relias Reviews

Swimming Pool (2003)

Sharp, smart, and sexy

[31 July 2003]

In Swimming Pool, Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling), author of a popular series of detective novels, is tired of writing whodunits. Her publisher (Charles Dance), a longtime friend, offers his French country retreat for a working vacation. When she accepts, she lands in a mystery of her own.

Her hoped-for solitude ends when his daughter Julie, a stranger to Sarah, turns up. With the face of a twelve-year-old and body of a centerfold, Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) swims nude in the pool and brings back men, one each night, for torrid sex within earshot of the affronted Sarah. Julie's shamelessness contrasts with Sarah's British reserve. It's not long before the mystery writer senses a story in the younger woman. The novel she planned is shelved when she begins snooping.

But Julie isn't the mystery in Swimming Pool; Sarah is, even to herself. The older woman, still striking in middle age, is as approachable as a coil of barbed wire. Her fascination with Julie comes from a writer's desire to uncover Julie's secrets, but also from an internal compulsion to move past her own inhibitions. External events push the two towards a murder, but Swimming Pool is more interested in psychological byways that converge in their encounter.

Rampling and director Ozon worked together in Under the Sand (2000). The new film more successfully works outward from the contrast between Rampling's exterior cool and inner fire. The actress came to international attention in The Night Porter (1974) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). She always looked like Lauren Bacall's evil twin: tall, angular, with a feline slant to her face. Middle age hasn't altered Rampling's screen sexiness, despite jowls and Sarah's frumpy clothes. Tension comes mainly from the star herself. Sagnier (also in Ozun's 8 Women, 2002), though naked for much of the picture, comes across as a Girl Scout trying to earn a merit badge in explicit sex when compared to Rampling..

Ozon's camera collaborates with the star, spying as she walks through the country house, whose cool colors match her temperament. The director must have taken careful notes of films by Clouzot (Les Diaboliques, 1955) and Leconte (Monsieur Hire, 1989, the current Man on the Train) to figure out how to film an actress who says more with her eyes than she could with the script. Dialogue, in English and French (with subtitles) counts for less than cinematography and editing in moving her inner story forward.

The director can be accused of mere formalism, channeling Hitchcock's French heirs to make cinematically interesting moves without regard for loose plot strands. Not much in his previous work argues for acquittal here. Swimming Pool leaves a few loose ends too, but these seem like one last tease for viewers expecting more of a whodunit, the kind Sarah writes, than a whydunnit, in which motives are always murky. A last minute twist puts Swimming Pool somewhere between `Aha!' and `Huh?' to steer the film into the vicinity of The Usual Suspects or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, works that play form against content via quirky endings. Viewers may leave the theater confused about what happened; they are advised to remember that Clouzot and Leconte's French approach to stories like this one examine the characters' souls rather than their actions, unlike Morton's brand of police-blotter stories.

Stand by Me (1986)

A Perfect Movie . . .

[25 June 2003]

I teach this movie to an enrichment class of middle-schoolers. The R rating is undeserved. Despite "language," etc., there is so much kids can learn from watching this film . . . and the kids I've taught always love it. Below is my review of the movie:

In Stand By Me, director Rob Reiner follows four boys on a journey to manhood in Castle Rock, Oregon in the early 1960's. Every step they take on a 20-mile hike to find the dead body of a missing boy brings them – and the audience – to a bittersweet understanding of the importance of one's friends in that important moment when you know childhood is ending. The four – Chris, Gordie, Vern, and Teddy – are losers by Castle Rock standards. Chris is the younger brother of a local juvenile delinquent and everyone expects he will follow the same sorry path. Teddy's father, a World War II vet, abused him. Vern is, well, fat and dumb, a nowhere kid. As for Gordie, he has smarts, but after the death of his football hero older brother a few months earlier, his parents have no emotion left to spend on their one surviving son. When Vern overhears that his brother, another hoodlum, knows where the body of a missing boy can be found, the boys set out to find the body and – they hope – become heroes. But the long trek on the railroad tracks brings other adventures to test them and, more importantly, their connection to each other. At the same time, a gang led by a sneering bully named Ace (Kiefer Sutherland) also decides to find the body and gain glory. Stand By Me puts the boys and the gang on a collision course. What elevates the movie is the tight bond between Chris (River Phoenix) and Gordie (Wil Wheaton). Gordie doesn't belong in this group of born losers. He's smart (he has a talent for writing), and his parents seem normal, even though they are in shock because of older brother Denny's death. Chris too has more promise than Castle Rock prejudice allows him to develop. He is thoughtful, a natural leader, but the town views him as another bad Chambers boy. The movie pivots on the way Gordie's need to get past his parents' rejection of him and Chris' resigned acceptance of his fate becomes a turning point for the two of them. The screenplay establishes the importance of their quest by presenting it in a flashback narrated by the grown-up Gordie reacting to the news that Chris, a local attorney, was killed trying to prevent a robbery at a fast food joint. The older Gordie's memories of that two-day adventure focus attention on its importance in shaping the direction their two lives would take. For Gordie, what happens with his friends on their trip, and especially its outcome, jolted him – at age 12 – into maturity. And for his best friend Chris, what the four confront and overcome gives him the courage to get out of the dead-end rut everybody in Castle Rock is pushing him into. Released in 1986, Stand By Me got an R rating mainly for language and scenes showing kids smoking. Younger viewers won't see or hear anything they haven't heard in the schoolyard, and might appreciate the chance to connect with four characters who aren't much different from themselves. Grownups can relate to the backward look at the importance of friendship at that critical moment when a boy starts to become a man. Yet this is a movie girls can enjoy too; it opens a window on a piece of boy life which is usually closed to them. The friends we had when we were 12 are different from the ones we make later on. With luck, they were there for us when we were least sure of who we were, where we were going. Over time, they may fall away, becoming – like Chris, Vern, and Teddy for Gordie – guys we pass in the high school hall on our way somewhere else. But moments like the ones captured in Stand By Me crystallize us. Memory can always recapture, often sadly, the way they shine.

The Pianist (2002)

The Holocaust without tears

[8 May 2003]

Director Roman Polanski's The Pianist is based on Wladyslaw Szpilman's account of his survival during the Nazi Holocaust in Poland. A Jew, Szpilman was a noted pianist for Warsaw radio in 1939 when Hitler's troops occupied his country. We watch Szpilman's family wear Star of David armbands identifying them as Jews, then suffer starvation and brutality in the Warsaw ghetto. His parents and sisters climb into boxcars to take them to the Treblinka death camp. He escapes; they don't. Whether his survival means anything is a question this powerful and austere film is too intelligent to answer.

The Pianist is a personal film for Polanski, whose mother was killed in a death camp, and is the first film shot in his native Poland since his breakout international hit Knife in the Water in 1962. That success led to Hollywood triumphs with Rosemary's Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), films darkened by a sense of evil that, after watching The Pianist, seems like the shadow of childhood experience. (Personal tragedy further darkened his vision. His wife, actress Sharon Tate, was slain by Charles Manson's `family' in 1969. Eight years later Polanski was convicted on a sex charge and fled to Europe to escape prison.)

Unlike recent Holocaust films, The Pianist never shows what happened in the death camps. Polanski almost ruthlessly limits his camera to what Szpilman saw, relying on the viewer's knowledge for historical context. Brick walls rise around the ghetto, German soldiers randomly shoot Jews in the street, and a few ghetto activists argue for armed resistance against their captors.

But one mark of genius is that Polanski's camera is not entirely subjective. His theme is the mystery and meaning of survival amid genocide. Polanski and writer Ronald Harwood embody this theme in a character that evokes empathy but not sympathy. Szpilman's artistic aloofness, imaged in the first scene when he continues to play Chopin in a radio studio while German shells explode outside, suggests Polanski chose this story because Szpilman witnessed events without participating in them. The meaning of his survival when millions died is thus as inexplicable to Polanski as it is for us.

The Pianist offers few moments of personal drama and no character arc. Szpilman's escape from the ghetto is abetted by a Jewish policeman whose earlier offer to join the goon squad of the Judenrat Szpilman had turned down. Outside the ghetto walls, sympathizers and friends who remember his talent leave him to starve in Warsaw apartments, like everyone else in that embattled city. Long stretches without dialogue follow efforts to find food in broken buildings, culminating in an encounter with a Nazi officer (Thomas Kretschmann) in a scene that is surprising, moving, and ultimately as enigmatic as Szpilman's earlier attempts to escape extermination.

In one scene, a singer he knew in happier days looks out the window of his hiding place at the ruined ghetto, pounded to rubble after the 1943 uprising. When Szpilman hints he should have remained inside, she says the Jewish resistance `died with dignity.' Yes, they did, and the pianist understands this, but false heroics are not a choice in the face of the Nazi killing machine. The Pianist gains power in scenes that reduce words to impossible gestures.

Adrien Brody's lean frame and ethnic face limited him in previous movies to strong character roles. The Pianist calls on his real talent. He keeps the movie moving through long sequences when his character is doing nothing except enduring in silence. In one he uncovers a piano and moves his fingers above the keyboard in a mime of a Chopin nocturne while the music plays in his head. Art can be an escape from horror, but that is not Polanski's point; the horror is always just outside the window or in the next apartment if he is overheard by the Polish woman who, later, shrieks `Jew!' when Szpilman is forced to flee.

His performance helps measure the distance between our engagement with Szpilman and Polanski's assessment of the significance of his main character's survival. Entirely believable in the role and aided by careful casting in minor roles (Maureen Lipman, who plays the mother, looks like she could be Brody's mother), the actor becomes an Everyman who depends on luck, pure and simple, to stay alive until the Russian army triumphs in 1945.

Character is not fate in a world gone mad. Polanski's film escapes the sentimentality of Holocaust films such Schindler's List or Life is Beautiful. Its harsh realism and closely-observed period feel turn us instead to enigmas pondered by the late Italian writer Primo Levi: millions died, some survived, those bear witness, let others extract the meaning if they can.

The Mystic Masseur (2001)

Film versus novel

[7 May 2003]

A half century ago, Trinidad was an outpost of the waning British Empire and, like most British holdings, attracted immigrants from the jewel in the crown, India, who established villages on the island. Novelist V.S. Naipaul, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature last year, grew up there. His first few novels wryly explored the comic clash between his fellow Indians and their exotic setting.

Now The Mystic Masseur, his first novel (1957) , comes to the screen directed by Ismail Merchant, best known as the producer half of the Merchant Ivory filmmaking team. Naipaul published it a few years after leaving Trinidad to study at Oxford, hoping for a career as a writer. The novel, narrated by a young Trinidad Indian at Oxford, refracts elements from Naipaul's early life into a story about another islander with similar but misplaced ambitions.

Ganesh Ransumair burns to make his mark in the world of letters. The trouble is, Trinidad doesn't offer much scope for a man with little learning and less talent. In his poor village on the outskirts of the colonial capital, books are so rare that a conniving shopkeeper with a marriageable daughter tries to score points with Ganesh by showing off his library, a collection of tattered paperback mysteries he's obviously never read. The daughter wins a few points, though, with her beauty and odd enthusiasm for English punctuation, of all things. A marriage is arranged and the new wife waits impatiently for her husband to finish the book that will make them rich. It turns out to be a pamphlet on Hinduism that fails to sell. Ganesh is then persuaded to try his hand as a masseur – actually, a faith healer – and once he gets the patter right and performs a few miraculous cures, he's on his way. Now the books he writes sell like hotcakes, not because Ganesh is a great author, but because he is a famous mystic. He parlays his fame among island Indians into an election victory, winning a seat on the colonial council.

Caryl Phillips' screenplay starts where Naipaul's novel ends, with a young Oxford student, an Indian from Trinidad, sent to meet an island statesman named G. Ramsay Muir at the railway station. Muir turns out to be Ganesh, thoroughly Anglicized and eager to visit the dreaming spires of the university town. Phillips invents scenes of Ganesh gushing at the riches of the Bodleian Library, marveling at all the learning he was never able to acquire. In the novel, learning that Muir is the ex-masseur is a comic punch line that caps the story of a man eager to reinvent himself. Phillips' decision to start there and then backtrack to Ganesh's rise leaves the movie without an ending and skews its themes.

But the movie works best where the novel also succeeds, in characters who wait impatiently while young Ganesh works out his mission in life. Chief among these is Ramlogan, the shopkeeper played by Om Puri, a veteran of Indian cinema. Wily, crass, but always polite, Ramlogan seems to smell the money this poor scholar might make. His daughter Leela (Ayesha Dharker) steals a few scenes when she wonders aloud why Ganesh isn't making any. As for Ganesh, Aasif Mandvi's performance seems driven by the plot, not the character. James Fox shows up twice in a weird cameo role as an Englishman gone native.

The Mystic Masseur is wildly comic when Merchant can get Ramlogan, Leela, and Ganesh into his lens. Then the interplay between Ganesh's ambition and the more practical concerns of his wife and father-in-law get laughs. Their dialect, Indian English with a Caribbean flavor, is also fun to listen to, although hard to follow at times. But Merchant is not much of a director, with too many flat shots of characters talking in the middle distance and cutaways to show their reaction. The languid editing also deadens the pace.

Coming so soon after Monsoon Wedding, a much more lively film, Mystic Masseur seems slow and unconvincing once it gets past village scenes. It aims at themes its characters never quite hit. Comedy comes from situations Ganesh finds himself in, not from the wobbly arc of his upward career. What's missing in this adaptation is the affectionate wonder of Naipaul's narrator who can laugh with but also at Ganesh but who also, in the novel, offers an implicit contrast to his ambitions. As Ganesh strives to become something more than the mystic masseur, he crashes into a theme Naipaul would develop in his later novels: the troubled identity of the exile caught between different worlds. In 1957, when Naipaul was just starting out, he could look back on Ganesh with wry affection, confident that his path would follow that of his narrator instead. A half century later, with laurels, a knighthood, and long residence in England, Naipaul himself seems to have hardened into a smarter, more successful G, Ramsay Muir.

Strawberry & Chocolate (1993)

Character comedy (?) w/ political theme

[7 May 2003]

`Strawberry and Chocolate' (1993)is set in contemporary Havana. The luster of that city has dimmed after nearly four decades of Castro's rule. David (Vladimir Cruz), a student and avid Castro supporter, is on the rebound after losing his girlfriend. He had taken her to a cheap hotel to make love, but the place is so shabby it puts her off. Instead, he promises never to touch her until they marry. In the next scene, she marries someone else while David stands sullenly among the well wishers at the registry office. Then he meets Diego (Jorge Perugorría).

Diego, who is flamboyantly gay, parks himself at David's table in an outdoor café to eat a dish of strawberry ice cream. For David, this is suspicious because chocolate is also available. Diego says some people like chocolate, some like strawberry, an innocuous line that gives the movie its title and also hints at the odd couple relationship to follow.

Diego does not disguise his sexual interest in David, but is also interested in giving David an education the regime denies him. The older man is far more cultured than his new friend. Offers of books banned in Castro's Cuba, such as a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa or the poems of John Donne, lure David to his apartment for tea and talk. When David reports that Diego is involved with a forbidden art exhibit, he is directed to befriend Diego to find out more information. `Strawberry and Chocolate' thus sets their emerging friendship against the backdrop of two bleak themes: anti-gay prejudice in the Castro regime, and the betray-thy-neighbor expectation of a police state.

But almost nobody conforms to type. A woman in Diego's building who is part of the neighborhood Vigilance Committee, on the watch for counter-revolutionary activities, turns out to be a good friend to Diego and then to David. Everyone plays one game with the government, but a different one in their private lives. This is a lesson David has to learn. Encounters with women along the way provide a few subplots, but the heart of the story lies in the hearts of the two men.

`Strawberry and Chocolate' is credited to directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío. The former was, until his death shortly after completing this film, the best known filmmaker in Cuba, winning an international reputation in the 1960's for titles such as `Memoirs of Underdevelopment,' a look at life in Cuba in the early Castro years that tempers criticism with prudence. `Strawberry' is smaller in scale and less overtly political.

The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1995 and won awards at film festivals around the world (including the Sundance Festival). American viewers may instantly slot it with Hollywood features that show how straight characters learn life lessons from a wiser gay companion (`Boys on the Side,' `As Good As It Gets'). And at times Diego's excesses recall the worst performances of Harvey Fierstein. Yet superb performances by the two male leads eventually move beyond stereotypes they – and the audience – initially share about each other, transforming their unexpected friendship into a statement that puts the lie to official groupthink in a repressive regime.

The Quiet American (2002)

Triumph for Caine . . . and Fraser

[30 April 2003]

Graham Greene's 1956 novel The Quiet American appeared soon after France abandoned colonial control of Vietnam but before the U.S. war effort escalated to stop the spread of Communism in that country. Nearly a half century later, director Phillip Noyce adapts this story of love and betrayal in Saigon in a powerful, moving film anchored by superb casting.. Saigon in 1952 was the outpost of the waning French empire. An insurgent movement in north Vietnam was pushing the French closer to defeat at Dien Bien Phu two years later. But Saigon has become home to London Times correspondent Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine). Fowler is a decent man, but disengaged. The war is less important to him than staying with Phuong (Do Thi Han Yen), a beauty he met in a dance hall. A telegram that threatens to recall him to London disturbs his quiet life, as does Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser), a young American ostensibly on a U.S.-sponsored medical mission. The screenplay by Christopher Hampton and Robert Schenkkan turns on Fowler's effort to stay put and on Pyle's sudden infatuation with Phuong. Because Fowler's wife in England won't divorce him, he can't offer marriage. But Pyle can. Fowler tries to uncover the truth about a massacre to buy time with London. His suspicion points to an upstart Vietnamese general, supported by unknown sources, who is driving a wedge between Viet Minh insurgents and the French. And clues hint that Pyle is involved. Romance and politics become entangled as Fowler realizes that to keep his woman, he must get rid of Pyle, a man whose good-natured innocence he can't help but like. Fowler is the center of Noyce's film. As in the novel, he tells the story in flashback from the discovery of Pyle's body in the Saigon river to Fowler's first encounter with the young American. Michael Caine gives Fowler his special seedy authority, an Englishman who has found a home where rules bred in the bone don't necessarily apply. This is a role Caine perfected long ago, starting with The Ipcress File (1965), which caught his character in a similar clash between loyalties. Much older than Harry Palmer in that film, but almost as cheeky, Caine plays Fowler as a man who knows life is running out but hopes to hold on to what little savor it has left. The increasing complexity of the Vietnam conflict forces him into moral ambiguities familiar to admirers of Graham Greene. Just as convincing, but more surprising, is Brendan Fraser as Pyle. Blocky, big-shouldered, and wearing horn-rim glasses, Fraser is an unexpected choice for Greene's quiet American. Yet this actor can traverse the distance between self-effacement (Gods and Monsters) and formula self-importance (The Mummy). Caine's portrayal was nominated for an Oscar and other awards, but Fraser deserves notice too. The Quiet American was filmed once before (1958) with Audie Murphy in the title role. Greene was reportedly furious because this version suppressed the novel's anticipatory indictment of America's chosen role in Vietnam. Noyce's version gains power from a half century of hindsight, imaged in a morose closing montage of newspaper articles over Fowler's byline about the ensuing American war. That hindsight and the need to invent a plot arc for a character-driven story forces Noyce to fashion a suspense thriller closer in spirit to Greene's `entertainments' (his term) than to his serious novels. This is no criticism of Noyce; many Greene `entertainments,' like The Third Man and Our Man in Havana became memorable movies. One welcome change enhances the importance of Phuong, who is little more than a cipher in the novel, and Do Thi Han Yen invests the role with passion and complexity. The director and star have run the gamut from psychological dramas to simple potboilers. Noyce debuted with Deep Calm and recently directed Rabbit-Proof Fence. Along the way he helmed The Saint, The Bone Collector, and other forgettables. Highs and lows punctuate Caine's roster of roles. This is another high. The Quiet American joins two mature talents in an emotionally subtle film that showcases their special skills.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Noir at its best

[30 April 2003]

Humphrey Bogart died nearly fifty years ago, but polls still put him at the top of all-time Hollywood stars. What turns a man into a legend? The man himself wasn't much: a slight build, not too tall, no Stallone muscles to swell his suit. What he had in classic films like `The Maltese Falcon' was a voice that cut through a script like a knife. `The Maltese Falcon,' directed by John Huston in 1941, reprised Dashiell Hammett's thriller. (It had been filmed before.) Hammett practically invented the tough guy so deep in cynicism nobody could hope to put anything past him. The novel, thick with plot, wasn't easy for director John Huston to untangle. Few people who cherish this film can summarize its story in a sentence or two. I'll try. San Francisco private eye Sam Spade (Bogart) is pulled into the search for a fabulously valuable statue by a woman who seeks his help. First, his partner is killed, then Spade pushes through her lies to uncover connections to an effete foreigner (Peter Lorre) and a mysterious kingpin (Sydney Greenstreet). The story unfolds like a crumpled paper. But the whodunit becomes less important than how we respond to the strong screen presence of Bogart and his co-stars. That's what makes `The Maltese Falcon' a classic. We see more and appreciate more each time we watch it. The art of Huston and Bogart doesn't come across until a second or third viewing. Huston invented what the French called film noir, in honor of Hollywood films (often `B' movies, cheap to make, second movies in double features) that took no-name stars into city streets to pit tough guys, often with a vulnerable streak, against dangerous dames. Audiences knew that when the tough guy said, `I'm wise to you, babe,' he'd be dead within a reel or two. Bogart was luckier than most noir heroes, but it cost. Struggling to maintain his own independence – against the claims of love or his own penchant towards dishonesty – the Bogart hero can do little better than surrender, with a rueful shrug, to the irony his survival depends on. The climax of `The Maltese Falcon' ranks with the last scene of `Casablanca,' another Bogart vehicle, in showing how the tough guy has to put himself back together after his emotions almost get the better of him. That assertion of strength, bowed but not broken, defines the enduring quality of Bogart on screen. For Huston, telling this story posed a different problem. Telling it straight wasn't possible – too many twists. Huston chose to focus on characters. One way to appreciate Huston's choices is to LISTEN to the movie. Hear the voices. Notice how in long sequences narrating back story, Huston relies on the exotic accents of his characters to keep us interested. Could we endure the scene in which Greenstreet explains the history of the Maltese falcon unless his clipped, somewhat prissy English accent held our attention? Also, we watch Bogart slip into drug-induced sleep while Greenstreet drones on. Has any director thought of a better way to keep us interested during a long narrative interlude? And is there a bit of wit in our watching Bogart nod off during a scene which, if told straight, would make US doze? All of this leads to the ending, minutes of screen time in which more goes on, gesture by gesture, than a million words could summarize. He loves her, maybe, but he won't be a sucker. The cops come in, and the emotional color shifts to gray, the color of film noir heroes like Bogart. Bars on the elevator door as Brigid descends in police custody foreshadow her fate in the last image of Huston's film. But after the film, we're left with Spade, whom we like and loathe, a man whose sense of justice squares, just this once, with our own, maybe. Black and white morality prevails in a black and white movie, but Sam Spade remains gray – and so does our response to this film classic.

It Happened One Night (1934)

THE classic screwball comedy

[30 April 2003]

Moviegoers in 1934 started their evening with a Fox Movietone newsreel, pictures of ex-stockbrokers selling apples on New York street corners, of that new president named Roosevelt and his plans for economic recovery, and maybe footage of a rising German leader named Hitler at the Nuremberg rally. Then, with bad news behind them, they'd tuck into a masterpiece of comic fluff titled `It Happened One Night.' Director Frank Capra's movie practically invented screwball comedy, movies that helped America take its mind off the ongoing worldwide economic depression. Nobody goes to movies to get depressed, except maybe fans of Ingmar Bergman films. And few moviegoers expect movies they pay to see to mirror problems they go to the movies to escape from. During the Depression, Hollywood responded to this box office need in comedies about the rich, the eccentric, about nearly anybody who wasn't broke or unemployed or fleeing from the dust that covered Oklahoma. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said, `The rich are very different from you and me.' He was talking about the Jazz Age Gatsbys he wrote about. If he were talking about Hollywood, he would have added, `and they're funnier.' Wealth creates freedom, a precious commodity in Depression America. The screwball comedy focuses on characters, often women, with enough cash reserves (usually from a rich father or relative) to behave as if the world was still theirs to command. Command, comedy, comeuppance – three words that define the movement of films like `It Happened One Night.' The rich aren't punished for being rich. Rather, the rich heroine learns true values and wins love through her unexpected connection with a man who exposes her to another side of life. Ellen Andrews (Claudette Colbert), daughter of a Wall Street tycoon, never descends as far as Ma Joad's rattletrap Ford. When she flees her father's yacht to join a weasly playboy she married, Capra, his writers, and comic fate put her on a bus with Peter Warne (Clark Gable)``, a down and out reporter. Sniffing a story (when he isn't smelling booze), Warne shepherds her towards New York. Stops along the way provide opportunities for Andrews to share the joys of people who can still sing joyfully without a dime in their pockets and, by the way, fall in love with Warne. Capra trowels on sentiment and sexual innuendo in famous scenes such as an overnight interlude in a motel cabin in which Warne ropes up a blanket between his bed and hers to create privacy. The `Walls of Jericho,' as he calls it, thinly preserve proprieties moviegoers (and the censors) expected in 1934. Naturally, this is too good a gag to let go after one scene, and when the walls fall down, the movie ends. `It Happened One Night' swept the Oscars and in 1993 was selected for the National Film Registry. The movie is a masterpiece of comic casting. Colbert, with her delicate looks, had a voice that could step down an octave into comic dialogue. Gable, then emerging as a Hollywood hunk, growled his lines but showed box office boffo in the Jericho scene when he explains how a man undresses for bed, peels off his shirt, and reveals a bare chest underneath. Sales of undershirts reportedly dropped for the next few years. Screwball comedy took many forms. The conflict between wealth and poverty almost always shadowed the comic plot, but within limits. Nobody seeking a nickel's worth of escape from American grimness was paying to watch real poverty. What moviegoers wanted, and what Hollywood provided, were comic fantasies that affirmed the essential rightness of what they were and what they believed even though darn little in their real lives affirmed these values. Thus, in comedy, sex is the ultimate comeuppance. Instinct and attraction pay no attention to class lines. The important point, in most of these screwball comedies, is that in a society where money makes a difference, sex (or love – your choice) erases those differences. That may be a comic fantasy, but it held sway in theaters for years. The rich, though different, still have the itch, and that's what Capra and other filmmakers took to the bank.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

SPOILERS: Beautiful, poetic movie

[29 April 2003]

POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD!



`The Wind Will Carry Us' comes from Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This enigmatic but resonant film takes its title from a modern Iranian poem the main character recites to a peasant girl as she fills a jug of milk for him in a dark cellar. We never see the woman. In fact we never see several principal characters in the story. But story and characters aren't the point here; setting, symbols, and rhythm are. Kiarostami opens with long shots of a jeep winding down a twisty road in the Iranian desert, looking for a village that isn't on any map. We never see anyone except the leader of the group, whom villagers call `the engineer' although he isn't one. The leader encounters a young boy who guides his group to the village, an ochre-colored warren of huts perched on a barren hill. Women climb wooden ladders up and down from one house to another. The place looks as if Kiarostami was inspired by an M.C. Escher print. The village is not beautiful, but each shot captures the eye. Each frame finds a peaceful beauty that contrasts the hurried life of the engineer, a prisoner of his cell phone, with the rhythms of people whose existence hasn't changed much in hundreds of years. We infer his mission is to wait until a 100 year old woman dies. Why? We don't know, but one guess is that he and his crew are supposed to covertly film the funeral ceremony. The problem is that the woman doesn't die while he and his unseen crew remain on watch. We never see the woman either. The movie sets up a dialogue, via its technique, between the engineer's Westernized expectations and the slow friction of village life he comes to expect and even value. The engineer's cell phone is a good example of how recurring patterns in this film amplify its themes. Every time his phone rings he has to drive his jeep to high ground, near the village cemetery, to explain to his unknown caller that the old woman has not died yet.

These interruptions become almost comic, a way of structuring sequences in which little happens from his point of view. On another level, an awful lot has happened. The engineer is working his way into the life of the village through indirections that mirror his initial problem in even finding the place. Kiarostami does not set up a plot in the Western sense. Much remains unexplained, and characters, like the engineer, don't undergo sudden conversions of the kind we are used to in movies. Some critics have likened the film to Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot because much is imminent but nothing happens. The comparison is inexact. The director's modernism stems from the visual tension between the push of the engineer -- his needs and deadline -- versus basic realities of people who live close to nature because they have no choice. Yet their lives, imaged in the director's camera, retain a beauty and connection his life cannot hope to attain. Beckett's bleakness exists in a realm apart from Kiarostami's humane vision. Small moments resonate with that vision. In one scene the engineer, frustrated by another phone call, kicks over a tortoise. Flailing on its back, the creature might die. But when the engineer drives away, the camera cuts to the tortoise righting itself and moving on. This would be a throwaway moment in any other film, but here it symbolizes a reality about village life the engineer cannot yet grasp: these people, including the old woman, live; they don't die on cue. A simple insight like this yields a harvest of riches in `The Wind Will Carry Us.'

Visages de femmes (1985)

Interesting look at plight of African women

[29 April 2003]

African films rarely play in U.S. theaters. That's one reason why `Faces of Women' is worth seeing. The other is that writer-director Désiré Ecaré's award-winning 1985 film (subtitled) puts us inside a culture few people ever directly encounter. The title announces the theme. Ecaré, from Ivory Coast, presents two stories set in a village and in the coastal city of Abidjan. The movie opens in a village festival where men and women dance while local musicians beat a drum and squeeze an accordion. We encounter Brou, his wife N'Guessan, and his brother Koaissi, a city dweller who refuses to join villagers in digging up manioc roots, a foodstuff. Koaissi lingers in the village because he is sexually involved with N'Guessan, culminating in an extended, explicit scene. (`Faces' is unrated but would get an NC-17 for that scene.)

Like a cuckold in a folktale, Brou plots to discover them together. He need not have bothered. Everyone in the village knows what is going on already. For Ecaré, that is the important point. The wife is trying to assert her independence of rules villagers expect women to follow. Brou makes this point when he says, `You are my slave.' `Faces' shifts abruptly to Madame Costas, an older woman who owns a fish drying business in Abidjan. She seeks a bank loan to open a restaurant, but can't get approval despite a profitable balance sheet. Her two grown daughters, city slickers, question why she wants to be in business at all. That is man's work. A woman's real assets, says the elder, are her breasts, buttocks, and thighs. The daughters vamp the banker into reconsidering the request. `Faces' shifts to a family gathering in which the father, who lives off his wife's income, is chided for neglecting village obligations as head of the family. When his wife refuses to send her hard-earned money back to their village, they resolve this impasse by deciding to visit the village festival, dance, and forget about their problems. `Faces' ends where it begins. The stories are joined by Ecaré's polemical concern to document the predicament of women in a male-dominated traditional society. Values represented by the village are the source of conflict in the first story. Yet those same values, still powerful even in the city, resolve, at least momentarily, Madame Costas' troubles with her money-sucking family.

Unlike Hollywood tracts on the `new woman,' `Faces' doesn't see female independence and self-assertion as unmixed blessings. The movie diagnoses, often vocally, the problems these two women face. The straitjacket of inherited culture cannot be thrown off easily, even for city dwellers whose modern life (three cars, cosmetics, banks) resembles our own. Sexual power becomes, by default, the only true power they can use, but this is not enough. The resolution goes back to the village and the sense of connectedness it provides. This is where Ecaré's film, often awkwardly, grounds her characters' predicament. Change, though necessary, implies loss. The stories in `Faces' were reportedly filmed ten years apart. Ecaré's movie has a patchwork feel. Film technique is different in both sections. What interested me was narrative method, which is closer to African folktales than to a Western character arc that typically asserts the unqualified independence of a character versus a community. Here, communal values, though questioned, remain real, a problem and source of consolation, especially in the face of urban modernism. Technically, `Faces' is a blotchy film. Some scenes look like out-takes from National Geographic specials shot on a low budget. The sex scene is daring, but could make the same point in less time with less flesh. Nonetheless, `Faces' offers a worthwhile perspective on the problems of African feminism in post-colonial society.

Raise the Red Lantern (1991)

Story versus film

[24 April 2003]

Zhang Yimou's film shows how a genius in one medium (film) can transform a work by a genius in another medium: Su Tong, whose story inspired the film. Su Tong's novella focuses on Lotus (Songlian in the movie) from her arrival as the unexpected Fourth Mistress to Master Chen to her ultimate madness. Su Tong's story, although told in third person, is nonetheless centered on its main character. We initially encounter her on her arrival at the Chen household, when she is mistaken for a poor relation. We know at once that this Fourth Mistress has not received the arrival honors her three predecessors enjoyed. (The film represents this by showing her journey on foot to Chen's compound.). Problems with the young servant girl who attends her are also featured in Zhang's film. The movie invents actions and episodes that clarify events in the source story. Songlian's feigned pregnancy, for example, has no parallel in Su Tong's tale, although the novella does hint that the Fourth Mistress' status in the troubled household depends either on keeping Chen's sexual interest (in the story, he wanes into impotence) or producing a male heir. The movie uses this invention to conflate plot points in the story, notably Songlian's revenge on Yan'er, the servant girl who loathes her. In the story, Swallow (the servant) is forced by Lotus to eat a tissue soiled with Songlian's menstrual blood, which the Fourth Mistress regards as a charm Swallow created to curse her. In the movie, it is Yan'er's revelation to the Second Mistress that precipitates her fate when Songlian punishes her by forcing her to kneel for days in the freezing courtyard. Also, the movie moves to its climax when Songlian, while drunk, reveals that the Third Mistress is sexually involved with a doctor who regularly visits her; Lotus, in the story, knows this, but does not reveal the adultery at all, even though she does get drunk at a key point in the story. Zhang's film brilliantly conflates the story and invents episodes that amplify and - for Western viewers - simplify what Su Tong presents mainly through his focus on the increasingly fragile mind of his main character as well as through images that don't lend themselves easily to film drama. Zhang also invented the ritual of the red lanterns, which serve as a structuring device in the film as well as a correlative of each woman's standing in the Chen household. The lanterns, plus the division of the film into seasons (Songlian's one year in the household), realize on film a pattern in Su Tong's story. That story remains worth reading, if only because by reading it one can truly appreciate the changes Zhang made and the reasons for these changes. Su Tong's story is brilliant; Zhang's film is even better.