dave-593 Reviews

A Moment of Innocence (1996)

Moments of Innocence Twenty Years Apart

[9/10 · 8 December 1999]

The Iranian cinema is perhaps the most self-reflexive of all national cinemas. Though it owes much to the development of Italian neo-realism, the Iranian cinema today is not just an extension of its predecessor's concerns about cinematic truth but a formal inquiry of the nature of cinema and the "truth" that lies within and outside of art. Jacques Rivette's groundbreaking "L'amour fou" already sets the stage in 1968 when he investigated the symbiotic relationship betwen art and life by using two different film stocks, 16 and 35 mm., to represent "reality" as it unfolds in front and behind the camera respectively.

In Moshen Makhmalbaf's 1996 masterpiece "A Moment of Innocence" twenty years separates a key moment in time and the recreation of it. The incident occurred when Makhmalbaf was only a youth who participated in an anti-Shah demonstration which led to the stabbing of a policeman and his imprisonment for the next five years. In an attempt to recapture this moment Makhmalbaf decides to a make a film within a film casting all the original participants (including the policeman) to play themselves as mentors to their younger selves, (i.e., actors) guiding and instructing them in the making of this "fictional" documentary.

It is not surprising that non-professional actors are employed here to both maintain a semblance of reality and to keep cinematic distortion at bay. But paradoxically, the young non-professional actors chosen to play Makhmalbaf and the policeman of their youth are as similar as they are dissimilar from their counterparts, thus, setting the stage for exploring the many tensions that exist between past and present, art and life, cinema and reality. This type of casting not only blurs the line between fiction and reality but also the distinction between documentary and narrative filmmaking.

The preoccupation with the phenomenological aspects of the cinema is as much the focus of this work as is the dramatization of the event leading up to the pivotal moment, then and now, reconstructed as a memory film as well as a product of the filmmaker's imagination to help correct an incident that only becomes clear to everyone involved after twenty years have elapsed. This celebrated moment which occurs at the end of film effectively captures the past by placing it in the present context much as if past and present suddenly converge and share the same space and time, thereby allowing us to see loss and recovery unfold simultaneously. That lost moment is now regained twenty years later through art's ability to heal and transform Makhmalbaf and his crew--thus altering the "reality" of life. The final shot is both life-affirming and referential because it so eloquently evokes the cinema's first prominent use of the freeze frame in Truffaut's "400 Blows"--if only to remind us just how far the cinema has come along. Like Truffaut's autobiographical based character Antoine Doinel the cinema has indeed grown up.

Jackie Brown (1997)

Santa's Got a Brand New Bag and it's Empty

[20 October 1999]

In the fall of 1994 "Pulp Fiction" became an overnight sensation. Critics all over hailed it as an American masterpiece--an instant classic that generated so much excitement that it immediately spawned a generation of Tarantinos and Tarantinites in its wake. In order to understand this phenomenon we need to turn our attention to the current state of the American cinema and compared it with the last three decades. In the seventies the American cinema enjoyed what is arguably its golden years when it produced such masterpieces as "McCabe & Mrs Miller", "The Godfather", "Badlands", "Chinatown", "The Godfather II", "The Conversation", "Taxi Driver", "Nashville", and "Manhattan". In the eighties the number of masterpieces dwindled to just three films. Apart from "Raging Bull" the best films were also the most underrated: "Cutter's Way" and "Dangerous Liaisons". In the nineties the American cinema declined so precipitously that the closest thing to a masterpiece, if any, was arguably Robert Altman's "The Player". So when "Pulp Fiction" opened it was not difficult to see why the public readily embraced it as a masterpiece. It was as if the American pride was at stake and that Tarantino was perhaps the man who could restore the public's faith in the cinema again. Does Tarantino really deserved this kind of attention? Maybe. But is he a major talent? I think not. Tarantino's talent is somewhat suspect when one considers just how much of his own "Reservoir Dogs" resembles Ringo Lam's "City on Fire". Was this homage or just plain theft? In "Pulp Fiction" the main characters end up pointing their pistols at each other in close proximity. This classic gun-toting mexican standoff was of course gleefully appropriated from John Woo--another favorite of the director's.

In "Jackie Brown" Tarantino, this time, turns his attention on Pam Grier and the black exploitation cinema of the seventies. But the end result of what he hopes is hip and soulful feels more like a white man's attempt to ape the moves and rhythms of someone black. Soul train on film it is not. "Jackie Brown" is rhythmless, sluggish, and shapeless. It is evident that he needs a more disciplined editor to trim the excess fat.

It is not that Tarantino is without talent. He certainly has a good ear for street gutter and writes dialogue that is appropriately foul, abrasive, and wickedly funny. But Tarantino's fondness for the lowlives, the B movies that he grew up on, is pure pulp not art no matter how good his craft is. His ludicrous screenplay for "From Dusk to Dawn" clearly suggests that what he truly loves is trash--which is enough to make one wonder if there is more to "Pulp Fiction" than all the clever chatter about redemption and the like. To put it another way, Tarantino is less than the artist he purports to be: he is a shrewd trickster, a consummate showman who is only too eager to dazzle us with his bag of tricks. Consider the scene in which the bag of money is switched in "Jackie Brown". Tarantino offers us three different viewpoints of this sequence but adds nothing significant to what we already know. It is an editing "trick" he had learned so well in "Pulp Fiction". But when the smoke clears it is unlikely that anyone will be gullible enough to believe that the LAPD would not arrive early to prepare their sting operation. It is the audience who will be left holding the bag. There is no doubt that when a man of Tarantino's talent decides to aim this low you can bet that he will surely hit his mark.

Shakespeare in Love (1998)

SHAKESPEARE COMES OF AGE

[1 October 1999]

"Shakespeare in Love" is ostensibly made for the MTV generation. Plodding and cloying, this shaggy dog comedy panders to the quasi middlebrow audience: it goes out of its way to reward those who are able to identify anything that resembles an Elizabethan in-joke. Call it a self-esteem booster or plain I- know-something-you-don't-because-I-took-English-Lit-101. Whatever the case, the film readily sacrifices wit for farce, and assumes an ill-fitting disposition that calls for tentative and clumsy attempts at bowdlerizing Shakespeare for the common age. It is little wonder that Joseph Fiennes plays Shakespeare like an irascible buffoon--a device that will firmly keep him in the Hall of Fame alongside Porky and the entire cast of Animal House.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Seeing is Believing

[31 August 1999]

Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" will certainly disappoint anyone who tries to measure up to the hype surrounding the film's sexuality and its real life married stars. The film is not especially erotic for good reasons: Kubrick was perhaps battling his own private obsessions and prefers to explore the emotional bonds that unite couples and the deception they sometimes go at great length to mask their own insecurities, fears and shortcomings.

Nicole Kidman's nakedly, ferocious performance is aptly counterbalanced by Tom Cruise's tormented and doubtful everyman wrestling with his seven year itch. Her monologue recounting a near love affair is arguably the film's highpoint. Still the paying public will expect more shedding of clothes from these headliners than they have been led to believe--courtesy of the press no less. While Kubrick's masterful handling of nudity is nowhere as shocking as Robert Altman's "Short Cuts" (remember Julianne Moore?), it is nonetheless effective in evoking the decaying and sick environment populated by his characters (especially the use of yellows and burnished tones). For the film to really work it is best to accept some of its contrivances such as the use of coincidences to advance the plot or cliches involving prostitutes with hearts of gold and eschew naturalism and logic for something surreal and nightmarish.

"Eyes Wide Shut" unfortunately is Kafka played straight without the sensual or perverse sensibilities of Bunuel to help propel this somewhat dated and overworked genre into another level. Whatever its faults "Eyes Wide Shut" will perhaps be remembered best as one of Kubrick's most humane and moral work--minus the plethora of icy cold characters of years' past.

The Garden of Delights (1970)

The Delights of Fascism

[7/10 · 30 August 1999]

Carlos Saura's "Garden of Delights" is a sly, black comedy about personal and political repression under Franco's regime. Psychodramas and shock therapy are among the tools of the trade employed to jump-start the memory of a wealthy industrialist recovering from an auto accident but still confined to a wheelchair. That his loved ones are in fact the instigators of such crude and farcical attempts to pry open the amnesiac's Swiss bank account should come as no surprise to anyone remotely familiar with Spanish history and culture. But Saura's dark tale, it seems, may proved too daunting to audiences who are unwilling to give themselves over to the film's dreamy, ruminative style that deliberately shunned "objective reality" for a subjective and interpretative approach to cinema. In Saura's view cinematic "reality" should represent the repressed state of the nation's collective consciousness and its refusal to surrender its dreams under those conditions. The debilitating conditions of fascism should not inhibit other forms of realities to exist or to challenge the prevailing political reality so that what "is" is not necessarily more important than what "should" or could have been. Scenes, real or imagined, accordingly compete for our attention throughout the narrative much as if the delights of the garden only become apparent after careful introspection and reflection. If fascism is indeed the soul of the new machine, then paralysis is just a state of the mind.

Oscar and Lucinda (1997)

GRAND ILLUSIONS

[25 August 1999]

Gillian Armstrong's previous films were either tepid and inconsequential ("Mrs Soffel", "Little Women") or too precious and unfinished ("My Brilliant Career", "Last Days of Chez Nous"). In "Oscar and Lucinda", Armstrong takes a quantum leap and creates her riskiest project to date, recalling the folly and bravery of Herzog's "Fitzcarraldo", a work that has come to signify the grandeur and illusions of filmmaking. Like "Fitzcarraldo", "Oscar and Lucinda" is imbued with the same obsessions and romantic longings that border on madness--defying reality at all costs. The courage to succeed or fail, the conviction to carry a project through to its final course is what separates this film from her previous efforts. In the past she sometimes mistake indifference for detachment. But here her heart and mind are completely in sync--she fearlessly wears her heart on her sleeve without compromising her determined, unmitigated intelligence. "For what does it profit a man if he should gain the whole world but lose his own soul?" Like Oscar who eventually redeems himself through death, Armstrong appears to be undertaking her own cinematic rebirth.

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Seeing Is Believing

[24 August 1999]

"Eyes Wide Shut" will certainly disappoint anyone who tries to measure up to the hype surrounding the film's sexuality and its real life married stars. The film is not especially erotic for good reasons: Kubrick was perhaps battling his own private obsessions and prefers to explore the emotional bonds that unite couples and the deception they sometimes go at great length to mask their own insecurities, fears and shortcomings.

Kidman's nakedly, ferocious performance is nicely balanced by Cruise's tormented and doubtful everyman approaching his seven year itch. Her monologue recounting a near love affair is arguably the film's highpoint. Still the paying public will expect more shedding of clothes from these headliners than they have been led to believe (by the press no less). While Kubrick's masterful handling of nudity is nowhere as shocking as Altman's in "Short Cuts" (remember Julianne Moore?), it is nonetheless effective in evoking the decaying and sick environment populated by his characters (especially the use of yellows and burnished tones). For the film to really work it is best to accept some of its contrivances (the use of coincidences to advance the plot, cliches involving prostitutes with hearts of gold, etc.) and eschew naturalism and logic for something surreal and nightmarish.

"Eyes Wide Shut" unfortunately is Kafka played straight without the sensual or perverse sensibilities of Bunuel to help propel this somewhat dated and overworked genre into another level. Whatever its faults "Eyes Wide Shut" will probably be remembered as one of Kubrick's most humane and moral work--minus the plethora of icy cold characters of years' past.

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

THE PHANTOM MOVIE

[5 August 1999]

Forty minutes into "Stars Wars: Episode 1--The Phantom Menace" one character, eyeing the impending storm announces: "it's very bad." True to form the storm along with the rest of the movie appears to live up to this apt description as well. Bland, derivative, and sophomoric "The Phantom Menace" is strictly a by-the-numbers movie conceived by focus groups and corporate executives--a deadly combination that probably robbed the film of its life force and a singular, coherent vision. Trying to be all things to all people the latest installment of the "Star Wars" saga is indeed a bloodless creation totally devoid of heart and soul. The Force must have taken a wrong turn, landed in Toysarus and applied for permanent residency. Someone should remind Mr. Lucas that a movie and a movie-tie-in are not the same thing at all. It is therefore unsurprising that "The Phantom Menace" is long on special effects and short on wit and imagination. It is so attuned to the millennium angst that it seems to be manufactured more by computers than man. It is as if the entire human population has been effectively shut out of the filmmaking process. Computers 1. Man 0. Phantom menace rules.

La rencontre (1996)

A Cinematic Valentine

[12 July 1999]

Alain Cavalier's latest film is deceptively simple and yet revolutionary because it seems to stand outside the boundaries of narrative and documentary filmmaking. One could describe "La Rencontre" as a cinematic diary--a home movie that documents the filmmaker and his muse during the course of their relationship. But unlike most movies the human subjects here are never photographed in whole, just partially. This brave new work is as much about Cavalier's object of desire, that is, his lover as it is about the medium that gives expression to his love. It is conceived as one part confessional and one part discourse on the metaphysics of love and cinema. The cinema, for Cavalier, is like a two-way mirror that records images while reflecting those images back onto itself. Subject and object appear to mirror each other's identity until they assume new personae in the process.

The immediate challenge for Cavalier, then, is cinema's objective gaze: the ability of the camera to record the physical nature of reality. But Cavalier's chief interest is just the opposite. He wants to demonstrate the possibility of a new cinema: one that evolves out of concealment and subterfuge. This cinema deemphasizes the human landscape and dislocates the image from its voice. It focuses inward rather than outward, and chooses to explore the intangible and the abstract over the tactile and the concrete.

Appropriately, Cavalier's cine-diary unfolds like an open book: his twin loves (muse and cinema) are illuminated through a series of tableaux filled with close-up objects which are brought vividly to life by the imagination and the transfigurative power of the cinema. It is as if these everyday objects have become the lovers' collective memories saturated with the emotions and energy of life. In short these objects have assumed a life of their own becoming humanized and perhaps immortalized in the process. After all isn't this precisely the paradox of cinema--the ability to resurrect inanimate objects, to bring them back to life at 24 frames per second?

The Terrorizers (1986)

THE DREAM CITY THAT EDWARD YANG BUILT

[9 July 1999]

It is unlikely that Edward Yang would quarrel with those who described him as the Antonioni of the East. But this kind of comparison is perhaps more damaging than helpful since it only engenders perceptions that have little or nothing to do with the filmmaker. If we are to understand Yang at all, we must allow his works to speak for themselves--they must succeed or fail on their own terms. "The Terrorizer" is one of Edward Yang's most accomplished works. In style, concerns, and methodology it differs significantly from the masterworks of Antonioni. Whereas Antonioni prefers to work with a narrower canvas, choosing to develop his characters until they achieve self-awareness, Yang seems to eschew such conventions, offering instead a logic akin to the dream world. "The Terrorizer" is indeed constructed very much like Chuang-Tzu's tale about a man who is unsure if he was dreaming that he was a butterfly or a butterfly who was dreaming that he was a man.

It would be a disservice to think that the ending of The Terrorizer is anything like O. Henry. It is perhaps more accurate to describe the ending as a faux denouement. The use of not a single but a double dream suggests that Yang is fully aware of his Chinese roots even when he is consciously quoting an outsider like Antonioni. It also indicates that he is less interested in the psychology of social behavior than in the actions taken by individuals and the effects they have on one another throughout the social network, regardless of their relations to each other. It is to this end that several couples in an unnamed metropolis of Taiwan are examined: a photographer and his girlfriend living off the wealth of their family; a teenage hustler and her pimp on a downward spiral of crime; an unhappily married novelist who embarks on an affair with a past lover. These three couples, in turn, are connected in some way, tangibly or peripherally, to a policeman, a law enforcer who is powerless to hold the city together, to keep it from coming apart. It is little wonder that everyone is constantly forging new relationships or alliances in a city where obsolescence is the rule.

Just as Antonioni uses dislocation as a means of conveying alienation, Yang chooses to use absentation--the absence of things--as a thematic device. Throughout the narrative one is reminded of the absence of fathers--both socially and politically. It is the absence of leadership. Elsewhere, absentation is employed when the photographer decides to turn an apartment into one huge darkroom which denies him the reality of time while permitting him to create a world of his own. At one point, a teenage girl whom he temporarily harbors asked him if it is day or night. When the camera finally peeps outside the apartment Yang gives us neither day nor night but that brief moment in time when light gives way to darkness or darkness breaks into light. It is here that Yang best captures the logic of that dream world: his protagonists are merely phantoms suspended in time. It is the absence of time. Throughout the narrative one is sometimes puzzled by the seemingly lack of explanations: the initial breakup of the photographer and his girlfriend (witnessed over the soundtrack of "Smoke Gets in Your Eye"); the return of the photographer's stolen cameras; the breakup of the married couple; the status of the policeman with no emotional or physical ties. It is the absence of elucidation. Unlike the works of Antonioni where there is always a central character whose viewpoint mirrors our own, functioning as a filter of reality, Yang denies us of such privilege. The impossibility of identifying with any character may be disorientating but it also serves as a metaphor of a city that has lost its moral compass. It is the absence of a central viewpoint. Absentation is clearly an effective tool in exploring the void that lies at the heart of modern culture--it is the black hole of the human condition.

When the film finally concludes it matters little what portion of it is real or a dream. Or for that matter who the dreamer really is. Fiction is perhaps no more than merely dreams, perfectly realized, and cinema the greatest dream machine ever built.

Flowers of Shanghai (1998)

Hou's Rules of the Game

[10/10 · 30 June 1999]

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's "Flowers of Shanghai" is an opium dream of a movie: visually and aurally there is no mistaking that this is the work of an artist with the imagination of a poet, and the precision of a clockmaker. The opening shot is among the most exquisite in all of cinema: a veritable tour de force that exudes Hou's love for the film medium, but is decidedly restrained and controlled, never allowing style to upstage the narrative and degenerate into mere spectacle. In keeping with the film's setting and rules of patriarchy, the major male characters are introduced first. The women serving these men are then introduced in the following "chapters", each one preceded by title cards announcing their names and place of residence as if gently mocking or subverting the patriarchical order.

This chamberpiece drama of sexual intrigue and power struggle is astonishingly acute in capturing the feel and sensibilities of the late 19th century but expressed in very contemporary terms without any apparent compromises or contradictions. The painterly colors of "Flowers" may invite comparison with Dutch masters like Vermeer even when Hou is deliberately conjuring an idealized world that is as hermetic as it is artificial: a world composed entirely without natural light is like a dream, hauntingly beautiful and intense but impossible to hold or to keep. That the film is shot entirely indoors and the mise-en-scene is orchestrated without any close-ups is a testament of Hou's faith and supreme confidence in creating a work that remains completely cinematic while averting the pitfalls of feeling stage bound. Despite the subject matter what is also startling is the complete absence of physical sex on screen; and, yet the film manages to sustain an erotically charged atmosphere.

Beginning with "The Puppetmaster" Hou has been increasingly moving towards a more minimalist form of cinema, stripping the narrative of everything that is superfluous until nothing is left but its emotional core, naked and unadulterated. "Flowers" is very much an interior film that does not depend on voiceover narration to make thoughts explicit. Hou's almost static camera continues to favor long medium takes ranging from 5 to 7 minutes, framing key characters sharing the same space and time, but well within reach of each other, capturing the subtle interplay and nuances while allowing them to drift in and out of the picture frame according to their relative importance in the social hierarchy. In this manner an entire community is evoked: demonstrating that the window to the world is precisely through the interior lives of individuals responsible for shaping the body politic.

An Ideal Husband (I) (1999)

WILDER AND MORE IDEAL THAN THE WINSLOW BOY

[30 June 1999]

Oscar Wilde's century old "An Ideal Husband" holds up much better than most works half its age, notably Terence Rattigan's "The Winslow Boy", and thus remains much more relevant to our times. It is so fitting that it could be seen as a wry commentary on contemporary politics and the pundits who drive that machinery. The self-deprecating humor and cynicism distinguish this middle class play from most others, and offers a far more perceptive and honest portrait of its class than those that merely provide lip service but without the fortitude and means to knock its audience off its pedestal. Wilde's sharp, acerbic wit takes centerstage and holds the mirror up to society, wreaking havoc on its unsuspecting occupants who are much too vain and self-conscious to notice the high drama unfolding daily amidst the pomp and circumstance. It is Wilde's good fortune that wit is his greatest ally, a weapon he dispenses with ease and alacrity to both disarm and endear the very same class he so lovingly mocks and skewers.

Oliver Parker's direction of the1999 film version is competent and serviceable, opening up the play in the beginning and the end while keeping the action brisk and fluid. To his credit Mr. Parker knows better than to tamper too much with a classic that for better or worse will be remembered more as an Oscar Wilde film than Oliver Parker's.

The Winslow Boy (1999)

MIDDLE CLASS MEDIOCRITY

[22 June 1999]

Terence Rattigan's 1946 play, "The Winslow Boy", is a stodgy warhorse that is every bit as affected and phony as they come. The playwright obviously understands his target audience and ingratiates himself to that end by accommodating middle class values and pretensions, mocking them with kid gloves, in order to elicit pathos that seemed unearned and underhanded. In the film version, David Mamet makes no attempt to update the work or conceal its fake premise: "let right be done" excepting the poor and underprivileged with no political clout or monetary means to avail themselves of a prominent lawyer to bail themselves and their ego out of such predicament. It is unlikely that anyone will overlook the age-old myth that the middle class can have it all. Give up the prospects of marrying a military officer, who conveniently turns out to be a cad, and hold out for a rich lawyer who can not only restore the family's honor but provide an even better physical match for a dutiful, self-sacrificing daughter and suffragette, and you will walk away with everything in the end. It is clear that Mamet, like Rattigan, knows precisely who his target audience is and milks it for all it is worth, vanity and all.

An Ideal Husband (I) (1999)

WILDER AND MORE IDEAL THAN WINSLOW BOY

[22 June 1999]

Oscar Wilde's century old "An Ideal Husband" holds up much better than most works half its age, notably Terence Rattigan's "The Winslow Boy", and thus remains much more relevant to our times. It is so fitting that it could be seen as a wry commentary on contemporary politics and the pundits who drive that machinery. The self-deprecating humor and cynicism distinguish this middle class play from most others, and offers a far more perceptive and honest portrait of its class than those that merely provide lip service but without the fortitude and means to knock its audience off its pedestal. Wilde's sharp, acerbic wit takes centerstage and holds the mirror up to society, wrecking havoc on its unsuspecting occupants who are much too vain and self-conscious to notice the high drama unfolding daily amidst the pomp and circumstance. It is Wilde's good fortune that wit is his greatest ally, a weapon he dispenses with ease and alacrity to both disarm and endear the very same class he so lovingly mocks and skewers.

Oliver Parker's direction of the1999 film version of the same name is competent and serviceable, opening up the play in the beginning and the end while keeping the action brisk and fluid. To his credit Mr. Parker knows better than to tamper with a classic that for better or worse will be remembered more as an Oscar Wilde film than Oliver Parker's.