"Greetings from Tim Buckley" sidesteps the conventions of the musical biopic. It's a no-pressure, just-hanging-out movie. You can easily forget that what you're seeing is scripted or acted at all; the feeling is as of a friendly fly-on-the-wall documentary.
The subject is Jeff Buckley, son of Tim Buckley, the prodigiously gifted hippie-era troubadour who died young. Jeff scarcely knew his father. The film covers a span of a week when Jeff (Penn Badgley) takes up an open-ended invitation to a memorial concert given by some of Tim's friends and associates. At this point in his life Jeff is noodling around with music himself, not quite seriously - and he agrees to perform one of Tim's songs at the concert.
While Jeff mixes with the musicians, explores New York, - and caries on a week-long lunch-date flirtation with one of the show's producers (played by Imogen Poots) - he also digs into his past, or it digs into him. He's trying to read the pre-history of his own consciousness, and there are no records of that. Here glows the young Tim Buckley (Ben Rosenfield), in flashbacks or in old raw footage. Just a few flashes of edge and dazzle to suggest why he became a legend. Even when he's all beat out, his nimbus doesn't desert him - they slump beat together (and a beat nimbus is something to see); with the best will in the world, too weary to be as congenial as his record label would like. Is it the nimbus of an angel or a pop star? Whichever it really is, it's pressed into service as the other one too. Tim Buckley was only 28 when he died. So much still in the realm of possibility, unanswerable. The melancholy undertone of the film is how for Jeff, his father's absence is a presence. You may come to feel that this is a movie about a haunting, a daylight ghost story. It has to be elusive; what stays with you is the music.
Reviews
19 Reviews
The Way We Laughed
(1998)
Mysteries of Turin
24 July 2017
This film about the complicated bonds of love and loyalty between two brothers is carried forward on the strength of its mysteries. The profoundest mysteries inhere in the subject, of course; others arise from Gianni Amelio's elliptical, episodic approach. Beginning in 1958, the brothers are part of the Sicilian migration to the industrialized North of Italy, specifically to the city of Turin. The younger Pietro has been there for a year already, going to school; he's the White Hope of his family, the one with brains, expected to amount to something – and chafing at the responsibility, though delighting in the bella figura he gets to cut. The elder brother Giovanni arrives intending just a short visit, but winds up staying on; at first sight he's a sweet-natured lunk, but then we see his steel. He goes to work to support Pietro's schooling; is exploited by the labor brokers who take an extortionate cut of the migrants' wages; little by little gets out from under them, and then replaces them: a familiar migrant's tale, one that usually brings tragedy in its wake.
Everyone in the film is more and different than a first estimate can take in. They make choices that defy our prediction. We see the effects, but learn the why and wherefore only partially, and always belatedly – just before the story propels us forward a year or so in time, and we have to get our bearings all over again.
The large-scale recreation of the city of Turin in its historical moment is beautiful, melancholy and alluring. Amelio has a showman- poet's sense of just how long to tantalize us before pulling back to reveal the full scope of this wonder: those are moments of quiet awe. At times, too, the characters are foregrounded while the city stretches wide and deep – miles deep – behind them. It almost could be rear-projection or green-screen trickery, but then the characters turn and walk off into the distance, which is real. The city feels a living thing then. And as they move away from us there comes a pang, as if foreboding a time when the loss will be final.
Everyone in the film is more and different than a first estimate can take in. They make choices that defy our prediction. We see the effects, but learn the why and wherefore only partially, and always belatedly – just before the story propels us forward a year or so in time, and we have to get our bearings all over again.
The large-scale recreation of the city of Turin in its historical moment is beautiful, melancholy and alluring. Amelio has a showman- poet's sense of just how long to tantalize us before pulling back to reveal the full scope of this wonder: those are moments of quiet awe. At times, too, the characters are foregrounded while the city stretches wide and deep – miles deep – behind them. It almost could be rear-projection or green-screen trickery, but then the characters turn and walk off into the distance, which is real. The city feels a living thing then. And as they move away from us there comes a pang, as if foreboding a time when the loss will be final.
Dream of Light
(1992)
An essay in idleness
21 March 2017
A documentary of a painter, painting, "Dream of Light" is at the same time a work of fiction. That's how it seems to go whenever a documentary takes narrative form: even the most straightforward story can only come about by shaping; and where you have shaping, fiction will get in, like dust – you can't keep it out. You might as well welcome it (fiction, that is, not dust so much); consider it a feature, not a bug.
As you watch the artist in Victor Erice's film set up his painting apparatus, you may wonder where all his meticulousness is to lead. He is painting en plein air, but no Impressionist he; he carries Academic studio practice out of doors, and the lengths he goes to might give even some Academicians the quivers. The more you see of his method, the more there is to question; but given no explanation all you can do is watch and wait.
The time is summer, the subject is a quince tree in the garden. The painter, an elderly gent, goes about his work without hesitation or hurry: his confidence is palpable; it seems he knows what he's doing. The garden where he sets up is tiny, cramped between the wall to the street and the wall of his house. He starts by constructing a box- like frame around his tree. He puts dabs of white paint, then more and more of them, on branch and twig, leaf and fruit: a constellation of dots. A taut white string traverses and segments his field of vision, and a plumb-line, defining the vertical, segments it again. He locks and marks the position of his easel's legs, and the height of the rail on which his canvas rests. When he takes up his stance to paint, he drives nails into the ground marking where his feet go. His purpose, with all this marking and measuring, is to find his place, over the course of the work – each day to find the exact place where he left off the previous day, despite all the changes brought on by weather, accident, or growth of the tree. He's in it for the long haul: you can almost hear him saying, I mean to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.
Given the artist's structural, architectural set-up, you might think when he finally addressed himself to his canvas he'd first reach to the structure of his subject: that his brush in a stroke or two would find the spine in the quince's mottled trunk, or the essential geometry in its tangle of limbs. Or alternatively that he'd lay on areas of color, or of light and dark, to establish his picture's space, then work to refine it toward completion. What you wouldn't guess is that he'd begin, as he does, with cautious, abruptly punctuated strokes, to draw, in ghost gray, a short segment of a branch, as it presents itself to him near front and center of his tree – with a stubby bit of twig extending up from it; and a forlorn little leaf, half-folded back upon itself. More like something from the margin of a sketchbook, this botanical detail floats, alone, in the middle of his blank white canvas: floats there for days it seems, as he works at an inchworm crawl, with rubbing and corrections, to get the bark ridges just right, the texture. This is drawing; and please, sir, when will we have painting?
Are we even supposed to ask? Whether the artist ever used this method before, and whether it proved successful, we can't know. Has he set himself up to fail? Erice quiets us with the sensual calm that holds the scene and all in it. And the very definiteness of the old man's activity wants to persuade us that all will be well. So does his whole demeanor: he wears such a lived-in face; and is too absorbed in what he's doing to put on a show for us. Visitors drop by; conversation is desultory, a bit of reminiscence mixed in; the tip-tap of workers' hammers somewhere off. Summer seems endless, though it's passing away. The camera, like a patient naturalist, observes, does not interrogate – and the artist-subject, being asked no questions, answers none, but simply goes about his business.
As you watch the artist in Victor Erice's film set up his painting apparatus, you may wonder where all his meticulousness is to lead. He is painting en plein air, but no Impressionist he; he carries Academic studio practice out of doors, and the lengths he goes to might give even some Academicians the quivers. The more you see of his method, the more there is to question; but given no explanation all you can do is watch and wait.
The time is summer, the subject is a quince tree in the garden. The painter, an elderly gent, goes about his work without hesitation or hurry: his confidence is palpable; it seems he knows what he's doing. The garden where he sets up is tiny, cramped between the wall to the street and the wall of his house. He starts by constructing a box- like frame around his tree. He puts dabs of white paint, then more and more of them, on branch and twig, leaf and fruit: a constellation of dots. A taut white string traverses and segments his field of vision, and a plumb-line, defining the vertical, segments it again. He locks and marks the position of his easel's legs, and the height of the rail on which his canvas rests. When he takes up his stance to paint, he drives nails into the ground marking where his feet go. His purpose, with all this marking and measuring, is to find his place, over the course of the work – each day to find the exact place where he left off the previous day, despite all the changes brought on by weather, accident, or growth of the tree. He's in it for the long haul: you can almost hear him saying, I mean to fight it out on this line if it takes all summer.
Given the artist's structural, architectural set-up, you might think when he finally addressed himself to his canvas he'd first reach to the structure of his subject: that his brush in a stroke or two would find the spine in the quince's mottled trunk, or the essential geometry in its tangle of limbs. Or alternatively that he'd lay on areas of color, or of light and dark, to establish his picture's space, then work to refine it toward completion. What you wouldn't guess is that he'd begin, as he does, with cautious, abruptly punctuated strokes, to draw, in ghost gray, a short segment of a branch, as it presents itself to him near front and center of his tree – with a stubby bit of twig extending up from it; and a forlorn little leaf, half-folded back upon itself. More like something from the margin of a sketchbook, this botanical detail floats, alone, in the middle of his blank white canvas: floats there for days it seems, as he works at an inchworm crawl, with rubbing and corrections, to get the bark ridges just right, the texture. This is drawing; and please, sir, when will we have painting?
Are we even supposed to ask? Whether the artist ever used this method before, and whether it proved successful, we can't know. Has he set himself up to fail? Erice quiets us with the sensual calm that holds the scene and all in it. And the very definiteness of the old man's activity wants to persuade us that all will be well. So does his whole demeanor: he wears such a lived-in face; and is too absorbed in what he's doing to put on a show for us. Visitors drop by; conversation is desultory, a bit of reminiscence mixed in; the tip-tap of workers' hammers somewhere off. Summer seems endless, though it's passing away. The camera, like a patient naturalist, observes, does not interrogate – and the artist-subject, being asked no questions, answers none, but simply goes about his business.
Guilty Hands
(1931)
Smarties
14 March 2017
An inside-out murder mystery, one in which you know who dunnit and watch only to see if he can get away with it, "Guilty Hands" gets right down to business, as it has to - this isn't the kind of material that can take much stretching. It's already a bit of a stretch. But in a good way.
At just over an hour, the film is essentially a programmer, never meant to be the main attraction of a night's entertainment. Exhibitors would pair it with a bigger picture, and add a couple of specialty shorts, choosing from among the available cartoons, song plugs, and travelogs. A night at the movies ca. 1931 set the pattern for a night around the TV-set in later decades. On that analogy, "Guilty Hands" is like a middling-to-better episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; it even sports an opening hook worthy of that show: a voice in the dark, talking of crime, says that a really clever fellow might commit a perfectly undetectable murder - and that under some circumstances, murder might be justified.
The dark room turns out to be the smoking lounge of a train passing through a long tunnel, and soon after we come into the light the speaker, a lawyer who has in his varied career both prosecuted and defended murderers, finds himself in a tight spot that practically invites him to put his theory into practice. Lionel Barrymore, as the lawyer, leads a cast who do nothing short of a good professional job of putting across the high and low mischief that ensues. Barrymore's target, a rich rotter played by Alan Mowbray, is so dried out with debauchery that it comes as a surprise how much fight he has in him when he knows he's a marked man - cussedness seems to get his juices flowing. Soulful-eyed Kay Francis, as Mowbray's lover and (she hopes) Barrymore's nemesis, moves with the right mixture of languor and ardor - her character is half vamp, half noble sufferer - but she's been directed in one scene into some hambone-pantomime attitudes of terror, a style of acting that was already terribly old-fashioned in 1931. She does it expertly, and she's so beautiful we'd want to go on watching her anyway; still, the fustian is unfortunate. Less lucky in their roles are Madge Evans, as Barrymore's daughter, and the lad who plays her ideal young suitor: both characters are so bland the actors can do nothing with them but say their lines and try not to look too foolish. They manage it, and the film doesn't linger over them.
Not lingering is the movie's best tactic for wriggling past its occasional weaknesses, especially the implausible motivation of that daughter character - she is possibly a watered down version of whatever the writer originally intended. The brisk pace comes from the makers' showbiz savvy; and if there was watering down, it was likely caution based on the same kind of wisdom about "what the traffic will bear." Those pre-code movies were seldom as daring as they're now cracked up to be; they were bent on entertaining, and a little bit of salaciousness could stir the plot - but they tried not to leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth.
Come now, what masques, what dances shall we have, to wear away this long age of three hours between our after-supper and bed-time? "Guilty Hands," plus a couple of shorts - and another, better movie, thanks.
At just over an hour, the film is essentially a programmer, never meant to be the main attraction of a night's entertainment. Exhibitors would pair it with a bigger picture, and add a couple of specialty shorts, choosing from among the available cartoons, song plugs, and travelogs. A night at the movies ca. 1931 set the pattern for a night around the TV-set in later decades. On that analogy, "Guilty Hands" is like a middling-to-better episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents; it even sports an opening hook worthy of that show: a voice in the dark, talking of crime, says that a really clever fellow might commit a perfectly undetectable murder - and that under some circumstances, murder might be justified.
The dark room turns out to be the smoking lounge of a train passing through a long tunnel, and soon after we come into the light the speaker, a lawyer who has in his varied career both prosecuted and defended murderers, finds himself in a tight spot that practically invites him to put his theory into practice. Lionel Barrymore, as the lawyer, leads a cast who do nothing short of a good professional job of putting across the high and low mischief that ensues. Barrymore's target, a rich rotter played by Alan Mowbray, is so dried out with debauchery that it comes as a surprise how much fight he has in him when he knows he's a marked man - cussedness seems to get his juices flowing. Soulful-eyed Kay Francis, as Mowbray's lover and (she hopes) Barrymore's nemesis, moves with the right mixture of languor and ardor - her character is half vamp, half noble sufferer - but she's been directed in one scene into some hambone-pantomime attitudes of terror, a style of acting that was already terribly old-fashioned in 1931. She does it expertly, and she's so beautiful we'd want to go on watching her anyway; still, the fustian is unfortunate. Less lucky in their roles are Madge Evans, as Barrymore's daughter, and the lad who plays her ideal young suitor: both characters are so bland the actors can do nothing with them but say their lines and try not to look too foolish. They manage it, and the film doesn't linger over them.
Not lingering is the movie's best tactic for wriggling past its occasional weaknesses, especially the implausible motivation of that daughter character - she is possibly a watered down version of whatever the writer originally intended. The brisk pace comes from the makers' showbiz savvy; and if there was watering down, it was likely caution based on the same kind of wisdom about "what the traffic will bear." Those pre-code movies were seldom as daring as they're now cracked up to be; they were bent on entertaining, and a little bit of salaciousness could stir the plot - but they tried not to leave a bad taste in anyone's mouth.
Come now, what masques, what dances shall we have, to wear away this long age of three hours between our after-supper and bed-time? "Guilty Hands," plus a couple of shorts - and another, better movie, thanks.
He Walked by Night
(1948)
Pretty sharp
30 October 2015
Not a little masterpiece as some of its fans would claim, "He Walked by Night" is just standard cheapie police-procedural: a manhunt for a cop killer, with the police techniques spelled out as if for an audience of simpletons. What distinguishes it from dozens of similar movies is the very energetic light-and-shadow work by cinematographer John Alton. Alton's brief must have been, in the first place, to disguise the low-budget deficiencies of the production (unable to shoot sound on location, unable to build elaborate sets); and he succeeds in covering them up, but then he keeps going, and going . . . until the film becomes a black-and-white graphic-arts explosion. (The editing is a let-down though, merely smooth and adequate, not up to the mark of the photography.) The sound design (although it wasn't called that back then) is sharp and inventive too, especially the noises and voices at a crowded streetside investigation late at night, and the echo after the concluding gunshot.
A promising young actor named Richard Basehart, still new to films, plays the killer at the center of it all, and he holds us right from the start; but as it soon becomes apparent the film isn't going to explore his character, it turns into a hollow exercise. There's a scarily intense self-surgery - no on-screen gore, but we can read every detail in Basehart's face. The other actors are a drab bunch, especially the ones playing cops, with the exception of Jack Webb, who takes advantage of his colleagues' mopishness to indulge in some shameless scene-stealing: it's petty theft - he ought to be ashamed. Dependable Whit Bissell plays a shopkeeper, dependably.
A promising young actor named Richard Basehart, still new to films, plays the killer at the center of it all, and he holds us right from the start; but as it soon becomes apparent the film isn't going to explore his character, it turns into a hollow exercise. There's a scarily intense self-surgery - no on-screen gore, but we can read every detail in Basehart's face. The other actors are a drab bunch, especially the ones playing cops, with the exception of Jack Webb, who takes advantage of his colleagues' mopishness to indulge in some shameless scene-stealing: it's petty theft - he ought to be ashamed. Dependable Whit Bissell plays a shopkeeper, dependably.
Ankhon Dekhi
(2013)
I might be wrong . . .
30 April 2015
An Indian film (Hindi) - old Bauji, narrating by way of introduction, tells us he has a recurring dream of "flying through the clouds," and the camera hovers above the little kitchen where his extended family's meals are prepared; it drifts through a window and hovers above the narrow lane, meanders over a tangle of streets, and drifts up to the tops of the buildings in Delhi - it's a twilight hour, the sky is like a glowing bruise for color, and down below it's quiet, no one about - then we are back in the apartment, and all is commotion: Bauji's young niece Rita has been out with a boy whose reputation is not good - the whole family, three generations, make an uproar about it. When some of the menfolk rush off to give the boy a walloping Bauji goes along, and finds that the boy is nothing like he's been painted. Bauji protects him, and later reflecting on what almost happened he resolves never again to believe anything he hasn't personally experienced. So thoroughly does he hold to this resolution that he can no longer perform his job, selling travel packages over the phone: he confides to customers that he doesn't really know what time the plane will depart and land, or if there will be a hotel waiting at the other end - he hasn't seen these things for himself. The manager must let him go. Being idle himself, Bauji attracts a circle of other idle men; at first they tease and mock him, but finding him so positive in his new way of life they become his disciples. What follows you must see for yourself. I could tell you that "Ankhon Dekhi" is that rarity, a philosophical comedy that's really funny - but that would just be me telling you; you won't really know, will you, until you see it.
Full Moon in Blue Water
(1988)
Full Moon in Blue Water
5 November 2014
A wonderful little movie that got overlooked in the distribution mill at the time of its release, "Full Moon in Blue Water" is overdue for rediscovery. It has so many parallels to "Moonstruck" that one could mistakenly peg it as a copycat, but guess again: "Full Moon" was completed before "Moonstruck" was ready for previews; the similarities are merely coincidental; and there's no need to choose between the two, when both films are so easy to love. Gene Hackman leads as Floyd, the owner of a rambling, cozy restaurant-shack on the Gulf Coast of Alabama: he's a man emotionally stalled by the disappearance of his beloved wife. She disappeared while swimming and everyone presumes her dead, but Floyd can't accept this; he believes she was drawn away by an undertow and struck her head: that she's wandering now with amnesia but someday will return to him. Business is dwindling at the shack, but he refuses all offers to buy him out: he's keeping the place for Dorothy to come home to. In the meantime Louise (Teri Garr) keeps him company, and wants more, a real commitment from him - her frustration is touching and funny. She can argue down all of his high-flown romantic notions, and his practical objections too, but when he remembers his loss he grows wistful and drifts away where she can't reach him. Their sad-tinged love affair is played out with screwball logic. It's Jimmy (Elias Koteas), a mildly retarded young man who sweeps up around the shack and cares for Floyd's in-and-out senile father (Burgess Meredith), who twists the screw to its tightest, by doing something so ghastly - something that would be absurdly funny if it weren't too appalling for laughter - and then tops even that by springing the worst possible plan to resolve matters, at the worst possible moment. "Full Moon in Blue Water" takes a kidding approach to the "magic" of romance, but on some level believes in it too; that it's able to keep both attitudes in play at the same time may be the best of what it shares with "Moonstruck." Its special distinctions are worth discovering.
Faust
(III) (2011)
Down in the dumps
4 November 2014
It begins with the evisceration of a corpse, and that could be a metaphor for the way this alleged adaptation proceeds - except that Goethe's "Faust" is not dead, only given the dead-letter treatment here. The film's emphasis is on gross, clumsy physicality: you never saw so many actors stumble as they walk, bumping into things and one another; too artless and unfunny for slapstick, the universal jostling is prevented from being laughable by funereal pacing and the array of hangdog faces. Since the Faust figure (Johannes Zeiler) conveys very little in the way of intellect, all that elevates him is that most of the other characters have been made open-mouthed gapers, presumable halfwits. Wit is barred out anyway by the color-palette, all various hues of mud - the surest sign of high-serious intentions in movies nowadays. In exterior shots the sky is overexposed so it shows as a gleamless white blur; the earth is dun-colored, greens are gray-tinged, and reds are virtually absent, on their rare appearance tending to brown, like bloodstained linens oxidizing. The cut of the men's clothing updates the story to several decades after Goethe's time: trousers are worn, rather than breeches and hose. The fabrics are thick, heavy, coarse, and of course dark-dyed and fraying badly. No one could think of playing the dandy here. Strangely, there seems to be no Republic of Letters either. The few characters with intellectual interests neither write nor receive letters; they're isolated from enlightenment and worldly affairs: no one awaits the postman; no one looks at a journal of science or politics or the arts - this is a stupefying omission, as false to the historical period as it would be to Goethe's own. Sokurov's flight from historical particulars strands his Faust: the fable and the character become "timeless" in all the wrong ways. Faust doesn't represent his age's high hopes, or its seeds of self-destruction; but then he doesn't represent our age either. Sealed off in its remoteness, Sokurov's "Faust" is just another - all-too-familiar - sulking, glooming art-house reverie.
I Went To
(2000)
Dora-heita
4 September 2014
A late film from Kon Ichikawa, approximately the eightieth in his sixty-year directing career. An honest magistrate uses guile as well as samurai skills to clean up a corrupt feudal fiefdom. The tale is framed by two scribes recording the "official" version of events: their ironic comments are funny as they gossip about all the juicy stuff they have to leave out of their chronicle; but behind their worldly-wise cracks, they really don't know what's going on, so the irony doubles back on them. The hero plays a shifty game going after his prey; his dodges are very amusing, and the star Koji Yakusho really seems to be enjoying himself. The corrupt port city, a medieval Big Easy, is a big rotten playground in nacreous colors that bleed into each other. About the only hard edges to be seen - until the blades come out - are the checkerboard squares on the robe of the determined Miss Keiko, who pursues the magistrate all the way from Edo. Ichikawa keeps his touch light and sure - what other great director has aged so well? - his mastery intact, with no sign of faltering or hardening.
El descanso
(2002)
El descanso
2 September 2014
"El descanso" [ also known as "El hotel" ] (2002) From Argentina, a loose-limbed road movie and one of the happiest surprises of my recent viewing. Two pals, Oswald and Freddy, drive away from the stress and pace of Buenos Aires for a vacation in the hill country, and to meet a friend and celebrate Oswald's birthday. They never get where they're going, because in a drowsy moment in the heat of the sun, they drive off the road and wreck their car. While waiting for a local mechanic to get them rolling again, Freddy goes exploring and turns up a derelict hotel, long ago the pride of the region, now a ramshackle dump with no owner on record - and just like that he gets the idea to put the place on its feet again.
The comedy here is low-key and rises from character. The two buddies are a study in contrasting temperaments, like the pair of gamblers in "California Split." When Oswald asks, "Why are we working on our vacation?" Freddy replies, "If we have a hotel, we'll be on vacation for the rest of our lives!" Freddy likes to start things, and people, spinning, and let them follow their own course - whatever happens, it's bound to be interesting.
Most of the town, which is pretty much just a dusty crossroads, bustles into activity for Freddy's pipedream party. But there's a lawyer in the works too, who knows the secrets of the confused ownership of the hotel, and discounts all Freddy's charm and hope, knowing that in the eyes of the law he's just a squatter. So the film chronicles another chapter in the eternal war between those who live to enjoy the moment, and those who own it, or try to, or pretend to.
The comedy here is low-key and rises from character. The two buddies are a study in contrasting temperaments, like the pair of gamblers in "California Split." When Oswald asks, "Why are we working on our vacation?" Freddy replies, "If we have a hotel, we'll be on vacation for the rest of our lives!" Freddy likes to start things, and people, spinning, and let them follow their own course - whatever happens, it's bound to be interesting.
Most of the town, which is pretty much just a dusty crossroads, bustles into activity for Freddy's pipedream party. But there's a lawyer in the works too, who knows the secrets of the confused ownership of the hotel, and discounts all Freddy's charm and hope, knowing that in the eyes of the law he's just a squatter. So the film chronicles another chapter in the eternal war between those who live to enjoy the moment, and those who own it, or try to, or pretend to.
Back in Crime
(2013)
L'autre vie de Richard Kemp
12 August 2014
"The Other Life of Richard Kemp"? . . . ye-es, but not exactly. The deadpan title works in French, but in English it's a bit of a blank; something else must be found, but the distributors have come up with "Back in Crime," suggesting a banal Time-Cop movie. "L'autre vie" is something else entirely - the time travel serves as an uncanny portal: Chief Inspector Richard Kemp is thrown back twenty years, to when he was a lone wolf detective, over-proud of his rep as best on the force, Co-existing in 1989, the older Kemp is afraid to approach the younger - he spies on himself, and works secretly in parallel to undo the mistakes that let a killer get away. And meanwhile the older Kemp is falling in love with the psychologist he first met on the last day of his first life. A "rebirth through water" motif might be a nod to De Palma's "Femme Fatale"; and the seductive camera movements and layered compositions also hint that the writer-director Germinal Alvarez has learned from his great precedent. But Alvarez brings out a triste atmosphere that's all his own. Best romantic thriller I've seen in a long time.
The Missing Picture
(2013)
The past recaptured
21 June 2014
The Khmer Rouge tried to leave no traces of the Cambodian genocide (1975-79). It could be a crime for anyone outside the Party to have pencil and paper, not to mention camera or tape recorder. Scarcely any images got out.
Rithy Panh was thirteen when his family was rounded up. along with the other residents of Phnom Penh, and sent to "re-education" camps and then five years of starvation and rural labor. Now as a survivor looking back at those years, he uses simple clay figures to represent the people who died unrecorded. He juxtaposes them with scraps of propaganda films and other footage, and with manufactured landscapes, while narrating a major 20th century horror story that's also a personal and national tragedy.
The film takes all kinds of aesthetic risks: the images are complexly beautiful, but they dare to seem simplistic or naïve, or to skirt "bad taste." The simplicity is more than justified though, as The Missing Picture does recapture a lost time, the artistic triumph inseparable from the human triumph.
Rithy Panh was thirteen when his family was rounded up. along with the other residents of Phnom Penh, and sent to "re-education" camps and then five years of starvation and rural labor. Now as a survivor looking back at those years, he uses simple clay figures to represent the people who died unrecorded. He juxtaposes them with scraps of propaganda films and other footage, and with manufactured landscapes, while narrating a major 20th century horror story that's also a personal and national tragedy.
The film takes all kinds of aesthetic risks: the images are complexly beautiful, but they dare to seem simplistic or naïve, or to skirt "bad taste." The simplicity is more than justified though, as The Missing Picture does recapture a lost time, the artistic triumph inseparable from the human triumph.
Kshudhita Pashan
(1960)
The Hungry Stones
28 April 2014
A modern ghost story, written and directed by Tapan Sinha, from "The Hungry Stones" by R. Tagore. A Bengali civil servant, educated and skeptical, is assigned to a remote, mostly Moslem province of India. He takes up residence, against the advice of the locals, in a deserted mansion, formerly the home of a long-dead Nabob with a reputation for licentiousness. The house is said to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died the victims of his lusts. The semi-ruined place awakens in the young modern man a romantic nostalgia that unsettles him but pleases him too. His imagination first peoples the twilight with beautiful visions and far-off music. But after dark his cook and serving man leave him there alone - no one else will stay the night in the mansion - and the visions return unbidden, and draw him into their world. The young man is played by the great Soumitra Chatterjee, a frequent Satyajit Ray collaborator. This is a splendid film.
Five Evenings
(1979)
A bruising path to love
5 February 2014
Not many films by Nikita Mikhalkov have made it to U.S. screens, and most of those that have leave no lasting impression – leisurely paced costume dramas muffled up in pretty scenery, pretty people; the kind of movies you can watch with your eyes closed, as the music cues you to remember other similar movies, and the too-familiar sequence of emotions. But that's less than half of Mikhalkov's output, the export quarter. Who knows but there may be treasures to find in the unseen territory of Mikhalkov's oeuvre? There's at least one treasure, and if it stands alone, it stands as a solitary masterpiece.
"Five Evenings" takes place in Moscow in 1958, during the Khruschev "thaw," when (some) Russians were able to experience a version of the Western-style delights of pop-culture and pop consumer goods – little sweeteners of the daily grind, "fleeting" pleasures because ultimately worthless, but sweet nonetheless; for once they were able to enjoy these without (too much) soviet moralizing about Western decadence. (It eventually turned out that the soviet moralizers hadn't vanished, they were only drawing breath – and learning new tricks.) The historical interval of the thaw is only casually related to the action of "Five Evenings," but the joyous touches that sketch in the period help to give the film an extra depth of interest and charm.
The central character, Sasha – Aleksandr Petrovich Iliyin – is a non-conformist, which implies nothing zany or counter-cultural as it might in a Hollywood story. Staying true to himself hasn't given him a free hand and a wide scope for activity; on the contrary, every free choice he has made has narrowed the way open ahead of him, and his stubborn pride at going on must be his satisfaction. His eyes, when they aren't hooded, are watchful and full of humor. He brings Russian soul music into the movie when he decides to stir the ashes of an old love, to see if there's still a spark left in there.
His former lover, Tamara, as curator of the ashes, has grown severe; a mask of disappointment seems to have taken over her personality. But she isn't stupid, and if she's a killjoy she doesn't want to be. After she crushes the spontaneity of a moment, the awareness of her blunder strikes her right away; she tries to fix things by being deliberately spontaneous, and the impossibility of getting any traction that way is both funny and painfully recognizable.
Iliyin carries his myth and mystery with him, along with a hint of danger. For that and other reasons, "Five Evenings" can claim kin with "Choose Me." If you liked Alan Rudolph's film, this dark-bordered Valentine may be just for you.
"Five Evenings" takes place in Moscow in 1958, during the Khruschev "thaw," when (some) Russians were able to experience a version of the Western-style delights of pop-culture and pop consumer goods – little sweeteners of the daily grind, "fleeting" pleasures because ultimately worthless, but sweet nonetheless; for once they were able to enjoy these without (too much) soviet moralizing about Western decadence. (It eventually turned out that the soviet moralizers hadn't vanished, they were only drawing breath – and learning new tricks.) The historical interval of the thaw is only casually related to the action of "Five Evenings," but the joyous touches that sketch in the period help to give the film an extra depth of interest and charm.
The central character, Sasha – Aleksandr Petrovich Iliyin – is a non-conformist, which implies nothing zany or counter-cultural as it might in a Hollywood story. Staying true to himself hasn't given him a free hand and a wide scope for activity; on the contrary, every free choice he has made has narrowed the way open ahead of him, and his stubborn pride at going on must be his satisfaction. His eyes, when they aren't hooded, are watchful and full of humor. He brings Russian soul music into the movie when he decides to stir the ashes of an old love, to see if there's still a spark left in there.
His former lover, Tamara, as curator of the ashes, has grown severe; a mask of disappointment seems to have taken over her personality. But she isn't stupid, and if she's a killjoy she doesn't want to be. After she crushes the spontaneity of a moment, the awareness of her blunder strikes her right away; she tries to fix things by being deliberately spontaneous, and the impossibility of getting any traction that way is both funny and painfully recognizable.
Iliyin carries his myth and mystery with him, along with a hint of danger. For that and other reasons, "Five Evenings" can claim kin with "Choose Me." If you liked Alan Rudolph's film, this dark-bordered Valentine may be just for you.
The Tree of Life
(2011)
Sandalwood-scented Gift Shop Movie
31 January 2014
Terrence Malick overrates his tingly inexpressible feelings, and now we all can too. If he could have shot the movie on film made from mulberry bark, he would have gladly. Not that it isn't deluxe enough already, in its fake naive way: the camera stumbles, the editing stammers, and lens flares are stuck all over like sequins. The nature imagery is in a contest with the voice-over to see which can be more generalized, more evasive. What it's all about is nothing more than a grown man having a bad day, remembering his childhood and feeling he was unloved. But no one's childhood was ever as unceasingly idyllic and "timeless" as what we're shown. Malick wants to avoid specificity, and with good reason: it disguises the silliness of The Tree of Life.
Marooned in Iraq
(2002)
Do you sing anymore?
23 January 2014
A welcome surprise! The previews made it look like another sensitive, lyrical piece about the indomitable human spirit, and it's that right enough, but in large part this is galumphing comedy of the sort Walter Matthau appeared in late in his career: a grumpy old man gathers his two grown sons for a road trip to bring back the old man's runaway wife. As they bicker and roar through the countryside, it feels like we've come in at the fifth or sixth sequel in a popular and long-running series. On the road again! The old complaints and small irritations; the blustery overreactions, little storms that blow up and blow over – they all seem familiar, lived-in and lived with. So do the trailing-off sentences, the tags of jokes that don't have to be finished
.
What differentiates Marooned from the other grumpy comedies is that this is a family of Kurds, and the wife, in leaving, crossed an imaginary line on the map, into the northeastern corner of Iraq, at a time when Iraqi jets are dropping bombs and strafing refugees, as Saddam toys with them murderously. It's a society of villages on the run: in one place, houses that seem rooted in the rock stand abandoned; while another place that seems no place at all suddenly blossoms with color and activity and voices – a village in the making, or just a camp on the road? A cluster of refugee tents is already a neighborhood, with its landmarks and close-knitting. Schools and marketplaces, hastily improvised, turn quite substantial, though they might still disappear overnight. And wherever the old man and his sons travel, complete strangers recognize them and ask about them: they had been famous as a family band of musicians, but broke up when the wife first became disaffected. Everyone hopes they'll get back together. The beautiful songs and musical interludes are essential to the picture, they complete it. Comedy, tragedy, music – Marooned in Iraq, rag-tag and splendorous in equal measure, encompasses it all.
What differentiates Marooned from the other grumpy comedies is that this is a family of Kurds, and the wife, in leaving, crossed an imaginary line on the map, into the northeastern corner of Iraq, at a time when Iraqi jets are dropping bombs and strafing refugees, as Saddam toys with them murderously. It's a society of villages on the run: in one place, houses that seem rooted in the rock stand abandoned; while another place that seems no place at all suddenly blossoms with color and activity and voices – a village in the making, or just a camp on the road? A cluster of refugee tents is already a neighborhood, with its landmarks and close-knitting. Schools and marketplaces, hastily improvised, turn quite substantial, though they might still disappear overnight. And wherever the old man and his sons travel, complete strangers recognize them and ask about them: they had been famous as a family band of musicians, but broke up when the wife first became disaffected. Everyone hopes they'll get back together. The beautiful songs and musical interludes are essential to the picture, they complete it. Comedy, tragedy, music – Marooned in Iraq, rag-tag and splendorous in equal measure, encompasses it all.
Letter Never Sent
(1960)
Experiment perilous
13 August 2013
A parable intended to glorify self-sacrifice in the cause of building the earthly paradise promised by Communism. The geologist hero has proved by theory that immense diamond reserves must lie under a region of barren wilderness - where no trace of the minerals have ever actually been seen. The spectacular hardships he and his companions undergo are supposed to secure
well, more toil and hardship - but then, in some distant future which no one now living will see, the people will be prosperous and happy.
The film conceives happiness and prosperity to be one and the same, the simple working out of a material process, and applies the visual rhetoric of sacred art to materialism. Quite effectively applies it: the explorers are Soviet "New Men" (and one woman), and they bubble with enthusiasm for the Radiant Future; while the landscapes are gorgeously stark, a suitable backdrop for sainthood. (The manly tracker who guides the group is so avid for inhospitable spaces he appears demonic even before the plot requires it.) But the striking look of the film and the thrilling dangers can barely conceal a vein of tawdry sentimentality. It will seem convincing to those who are predisposed to be convinced.
The film conceives happiness and prosperity to be one and the same, the simple working out of a material process, and applies the visual rhetoric of sacred art to materialism. Quite effectively applies it: the explorers are Soviet "New Men" (and one woman), and they bubble with enthusiasm for the Radiant Future; while the landscapes are gorgeously stark, a suitable backdrop for sainthood. (The manly tracker who guides the group is so avid for inhospitable spaces he appears demonic even before the plot requires it.) But the striking look of the film and the thrilling dangers can barely conceal a vein of tawdry sentimentality. It will seem convincing to those who are predisposed to be convinced.
A Matter of Resistance
(1966)
La vie de château
9 December 2010
"La vie de château" is little known in the US, but it was popular in France and won the Prix Louis-Delluc. It's built around Catherine Deneuve as a farm girl who has married Jérome, the winded scion of a grand seigneurial family (Philippe Noiret), and is discontented as a result. Pent up in their crumbling château in Normandy, she longs for the high life of Paris. Her husband, though, seems pleased to slowly rot away, as long as the ancestral orchards keep producing the finest fruit in the world; he bears himself as the final fruit of a noble line. His widowed mother (Mary Marquet) lives with them, playing the piano with a lofty air while ceiling plaster falls into the wires. She dotes on her son, but can't help reminding him that he's not the man his father was. His father-in-law, a growling old peasant with a keen grasp of the situation (Pierre Brasseur), reminds him of the same thing. The château is mortgaged to the hilt, and the former tenant is in a position to buy it cheaply, and become the new seigneur. Into this set-up parachutes Henri Garcin as a member of the Resistance, sent to spy out the German troop placements in the neighboring countryside. For our Normandy farce is set in the spring of 1944. The ineffectual husband is indifferent to the German invaders, and unaware of the activities of the Resistance: we may have a small fable unfolding here. Both the German colonel and the French patriot want to dress Deneuve in finery and take her to the Paris of her dreams – but the sticking point is that her husband really does love her, and an unpredictable gallant lover awakens under his placid surface.
Deneuve has none of the usual technique needed for playing farce, but the serene quality of her beauty keeps her from straining at it. When the young wife's frustrations make her fly into anger over trifles, the flights are truly jarring and spiky; the comedy is in Noiret's limitless capacity for absorbing these darts – or is it limitless?
The fine score is by Michel Legrand.
Deneuve has none of the usual technique needed for playing farce, but the serene quality of her beauty keeps her from straining at it. When the young wife's frustrations make her fly into anger over trifles, the flights are truly jarring and spiky; the comedy is in Noiret's limitless capacity for absorbing these darts – or is it limitless?
The fine score is by Michel Legrand.
Kapitanskaya dochka
(1958)
A rhapsody
10 April 2008
There's so much in the Pushkin tale that doesn't make it into the movie, but what does get in is glorious. The young hero's soul is in his face, and the figure of Pugachev is magnificent. There are gaps in the storytelling, but the visual imagery flows through: the rebellion, when it comes, seems as natural as the unlocking of the seasons. And when the following winter ends in defeat, there's tragic weight to the breaking ice and the muddy roads. (A historical reflection: the film assiduously portrays the nobility and beauty in the different nationalities, all those who were to become members of "soviet republics".) For all the real heroism, there's a tinge of Shandy Hall about the army residence - Pushkin knew of Sterne's novel, though I've never heard that it was an influence; but the association is surprisingly apt for this adaptation.
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