in the middle of Buenos Aires, a haven for cats and parrots and chickens, and observes the family’s rifts and romances with patience and equanimity. By contrast, the fussy, citified Ernesto does not seem to be at home anywhere. He is of no help with the many necessary auto repairs, and worse yet, he attempts to use this family trip as an opportunity to rekindle his old romance with his wife’s sister, Marta.
Once the family reaches their destination, the film’s awkward close-ups give way to a more expansive view, suggesting the serenity and simple jubilation of the country. The country wedding and the traditional milongas echo the tranquility with which Emilia observes her family’s troubles: “In life you have to learn to lose too. Not everything goes your way. That’s life.” In familiar terms, the film’s conclusion posits Emilia as an emblem of an old-world wisdom and calm that has been lost in the cramped and anxious life of the city.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Matanza Cine/Buena Onda Films 35mm print
11 Oct 2004 8:50 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – Lodge Kerrigan’s seasick and hysterical Keane follows the circuitous path of a man tortured by the abduction of his seven-year old daughter. William Keane walks the streets night and day, from Port Authority to Newark and back, talking to himself, drinking a lot, and yelling at strangers. And this persists for roughly ninety minutes.
Fortunately for the audience, though Keane is a drunk, drug addict, and delusional paranoiac, he’s an attractive and WASPy one. And as luck (or the script) would have it, he meets another lost soul who also happens to be attractive and WASPy. Lynn is a lonely waitress who lives in the same hotel near the New Jersey Turnpike that William lives in. Also fortuitously, Lynn has a seven-year old daughter. Cue William’s redemption.
Damian Lewis, who plays the title role, is no doubt an able actor, slipping only occasionally into his native Irish brogue. But the camera spends far too much time in his face, and so the effectiveness of the film rests entirely on the viewer’s patience for method acting and scenery-chewing. Lewis is in every shot of the film, and so his flailing performance submerges the film with wide-eyed anxiety and constant mumbling (“I’ve got to get some sleep. Get some rest. Lie down. Lie down,” etc.).
The film’s one truly fascinating element is its setting. There are many interesting films that could be made about the industrial wasteland that surrounds the Lincoln Tunnel, and while Keane is not one of them, it does convey some of the grayness and isolation of this peripheral, transitory space. Sadly, this world is portrayed only on the margins of the frame, filtered through Keane’s drunk and emotionally disturbed mindset. And in John Foster, the film has a cinematographer who seems also to be drunk and emotionally deranged, or at least incapable of holding a camera steady. This horribly overused device of the handheld camera makes Keane not simply grating and heavy-handed, but also nauseating.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Populist Pictures 35mm print
11 Oct 2004 8:44 PM | Comments (7)
The Enigma of Loch Ness – Werner Herzog’s presupposed failed documentary film and the subject of Incident at Loch Ness – was produced by Zak Penn until its quick dissolution. Penn’s prior credits include Last Action Hero, Behind Enemy Lines, and X2. His credentials spell the disreputable intent of Incident.
Incident at Loch Ness hinges on a loosely concealed contrivance (one a visit to the film’s imdb page ruins), and the concept is sold because of Herzog’s presence in the film. Herzog’s disparate ambitions are feasible in this scenario, and the events that fold his production are expected before you even know what they are. This is an in-joke for those familiar with the remarkable career of its lead actor, and although its share of moments built on Herzogian anecdotes are entertaining (such as when Penn aims a flare gun at his disagreeable actor, instilling the same threat Klaus Kinski allegedly endured during Aguirre), Incident at Loch Ness is ultimately offensive as it’s a parody of a great director’s inimitable filmmaking. At the very least Herzog is game to sell the joke, only it’s not that funny.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: 35mm print
10 Oct 2004 3:41 PM | Submit Comment
David O. Russell’s first three films bear his penchant for infusing slapstick with an otherwise humorless topic, usually some political or social issue. With I ♥ Huckabees the unlikely source for comedy is inherently exploitable and less taboo than in his previous films (comedies about incest, adoption, and war), which is to say Huckabees (“An Existential Comedy”) is Russell’s funniest film.
It is replete with philosophical applesauce, and it has a plot to speak of, but Huckabees favors punch lines instead of revelations. (At least, its numerous punch lines are more adept than its mystified conclusion.) For an audacious resistance to secure credence for the talk contained herein, the film is noteworthy as an opportunist comedy in which discussion and rumination are often second service.
by Rumsey Taylor | Source: Fox Searchlight Pictures 35mm print
10 Oct 2004 2:18 PM | Comments (2)
NYFF COVERAGE – Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers is only his second wuxia (martial arts) film, but the director seems to have mastered the form and imprinted on it his own bravura style. Like Hero, which has just been released in the United States, Flying Daggers is absurdly extravagant; each set, costume, and landscape is as finely detailed and beautiful as the balletic fight sequences. But unlike its predecessor, which has drawn some criticism for its overly generous depiction of historical figures, the new film addresses politics in a far more conscious and circumspect manner, drawing vague connections to the complexities of contemporary politics under the lush surface of its Sinophilic fantasy world.
Set in 859 AD, during the Tang Dynasty, the film’s opening titles announce the government’s widespread corruption and the dissatisfaction of the people. The “House of Flying Daggers” is the name of an underground resistance movement, a group of dissidents bent on assassinating and overthrowing the corrupt officials of the government. Determined to crush any resistance, those in power unleash all the means at their disposal – torture, clandestine police activity, assassination – to infiltrate and destroy the rebels.
Having captured a beautiful female assassin, Mei (who may or may not be the blind daughter of the former leader of the Flying Daggers), police captains Jin and Leo construct a plot to insinuate themselves into the rebel group. Jin liberates Mei from prison, convincing her that he is a renegade and enemy of the corrupt state, desperate to help the House of Flying Daggers defeat the government. But Jin soon falls for his own ruse, inevitably falling in love with Mei and finding himself caught between the arch machinations of the government and the dissidents.
The film’s script, written by Zhang and Hero collaborators, Li Feng and Wang Bin, weaves an intricate pattern of dissimulation and illusion. The characters are continually trying to determine what is “for real,” but their beautiful exteriors mask the intricacy of their motives and true emotions, just as the film’s ornate sets, staging, and costuming form a lush, artificial surface that obscures the complex emotional core behind the action. And while few of the plot twists are truly surprising, the sheer force of the visuals and of the expertly choreographed and shot fight sequences is surely enough to seduce the spectator.
But at heart, House of Flying Daggers is an erotically charged love story, with much sword-caressing and heavy breathing. The film impressively relates the complex interrelations of its characters, and it is with this emphasis on the emotional lives of the characters that its political (or apolitical) point of view is stated. With both the government and the Flying Daggers against them, Jin tells Mei that they “are like pawns on a chessboard. Nobody cares about us.” Their realization of their lives’ lack of value in the grand scheme of their political environment leads the characters to a desire for an apolitical status, a freedom from the oppressive political dichotomy.
In this way, though it is by no means an explicit criticism of any government agenda, the film expresses a tragic exasperation with the tendency of political situations to subsume the rights and lives of individuals, to require that one choose alliances at the expense of one’s desire. It is thus significant that, in the film’s final moments, none of the principal characters aligns with either the government or the rebels. Their erotic lives eclipse the political situations in the film’s backdrop, transcending the repressive force of their binary structure.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Sony Pictures Classics 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:23 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – Contemporary British cinema is a strangely mixed bag these days. The imports we in the United States are likely to receive are either drawing room dramas, Hugh Grant comedies, or the latest James Bond film. These days, little is heard of the great tradition of British realism on this side of the Atlantic; the films of Tony Richardson and Alan Clarke drift into obscurity, and new films by Ken Loach go largely unnoticed.
One of the few filmmakers to have bridged these two trends in British filmmaking is Mike Leigh. First with films like Secrets and Lies and Topsy-Turvy, and now with his new film, Vera Drake, Leigh has provided a kind of agitprop for the PBS and BBC crowds, realistic documents of middle and lower class life with that meticulous attention to character and acting so particular to British film, television, and theater.
But this wider international appeal seems not to have diminished Leigh’s commitment to political, social, and especially familial realities. Vera Drake is his second period film, set in London in the wake of the Second World War. But unlike many a bucolic, golden-hued episode of Miss Marple, Vera Drake takes on the issue of abortion before its legalization in the hazy, drab green working class areas of North London. Vera is a busy wife, mum, and housecleaner who provides tea and sympathy to everyone she knows. Her diligence and generosity are boundless, even in her secret life of “helping girls in trouble.” As in Secrets and Lies, the exposure of this secret life provides the film’s point of crisis, in which each of the characters reacts to the situation in accordance with their experience, their class (or class pretensions), their morality, or their fears.
Many of the protagonists in Mike Leigh’s films conform to certain vaguely recognizable types, but the director almost invariably elicits rich characterizations from his performers. Here, it is Imelda Staunton’s transformative (and award-winning) performance as the title character that draws the film away from being merely a “message picture” and makes it an expert and thoroughly engrossing character drama. Staunton makes the role of Vera – a golden-hearted old dear with a seemingly insatiable hunger for tea and biscuits – one of great emotional complexity, eschewing any facile moral response to the social and sexual issues at the heart of the film.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Fine Line Features 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:20 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – “Koreans are too fond of sex. They have nothing better to do. There’s no real culture.” While the last of these statements is certainly up for debate, a quick glance at the films of Hong Sang-soo would seem to lend credence to the first two statements. This evaluation of the sex life of contemporary South Korea is voiced by Munho, one of the protagonists of Hong’s new film, Woman is the Future of Man. Munho is a typical Hong male character: baffled by the mysteries of female sexuality (and perhaps also his own), he unscrupulously seeks sex from his university students or from an old flame, mustering only a shrug of self-derision in response.
The film begins as Munho’s old friend, Hunjoon, returns from film school in America. As so often happens in Hong’s films, the two linger over an extended (and boozy) lunch and reminisce over old times. Each secretly reflects over a woman, Sunhwa, whom they were both involved with: Hunjoon before leaving for the United States, Munho after his friend’s departure. Drunk from rice wine and nostalgic with the season’s first snowfall, the two friends decide to seek out Sunhwa in a neighboring town, and proceed to reopen old wounds and old relations in ways that continue to muddy their attitudes toward each other and to sex in general.
Like the films of his great cinematic influence, Robert Bresson, Hong’s films play solely on the surface of their characters actions, but his style relies much less on montage and close-ups than the French director’s. Usually in long takes and wide shots, the camera documents the intricacies of the strained, occasionally mortifying interactions and mundane situations. His graphic, mostly unpleasant depictions of sex are also framed at an equivocal distance, insisting upon a frustratingly amoral stance in the face of his characters actions and motivations.
Woman is the Future of Man confronts its viewers with this total ambiguity, pitching its characters into one grey moral area after another and abjuring all opportunities to comment on their reactions. The film’s tone shifts from light satirical comedy (hinted by its jumpy, light-hearted score) to grim realism (expressed by its clinical blue palette) within a scene; its title could be construed as either mocking or hopeful, depending on one’s reading; and its final minutes provide only the most cursory of resolutions. The film does not overtly experiment with narrative as some of Hong’s previous films have, but its deceptively meandering structure instills the same sense of doubt and confusion in the spectator as the rigorously schematic ordering of events in The Virgin Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors. Here again, Hong has created a film that is provocative, even disturbing in its resistance to categorization, demanding from its viewers a response without the reassurance of psychology or narration.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: MK2 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:17 PM | Comments (1)
NYFF COVERAGE – Keren Yedaya’s feature film debut, Or (also known as My Treasure) is an unsparing portrayal of prostitution in Israel. Ruthie is an aging, ailing prostitute whose days of working are numbered, and Or her teenage daughter who works laboriously to attempt to keep her mother off the streets. Administering medicine to her mother, picking her up from the hospital, finding her a respectable job as a cleaning lady, Or patiently cares for her mother while trying to find and maintain a more normal life herself.
At first, the film sets up an ambiguous comparison between Ruthie’s occupation and Or’s random sexual encounters with boys she meets on the street. But once the mother of Or’s boyfriend Ido voices her objections to her son’s relationship with Or, any moral distinction between Ruthie’s and Or’s sexual habits is effectively dissolved as Or begins a seemingly inevitable progression into her mother’s line of work.
Perhaps the film’s principal weakness is its assumption that this turn of events is unavoidable—not simply because it makes for a grim movie, but because it provides no discernible motivations for this downward spiral. Similarly, Ruthie’s apparent addiction to her job goes largely unquestioned. It is possible that both women feel incapable of subsisting in their environment without playing into the male-dominated world of sexual relations, or they find the devotion of their impossibly sympathetic boyfriends insufficient to their needs.
In this respect, the film remains outside of its characters, even as it portrays their banal and unpleasant surface actions (dishwashing, fucking) without flinching at the details. Particularly in its final shot (a somewhat predictable quotation from The 400 Blows), Or observes a moral and psychological distance form its characters that is maddeningly, heartbreakingly irresolute.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Transfax Films 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:14 PM | Submit Comment
NYFF COVERAGE – “Sometimes it’s the strange moments that stick with you,” observes the character John Munn in David Gordon Green’s new film, Undertow. This statement could be aptly applied to any of David Gordon Green’s three feature films, each of which meditates on the minute peculiarities of everyday life and speech in ways that heighten both the strangeness and familiarity of his characters’ interactions. But as many critics have noted, what is perhaps most strange about his films is not their sense of weird details, but rather the fact that Green’s ear for strangeness distinctly resembles that of another director: Terrence Malick.
Like Green’s previous films (George Washington, All the Real Girls), Undertow is set in the rural South, in the backwoods of Georgia, where John Munn has taken his two boys to live on a pig farm, away from people. His sons present quite a burden for the reclusive single father: the teenager Chris (played by a still agile Jamie Bell from Billy Elliott) likes to break windows and get arrested, and the sickly Tim can do no work on account of an obscure stomach disorder which he exacerbates by eating paint. When John’s brother Deel comes to visit after being released from prison, John takes him in to help with the boys (and the pigs). But it soon becomes clear that Deel has not come simply to help out.
The film’s setting and fragmented narrative style, combined with the intricate family mythology and occasional reference to classical Greece, situate Undertow in a Southern Gothic tradition. The film announces itself (both stylistically and via the press-packet) as a descendent of Faulkner, with its random flashes of violence, repressed family secrets, and the offhand lyricism in the dialogue. (Green seems to match Faulkner’s linguistic pyrotechnics with an arsenal of camera tricks — freeze frames, zooms, wipes, solarization — that plays with narrative time and echoes the cinematic style of the 1970s, the era in which the film takes place). But this is merely one of the stylistic influences that the film wears on its sleeve. The film’s second half is an explicit retelling of the chase sequence from Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter, complete with its mildly comical tone and odd lack of suspense and urgency. And then there’s the enduring presence of Malick, evident in an almost direct quotation of Badlands’ forest scene, down to a Carl Orff-like score from Philip Glass.
Undertow will do nothing to dispel the Malick comparisons persistent in critiques of Green’s work, particularly as Malick co-produced the film along with Badlands producer, Ed Pressman. Indeed, if anything, it will likely polarize his critics further, causing some to recoil at his welcoming of influences, and others to be thankful for more “Malick-lite” in lieu of a new film from the reclusive director. But Green must be credited with some stylistic strengths of his own, particularly his warm facility with his actors and his desire to elicit sympathetic (if stylized) performances from them. This is a quality that Green’s cinematic forefather has largely disdained, but one that grounds the younger director’s work and makes Undertow an ultimately winning film.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 35mm print
02 Oct 2004 2:37 PM | Comments (1)
NYFF COVERAGE – Agnès Jaoui’s second film (and the Opening Night selection at this year’s festival) is the type of light, Foucauldian romantic comedy that only the French can make. Following in Renoir’s large footprints, the film delineates the power dynamics between friends, lovers, and relations, portraying a diverse group of characters with a mixture of empathy and mild derision.
The film concerns Lolita, a young student of opera, who feels entirely ignored by the world. She is overweight and plain, and the only attention she receives from men is really directed toward her celebrity-novelist father, Etienne (played by Jaoui’s frequent writing collaborator, Jean-Pierre Bacri). The character of Etienne is entirely (even absurdly) self-absorbed, pausing momentarily from his endless cell-phone conversations to brow-beat his assistant, patronize his daughter, or manipulate sympathy or deference from his new, young wife.
Concurrent with this narrative is the story of another novelist, Pierre, whose illustrious career is only beginning. After years of only tepid critical reception, Pierre has also made a habit of eliciting the pity of his wife, Sylvia (played by Jaoui), through self-deprecation. When Sylvia agrees to help Lolita with her singing as a means of connecting her husband with the celebrity Etienne, a complex set of relations is established with which the film explores issues of power, self-image, and sex.
Look at Me gracefully integrates its many narratives and characters into a series of interactions that alternate between (as well as blend) the mortifying and the hilarious. In this way, it is very much an actor’s film: each scene brings out the minute subtleties in the characters, relations through fluid dialogue and naturalistic blocking. These interactions shed light on the intricate power plays and manipulations at work beneath the film’s more charming surface.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: 35mm print
01 Oct 2004 2:35 PM | Comments (1)
