tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-130956952024-03-06T23:25:46.610-05:00TativilleA Place for Cinema & the Visual ArtsMichael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.comBlogger346125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-91337871590815057172014-10-01T21:09:00.006-04:002022-08-19T15:58:59.036-04:00Goodbye Tativille, Hello OKCMOA Film Blog<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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After nine years and three hundred ninety posts, Tativille<i> </i>will be going on permanent hiatus. Let me extend my sincerest thanks to my exceptionally loyal readership, and my gratitude to the many of you who have contributed over the years. In particular, let me thank Jeremi Szaniawski, a frequent - and always provocative - guest writer, and Lisa K. Broad, my consistent collaborator and the author of many exceptional posts. And to the many filmmakers and artists about whom we have written over the past nine years, thank you for making this a truly extraordinary experience!<br />
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Moving forward, I will be authoring a new weekly blog in my capacity as Film Curator of the Oklahoma City Museum of Art: <a href="http://www.okcmoa.com/filmblog/">http://www.okcmoa.com/filmblog/</a>. Appropriately, my first post focuses on Jafar Panahi's <i><a href="http://www.okcmoa.com/this-is-a-film-jafar-panahis-closed-curtain/">Closed Curtain</a></i>, my favorite film of 2014. And of course, there are 389 additional pieces to explore in the Tativille archives. Happy reading, and again, thank you very much!</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-39083780714825144472014-05-29T15:23:00.001-04:002014-05-30T11:52:00.158-04:00New Film: The Immigrant (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Representing the absolute pinnacle of American prestige filmmaking in twenty-thirteen - even as it would be all but discarded by its Weinstein Co. distributor in a profoundly unheralded spring 2014 release - <b>James Gray's </b>marvelous fifth feature <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Immigrant_(2013_film)">The Immigrant</a> </i>(2013) advances its mid-career, Gen-X maker's career-defining exploration of the New York Jewish experience with its Ellis Island narrative of a used and abused newcomer. Set predominately in a heavily processed, though still easily recognizable Orchard St.-area Lower East Side, Gray's focal heroine Ewa (<b>Marion Cotillard</b>) is in fact a Polish Catholic immigrant who will be preyed upon by the outwardly empathetic Bruno Weiss (<b>Joaquin Phoenix</b>), a Yiddish-speaking Ellis Island visitor whose malevolent intentions are intimated by the care with which he observes the beautiful new arrival. Bruno, as we will soon discover, is a burlesque showman and pimp, a man who at once has some pull with Ellis Island inspectors, and at the same time will be bullied and badly beaten by corrupt law officers who are quick to call him a "kike." In short, Bruno belongs to that archetypal class of ambitious, early twentieth century urban dwellers whose race nonetheless has dictated a more marginal, pettily-criminal existence.<br />
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Though she will prove resistant consistently to the charismatic Bruno's charms, the whored-out Ewa nevertheless will find herself at the center of a love triangle that also includes Bruno's magician brother, the more immediately sympathetic Emil or Orlando, as <b>Jeremy Renner's </b>character is known on stage. Suffice it to say that the rival brothers' shared romantic obsession will yield catastrophe, while also providing the lever for the film's redemptive resolution. As such, <i>The Immigrant</i> not only reproduces the romantic geometry of the writer-director's outstanding <b><i><a href="http://tenbestfilms.blogspot.com/2009/03/ten-best-films-of-2008.html#">Two Lovers</a></i> </b>(2008); it also reaffirms the traditional Jewish morality that appeared likewise in that earlier Joaquin Phoenix vehicle.<br />
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<i>The Immigrant</i>, above all, reads as old-fashioned - in the very best sense, for this writer - not only in its mining of the thematic of redemptive suffering, which will find its most consistent canvas on Cotillard's radiating visage, but also in its unhurried and very precise visual storytelling, which achieves a level of perfection in the narratively and emotionally rich concluding divided frame that matches any last shot in the recent annals of American film art. Gray's neo-classicism, more broadly, eschews generations of intensified continuity, opting instead for a deliberate decoupage and gracefully composed master-shots that bring the filmmaker's golden-hued New York, circa 1921, to vivid and indeed familiar life. Between the film's essentially classical style, therefore, and its ultimate moral complexities - which emerge equally in Ewa's last-act psychology and Bruno's commensurate behavior - <i>The Immigrant </i>emerges as nothing so much as a late, lost cousin to an American Renaissance that experienced many of its own greatest moments on the very same Lower New York streets.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-14705691512060549592014-05-10T21:22:00.000-04:002014-05-10T21:22:14.705-04:00New Film: Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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With its opening, starry nocturnal sky bleeding into an overhead set-up of a revolving turntable, <b>Jim Jarmusch's </b>vampiric opus<b> </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Only_Lovers_Left_Alive">Only Lovers Left Alive</a> </i>(2013) wastes little time in (analogically) tipping the identity of his heroic blood-sucking faction: they are the men of science rejected by generations of ignorant "zombies" and the greats of poetry, literature and most of all music who toil in and out of public view. Jarmusch's male lead Adam (<b>Tom Hiddleston</b>), identified and juxtaposed with his lover Eve (<b>Tilda Swinton</b>) in the alternating, LP-style overheads that succeed the picture's introductory set-piece, proves immediately exemplary, producing great music over a span of centuries that on the one hand would be credited to Schubert and on the other passionately consumed by twenty-first century zombie rock kids - despite Adam's refusal to receive citation for his art. The Romantic myth of the artist is much bigger than Jarmusch's fundamentally nineteenth century hero.<br />
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Adam, of course, is also a connoisseur of the first order, with his stunning collection of stringed instruments in particular providing an object for his (and the film's) rapt attention. Jarmusch's own expertise shades more toward the vinyl that dominates Adam's living space - just as perilous stacks of paperbacks populates Eve's - with the film's carefully curated noise, Motown and Middle Eastern-dominated musical cues never less than spot on in their selections. While the same cannot quite be said for the literary one-liners that would not have felt <i>that</i> out of place in the risible <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2011/06/new-film-midnight-in-paris.html">Midnight in Paris</a></i> (2011), these occasional incursions of dilettantism seem only appropriate in the director's latest piece of bohemian identity-building (which builds directly on 2009's similarly concerned and wildly undervalued <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-film-limits-of-control-co-written.html" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The Limits of Control</a>) in the face of a hostile, insensate and ecologically irresponsible consumerist present.<br />
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Geographically, Jarmusch finds the nineteenth century of his Gothic generic subject, or at least its predilections, in the urban ruins of post-Industrial Capitalist Detroit, and in the perpetual exoticism of Eve and close friend Christopher Marlowe's (<b>John Hurt</b>)<b> </b>old Tangiers. While the latter provides a familiar subject within the contours of the Romantic visual tradition, the film's mobile, midnight registration of latter-day Detroit feels affectingly new and even urgent as an originary act of poetic reclamation. Jarmusch's isn't the first fiction film to capture the experience of despondent present-day Detroit, but it is certainly the most lyrical, and on some level, the most compassionate. <i>Only Lovers Left Alive</i>, even more than the ultra specific <b style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_Mile_(film)">8 Mile</a> </b>(2002) and Clint Eastwood's masterful, if generically 'Rust Belt' <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2008/12/new-film-gran-torino.html">Gran Torino</a> </i>(2008), emerges thusly as <i>the </i>twenty-first century Motor City masterwork.<br />
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Then there is <i>Only Lovers Left Alive's</i> more immediate identity as a latter-day vampire film, a sub-genre that Jarmusch's film equally dominates, thanks especially to the the filmmaker's creative interpretation and application of the nineteenth-century mythos. Present similarly in details such as its O-negative popsicles, privately commissioned hardwood bullets and complicated, nighttime trans-Atlantic flight itineraries, <i>Only Lovers Left Alive's </i>most memorable and noteworthy refashioning of the vampire narrative ultimately occurs with its instantly compelling and even revelatory characterization of its nocturnal rock musician as vampire. Much to the author's credit, there is a sense in which Jarmusch's narrative choice feels as if it is the <i>most natural</i> within our current cultural context (while of course remaining deeply personal for this cinematic paragon of the early 80s Downtown 'punk' scene). To put it another way, Jarmusch has managed to organically transform the stock vampire narrative into an archetypal example of his own personal mythology. <br />
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The filmmaker's postmodern sensibility, by comparison, emerges through the unique temporality of vampiric experience: having lived for centuries and even millennia, Adam and Eve persevere in an almost post-historical condition of multiplicity, as inhabitants not simply of a degraded present but also of countless pasts that live on not just in their remembrances and relationships, but in the anachronistic artifacts that fill the filmmaker's latest (from Adam's century-old dressing gown, stringed objects and late sixties stethoscope to Eve's modern iPhone and the leather gloves worn by both). Time itself emerges as one of <i>Only Lovers Left Alive's </i>primary emphases and points of contemplation, whether it is the elegantly languid form that conveys Jarmusch's deliriously romantic narrative - and expresses the indie master's modernist interest in the experience of duration - or in the lovers' essential immortality, which provides the film with its deeper emotional resonance. </div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-83428997539056891862014-03-31T12:11:00.000-04:002014-03-31T13:17:56.278-04:00February/March In Review: The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Missing Picture, Non-Stop & Kinoshita Keisuke <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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At the end of January, I <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/02/tativilles-january-2014-in-review.html">wrote</a> of the relief that comes with the new year, with no longer having to submit oneself to the responsibilities of list-making and being able, finally, to find some balance between the old and the new. In the past two months, my viewing has tilted even further toward the old, thanks in particular to two new scholarly projects that came to dominate much of my film-viewing time. Before I get to the more substantial (and official) of the two in this piece's final paragraph, let me review those noteworthy new releases that I have not yet discussed on this platform, beginning with a major-work that I have done my best to avoid speaking about until now.<br />
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The film in question, as the post's opening two screen-grabs indicate, is none other than <b>Wes Anderson's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Budapest_Hotel">The Grand Budapest Hotel</a></i> (2014), the most dioramic of the mid-career Gen-X master's career, and one of his stronger perhaps (though not quite to the level of his 2012 career peak <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-film-moonrise-kingdom-2012.html" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Moonrise Kingdom</a>,<b> </b>or to 2007's unjustly undervalued <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2007/10/new-film-darjeeling-limited.html">The Darjeeling Limited</a></i>). What <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i> shares with the latter work in particular is a discursive focalization through the medium of cinema itself, or more precisely in the case of <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i>, film history. We see this in the economy of aspect ratios that preserve the film's three time periods; in the irises and tracking shots that call attention to its fundamental materiality; and of course in the Ruritanian romances, Alpine mountain films, and its star-studded partial namesake that all contribute to the picture's narrative content. Anderson's latest is also a work again of the diorama, of the <i>kunstmuseum </i>and the miniature, captured in tilt-shift photography (as my viewing companion and this website's co-author has pointed out). <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i> finds its greatest pleasures thus, in its accumulations - be it those of the narrative or of its <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Hotel_(film)"><b>Grand Hotel</b></a></i>-caliber casting - and its manifold details, in sum, its <i>mise-en-scène</i>. It would be tempting to describe the film in terms likewise of the confectionery that has played a large role in its marketing, and in many respects it does feel this way, were it not also for the film's comically gratuitous cartoon violence - <i>The Grand Budapest Hotel</i> is the closest of Anderson's films to 2009's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tenbestfilms.blogspot.com/2010/06/ten-best-films-of-2009.html">Fantastic Mr. Fox</a> </i>- and its more and less oblique references to mid-century fascism. Anderson indeed contributes another key film to his generation-defining body-of-work.<br />
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Staging its own meticulously crafted dioramas with sculpted clay figurines, <b>Rithy Panh's</b> <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Picture_(film)">The Missing Picture</a> </i>(2013) produces a new form of political essay film that seeks to recreate the filmmaker's personal recollections of life under the murderous Khmer Rouge using the aforementioned inanimate objects - and those few newsreels and relevant propaganda films that survive the period. The genius of Panh's latest testimonial resides in this very novelty, in its figuration of the Marxist regime's intentional and systematic process of dehumanization in a form that essentially eliminates the human form from its reproductions. What results is the titular "missing picture," the heretofore largely undocumented nightmare reality that the Khmer Rouge endeavored to create for its bourgeois and capitalistic enemies, in the image of its profoundly flawed political theory (which disastrously combined Rousseau and Marx). In his dioramic spaces (mostly) and the occasional surviving film clip, Panh's picture equally offers a fond glimpse into Cambodia's lost, pre-Democratic Kampuchea past, into the modern Phnom Penh that would be ravaged by Pol Pot and his ideological faction. A work of powerful, even undeniable truth, <i>The Missing Picture </i>is one of twenty-fourteen's finest commercial premieres to date.<br />
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The biggest surprise of the past two months belonged to <b>Jaume Collet-Serra </b>for his<b> </b>of-the-moment actioner, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Stop_(film)">Non-Stop</a> </i>(2014). The Catalan-born Collet-Serra seems to understand something that most others do not, namely that we spend much of our time communicating with others through our phones - rather than in the face-to-face conversations that has traditionally provided the medium with its mode of interpersonal exchange. Collet-Serra responds to the representational problematic involved in this new means of communicative discourse by projecting Liam Neeson's narratively central texts on screen, in a manner similar to the method utilized in Netflix hit <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(U.S._TV_series)">House of Cards</a></i> (another mainstay in my past two months of viewing). Consequently, Collet-Serra creates a plastic image that is at once transparent onto the fictional world that he expressively brings into being, and is, at the same time, readable as a flat surface containing a series of significant data points. <i>Non-Stop </i>does not simply engage, however, with our new forms for mediating the world, but instead also interrogates the outstanding, though rarely discussed question of public safety in the long post-9/11 era. Specifically, Collet-Serra's film, from a <b>John W. Richardson </b>and <b>Christopher Roach</b> story, brings to fictional light the superficial measures enacted by the United States government to insure air safety in the period following the terrorist attack. <i>Non-Stop</i>, in other words, is a film rich in ideas about the world we inhabit - and how we have come to engage it.<br />
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Finally, as I have noted above, I spent much of the past two months viewing older films, with those of Japanese master <b>Kinoshita Keisuke</b> (1912-1988) representing the large majority. Indeed, as part of a project that I recently drafted for a non-English-language film journal - given my, shall we say, baroque writing style, you all should feel great pity for my translator - I watched or re-watched fifteen of the filmmaker's features, with the majority coming from the wartime and Occupation-era phases of the writer-director's career. Most of my critical insights on the generally under-appreciated Kinoshita and his marvelous body-of-work belong to my future essay, of course, so let me instead list those works that I would number among my favorites of the director's (and/or his most formally notable, in the case of some of the later films in particular): the propagandistic <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036034/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_50">The Living Magoroku</a> </i>(1943); personal favorite-among-the-favorites, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039091/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Girl I Loved</a> </i>(1946); <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039406/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_43">Phoenix</a></i> (1947); from a <b>Kurosawa Akira </b>script, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040782/?ref_=fn_al_tt_3">The Portrait</a></i> (1948); <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041713/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_39">Here's to the Young Lady</a> </i>(1949); <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0042651/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_35">The Wedding Ring</a> </i>(1950); <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043699/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Carmen Comes Home</a></i> (1951), Japan's masterful first color feature; <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046127/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">A Japanese Tragedy</a> </i>(1953); <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047281/?ref_=nm_knf_i1">Twenty-four Eyes</a> </i>(1954); and the (pictured) scroll-painting-inspired <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053842/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_15">The River Fuefuki</a></i> (1960). A near-exact contemporary of Kurosawa, the exceedingly 'Japanese' Kinoshita might just be a more generically adventurous Ozu to his compatriot's second-generation Mizoguchi. At the very least, Kinoshita belongs in any remembrance of Japan's post-World War II 'golden age.'<br />
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<i>The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Missing Picture and Non-Stop are all currently in commercial release in North America, while the ten Kinoshita films listed above are available to be streamed on <a href="http://www.hulu.com/plus%E2%80%8E">Hulu Plus</a>.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-36972888947123759142014-03-10T16:41:00.000-04:002014-03-11T17:05:59.593-04:00New Film: Stranger by the Lake / L'Inconnu du lac (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Distributed by Les Films du Losange, the French production company most associated with the films of its co-founder Éric Rohmer, <b>Alain Guiraudie's </b><i><b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stranger_by_the_Lake">Stranger by the Lake</a></b> </i>(<i>L'Inconnu du lac</i>, 2013) draws on the late master's suspended holiday-season settings, iterative narrative structures and two-shot conversational set-ups for its own, very different story of death and desire within the context of gay cruising culture. In this framework, that is by bringing a more expressly 'other-ed' portrait of male homosexuality to the screen than is common in this <i>Modern Family</i> media moment - Guiraudie populates his exceedingly explicit film with the conspicuously promiscuous much more than the monogamous, with the voyeur and the sexless bisexual - not to mention one that calls upon earlier 'cruising' stereotypes, <i>Stranger by the Lake </i>would seem on some level to court conversation-stopping accusations of homophobia. Thankfully, for once at least, we've been saved from this canard, for reasons one might imagine that have to do mostly with its abundantly apparent originality - that is for its organic joining of the deliberate and lyrical 'Losange' film, graphic gay copulation and indeed Chabrolian suspense, all in the service of a sharp, socially potent allegory.<br />
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<i>Stranger by the Lake</i>, to expand with spoilers on this last point, is at its core an allegory for unsafe sex in the AIDS era. (As a partial aside, the Tom Selleck-ness of <b>Christophe Paou's</b> Michel and <b>Pierre de Ladonchamps'</b> anachronistic choice of automobile both speak to plague's earlier peak years.) From the first, focal protagonist Franck (Ladonchamps) seems little concerned with using protection, an attitude that is not shared by one of his older hook-ups. Following another of his casual forested encounters, Franck spies his <i>objet du désir </i>Michel clandestinely drowning his lover in the eponymous lake. Concealing this knowledge and little concerned, evidently, for his own safety, Franck commences a passionate affair with the newly unattached murderer, a romance that increasingly separates the lead from his platonic conversational partner Henri (<b>Patrick D'Assumçao</b>). The observant and very sympathetic Henri, however, will confront Michel with an insinuation of his crime, an accusation that compels the mustachioed killer to follow the middle-aged divorced male into the erotically coded woods. Indeed, as the murderer Michel gives Henri what he wants - a throat-slashing in lieu of intercourse in the perfect, Bataillean grafting of AIDS-age sex and death - Guiraudie's camera intentionally misleads the viewer as it peers at the pair, in a manner that calls to mind many of the film's sexual encounters, through the slightly obscuring tall grass. Franck too will finally face Michel, at least in a fashion, as he willingly accepts death to satisfy his sexual desire - in what therefore proves the ultimate emblem of unprotected promiscuous (gay) sex in the AIDS era.<br />
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Throughout <i>Stranger by the Lake</i>,<i> </i>Guiraudie's visual storytelling proves never less than expert - cf. the maddening handheld work of the much lesser <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Is_the_Warmest_Colour">Blue Is the Warmest Color</a> </i>(2013) - with his observational, surveillance-style long-takes offering an ideal and thematically commensurate vehicle for the picture's voyeuristic psycho-sexual drama. The film's setting - <i>Stranger by the Lake</i> does not once deviate from the lake, its rocky shore and the surrounding woods - is no less ripe in its connotations, particularly when one considers the frequently nude, foreshortened male subjects that transform this space into a spoiled Eden of sorts (to again hint at the disease's early history, while also drawing upon or at least echoing such work as Thomas Eakins' <a href="http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/The_Swimming_Hole">"The Swimming Hole"</a>). At the same time, Guiraudie's film is an exemplary piece equally of lyrical landscape cinema, a work that digresses to disclose the beauty of the lake's choppy blue-black surface or the sudden breeze that caresses the location's towering hardwoods. The acts depicted give way to the fact of the setting (to paraphrase Bazin) in this striking new masterwork of the queer cinema and 'Losange' catalog both.<br />
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<i>Let me thank Lisa K. Broad for her considerable interpretative input. Since Lisa has not yet seen Blue Is the Warmest Color, any suggestion of the film's manifestly inferior quality is mine alone.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-64109153361517972392014-03-07T15:48:00.001-05:002014-03-08T00:36:01.968-05:00"How bored, how doleful is the flesh!": Jeremi Szaniawski on Nymph()maniac (2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The impetuous and darkly facetious <b>Lars von Trier </b>is back with a two-in-one hat-trick,<b> </b><i><b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymphomaniac_(film)">Nymph()maniac</a></b> </i>(2014). It tells the story of Joe (<b>Charlotte Gainsbourg</b>), a self-professed nymphomaniac who embarks upon a life-revisiting confession to Seligman (<b>Stellan Skarsgard</b>), a middle-aged man who takes her in after finding her lying, beaten up and unconscious, in a damp alleyway. As he listens to the recollections of Joe’s many tumultuous and colorful sexual adventures—they never bring solace to this bored and compulsive soul—suspicion grows that Seligman's care and attention are far too kind to be driven solely by noble and selfless intentions…<br />
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As the spelling of the film(s)’ title indicates, the first volume focuses on the <i>‘Nymph’</i> stage; while the second, more violent part, has to do with the <i>‘Maniac’</i> side of its titular character, emphasizing a brutal dialectical rapport between youth and adulthood, boredom and pain, beauty and ugliness, which turn out, in an indirect but sobering way, to be utterly universal. With this apparently vapid ‘pornographic’ diptych, the Danish director may have found the most profound expression of his cinema, namely one that is at once profoundly didactic/demonstrative (a <i>film à thèse</i>) while pushing the boundaries of self-referentiality (to <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemic_(film)">Epidemic</a></i></b>, most clearly, but also the anti-naturalistic, almost Brechtian acting found in many of his films), irreverent playfulness and irony to the very limits. <i>Nymph()Maniac</i> also gives us at long last what von Trier always seemed to teeter on, often breaking down his films into chapters, namely a form of ‘cinematic novel’. The frame narrative of the film, constantly interrupted à la <i>Tristram Shandy</i>, is in itself perfect material for a dark comedy, and it titillates one to see how far von Trier is going to push the parallel with several Marquis de Sade books, wherein a young woman is taken in by an apparently well-meaning man who turns out to be an even greater sadist than the ones she met earlier. Other more punctual references to literary classics include Nabokov’s <i>Lolita</i>, or the greatest poet of grotesque and sublime eroticism who ever set word to paper, Georges Bataille. As for the film’s ‘chapters’ <i>per se</i>, Joe’s recollected stories, as in a picaresque novel, introduce random characters which are often jubilant grist for the Dane’s comedic mill: in the first film, special mention ought to go to Uma Thurman as an apodictic cuckolded wife, as she bursts into Joe’s apartment with her children in order to show them ‘the whoring bed’, to much comic effect. Yet all these scenes in the first film constantly elude the proverbial punch. In similar anticlimactic fashion, it ends with young Joe (model <b>Stacy Martin</b>) claiming to her lover (<b>Shia LaBeouf</b>) that she can’t experience orgasms anymore, the image fading in the most cheap fade fashion into the credits. The latter are accompanied by footage from part two, wherein other familiar von Trier character actors appear, and of far more grotesque qualities: <b>Willem Dafoe</b>, <b>Jean-Marc Barr</b> and the inenarrable<b> Udo Kier</b>, for what promises to take us into the darker, <i>‘Maniac’</i> part of the narrative, where all hell will break loose.<br />
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In spite of its pronounced literariness, far from feeling like an unrealized book, this film creates a perfectly original—if heavily derivative—form of this hybrid, between the purity of the nymph and the provocation of the maniac, and the gaping hole in the middle, the disquieting mystery (and meaninglessness) of life, all bathed in a jarring, absurdist humor. Like the grotesque bodies it bares naked, <i>Nymph()Maniac</i> never shies away from exposing this aspect, opening on a series of mysterious and beautiful shots of walls and pipes in a snowy alleyway (evocative of 1950s Japanese cinema), followed by the nihilistic chords of Rammstein’s heavy and foreboding music—the tone of dark irony and excess of the film set from the get go. And the conversations between Joe and Seligman, filmed mostly with fixed shots and in a dull interior are starkly counterbalanced by the postmodern pastiche that constitute each recollected story/chapter, all boast a different visual style, filled with playful elements of <i>mise-en-scène</i> where von Trier seems to nod toward Hal Hartley more often than to his much revered Andrey Tarkovsky—although the episodic and formally diverse looks also reference <b><i><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2011/11/yale-university-122-123-remnants-of.html">The Mirror</a></i></b>, in a rather irreverent way. This, needless to say, makes for a highly original, but also heavy to digest, mix. Admittedly the various episodes could become quite tiresome, were the film a single opus. As for the segues which stitch the various chapters together, peppered with Joe’s awkward non-sequiturs and Seligman’s eager displays of pedantic erudition (from fishing techniques to Bach and Fibonacci’s number) they are so preposterously arbitrary and contrived in their effort at imparting structure (and therefore control) onto the universe, i.e. giving meaning to what has none, that they can only elicit laughter (or at least a satisfied grin) in the audience.<br />
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But all of the above doesn’t do justice to the participative dimension of the film—during the short narratives that Joe tells Seligman, it is the question of veracity rather than the picaresque erotic adventures which fascinates the viewer. We become the investigators, never fully identified with Joe or Seligman, trying to see through their lies: Seligman claims to be Jewish, yet his wall shows a Christian Orthodox icon. And while he tells Joe that he is asexual, the lecherousness deep in his voice and the eagerness with which he spurs her on betray his further, darker intent—as much as his sexual frustration and the limits of his super-ego. Joe, for that matter, could be lying too, but it is her ambiguity which makes her titillating: as she recounts, in a fragile, almost angelic voice, a story that is so utterly comedic and implausible, it seems as though most of it is pure fabrication. This is allegorized in the way a bruised and beat-up Charlotte Gainsbourg projects herself as the young Stacy Martin. Phony and hokey, the dialogues also constantly remind us of the falseness and pretenses of the characters: Joe, for instance, often delivers her story in an impeccable English, but will pause at words pronounced by Seligman that she couldn’t possibly not know otherwise, yet sheepishly insisting that she doesn’t, inviting more pedantic elaborations from the older man. But it isn’t the lies she tells so much as the story she never reveals which give the film its psychoanalytical interpretive key: if it seems quite clear that Joe didn’t have a fraction of the sexual experiences she professes to, the question of her loving, idealized father’s role (<b>Christian Slater</b>) in shaping her psychosexual profile remains suspended. But its presence, the poetic lyricism of the early years, clearly idealized and contradicted by the father’s dark delirium on his deathbed and Joe’s lubricating at the sight of it, elegantly suggests Freudian explanations without actually bringing them to the fore, eliding and leaving heavily pregnant the incestuous, melodramatic cliché. Constantly going from lies and fabrications to the next, all the while feebly explained and ‘boxed up’ by Seligman, the film allegorizes the manipulative and enticing nature of cinema itself: a constant work of deception and engulfment to which we develop a fetishistic and libidinal attraction.<br />
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Those disparaging critics who derided the film as pretentious and boring are at once spot-on and dead wrong.<i> Nymph()maniac</i> cultivates boredom like the greatest works of modern literature did: with relish and distinction. This distinguished ennui becomes utterly fascinating as we are forced to contemplate the very fabric of the film, indeed becoming its writers instead of the readers of the film. This participative stance is invigorating, and has seldom been witnessed in recent art-house cinema, harking back to the great triumphs of the 1960s, but with von Trier’s added postmodern gimmicky pauses, which are indeed pretentious but also endearing in the way in which they unmask the mad hatter that is the director, all the while keeping us guessing as to what this wildly original and creative mind is made of—perhaps a mixture of childish imagination and cruelty with the maturity and weathered perversion of a (dirty) old man, itself referenced in the constant ebb and flow in the narrative between youth and jaded middle-age. And this is becoming insofar as the film narratizes the life of a proxy for the filmmaker, Joe being about von Trier’s age at the time of the making of the film, moving from the adorable child to the rugged, beat-up adult who lives in a world of dangerous fantasy. The scenes involving Joe as a child, for that matter, play to the music of Shostakovich’s jazz waltz, used most memorably in another faux sexy thriller,<b><i> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyes_Wide_Shut">Eyes Wide Shut</a></i></b>, but more to the point here, in von Trier’s remarkably kitsch commercial directed in the early 90s for the French insurance company CNP, where a child traverses several decades and becomes an adult in a faux one-take lateral tracking <a href="http://www.ina.fr/video/PUB3774418055/cnp-assurance-vie-video.html">shot</a>.<br />
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Lars von Trier is a master of (self-)advertising and promotional coups, and so it is probably very cynically that he has marketed his <i>Nymph()Maniac </i>for what it is not (cf. Paul Verhoeven's <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Showgirls">Showgirls</a></i></b>), namely a film filled with sexual tension and enticing erotic material—the film, at least in its theatrical version, features far less nudity and eroticism than, say, <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_is_the_Warmest_Color">Blue is the Warmest Color</a></i></b>. Whenever the film comes anywhere close to becoming arousing (mostly thanks to the rather unambiguously beautiful body of Martin), the director playfully reverts to the grim interior of Seligman and Joe’s bruised and fatigued features. This is a film about the sexual frustration and utter deprivation of an erotic life in most of the Western world, and as such it serves as a brilliant indictment of that very state of things; or at least it does show how pornography reifies the body and sucks passion and meaning out of physical ‘love’.<br />
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Even though the film is definitely not about its ending, I shall not reveal it for those who might care about Seligman’s and Joe’s wretched fates and all their many glaring contradictions, discursive and otherwise. The film’s finale continues, however tamed, the grand climaxes of <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antichrist_(film)">Antichrist</a></i></b> and <b><i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melancholia_(2011_film)">Melancholia</a></i></b>, wherein vindication or cataclysms are completely thwarted by a profound nihilism, adding another layer of meta-commentary on the senselessness of existence and, more to the point, on the lack of pertinence of the vast majority of cinema today, equating it with the episodic, procrastinating and addictive nature of TV shows and the raw and monotone nature of pornography, two of the (sadly) major ‘cultural’ phenomena of the early 21st media. <i>Nymph()Maniac</i>, a paradoxical miracle of a film(s), will leave the viewer wanting, whetting a welcome appetite—specifically for good cinema, a thirst that can never truly be quenched. In this, the film brilliantly establishes a parallel between its characters’ compulsions and us spectators, caught face to face with our sobering condition and destiny.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-59368138060833350252014-02-17T23:28:00.002-05:002014-02-17T23:48:17.769-05:00New Film: Like Father, Like Son (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Reaffirming its writer-director as one of the contemporary screen's most effective makers of sentimental, family-centered melodrama, to damn with faint praise in any context other than the filmmaker's country of origin or his own, exceptional body of work, <b>Kore-eda Hirokazu's</b><b> </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2331143/">Like Father, Like Son</a></i> (<i>Soshite chichi ni naru</i>, 2013) displays the same gentleness and narrative restraint that has long proven a hallmark of the Japanese auteur's corpus. Elliptical and delicate in its presentation of its ripped-from-the-headlines-style shocker - six years earlier, two newborn boys are switched at birth - Kore-eda's Cannes prize-winning, Ozuesque latest emerges above all as a subtle, yet sharp (in the manner of the great master) critique of historical Japanese notions of parent- and especially father-hood.<br />
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The most emotionally satisfying solution to the mix-up, at least to the distant observer - the situation remaining status-quo, with the Nonomiya and Saiki families raising their 'adopted' children, rather than their long-separated blood off-spring - is rejected quickly by the professionally driven and rather successful Ryota (<b>Fukuyama </b><b>Masaharu</b>). Indeed, in keeping with what we are told is the long-held habit of the Japanese people, from an era when such mix-ups were commonplace, Fukuyama's lead defaults to blood, a decision that is made that much easier for Ryota by his adopted son Keita's (<b>Ninomiya </b><b>Keita</b>, in one of the <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0408664/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Nobody Knows</a> </i>and <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1650453/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">I Wish</a> </i></b>director's uniformly accomplished child performances) comparative lack of natural ability. In the end, <i>Like Father, Like Son</i> is about Ryota's struggle to overcome the idiom named in the English title: he must at once resist the cold, disinterested parenting style of his own father, and at the same time become the father that he has failed to be, both to his biological offspring Ryusei (<b>Hwang </b><b>Shôgen</b>) and more importantly, to the loving, loyal (and impossibly cute) Keita. Ryota, in other words, must reject the less and less culturally valid economic and masculine ideal that he has spent his life pursuing.<br />
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The Saiki family, on the other hand, provides an alternative to the career-oriented Nonomiya's and their sterile urban bourgeois existence. Alternate patriarch Yudai (<b>Furankî Rirî</b>) in particular offers a point of contrast in his lax attitudes toward work - why do today what can be put off to tomorrow? - and his more nurturing, hands-on style of parenting. Though the buffoonish and occasionally greedy Yudai is himself no unambiguous ideal, as his wife Yukari (<b>Maki </b><b>Yôko</b>) makes abundantly clear time and again, his virtues do serve to highlight Ryota's archly Japanese shortcomings. Indeed, for all Yukari's faults and for the Saiki's far more modest circumstances in general, their larger nuclear family does seem to work in a manner that the reconfigured, biological Nonomiya's fail to. Nurture most certainly rules out over nature and blood in <i>Like Father, Like Son's</i> cinema of reassessed cultural priorities.<br />
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Through all the above, Kore-eda manages, rather masterfully, to be both universal and culturally specific in his humanistic, paternal melodrama. The same also can be said for his keen eye for middle-class detail - an observational skill perfected previously in the director's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-film-still-walking.html">Still Walking</a> </i>(2008) - which here finds expression in the chewed straws that restate the film's final thesis or in the Red Lobster setting that provides a meeting point for the families, their attorney and representatives of the negligent rural hospital. (Kore-eda's camera naturally pursues a similarly observational tact that at the same time allows for mimetic grace-notes, such as the concluding rainbow flare that emotionally echoes the film's final, ever-so-slightly unconventional familial reorganization.) Ultimately, <i>Like Father, Like Son</i>, like all the very best Kore-eda, is a robust cinema, a work of precise gestures, carefully crafted familial relations and lived-in (or in the case of the Nonomiya's hotel-like flat: not-so-lived-in) places that do not so much provide added value as they comprise the very substance of the director's sterling middle-range craft.<br />
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<i>This piece was written by Michael J. Anderson with significant authorial input from Lisa K. Broad. Like Father, Like Son is <a href="http://www.ifcfilms.com/films/like-father-like-son">now playing</a> in Denver, Minneapolis, New York and a number of additional North American cities (in which I have not lived).</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-56157212910983213562014-02-01T17:04:00.000-05:002014-02-01T21:43:36.137-05:00January In Review (feat. Spike Jonze's Her)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Always a welcome relief from the rigors and assumed responsibilities of year-end list-making season, January is that month, at least for this academic critic, where things get back to normal, where my viewing log again begins tilt away from the current releases that have dominated since at least early November, toward a more privately enriching balance of old and new. This changing of priorities, so to speak, has already yielded more than its reasonable share of exceptional viewing, beginning with <b>Frank Borzage's </b>recently released on home-video <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/too-poor-and-too-rich-little-man-what.html">Little Man, What Now?</a> </i>(1934), a film that falls squarely within my academic area of specialization. Written about in this <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/too-poor-and-too-rich-little-man-what.html">space</a>, the outstanding <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> is perhaps most extraordinary (and exciting) as an object of auteurist research. A different kind of context - the social history of Shah-era Iran - provided the primary interest in and my <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/iranian-oscar-submission-supplement.html">reason</a> for writing on another key January discovery (in one of my secondary scholastic fields), <b>Dariush Mehrju'i's </b><i><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/iranian-oscar-submission-supplement.html"><b>The Cycle</b></a> </i>(1977). But, of course, loyal <i>Tativille</i> readers will already know my admiration for both of these remarkable films.<br />
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Among those older January 2014 films that I have not considered previously on this site, <b>Chu Yuan's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075329/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Magic Blade</a></i> (1976, <i>pictured</i>), available on Eastern Masters home video, surely stands as the most purely pleasurable: composed in Shawscope with an at times almost Mizoguchian depth and elegance, <i>The Magic Blade</i> adopts a proto-gaming structure for its spatially dislocated pageant of studio-set-driven stagings - and the deliriously bizarre hired-killers that magically materialize in each. For the Bollywood enthusiast, the Chinese-language<i> Magic Blade </i>approaches the high kitsch that was being created by <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2010/01/narratively-integrated-spectacle.html">Manmohan Desai</a> at approximately the same moment. From earlier in that same odd-ball decade, this past month also provided my first opportunity to view <b>Barbara Loden's</b> counter-classic debut <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanda_(film)">Wanda</a> </i>(1970), or a better, and more richly specific <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonnie_and_Clyde_(film)" style="font-style: italic;">Bonnie and Clyde</a>, stripped of any semblance of Penn's romanticism. As befits a work of its now monumental critical stature, the sexual politics of Loden's exceptional film hint at the actress-director's profoundly marginal position in an inequitable and excluding American film industry.<br />
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As is inevitably true, given the studios' propensity to release their award-hopefuls late in the calendar year, my January also witnessed its share of noteworthy newer titles, with <b>Martin Scorsese's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/too-poor-and-too-rich-little-man-what.html">The Wolf of Wall Street</a></i> (2013) and <b>Asghar Farhadi's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/iranian-oscar-submission-supplement.html">The Past</a> </i>(2013) among the more successful. The only film that I felt the need to view twice in January 2014 - I wrote about my less conflicted second screening <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/too-poor-and-too-rich-little-man-what.html">here</a> - <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i> exhibits both the strengths and limitations of the director's worldview, with the former ultimately overwhelming the latter in one of Scorsese's most entertaining epics in ages. As for Farhdi's latest, though it does not quite rise to the masterful level of <i><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2011/09/49th-new-york-film-festival-separation.html">A Separation</a></i><b> </b>(2011) in its manipulation of architecture for the purposes of its melodramatic narrative, <i>The Past</i>, reviewed <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2014/01/iranian-oscar-submission-supplement.html">here</a>, does succeed in re-imagining its primary virtues within a decidedly French context. I also belatedly caught French-Canadian director <b>Denis Villeneuve's</b> <b style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392214/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Prisoners</a> </b>(2013, <i>pictured</i>), a strong piece of revisionist, vigilante-themed cinema that finds real interest in its curious and compelling religious discourse; <i>Prisoners </i>emerges, above all, as a consummate work of mood and mid-winter atmosphere.<br />
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Then there was <b>Spike Jonze's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Her_(film)">Her</a></i> (2013, <i>pictured</i>), my personal choice for the best new film I saw last month, and to my present thinking, the second best American fiction film of twenty-thirteen (just behind Richard Linklater's superlative <i><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-film-before-midnight-2013.html">Before Midnight</a></i>). Extrapolating ever so slightly from our own, less-than-admirable iPhone-dominated existence, <i>Her </i>achieves an extraordinary intimacy and even empathy in its depiction of <b>Joaquin Phoenix's</b> attraction to and romantic affair with his operating system, voiced by <b>Scarlett Johansson </b>in a role that relies heavily on the spectator's cognizance of her absent, very familiar body. <i>Her </i>is a film filled with questions and ideas, and not simply those of a speculative, science-fiction variety: we are asked to consider what it is exactly that we love in another, and are confronted by the dangers (for any romantic relationship) inherent in the processes of growth and change. Jonze brings this story to the screen within a synthetic, digital environment - a flat, pro-filmic world dominated by whites, reds, pinks and oranges - that in some sense fuses with and confuses the film's sci-fiction subject with our own aesthetic connection to an anesthetized, Apple-style digital cinema. <i>Her </i>in this respect, which is to say in both content <i>and</i> form, is all about <i>our</i> love of machines - even as it seems to disclose something much deeper of Jonze's own romantic history.<br />
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Finally, to January's misses, more to footnote and give context to my cinematic month than to grind axes, not that you shouldn't be skeptical: excluding the more immediately forgettable and culturally off-the-radar - including a handful of American features from the early-to-mid 1930s, which I need not mention here - my most notable disappointments included the first and last films I saw in January 2014, <b>Joel </b>and <b>Ethan Coen's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inside_Llewyn_Davis">Inside Llewyn Davis</a> </i>(2013) and <b>Woody Allen's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Jasmine">Blue Jasmine</a> </i>(2013, <i>pictured</i>). Though the former feels fairly central to the brothers' work, inasmuch as it provides a synthesis of their archetypal <i>Odyssey</i> and <i>Job</i> (sans restoration) narratives, and though <b>Oscar Isaac</b> is as good as advertised, I must confess that I found the experience of watching <i>Inside Llewyn Davis</i> to be, on the whole, quite unpleasant. While the same cannot quite be said for <i>Blue Jasmine</i>, Allen's dialogue - a veritable master-class in cringe-worthy exposition - insures its place at a level below the Coen's current critical favorite.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-85920968386231474922014-01-26T14:57:00.001-05:002014-12-06T01:03:47.565-05:00Iranian Oscar-Submission Supplement: The Past (2013) & The Cycle (1977)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Anointed Iran's submission for the 86th Academy Awards, following its fêting for 'Best Actress' at last year's Cannes Film Festival - it failed not only to receive a 'Best Foreign-language' nomination, but even, quite unexpectedly and undeservedly, to secure a place on Oscar's nine-film <a href="http://www.deadline.com/2013/12/foreign-language-oscar-academy-award-shortlist/">shortlist</a> - <b>Asghar Farhadi's </b>French-Italian co-production <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Past_(film)">The Past</a> </i>(<i>Le passé</i>, 2013) transposes the transparent settings of the director's Iranian-set Oscar winner <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2011/09/49th-new-york-film-festival-separation.html">A Separation</a> </i>(<i>Jodái-e Náder az Simin</i>, 2011) into the French doors and sliding glass of contemporary France. <i>The Past </i>accordingly lacks some of the former's cultural specificity, its inscription of a surveillant, theocratic society - though <i>The Past</i> does still rely on acts of spying, of overhearing to expedite conflict. <i>The Past</i>,<i> </i>in other words, loses a bit of what might be described as the architectural masterpiece's 'Iranianess', though it will make up for this with a more Antonioni-esque form of incommunicable modernity that materializes in an opening set-piece where separated spouses Marie (<b>Bérénice Bejo</b>) and Ahmad (<b>Ali Mosaffa</b>) attempt to speak through a transparent airport barrier: here, Farhadi's film adopts the inaudible perspective of the hearer, rather than the speaker, reversing fields as their exchange progresses in silence. (Speaking of silence, there is a palpable, almost heavy lack of sound throughout much of Farhadi's un-scored film, which above all suggests the deep and fundamental theatricality of the director's latest feature.)</div>
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<i>The Past</i> also witnesses the return of <i>A Separation's</i> divorce-themed subject - a topic that seems to be inspiring a new generation of Persian filmmakers^ - albeit from a perspective that again resounds more immediately with European and French stereotypes than it does those of the Islamic republic - though, of course, there remains the almost inescapable intimation that the morality that Farhadi realizes is also present, however covertly, in his Middle Eastern homeland. Specifically, <i>The Past </i>brings a French heroine to the screen, in Marie, who has moved through a number of men over the course of her adult life. She lives with the married Samir (<b>Tahar Rahim</b>; pictured, middle), and as we soon discover, they've conceived their first child together. Meanwhile and melodramatically, Samir's wife lies comatose following an attempted suicide that thusly calls to mind the director's fine, <i><b><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%27Avventura">L'Avventura</a></b></i>-inspired <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/About_Elly">About Elly</a> </i>(<i>Darbâreye Eli</i>, 2009), as will, more directly, the film's subsequent investigation into the causes for her self-inflicted act-of-violence. Ultimately, the admirably complex <i>The Past </i>favors something approaching the former film's uncertainty, which will again place the filmmaker's engaging and effective latest - a work, which it almost goes without saying, that is very well performed from the deeply unlikable Bejo down through to the film's adolescent and child actors - squarely within the domain of the Euro-Asian art film. </div>
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Begun in 1973-74, but not officially released until 1977 when it became Iran's <i>first</i> submission for Best Foreign Language Film*, <b>Dariush Mehrju'i's <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cycle_(1975_film)">The Cycle</a> </i></b>(<i>Dayereh-ye Mina</i>) remains one of the most forceful and unflinching social-problem films that the nation has yet produced, a work that seeks to expose and testify against the appalling (real-world) conditions of Iran's black-market blood banks*. Building on the social realism of the director's lightly surreal, symbol-laden New Wave landmark <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaav">The Cow</a></i> (<i>Gāv, </i>1969), <i>The Cycle </i>deliberately discloses the abject conditions - almost unbearable from our post-HIV perspective - under which the gangsters prey on the approximately eight-hundred addicts (according to one the feature's physicians), who supply the nation's tainted blood supply: junkies huddle together on the floor, giving liter upon liter of blood, for a small fee, until they literally pass out. Among those who will find themselves in this hellscape is handsome seventeen year-old Ali (<b>Saeed Kangarani</b>), whose presence here is dictated by his father's failing health, rather than by addiction. In fact, Ali's intrinsic intelligence, ambition and resourcefulness, not to mention his material want, will insure his transformation into a successful black market entrepreneur and criminal facilitator - and even more insidiously, his loss of familial obligation and human compassion. Mehrju'i's Iran thus emerges as a nation ripe for the revolution it would soon undergo - a revolution, ironically that led the filmmaker to reside in <i>The Past's </i>France for several years (after another incidence of censorship) before finding the opportunity to direct his sharp housing-crisis satire, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099492/?ref_=nm_flmg_dr_19">The Tenants</a> </i>(<i>Ejareh Nesheenha</i>, 1986), more than a half-decade later.<br />
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Then again, owing to its late-Shah-era historical moment, a period that famously experienced increased Westernization (and greater opportunities for women than would be the norm, subsequently), <i>The Cycle</i> displays a liberal modernity that at best has been a rarity in the post-revolutionary Persian cinema. Mehrju'i's film is frank not only in its depictions of the nation's grave social ills, but also in its presentations of the uncovered female body - both at the very top and very bottom, see pictured - and even in its elliptical inscriptions of casual extra-marital sex. Just as notable is Mehrju'i's characteristically deft light comedic touch, which we witness, for example, in Ali's wide-eyed encounter with <b>Fourouzan's </b>comely nurse Zahar: coming upon the bare-legged young woman as she plucks leg hairs, Ali quickly ducks behind a frosted pane of glass, where he will slide to the floor while maintaining his broad, unblinking gaze (which Zahar reciprocates as she slides on her stockings and covers her bare head). In this very Western moment, we see a society in the process of a sexual modernization that nonetheless would soon be arrested with the arrival of the Ayatollah Khomeini's theocratic Iran.<br />
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This, of course, is also a moment of unabashed youthful vigor, which, in Mehrju'i's work, would eventually give way to the sophisticated middle-age of the director's deeply Fellini-esque tale of spousal mistreatment and divorce, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamoun_(film)">Hamoun</a></i> (1990), and to <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leila_(film)">Leila</a> </i>(1996), Mehrju'i's justly lauded polygamy-themed post-Revolution pinnacle. <i>The Cycle</i>, even more than <i>The Cow </i>in this critic's view, comes closest to matching <i>Leila's </i>achievement, as it attains not only the aforementioned candor, but also an incantatory, almost uncanny visual beauty that materializes, above all, in the film's hazy natural sunlight. From a pro-filmic perspective, beauty balances the ugliness - even within the filmmaker's establishing exteriors of a bleak, industrializaing urban landscape - that provides <i>The Cycle's</i> final justification.<br />
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<i>^ The best of the plausibly Farhadi-inspired features that I saw in 2013 was About Elly and A Seperation star Peyman Moaadi's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2357790/" style="font-weight: bold;">Snow on the Pines</a>. Named 2012’s best feature, and awarded the best screenplay prize by the Iranian Film Critics and Screenwriters Guild, at a ceremony in which Merhruj'i also won a lifetime achievement award, Moaadi’s directorial feature-debut presents its subtle and open-ended narrative of marital infidelity and protracted dissolution in an alternating set of fluid hand-held framings and static set-ups that each make successful use of the film’s sensuous black-and-white cinematography. An actors’ film, naturally enough, Moaadi uses his performances to support a narrative that withholds the dramatic confrontation between the cheating husband and wronged wife - one that will prove comparatively low-key, ultimately - until very late in the narrative.</i><br />
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<i>* According to <a href="http://www.iranchamber.com/cinema/articles/iranian_cinema_before_revolution2.php">Shahin Parhami</a>, the Shah administration lifted its ban on The Cycle only after the state opened its first blood bank.</i><br />
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<a href="http://www.sonyclassics.com/">Sony Picture Classics</a> is currently distributing <a href="http://www.sonyclassics.com/thepast/"><i>The Past</i></a> in North America, while <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Cycle-Saeed-Kangarani/dp/B004XQO8BE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1390765458&sr=8-1&keywords=The+Cycle+DVD+mehrjui">The Cycle</a> </i>is available on Region-1 DVD courtesy of <a href="http://www.nimapictures.com/">Nima Pictures</a>.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-31342661524696836102014-01-13T23:41:00.001-05:002014-06-15T13:09:35.388-04:00Too Poor and Too Rich: Little Man, What Now? (1934) & The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Premiering finally on home video last October as part of TCM's Universal Vault Series, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025408/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Little Man, What Now?</a> </i>(1934, Universal) provides even further evidence of the extraordinary emotional richness and thematic consistency of director <b>Frank Borzage's</b> Depression-era body-of-work, a cinema that considered as a whole comfortably places the Italian-American auteur in the pantheon of studio-era filmmakers. Adapted from <b>Hans Fallada's</b> best-selling 1932 novel, <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> opens with a lengthy intertitle from producer <b>Carl Laemelle, Jr. </b>that defines the filmmakers' intentions in presenting the work: namely, to render a "social service" by offering a solution to the "WORLD'S DAILY PROBLEM," which is to say the economic hardships that prevailed in its mid-Depression time of production. This answer is proposed early in Borzage's German-set, Pre-Code melodrama, following the soapbox homily of a socialist speaker who opines that the "rich are too rich and [that] the poor are too poor." Though Borzage's film isn't without sympathy for this view, particularly where it comes to the deeply felt material sufferings of his under-class protagonists, <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> ultimately proffers a more Roman Catholic response commensurate with many of his other signature achievements, from the supreme <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10509208.2010.495006#.UtMEDdJDuSo">Man's Castle</a> </i>(1933) to the more middle-range, though no less thematically essential <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2012/04/little-space-all-to-ourselves-frank.html">Mannequin</a> </i>(1937); here, Borzage<i> </i>frames his family-centered, hearth-and-home philosophy in the form of question, one to which male romantic lead Hans Pinneberg (<b>Douglass Montgomery</b>) will receive an affirmative answer: "if one is satisfied to accept his life, peacefully, he's better off, isn't he?"</div>
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<i>Little Man, What Now?</i> finds much of its drama in Hans's struggle to do something so seemingly simple, to accept the domestic happiness that his beautiful young wife Lämmchen (<b>Margaret Sullivan</b>) seems eager to provide, even in the most materially scarce - and thus classically Borzagian - of circumstances. In his resistance, Hans provides another example of the director's archetypal male, a man of some ambition, and even more pride, who fruitlessly strives after worldly success. (By contrast, Sullivan's Lämmchen, in the image of <i>Man's Castle's </i>Loretta Young, embodies the redemptive woman, the figure whose extraordinary love and uttermost faith provides meaning in an indifferent Depression world.) At the same time, as the film's opening political rhetoric indicates, <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> does not entirely lack a class consciousness, thanks not only to its inscriptions of poverty and on occasion, ill-gotten wealth, but also to its dramatizations of Hans's mistreatment by a deeply unjust employer class. <i>Little Man, What Now? </i>accordingly accedes to the problem that the film's inscribed politics approaches - but not its materialist solution (thankfully, given the film's situation in Düsseldorf and Berlin on the eve of National Socialism). As always, Borzage's is a fundamentally Roman Catholic work, a film that imagines happiness within the context of the sacramental family - not in wealth or even the lack of material want. (Of course, owing to its late Pre-Code timing, Borzage depicts a couple who, at the film's open, are both unmarried and expecting their first child; this is simply to point out that marriage is not a pre-condition for family in Borzage's liberal, post-World War I universe.) </div>
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A work therefore that is consistent both thematically and morally with Borzage's broader body-of-work, <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> equally shares the fleshed-out domestic spaces that define the director's visual art - and confirm his family-centered philosophy - with the couple's various top floor flats echoing the private worlds, for instance, of <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7th_Heaven_(1927_film)">7th Heaven</a> </i>(1927) and <i>Man's Castle</i>. (In <i>Little Man, What Now?</i>, a ladder memorably leads to the couple's final flat, a space so modest that it transforms Lämmchen, her husband and their newborn into a modern-day Holy Family.) Borzage's signature is no less present, likewise, in the film's smaller details and motifs, in the bread (cf. <i>Man's Castle</i> again) that one supporting player complains is being fed to the birds rather than to he and his starving wife. It is indeed here, above all, that the Depression and Borzage's social consciousness is felt most acutely - even as the politics that this same secondary character spouts are undercut by a previous act of political selfishness, one that indirectly will lead to his devoted wife's death.</div>
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Though to do so would be hardly fair or even appropriate, <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> is precisely the sort of film that might be used against <b>Martin Scorsese's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993846/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Wolf of Wall Street</a></i> (2013): Borzage concerns himself with the victims of financial injustice, while Scorsese's narrative (in terms of screen time, at the very least) favors a predatory elite; the studio-era director grants his heroine moral strength and greater spiritual intelligence, whereas Scorsese's depiction of his female characters has occasioned vociferous accusations of misogyny; Borzage's spaces are memorably robust and feel lived in, while Scorsese's shallow visuals routinely strike the viewer as overly artificial and can be inelegantly planar; and finally, <i>Little Man, What Now?</i> is upfront with its conceived social value, one that speaks eloquently to its precise historical moment, where <i>The Wolf of Wall Street's </i>is perplexing at best. In short, <i>Little Man, What Now? </i>offers a sort of accusation and even testimony against the lapsed Catholic's latest, a film, speaking of Scorsese's, which seems to do little more than exist in its flawed, even suspect form.</div>
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And yet, exist it does with so much comedic verve and formal adventure<span style="font-size: x-small;">*</span>, that the above litany of accusations, whether or not they merit serious consideration, lose any real force. In bringing Jordan Belfort (<b>Leonardo DiCaprio</b>, in what might be a new career best performance - see the "cerebral palsy-stage" scene, a latter day master-class in the key of <i>Gilbert Grape</i>) and his marry band of idiots and rakes to the screen, <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i> proves extremely effective farce - as opposed to satire - an object of ridicule wrapped in the (occasionally) more and (more often) far less appealing dimensions of their unfettered consumption. Well, actually Jordan's addiction, be it his dependency on sex, narcotics or money, which in each instance the filmmakers bring to the screen with extraordinary frequency and excess. Scorsese's latest is indeed another work of his signature expressionism<span style="font-size: x-small;">^</span>, where Jordan's internal life ultimately intrudes on and shapes the world that reaches the viewer - in its visual distortions and gaps in continuity, not to mention its detours into contingent possibility (cf. the two depictions of his drive home from the country club) and even its free and playful use of an audible interior dialogue at the Swiss bank. Scorsese's form, not to mention the tone and content of his dialogue and the lead's near constant voice-over, brings a lightness ultimately that belies the implications of Jordan's crime and his self-destruction.</div>
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<i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i> thusly stands as the latest of the director's <i>Citizen Kane</i> narratives, a film that witnesses the rise and fall of a great (American) man who is anything but, and in this particular case, has no obvious excuse - in his social acculturation - for his beastly behavior. Jordan, in some sense, just is this way, he exists as a figure of corrupted animal nature who, in the end, receives a typically (for Scorsese) small dose of redemption. <i>The Wolf of Wall Street</i> devours the straw man and emerges as one of the best films among this year's Oscar hopefuls.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* <i>Little Man, What Now? </i>also witnesses a moment of genuine formal freedom in its wonderful carousel set-piece: Sullivan and Montgomery are able to carry out their conversation only in snippets, on the occasion of each of the merry-go-round's revolutions. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">^ <i>Tativille</i> co-author Ms. Broad emphasized both the filmmaker's expressionism and the film's tepid redemption in a post-screening discussion.</span></div>
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Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-27362517396231226462014-01-01T21:51:00.000-05:002014-01-02T00:53:01.017-05:00The Best Films of 2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>The Twenty Best New Films of 2013:</i><br />
<i>1. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/36th-starz-denver-film-festival-touch.html">A Touch of Sin</a></b> </i>(Jia Zhangke)<br />
<i>2. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-film-grandmaster-2013_7.html">The Grandmaster</a></b> </i>(Wong Kar-wai; pictured)<br />
<i>3. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/05/out-of-murky-depths-lucien-castaing.html">Leviathan</a></b> </i>(Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012)<br />
<i>4. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/12/new-film-stray-dogs-12-years-slave.html">Stray Dogs</a></b> </i>(Tsai Ming-liang)<br />
<i>5. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/36th-starz-denver-film-festival-great.html">The Great Beauty</a></b> </i>(Paolo Sorrentino)<br />
<i>6. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-film-before-midnight-2013.html">Before Midnight</a></b> </i>(Richard Linklater)<br />
<i>7. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-best-of-netflix-neighboring-sounds.html">Neighboring Sounds</a></b> </i>(Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)<br />
<i>8. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/06/new-film-you-aint-seen-nothin-yet-vous.html">You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</a></b> </i>(Alain Resnais, 2012)<br />
<i>9. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/03/new-film-beyond-hills-2012.html">Beyond the Hills</a></b> </i>(Cristian Mungiu, 2012)<br />
<i>10. </i><i><b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-film-to-wonder-2012.html">To the Wonder</a></b> </i>(Terrence Malick, 2012)<br />
<i>11. </i><i><b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/12/2013-better-by-help-of-good-epilogue.html">Viola</a></b> </i>(Matías Piñeiro, 2012)<br />
<i>12. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-film-spring-breakers-2012-no-2012.html">Spring Breakers</a></b> </i>(Harmony Korine, 2012)<br />
<i>13. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/06/between-philia-and-eros-noah-baumbachs.html">Frances Ha</a></b> </i>(Noah Baumbach, 2012)<br />
<i>14. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2018086/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Camille Claudel 1915</a> </i>(Bruno Dumont)<br />
<i>15. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/12/2013-better-by-help-of-good-epilogue.html">Bastards</a></b> </i>(Claire Denis)<br />
<i>16. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/06/new-film-post-tenebras-lux-2012.html">Post Tenebras Lux</a></b> </i>(Carlos Reygadas, 2012)<br />
<i>17. </i><i><b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-film-pain-gain-2013.html">Pain & Gain</a></b> </i>(Michael Bay)<br />
<i>18. </i><i><b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/12/new-film-stray-dogs-12-years-slave.html">12 Years a Slave</a></b> </i>(Steve McQueen)<br />
<i>19. <b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/10/previewing-36th-starz-denver-film.html">Vic+Flo Saw a Bear</a></b> </i>(Denis Côté)<br />
<i>20. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268732/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Museum Hours</a> </i>(Jem Cohen, 2012)<br />
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</i> <i>Twenty might have been thirty-five or more in a year that showed exceptional depth beyond 2013's peak achievements. At the summit, the Sinophone cinema dominated with the competition best from Europe's three leading fests, Berlin (The Grandmaster), Cannes (A Touch of Sin) and Venice (Stray Dogs). The Sensory Ethnography Lab's avant-garde doc masterstroke Leviathan and Paolo Sorrentino's deliriously pleasurable The Great Beauty, a La Dolce Vita for the Berlusconi era, rounded out a decisive personal top five. Six through nine sported the American fiction film of the year (Before Midnight); an outstanding first feature from Brazil (Neighboring Sounds); one more masterwork from one of the medium's true giants (Alain Resnais's You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet); and a new career best from a critical favorite of the New Romanian cinema (Beyond the Hills). This second group represents the next tier, a cut above the remaining eleven selections for this year's top twenty.</i><br />
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</i> <i>Overall, I hope that my list provides some sense of the 'where,' 'what' and 'who' of film art in 2013 - even if my list is short on 'event' films, be it </i><i>the multiplex's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Gravity</a> (mostly successful, in my estimation) or the art-house's <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2278871/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Blue Is the Warmest Color</a> (which I found only slightly praiseworthy - and almost exclusively for Adèle Exarchopoulos's performance). Then there are the inevitable blind-spots, from <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0993846/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Wolf of Wall Street</a> and 1/10 local debut <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Her</a>, to the very large number of international premieres that have yet to open commercially in the United States, let alone in Colorado. Consider these exclusions the context for what remained a very good year, even here deep in flyover country.</i><br />
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Finally, I should mention that my use of boldface type (on both the above and below lists) indicates those works about which I have written during the past twelve months. Together these posts, accessible by clicking on the respective titles, comprise my public (critical) engagement with a medium that remains very much alive, aesthetically at least, in this age of long-form television - speaking of 'events,' there was none bigger than the final season of <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903747/episodes?season=5&ref_=tt_eps_sn_5">Breaking Bad</a>, another personal audio-visual highlight - and the continued collapse of celluloid as a medium of both production and projection.</i><br />
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<i>Ten Outstanding Older Films Seen for the First Time:</i><br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067962/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Beware of a Holy Whore</a> </i>(Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1971)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077402/?ref_=nv_sr_2">Dawn of the Dead</a> </i>(George A. Romero, 1978)<br />
<i><b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/07/le-grand-amour-1969-erotic-imagination.html">Le grand amour</a></b> </i>(Pierre Étaix, 1969)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052876/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Hanging Tree</a> </i>(Delmer Daves, 1959)<br />
<i><b><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/i-like-these-anglo-saxons-in.html">Professional Sweetheart</a></b> </i>(William A. Seiter, 1933)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102497/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Revenge</a> </i>(Yermek Shinarbayev, 1989; pictured)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063169/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Three Resurrected Drunkards</a> </i>(Nagisa Oshima, 1968)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110081/?ref_=nv_sr_2">To Live</a> </i>(Zhang Yimou, 1994)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069404/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Travels with My Aunt</a> </i>(George Cukor, 1972)<br />
<i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059934/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Yoyo</a> </i>(Pierre Étaix, 1965)<br />
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<i>A far more subjective and scatter-shot experience of the year that was, a year that most significantly introduced this writer to the wonderful mini corpus of long-forgotten French comedian Pierre Étaix</i>.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-84387933089842475802014-01-01T21:36:00.000-05:002014-01-01T21:36:15.437-05:00The Best Films of 2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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1. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-film-grandmaster-2013_7.html">The Grandmaster</a> (Wong Kar-wai)<br />
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2. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/36th-starz-denver-film-festival-great.html">The Great Beauty</a> (Paolo Sorrentino)</div>
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3. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/06/between-philia-and-eros-noah-baumbachs.html">Frances Ha</a> (Noah Baumbach, 2012; pictured)</div>
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4. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/05/out-of-murky-depths-lucien-castaing.html">Leviathan</a> (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012)</div>
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5. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/06/new-film-post-tenebras-lux-2012.html">Post Tenebras Lux</a> (Carlos Reygadas, 2012)</div>
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6. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/36th-starz-denver-film-festival-report.html">A Touch of Sin</a> (Jia Zhangke)</div>
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7. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/07/new-film-before-midnight-2013.html">Before Midnight</a> (Richard Linklater)</div>
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8. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1454468/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Gravity</a> (Alfonso Cuarón)</div>
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9. <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/04/new-film-spring-breakers-2012-no-2012.html">Spring Breakers</a> (Harmony Korine, 2012)</div>
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10. <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2268732/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Museum Hours</a> (Jem Cohen, 2012)</div>
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Lisa K. Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04722888430261386839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-45711193214742448102013-12-22T22:25:00.000-05:002013-12-22T22:57:06.382-05:00Twenty-thirteen - Better by the Help of a Good Epilogue: Matías Piñeiro's Viola & Claire Denis's Bastards<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Taking its title from the gender masquerading protagonist of William Shakespeare's <i>Twelfth Night</i>, and borrowing story-lines and snatches of dialogue from both the aforesaid and also the playwright's <i>As You Like It</i>, <b>Matías Piñeiro's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2379418/">Viola</a> </i>(2012) presents its theatrical subject in a de-spatialized fugue of tightly framed faces, shot just above or at the eye-level of the film's shifting set of speakers. Piñeiro elegantly cuts within the camera, moving between his stratum of actors as they articulate the author's words or elaborate in their own philosophical flights of fancy.<b> </b>In thus abstracting the Bard's (and Piñeiro's) dialogue from a proscenium-like setting, the early thirty-something Argentine writer-director re-conceives his sister art subject - this is a film that engages and explores questions of theatrical and cinematic ontology and specificity - as an object, foremost, of language, as an endlessly reproducible and transportable series of conversations that will quickly move beyond the film's opening, imprecisely marked theatrical space (where the disguised Viola first meets countess Olivia). Piñeiro consequently presents Shakespeare's art in the form with which it is most often lived, as words to be read, recalled and repeated, rather than as a fully formed art-object to be received within the space of exhibition. Theatre is dialogue, and cinema faces in this searching, intelligent sixty-minute interstitial. </div>
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<i>Twelfth Night</i> and <i>As You Like It</i> additionally offer points of theoretical and narrative departure, all in a manner that distinctively recalls the verbose cinema of Eric Rohmer - the Millennial director accordingly joins fellow Argentine auteur Celina Murga in finding significant inspiration in the work of the late French master. The performance's Viola, the pictured Cecilia (<b>Agustina Muñoz</b>), plays the disguised Cesario both on and off the stage, inserting herself in the romantic life of her co-star countess, before attaining the same heterosexual fate as her Shakespearean model. (In so doing, Piñeiro makes even more explicit the essentially modern gender instability of the author's original.) A second Viola (<b>María Villar</b>) materializes just before the film's mid-point, bringing with her a shift in emphasis from the world of theatre to that of D.I.Y. arts publication: Viola and her boyfriend produce the multi-media "Metropolis," which she disseminates by bicycle throughout Buenos Aires's underground arts community. Indeed, it is this latter sub-culture that the film's second half - which will bring together the two Viola's, occasion the <i>As You Like It</i> dialogue referenced in this post title's (in the midst of a spatially disorienting dream sequence) and conclude with an off-key musical 'epilogue' that follows a Rohmerian bit of voice-over business - ultimately sketches. Piñeiro's highly accomplished re-appropriation of Shakespearean light comedy is in the respect a fundamentally social affair in its orientation, a work of film art that achieves its communitarian vision through its overlapping multi-character story construction, romantic entanglements and of course, its sinuous, sensual<i> mise-en-scène</i>.</div>
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Where narrative subject and visual style prove elegantly coterminous in Piñeiro's <i>Viola</i>, leading French auteur <b>Claire Denis's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2821088/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Bastards</a> </i>(<i>Les salauds</i>, 2013) emerges more, by contrast, as an application, however tonally appropriate, of the filmmaker's exceedingly distinctive audio-visual idiom. Combining the dusky vocals and moody instrumentation of <b>Tindersticks </b>with the tenebrous cinematography of <b>Agnès Godard</b>, consistent collaborators both, Denis's film evocatively sketches the grim, conspiratorial story of the extended Silvestri family as they suffer through a Great Recession-era crisis of their own partial creation. From the rain-soaked streets and facades that accompany the film's elliptical opening suicide set-piece, cause <i>and </i>effect of the aforementioned familial breakdown, Denis fixes her post-Bressonian gaze on a series of lightly stroked surfaces that together mark the filmmaker's immediately recognizable signature. Most notable among these forms are the focalized bodies of co-leads <b>Vincent Lindon </b>and <b>Chiara Mastroianni</b>:<b> </b>respectively, we behold the middle-aged Marco's muscular physique beneath his clinging linen shirt and Raphaëlle's supple, mole-covered skin as she writhes beneath her mysterious new neighbor. The body, or more precisely the abused anatomy of <b>Lola Créton's</b> Marquis de Sade's namesake Justine*, presents a site likewise for the film's uttermost expression of abjection, intimated and articulated in increasingly troubling a-chronological snippets, before being forcefully disclosed in the work's concluding low-res shocker. <i>Bastards</i> finds a filmmaker in full control of her inimitable art - if also a shade ambivalent toward the arch provocation that she is bringing to the screen.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">* The Justine reference was noted by <i>Tativille</i> contributor <b>Lisa K. Broad</b>.</span></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.cinemaguild.com/viola/">Cinema Guild</a> is distributing <b>Viola </b>in North America, while <a href="http://www.sundanceselects.com/">Sundance Selects</a> is responsible for <b>Bastards</b>, having released the film both theatrically and via Amazon's streaming service in the United States.</i></div>
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Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-47089054570687597512013-12-11T17:59:00.002-05:002014-10-01T21:12:33.408-04:00New Film: Stray Dogs & 12 Years a Slave<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Following the Berlin and Cannes premieres of Wong Kar-wai's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/09/new-film-grandmaster-2013_7.html">The Grandmaster</a></i> (2013) and Jia Zhang-ke's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/36th-starz-denver-film-festival-touch.html">A Touch of Sin</a></i> (2013) respectively, films that in both instances conceivably merit the title of best in competition, Venice witnessed the debut of a third, prodigious masterpiece of the Sinophone cinema that looks to be the unequivocal equal of the first two, and again a leading pick for the best of its fest. <b>Tsai Ming-liang's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3119416/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Stray Dogs</a> </i>(<i>Jiao you</i>, 2013), from a <b>Tung Cheng-yu</b>, <b>Song Peng-fei</b> and Tsai screenplay, matches <i>The Grandmaster's</i> overriding temporal obsession and <i>A Touch of Sin's</i> encyclopedic inscriptions of space with its own exceptionally rigorous study of physical presence, of the spatialized experience of time that is no less the (story-based) cinema's fundamental subject and substance. Or, to put it another way, <i>Stray Dogs </i>is all about the occupation of spaces, whether it is lightly surreal urban architecture that provides the film with its indelible, post-deluge setting - Tsai expressly personifies these places - or the exceptionally marginal edge of the capitalist economy where the film's protagonists live their unendingly difficult lives.<br />
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Tsai sets the template immediately, providing, in the first of the film's exquisite (and exquisitely slow) sequence-shots - Tsai's visual constructions find the director at the absolute peak of his powers - a formally re-focused emphasis on patient observation, on a multi-sensory exploration of the decomposing <i>mise-en-scène</i>, which will lend the sudden kick of a sleeping child something approaching narrative significance. Both Tsai's obliquely staged, elegantly lit landscapes of a rain-sodden and wind-swept Taiwan, and his unshaven close-ups of patriarch Lee (<b>Lee Kang-sheng</b>) ironically serving as human advertising for new housing, unfold over a matter of minutes rather than the seconds that they would cover more conventional art-house fare. Invested with phenomenological force thus, Tsai creates a marginally narrative cinema, however lacking in dramatic action and verbal exposition for the most part, which draws more on the visual arts, ultimately, than it does on literary and theatrical (read: temporal) media. In fact, in the film's final set-piece, Tsai evacuates his long-take imagery first of human presence, and consequently, of ambient sound, leaving only a monochromatic mural in the rear-distance as his visual field becomes little more than filmed visual art.<br />
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The Taiwanese master's profoundly painterly idiom spreads across a series of discrete set-pieces that slowly disclose the film's human subjects: single-father Lee, his two children (<b>Lee Yi-cheng</b> and <b>Lee Yi-chieh</b>) and the unidentified mother or motherly figures (<b>Yang Kuei-mei</b>, <b>Lu Yi-ching</b> and <b>Chen Shiang-chyi</b>; all three have collaborated with director previously) who move into and out of their orbit. <i>Stray Dogs</i> centers on the family's meager, mundane existence, depicting their daily struggle to satisfy even their most basic needs, from the shelter they find in a grim single-room space to the grimy public lavatory where they brush their teeth and wash their feet - in the trickle that escapes from the bathroom plumbing. Tsai fills his film with the quotidian, with the ways in which the Lee family subsides and spends their days on the most distant margins of the Taiwanese economy, be it again in the work to which the semi-homeless Lee is subjected, or the childhood fantasies that the young heroine pursues in the film's gorgeously lensed supermarket, a vast space of reflective surfaces and painstakingly curated displays. <i>Stray Dogs </i>similarly concerns itself with biological necessity, with the acts of eating, sleeping and even urinating (all of which the films' actors do in full view of the spectator).<br />
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As befits this subject, which is to say as is appropriate for characters who struggle to maintain without any hope of economic advancement or personal progress, <i>Stray Dogs</i> proves a comparatively static experience, for most of its two-hour plus running time at least. This will change, at least momentarily, following the film's most memorable (and certainly discussed) set-piece, Lee's violent, inebriated, psychoanalytically ripe fondling and consumption of his daughter's toy cabbage head - a cousin as it were to <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0445760/?ref_=nv_sr_1">The Wayward Cloud's</a> </i>(2005) even more shocking watermelon. Following this outpouring of abject despair, Tsai will momentarily break from the everyday, as the film's focal patriarch, in a passage reminiscent and worthy of Kenji Mizoguchi - a key source for Tsai's compositional strategies - leads his children to the water's edge in the midst of precipitous nocturnal downpour. Melodrama, in other words, will make a brief but impactful cameo.<br />
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In the extended (concluding) flashback that follows, the Lee's reemerge within an ultra-modern domestic interior that was devastated by the act-of-god that has occurred before the film's narrative begins. Here, in this once comfort-filled setting, there is at least some sense of the upper middle-class experiences and modern conveniences that the family has heretofore lacked, whether it is the homework that the children work on in the presence of their mother (presumably) or the illuminated leather chair in which Lee relaxes. The flood-decimated flat, however, discloses the fundamental sickness that inflects this bourgeois family - a thematic motif that is confirmed in one of the film's rare moments of exposition, and which the viewer is led to speculate may be connected to the male lead's apparent alcoholism. This displaced emotional devastation will come to the fore, moreover, in the film's staggering thirteen minute-plus static penultimate camera set-up, a scene, which in its divergent gazes and multi-planar staging, calls to mind the interpersonal alienation of the director's outstanding <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109066/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2">Vive l'Amour</a> </i>(1994). Indeed, in the emotional terrain it explores, its predilection for narrative experimentation, its implicit political discourse and even in its occasional recourse to the surreal, the very great <i>Stray Dogs</i> will keep the same modernist faith as the aforesaid late twentieth-century masterpiece.<br />
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If in spirit <i>Stray Dogs</i> belongs most to modernism's (twentieth) century, <b>Steve McQueen's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/">12 Years a Slave</a></i> (2013) finds its inspiration in the nineteenth, and not simply by virtue of its slave-era subject. Based on freeman Solomon Northup's published 1853 account of his kidnapping and subsequent decade-plus as a slave in the Antebellum South, McQueen's third theatrical feature reverberates, as <i>Tativille </i>contributor Lisa K. Broad has smartly observed, with the tropes of nineteenth century melodrama. <i>12 Years a Slave </i>indeed hinges on that most Hugoesque of concerns - here it is worth remembering that Northup wrote his memoirs in the very specific discursive context of the mid-nineteenth century - namely, a concealed identity that provides the key to the hero's future happiness (and in this particular case, his freedom). The (legally sanctioned) breakdown of the family and the moral compromises foisted upon <b>Lupita Nyong'o's </b>Patsey, which is to say two of the greater sins perpetrated by an ostensibly religious, thoroughly wicked public, only deepen the emotional impact of McQueen's period melodrama.<br />
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Of course, <i>12 Years a Slave</i> is also a movie of its moment, of an increased interest in the abhorrent institution of Trans-Atlantic slavery, in the midst of the Obama presidency, that in the past year has beget the uniformly rich <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443272/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Lincoln</a> </i>(2012), <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/01/new-film-django-unchained-2012_25.html">Django Unchained</a></i> (2012) and Chris Eska's indie <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2635006/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Retrieval</a></i> </b>(2013). <i>12 Years a Slave</i> adds an extreme sense of visceral pain - aided by ear-splitting sound-cues - and a searing sense of injustice to this latest American feature-film cycle, as well as a carefully observed lyricism and sensitivity toward duration of which McQueen makes discerning use (as for instance in the film's extraordinary long-take lynching scene). Though not ultimately among this writer's choices for the year's best, <i>12 Years a Slave</i> nonetheless would make a perfectly respectable choice for 'Best Picture' - much as <i>Lincoln</i> or the superior, if less-than-safe <i>Django Unchained </i>would have one year ago. While in recent years Oscar seems to have perfected the selection of films that would quickly enter the annals of its most uninspired favorites, <i>12 Years a Slave</i> in the end may be too much (and too obvious a film) for the middle-brow body to ignore.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-64380275478262830372013-11-21T17:25:00.002-05:002013-11-21T17:39:36.424-05:00"I like these Anglo-Saxons": In Consideration and Great Appreciation of William A. Seiter's Professional Sweetheart<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Bowing at Radio City Music Hall in July 1933, an apt setting for the New York premiere of RKO's radio-sponsorship send-up, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024476/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Professional Sweetheart</a></i>, director <b>William A. Seiter's</b> early <b>Ginger Rogers</b> vehicle appeared in the latter stages of an epochal cultural transformation of which Seiter and his playwright screenwriter <b>Maurine Watkins</b> (<a href="http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=10192" style="font-style: italic;">Chicago</a>, 1926) seemed almost uniquely discerning. Defined by a rising consumer capitalism, anti-immigration sentiment and increasingly liberal sexual mores, the immediate postwar years represented what would prove the last glorious gasp for the nation's long dominant Protestant mass culture - sociologist E. Digby Baltzell has named this the "Anglo-Saxon Decade" - though it would be an apogee that already contained the seeds of its own decline, a fall that would be felt acutely with the imminent rise of the more heterogeneous New Deal coalition. <i>Professional Sweetheart</i>, released in the earliest stages of the latter's ascendancy, observes the conflicts or space between prewar heterogeneous Protestant culture, here a lucrative commodity sold to denizens of the nation's "Corn Belt," and both a newer urban secular American Protestantism and an emergent Rooseveltian cultural multiplicity.<br />
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Rogers's radio spokeswoman Glory Eden is both cultural product, she is said to represent "the lost innocence that went out with the war," and also a site for the contradictions that had since developed among the nation's historically dominate Protestant faction. Billed as "The Purity Girl" for wash-cloth king Ipswich's "Ippsie-Wippsie Radio Hour," Glory's public persona is closely monitored and managed by her corporate handlers: she is ordered "certified milk" for the sake of the hotel's nosy staff, is forced to wear a modest nightgown for a matronly interviewer (<b>Zasu Pitts </b>as Elmerada), and is denied every postwar vice - be it drink, cigarettes or jazz. In private, however, would-be wild-child Glory demands sexy underwear and fantasizes about transgressive trips to Harlem. Belying her image spectacularly, Glory contends that she wants to go "the Devil," preferably with an international playboy; she wants to "sin and suffer," ruing that "now I'm only suffering." There is, in other words, a substantial disparity between Glory's wholesome public image, her commodified self, and what is in effect the acculturated postwar reality she embodies.<br />
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This gap is made possible by the lax censorship standards that obtained in Hollywood before the implementation of the Hays Code one year later. It is also indicative of a larger project that Seiter, in a measure of his considerable artistic imagination, pursues throughout the highly accomplished <i>Professional Sweetheart</i>. In the opening studio set-piece, where we are first introduced to our 'Purity Girl,' Seiter makes use of sound perspective to express the discrepancy between the ad campaign that reaches the airwaves and those who are producing the 'Corn Belt'-targeted program: as the camera surveys the studio space with Glory on-the-air, we see (but don't hear) the show's host berating a producer behind a thick pain of glass. That is, we see the reality that is concealed behind the kitschy 'Ippsie-Wippsie Radio Hour' that we, and Middle America, hears. Similarly, Glory's consequent on-air wedding again plays on radio's image-less ontology, with the broadcaster effusively describing the couple's gifts - even as Seiter's tracking camera discloses the far less impressive truth - while also lamenting the fact that they are not on television (in what is therefore a very early reference to the new medium). Seiter's pre-Code cinema shows the reality that 'The Purity Girl' radio spots conceal.<br />
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In an attempt to protect the restless, sex-starved Glory's small-town image, <b>Gregory Ratoff's</b> Ipswich namesake, along with his two protégées, <b>Frank McHugh's </b>Speed Dennis and <b>Franklin Pangborn's </b>Herbert Childress - which is to say, a thickly-accented non-native, Irish newsman-type and coded homosexual; there is again a different ethnic reality that the film's fake, commodified purity obscures - conspire to identify a suitable mate, "an Anglo-Saxon from the Corn Belt" as one of the men puts it. From her coterie of admirers, and much to Herbert's initial chagrin - Pangborn would prefer a blond - they choose Daniel Boone-figure Jim Davey (<b>Norman Foster</b>), a hulking Kentucky native of Anglo-Saxon (read: American or Scotch-Irish) ancestry. A real white American, in other words. When Speed travels to the "home of the purest Anglo Saxons" to recruit the unsuspecting Jim, McHugh's character insists that he not wear his "store cloths," but instead his rural, hunting garb in a further attempt to construct his own wholesome Middle-American (and indeed, pre-twentieth century) persona. Following their on-air nuptials, which Glory wrongly assumes will be her ticket to worldly pleasures, Jim whisks his new bride back to his back-country cabin, to the quieter life that he presumes every woman wants.<br />
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While Glory initially expresses satisfaction with her new life, her on-air displacement by another member of a charter demographic of the New Deal coalition, her black maid Vera (<b>Theresa Harris</b>) - when listening to Glory's replacement, Jim tellingly notes of her more jazz vocal inflections: "say, she makes you feel kind of, say they shouldn't let her do that on the air" - spurs Rogers's lead to return to her star-making role. (Seiter accordingly initiates a discourse that his subsequent <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0025797/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Sing and Like It</a> </i>[1934] would pursue to an even greater degree: namely, the conflict between the life of the artist and that of a more banal, familial existence; in the latter comic feature, Pitts's modestly talented heroine, to be generous, resigns herself to the fact that she will have to sleep with one of his producers - a belief that she most certainly is alone in holding.) Returning back to New York, Glory and Jim now share the microphone in what will thus represent a détente of sorts between Jim's simpler prewar ('Corn Belt') world and Glory's more liberal postwar (urban) present.<br />
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<i>Professional Sweetheart</i> represented Ginger Rogers's first role and starring performance for RKO, following her previous contract work for Warner Bros. (which concluded with her breakthrough appearances in <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024034/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_76">42nd Street</a></i> and <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024069/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_75">Gold Diggers of 1933</a></i></b> earlier that same year). It was of course beside Fred Astaire at RKO that Rogers built her enduring reputation, beginning in yet another 1933 production, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0024025/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_68" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Flying Down to Rio</a>, which was conceived originally as a Dolores del Rio vehicle. <i>Professional Sweetheart </i>was itself received as a Ginger Rogers film, despite her relatively short résumé, with <i>Variety </i>noting that the film "demonstrates again, as she has before, that light comedy is her apple pie." <span style="font-size: x-small;">(7.18.1933)</span> Reviews were indeed generally positive, with <i>The New York Times's </i>Frank S. Nugent arguing that "Miss Rogers has rarely been more entertaining" and that "RKO Radio, which sponsored the picture, merits a vote of thanks for an entertaining comedy." <span style="font-size: x-small;">(7.14.1933)</span> <i>Photoplay </i>shared both sentiments in naming Seiter's film one of the "Six Best Pictures of the Month," alongside the aforementioned <i>Gold Diggers of 1933</i> and the George Cukor classic <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0023948/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Dinner at Eight</a></i>. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Aug. 1933) </span>Though the film is largely unknown today, it is not for a general lack of critical appreciation in its own time.<br />
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Then again, there was at least one source of dissension: trade publication <i>The</i> <i>Film Daily </i>complained of <i>Professional Sweetheart's</i> "choppy story and mechanical treatment and situations," insisting ultimately that the RKO film was "very mild and unimportant." <span style="font-size: x-small;">(5.27.1933)</span> To the latter point, there did seem to exist agreement that as pre-Code as it may now seem, <i>Professional Sweetheart </i>was in fact not prohibitively lurid for contemporary audiences, but instead was "wholesomely insane satire," as <i>Motion Picture's </i>more favorable review observed. <span style="font-size: x-small;">(Sept. 1933) </span>That <i>Professional Sweetheart</i> presently appears, to its very benefit, to lack this same 'respectable' quality, above all speaks to the next two-plus decades of comparatively sanitized Hollywood practice. This is a racy, culturally irreverent studio cinema - before the Hays Code effectively suspended these birthrights - that continues to manifest a real daring in the true subject of its radio-world satire: an Anglo-Saxonism that had become a kitsch commodity in an increasingly pluralistic (newly New Deal) America.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-68588089975817968382013-11-15T12:04:00.000-05:002013-12-01T23:02:20.028-05:0036th Starz Denver Film Festival: The Great Beauty (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Populated by the debauched, disenchanted or simply disinterested elite of Roman society – that is, by a decadent and fading aristocracy, counterfeit art-world celebrities, and endlessly prattling priests – <b>Paolo Sorrentino’s</b> latter-day Babylon revolves around Jep Gambardella (the great <b>Toni Servillo</b> in a career-defining performance), a successful journalist and frustrated former novelist with an acerbic wit and irresistible charm. Jep and his social circle are joined first in a pulsing discotheque on the occasion of the former's sixty-fifth birthday, an event that is celebrated with exuberant group choreography and conspicuous kitsch. So begins <b><i><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=26017">The Great Beauty’s</a></i></b> (<i>La Grande Belleza</i>, 2013)<i> </i>unending progression of chic dinners, all-night bacchanalias and casual hook-ups, with Jep, “the king of the high life,” perpetually present as both participant and observer.<br />
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Borrowing both its decadent Roman subject and its episodic narrative structure, <i>The Great Beauty</i> stands as a soaringly ambitious and spectacularly successful update of Federico Fellini’s 1960 masterpiece, <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053779/?ref_=nv_sr_1">La Dolce Vita</a></i></b>. Where Sorrentino’s luridly contemporary refashioning – a refreshing, in the image of 2008’s <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1023490/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">Il Divo</a>, that obliquely speaks to the cascading corruptions of the Silvio Berlusconi era – departs most from the Fellini original, is in the age of its hero: the sentimental, lost love-obsessed Jep is two decades older than Mastroianni’s Marcello. Sorrentino’s sprawling feature is, in this respect, a decidedly Proustian affair, with Jep's man of supreme sensibility providing a modern-day stand-in for the French author's Marcel - while the appearance of his younger self, in an ingenious aquatic flashback, serves to replicate or at least echo the novelist's fluid structure of remembrance.<br />
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Though perhaps a shade less baroque than Sorrentino’s preceding David Lynch-inspired corpus (see 2006’s <b><i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0772105/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The Family Friend</a></i></b>), the outstanding <i>The</i> <i>Great Beauty</i> remains a work of intoxicating stylization, with short lateral tracking shots and frontal framings joined by brisk montage. The film’s contrastive sacred and secular musical cues separately serve to bring out the contradictions of a Rome that is no less Sorrentino’s city-symphonic subject. A sizable leap forward, ultimately, for the director of the very fine <a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2008/03/more-than-glimmer-of-hope-consequences.html"><b><i>The </i></b><i style="font-weight: bold;">Consequences of Love</i></a> (2004), <i>The Great Beauty </i>represents a viable contender for film of the year.<br />
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<i>The Great Beauty screens at the Sie Film Center tomorrow, November 16, at 1:00 PM, with Sorrentino present to receive Maria and Tommaso Maglione Italian Filmmaker Award. Janus Films is distributing the feature in North America, with dates confirmed for Denver (11/29) and Minneapolis, among other cities. The above review has been adapted from my original 36 SDFF <a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=26017">program notes</a>.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-53270933350156176742013-11-15T09:14:00.000-05:002014-02-23T23:42:46.598-05:00Previewing the Directory of World Cinema: Belgium: The Broken Circle Breakdown, as reviewed by Jeremi Szaniawski (and Updated 2/23/2014)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<b><i>The Broken Circle Breakdown</i></b><br />
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<b>Studio/Distributor:</b> Menuet Producties, Topkapi Films/Kinepolis Film Distribution, <br />
Wild Bunch, Tribeca Film<br />
<b>Director:</b> Felix Van Groeningen<br />
<b>Producer: </b>Dirk Impens<br />
<b>Screenwriter:</b> Johan Heldenbergh, Mieke Dobbels, Carl Joos, Felix Van Groeningen<br />
<b>Cinematographer: </b>Ruben Impens<br />
<b>Production Designer:</b> Kurt Rigolle<br />
<b>Editor: </b>Nico Leunen<br />
<b>Costumes:</b> Ann Lauwerys<br />
<b>Genre: </b>Drama<br />
<b>Cast: </b>Veerle Baetens, Johan Heldenbergh, Nell Cattrysse<br />
<b>Duration: </b>111 minutes<br />
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<b>Year: </b>2013<br />
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<b><u>Synopsis</u></b><br />
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Tattoo artist Elise (Veerle Baetens) and musician Didier (Johan Heldenbergh) fall in love at first sight; in spite of their differences, they are united by a love of music. Soon a daughter, Maybelle, springs forth from their union. Everything seems to be going well, but when Maybelle becomes seriously ill, the couple’s relationship is tested. Their worldviews, once harmonious, deteriorate as Elise’s religious leanings and idealism chafe against Didier’s militant atheism, with tragedy close at hand.<br />
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<u><b>Critique</b></u><br />
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Felix Van Groeningen upholds the fascination with and will to emulate the American movie formula in Flemish cinema, yielding a tragic love story which retains a powerful grittiness in spite of its lush and sensuous representations. Finding his emotional substrate in American culture, the director adroitly reaches for the sentiments contained in bluegrass music, which makes for the most memorable moments of his latest film: who cannot respond in a somatic fashion to classic songs such as ‘Will the Circle be Unbroken?’ or ‘Wayfaring Stranger’, and its lineage of interpretations by great masters such as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, or Bill Monroe? These fabulous songs disarm the viewer, beautifully integrated as they are into the fabric of the film, which is filled with passion and heartbreak, joy and longing—sad yet uplifting all at once—just as the music it references.<br />
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Undoubtedly, Van Groeningen shows the knack he displayed in his earlier efforts, namely to combine relatively unexpected elements into a powerful whole. Here, bluegrass music goes hand in hand with the story of Flemish characters—and the pathos of American melodrama with more typically Belgian down-to-earth-ness. Much as the Strobbes were unconditional adorers of Roy Orbinson in the director’s best film, <i>The Misfortunates</i> / <i>De helaasheid der dingen</i> (2009), Didier and Elise are lovers of music, but also lovers tout court: they pair their erotic passion and familial love with their melomania, at least at first.<br />
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While the film complicates the cliché story about the rise and fall of a relationship through a jumbled chronological structure (a narrative technique which has served many a successful American film), it is in the bodies and voices of imperfect (and therefore human) beings that it acquires its actual credibility and worth. This could not have been achieved without fully committed and talented actors, and both Baetens and Heldenbergh live up beautifully to the occasion: the latter (upon whose play the film is based) is rock solid as a rugged, rationalistic but romantic bohemian soul, while the former dazzles with her beauty and sensuality, sensitivity and vulnerability, in a truly unforgettable performance, which alternate moments of seduction with an earnest fallibility bordering on comedy. Not least among the accomplishments of the stars is that they sing the bluegrass standards themselves. The result is nothing short of extraordinary, and the soundtrack to the film has become a best-seller in Europe, and even made a remarkable entrance into the bluegrass charts in the US.<br />
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If the performances are first class, if the cinematography and camera movements are lush and impeccable overall, if the editing by Nico Leunen (the husband of Fien Troch, another young Belgian director to follow) is outstanding, the story does lose a little bit of steam at the beginning of the second half, and several of the last scenes show some less inspired directorial choices, including one near the film’s end, centered on Elise’s confusion, which plays a trick on the viewer, which is ill-fitting considering the earnest tone of the rest. But the weakest moments come in the film’s social, ideological critique dimension, when it critiques fundamentalism and American politics (the figure of George W. Bush is twice seen on TV in a film which takes place over the years of his infamous presidency). This could possibly have made <i>The Broken Circle Breakdown</i> stronger but instead does it a disservice for lack of depth, particularly when Didier rants, in the middle of a concert, against religion and how it slows down progress and medical research. This scene, which probably worked fine in the play and from which it clearly is borrowed too literally, taking place on the stage as it does, falls flat and is awkward here, although it triggers the film’s final act. But most clearly it goes to show that the desire to keep the core ideological debate of the play (atheism vs religion, rationalism vs idealism) was neither a very good, nor a very successful, idea. <br />
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For all these reasons, <i>The Broken Circle Breakdown</i> remains strongest when its author stays clear of didactic and literal discourse or binary oppositions, and remains true to the tone of the songs: simple, deep and earnest, beautiful and heartbreaking--stories of how happiness seems ever elusive, or how, once reached, its fleeting nature can be as unbearable as the most shattering loss; and how excess of love can be as damaging as a shortage of it. Gladly there is no shortage of beautiful moments in the film, including the final scene itself, in which the personal evolution of Elise, expressed in her tattoos which elegantly tell the story of her relationship with Didier throughout the film, reaches a truly electrifying moment where music and cinema come together one last time.<br />
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Belgian cinema never was more prominent at the Oscars than this year, with two nominations (the irresistible <i>Ernest & Célestine</i>, made by Belgians Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier, is nominated for best animation feature), and never did it have a more likely candidate for best foreign film than <i>The Broken Circle Breakdown</i>. Not only because the film so skillfully embraces a beacon of American culture, but also because it manages to speak to the audience in a way that is at once accessible yet never simplistic—the essence of good entertainment. Regardless of whether the film goes on to win the statuette on March 2nd (something I would gladly put my money on), it is quite clear that Van Groeningen, who now spends a lot of his time in Los Angeles, with his flair for stylish cinema and unquestionable talent for working with actors, has made a place for himself on the international film scene (the director has already announced that his next project would star Matthias Schoenaerts, who was featured in Belgium’s previous Oscar nominated film, <i>Bullhead</i> (2011)). Let us hope that the circle of success, for the young director as well as the emulation he will foster within the greatest of small cinematic nations--and beyond--remains unbroken, at least for a little while longer.<br />
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<i>Editor's Note: The Directory of World Cinema: Belgium, edited by Jeremi </i><i>Szaniawski and Marcelline Block, will be available for </i><i><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/D/bo16814197.html">purchase</a> from Intellect </i><i>Ltd. beginning in January 2014. In keeping with the recent emphasis of this site, </i><i><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25872&fid=77">The Broken Circle Breakdown</a> </i><i>also screened this past week as part of the 36th </i><i>Starz Denver Film Festival.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-25118616917512808792013-11-14T11:54:00.000-05:002013-11-14T23:26:40.293-05:0036th Starz Denver Film Festival Report Card<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=26029"><b>Borgman</b></a> </i>(Alex van Warmerdam, Netherlands, 2013, 118 min.)</div>
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Jan Bijoviet and his band of anarchic wood sprites enter the lives of a middle class family like a force of nature leaving chaos and destruction in their wake. Excellent, expressionistic sound design and engaging performances distinguish this absurdist satire on bourgeois alienation and repressed desire. </div>
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<i>Lisa’s Grade: A-</i></div>
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<i><b><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=25995">The Fifth Season</a></b> </i>(Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth, Belgium, 2012, 93 min.)<br />
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A visually stunning apocalyptic fable about the loss of connection between man and the natural world, <i>The Fifth Season</i> combines dark, deadpan humor with free floating environmental and political allegory. Young Belgian filmmakers Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth create painterly compositions - which are frequently suggestive of Pieter Bruegel and James Ensor - and multi-layered soundscapes that recall the work of Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr.<br />
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<i>Lisa’s Grade: B+</i><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?FID=77&id=25882">Go Down Death</a> </i>(Aaron Schimberg, United States, 2013, 88 min.)</div>
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This singular work of DIY punk filmmaking unites Guy Madden’s anachronistic nitrate-era aesthetic, apocalyptic post-WWI iconography, and the mannered, circular dialogue of early 90s-indie auteurs like Hal Hartley. Enigmatic and elliptical, <i>Go Down Death</i>, feels significantly longer than its 88-minute running time, but its combination of energy and intellect keeps the viewer engaged.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Lisa’s Grade: B</i><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25867&FID=77">Grigris</a> </i>(Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, France/Chad, 2013, 101 min.)</div>
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Esteemed African filmmaker Mahamat-Seleh Haroun follows Grigris – an aspiring dancer with a paralyzed leg – from the city to the country as he attempts to earn a living and find romantic happiness. Haroun’s subtle direction highlights Souleymane Deme’s remarkable physical performance in the title role, while the film’s pastoral coda opens up new areas of meaning.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Lisa’s Grade: A-</i><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25869&FID=77">Ilo Ilo</a> </i>(Anthony Chen, Singapore, 2013, 99 min.)<br />
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Set in the late 1990s, this warm and occasionally harrowing family drama from Singapore charts the increasingly uncertain fate of a middle class family and their Pilipino maid as the Asian financial crisis intensifies. Spare, but elegant cinematography and uniformly excellent, understated performances elevate this Cannes Film Festival favorite, which often recalls Edward Yang’s <i>Yi Yi</i> (2000).<o:p></o:p></div>
<i>Lisa’s Grade: A- </i><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25799&FID=77">Labor Day</a> </i>(Jason Reitman, United States, 2013, 111 min.)</div>
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<i>Labor Day</i> unfolds over six consecutive days, during which Josh Brolin’s sensitive escaped convict opens the hearts of reclusive divorcee, Kate Winslet, and her wide-eyed teenage son. This overwrought family melodrama combines hothouse sexual metaphor and heavy-handed sentimentality in a manner that over-powers the well-meaning performances of his talented cast. At the level of style, Reitman’s signature shallow-focused cinematography denies the spectator’s gaze the freedom to move while cross-cut flashbacks confuse more often than they enlighten.<o:p></o:p></div>
<i>Lisa’s Grade: D </i><br />
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25841&FID=77">The Search for Emak Bakia</a> </i>(Oskar Alegria, Spain, 2012, 84 min.)<b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
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First-time filmmaker Oscar Alegria lets chance be his guide as he attempts to discover the namesake of Man Ray’s experimental, Basque-language film Emak-Bakia. Quirky and charming – almost to a fault – <i>The Search for Emak Bakia'</i>s unique and evocative audiovisual landscape is too frequently intruded upon by explanatory inter-titles. In its final 45-minutes, the film finds its footing as a bittersweet travelogue and meditation on the waning Basque language and culture.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Lisa’s Grade: B-</i><o:p></o:p><br />
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<b><i><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2013/11/36th-starz-denver-film-festival-touch.html">A Touch of Sin</a></i> </b>(Jia Zhangke, 2013, China, 125 min.)<br />
A series of unexpected acts of violence coalesce into a sweeping political and economic indictment in the newest masterwork from 6th Generation auteur Jia Zhangke. An epic, cerebral, and visually striking trek across contemporary China’s diverse landscapes and cultures, <i>A Touch of Sin </i>gives Jia the opportunity to revisit the thematic terrain of several of his previous films.<br />
<i>Lisa’s Grade: A</i></div>
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<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25868&FID=77">Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?</a> </i>(Arvin Chen, Taiwan, 2013, 104 min.)</div>
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A closeted gay man with a wife and young child, mild-mannered eyeglass salesman Weichung, finds his world upended by an unexpected romance in this sparkling comedy-drama from the Republic of China. Drawing on the conventions of the Hollywood musical, Chen’s lightly surreal flights of fancy capture the intoxication of new love. At the same time, the film also paints a detailed and touching portrait of a loving family in the midst of dramatic change. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Lisa’s Grade: B+</i> </div>
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Lisa K. Broadhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04722888430261386839noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-90914562477318303312013-11-11T16:59:00.000-05:002013-11-11T17:03:59.430-05:0036th Starz Denver Film Festival: A Touch of Sin (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Conceived as an oblique, 21st-century take on the <i>wuxia</i> (literally "martial hero") film, where that genre’s perpetual rendering of motion is transformed and displaced onto China’s exceedingly mobile, circulating workforce, <b><i><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=26077">A Touch of Sin</a></i></b> (<i>Tian Zhu Ding</i>, 2013) divides into four fluid, gently overlapping parts, with each centering on an economically marginalized protagonist. Working from mainland China’s snowy north to its subtropical south, director <b>Jia Zhangke</b> presents a remarkably comprehensive and detailed snapshot of China's economic and cultural present. The film opens with Dahai (the exceptionally charismatic <b>Wu Jiang</b>), a poor laborer incensed by his village chief’s failure to make good on an earlier promise. Dahai ultimately responds with extreme, even shocking violence in a segment that will confirm the pattern for each of the film’s subsequent three sections. <br />
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'Confirm' rather 'establish' as Dahai's Shanxi-set opening segment is preceded by a thematically generative triple killing perpetrated by the film's second subject, Zhou San (<b>Wang </b><b>Baoqiang</b>). With Zhou's brief entry into and disappearance from Jia's narrative, the Mainland master begins his work of creating a national space that extends - and more importantly, persists - far beyond the limits of the filmmaker's frame. In audio-visual terms, Jia reinforces this sense of great spatial expanse with an aurally dense off-camera field (that emerges again beyond the boundaries of the film's graceful widescreen compositions). In this respect, <i>A Touch of Sin </i>continues the formal project of <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0258885/?ref_=nv_sr_1">Platform</a></i> (2000) and <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318025/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">Unknown Pleasures</a></i> (2002), whose Shanxi setting the Dahai segment expressly shares.<br />
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Geographically, Zhou's second section shifts into the Chongqing municipal location of the director's Three Gorges-themed <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-film-still-life-boss-of-it-all.html">Still Life</a></i> (2006), with Zhou arriving by ferry boat - <i>Still Life's </i>preferred form of transportation and another in <i>A Touch of Sin's</i> exhaustive variety of conveyances. With Zhou disappearing again into the vast Mainland off-screen, <i>A Touch of Sin</i> transitions to long-time Jia axiom <b>Zhao Tao</b>,<b> </b>as the actress's Xiao Yu faces an uncertain future with her married, factory-executive lover. After being assaulted by the latter's spurned wife, Xiao finds herself in an even more perilous confrontation in her spa workplace. In the consequent explosion of violence, Jia's film breaks most decisively from any semblance of naturalism, with Xiao striking down her aggressors in manga-inspired moment of Japanese sword-play - not that there aren't other moments of the surreal: see the tiger's non-diegetic roar.<br />
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In spite of its uncharacteristic, Takeshi Kitano-influenced eruptions of violence (the effect and meaning of these seemingly unconnected incidents slowly accumulates over the course of the film) the writer-director's latest remains recognizably his own, from the aforementioned articulations of off-camera space to the post-communist kitsch on sale in the film’s fleshy final segment, a set-piece that brings to mind another of Jia's impressive array of masterworks, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0423176/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1">The World</a> </i>(2004). As the filmmaker surveys his homeland’s deeply troubled materialist present, he provides an almost comprehensive catalog of his many emphases, whether it is the injustices that his actors suffer, the motivations for the violence that in each instance is based on real events or even the multitude of regions and dialects to which the director gives cinematic voice.<br />
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This is all to suggest that there is admirable conceptual completeness to <i>A Touch of Sin</i>, which also functions as a kind of mid-career retrospective for one of China's greatest living directors. Indeed, Jia's Cannes prize-winning latest is no less than a major masterpiece and one of the year's very best films.<br />
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<i>This piece was modified by Lisa and myself from my original Starz Denver Film Festival program notes, available <a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=26077&fid=77">here</a>. <a href="http://www.kinolorber.com/film.php?id=1472">Kino Lorber</a> is doing the good work of distributing this great film in North America.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-48097973822708207222013-10-27T20:34:00.001-04:002013-12-24T15:34:02.162-05:00Previewing The 36th Starz Denver Film Festival<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Since mid-July, the overwhelming majority of my film-viewing has been devoted to next month's Starz Denver Film Festival, first in previewing nearly forty festival submissions, and consequently in contributing program notes for more than thirty additional features. Over the next few weeks, this virtual space will be overtaken by the same project, with Lisa reprising last year's exceedingly popular SDFF Report Card, and both she and I contributing longer reviews when we are so moved. The reader may indeed rest assured that longer analyses of two of this year's unequivocal festival peaks, <b>Jia Zhangke's <i><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=26077&FID=77">A Touch of Sin</a></i> </b>and <b>Paolo Sorrentino's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=26017&FID=77">The Great Beauty</a></i>, will follow over the course of the coming weeks (as hopefully will other pieces for unexpected pleasures not yet seen). In the meantime, from the remaining thirty official selections that I have screened thus far, I have chosen the following six title sample as especially deserving the reader's attention and viewing resources.<br />
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Among the number of promising feature-length debuts included in this year's SDFF, none showed the formal intelligence and rigor of former critic <b>Eddie Mullins's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25874&FID=77">Doomsdays</a></i>, an American indie slacker comedy that shades toward the truly anarchic and counter-cultural. (If you click through to the description of this or any title on the Denver Film Center website, you will notice, no doubt, my wanton self-plagiarism.) Displaying considerable consideration of alternative methods for telling a story in visual and spatial terms, Mullins relies almost exclusively on highly choreographed long-take set-ups, where a punch-line or plot-point is allowed to developed in a receding plane or on the edges of the frame. Indeed, for a film - home-invasion themed - where "being caught" is a constant source of suspense and especially comedy, Mullins has produced an art that privileges the commensurate act of seeing, and subtly encourages a more active form of spectatorship. If only a fraction of independent filmmakers showed the attention to form and stylistic ambition that Mullins reveals in his first feature, the American indie cinema would be a far richer field.<br />
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The mid-tier latest from one of the two most important Sub-Saharan African art-film directors to emerge since the mid-1990s - the other is Mauritania's Abderrahmane Sissako - <b>Mahamat-Saleh Haroun's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25867&FID=77">Grigris</a></i> pushes the understated Chadian auteur of the exceptional <i>Abouna </i>(2002) and <i>Daratt</i> (2006) into novel feminist territory, as the film segues, in its final act, from the low-key nocturnal city to the bright, picturesque African savanna. (Antoine Heberle’s handsome cinematography was honored at this year's Cannes film festival.) However, like the aforementioned career highlights, a male lead remains focal, with Souleymane Démé's eponymous, physically impaired hero providing the haptic presence around which Haroun constructs his humanistic crime drama. In fact, the rhythmic advantage that Grigris makes of his disability - within the film's throbbing, neon-lit discotheque passages - provides Haroun's work with its most memorable and even transcendent moments of pure cinema.<br />
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Heavily atmospheric, elliptical and even dream-like, writer-director <b>Daniel Patrick Carbone's </b>feature-length debut <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25875&FID=77">Hide Your Smiling Faces</a></i> provides further evidence of Terrence Malick's growing influence over the the latest generation of American independent filmmakers. Built around an incomprehensible summer-vacation tragedy that occurs within a verdant exurban New Jersey setting, Carbone authentically brings the homo-social interactions of a loosely connected group of teen and preteen boys to the screen, emphasizing the almost ritual violence - and threats of even greater harm - that defines their everyday existence. In its near complete absence of young female actors, moreover, <i>Hide Your Smiling Faces</i> is that very rare coming-of-age film where sex does not figure prominently in the equation. The young male mind is otherwise occupied in Carbone's quietly affecting, carefully calibrated indie drama.<br />
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Recipient of the prestigious Camera d'Or prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival - the first Singaporean feature to be honored by the French fest - <b>Anthony Chen's</b><b> </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=25869&FID=77">Ilo Ilo</a> </i>finds unexpected emotional warmth in the unusual bond that forms between Teresa, a non-citizen Filipino maid, and Jiale, a serially mischievous eleven year-old bully. Conventional Asian art cinema in most respects, Chen's undeniably assured, semi-biographical debut nonetheless manages a national specificity that will prove most conspicuous in the corporal form of punishment that the charismatic young lead Koh Jia Ler receives before an audience of his classmates. The film's historical inscription of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis contributes equally, though less distinctively, to Chen's construction of national identity, while also serving as the catalyst for the film's collapsing middle-class milieu (which the spectator witnesses alongside the picture's on-screen outsider surrogate Teresa).<br />
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A habitually enchanting film essay that above all submits to the surreal operations of chance, though in a fashion that is more whimsical than radical, <b>Oskar Alegria's </b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgm4ljrEwpzlyP-glLUyjFrsFAVJ6zkGATJ-m4aKdW6m7QvJIbPmctwxuh4SgVMGGqwuA-QquAUSbPQXiPNlGw0i7fpCVB4sVkd8ZMY7VyR_skEqErvnHGJkaAIVCriQOFXlO3J/s1600/La%252Bcasa%252Bde%252BEmak%252BBakia.jpg" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The Search for Emak Bakia</a> seeks an answer to the origins of Man Ray's mysterious Basque-language film title, <i>Emak-Bakia</i>. Most meaningfully, Algeria's lightly experimental feature documentary represents an act of exhumation: of the forgotten meanings of an all-but-dead Euskara language and the even more obscure private histories - from table tennis-champion Romanian princesses to resurrected clowns - that Alegria's digressive approach manages to uncover. Yet another feature film debut, <i>The Search for Emak Bakia</i> is a surprisingly easy pleasure and one of the left-field discoveries of SDFF 36.<br />
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Award the Silver Bear (Alfred Bauer Prize) at this year's Berlin International Film Festival, former critic and occasional documentarian <b>Denis Côté's</b> <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/festival/film/detail.aspx?id=26012&FID=77">Vic+Flo Saw a Bear</a> </i>provides early and relatively decisive localized evidence of Quebec's rumored 2013 boom. Centering on Victoria and Florence, a same-sex couple who seek refuge from their troubled pasts in the remote forests of the French-Canadian province, <i>Vic+Flo Saw a Bear</i> strings together a series of initially naturalistic set-pieces that alternate between mobile camera movements and conspicuously static set-ups. Throughout, Côté deftly affects an atmosphere of uncertainty and lingering dread, a sense that he imparts in no small measure through his mysterious and menacing cast of locals. This feeling is confirmed by the film's spectacularly sadistic, almost impossible to watch climactic act to which Côté's title obliquely refers. A flamboyantly surreal concluding flourish will follow in this award-winner from the fast-rising under forty.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-6234175576309766032013-09-07T18:07:00.001-04:002013-09-08T01:37:27.786-04:00New Film: The Grandmaster (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The first evidence or rather confirmation to reach the United States that two thousand thirteen belongs foremost to the world-class masters of the Sinophone cinema, <b>Wong Kar-wai's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grandmaster_(film)">The Grandmaster</a></i> (<i>Yi dai zong shi</i>, 2013) is quite likely to prove the most unambiguously pleasurable achievement in Greater China's very big year. An epically structured, elegantly staged Ip Man biography that opens on the brief 1930s rapprochement of China's northern and southern martial arts schools, Wong's first magnificent feature in six years soon develops into another of the auteur's signature star-crossed opuses, with <b>Tony Leung's</b> Wing Chun grandmaster falling for the exceedingly skilled daughter (<b>Zhang Ziyi</b>) of an aging northern legend. Following Ip Man's ceremonial defeat of the latter in the opulent, mirror-filled interior of the Golden Pavilion, a brothel and martial arts social club in the Cantonese city of Foshan, the hero and heiress Gong Er stage their own combat exhibition, despite period prohibitions that forbid women from fighting.<br />
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The resulting set-piece represents not only one of Ip Man's few matches with an equal, but indeed the lone occasion in which he is bested by an opponent. Of course, it comes in an exchange that Wong infuses with an ecstatic sensuality, where Ip Man clasps the female lead's wrist and where Gong Er circles above her fellow combatant, as their faces come within a hair's breadth of touching. With hand-to-hand combat thus providing a metonymy for the sexual act, Ip Man and Gong Er's exchange proves one of <i>The Grandmaster's</i> rare consummated unions, where two appropriately paired figures meet, in Wongian discourse, at precisely the right time of life.<br />
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The married Ip Man's consequent attempts to renew his relationship with Gong Er are thwarted first by the sudden onset of the Japanese Occupation, and later by Gong Er's private vows to avenge her father's death. Their time, in other words, will never again be right - in much the same way that the Ip Man's various master opponents all-to-often challenge the Southern hero far too late in their own professional existences. In this regard, <i>The Grandmaster</i> morphs into a martial arts variation on the filmmaker's middle-aged masterpiece, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tenbestfilms.blogspot.com/2008/08/2000.html">In the Mood for Love</a></i> (2000): Ip Man and Gong Er's time will pass before they (in their case) renew their acquaintance in the colorized Hong Kong of the early 1950s. Fate will prevent their permanent romantic happiness.<br />
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As the above attests, <i>The Grandmaster</i>, like every great Wong,<i> </i>is all about time. Time as it is refracted through Ip Man and Gong Er's frustrated romance or in Ip Man's equitable and ill-matched contests alike, but time also it is expressed in Wong's archetypal aesthetic, in the step printing process and slow motion effects that filters and pulls time apart, investing the instant and the momentary - which is to say the true substance of Wong's art - with an added weight. The film's focalized temporal register is also felt in the de-saturated photos that freeze similar points-in-time, not to mention in the voice-over narration that implies some indistinct point in the future from which Ip Man in particular reminisces about his great unfulfilled love. <i>The Grandmaster</i>, in short, is at once an object of temporal manipulation and reorganization and an attempt, however vain, to recapture time that has been lost.<br />
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Wong's visual strategies equally serve the filmmaker's excessive attention to surface appearances and his commensurate fetishism: in the film's expert opening action set-piece, a cascade of individual raindrops slice off the side of Ip Man's brimmed white hat, thus providing as concentrated a site for pure spectacle as the combat itself (which in the scene's under-lit staging will prove more two-dimensional than three, more a matter of surface than of depth). In the amber corridors of the Golden Pavilion and on the snowy rail platforms of the north, Wong turns his attention to the way in which his performers' footwear slides across the hardwood and through the light powder, again making extensive use of slow-motion to emphasize his visual subject. Finally there is the film's truest fetish of all, the coat-button that Ip Man saves and ultimately gives to Gong Er to commemorate the reunion that the Occupation repressed. It is in other words visual evidence of his enduring passion.<br />
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For all its interest in the interior and the imagistic, <i>The Grandmaster </i>makes skillful use of the more conventional features of film language. Indeed, in what might be termed Wong's post-classicism, the director makes special use of his block strategies within his shot/reverse-shot editing chains: as Gong Er and her father's former protegee face off in one of the film's most heated confrontations, each occupies the edge of the frame that they look off, thus visually implying their increased interpersonal aggression. Likewise, when Ip Man and Gong Er meet for the last time, Wong sets each of the two characters in the same left-center position in the wide screen, suggesting the same affinity that the narrative otherwise establishes. Wong accordingly makes master (if intensified) use of classical continuity editing.<br />
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Elsewhere one might cite the film's sterling star chemistry, vivid secondary characterizations, assured hand-to-hand stagings and moving musical cues as evidence of Wong's supreme mastery of a convention mode of screen entertainment - to augment Wong's always personal discourse. Recalling the epic early 1990s pinnacles of China's Fifth Generation, not to mention Hou Hsiao-hsien's supreme Sino masterpiece, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_of_Shanghai">Flowers of Shanghai</a></i> (1998), <i>The Grandmaster</i> is both the latest ecumenical attempt at forging a combined Chinese identity in its shared historical experience and also a founding-myth narrative for Wong and Leung's Hong Kong home.<br />
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<i>This piece was co-authored by <b>Michael J. Anderson</b> and <b>Lisa K. Broad</b>.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-61749951882265618182013-08-17T14:36:00.000-04:002013-08-17T15:26:40.219-04:00New Film: The Hunt & Drug War<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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A Kafkaesque scenario of the agonizing injustices inflicted upon a kindergarten teacher falsely accused of child sex abuse, <b>Thomas Vinterberg's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunt_(2012_film)">The Hunt</a></i> (<i>Jagten</i>,<i> </i>2012), from a screenplay by <b>Tobias Lindholm</b> and the director, perceptively details the extra-legal apparatus that punishes the middle-aged lead for a single, indiscriminate allegation. <i>The Hunt's</i> inscription of inequity hinges on the fictive testimony of six year-old innocent Klara (<b>Annika Wedderkopp</b>), who in a bout of pre-pubescent sexual jealousy, repeats an explicit utterance of her older brother. Her testimony, however off-handed - and even after she contritely disavows her claim, on more than one occasion - is considered unimpeachable by those in her care: children, as we are reminded repeatedly, never lie. It is on this basis, in accordance with this false proposition, that Lucas (<b>Mads Mikkelsen</b>) is stripped of his teaching job and violently ostracized from the film's small-town (Danish) society. There is no place for due process when it comes to protecting society's most vulnerable from transformative trauma - even when this means destroying the life of the innocent, and implicitly, those he holds closest. <i>The Hunt</i>, in other words, imagines the subject of the director's outstanding <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Celebration">The Celebration</a></i> (<i>Festen</i>, 1998), the absolute peak of the Dogme 95 cycle, from the position of the accused rather than that of the accuser.<br />
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<i>The Hunt</i> accordingly presents a problem without an easy solution - blindly believing Lucas is no more advisable from the standpoint of crime prevention, even if in this case we know it would lead to a just outcome, which is to say narrative satisfaction. In this same regard, <i>The Hunt</i> finds itself in a difficult position <i>vis–à–vis</i> its dramatic resolution: either injustice continues to obtain or the apparatus that insures it implausibly collapses. Without being too explicit or direct, Vinterberg and Lindholm find a placating means of having it both ways, of having justice restored while maintaining the film's enraging extra-legal (semi-vigilante) apparatus. However imprecise the allegation, and however faulty the film's initial process of verification - the case is made through a series of leading questions that encourage Klara's assent - the accusation can never be unmade; suspicions can never be completely allayed.<br />
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As the above no doubt attests, much of <i>The Hunt's </i>strength resides in its scenario, in the extreme injustice that Vinterberg and Lindholm credibly bring to the screen. Of course, <i>The Hunt</i> relies equally on the achievement of its actors, beginning with the Cannes-laureled Mikkelsen, who exquisitely emotes the arch of his excruciating experience just beneath his controlled surface countenance. Admirable too, among others, are Wedderkopp as the troubled Klara, <b>Susse Wold </b>as the school supervisor who spearheads the investigation-cum-persecution and <b>Alexandra Rapaport</b> as Lucas's nascent, non-native love interest. Visually, <i>The Hunt</i> cues into the film's generative performances, with the filmmakers' hand-held framing and accentuating zooms the most common and clichéd of Vinterberg and cinematographer <b>Charlotte Bruus Christensen's </b>storytelling strategies; there is, in this sense, a remnant of <i>The Celebration's</i> appreciable amateurism. Longer establishing set-ups gracefully render the handsome late autumnal setting that provides the site for the film's eponymous activity, a mid-December snow that strikes wonder into the young Klara and the luminous candlelit church where an inebriated Lucas finally confronts his estranged best-friend Theo (<b>Thomas Bo Larsen</b>), Klara's justifiably aggrieved father. On balance, Vinterberg's <i>The Hunt</i> is certainly laudable work.<br />
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I would be remiss were I not now also to offer a word or two in appreciation of <b>Johnnie To's</b> very solid <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_War_(film)"><i style="font-weight: bold;">Drug War</i> </a>(<i>Du zhan</i>,<i> </i>2012), the rare title from the 'Milky Way' master to receive proper commercial distribution in the United States (thanks to upstart <a href="http://www.wellgousa.com/">Well Go USA</a>). The Chinese-Hong Kong production finds To and company back on <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_2">Election 2's</a></i> (2006) Mainland, and in similar organized-crime territory, as a team of undercover officers, with the aid of <b>Louis Koo's</b> informant Timmy Choi, seek to bring down a major trans-Asian meth ring. As is true of the director's best work (<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mission_(1999_film)">The Mission</a></i>, 1999; <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiled">Exiled</a></i>, 2006; and <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2008/06/7th-new-york-asian-film-festival_27.html">Sparrow</a></i>, 2008), the success of the film is imbricated in the design and actualization of its comedic and dramatic action-centered set-pieces - which is to say in the true substance of To's modular art. Where <i>Drug War</i> really elevates itself above median Milky Way fare, though I would not go so far as to say that this is one of the director's very best, is in the self-reflexivity that the filmmakers infuse in these passages, whether it is Captain Lei and Choi's (<b>Sun Honglei</b>) literal re-playing of an undercover meeting with Lei shifting identities from one to the next - we have here both an emphasis on role-playing and an occasion for rehearsal, therefore - or the appearance of the deaf brothers, whose visual communication provides an ideal object for optical surveillance. <i>Drug War</i> impressively is about the medium-specific dimensions of its undercover and surveillance subjects.<br />
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Of course, To's film, a 105-minute Canto-pop variation of HBO's <i>The Wire</i>, is also about the 'war' of its title, an effort that is shown to be futile in the film's final doubling plea for clemency. This comes on the heals of climactic shootout where To's blocking actively encourages confusion, where cop and criminal, following the film's undercover story line, tend to become indistinguishable. Though thematically appropriate at this juncture, this basic lack of clarity will at other times prove <i>Drug War's </i>most notable deficiency. </div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-15087588765727249912013-07-19T01:01:00.002-04:002013-07-19T01:13:33.213-04:00Le grand amour: The Erotic Imagination of Pierre Étaix<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Staged, in often voiced-over vaudevillian silence, as a series of recollections, desires and contingent realities that collectively map the mental geography of actor-director <b>Pierre Étaix's </b>middle-aged lead, <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Amour">Le grand amour</a></i></b> (1969) is indeed a cinema of the male mind, overcome by the obsessive passions that the first sight of <b>Nicole Calfan's </b>eighteen year-old Agnès inspire. Perfectly cast for the spaces that give her grin its wink-like, corrupted adolescent appearance and for the slim shape of her calves as they extend between her sculpted knees and the straps of her black Mary-Jane's, Calfan provides the spectacular sensual presence around which Étaix constructs his digressive imaginings of an adulterous alternative.<br />
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In the first of these passages, with Étaix's Pierre drifting into a dream-filled sleep, <i>Le grand amour </i>presents its married male lead rolling over a tree-lined country road on his identical twin bed. As an ethereal vocal combines with the scene's organ score, Pierre passes silently among his fellow mattress-motorists, ultimately reaching his <i>objet du désir</i> as she waits roadside, her short pink negligee fluttering in the gentle breeze. Deliberately, she softly slides her bare legs into Pierre's mobile bed; her much older companion tucks her in and pulls her close as the silently shot, five minute-plus passage continues first on the congested rural thoroughfares, and then in an idyllic wooded park. After the couple finds momentary pause in a private glen, they motor back magically to Pierre and Florence's (<b>Annie Fratellini</b>) master bedroom, thus bringing to its conclusion the most classically surreal moment of screenwriters Étaix and <b>Jean-Claude Carrière's</b> fourth feature-length collaboration.<br />
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Elsewhere it is the daydream, the waking fantasy and speculative reflection that provides <i>Le grand amour </i>with its many ruptures from mundane reality. Even prior to Agnès's second-act appearance, Étaix fills his film with sight gags that originate on some level in his character's mind, be it in the kneeling arc of ex-lover brides that take Florence's place or in his spatial alternations between the café's interior and terrace as Pierre struggles to remember where he first spotted his betrothed. (The latter provides occasion for one of a set of comic breaks from the ontological space of Pierre's mind, as a frustrated waiter demands that the lead decide whether he wants to be inside or out.)<br />
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Of course, it is not only Pierre's mental activity that finds expression, but that of his circle, including best-friend Jacques (<b>Alain Janey</b>), who speculates on ways to end the factory executive's marriage to Florence - though not without Pierre correcting Jacques's more improbable suggestions (as described by the on-screen, contingent comedic scenarios). It is indeed in <i>Le grand amour's</i> comedy of imagination that Étaix and Carrière bridge the gap between their two most prominent former collaborators: Jacques Tati for <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mon_Oncle">Mon Oncle</a> </i>assistant director Étaix - <i>Le grand amour's</i> opening church set-piece offers an especially Tatiesque, gag-heavy comedic aural-scape, with sound effects employed for the purposes of distraction - and Luis Buñuel for the <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_de_Jour_(film)">Belle de jour</a> </i>screenwriter.<br />
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<i>Le grand amour</i> in fact anticipates another of Carrière and Buñuel's imminent pairings, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Discreet_Charm_of_the_Bourgeoisie">The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie</a></i> (1972), in both its digressive subjective structure and also its upper middle-class milieu. The latter provides amble opportunity for parody, as, for example, in one of the film's most original and ingenious set-pieces: the early gossip scene. Here an inconsequential, chance crossing of paths between Pierre and an unidentified female pedestrian escalates in each malicious retelling - as visualized in the passage's progression of pantomimed meetings - until an overweight middle-aged woman, with pastry spread slovenly across her chattering mouth, tells of the couple's clandestine lovemaking behind a bit of park shrubbery. Generally more benign elsewhere, Étaix's bourgeoisie are the authors of the banality that Pierre endeavors to escape with the exquisite Agnès.<br />
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Not that Pierre doesn't immediately appear happy (or is in any genuine sense unsatisfied) with the wife and job he never wanted. (Florence and the factory, it should be noted, come together in a large, red-framed portrait that absolutely dominates the<i> mise-en-scène</i> of Pierre's office.) Rather, Agnès offers a pure object of erotic desire, who as it happens threatens his respectable middle-class existence. <i>Le grand amour</i>, however, will prove far less morally anarchic than Carrière's collaborations with Buñuel: Pierre indeed realizes that he and Agnès are incompatibile after she repeats one of his earlier deflections during their one arranged rendezvous. Dropping her off in his newly purchased cherry-red sports car, Pierre confesses that he no longer loves her, bringing their just embarked upon courtship to an abrupt close. In the concluding passage that follows, Pierre joyously reunites with his vacationing wife, Fratellini's attractive in her own right and far more age appropriate Florence, in a comparatively conservative affirmation of the sacramental institution.<br />
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Off-screen, it bears mentioning, as a closing point of trivia, that Étaix and Fratellini would marry the same year that <i>Le grand amour</i> was released (1969), beginning a union that would continue until the actress's death in 1997. Fratellini, as such, would not survive to see Étaix's belated re-discovery in 2010, when <i>Le grand amour </i>received its first public <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.premiere.fr/Cinema/News-Cinema/Cannes-2010-Pierre-Etaix-Pretendre-faire-rire-ses-semblables-c-est-completement-fou-non-2325340&prev=/search%3Fq%3Detaix%2Bcannes%2B2010">screening</a> in forty years at the Cannes International film festival. For this writer, Étaix has been 2013's biggest revelation - welcome evidence that Tati was not alone in his great comedic art in the 1960s, but that he instead inspired another major director of that same period - thanks to a spring <a href="http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=25492">program</a> of the filmmaker's work at the Denver Film Society and the Criterion Collection's release of the Pierre Étaix <a href="http://www.criterion.com/boxsets/947-pierre-etaix">box set</a> in April. Along with the signature <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_Yo">Yoyo</a></i> (1965), the film that the massively over-praised, Academy award-winning <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Artist_(film)" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;">The Artist</a><i style="font-weight: bold;"> </i>(2011) should have been, <i>Le grand amour </i>might just be the director's greatest achievement.<br />
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<i>Let me offer a special thanks to Lisa K. Broad for her insights included in this essay.</i></div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-71672056374543793882013-07-03T16:18:00.002-04:002013-07-04T01:11:21.856-04:00New Film: Before Midnight (2013)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The consensus <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/survey/best-films-of-2013-so-far/">selection</a> for the best new film of 2013, six months in, <b>Richard Linklater's </b><i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Midnight_(film)">Before Midnight</a></i> conceivably brings one of the recent screen's richest franchises, such as it is, to a courageously corrosive close: eighteen years after early twenty-somethings Jesse (<b>Ethan Hawke</b>) and Céline (<b>Julie Delpy</b>) first became acquainted over a deeply romantic day and night (<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Sunrise">Before Sunrise</a></i>, 1995), and another nine since the couple re-connected for a real-time afternoon reunion in Céline's Paris (<i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Sunset">Before Sunset</a></i>, 2004), <i>Before Midnight </i>finds the pair on an ultimately argument-filled final day of an extended family vacation in Greece's Peloponnese. The bliss of first sight and rapture of a rekindled (elicit) romance is replaced in Linklater's latest by middle-aged negotiations of familial obligations and career ambitions - or, by the fallout of a passion pursued at all costs. Though it will in this sense prove quite different in the particularity of its subject and the perspectives it offers, <i>Before Midnight</i> emerges nonetheless as a sort of contemporary <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symposium_(Plato)" style="font-style: italic;">Symposium</a>, with an extended dinner table conversation replicating the sequence of encomiums that lends Plato's work its structure. Jesse, Céline and (most of all) their Greek dining companions present their twenty-first century standpoints on the differences between the two sexes and (cf. Aristophanes's memorably oddball speech) the romantic economy and virtues of the two, remaining separate or becoming one.</div>
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<i>Before Midnight</i>, no less than its predecessors - let us say here that until further notice, Linklater's reputation deserves to reside with these three outstanding efforts - is a talking cinema, most of all. It is in this sense a displaced object of the director's 1990s, of a not-too-distant age in which the mind still seemed a worthy competitor to the body, our own present day's all-consuming concern. More importantly, judging from the film's visual and verbal signposting, is the largely European tradition that <i>Before Midnight</i> extends. Foremost among Linklater and co-screenwriters Delpy and Hawke's sources is Rossellini's expressly referenced <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_in_Italy">Viaggio in Italia</a></i> (1954), which provides not only an overarching thematic and structure in its inscriptions of mid-life marital tensions (and a final-act romantic resolution), but also presaging passages of conversation, be it <i>Before Midnight's</i> single-take, front-seat two-shot or the couple's speculative perambulation (where mention is indeed made of the mid-century masterpiece's Pompeii set-piece). Visually, in the blocking and reverse-field cutting of its seaside sunset, and verbally in its aforementioned moment of dinner-table dialogue, <i>Before Midnight </i>equally calls to mind Eric Rohmer's very great <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2009/08/face-form-in-rohmer-from-ma-nuit-chez.html">Le Rayon vert</a></i> (1986). In fact, we might look to <i>Le Rayon vert</i> likewise for an ancestor to Delpy's occasionally (if not often) unlikable or irritating lead - given especially that Rohmer's female star, Marie Rivière, also earned a co-writing credit for her work in the aforementioned, dialogue-centered feature. Rivière's Delphine, in other words, provides the self-critical template for Delpy's auto-expression.</div>
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Following the romantic fantasies that structure the first two films, <i>Before Midnight</i> seeks instead to impart the unpleasant realities and work of their now long-term committed relationship. Linklater, Hawke and Delpy's film confronts and exposes, with the latter again taking the on-screen lead: in one of the series' most instantly iconic and memorable moments, Delpy remains topless for an extended duration as she begins to make love to her partner, answers a telephone call from Jesse's son Hank and then commences to argue with her lover after she fails to give him the phone. It is indeed in the protracted dispute that thus begins, an argument in which Céline decries Jesse's rational tone and wonders aloud if she no longer loves her <i>Before Sunrise </i>one-night stand, where Linklater's latest really shows its emotional weight. As surpassingly clever as the consistently self-reflexive first hour may be, with its conspicuous fictional doubling of the first two films in Jesse's name-checked novels - though it might also be argued that the ESL dialogue does not always provide an entirely adequate match - it is the force of the film's hotel-room finale that insures <i>Before Midnight's </i>greater achievement: as the richest and most mature film about heterosexual relationships since Maren Ade's <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-film-everyone-else.html">Everyone Else</a></i> (2009). 2013's midpoint critical hit feels destined for end-of-the-year, list-season domination.</div>
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<i>This piece was co-authored by Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad.</i></div>
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Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13095695.post-4283267586215638632013-06-23T22:05:00.001-04:002013-06-23T23:31:19.157-04:00New Film: You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet / Vous n'avez encore rien vu (2012)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Seated in a marble-walled home cinema adorned with rows of plush black couches and over-sized armchairs, twelve French actors, each identified by his or her real name in a previous series of phone calls that convey the tragic news of friend and colleague Antoine d'Anthac's (<b>Denis Podalydès</b>) untimely death, respond to a televised performance of <i>Eurydice</i>, screened for their professional scrutiny as a sort of last will and testament by the deceased playwright. (As a second round of introductions during Antoine's pre-screening message to the assembled actors makes clear, all twelve worked with the director - within the fictional world of the film, that is - in at least one of his two prior stagings of the aforesaid play.) <b>Michel Piccoli </b>is the first to speak, repeating an audible on-screen line and then adding a second as he glances back at the high-definition set in a balanced, multi-figural medium close-up. As the scene continues off screen, <b>Pierre Arditi </b>turns to Piccoli as he phrases his own dialogue (as Orpheé) in response to his fictional father. Following another cutaway to the screen that the filmmakers frame with an elegant marble balustrade that functions equally as a found proscenium, Arditi and Piccoli continue in their remembered reproduction. With the arrival of the eponymous Eurydice (<b>Vimala Pons</b> in the filmed play), Antoine's two generations of female lead, <b>Sabine Azéma</b> and <b>Anne Consigny</b> (pictured), take turns repeating the heroine's opening line - and then reacting to their shared mother, <b>Anne Duperey </b>- as the spontaneous performance begins to to spread among the broader assembly.<br />
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As the staged version progresses on and off camera, <b>Jean-Noël Brouté </b>and then Azéma and Ardit (see below), stand to deliver their dialogue for their seated brethren. The latter two, Antoine's first Eurydice and Orpheé, accordingly turn to face one another as their intimate conversation continues - even as the rest of the room persists in watching the (now off-screen) televised version. As director <b>Alain Resnais </b>stages his two frequent collaborators on either edge of his CinemaScope frame - Azéma has been married to the director since 1998 -<b> Mark Snow's </b>orchestral score provides minor-key support for the suddenly emergent feeling emanating from the former legit leads. With Resnais and cinematographer <b>Eric Gautier's</b> camera finding the film's other Eurydice, Consigny's Orpheé, <b>Lambert Wilson</b>, rises from his former rear-ground position to join the whispering actress for a tender, face-to-face exchange. <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Ain%27t_Seen_Nothin%27_Yet!_(film)">You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</a></i> (<b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Ain%27t_Seen_Nothin%27_Yet!_(film)">Vous n'avez encore rien vu</a></i></b>, 2012), in other words, hastens to divide into its two previous casts, which is to say, into the two worlds of experience that animate the thespians' responses to the filmed play-within-the-film.<br />
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At this same first-act juncture, Resnais's parallel performances begin to spread into the adjacent spaces of Antoine's Greek-inspired interior. A rear-projected train passes behind Azéma's Eurydice as the stagecraft of the earlier production starts to seep into Resnais's <i>mise en scène</i>. A brief cutaway to the on-screen performance is followed immediately by Azéma and Arditi return to the screening space in what will prove an early indication of the film's ontologically unstable mapping of memory, fantasy and external reality all. Indeed, as the increasingly off-screen contemporary play presses on, its impromptu re-imaginings by the assembled actors will occur not only before the screen or in corners of the large marble hall, but on a train platform and in a separate set of Marseilles bedrooms that disclose the differing, period-determined design strategies employed for the Azéma-Arditi and the Consigny-Lambert productions.<br />
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In each of these latter spaces, just as in his prior home-cinema exchanges, Resnais reproduces the shared memories of his two generations of performers, the histories that they lived in common by virtue of their co-inhabited times and places. As a subject for his fictional cinema, collective memory extends back to the beginning - and beyond (see <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_and_Fog_(film)">Night and Fog</a></i>, 1955; and <b><i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toute_la_m%C3%A9moire_du_monde">Toute la mémoire du monde</a></i></b>, 1956) - to the diagramming of the conversations, copulation and catastrophe of <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_mon_amour">Hiroshima mon amour</a> </i>(1959) and, in negative, to the failure to remember a possible shared past that provides the plot for the filmmaker's follow-up, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Year_at_Marienbad">Last Year at Marienbad</a></i> (1961). In the particular case of <i>You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</i>, Resnais gestures toward the parallel structure of his more recent stage-adapted masterwork, <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://tativille.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-film-private-fears-in-public.html">Private Fears in Public Places</a></i> (2006), in rendering the overlapping personal histories of Antoine's successive casts in a series of cross-cut set-pieces that alternately push forward the anchoring <i>Eurydice</i> plot-line.<br />
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Consummately and constantly a cinema of memory and of the stage - the nonagenarian director's latest is in this sense alone a signature manifestation of his authorial identity<i> </i>- <i>You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</i> also adventurously brings to bear strategies drawn from an at times less reputable and much earlier film art, whether it is the aforementioned rear-projection, irises, Resnais's use of intertitles, his deployment of split-screen to showcase <b>Mathieu Amalric </b>(front row center)<b> </b>in both of the bedroom settings, or his predilection for allowing characters to dissolve from view once they've delivered their lines. Resnais calls on the fantastic language of film specifically to externalize and reclaim lost time. Then again, it will be a final act <i>coup de théâtre</i>, a sudden dramatic turn of events, that will push <i>You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</i> furthest beyond the everyday. With regard to this last narrative twist, suffice it to say that whatever the filmmaker in fact wishes or allows the viewer to believe with this revelation - and there is justification within the world of the narrative - he introduces a both/and logic, at least conceptually, that has long been the <i>Marienbad</i> filmmaker's purview. In Aristotelian terms, <i>You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</i> manages to be both comedy and drama in its closing moments, however unsatisfying this may prove to many a spectator.<br />
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Free in its employment of artifice (see also the expressionistic, Oliveiraesque swirling doorway set-piece that greets each of the villa's visitors) and in its willingness to open itself up to contradiction, <i>You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet</i> is a work of advanced age in the best sense - and one, much unlike the substantially younger Michael Haneke's parasitic <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amour_(2012_film)">Amour</a></i> (2012), which never succumbs to an act of loathing or pity for the experience. Though his actors are now past the ages of the characters they are portray, the spontaneous joy with which they throw themselves into their performances makes for a very different (and much richer) experience of encroaching mortality than Haneke's unsparing Palme d'Or. Of course, Resnais's semi-biographical 2012 Cannes debut - the filmmaker first attended <b>Jean Anouilh's</b> <i>Eurydice </i>seventy years ago and has been involved in around twenty of the source playwright's productions - is much more about life, and especially a life consumed by a passion for art, than it is death. Few subjects could be more appropriate to what is almost certain to prove one of the final masterstrokes of the <i>nouvelle vague</i>.<br />
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<i>I would like to thank my viewing companion (and fellow Resnais lover) Lisa K. Broad for her significant contributions to this piece. <a href="http://www.kinolorber.com/film.php?id=1346">Kino Lorber</a> is doing the essential work of distributing the film in the United States. Upcoming dates include a July 24th screening at the Durango 9 in Durango, Colorado and July 26-27th screenings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston</i>.</div>
Michael J. Andersonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12333893240336518881noreply@blogger.com0