Broadchurch (UK TV Mini-Series 2103 ): Exceptional

Broadchurch which had a massive following in the UK over 8 weeks earlier this year, is about the investigation of the murder of a young boy in a small prosperous seaside town in Dorset. The performances from a stellar cast are top notch, and the high production values demonstrate the real strength of British TV, and the willingness to delve into life as it is lived by most of us, using actors who actually look and behave like real people.

 

At first I was reluctant to go to such a dark place, and then was compelled to continue watching as it drew me into a maelstrom of emotions driven by the need not only to find the killer but to comprehend the how and why of it all. The writing, the cinematography, and the direction are exceptional. The landscape is intimately involved and rendered in rich tones of aching beauty. A must-see.

 

 

To The Wonder (2012): Indulgent

Terrence Malick’s  latest film To The Wonder is disappointing. Flimsy and pretentious, with the masterful cinematography and elegant mis-en-scene largely wasted on the mannered antics of a clutch of shallow bourgeois mouthing banal verse over too many scenes of egotistical ardour, and of impossibly beautiful women if not endlessly dancing around like 10 year olds, moping about empty backyards, or running nymph-like through fields of wheat.

 

Indulgent film-making that mistakes talking about love over pretty pictures for profundity. The priest is the only interesting character, and we see too little of him. Are we supposed to care about the Affleck character because he is some kind of environmentalist? Most of the time he looks like the Incredible Hulk fitted-out by Ralph Lauren.

 

 

The Master (2012)

The Master is an ultimately empty film. Great period setting and cinematography, with strong performances, but the scenario is indulgent and meandering. All those long takes and mobile camera movements are elegant but have surface only.  I get that Freddy Quell is a mumbler, autistic perhaps, but being able to follow only snatches of what he is saying, makes you painfully aware that you are watching a movie.  Like observing someone else's dream and on the cusp of totally boring. The last hour goes literally nowhere. Deeply flawed.

Tod Browning's Freaks (1932): A humanist masterpiece

Tod Browning's Freaks is a humanist masterpiece that leaves you thinking and in awe its compassion and craft.

Browning has you first appalled with a confronting directness that borders on exploitation, yet all the while he builds compassion and a criminal solidarity through empathy. He makes you complicit in terrible acts of revenge - not withstanding the tacked-on studio-imposed closed romantic ending, which perversely reinforces the darkness of the deeds by rewarding vengeance. Indeed the expressionist climax is as dark as any noir from ten years down the track.

Notes on Yasujirô Ozu's I Was Born But (1932)

Contrary to most critics' view that the ending of Yasujirô Ozu's I Was Born But is downbeat, I find it delicately up-beat. The two precocious brothers not so much lose their innocence but rather gain in maturity and compassion. They are too young to see that their father’s silliness is a much lesser crime than the philandering of the boss, which while it is played for laughs, is there for the adults to see.

The kid brother played by 8yo Tomio Aoki  has to be one of the greatest childhood performances ever. Those mean poses, the cheekiness, the raspberries, and the mimicking of the older brother are glorious. A fantastic example of the uplifting joy of cinema both in its wistful nostalgia and human pathos. Great performances, a wry script, and a beguiling rhythm have you hooked.

The Ozu static shots and interludes with a low camera (and the flagrant disregard of Hollywood's rule) are there, but the editing and ensemble scenes also have a cheeky eloquence, like the camera panning before the character providing the perspective is shown, tracking shots with the camera like a little kid trying to keep up with the antics of the older kids, and the same tracking camera stopped by an obstacle such as a lamp-post . The shots of trams crossing the frame insinuate the elemental pathos we are witnessing.

A Night at the Opera (1935): “and one duck egg”

“For the first time in the Brothers’ cinematic careers, they had pulled in a large portion of female fans. The price for this widening appeal could not be fully calculated at the time. Only much later did the cost become apparent.  In A Night at the Opera Harpo remained as silent as a stone, Chico kept his accent and his pianistic style, and Groucho still walked the walk and talked the talk. Some of their bits were among the funniest ever written and performed on screen. Yet a close examination shows that the old fire was banked. Instead of making sport of romance, they now facilitated it. Instead of whacking away at the powerful institutions of government or the military or education, they battled the toothless enemy of grand opera.  At [Irving] Thalberg’s insistence the crew of maniacs had become hilarious but harmless uncles, like the later Laurel and Hardy. They were not outrageous anymore, they were only frivolous; they were not surreal, they were only foolish; they were not daring, they were only impolite. Not that the Brothers minded. They were the first comedy team to become a box office attraction in the sound era. MGM proudly announced proudly announced plans to put them in another glossy vehicle, complete with ten-week road tryout.  Thalberg had been proven correct on all counts, the Marxes were flush, and the receipts kept pouring in.”
- Stefan Kanfer, Groucho (2000)

- Are you sure you have everything, Otis?
– Well, I haven’t had any complaints yet.

The Marx Bros. had not been a hit with women when Irving Thalberg took them on for Sam Goldwyn’s MGM.  Thalberg gave them a plausible narrative, a big budget, and the best writers for A Night at the Opera, their first MGM movie.  A slick production with great gags and set pieces delivered one of the studio’s biggest hits and a gross of $5 million – big money in 1936. The scenarios had been honed on the road across America, with the famous stateroom scene and other key scenes played to live audiences before production began.  The soppy romance delivered the dames and the boys’ antics the rest of an appreciative crowd, with only one major critic giving the film the thumbs down.

- That woman? Do you know why I sat with her? Because she reminded me of you.
– Really?
– Of course, that’s why I’m sitting here with you. Because you remind me of you. Your eyes, your throat, your lips! Everything about you reminds me of you. Except you. How do you account for that? <If she figures that one out, she’s good.>

A Night at the Opera is a very funny movie and includes many memorable scenes and lines, and with a sincere ring of pathos.  The chaotic stateroom imbroglio, the opera finale with Groucho spruiking for dough from the balcony and Harpo literally ripping up the scenery, the wonderful  sanity clause stand-up between Chico and Groucho,  the achingly funny moving hotel beds routine, the sparks that fly between Groucho and Margaret Dumont, and the wonderfully irreverent takedowns of the great character actor Sig Ruman as Gottlieb,  the pompous opera impresario.  Fittingly the ‘last’ musical interlude, on deck with the Italian migrants heading for the New World, has a real dignity and pathos that gives the melodrama a harder edge.

 - Hey you. I told you to slow that nag down. On account of you I almost heard the opera.

Is Kanfer right though? Were the Marx Bros. tamed by Thalberg?  I think he makes a strong case, though which side you come down on is a matter of perspective.  A Night at the Opera is a great, very great Hollywood comedy, and on those terms there is more to celebrate than lament.  If however we compare the movie to their earlier pictures, the Marx Bros. are no longer subversive, they are no longer protagonists but facilitators in a narrative that, if we are truly honest, is as hackneyed as they come – a totally predictable romantic triangle that maintains its claim to seriousness despite the best antics of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo to expose its banality. The Marx Bros. were no longer radical, and A Night at the Opera marked the beginning of a lamentable decline. The team had been co-opted by the establishment, and it had been so easy.

- Never in my life have I received such treatment. They threw an apple at me. 
- Well, watermelons are out of season.

Horse Feathers (1932): “You can’t put the wall over my ice”

Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Zeppo.  Three clowns and a straight man. Anarchists all. Whatever it is, they’re against it.

Gonzo intellectual and all-round eccentric Slavoj Zizek from Slovenia has posted a short video on YouTube.  For those who know what the appellation means – I can’t make head nor tail of it – Zizek is a  Lacanian-Marxist philosopher. Quick, get me a four-year-old child. Zizek posits that Freud’s construction of the human psyche applies perfectly to the three erstwhile lunatics Groucho, Chico, and Harpo.  The video is titled ‘How the Marx Brothers Embody Freud’s Id, Ego & Super-Ego’. I am not quite sure what to make of it, but let’s explore how the elephant got into Groucho’s pyjamas.

Zizek says Groucho, “with his nervous hyper-activity”, is superego.

I don’t know what they have to say
It makes no difference anyway
Whatever it is, I’m against it…
And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it,
I’m against it!

Chico “the rational guy, egotistic, calculating all the time”, is ego.

Professor Wagstaff: In case I never see you again, which would add ten years to my life, what would you fellas want to play football.

Baravelli: Well, first we want a football.

Professor Wagstaff: Well, I don’t know if we’ve got a football, but if I can find one, would you be interested? I don’t want a hasty answer, just sleep on it.

Baravelli: I no think I can sleep on a football.

And, “the weirdest of them all, Harpo, the mute guy, he doesn’t talk”, is id. “Freud said that drives are silent… The id in all its radical ambiguity… childishly innocent, just striving for pleasure… But, at the same time, possessed by some kind of primordial evil, aggressive all the time. And this unique combination of utter corruption and innocence is what the id is about.”

In Horse Feathers, in the speak-easy while Chico is in the back-room filling a bottle of Scotch and a bottle of Rye from the same container of hooch,  Harpo passes a poker-game and when he overhears one of the players say “Cut the cards”,  he pulls an axe from his raincoat and happily obliges.  Later, Harpo stokes a raging fireplace with a spade filled from a pile of books.  Indeed, the movie’s original ending which was cut (and replaced by the bigamous marriage scene with the three villains scrambling to be the first to hump their new bride) had the college burning to the ground after another fire lit by Harpo, while the musketeers play cards.

Some see a social critique of sorts in Horse Feathers, and you can pretty well read what you like into the narrative about college football, which is essentially only a pretext for a string of gags and absurdities melding irreverent and raunchy vaudeville with subversive attacks on authority.

The movie was a box-office smash in 1932, and both the in-crowd and the intelligentsia wasted no time in claiming the Marx Bros as their own. Stefan Kanfer laid out the critical response in his authoritative biography of Groucho (2000) quoting from articles in Le Monde, London’s New Statesman, and Time magazine, which had the boys on the cover of the August 13, 1932 issue, and referring to Groucho’s “unsquelchable effontry.”  The left-leaning New Statement gave the reportage a surrealist twist: “They [the Marx Bros.] introduced the psychological disturbance that is caused by seeing something that is mad and aimless… something which, if not utterly disconnected, depends for its connections on the workings of the unconscious.”

Put simply, Horse Feathers is damned hilarious.  Ask a four-year-old child.

Monsieur Lazhar (Canada 2011): “She hugged you after you cried”

“Don't try to find a meaning to Martine's death.
There isn't one.
A classroom is a home for...
It's a place
of friendship, of work,
and courtesy.
Yes, courtesy.
A place full of life.
Where you devote your life.
A place where you give of your life.
Not infect a whole school
with your despair.”

­- Monsieur Lazhar

A teacher hangs herself in the classroom before school.  A tragedy?  Was she driven to it? Do her sixth graders know why?  Is one of them to blame?

Are physical demonstrations of care not welcome in the classroom?  So many rules and so little room for simple humanity. 

A new teacher, a somber decent man from Algeria, Bachir, as wise and scarred as his years replaces the lost Martine.  The wall of the classroom have been repainted, her desk emptied, and a psychologist employed.  Still a specter lingers. Who has the greater pain, the children or the new teacher?  He must guide the children from the dark forest of loss, and suppress his own angst.  Death and injustice, from two worlds apart.

He reads his own composition for their correction:

The Tree and the Chrysalis by Bachir Lazhar

After an unjust death,
there's nothing to say.
Nothing at all.
As will become plain below.
From the branch of an olive tree,
there hung a tiny chrysalis
the color of emerald.
Tomorrow it would be a butterfly,
freed from it's cocoon.

> Its. I-t-s.

The tree was happy
to see his chrysalis grown,
but secretly, he wanted to keep her
a few mor years.

> More, m-o-r-e.

"So long as she remembers me."

He'd shielded her from gusts,
saved her from ants.
But tomorrow she would leave
to affront alone predators and poor whether.

> Weather, w-e-a.

That night,
a fire ravaged the forest,
and the chrysalis
never became a butterfly.

At dawn, the ashes cold,
the tree still stood,
but his heart was charred,
scarred by the flames,
scarred at grief.

> Scarred by grief.

When a bird alights on the tree,
the tree tells it about
the chrysalis that never woke up.
He pictures her, wings spread,
flitting across
a clear blue sky,
drunk on nectar and freedom,
the discreet witness
to our love stories.

A story of love and grief.  The love that binds and the grief that keeps us apart.

Big Deal on Madonna Street (Italy 1958)

“Rubare è un mestiere impegnativo, ci vuole gente seria, mica come voi… Voi al massimo potete andare a lavorare.” [Robbery is a serious craft, you need to know what you are doing, not like you guys… the best you can hope for is honest work.]

A wacky gang of incompetent penny-ante Roman felons hatches a heist with hilarious consequences.  This is all that really needs to be said about this classic cinematic caper from the masters of la comedia all’italiana, the writing team of Furio Scarpelli & Agenore Incrocci, and director Mario Monicelli, but of course dear reader you have come here expecting more. At least four-to-five hundred words, choice turns of phrase, a display of filmic erudition, and a certain – even if counterfeit – humility. Oh well, if I must.

As well as a neo-realist patina in the scenes filmed on the streets of Rome courtesy of DP Gianni Di Venanzo, there is a dark expressionism in the night scenes that gives a dark edge to the comedy in Big Deal on Madonna Street. More on the flip-side later. Piero Umiliani contributes a boppy jazz score, which adds a lot to the fun.

There are also extensive connections with De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves from a decade before which go beyond the thematic. For those who are familiar with De Sica’s film there is a discomfiting irony in a scene at the start of Big Deal on Madonna Street where a stolen pram is sold to a fence – the petty larcenist saying he is reduced to pinching prams as almost all cars and bicycles are now fitted with alarms – and later with the gang stealing a movie camera to case the scene of the heist from the very same flea market where De Sica’s Antonio desperately searches for his bicycle. Then there is the engaging comedia in Bicycle Thieves from Antonio’s young son Bruno, who in his innocence is the aching counterpoint to the father’s despair.  The comic relief afforded by his presence is to be cherished.  His first scene when he is cleaning the bicycle for Papa’s first day on the job is full of pathos and humour – Bruno telling Antonio that the pawnbroker didn’t look after the bike as there is now a scratch on the pedal and that he would have complained.  This is by way of saying that in Monicelli’s film as in De Sica’s, the unique flavour of the Italian language is integral, and with a number of the character’s speaking different dialects, the individual characterisations have a spice all their own. Sadly so much of this expressiveness is lost in translating the dialog for the sub-titles. The line I quote at the top of this essay is redolent of an idiom and humour that can never be fully translated.

Humour. The essence of true comedy is the unexpected. Whether from razor sharp wit, innuendo, risible delusions, or slapstick, laughter is truly unleashed when we are caught by surprise, when unassailable absurdity is topped by the even more ludicrous; and we are again reduced to tears of joy, aching sides, and uncontrollable fits of coughing.  Your soul skips and oxytocin fills your blood-stream. All is well with you, and the world.  But just in case you get too carried away Monicello has a poor sod – un povere disgraziato – chased into the path of a tram and killed. Cut to the crematorium and Toto in dark glasses:  ”Better later than sooner.”

If the essence of true comedy is the unexpected, the key to great comedy is love. An empathy with the absurdity of existence, of its ultimate futility, and a sad fondness for the pathos of life.  The attitude that yes we are miserable but heck we can die laughing.  This madness takes hold of De Sica’s Antonio when he blows whatever money he has left on lunch in a restaurant.   The original Italian title for Big Deal on Madonna Street, I soliti ignoti aka “The Usual Unknown Suspects”, has a savour of this pathos (while its aptness is revealed in a newspaper headline shown on the screen just before the end title).

I wonder what was going through Mario Monicelli’s mind as he prepared to end his life by jumping out of a hospital window in 2010 at the age of 95.  Perhaps he was thinking thoughts like those he admitted to in an interview he gave three years earlier: “Death doesn’t frighten me, it bothers me. It bothers me for example that someone can be there tomorrow but me I am no longer there. What bothers me is no longer being alive, not being dead.”

This idea of  ’absence’ as loss is behind the greatest moment in I soliti ignoti, which is not found in the rollicking absurdity and high jinks that lead up to the disaster, nor in the towering stupidity and incompetence of the heist proper, but on the early morning after when the perps straggle out onto the deserted streets of Rome, say their goodbyes, and go their separate ways. A palpable regret suffuses the screen and your own heart aches for your loss as well as theirs.  Arrivederci.  Till we meet again.

Zéro de Conduite: "Like a scattered student""

I would rather smell the way boys smell–
Oh those schoolboys the way their legs flap under the desks in study hall
That odour rising roses and ammonia
And way their dicks droop like lilacs
Or the way they smell that forbidden acrid smell

- Patti Smith, ‘Piss Factory’, 1974

Me? Looking like a scattered student
I follow exuberant girls through the green chestnuts:
They know I’m there, and turn towards me
Laughing, eyes brimming with indiscretion.
I don’t say a word: I just stare at the flesh

Of their white necks framed by tresses:
I follow the curve of their shoulders down
Their divine backs, hidden by bodices and flimsy finery.

Soon I’m ogling their boots and socks …
Burning with fever, yearning for flesh.
They think I’m silly. They whisper to each other …
-And I feel kisses blossom on my lips …

- Arthur Rimbaud, ‘TO MUSIC: Railway square, Charleville’, 1870

I hated high school.  Stupid regimentation and oppressive teachers.  Corporal punishment from self-righteous frauds.  Six cuts of the cane across the hand you didn’t write with.  Basher  would sneak up behind you in class and hit you hard on the head with the attendance book.  Heinrich  the crypto-fascist enforcer of discipline loved to shout and humiliate.  “Attention! At ease!”  We sotto voce: “Fuck you, Jack”. Prefects in blazers for black shirts.

No girls – just the odd female teacher – if she happened to be young fetishised to distraction. That fetid smell of grey flannel and ammonia.

The deputy-principal and principal, both Mr Brown’s and both balding old bastards – “Bing” and “Bong”. Bong never soiled his hands, while Bing had a cupboard full of canes: short ones, long ones, thin ones, thick ones. He climaxed each time he hit you – red-faced and on the edge of apoplexy – pausing on each stroke to catch his breath and force up your outstretched hand to inflict the maximum pain. Your hand throbbed for hours.  I wish I had had the gumption to climb onto the roof of that hell-hole and pelt those jailers with whatever came to hand.

The French film-maker Jean Vigo (1905-34) hated his boarding school and dreamed a wild dream of schoolboy revolution.  The son of a Catalan anarchist, and consumptive, he made only four films in his short life. While his last film, L’Atalante (1934), is his masterpiece, his first and third films À propos de Nice (About Nice 1930) and Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct 1933) are exhilarating forays into an artist’s discovery of cinema as personal expression, anarchic joyous experiments in which we enter the world of a magic lantern. A mosaic surprise of the potential of cinema to not only observe the concrete in new ways but to express our humanity, to wonder, to rebel, to satirise, and to laugh.

Zéro de conduite: young devils at school a 45 minute fiction talkie about boys at an elementary boarding school rebelling against the mindless discipline, is not only anarchic, but inspired comic lunacy from a fountainhead of deep love for childhood, and the joy of life lived with spontaneity and without pretence.

A new teacher points the way: he is indulgent and playful. He is awed by everything. In the playground he suddenly starts impersonating Chaplin’s tramp, then grabs a ball from the boys and runs. On an excursion into the town he leads the boys a merry chase after a young woman he fancies, and you see she is having as much fun as the audience.

In their dormitory a gang of agitators instigates a surreal pillow-fight and mock crucifixion – slowed down on the screen against the musical score played backwards.  Total chaos.  A lecherous teacher outed and the revolution begins: “You’re full of shit!” (Vigo’s father who died in prison in suspicious circumstances had changed his name to Miguel Almereyda - Alyamerda being an anagram of  ”y’a la merde”, literal translation “there’s the shit”.)

The rebels take to the roof on a civic occasion and pelt the literally stuffed shirts from the Board of Governors on the dais below with rubbish. The stern midget principal – played by a young boy affecting a manly voice and demeanor - with a beard nearly as long as he is short scurries away for shelter.

Surrealism as fun shot at all angles and in frenetic montage, with a liberating asynchronous score of unbridled vitality. Mad strategams, irreverent language, and kids sick of eating beans throwing them at each other.  Zero for conduct!