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tom-1203
Reviews
The Dreamers (2003)
Smug nonsense
At first it looked like this film could be fun but its shortcomings were so blatant that after about the first half hour the only enjoyment you can get out of it is by carping and criticising and making witty sideswipes to your friends (opportunities for which are plentiful).
The French student riots of 1968 are established as the backdrop at the start of the film, and are crudely re-inserted at the very end. Through the main body of the plot that background's completely irrelevant, except that sporadically one of the main characters will read out a few lines of political philosophy to each other.
The main plot is an awkward "three's a crowd" sexual coming-of-age story, where the wide-eyed American Matthew, naive to the point of self-parody, inserts himself into the incestuous relationship between two Parisians. Isabelle, as is typically the case in this sort of set-up, isn't really a protagonist but gets pulled between the two men who act as poles. The thing that offends me about the whole incest story is not, like most people who disliked the film, that I've got a moral objection, but the fact that it fails to develop in any way. We've got Theo, straight out of a nineteenth century opium den, being withdrawn and arrogant, and when he can't get his way through intimidation occasionally tries to strangle people. Then we've got Matthew who is distressingly earnest and comes up with sickening things all the time along the lines of "we're all connected", "love is the greatest force" but apparently has no objection to sitting in the bath with Theo having smug, ill-informed political debates and throwing menstrual blood around.
None of it makes any sense. Isabelle and Theo are testing the boundaries of sexual norms in their corrupt bohemian boudoir and they choose to involve the completely incongruous Matthew. Why? - because he likes films, you see, and they need someone to run around the Louvre with them. Predictably Matthew, who thinks this is all larks for a while, soon enough tries to persuade Isabelle that sleeping with your brother is well, pretty wrong, you see, and girls your age should be going out with a boy to the cinema, drinking cherryade and paying for it by putting out a bit in the back row. But Theo, who's read about Mao Tse Tung don't you know, isn't to keen on this injection of capitalist bourgeois morality separating him from his big-breasted sister.
So what does the film turn into - it's basically Matthew trying to make a 2-hour porn film with Isabelle, but having to appease Theo by occasionally getting into the bath with him and making arguments so desperately crass that Theo looks like an intellectual. Really this is an appalling hatchet job of a film, I've seen pornos with better characterisation and more subtle socio-political debates than this. Each of the three stars I've given belong to a part of Eva Green's (Isabelle's) anatomy.
La dolce vita (1960)
Some good material but unsatisfying
When I finished watching this film the main thing I felt was frustration - I think my conclusion is that there are lots of good elements but they aren't well combined.
The opening is promising - the premise is interesting and the striking images and soundtrack impress a character. But then, nothing, the film's stillborn, this frustrating episodic structure means that the initial impetus has dissipated well before the 3 hours are up.
There are lots of things I like about each of the episodes individually - more than just decadence I think there's a tangible menace in the party scenes. The behaviour of the adults is creepily childish (underlined beautifully by the emphatic, infantile sounds of Italian). People are talking all the time, clamouring to be heard, but no one bothers to listen. There's a lot of laughter in those scenes but none of it is shared, there's no compassion, it is the characters' response to the absurd situation they're in - it's a laughter that's hysterical, deranged. I don't think Fellini is being at all subtle about Marcello being in hell - the only way he could make it more obvious would be for the walls to turn to flames. I don't agree with what some reviews said about the viewer too being seduced by the Sweet Life - I was alienated, if not repelled by it from the outset.
My criticisms of the film are twofold. Firstly, if this is the point - that pure materialism is corrosive and cancerous and draws everyone into a hellish solitude - then I don't think the film as a whole communicates it too well. The episodes are not well enough linked - Marcello's hardly marked out as a enough of a "good guy" at the start to be corrupted, and it's only in the last couple of scenes - where we reach true psychosis - that there's a clear downward trajectory. For the rest of the film the plot's too ponderous and I think Fellini tries to throw in far too many side elements in each of the episodes. So in spite of the great direction, the style, the unmistakable soundtrack, the film is without a centre - there's neither a defining moment nor a clear purpose. It's like, if this film were a newspaper article there'd be no headline.
My second criticism is that apart from not making its point terribly well, the point of the film isn't a revelation, it's just not that interesting. So pure materialism is corrosive and rich people can have horrible lives. Well who hasn't realised that yet? Classics are supposed to resonate through the ages - offer an insight that may cease to be new but never ceases to be profound. But the scope of this film is so limited. It seems to me just a belated, panicky, typically Latin response to capitalism - stimulated no doubt by the contact the director had had with the scene he's describing where American style capitalism at its most debauched was imported wholesale into Italy. The film describes this - it doesn't look beyond it at all. Oh, rich film stars committing suicide - yesterday's news. Other people back in the 1960s were foreseeing the voyeurism, the state we've got to now where celebrities are created for the very purpose of being destroyed for public amusement.
And at times this is no more than Catholic moralism. Look at who populates Fellini's realm of the damned - divorcées and homosexuals - the regressive and hysterical moralistic streak in this film detracts greatly from it when viewed today.
A classic should be prescient and profound. This film doesn't really offer any sort of commentary - it's just a portrait of an obviously decadent portion of Italian society in the 1950s, and it's very much of its time.
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso (1988)
Tedious beyond belief
I really don't understand how this film got to be so famous and widely recommended. Two hours of clumsy sentimentality, in which nothing happens; a coming-of-age tale which tackles none of the problems of adolescence; characters who spend most of their time simpering over each other, yet they never bother trying to make them connect with the viewer; child acting so dreadful a wooden puppet with its strings cut would have been a better replacement...
I resent the laziness of the film, they thought they could rely on its magic formula of nostalgia, saccharine and being foreign so they thought "we don't need to bother building up any genuine feeling for these characters". The story starts with an incorrigible young tyke (who i found extremely irritating) befriending the local projectionist. That's about all you need to know, what there is of a plot that develops from there doesn't really matter - it doesn't offer any interest, it doesn't put any of the characters in a dilemma, it all just dissolves into the steady flow of sap. With a plot development occurring every twenty minutes or so, thank God that we're anchored to the motif of the cinema by lengthy footage of people sitting around in it, making entertaining comments which make us just resonate with the warmth of the Italian people. More sugar anyone? Perhaps if I had a very fragile and elderly relative - I mean several centuries old - for whom trying to follow a plot that wasn't totally linear might get their blood up, who was too mentally impaired to take a character at anything but face value, for whom nuanced was just a seven letter word they weren't sure how to spell, then I might recommend to them Cinema Paradiso. Although the possibility that their heart might stop mid-way through, making me culpable for their death, would make me think twice. In fact I think I've got it, Cinema Paradiso might be a very good film to die to. Especially if you've been incapacitated waiting to die for a very long time, and would like to assure yourself that other people have been subjected to something of what you're going through.
The Spirit of the Beehive (La Espíritu de la Colmena) is sometimes presented as Cinema Paradiso gone right, again centred on a cinema in a small town and a child's reaction to it. Sure it's slow, and makes no concessions to commercialism, but it is beautifully directed and in an understated way develops the viewer's empathy for the characters. Exactly the opposite of the crass tedium of the film I've just had the misfortune to see.
Azúcar amarga (1996)
One-sided trash
This film sets out to be nothing more than a crass criticism of Cuba's Communist state, with the plot strung along by a tepid and saccharine romance. There's really no artistic vision here - most of the direction is trying to be "classic", but then you get "heady" bursts of realism with some wobbly camera-work during a protest march. The soundtrack's not bad, some of the acting's pretty good, but everything in the film is designed to be easy to watch, and keep you just engaged enough so you can learn about how terrible Castro is.
And this criticism isn't to deny that the regime has its problems. I can't claim any direct knowledge of Cuba, but I am aware of the oppression, and the poverty. But this film doesn't want to explore any of these issues. Why is Cuba prostituting itself (literally) to foreign capital? Well the American embargo would have had its crushing effects on Cuba's economy long before if it hadn't been for the Soviet subsidy. It *is* far more damaging, if you're going to have a tourist industry, to have an apartheid system in an attempt to stop the tourist economy "polluting" your political system, but what drove Cuba to its reliance on tourism in the first place? And what really gets me about this film is they're clearly looking to America for liberation. Did everyone forget that America propped up Batista, under which the Cubans were not only unfree but starving? Oh yeah, the USA's got a great track record of bringing freedom to Latin America - Pinochet in Chile, the contras in Nicaragua. And even its liberation of Panama came after propping up the vicious dictatorship of Torrijos then Noriega for 30-odd years. And what does it say about America that impoverished Cuba has higher literacy rates and comparable life expectancy? Cubans enjoy health care which the 40 million impoverished Americans who can't afford health insurance can only dream of.
The film addressed none of these issues, and it's not that I mind a film taking a position, how can it not? But give your viewer some credit, don't just expect them to swallow it whole. Just showing particularly extreme manifestations of protest doesn't automatically win your case. This is a Miami-Cuban's caricature of modern Cuba, scribbled in 5 minutes. You think for the effort they've put in it could be something more substantial.