Of Gods and Men (France 2010)

Based on a true story. Under threat by fundamentalist terrorists, a group of Trappist monks stationed with an impoverished Algerian community must decide whether to leave or stay.

A significant film, but flawed.  The fatal shortcoming is the treatment of the Islamists as the dark other -  a real failure to deal with the complexities of Jihadism and the historical legacy of colonialism.  The actions of the insurgent leader Ali Fayattia are left hanging and this underdevelopment reinforces an exclusivist perspective.  Great performances by a wonderful cast though.

The film failed to connect with me emotionally. I found myself observing rather than participating. The spirituality is there, but Beauvois keeps you at a distance. The widescreen works well for the scenic images, but his long focus shots of the protagonists distance us from the drama and are too diffuse in their impact. The ‘last supper’ scene goes on too long and the sudden use of close-ups with the ‘alien’ music jar - the use of Tchaikovsky is a mis-step - it is imposed and unnecessary.

Treni popolare

The Italian comic gem from 1933 Treno popolare, the first feature of director Raffaello Matarazzo, and the first movie scored by Nino Rota, is utterly charming and speaks to an innocence and love of common humanity lost forever. The story of a Sunday pic-nic visit to a regional village on a special train by denizens of Rome is told with elegance and panache, with Rota’s music and title song integral to the experience. Alas, the joy for a modern viewer is bitter-sweet watching simple lives oblivious to the sinister undertow of fascism and the cataclysm to come. Essential.

Domenica d’Agosto from 1950 is a charming delight. The benign chaos of Italians out for a good time and the sweet melancholy of everyday life. A celebration of the feminine. A set of stories of five girls and women is metaphorically the story of the same woman: a cute little innocent re-united with her father, an achingly-charming teenager playing at life and love, a young woman sadly in love with the wrong man, a working-class girl on the cusp of motherhood and a life of travail, and a luminous older mother who reaches out to a lonely father. The mise-en-scene is quite brilliant at times: the shower of propaganda leaflets disturbing the family picnic, a sardonic scene where we cut to a ‘businessman’ and his heap of a truck, and the subtle wit of a scene on the train near the end when the father completes a phone number for his daughter.

Occupe-toi d'Amélie (France 1949)

A marvelous French farce from director Claude Autant-Lara. The pace is beautifully established from the lengthy opening credits in a long long take as a rather portly bourgeois gentil-homme runs down a collonade – you know that attempt at running by a fattie in a hurry but constrained by a conceit of deportment – towards the camera which seamlessly recedes into the cinema, accompanied by a gorgeously insouciant musical accompaniment from composer René Cloërec. It turns out this gentleman is late for his role in a farce playing at a Paris theater. The scene as he hurries into the labyrinth of stairways and corridors backstage owes nothing to Max Ophuls – it is sin qua non elegant. In his dressing room, we get down to business as he exchanges a hurried conversation with a party of petit-bourgeios, which includes two bearded twins who must be the bizarro avatars of two of the the aviator triplets from A Night at the Opera. Later we cut to the streets of Paris with another elegant zoom pan from the street to a soiree in an upper floor apartment. The camera enters from the window takes in the scene and then pans to the right – we are on stage in the same theater! Of course Danielle Darrieux is gorgeous, and wastes no time in farcing it up. She slaps a servant who is caught sneaking a drink, and is immediately slapped in return! All this in the first 7 minutes – brilliant.

Reflections on a Black Swan

I have only seen Black Swan being cloistered in a cinema-free zone for a number of weeks. A weird denial of fantasy and a stubborn rebellion to make my own prosaic life matter more than someone else’s vision of hapless reality – perhaps.Or is it a dream? A paranoid fear that I will confront my own debauched existence in another zone of meaning? But my nightmares when I do succumb to sleep are vivid phantasmagoria I can embrace and discard when I awake, or can I? Dreams of ballerinas, swans, sluts, goddesses, dark fallen angels, and virgin nymphs, that don’t pass the reality test but are more real than the tepid realism I confront when not in sleep. The White Swan is dead, long live the Black Swan, in all her lurid unreality. Renew my subscription to the Resurrection.

The White Swan is dead.

The wraith in the mirror
A thousand and one shards of shattered glass dissolve into a bloody cascade
A cosmic alchemy
The red phoenix rises into a hurricane of abandon

Monochrome

The black swan pirouettes into and out of the spotlight
A crescendo of liberation
She takes no prisoners

Her lips dark labia of debauchery.
She bites and draws blood from the mouth of her dark prince

The Good Wife (CBS 2009-2010)

The Good Wife a legal drama series set in Chicago is surprisingly good. It showcases how important good screen-writing is. Glossy yes, but deals with weighty issues intelligently and with panache. There is an ongoing story arc centering on big-city political and judcial corruption – very topical and compelling.

Inception (2010): Banal shoot-em-up

A disappointment. Apart from the technical wizardry, the direction and editing was pedestrian. Director Christopher Nolan wants to have his intellectual cake and eat it too: an essentially banal shoot-em-up with a thin veneer of pseudo-philosophical posturing.

Before Sunset (2004) after Before Sunrise (1995)

Before Sunrise is romantic, as young lovers are, and thankfully there is no cynicism, but there is love and a cold reality. The camera towards the end returns to empty places where Jesse and Céline spent time together, and you the viewer bring the sadness to these scenes, of a special night that seemed liked it would last forever and is now ended and gone forever, with the lovers leaving no trace of their passage. Such is mortal life. Memory and regret have no refuge, they are lost in the brightness of the new day. This is truth and great cinema: beyond romance or the cynical.

Before Sunset is again about memory and time lost. The regret of growing older and deflated dreams. Fate is kind to Jesse and Céline. They are given a chance to recapture that night in a reprise of the new day after the night they last met. They are older but wiser, and now they can discover that mellow flavor of a love cellared and mellowed into a new sweetness and softness. As they approach Céline’s apartment they encounter Céline’s cat, and Céline tells Jesse envies her cat – each day everything is new again.

Marty (1955)

Directed by Delbert Mann from the screenplay/teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky, and starring Ernest Borgnine (4 Oscars in 1956).

Borgnine and his co-stars wonderfully inhabit their roles. Great in a simple way: 24 hours in the life of a lonely 34yo Bronx butcher from an Italo-American family told with empathy, pathos, and without melodrama. Coming from a similar background but growing up half a world away, I recalled what my dear late father used to say, “Tutt’il mondo e un paese [All the world is one country]“. From a tradition in film-making that finds universal truth in stories of simple humanity told with sincerity, respect, and affection, with a feeling for place and the wonderful nuance of character that shines in family life, the movie is also about the richness of language that develops from a transmigration of cultures. My favorite lines are when Marty’s mamma is talking to her sister about the girl Marty has just met, a shy school-teacher:

MRS. PILLETTI
Hey, I come home from your house
last night, Marty was here with a girl.

CATHERINE
Who?

MRS. PILLETTI
Marty.

CATHERINE
Your son Marty?

MRS. PILLETTI
Well, what Marty you think is gonna
be here in this house with a girl?

CATHERINE
Were the lights on?

MRS. PILLETTI
Oh sure. (frowns at her sister)
This girl is a college graduate.

CATHERINE
They’re the worst. College girls are
one step from the streets. They smoke
like men inna saloon. My son Joseph,
his wife, you know, she types onna
typewriter. One step from the streets,
I tell you.

(Mrs. Pilletti ponders this philosophy for a moment.)

MRS. PILLETTI
That’s the first time Marty ever
brought a girl to this house. She
seems like a nice girl. I think he
has a feeling for this girl. You
heard him sing. He been singing like
that all morning.

There is an interesting counterpoint in the screenplay where the unmarried guys talk about Mickey Spillane and how he depicts women. Not as savage a critique as Bezzeridis’ in Kiss Me Deadly, but quite witty:

JOE
…so the whole book winds up, Mike
Hammer, he’s inna room there with
this doll. So he says, “You rat, you
are the murderer.” So she begins to
con him, you know? She tells him how
she loves him. And then Bam! He shoots
her in the stomach. So she’s laying
there, gasping for breath, and she
says, “How could you do that?” And
he says, “It was easy.”

LEO
(without looking up
from his magazine)
Boy, that Mickey Spillane, boy he
can write.

[ ... ]

JOE
What I like about Mickey Spillane is
he knows how to handle women. In one
book, he picks up a tomato who gets
hit with a car, and she throws a
pass at him. And then he meets two
beautiful twins, and they throw passes
at him. And then he meets some
beautiful society leader, and she
throws a pass at him, and…

LEO
Boy, that Mickey Spillane, he sure
can write.

The Secret in Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos 2009)

While there are flaws in the plausibility of the final resolution of the murder investigation, the film has a deep humanity and an existential sadness at its core that is quite profound. A powerful exploration of memory, the consequences of clinging to the past, the nature of justice and retribution, and the courage required to pursue love and true passion. What is the right course in the face of the state failing in the obligation to enforce justice?

The emotional embrace of the film in its totality leaves you overwhelmed.

The Blind Side (2009): Beyond Political Correctness

Flaws aside, an honest and inspirational movie.  Saccharine and sentimental yes, but decent and honest.  The focus is on a relationship between two people, and it is true.  What is wrong with portraying a family life we aspire to? Must we contrive a story to fit an ideological imperative?  Is not the story as much about a woman doing something truly extraordinary as about a homeless black boy given a chance. That countless others do not get this chance is not  ignored, the film’s coda deals with this and reasonably. Bullock and the black kid are great. Don’t we know such women in our own lives – our own mothers and wives?

Sometimes cinema is not about artistry, but a celebration of what can be - of decencies that we can all admire and aspire to.